Training Large Language Models (LLMs) from scratch requires immense computational resources, making it prohibitively expensive. Model scaling-up offers a promising solution by leveraging the parameters of smaller models to create larger ones. However, existing depth scaling-up methods rely on empirical heuristic rules for layer duplication, which result in poorer initialization and slower convergence during continual pre-training. We propose LESA, a novel learnable method for depth scaling-up. By concatenating parameters from each layer and applying Singular Value Decomposition, we uncover latent patterns between layers, suggesting that inter-layer parameters can be learned. LESA uses a neural network to predict the parameters inserted between adjacent layers, enabling better initialization and faster training. Experiments show that LESA outperforms existing baselines, achieving superior performance with less than half the computational cost during continual pre-training. Extensive analyses demonstrate its effectiveness across different model sizes and tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in handling complex interactive problems. Existing LLM agents mainly generate natural language plans to guide reasoning, which is verbose and inefficient. NL plans are also tailored to specific tasks and restrict agents’ ability to generalize across similar tasks. To this end, we explore pseudocode-style plans (P-code Plan) to capture the structural logic of reasoning. We find that P-code Plan empowers LLM agents with stronger generalization ability and more efficiency. Inspired by this finding, we propose a pseudocode-style  ̲Planning  ̲Guided  ̲Preference  ̲Optimization method called PGPO for effective agent learning. With two planning-oriented rewards, PGPO further enhances LLM agents’ ability to generate high-quality P-code Plans and subsequent reasoning. Experiments show that PGPO achieves superior performance on representative agent benchmarks and outperforms the current leading baselines. Analyses reveal the advantage of PGPO in reducing action errors and omissions during reasoning.

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, evaluating their performance is becoming more important and more challenging. This paper aims to address this issue for Mandarin Chinese in the form of CMMLU, a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that covers various subjects, including natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and the humanities. We conduct a thorough evaluation of more than 20 contemporary multilingual and Chinese LLMs, assessing their performance across different subjects and settings. The results reveal that most existing LLMs struggle to achieve an accuracy of even 60%, which is the pass mark for Chinese exams. This highlights that there is substantial room for improvement in the capabilities of LLMs. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to identify factors impacting the models’ performance and propose directions for enhancing LLMs. CMMLU fills the gap in evaluating the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large language models for Chinese.