As language models regularly make mistakes when solving math problems, automated identification of errors in the reasoning process becomes increasingly significant for their scalable oversight. In this paper, we introduce ProcessBench for measuring the ability to identify erroneous steps in mathematical reasoning. It consists of 3,400 test cases, primarily focused on competition- and Olympiad-level math problems. Each test case contains a step-by-step solution with error location annotated by human experts. Models are required to identify the earliest step that contains an error, or conclude that all steps are correct. We conduct extensive evaluation on ProcessBench, involving two types of models: process reward models (PRMs) and critic models, where for the latter we prompt general language models to critique each solution step by step. We draw two main observations: (1) Existing PRMs typically fail to generalize to more challenging math problems beyond GSM8K and MATH. They underperform both critic models (i.e., prompted general language models) and our own trained PRM that is straightforwardly fine-tuned on the PRM800K dataset. (2) The best open-source model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has demonstrated the critique capability competitive with the proprietary model GPT-4o, despite that it still lags behind the reasoning-specialized o1-mini. We hope ProcessBench can foster future research in reasoning process assessment, paving the way toward scalable oversight of language models.

This paper revisits the implementation of Load-Balancing-Loss (LBL) when training Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models. Specifically, LBL for MoEs is defined as N_E ∑_i=1^N_E f_ip_i, where N_E is the total number of experts, f_i represents the frequency of expert i being selected, and p_i denotes the average gating score of the expert i. Existing MoE training frameworks usually employ the parallel training strategy so that f_i and the LBL are calculated within a micro-batch and averaged across parallel groups.However, a micro-batch for training billion-scale LLMs typically contains very few sequences, leading to the micro-batch LBL being almost at the sequence level, and the router is pushed to distribute the token evenly within each sequence.Under this strict constraint, even tokens from a domain-specific sequence (e.g., code) are uniformly routed to all experts, thereby inhibiting expert specialization.In this work, we propose calculating LBL using a global-batch to loose this constraint. Because a global-batch contains much more diverse sequences than a micro-batch, which will encourage load balance at the corpus level. Specifically, we introduce an extra communication step to synchronize f_i across micro-batches and then use it to calculate the LBL.Through experiments on training MoEs-based LLMs (up to 42.8B parameters and 400B tokens), we surprisingly find that the global-batch LBL strategy yields excellent performance gains in both pre-training perplexity and downstream tasks.Our analysis reveals that the global-batch LBL greatly improves the domain specialization of experts. Global-batch LBL is also used in Qwen3-MoEs.

Multimodel Large Language Models(MLLMs) have achieved promising OCR-free Document Understanding performance by increasing the supported resolution of document images. However, this comes at the cost of generating thousands of visual tokens for a single document image, leading to excessive GPU memory and slower inference times, particularly in multi-page document comprehension. In this work, to address these challenges, we propose a High-resolution DocCompressor module to compress each high-resolution document image into 324 tokens, guided by low-resolution global visual features. With this compression module, to strengthen multi-page document comprehension ability and balance both token efficiency and question-answering performance, we develop the DocOwl2 under a three-stage training framework: Single-image Pretraining, Multi-image Continue-pretraining, and Multi-task Finetuning. DocOwl2 sets a new state-of-the-art across multi-page document understanding benchmarks and reduces first token latency by more than 50%. Compared to single-image MLLMs trained on similar data, our DocOwl2 achieves comparable single-page understanding performance with less than 20% of the visual tokens. Our codes, models, and data will be publicly available.

Large language models have shown exceptional capabilities in a wide range of tasks, such as text generation and video generation, among others. However, due to their massive parameter count, these models often require substantial storage space, imposing significant constraints on the machines deploying LLMs. To overcome this limitation, one research direction proposes to compress the models using integer replacements for floating-point numbers, in a process known as Quantization. Some recent studies suggest quantizing the key and value cache (KV Cache) of LLMs, and designing quantization techniques that treat the key and value matrices equivalently. This work delves deeper into the asymmetric structural roles of KV Cache, a phenomenon where the transformer’s output loss is more sensitive to the quantization of key matrices. We conduct a systematic examination of the attention output error resulting from key and value quantization. The phenomenon inspires us to propose an asymmetric quantization strategy. Our approach allows for 1-bit quantization of the KV cache by implementing distinct configurations for key and value matrices. We carry out experiments across a variety of datasets, demonstrating that our proposed model allows for the quantization of up to 75% decoder layers with 1 bit, while simultaneously maintaining performance levels comparable to those of the models with floating parameters.

The key to effective alignment lies in high-quality preference data. Recent research has focused on automated alignment, which involves developing alignment systems with minimal human intervention. However, prior research has predominantly focused on developing data generation methods, while insufficient attention has been paid to quality control mechanisms and often produces inaccurate and unhelpful data, leading to unpredictable benefits during iterative optimization. In this paper, we present Self-Steering Optimization (SSO), an algorithm that autonomously generates high-quality preference data, eliminating manual annotation requirements. SSO employs a specialized optimization objective to build a data generator from the policy model itself, which is used to produce accurate and on-policy data. We demonstrate SSO‘s effectiveness through comprehensive experiments on two series of models: Llama 3 and Qwen 2. Our evaluation across diverse benchmarks shows that SSO consistently outperforms baselines in human preference alignment and reward optimization. Further analysis validates SSO as a scalable framework for preference optimization, benefiting the advancement in automated alignment techniques.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) aim to identify and mitigate intermediate errors in the reasoning processes in mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs).However, the development of effective PRMs faces significant challenges, particularly in data annotation and evaluation methodologies.In this paper, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that commonly used Monte Carlo (MC) estimation-based data synthesis for PRMs typically yields inferior performance and generalization compared to LLM-as-a-judge and human annotation methods.Furthermore, we identify potential biases in conventional Best-of-N (BoN) evaluation strategies for PRMs.To address these challenges, we develop a consensus filtering mechanism that effectively integrates MC estimation with LLM-as-a-judge and advocates a more comprehensive evaluation framework that combines response-level and step-level metrics. Based on the mechanisms, we significantly improve both model performance and data efficiency in the BoN evaluation and the step-wise error identification task.Finally, we release a new state-of-the-art PRM that outperforms existing open-source alternatives and provides practical guidelines for future research.

Auto-regressive decoding is a memory-bound job, meaning decoding inference performance is limited by the bandwidth rather than the computational capabilities of the GPU. Weight-only quantization is a promising method to address the memory-bound limitations. Previous studies have followed one of two approaches. Some have exclusively studied integer quantization while ignoring the Gaussian distribution nature of LLMs’ weights. Others have proposed non-uniform quantization but incurred additional I/O overhead due to lookup tables, e.g. NF4. In this work, we extend the IEEE 754 float-point standard to the ExMy quantization schema, which allocates x bit for the exponent and y bit for the mantissa to represent a number. In terms of runtime efficiency, we demonstrate that the conversion from ExMy to FP16 can be realized through register-level operations, which can get almost the same performance as INT5. In terms of quantization loss, we analyze that of different ExMy settings, where the E2M2 schema achieves an optimal balance, offering the highest efficiency with lossless accuracy. We further propose the FPE2M2 framework that supports lossless weight-only quantization inference and validate the FPE2M2 framework on Qwen and LLaMA Models across various modalities, such as text, image, and audio tasks, which achieves a faster inference speed while maintaining nearly lossless accuracy.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent years have witnessed many promising studies on leveraging LLM-based agents to simulate human social behavior. While prior work has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, much of it has focused on specific scenarios involving a limited number of agents and has lacked the ability to adapt when errors occur during simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel LLM-agent-based simulation platform called GenSim, which: (1) Abstracts a set of general functions to simplify the simulation of customized social scenarios; (2) Supports one hundred thousand agents to better simulate large-scale populations in real-world contexts; (3) Incorporates error-correction mechanisms to ensure more reliable and long-term simulations. To evaluate our platform, we assess both the efficiency of large-scale agent simulations and the effectiveness of the error-correction mechanisms. To our knowledge, GenSim represents an initial step toward a general, large-scale, and correctable social simulation platform based on LLM agents, promising to further advance the field of social science.

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameters emerge diverse abilities, including math reasoning, codegeneration, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). While the open-source community has explored ad-hoc SFT for enhancing individual capabilities, proprietary LLMs exhibit versatility across various skills. Therefore, understanding the facilitation of multiple abilities via SFT is paramount. In this study, we specificially focuses on the interplay of data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during SFT. We propose four intriguing research questions to explore the association between model performance and various factors including data amount, composition ratio, model size and SFT strategies. Our experiments reveal that distinct capabilities scale differently and larger models generally show superior performance with same amount of data. Mathematical reasoning and code generation consistently improve with increasing data amount, whereas general abilities plateau after roughly a thousand samples. Moreover, we observe data composition appears to enhance various abilities under limited data conditions, yet can lead to performance conflicts when data is plentiful. Our findings also suggest the amount of composition data influences performance more than the composition ratio. In analysis of SFT strategies, we find that sequentially learning multiple skills risks catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed Dual-stage Mixed Fine-tuning (DMT) strategy offers a promising solution to learn multiple abilities with different scaling patterns.

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for human-audio interaction. However, the absence of benchmarks capable of evaluating audio-centric interaction capabilities has impeded advancements in this field. Previous models primarily focus on assessing different fundamental tasks, such as automatic speech recognition, and lack an assessment of the open-ended generative capabilities centered around audio. Thus, it is challenging to track the progression in the Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) domain and to provide guidance for future improvement.In this paper, we introduce AIR-Bench (Audio InstRuction Benchmark), the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LALMs to understand various types of audio signals (including human speech, natural sounds, and music), and furthermore, to interact with humans in the textual format. AIR-Bench encompasses two dimensions: foundation and chat benchmarks. The former consists of 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions, intending to inspect the basic single-task ability of LALMs. The latter one contains 2k instances of open-ended question-and-answer data, directly assessing the comprehension of the model on complex audio and its capacity to follow instructions. Both benchmarks require the model to generate hypotheses directly. We design a unified framework that leverages advanced language models, such as GPT-4, to evaluate the scores of generated hypotheses given the meta-information of the audio. Experimental results demonstrate a high level of consistency between GPT-4-based evaluation and human evaluation. By revealing the limitations of existing LALMs through evaluation results, AIR-Bench can provide insights into the direction of future research. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/AIR-Bench.

Considerable efforts have been invested in augmenting the role-playing proficiency of open-source large language models (LLMs) by emulating proprietary counterparts. Nevertheless, we posit that LLMs inherently harbor role-play capabilities, owing to the extensive knowledge of characters and potential dialogues ingrained in their vast training corpora. Thus, we introduce Ditto, the first self-alignment method for role-play, which encourages an instruction-following LLM to simulate role-play dialogues as a variant of reading comprehension, and creates a role-play training set comprising 4000 characters, surpassing the scale of currently available datasets by tenfold regarding the number of roles. Subsequently, we fine-tune the LLM using this self-generated dataset to augment its role-playing capabilities. Upon evaluating our meticulously constructed role-play benchmark and the roleplay subset of MT-Bench, Ditto, in various parameter scales, consistently maintains a consistent role identity and provides accurate role-specific knowledge in multi-turn role-play conversations, outperforming all open-source role-play baselines. Furthermore, we present the first cross-supervision role-play experiment, revealing that the role-play styles can be easily acquired, while the intrinsic capabilities of LLMs confine the knowledge within role-play.

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit limitations such as generating unsafe responses, unreliable reasoning, etc. Existing inference intervention approaches attempt to mitigate these issues by finetuning additional models to produce calibration signals (such as rewards) that guide the LLM’s decoding process. However, this solution introduces substantial time and space overhead due to the separate models required. This work proposes Non-disruptive parameters insertion (Otter), inserting extra parameters into the transformer architecture to predict calibration signals along with the original LLM output. Otter offers state-of-the-art performance on multiple demanding tasks while saving up to 86.5% extra space and 98.5% extra time. Furthermore, Otter seamlessly integrates with existing inference engines, requiring only a one-line code change, and the original model response remains accessible after the parameter insertion.

Structure information is critical for understanding the semantics of text-rich images, such as documents, tables, and charts. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Visual Document Understanding are equipped with text recognition ability but lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images. In this work, we emphasize the importance of structure information in Visual Document Understanding and propose Unified Structure Learning to boost the performance of MLLMs. Based on publicly available text-rich images, we build a comprehensive training set DocStruct4M to support structure-aware parsing tasks and multi-grained text localization tasks across 5 domains: document, webpage, table, chart, and natural image. To better encode structure information, we design a simple and effective vision-to-text module H-Reducer, which can not only maintain the layout information but also reduce the length of visual features by merging horizontal adjacent patches through convolution, enabling the LLM to understand high-resolution images more efficiently. Our model DocOwl 1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks. All codes, models, and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/DocOwl1.5.

The complementary potential of Large Language Models (LLM) assumes off-the-shelf LLMs have heterogeneous expertise in a wide range of domains and tasks so that an ensemble of LLMs can achieve consistently better performance. Existing ensemble methods for LLMs mainly focus on reward model ranking of outputs, leading to significant computation overhead. To combat this issue, we revisit the complementary potential of LLMs and further elaborate on it by mining latent expertise with off-the-shelf reward models. We propose ZOOTER, a reward-guided routing method distilling rewards on training queries to train a routing function, which can precisely distribute each query to the LLM with expertise about it. We also integrate a tag-based label enhancement to mitigate noise from uncertainty when using rewards as silver supervision. ZOOTER shows computation efficiency in inference as it only introduces minor computation overhead of a routing function compared with reward model ranking methods. We evaluate ZOOTER on a comprehensive benchmark collection with 26 subsets in different domains and tasks. ZOOTER outperforms the best single model on average and ranks first on 44% of tasks, even surpassing multiple reward model ranking methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. To further unleash the power of LLMs to accomplish complex tasks, there is a growing trend to build agent frameworks that equips LLMs, such as ChatGPT, with tool-use abilities to connect with massive external APIs. In this work, we introduce ModelScope-Agent, a general and customizable agent framework for real-world applications, based on open-source LLMs as controllers. It provides a user-friendly system library, with a customizable engine design to support model training on multiple open-source LLMs, while also enabling seamless integration with both model APIs and common APIs in a unified way. To equip the LLMs with tool-use abilities, a comprehensive framework has been proposed spanning tool-use data collection, tool retrieval, tool registration, memory control, customized model training, and evaluation for practical real-world applications. Finally, we showcase ModelScopeGPT, a real-world intelligent assistant of ModelScope Community based on the ModelScope-Agent framework, which is able to connect open-source LLMs with more than 1000 public AI models and localized community knowledge in ModelScope. The ModelScope-Agent online demo, library are now publicly available.

Large-scale pre-trained foundation models have been an emerging paradigm for building artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which can be quickly adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. This paper presents mPLUG, a new vision-language foundation model for both cross-modal understanding and generation. Most existing pre-trained models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. To address both problems, mPLUG introduces an effective and efficient vision-language architecture with novel cross-modal skip-connections.mPLUG is pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. It achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. mPLUG also demonstrates strong zero-shot transferability on vision-language and video-language tasks. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/alibaba/AliceMind

Despite the achievements of large-scale multimodal pre-training approaches, cross-modal retrieval, e.g., image-text retrieval, remains a challenging task. To bridge the semantic gap between the two modalities, previous studies mainly focus on word-region alignment at the object level, lacking the matching between the linguistic relation among the words and the visual relation among the regions. The neglect of such relation consistency impairs the contextualized representation of image-text pairs and hinders the model performance and the interpretability. In this paper, we first propose a novel metric, Intra-modal Self-attention Distance (ISD), to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. In response, we present Inter-modal Alignment on Intra-modal Self-attentions (IAIS), a regularized training method to optimize the ISD and calibrate intra-modal self-attentions from the two modalities mutually via inter-modal alignment. The IAIS regularizer boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach.