Yuhui Xu
2026
Beyond ’Aha!’: Toward Systematic Meta-Abilities Alignment in Large Reasoning Models
Zhiyuan Hu | Yibo Wang | Hanze Dong | Yuhui Xu | Amrita Saha | Caiming Xiong | Bryan Hooi | Junnan Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhiyuan Hu | Yibo Wang | Hanze Dong | Yuhui Xu | Amrita Saha | Caiming Xiong | Bryan Hooi | Junnan Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large reasoning models (LRMs) already possess a latent capacity for long chain-of-thought reasoning. Prior work has shown that outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) can incidentally elicit advanced reasoning behaviors such as self-correction, backtracking, and verification–phenomena often referred to as the model’s ”aha moment”. However, the timing and consistency of these emergent behaviors remain unpredictable and uncontrollable, limiting the scalability and reliability of LRMs’ reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we move beyond reliance on prompts and unpredictable ”aha moments”. Instead, we explicitly align models with three meta-abilities: deduction, induction, and abduction, using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks. Our three-stage pipeline (individual alignment, parameter-space merging, domain-specific reinforcement learning) boosts performance by over 10% relative to instruction-tuned baselines. Furthermore, domain-specific RL from the aligned checkpoint yields an additional gain in performance ceiling for both 7B and 32B models across math, coding, and science benchmarks, showing that explicit meta-ability alignment offers a scalable and dependable foundation for reasoning. Code and data can be found in Software and Data part in submission page.
2025
One QuantLLM for ALL: Fine-tuning Quantized LLMs Once for Efficient Deployments
Ke Yi | Yuhui Xu | Heng Chang | Yuan Meng | Tong Zhang | Jia Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ke Yi | Yuhui Xu | Heng Chang | Yuan Meng | Tong Zhang | Jia Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly but face significant memory demands. While quantization has shown promise for LLMs, current methods typically require lengthy training to alleviate the performance degradation from quantization loss. However, deploying LLMs across diverse scenarios with different resource constraints, e.g., servers and personal computers, requires repeated training per application, which amplifies the lengthy training problem. Given that, it is advantageous to train a once-for-all (OFA) supernet capable of yielding diverse optimal subnets for downstream applications through one-shot training. Nonetheless, the scale of current language models impedes efficiency and amplifies interference from weight sharing between subnets. We make an initial attempt to extend the once-for-all framework to large language models. Specifically, we decouple shared weights to eliminate the interference and incorporate Low-Rank adapters for training efficiency. Furthermore, we observe the imbalance allocation of training resources from the traditional uniform sampling. A non-parametric scheduler is introduced to adjust the sampling rate for each quantization configuration, achieving a more balanced allocation among subnets with varying demands. We validate the approach on LLaMA2 families and Mistral on downstream evaluation, demonstrating high performance while significantly reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios.
2024
Not All Experts are Equal: Efficient Expert Pruning and Skipping for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models
Xudong Lu | Qi Liu | Yuhui Xu | Aojun Zhou | Siyuan Huang | Bo Zhang | Junchi Yan | Hongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xudong Lu | Qi Liu | Yuhui Xu | Aojun Zhou | Siyuan Huang | Bo Zhang | Junchi Yan | Hongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
A pivotal advancement in the progress of large language models (LLMs) is the emergence of the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs. Compared to traditional LLMs, MoE LLMs can achieve higher performance with fewer active parameters, but it is still hard to deploy them due to their immense parameter sizes. Different from previous weight pruning methods that rely on specifically designed hardware, this paper mainly aims to enhance the deployment efficiency of MoE LLMs by introducing plug-and-play expert-level sparsification techniques. Specifically, we propose, for the first time to our best knowledge, post-training approaches for task-agnostic and task-specific expert pruning and skipping of MoE LLMs, tailored to improve deployment efficiency while maintaining model performance across a wide range of tasks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed methods can simultaneously reduce model sizes and increase the inference speed, while maintaining satisfactory performance. Code will be made available at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/Expert_Sparsity.