While data synthesis and distillation are promising strategies to enhance small language models, current approaches heavily rely on Large Language Models (LLMs), which suffer from high computational costs, environmental inefficiency, and potential biases inherited from monolithic architectures. In contrast, smaller LMs are more accessible and sustainable, but their individual capabilities often fall short in generating high-quality, diverse, and reliable data. Inspired by collaborative human processes (e.g., peer review), we propose a multiple small LMs involved framework, GRA, that aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by a single large LM. In this collaborative framework, multiple small LMs assume distinct roles—Generator, Reviewer, and Adjudicator—to simulate a peer-review-inspired data synthesis pipeline. The Generator proposes initial data samples, the Reviewer critiques their quality and diversity, and the Adjudicator resolves conflicts to finalize the output. By decomposing the synthesis process into specialized sub-tasks, collaborative small LMs can achieve data-level parity with distillation from large LMs. Through experiments across multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that GRA-produced data matches or exceeds the quality of single large LM outputs, e.g., Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct. Our results challenge the necessity of monolithic large models for high-quality data synthesis, advocating instead for strategic coordination of smaller agents.

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by improving their ability to refuse responses to questions beyond their knowledge, thereby reducing hallucinations and improving reliability. Effective RAIT must address two key challenges: firstly, effectively reject unknown questions to minimize hallucinations; secondly, avoid over-refusal to ensure questions that can be correctly answered are not rejected, thereby maintain the helpfulness of LLM outputs. In this paper, we address the two challenges by deriving insightful observations from the gradient-based perspective, and proposing the Gradient-driven Refusal Aware Instruction Tuning Framework GRAIT: (1) employs gradient-driven sample selection to effectively minimize hallucinations and (2) introduces an adaptive weighting mechanism during fine-tuning to reduce the risk of over-refusal, achieving the balance between accurate refusals and maintaining useful responses. Experimental evaluations on open-ended and multiple-choice question answering tasks demonstrate that GRAIT significantly outperforms existing RAIT methods in the overall performance. The source code and data will be available at https://github.com/opendatalab/GRAIT .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, especially the recent advancements in reasoning, such as o1 and o3, pushing the boundaries of AI. Despite these impressive achievements in mathematics and coding, the reasoning abilities of LLMs in domains requiring cryptographic expertise remain underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CipherBank, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in cryptographic decryption tasks. CipherBank comprises 2,358 meticulously crafted problems, covering 262 unique plaintexts across 5 domains and 14 subdomains, with a focus on privacy-sensitive and real-world scenarios that necessitate encryption. From a cryptographic perspective, CipherBank incorporates 3 major categories of encryption methods, spanning 9 distinct algorithms, ranging from classical ciphers to custom cryptographic techniques. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on CipherBank, e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and cutting-edge reasoning-focused models such as o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Our results reveal significant gaps in reasoning abilities not only between general-purpose chat LLMs and reasoning-focused LLMs but also in the performance of current reasoning-focused models when applied to classical cryptographic decryption tasks, highlighting the challenges these models face in understanding and manipulating encrypted data. Through detailed analysis and error investigations, we provide several key observations that shed light on the limitations and potential improvement areas for LLMs in cryptographic reasoning.These findings underscore the need for continuous advancements in LLM reasoning capabilities.

We introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. OpenHuEval is constructed from a vast collection of Hungarian-specific materials sourced from multiple origins. In the construction, we incorporated the latest design principles for evaluating LLMs, such as using real user queries from the internet, emphasizing the assessment of LLMs’ generative capabilities, and employing LLM-as-judge to enhance the multidimensionality and accuracy of evaluations. Ultimately, OpenHuEval encompasses eight Hungarian-specific dimensions, featuring five tasks and 3953 questions. Consequently, OpenHuEval provides the comprehensive, in-depth, and scientifically accurate assessment of LLM performance in the context of the Hungarian language and its specifics. We evaluated current mainstream LLMs, including both traditional LLMs and recently developed Large Reasoning Models. The results demonstrate the significant necessity for evaluation and model optimization tailored to the Hungarian language and specifics. We also established the framework for analyzing the thinking processes of LRMs with OpenHuEval, revealing intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of these models in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as a representative example. We will release OpenHuEval at https://github.com/opendatalab/OpenHuEval .

We introduce CHARM, the first benchmark for comprehensively and in-depth evaluating the commonsense reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in Chinese, which covers both globally known and Chinese-specific commonsense. We evaluated 7 English and 12 Chinese-oriented LLMs on CHARM, employing 5 representative prompt strategies for improving LLMs’ reasoning ability, such as Chain-of-Thought. Our findings indicated that the LLM’s language orientation and the task’s domain influence the effectiveness of the prompt strategy, which enriches previous research findings. We built closely-interconnected reasoning and memorization tasks, and found that some LLMs struggle with memorizing Chinese commonsense, affecting their reasoning ability, while others show differences in reasoning despite similar memorization performance. We also evaluated the LLMs’ memorization-independent reasoning abilities and analyzed the typical errors. Our study precisely identified the LLMs’ strengths and weaknesses, providing the clear direction for optimization. It can also serve as a reference for studies in other fields. We will release CHARM at https://github.com/opendatalab/CHARM.