Speech quality assessment (SQA) is typically formulated as a score regression task based on subjective ratings, such as the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which inherently suffer from inconsistent standards and limit cross-dataset training and evaluation. To address these limitations, we reformulate SQA as a preference-based comparison paradigm and construct MOS-Pref, a large-scale MOS-derived preference dataset. Building on MOS-Pref, we systematically implement and evaluate three reward modeling paradigms: scalar, semi-scalar, and generative reward models, alongside existing SQA approaches. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) scalar models achieve the strongest overall performance, consistently exceeding 74% accuracy; (2) score regression-based approaches generally underperform preference-based methods in both overall performance and generalization; and (3) all reward models struggle on pairs with very small MOS gap. Motivated by these observations, we propose a MOS-aware GRM design that incorporates MOS gap into the reward function during reinforcement learning. Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. We hope this work fosters more rigorous and scalable research in SQA.

Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, while academic research remains largely non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data, hindering fair comparison and progress. To this end, we release a fully open-source system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning, including a licensed synthetic dataset, training and evaluation pipelines, and Muse, an easy-to-deploy song generation model. The dataset consists of 116k fully licensed synthetic songs with automatically generated lyrics and style descriptions paired with audio synthesized by SunoV5. We train Muse via single-stage supervised finetuning of a Qwen-based language model extended with discrete audio tokens using MuCodec, without task-specific losses, auxiliary objectives, or additional architectural components. Our evaluations find that although Muse is trained with a modest data scale and model size, it achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality, while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. All data, model weights, and training and evaluation pipelines will be publicly released, paving the way for continued progress in controllable long-form song generation research.

Existing evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting, critical issues that obscure true model capabilities. To address this, we introduce LLMEval-Fair, a framework for dynamic evaluation of LLMs. LLMEval-Fair is built on a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions, from which it dynamically samples unseen test sets for each evaluation run. Its automated pipeline ensures integrity via contamination-resistant data curation, a novel anti-cheating architecture, and a calibrated LLM-as-a-judge process achieving 90% agreement with human experts, complemented by a relative ranking system for fair comparison. An 30-month longitudinal study of nearly 60 leading models reveals a performance ceiling on knowledge memorization and exposes data contamination vulnerabilities undetectable by static benchmarks. The framework demonstrates exceptional robustness in ranking stability and consistency, providing strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm. LLMEval-Fair offers a robust and credible methodology for assessing the true capabilities of LLMs beyond leaderboard scores, promoting the development of more trustworthy evaluation standards.

The GPT-4 technical report suggests that downstream performance can be predicted from pre-training signals, but offers little methodological detail on how to quantify this. This work address this gap by modeling knowledge retention, the capacity of a pre-trained language model to memorize factual information from its corpus, and introduce a principled method to estimate it prior to training. We propose Size-dependent Mutual Information (SMI), an information-theoretic predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering (QA) accuracy. SMI is validated through large-scale document retrieval over the disclosed pre-training corpora of 21 public and 3 custom models, combined with a robust multi-template QA evaluation. Experiments show that SMI significantly outperforms repetition-based baselines and achieves R² > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy for models above 1B parameters, without additional training. The analysis further reveals diminishing returns from scaling data and model size and provides evidence for an intrinsic upper bound on knowledge retention achievable by pre-training alone, motivating retrieval and other augmentation strategies.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete reward supervision, which undermines policy stability and generalization. Such noise may cause models to ignore key information or even collapse in advantage estimation. We find that a strong value model is essential for absorbing unstable signals and producing reliable advantages, offering denser and more robust supervision than the reward model. To better optimize noisy supervision, we propose VRPO, a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training. VRPO integrates (1) auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model, and (2) a variational information bottleneck, enabling the value model to filter noise and capture key words. This design allows the value model to correct noise rewards and generate more reliable advantage estimates, transforming it from a passive predictor into an active noise regulator. Experiments on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with both rule-based and model-based rewards show that VRPO consistently outperforms baselines such as PPO and GRPO. Our work highlight the central role of the value model in Robust RL and provide a principled and practical approach to policy optimization under noisy supervision.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in medicine is crucial because medical applications require high accuracy with little room for error. Current medical benchmarks have three main types: medical exam-based, comprehensive medical, and specialized assessments. However, these benchmarks have limitations in question design (mostly multiple-choice), data sources (often not derived from real clinical scenarios), and evaluation methods (poor assessment of complex reasoning). To address these issues, we present LLMEval-Medicine, a new benchmark covering five core medical areas, including 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. We also design an automated evaluation pipeline, incorporating expert-developed checklists into our LLM-as-Judge framework. Furthermore, our methodology validates machine scoring through human-machine agreement analysis, dynamically refining checklists and prompts based on expert feedback to ensure reliability. We evaluate 13 LLMs across three categories (specialized medical models, open-source models, and closed-source models) on LLMEval-Med, providing valuable insights for the safe and effective deployment of LLMs in medical domains.

Process-driven dialogue systems, which operate under strict predefined process constraints, are essential in customer service and equipment maintenance scenarios. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, they still struggle to solve these strictly constrained dialogue tasks. To address this challenge, we construct Process Flow Dialogue (PFDial) dataset, which contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions derived from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. Based on PlantUML specification, each UML flowchart is converted into atomic dialogue units i.e., structured five-tuples. Experimental results demonstrate that a 7B model trained with merely 800 samples, and a 0.5B model trained on total data both can surpass 90% accuracy. Additionally, the 8B model can surpass GPT-4o up to 43.88% with an average of 11.00%. We further evaluate models’ performance on challenging backward transitions in process flows and conduct an in-depth analysis of various dataset formats to reveal their impact on model performance in handling decision and sequential branches. The data is released in https://github.com/KongLongGeFDU/PFDial.

Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we investigate the compositionality of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we construct a new dataset MathTrap by introducing carefully designed logical traps into the problem descriptions of MATH and GSM8K. Since problems with logical flaws are quite rare in the real world, these represent “unseen” cases to LLMs. Solving these requires the models to systematically compose (1) the mathematical knowledge involved in the original problems with (2) knowledge related to the introduced traps. Our experiments show that while LLMs possess both components of requisite knowledge, they do not spontaneously combine them to handle these novel cases. We explore several methods to mitigate this deficiency, such as natural language prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and fine-tuning. We find that LLMs’ performance can be improved through the above external intervention. Overall, systematic compositionality remains an open challenge for large language models.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems aim to efficiently handle task-oriented conversations, including information collection. How to utilize TOD accurately, efficiently and effectively for information collection has always been a critical and challenging task. Recent studies have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in dialogue, instruction generation, and reasoning, and can significantly enhance the performance of TOD through fine-tuning. However, current datasets primarily cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots, thereby necessitating improvements in the proactiveness, diversity, and capabilities of TOD. In this study, we present a detailed multi-domain task-oriented data construction process for conversations, and a Chinese dialogue dataset generated based on this process, **TransferTOD**, which authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, we trained a model using full-parameter fine-tuning called **TransferTOD-7B**, showcasing notable abilities in slot filling and questioning. Our work has demonstrated its strong generalization capabilities in various downstream scenarios, significantly enhancing both data utilization efficiency and system performance. The data is released in https://github.com/KongLongGeFDU/TransferTOD.