Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional performance in complex reasoning via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), yet the associated computational costs remain prohibitive. CoT reasoning contains significant untapped efficiency potential across two dimensions: temporal redundancy, where reasoning steps may be unnecessary, and spatial redundancy, where computations can be performed at reduced precision. While current optimization techniques often necessitate resource-intensive fine-tuning or data curation, we introduce ASTRO (Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization), a training-free framework that simultaneously addresses both dimensions. ASTRO leverages Dewey’s reflective thinking model to segment reasoning phases, applying a progressive precision reduction strategy coupled with an entropy-based confidence mechanism for adaptive termination. Empirical results across diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ASTRO achieves up to an 11.3 × efficiency gain without compromising accuracy, highlighting the advantages of holistic multi-dimensional redundancy management over isolated optimization methods.

Training LLMs at ultra-low precision remains a formidable challenge. Direct low-bit QAT often suffers from convergence instability and substantial training costs, exacerbated by quantization noise from heavy-tailed outlier channels and error accumulation across layers. To address these issues, we present Bit-by-Bit, a progressive QAT framework with outlier channel splitting. Our approach integrates three key components: (1) block-wise progressive training that reduces precision stage by stage, ensuring stable initialization for low-bit optimization; (2) nested structure of integer quantization grids to enable a "train once, deploy any precision" paradigm, allowing a single model to support multiple bit-widths without retraining; (3) rounding-aware outlier channel splitting, which mitigates quantization error while acting as an identity transform that preserves the quantized outputs. Furthermore, we follow microscaling groups with E4M3 scales, capturing dynamic activation ranges in alignment with OCP/NVIDIA standards. To address the lack of efficient 2-bit kernels, we developed custom operators for both W2A2 and W2A16 configurations, achieving up to 11× speedup over BF16. Under W2A2 settings, Bit-by-Bit significantly outperforms baselines like BitDistiller and EfficientQAT on both Llama2/3, achieving a loss of only 2.25 WikiText2 PPL compared to full-precision models.

Binary quantization represents the most extreme form of compression, reducing weights to ±1 for maximal memory and computational efficiency. While recent sparsity-aware binarization achieves sub-1-bit compression via weight pruning, it faces critical challenger: performance degradation, mask-management overhead, and limited hardware compatibility. In this paper, we present BTC-LLM, a novel sub-1-bit LLM quantization framework that leverages binary pattern clustering and weight transformation to overcome these limitations. Our approach incorporates two key innovations: (1) a Binary Codebook that clusters recurring vectors into compact indices using custom distance metrics and sign-based updates; (2) a Learnable Transformation that reduces outliers and promotes shared sign patterns among binary weights. This eliminates sparse masks, enabling efficient inference on standard hardware. Extensive evaluations across LLaMA, Qwen, and FBI-LLM families demonstrate that BTC-LLM achieves state-of-the-art results in extreme compression (1.11–0.7 bits). Notably, BTC-LLM compressed to 0.8 bits on LLaMA-2-13B maintains high performance—with only a 3.1% accuracy drop in zero-shot benchmarks—while delivering a 1.6× speedup over FP16.

Large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines are often bottlenecked by rollout generation, making end-to-end training slow. Recent work mitigates this by running rollouts with quantization to accelerate decoding, which is the most expensive stage of the RL loop. However, these setups destabilize optimization by amplifying the training–-inference gap: rollouts are operated at low precision, while learning updates are computed at full precision. To address this challenge, we propose QaRL (Rollout Alignment Quantization-Aware RL), which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. We further identify a failure mode in quantized rollouts: long-form responses tend to produce repetitive, garbled tokens (error tokens). To mitigate these problems, we introduce TBPO (Trust-Band Policy Optimization), a sequence-level objective with dual clipping for negative samples, aimed to keep updates within the trust region. On Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems, QaRL outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 while improving stability and preserving low-bit throughput benefits.

We study event understanding as a critical step towards visual commonsense tasks. Meanwhile, we argue that current object-based event understanding is purely likelihood-based, leading to incorrect event prediction, due to biased correlation between events and objects. We propose to mitigate such biases with do-calculus, proposed in causality research, but overcoming its limited robustness, by an optimized aggregation with association-based prediction.We show the effectiveness of our approach, intrinsically by comparing our generated events with ground-truth event annotation, and extrinsically by downstream commonsense tasks.