Daily Papers

Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have revealed an overthinking phenomenon, where models generate verbose reasoning across all tasks regardless of questions. To address this issue, we present FAST, a novel Fast-Slow Thinking framework that dynamically adapts reasoning depth based on question characteristics. Through empirical analysis, we establish the feasibility of fast-slow thinking in LVLMs by investigating how response length and data distribution affect performance. We develop FAST-GRPO with three components: model-based metrics for question characterization, an adaptive thinking reward mechanism, and difficulty-aware KL regularization. Experiments across seven reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FAST achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with over 10\% relative improvement compared to the base model, while reducing token usage by 32.7-67.3\% compared to previous slow-thinking approaches, effectively balancing reasoning length and accuracy.

Video-to-Audio (V2A) generation requires balancing four critical perceptual dimensions: semantic consistency, audio-visual temporal synchrony, aesthetic quality, and spatial accuracy; yet existing methods suffer from objective entanglement that conflates competing goals in single loss functions and lack human preference alignment. We introduce PrismAudio, the first framework to integrate Reinforcement Learning into V2A generation with specialized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) planning. Our approach decomposes monolithic reasoning into four specialized CoT modules (Semantic, Temporal, Aesthetic, and Spatial CoT), each paired with targeted reward functions. This CoT-reward correspondence enables multidimensional RL optimization that guides the model to jointly generate better reasoning across all perspectives, solving the objective entanglement problem while preserving interpretability. To make this optimization computationally practical, we propose Fast-GRPO, which employs hybrid ODE-SDE sampling that dramatically reduces the training overhead compared to existing GRPO implementations. We also introduce AudioCanvas, a rigorous benchmark that is more distributionally balanced and covers more realistically diverse and challenging scenarios than existing datasets, with 300 single-event classes and 501 multi-event samples. Experimental results demonstrate that PrismAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four perceptual dimensions on both the in-domain VGGSound test set and out-of-domain AudioCanvas benchmark. The project page is available at https://PrismAudio-Project.github.io.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from low-quality rollouts lead to unstable updates and inefficient exploration. We introduce Slow-Fast Policy Optimization (SFPO), a simple yet efficient framework to address these limitations via decomposing each step into three stages: a short fast trajectory of inner steps on the same batch, a reposition mechanism to control off-policy drift, and a final slow correction. This reposition-before-update design preserves the objective and rollout process unchanged, making SFPO plug-compatible with existing policy-gradient pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFPO consistently improves stability, reduces rollouts, and accelerates convergence of reasoning RL training. Specifically, it outperforms GRPO by up to 2.80 points in average on math reasoning benchmarks. It also achieves up to 4.93 fewer rollouts and a 4.19 reduction in wall-clock time to match GRPO's best accuracy.

Tool-integrated (TI) reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning by interacting with external tools such as search engines and retrievers. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), exemplified by the recent Search-R1, offers fast convergence and a value-free formulation that makes it appealing for this setting, yet consistently suffers from training collapse. We identify Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD), a systematic reduction or stagnation in the likelihood of both correct and incorrect responses, as the core mechanism driving this failure. LLD emerges early and triggers a self-reinforcing LLD Death Spiral, where declining likelihood leads to low-confidence responses, inflating gradients, and ultimately causing collapse. We empirically characterize this process across models on a Search-R1-style, search-integrated question answering task, revealing a consistent three-phase trajectory: early stagnation, steady decay, and accelerated collapse. To address this, we propose a lightweight likelihood-preserving regularization LLDS for GRPO that activates only when a trajectory's likelihood decreases, and regularizes only the tokens responsible. This fine-grained structure mitigates LLD with minimal interference to optimization. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop QA benchmarks, our method stabilizes training, prevents gradient explosion, and yields substantial performance improvements, including +37.8% gains on Qwen2.5-3B and +32.0% gains on Qwen2.5-7B. Our results establish LLD as a fundamental bottleneck in GRPO-based TIRL and provide a practical path toward stable, scalable training of tool-integrated LLM.

Fast weight architectures offer a promising alternative to attention-based transformers for long-context modeling by maintaining constant memory overhead regardless of context length. However, their potential is limited by the next-token prediction (NTP) training paradigm. NTP optimizes single-token predictions and ignores semantic coherence across multiple tokens following a prefix. Consequently, fast weight models, which dynamically update their parameters to store contextual information, learn suboptimal representations that fail to capture long-range dependencies. We introduce REFINE (Reinforced Fast weIghts with Next sEquence prediction), a reinforcement learning framework that trains fast weight models under the next-sequence prediction (NSP) objective. REFINE selects informative token positions based on prediction entropy, generates multi-token rollouts, assigns self-supervised sequence-level rewards, and optimizes the model with group relative policy optimization (GRPO). REFINE is applicable throughout the training lifecycle of pre-trained language models: mid-training, post-training, and test-time training. Our experiments on LaCT-760M and DeltaNet-1.3B demonstrate that REFINE consistently outperforms supervised fine-tuning with NTP across needle-in-a-haystack retrieval, long-context question answering, and diverse tasks in LongBench. REFINE provides an effective and versatile framework for improving long-context modeling in fast weight architectures.

Adapting reasoning models to new tasks during post-training with only output-level supervision stalls under reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) when the initial success probability p_0 is small. Using the Tsallis q-logarithm, we define a loss family J_Q that interpolates between RLVR (at q{=}0, the exploitation pole) and the log-marginal-likelihood over latent trajectories (at q{=}1, the density-estimation pole). All members share the same per-example gradient direction, differing only by a scalar amplification P_{θ^{-q}} that reweights each instance independently of the learning rate. This amplification is the mechanism that addresses cold-start stalling: under gradient flow, the exploitation pole requires Ω(1{p_0}) time to escape cold start, while the density-estimation pole escapes in Θbig(log(1{p_0})big); intermediate q trades escape speed against noise memorization. Because P_θ is intractable, we derive two Monte Carlo estimators from the two factorizations of the gradient: Gradient-Amplified RL (GARL) samples from the prior and amplifies the RL gradient, and Posterior-Attenuated Fine-Tuning (PAFT) importance-resamples from the posterior and runs standard SFT. Both have bias Obig(q{M P_θ^{q+1}}big); GARL has lower variance, PAFT has semantically coherent gradients. On FinQA, HotPotQA, and MuSiQue, GARL at q{=}0.75 substantially mitigates cold-start stalling, escaping cold start where GRPO fails entirely. In warm start, GARL at low q dominates FinQA where training is stable; on HotPotQA and MuSiQue, GARL destabilizes during training, and PAFT at q{=}0.75 provides stable gradients (best overall on HotPotQA at 47.9 maj@16, +14.4 over GRPO).

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) offer the potential for parallel token generation, but most open-source MDLMs decode fewer than 5 tokens per model forward pass even with sophisticated sampling strategies. As a result, their sampling speeds are often comparable to AR + speculative decoding schemes, limiting their advantage over mainstream autoregressive approaches. Existing distillation-based accelerators (dParallel, d3LLM) finetune MDLMs on trajectories generated by a base model, which can become off-policy during finetuning and restrict performance to the quality of the base model's samples. We propose dUltra, an on-policy reinforcement learning framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that learns unmasking strategies for efficient parallel decoding. dUltra introduces an unmasking planner head that predicts per-token unmasking likelihoods under independent Bernoulli distributions. We jointly optimize the base diffusion LLM and the unmasking order planner using reward signals combining verifiable reward, distillation reward, and the number of unmasking steps. Across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks, dUltra improves the accuracy--efficiency trade-off over state-of-the-art heuristic and distillation baselines, moving towards achieving ``diffusion supremacy'' over autoregressive models.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-turn decision-making tasks. However, current agents typically rely on fixed cognitive patterns: non-thinking models generate immediate responses, while thinking models engage in deep reasoning uniformly. This rigidity is inefficient for long-horizon tasks, where cognitive demands vary significantly from step to step, with some requiring strategic planning and others only routine execution. In this paper, we introduce CogRouter, a framework that trains agents to dynamically adapt cognitive depth at each step. Grounded in ACT-R theory, we design four hierarchical cognitive levels ranging from instinctive responses to strategic planning. Our two-stage training approach includes Cognition-aware Supervised Fine-tuning (CoSFT) to instill stable level-specific patterns, and Cognition-aware Policy Optimization (CoPO) for step-level credit assignment via confidence-aware advantage reweighting. The key insight is that appropriate cognitive depth should maximize the confidence of the resulting action. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld demonstrate that CogRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior efficiency. With Qwen2.5-7B, it reaches an 82.3% success rate, outperforming GPT-4o (+40.3%), OpenAI-o3 (+18.3%), and GRPO (+14.0%), while using 62% fewer tokens.

When confronted with complex problems, we tend to think slowly; conversely, for simple questions, we think quickly. Such a two-system thinking mechanism allows us to efficiently allocate cognitive resources, enabling quick decision-making for straightforward issues while reserving deeper analytical thinking for more intricate challenges. However, existing reasoning-oriented visual language models (VLMs), whether trained with explicit chain-of-thought annotations or rule-based RL rewards, mainly pursue lengthy, detailed reasoning chains, which often lead to excessive computational costs. In this work, we propose a simple RL approach, which enables VLMs to automatically switch between fast and slow thinking modes depending on task difficulty. The approach consists of two stages: in the first stage, we label data as either requiring fast thinking or slow thinking based on the model output length, which is inspired by the observation that pre-trained VLMs typically produce answers of varying lengths for different types of questions; in the second stage, we train the model using GRPO along with the thinking mode labels to develop dual-mode thinking. Despite its simplicity, our model, named DualMindVLM, significantly outperforms the base model and achieves performance on par with state-of-the-art visual reasoning models, while maintaining exceptionally high token efficiency.

Diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-quality images from text prompts. However, these models often require large-scale training data and significant computational resources to train, or suffer from heavy structure with high latency. To this end, we propose Efficient Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (E-MMDiT), an efficient and lightweight multimodal diffusion model with only 304M parameters for fast image synthesis requiring low training resources. We provide an easily reproducible baseline with competitive results. Our model for 512px generation, trained with only 25M public data in 1.5 days on a single node of 8 AMD MI300X GPUs, achieves 0.66 on GenEval and easily reaches to 0.72 with some post-training techniques such as GRPO. Our design philosophy centers on token reduction as the computational cost scales significantly with the token count. We adopt a highly compressive visual tokenizer to produce a more compact representation and propose a novel multi-path compression module for further compression of tokens. To enhance our design, we introduce Position Reinforcement, which strengthens positional information to maintain spatial coherence, and Alternating Subregion Attention (ASA), which performs attention within subregions to further reduce computational cost. In addition, we propose AdaLN-affine, an efficient lightweight module for computing modulation parameters in transformer blocks. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/Nitro-E and we hope E-MMDiT serves as a strong and practical baseline for future research and contributes to democratization of generative AI models.

Language agents increasingly operate over streams of related tasks, yet existing memory systems struggle to convert accumulated experience into reusable knowledge. Retrieval-augmented and structured memory methods record per-session observations effectively, but often couple acquisition and consolidation into a single online process, leaving the agent without a global view across sessions to discover recurring patterns, abstract shared procedures, or prune redundant entries. Inspired by complementary learning systems theory, we propose Auto-Dreamer, a learned offline consolidator for language-agent memory. Auto-Dreamer decouples fast per-session memory acquisition from slow cross-session consolidation. Given a selected working region of a typed memory bank, the consolidator treats the region as read-only evidence, performs bounded tool-use to inspect entries and provenance-linked source trajectories, and synthesizes a fresh compact replacement set that abstracts across sessions and supersedes the original region. We train Auto-Dreamer via GRPO, using end-to-end agent performance as the reward signal to learn how to consolidate memories acquired through fast online experience. Trained on ScienceWorld trajectories alone, Auto-Dreamer outperforms fixed, RL-trained, and prompted memory baselines on ScienceWorld by 7 points while using an active memory bank 12times smaller than the strongest baseline, and continues to lead on held-out ALFWorld and WebArena without retraining -- using 6times less memory than the strongest baseline on ALFWorld.

Exploration is essential in modern learning, from reinforcement learning environments with small neural policies to large language models (LLMs). Existing work, such as DPO, leverages full sequence log-likelihoods to capture an entire trajectory of the model's decisions, while methods like GRPO aggregate per-token ratios into a trajectory-level update. However, both often limit exploration on long-horizon tasks. We introduce History-Aggregated Exploratory Policy Optimization (HAEPO), a history-aware exploratory loss to combat these shortcomings. HAEPO compresses each trajectory into the sum of its logarithmic probabilities (a cumulative logarithmic likelihood), and applies a Plackett-Luce softmax across trajectories to obtain normalized weights proportional to their returns, thus encouraging broader exploration. We add entropy regularization to stabilize the aggressive updates to prevent premature collapse and a soft KL penalty relative to a frozen copy of the previous (reference) policy. Empirically, HAEPO converges fast, explores thoroughly, aligns closely with true rewards, and demonstrates robust learning behavior better or at par with PPO, GRPO, and DPO across diverse tasks. Thus, HAEPO provides a stable and interpretable framework by explicitly leveraging full-trajectory history while balancing exploration and stability.

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with gradient-based optimizers such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) or Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). While effective, these methods require complex distributed training, large memory budgets, and careful hyperparameter tuning, all of which become increasingly difficult at billion-parameter scale. We present ESSA, Evolutionary Strategies for Scalable Alignment, a gradient-free framework that aligns LLMs using only forward inference and black-box optimization. ESSA focuses optimization on Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) and further compresses their parameter space by optimizing only the singular values from an SVD decomposition of each adapter matrix. This dimensionality reduction makes evolutionary search practical even for very large models and allows efficient operation in quantized INT4 and INT8 inference mode. Across these benchmarks ESSA improves the test accuracy of Qwen2.5-Math-7B by 12.6% on GSM8K and 14.8% on PRM800K, and raises the accuracy of LLaMA3.1-8B on IFEval by 22.5%, all compared with GRPO. In large-scale settings ESSA shows stronger scaling than gradient-based methods: on Qwen2.5-32B for PRM800K it reaches near-optimal accuracy twice as fast on 16 GPUs and six times as fast on 128 GPUs compared with GRPO. These results position evolutionary strategies as a compelling, hardware-friendly alternative to gradient-based LLM alignment, combining competitive quality with substantially reduced wall-clock time and engineering overhead.