Daily Papers

In this work, we use large language models (LLMs) to augment and accelerate research on the P versus NP problem, one of the most important open problems in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Specifically, we propose Socratic reasoning, a general framework that promotes in-depth thinking with LLMs for complex problem-solving. Socratic reasoning encourages LLMs to recursively discover, solve, and integrate problems while facilitating self-evaluation and refinement. Our pilot study on the P vs. NP problem shows that GPT-4 successfully produces a proof schema and engages in rigorous reasoning throughout 97 dialogue turns, concluding "P neq NP", which is in alignment with (Xu and Zhou, 2023). The investigation uncovers novel insights within the extensive solution space of LLMs, shedding light on LLM for Science.

p-adic linear regression is the problem of finding coefficients β that minimise sum_i |y_i - x_i^topβ|_p. We prove that computing an optimal solution is NP-hard via a polynomial-time reduction from Max Cut using a regularisation gadget.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities, with models like OpenAI's O-series and DeepSeek R1 excelling at tasks such as mathematics, coding, logic, and puzzles through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, their ability to solve more complex optimization problems - particularly NP-hard tasks - remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose NP-ENGINE, the first comprehensive framework for training and evaluating LLMs on NP-hard problems. NP-ENGINE covers 10 tasks across five domains, each equipped with (i) a controllable instance generator, (ii) a rule-based verifier, and (iii) a heuristic solver that provides approximate optimal solutions as ground truth. This generator-verifier-heuristic pipeline enables scalable and verifiable RLVR training under hierarchical difficulties. We also introduce NP-BENCH, a benchmark derived from NP-ENGINE-DATA, specifically designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to tackle NP-hard level reasoning problems, focusing not only on feasibility but also on solution quality. Additionally, we present QWEN2.5-7B-NP, a model trained via zero-RLVR with curriculum learning on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, which significantly outperforms GPT-4o on NP-BENCH and achieves SOTA performance with the same model size. Beyond in-domain tasks, we demonstrate that RLVR training on NP-ENGINE-DATA enables strong out-of-domain (OOD) generalization to reasoning tasks (logic, puzzles, math, and knowledge), as well as non-reasoning tasks such as instruction following. We also observe a scaling trend: increasing task diversity improves OOD generalization. These findings suggest that task-rich RLVR training is a promising direction for advancing LLM's reasoning ability, revealing new insights into the scaling laws of RLVR.

Complex reasoning ability is one of the most important features of current LLMs, which has also been leveraged to play an integral role in complex decision-making tasks. Therefore, the investigation into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical: numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, current benchmarks are inadequate in offering a rigorous evaluation of the full extent of reasoning abilities that LLMs are capable of achieving. They are also prone to the risk of overfitting, as these benchmarks, being publicly accessible and static, allow models to potentially tailor their responses to specific benchmark metrics, thereby inflating their performance. Addressing these limitations, our research introduces a new benchmark, named NPHardEval. This benchmark is designed to evaluate the reasoning abilities of LLMs across a broad spectrum of 900 algorithmic questions, extending up to the NP-Hard complexity class. These questions are meticulously chosen to represent a wide range of complexity class below the NP-hard complexity class, offering a rigorous measure of the reasoning ability of LLMs. Through this study, we shed light on the current state of reasoning in LLMs, providing an objective and rigorous perspective through the comparison of LLMs' performance across complex classes. Moreover, this benchmark is designed with a dynamic update mechanism, where the datapoints are refreshed on a monthly basis. Such regular updates play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of LLMs overfitting to the benchmark, promoting a more accurate and reliable assessment of their reasoning capabilities. The benchmark dataset and code of NPHardEval are available at https://github.com/casmlab/NPHardEval.

The creation of high-fidelity, digital versions of human heads is an important stepping stone in the process of further integrating virtual components into our everyday lives. Constructing such avatars is a challenging research problem, due to a high demand for photo-realism and real-time rendering performance. In this work, we propose Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars (NPGA), a data-driven approach to create high-fidelity, controllable avatars from multi-view video recordings. We build our method around 3D Gaussian Splatting for its highly efficient rendering and to inherit the topological flexibility of point clouds. In contrast to previous work, we condition our avatars' dynamics on the rich expression space of neural parametric head models (NPHM), instead of mesh-based 3DMMs. To this end, we distill the backward deformation field of our underlying NPHM into forward deformations which are compatible with rasterization-based rendering. All remaining fine-scale, expression-dependent details are learned from the multi-view videos. To increase the representational capacity of our avatars, we augment the canonical Gaussian point cloud using per-primitive latent features which govern its dynamic behavior. To regularize this increased dynamic expressivity, we propose Laplacian terms on the latent features and predicted dynamics. We evaluate our method on the public NeRSemble dataset, demonstrating that NPGA significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art avatars on the self-reenactment task by 2.6 PSNR. Furthermore, we demonstrate accurate animation capabilities from real-world monocular videos.

Efficiently solving Poisson equations on complex, irregular domains remains a fundamental challenge in scientific computing, as classical iterative solvers often suffer from prohibitive runtime due to ill-conditioned systems. While neural operators offer a fast alternative, they typically rely on large-scale labeled datasets or struggle with unstable training dynamics when using physics-informed residual losses. We propose NPSolver, a neural Poisson solver trained without solution labels via iterative physics supervision. Instead of relying on fully converged numerical solutions or raw PDE residuals, NPSolver utilizes a small number of preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) steps to refine its own predictions, providing a more stable and well-scaled training signal. Theoretical analysis confirms that this iterative supervision serves as a well-conditioned error proxy and that a stop-gradient design is essential for optimization stability. To better capture boundary-driven features under mixed boundary conditions, we further introduce the Boundary-Aware Transolver (BA-Transolver) architecture that explicitly separates interior and boundary tokenization. Extensive evaluations on 2D and 3D irregular geometries demonstrate that NPSolver outperforms both physics-informed and data-driven baselines. Furthermore, a downstream thermal control task highlights the model's capability for conducting efficient and reliable gradient-based boundary control. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/NPSolver.

NPCs in traditional games are often limited by static dialogue trees and a single platform for interaction. To overcome these constraints, this study presents a prototype system that enables large language model (LLM)-powered NPCs to communicate with players both in the game en vironment (Unity) and on a social platform (Discord). Dialogue logs are stored in a cloud database (LeanCloud), allowing the system to synchronize memory between platforms and keep conversa tions coherent. Our initial experiments show that cross-platform interaction is technically feasible and suggest a solid foundation for future developments such as emotional modeling and persistent memory support.

High-fidelity human 3D models can now be learned directly from videos, typically by combining a template-based surface model with neural representations. However, obtaining a template surface requires expensive multi-view capture systems, laser scans, or strictly controlled conditions. Previous methods avoid using a template but rely on a costly or ill-posed mapping from observation to canonical space. We propose a hybrid point-based representation for reconstructing animatable characters that does not require an explicit surface model, while being generalizable to novel poses. For a given video, our method automatically produces an explicit set of 3D points representing approximate canonical geometry, and learns an articulated deformation model that produces pose-dependent point transformations. The points serve both as a scaffold for high-frequency neural features and an anchor for efficiently mapping between observation and canonical space. We demonstrate on established benchmarks that our representation overcomes limitations of prior work operating in either canonical or in observation space. Moreover, our automatic point extraction approach enables learning models of human and animal characters alike, matching the performance of the methods using rigged surface templates despite being more general. Project website: https://lemonatsu.github.io/npc/

Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured environments where obstacles and objects are movable. Navigation in such environments is known as interactive navigation, where task completion requires not only avoiding obstacles but also strategic interactions with movable objects. Non-prehensile interactive navigation focuses on non-grasping interaction strategies, such as pushing, rather than relying on prehensile manipulation. Despite a growing body of research in this field, most solutions are evaluated using case-specific setups, limiting reproducibility and cross-comparison. In this paper, we present Bench-NPIN, the first comprehensive benchmark for non-prehensile interactive navigation. Bench-NPIN includes multiple components: 1) a comprehensive range of simulated environments for non-prehensile interactive navigation tasks, including navigating a maze with movable obstacles, autonomous ship navigation in icy waters, box delivery, and area clearing, each with varying levels of complexity; 2) a set of evaluation metrics that capture unique aspects of interactive navigation, such as efficiency, interaction effort, and partial task completion; and 3) demonstrations using Bench-NPIN to evaluate example implementations of established baselines across environments. Bench-NPIN is an open-source Python library with a modular design. The code, documentation, and trained models can be found at https://github.com/IvanIZ/BenchNPIN.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on mobile devices faces the challenge of insufficient performance in smaller models and excessive resource consumption in larger ones. This paper highlights that mobile Neural Processing Units (NPUs) have underutilized computational resources, particularly their matrix multiplication units, during typical LLM inference. To leverage this wasted compute capacity, we propose applying parallel test-time scaling techniques on mobile NPUs to enhance the performance of smaller LLMs. However, this approach confronts inherent NPU challenges, including inadequate hardware support for fine-grained quantization and low efficiency in general-purpose computations. To overcome these, we introduce two key techniques: a hardware-aware tile quantization scheme that aligns group quantization with NPU memory access patterns, and efficient LUT-based replacements for complex operations such as Softmax and dequantization. We design and implement an end-to-end inference system that leverages the NPU's compute capability to support test-time scaling on Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms. Experiments show our approach brings significant speedups: up to 19.0 for mixed-precision GEMM and 2.2 for Softmax. More importantly, we demonstrate that smaller models using test-time scaling can match or exceed the accuracy of larger models, achieving a new performance-cost Pareto frontier.

This work proposes XR-NPE, a high-throughput Mixed-precision SIMD Neural Processing Engine, designed for extended reality (XR) perception workloads like visual inertial odometry (VIO), object classification, and eye gaze extraction. XR-NPE is first to support FP4, Posit (4,1), Posit (8,0), and Posit (16,1) formats, with layer adaptive hybrid-algorithmic implementation supporting ultra-low bit precision to significantly reduce memory bandwidth requirements, and accompanied by quantization-aware training for minimal accuracy loss. The proposed Reconfigurable Mantissa Multiplication and Exponent processing Circuitry (RMMEC) reduces dark silicon in the SIMD MAC compute engine, assisted by selective power gating to reduce energy consumption, providing 2.85x improved arithmetic intensity. XR-NPE achieves a maximum operating frequency of 1.72 GHz, area 0.016 mm2 , and arithmetic intensity 14 pJ at CMOS 28nm, reducing 42% area, 38% power compared to the best of state-of-the-art MAC approaches. The proposed XR-NPE based AXI-enabled Matrix-multiplication co-processor consumes 1.4x fewer LUTs, 1.77x fewer FFs, and provides 1.2x better energy efficiency compared to SoTA accelerators on VCU129. The proposed co-processor provides 23% better energy efficiency and 4% better compute density for VIO workloads. XR-NPE establishes itself as a scalable, precision-adaptive compute engine for future resource-constrained XR devices. The complete set for codes for results reproducibility are released publicly, enabling designers and researchers to readily adopt and build upon them. https://github.com/mukullokhande99/XR-NPE.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in various visual generation tasks, including image, video, and 3D content generation. Preference optimization (PO) is a prominent and growing area of research that aims to align these models with human preferences. While existing PO methods primarily concentrate on producing favorable outputs, they often overlook the significance of classifier-free guidance (CFG) in mitigating undesirable results. Diffusion-NPO addresses this gap by introducing negative preference optimization (NPO), training models to generate outputs opposite to human preferences and thereby steering them away from unfavorable outcomes through CFG. However, prior NPO approaches rely on costly and fragile procedures for obtaining explicit preference annotations (e.g., manual pairwise labeling or reward model training), limiting their practicality in domains where such data are scarce or difficult to acquire. In this work, we propose Self-NPO, specifically truncated diffusion fine-tuning, a data-free approach of negative preference optimization by directly learning from the model itself, eliminating the need for manual data labeling or reward model training. This data-free approach is highly efficient (less than 1% training cost of Diffusion-NPO) and achieves comparable performance to Diffusion-NPO in a data-free manner. We demonstrate that Self-NPO integrates seamlessly into widely used diffusion models, including SD1.5, SDXL, and CogVideoX, as well as models already optimized for human preferences, consistently enhancing both their generation quality and alignment with human preferences. Code is available at https://github.com/G-U-N/Diffusion-NPO.

Diffusion models have made substantial advances in image generation, yet models trained on large, unfiltered datasets often yield outputs misaligned with human preferences. Numerous methods have been proposed to fine-tune pre-trained diffusion models, achieving notable improvements in aligning generated outputs with human preferences. However, we argue that existing preference alignment methods neglect the critical role of handling unconditional/negative-conditional outputs, leading to a diminished capacity to avoid generating undesirable outcomes. This oversight limits the efficacy of classifier-free guidance~(CFG), which relies on the contrast between conditional generation and unconditional/negative-conditional generation to optimize output quality. In response, we propose a straightforward but versatile effective approach that involves training a model specifically attuned to negative preferences. This method does not require new training strategies or datasets but rather involves minor modifications to existing techniques. Our approach integrates seamlessly with models such as SD1.5, SDXL, video diffusion models and models that have undergone preference optimization, consistently enhancing their alignment with human preferences.

This paper delineates the visual speech recognition (VSR) system introduced by the NPU-ASLP (Team 237) in the second Chinese Continuous Visual Speech Recognition Challenge (CNVSRC 2024), engaging in all four tracks, including the fixed and open tracks of Single-Speaker VSR Task and Multi-Speaker VSR Task. In terms of data processing, we leverage the lip motion extractor from the baseline1 to produce multiscale video data. Besides, various augmentation techniques are applied during training, encompassing speed perturbation, random rotation, horizontal flipping, and color transformation. The VSR model adopts an end-to-end architecture with joint CTC/attention loss, introducing Enhanced ResNet3D visual frontend, E-Branchformer encoder, and Bi-directional Transformer decoder. Our approach yields a 30.47% CER for the Single-Speaker Task and 34.30% CER for the Multi-Speaker Task, securing second place in the open track of the Single-Speaker Task and first place in the other three tracks.

On-device large language models (LLMs) are catalyzing novel mobile applications such as UI task automation and personalized email auto-reply, without giving away users' private data. However, on-device LLMs still suffer from unacceptably long inference latency, especially the time to first token (prefill stage) due to the need of long context for accurate, personalized content generation, as well as the lack of parallel computing capacity of mobile CPU/GPU. To enable practical on-device LLM, we present mllm-NPU, the first-of-its-kind LLM inference system that efficiently leverages on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offloading. Essentially, mllm-NPU is an algorithm-system co-design that tackles a few semantic gaps between the LLM architecture and contemporary NPU design. Specifically, it re-constructs the prompt and model in three levels: (1) At prompt level, it divides variable-length prompts into multiple fixed-sized chunks while maintaining data dependencies; (2) At tensor level, it identifies and extracts significant outliers to run on the CPU/GPU in parallel with minimal overhead; (3) At block level, it schedules Transformer blocks in an out-of-order manner to the CPU/GPU and NPU based on their hardware affinity and sensitivity to accuracy. Compared to competitive baselines, mllm-NPU achieves 22.4x faster prefill speed and 30.7x energy savings on average, and up to 32.8x speedup in an end-to-end real-world application. For the first time, mllm-NPU achieves more than 1,000 tokens/sec prefilling for a billion-sized model (Qwen1.5-1.8B), paving the way towards practical on-device LLM.

Modern transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are constructed with a series of decoder blocks. Each block comprises three key components: (1) QKV generation, (2) multi-head attention, and (3) feed-forward networks. In batched processing, QKV generation and feed-forward networks involve compute-intensive matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMM), while multi-head attention requires bandwidth-heavy matrix-vector multiplications (GEMV). Machine learning accelerators like TPUs or NPUs are proficient in handling GEMM but are less efficient for GEMV computations. Conversely, Processing-in-Memory (PIM) technology is tailored for efficient GEMV computation, while it lacks the computational power to handle GEMM effectively. Inspired by this insight, we propose NeuPIMs, a heterogeneous acceleration system that jointly exploits a conventional GEMM-focused NPU and GEMV-optimized PIM devices. The main challenge in efficiently integrating NPU and PIM lies in enabling concurrent operations on both platforms, each addressing a specific kernel type. First, existing PIMs typically operate in a "blocked" mode, allowing only either NPU or PIM to be active at any given time. Second, the inherent dependencies between GEMM and GEMV in LLMs restrict their parallel processing. To tackle these challenges, NeuPIMs is equipped with dual row buffers in each bank, facilitating the simultaneous management of memory read/write operations and PIM commands. Further, NeuPIMs employs a runtime sub-batch interleaving technique to maximize concurrent execution, leveraging batch parallelism to allow two independent sub-batches to be pipelined within a single NeuPIMs device. Our evaluation demonstrates that compared to GPU-only, NPU-only, and a na\"ive NPU+PIM integrated acceleration approaches, NeuPIMs achieves 3times, 2.4times and 1.6times throughput improvement, respectively.

This paper delineates the visual speech recognition (VSR) system introduced by the NPU-ASLP-LiAuto (Team 237) in the first Chinese Continuous Visual Speech Recognition Challenge (CNVSRC) 2023, engaging in the fixed and open tracks of Single-Speaker VSR Task, and the open track of Multi-Speaker VSR Task. In terms of data processing, we leverage the lip motion extractor from the baseline1 to produce multi-scale video data. Besides, various augmentation techniques are applied during training, encompassing speed perturbation, random rotation, horizontal flipping, and color transformation. The VSR model adopts an end-to-end architecture with joint CTC/attention loss, comprising a ResNet3D visual frontend, an E-Branchformer encoder, and a Transformer decoder. Experiments show that our system achieves 34.76% CER for the Single-Speaker Task and 41.06% CER for the Multi-Speaker Task after multi-system fusion, ranking first place in all three tracks we participate.

This paper describes our NPU-ASLP system for the Audio-Visual Diarization and Recognition (AVDR) task in the Multi-modal Information based Speech Processing (MISP) 2022 Challenge. Specifically, the weighted prediction error (WPE) and guided source separation (GSS) techniques are used to reduce reverberation and generate clean signals for each single speaker first. Then, we explore the effectiveness of Branchformer and E-Branchformer based ASR systems. To better make use of the visual modality, a cross-attention based multi-modal fusion module is proposed, which explicitly learns the contextual relationship between different modalities. Experiments show that our system achieves a concatenated minimum-permutation character error rate (cpCER) of 28.13\% and 31.21\% on the Dev and Eval set, and obtains second place in the challenge.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong coding abilities, enabling not only static code generation but also iterative code self-evolving through agentic frameworks. Recently, AlphaEvolve novikov2025alphaevolve demonstrated that LLM-based coding agents can autonomously improve algorithms and surpass human experts, with scopes limited to isolated kernels spanning hundreds of lines of code. Inspired by AlphaEvolve, we present SATLUTION, the first framework to extend LLM-based code evolution to the full repository scale, encompassing hundreds of files and tens of thousands of lines of C/C++ code. Targeting Boolean Satisfiability (SAT), the canonical NP-complete problem and a cornerstone of both theory and applications. SATLUTION orchestrates LLM agents to directly evolve solver repositories under strict correctness guarantees and distributed runtime feedback, while simultaneously self-evolving its own evolution policies and rules. Starting from SAT Competition 2024 codebases and benchmark, SATLUTION evolved solvers that decisively outperformed the human-designed winners of the SAT Competition 2025, and also surpassed both 2024 and 2025 champions on the 2024 benchmarks.

We prove that completing an untimed, unbounded track in TrackMania Nations Forever is NP-complete by using a reduction from 3-SAT and showing that a solution can be checked in polynomial time.

Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks, largely enabled by their long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) capabilities. However, developing these Long CoT behaviors relies heavily on post-training with high-quality datasets, which are typically costly and human-curated (e.g., mathematics and code), leaving scalable alternatives unexplored. In this work, we introduce NP-hard (NPH) graph problems as a novel synthetic training corpus, as they inherently require deep reasoning, extensive exploration, and reflective strategies, which are core characteristics of Long CoT reasoning. Building on this insight, we develop a two-stage post-training framework: (i) Long CoT Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on rejection-sampled NPH graph instances, which substantially enhances reasoning depth, and (ii) Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a fine-grained reward design, which sharpens reasoning efficiency. Our flagship model, Graph-R1-7B, demonstrates strong generalization across mathematics, coding, STEM, and logic, and surpasses QwQ-32B on NPH graph problems in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency. These results position NPH graph problems as an effective and scalable resource for advancing Long CoT reasoning in LLMs, opening a new frontier for LLM post-training. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Graph-Reasoner/Graph-R1, with models and datasets hosted in our Hugging Face collection HKUST-DSAIL/Graph-R1.

Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word w that has been chosen from a dictionary D. In order to discover w, the player can make at most ell guesses, which must also be words from D, all words in D having the same length k. After each guess, the player is notified of the positions in which their guess matches the secret word, as well as letters in the guess that appear in the secret word in a different position. We study the game of Wordle from a complexity perspective, proving NP-hardness of its natural formalization: to decide given a dictionary D and an integer ell if the player can guarantee to discover the secret word within ell guesses. Moreover, we prove that hardness holds even over instances where words have length k = 5, and that even in this case it is NP-hard to approximate the minimum number of guesses required to guarantee discovering the secret word. We also present results regarding its parameterized complexity and offer some related open problems.

Understanding the relations between entities denoted by NPs in a text is a critical part of human-like natural language understanding. However, only a fraction of such relations is covered by standard NLP tasks and benchmarks nowadays. In this work, we propose a novel task termed text-based NP enrichment (TNE), in which we aim to enrich each NP in a text with all the preposition-mediated relations -- either explicit or implicit -- that hold between it and other NPs in the text. The relations are represented as triplets, each denoted by two NPs related via a preposition. Humans recover such relations seamlessly, while current state-of-the-art models struggle with them due to the implicit nature of the problem. We build the first large-scale dataset for the problem, provide the formal framing and scope of annotation, analyze the data, and report the results of fine-tuned language models on the task, demonstrating the challenge it poses to current technology. A webpage with a data-exploration UI, a demo, and links to the code, models, and leaderboard, to foster further research into this challenging problem can be found at: yanaiela.github.io/TNE/.

Motivated by the fact that information is encoded and processed by physical systems, the P versus NP problem is examined in terms of physical processes. In particular, we consider P as a class of deterministic, and NP as nondeterministic, polynomial-time physical processes. Based on these identifications, we review a self-reference physical process in quantum theory, which belongs to NP but cannot be contained in P.

Current game world models simulate environments from a subjective, player-centric perspective. However, by treating the Non-Player Character (NPC) merely as background pixels, these models cannot capture interactions between the player and NPC. In that sense, they act as passive video renderers rather than real simulation engines, lacking the physical understanding needed to model action-induced NPC reactivities. We introduce ReactiveGWM, a reactive game world model that synthesizes dynamic interactions between the player and NPC. Instead of entangling all interaction dynamics, ReactiveGWM explicitly decouples player controls from NPC behaviors. Player actions are injected into the diffusion backbone via a lightweight additive bias, while high-level NPC responses (e.g., Offense, Control, Defense) are grounded through cross-attention modules. Crucially, these modules learn a game-agnostic representation of interactive logic. This enables zero-shot strategy transfer: our learned modules can be plugged directly into off-the-shelf, unannotated world models of different games. This instantly unlocks steerable NPC interactions without any domain-specific retraining. Evaluated on two Street Fighter games, ReactiveGWM maintains fine-grain player controllability while achieving robust, prompt-aligned NPC strategy adherence, paving the way for scalable, strategy-rich interaction with the NPC.

While Neural Processing Units (NPUs) offer high theoretical efficiency for edge AI, state-of-the-art Vision--Language Models (VLMs) tailored for GPUs often falter on these substrates. We attribute this hardware-model mismatch to two primary factors: the quantization brittleness of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and the I/O-bound nature of autoregressive attention mechanisms, which fail to utilize the high arithmetic throughput of NPUs. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoNeural, an NPU-native VLM architecture co-designed for integer-only inference. We replace the standard ViT encoder with a MobileNetV5-style backbone utilizing depthwise separable convolutions, which ensures bounded activation distributions for stable INT4/8/16 quantization. Complementing this, our language backbone integrates State-Space Model (SSM) principles with Transformer layers, employing efficient gated convolutions to achieve linear-time complexity. This hybrid design eliminates the heavy memory I/O overhead of Key-Value caching during generation. Our approach delivers substantial efficiency gains, reducing quantization error of vision encoder by up to 7x and end-to-end latency by 14x compared to conventional baselines. The AutoNeural also delivers 3x decoding speed and 4x longer context window than the baseline. We validate these improvements via a real-world automotive case study on the Qualcomm SA8295P SoC, demonstrating real-time performance for cockpit applications. Our results highlight that rethinking model topology specifically for NPU constraints is a prerequisite for robust multi-modal edge intelligence.

We explore the ability of large language models to solve and generate puzzles from the NPR Sunday Puzzle game show using PUZZLEQA, a dataset comprising 15 years of on-air puzzles. We evaluate four large language models using PUZZLEQA, in both multiple choice and free response formats, and explore two prompt engineering techniques to improve free response performance: chain-of-thought reasoning and prompt summarization. We find that state-of-the-art large language models can solve many PUZZLEQA puzzles: the best model, GPT-3.5, achieves 50.2% loose accuracy. However, in our few-shot puzzle generation experiment, we find no evidence that models can generate puzzles: GPT-3.5 generates puzzles with answers that do not conform to the generated rules. Puzzle generation remains a challenging task for future work.

The rapid scaling of Large Language Models presents significant challenges for their deployment and inference, particularly on resource-constrained specialized AI hardware accelerators such as Huawei's Ascend NPUs, where weight data transfer has become a critical performance bottleneck. While lossless compression can preserve model accuracy and reduce data volume, existing lossless compression algorithms exhibit extremely low throughput when ported to the Ascend NPU architecture. In this paper, we propose ENEC, a novel lossless compression method specifically customized for AI model weights and optimized for Ascend Neural Processing Units. ENEC adopts a block-based fixed-length encoding scheme and incorporates a series of NPU-specific optimizations: bit-width quantization with hierarchical halving bit-packing, vectorized branch-free integer transformation, and dependency-decoupled intra-segment scan for efficient prefix-sum computation. Experimental results demonstrate that ENEC outperforms existing state-of-the-art NPU compressors in both compression ratio and throughput. Compared to leading GPU solutions, ENEC achieves a 3.43X higher throughput than DietGPU and a 1.12X better compression ratio than nvCOMP. By reducing weight transmission overhead, ENEC significantly improves end-to-end inference performance, achieving up to a 6.3X speedup. On Ascend NPUs, ENEC is the first open-source lossless compression algorithm for model weights that achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art GPU compressors, offering an effective solution for deploying large-scale AI models.

Deploying Large Language Models to data-scarce programming domains poses significant challenges, particularly for kernel synthesis on emerging Domain-Specific Architectures where a "Data Wall" limits available training data. While models excel on data-rich platforms like CUDA, they suffer catastrophic performance drops on data-scarce ecosystems such as NPU programming. To overcome this cold-start barrier without expensive fine-tuning, we introduce EvoKernel, a self-evolving agentic framework that automates the lifecycle of kernel synthesis from initial drafting to continual refining. EvoKernel addresses this by formulating the synthesis process as a memory-based reinforcement learning task. Through a novel value-driven retrieval mechanism, it learns stage-specific Q-values that prioritize experiences based on their contribution to the current objective, whether bootstrapping a feasible draft or iteratively refining latency. Furthermore, by enabling cross-task memory sharing, the agent generalizes insights from simple to complex operators. By building an NPU variant of KernelBench and evaluating on it, EvoKernel improves frontier models' correctness from 11.0% to 83.0% and achieves a median speedup of 3.60x over initial drafts through iterative refinement. This demonstrates that value-guided experience accumulation allows general-purpose models to master the kernel synthesis task on niche hardware ecosystems. Our official page is available at https://evokernel.zhuo.li.

To mitigate the Memory Wall bottleneck encountered by Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference on NPU hardware, and addressing the scarcity of native support for mainstream speculative decoding algorithms on domestic infrastructure, this study presents an end-to-end speculative inference acceleration scheme for OpenPangu-7B.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on customer devices. To support them, current devices are adopting SoCs (System on Chip) with NPUs (Neural Processing Unit) installed. Although high performance is expected, LLM inference on NPUs is slower than its CPU counterpart. The reason is that NPUs have poor performance on computations other than GEMM, like dequantization. Current works either disaggregate prefill on the NPUs and decoding on the CPUs, or put both on the NPUs but with an accuracy loss. To solve this issue, based on the insight that low-bit can enable target computation encoded within an acceptably sized table, we propose table lookup to subsume hardware operations otherwise unsupported. To realize this, we overcome the conflicting hardware behavior of prefill and decoding to design a unified table layout and tiling through (1) fused two-level table-based dequantization and (2) concurrency-hierarchy-guided tiling. Based on that, we implement the prefill phase by three-stage pipeline and map the table-lookup-based decoding to NPU's vector units. Results show 1.4x and 3.1x speedup for prefill and decoding respectively, and 84% energy savings compared to the baseline NPU methods. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/T-MAC/tree/main/t-man.

FlashAttention series has been widely applied in the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, FlashAttention series only supports the high-level GPU architectures, e.g., Ampere and Hopper. At present, FlashAttention series is not easily transferrable to NPUs and low-resource GPUs. Moreover, FlashAttention series is inefficient for multi- NPUs or GPUs inference scenarios. In this work, we propose FastAttention which pioneers the adaptation of FlashAttention series for NPUs and low-resource GPUs to boost LLM inference efficiency. Specifically, we take Ascend NPUs and Volta-based GPUs as representatives for designing our FastAttention. We migrate FlashAttention series to Ascend NPUs by proposing a novel two-level tiling strategy for runtime speedup, tiling-mask strategy for memory saving and the tiling-AllReduce strategy for reducing communication overhead, respectively. Besides, we adapt FlashAttention for Volta-based GPUs by redesigning the operands layout in shared memory and introducing a simple yet effective CPU-GPU cooperative strategy for efficient memory utilization. On Ascend NPUs, our FastAttention can achieve a 10.7times speedup compared to the standard attention implementation. Llama-7B within FastAttention reaches up to 5.16times higher throughput than within the standard attention. On Volta architecture GPUs, FastAttention yields 1.43times speedup compared to its equivalents in xformers. Pangu-38B within FastAttention brings 1.46times end-to-end speedup using FasterTransformer. Coupled with the propose CPU-GPU cooperative strategy, FastAttention supports a maximal input length of 256K on 8 V100 GPUs. All the codes will be made available soon.

One major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is the large amount of steps for the RL agent needs to converge in the training process and learn the optimal policy, especially in text-based game environments where the action space is extensive. However, non-player characters (NPCs) sometimes hold some key information about the game, which can potentially help to train RL agents faster. Thus, this paper explores how to interact and converse with NPC agents to get the key information using large language models (LLMs), as well as incorporate this information to speed up RL agent's training using knowledge graphs (KGs) and Story Shaping.

In this note we explore the distribution of vacuum expectation values of the superpotential W_0 in explicit Type IIB flux compactifications. We show that the distribution can be approximated, universally across geometries, by a two-dimensional Gaussian with a model dependent standard deviation. We identify this behaviour in 20 Calabi-Yau orientifold compactifications with between two and five complex structure moduli by constructing a total of O(10^7) flux vacua. We observe a characteristic scaling behaviour of the width σ of our distributions with respect to the D3-charge contributions N_{flux} from fluxes which can be approximated by σsim N_{text{flux}}. This W_0 distribution implies that locating small values of |W_0| as a preferred regime associated with classes of string theory solutions typically featuring hierarchies, simplifies to the basic statement of finding small Euclidean norms of normally distributed values. We do also identify small modifications to this Gaussian behaviour in our samples which might be seen as indications for the breakdown of the continuous flux approximation commonly used in the context of statistical analyses of the flux landscape.

State-of-art NPUs are typically architected as a self-contained sub-system with multiple heterogeneous hardware computing modules, and a dataflow-driven programming model. There lacks well-established methodology and tools in the industry to evaluate and compare the performance of NPUs from different architectures. We present an event-based performance modeling framework, VPU-EM, targeting scalable performance evaluation of modern NPUs across diversified AI workloads. The framework adopts high-level event-based system-simulation methodology to abstract away design details for speed, while maintaining hardware pipelining, concurrency and interaction with software task scheduling. It is natively developed in Python and built to interface directly with AI frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, ONNX and OpenVINO, linking various in-house NPU graph compilers to achieve optimized full model performance. Furthermore, VPU-EM also provides the capability to model power characteristics of NPU in Power-EM mode to enable joint performance/power analysis. Using VPU-EM, we conduct performance/power analysis of models from representative neural network architecture. We demonstrate that even though this framework is developed for Intel VPU, an Intel in-house NPU IP technology, the methodology can be generalized for analysis of modern NPUs.

This article shows yet another proof of NP=CoNP$. In a previous article, we proved that NP=PSPACE and from it we can conclude that NP=CoNP immediately. The former proof shows how to obtain polynomial and, polynomial in time checkable Dag-like proofs for all purely implicational Minimal logic tautologies. From the fact that Minimal implicational logic is PSPACE-complete we get the proof that NP=PSPACE. This first proof of NP=CoNP uses Hudelmaier linear upper-bound on the height of Sequent Calculus minimal implicational logic proofs. In an addendum to the proof of NP=PSPACE, we observe that we do not need to use Hudelmaier upper-bound since any proof of non-hamiltonicity for any graph is linear upper-bounded. By the CoNP-completeness of non-hamiltonicity, we obtain NP=CoNP as a corollary of the first proof. In this article we show the third proof of CoNP=NP, also providing polynomial size and polynomial verifiable certificates that are Dags. They are generated from normal Natural Deduction proofs, linear height upper-bounded too, by removing redundancy, i.e., repeated parts. The existence of repeated parts is a consequence of the redundancy theorem for a family of super-polynomial proofs in the purely implicational Minimal logic. It is mandatory to read at least two previous articles to get the details of the proof presented here. The article that proves the redundancy theorem and the article that shows how to remove the repeated parts of a normal Natural Deduction proof to have a polynomial Dag certificate for minimal implicational logic tautologies.

Recent advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have largely focused on improving the performance of agents with the aim of replacing humans in known and well-defined environments. The use of these techniques as a game design tool for video game production, where the aim is instead to create Non-Player Character (NPC) behaviors, has received relatively little attention until recently. Turn-based strategy games like Roguelikes, for example, present unique challenges to DRL. In particular, the categorical nature of their complex game state, composed of many entities with different attributes, requires agents able to learn how to compare and prioritize these entities. Moreover, this complexity often leads to agents that overfit to states seen during training and that are unable to generalize in the face of design changes made during development. In this paper we propose two network architectures which, when combined with a procedural loot generation system, are able to better handle complex categorical state spaces and to mitigate the need for retraining forced by design decisions. The first is based on a dense embedding of the categorical input space that abstracts the discrete observation model and renders trained agents more able to generalize. The second proposed architecture is more general and is based on a Transformer network able to reason relationally about input and input attributes. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that new agents have better adaptation capacity with respect to a baseline architecture, making this framework more robust to dynamic gameplay changes during development. Based on the results shown in this paper, we believe that these solutions represent a step forward towards making DRL more accessible to the gaming industry.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning benchmarks through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), excelling at tasks such as math, coding, logic, and puzzles. However, existing benchmarks evaluate only correctness, while overlooking optimality, namely the ability to find the best solutions under constraints. We propose OPT-BENCH, the first comprehensive framework for training and evaluating LLMs on NP-hard optimization problems through quality-aware RLVR. OPT-BENCH provides three key components: a scalable training infrastructure with instance generators, quality verifiers, and optimal baselines across 10 tasks; a rigorous benchmark with 1,000 instances evaluating both feasibility, measured by Success Rate, and quality, measured by Quality Ratio; and quality-aware rewards that enable continuous improvement beyond binary correctness. Training on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M with 15K examples achieves 93.1% SR and 46.6% QR, significantly outperforming GPT-4o, which achieves 29.6% SR and 14.6% QR. Beyond optimization, training on OPT-BENCH transfers to diverse tasks, including mathematics (+2.2%), logic (+1.2%), knowledge (+4.1%), and instruction following (+6.1%). Our analysis reveals that quality-aware rewards improve solutions by 28.8% over binary rewards, and that task diversity drives generalization more than data quantity, offering insights into RLVR scaling for complex reasoning.

Effective scheduling under tight resource, timing, and operational constraints underpins large-scale planning across sectors such as capital projects, manufacturing, logistics, and IT fleet transitions. However, the reliability of large language models (LLMs) when reasoning under high-constraint regimes is insufficiently characterized. To address this gap, we present R-ConstraintBench, a scalable framework that evaluates models on Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problems (RCPSP), an NP-Complete feasibility class, while difficulty increases via linear growth in constraints. R-ConstraintBench incrementally increases non-redundant precedence constraints in Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and then introduces downtime, temporal windows, and disjunctive constraints. As an illustrative example, we instantiate the benchmark in a data center migration setting and evaluate multiple LLMs using feasibility and error analysis, identifying degradation thresholds and constraint types most associated with failure. Empirically, strong models are near-ceiling on precedence-only DAGs, but feasibility performance collapses when downtime, temporal windows, and disjunctive constraints interact, implicating constraint interaction, not graph depth, as the principal bottleneck. Performance on clean synthetic ramps also does not guarantee transfer to domain-grounded scenarios, underscoring limited generalization.

Reinforcement learning has recently been used to approach well-known NP-hard combinatorial problems in graph theory. Among these problems, Hamiltonian cycle problems are exceptionally difficult to analyze, even when restricted to individual instances of structurally complex graphs. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), the search algorithm behind many state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms such as AlphaZero, to create autonomous agents that learn to play the game of Snake, a game centered on properties of Hamiltonian cycles on grid graphs. The game of Snake can be formulated as a single-player discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP) where the agent must behave optimally in a stochastic environment. Determining the optimal policy for Snake, defined as the policy that maximizes the probability of winning - or win rate - with higher priority and minimizes the expected number of time steps to win with lower priority, is conjectured to be NP-hard. Performance-wise, compared to prior work in the Snake game, our algorithm is the first to achieve a win rate over 0.5 (a uniform random policy achieves a win rate < 2.57 times 10^{-15}), demonstrating the versatility of AlphaZero in approaching NP-hard environments.

We present Pangu Ultra, a Large Language Model (LLM) with 135 billion parameters and dense Transformer modules trained on Ascend Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Although the field of LLM has been witnessing unprecedented advances in pushing the scale and capability of LLM in recent years, training such a large-scale model still involves significant optimization and system challenges. To stabilize the training process, we propose depth-scaled sandwich normalization, which effectively eliminates loss spikes during the training process of deep models. We pre-train our model on 13.2 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens and further enhance its reasoning capabilities during post-training. To perform such large-scale training efficiently, we utilize 8,192 Ascend NPUs with a series of system optimizations. Evaluations on multiple diverse benchmarks indicate that Pangu Ultra significantly advances the state-of-the-art capabilities of dense LLMs such as Llama 405B and Mistral Large 2, and even achieves competitive results with DeepSeek-R1, whose sparse model structure contains much more parameters. Our exploration demonstrates that Ascend NPUs are capable of efficiently and effectively training dense models with more than 100 billion parameters. Our model and system will be available for our commercial customers.

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

During the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs), the autoregressive decoding phase on heterogeneous NPU platforms (e.g., Ascend 910B) faces severe memory-bound challenges. This study reveals the ``Model Scaling Paradox'' caused by the static deployment of single-sized models. It also points out the kernel synchronization overhead of fine-grained speculative decoding leviathan2023fast, chen2023speculative under NPU computational graph compilation, and the severe limitations of purely relying on micro-level acceleration algorithms like Prompt LookUp Decoding (PLD)

Large foundation models have become central to modern machine learning, with performance scaling predictably with model size and data. However, training and deploying such models incur substantial computational and memory costs, motivating the development of low-precision training techniques. Recent work has demonstrated that 4-bit floating-point (FP4) formats--such as MXFP4 and NVFP4--can be successfully applied to linear GEMM operations in large language models (LLMs), achieving up to 4x improvements in compute throughput and memory efficiency compared to higher-precision baselines. In this work, we investigate the recently proposed HiFloat4 FP4 format for Huawei Ascend NPUs and systematically compare it with MXFP4 in large-scale training settings. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPU clusters, with linear and expert GEMM operations performed entirely in FP4 precision. We evaluate both dense architectures (e.g., Pangu and LLaMA-style models) and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, where both standard linear layers and expert-specific GEMMs operate in FP4. Furthermore, we explore stabilization techniques tailored to FP4 training that significantly reduce numerical degradation, maintaining relative error within 1% of full-precision baselines while preserving the efficiency benefits of 4-bit computation. Our results provide a comprehensive empirical study of FP4 training on NPUs and highlight the practical trade-offs between FP4 formats in large-scale dense and MoE models.

AscendC (Ascend C) operator optimization on Huawei Ascend neural processing units (NPUs) faces a two-fold knowledge bottleneck: unlike the CUDA ecosystem, there are few public reference implementations to learn from, and performance hinges on a coupled two-part artifact - a host-side tiling program that orchestrates data movement and a kernel program that schedules and pipelines instructions. We present AscendOptimizer, an episodic agent that bootstraps this missing expertise by turning execution into experience. On the host side, AscendOptimizer performs profiling-in-the-loop evolutionary search to discover valid and high-performing tiling and data-movement configurations directly from hardware feedback. On the kernel side, it mines transferable optimization motifs by rewinding optimized kernels - systematically de-optimizing them to synthesize instructive "bad-to-good" trajectories - and distills these motifs into a retrievable experience bank for guided rewriting. By alternating host tuning and kernel rewriting in a closed loop, AscendOptimizer steadily expands feasibility and pushes latency down. On a benchmark of 127 real AscendC operators, AscendOptimizer achieves a 1.19x geometric-mean speedup over the open-source baseline, with 49.61% of operators outperforming their references, outperforming strong agent and search baselines.

Software supply chain attacks targeting the npm ecosystem have become increasingly sophisticated, leveraging obfuscation and complex logic to evade traditional detection mechanisms. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for malicious code detection due to their strong capabilities in semantic code understanding. However, the practical deployment of LLMs in this domain is severely constrained by limited context windows and high computational costs. Naive approaches, such as token-based code splitting, often fragment semantic context, leading to degraded detection performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel LLM-based framework for malicious npm package detection that leverages code slicing techniques. A specialized taint-based slicing method tailored to the JavaScript ecosystem is proposed to recover malicious data flows. By isolating security-relevant logic from benign boilerplate code, the approach reduces the input code volume by over 99\% while preserving critical malicious behaviors. The framework is evaluated on a curated dataset comprising over 7000 malicious and benign npm packages. Experimental results using the DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B model demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a detection accuracy of 87.04\%, significantly outperforming a full-package baseline based on naive token splitting (75.41\%). These results indicate that semantically optimized input representations via code slicing not only mitigate the LLM context window bottleneck but also enhance reasoning precision for security analysis, providing an effective defense against evolving open-source software supply chain threats.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are designed to transcribe spoken language into written text and find utility in a variety of applications including voice assistants and transcription services. However, it has been observed that state-of-the-art ASR systems which deliver impressive benchmark results, struggle with speakers of certain regions or demographics due to variation in their speech properties. In this work, we describe the curation of a massive speech dataset of 8740 hours consisting of sim9.8K technical lectures in the English language along with their transcripts delivered by instructors representing various parts of Indian demography. The dataset is sourced from the very popular NPTEL MOOC platform. We use the curated dataset to measure the existing disparity in YouTube Automatic Captions and OpenAI Whisper model performance across the diverse demographic traits of speakers in India. While there exists disparity due to gender, native region, age and speech rate of speakers, disparity based on caste is non-existent. We also observe statistically significant disparity across the disciplines of the lectures. These results indicate the need of more inclusive and robust ASR systems and more representational datasets for disparity evaluation in them.

Autoregressive decoding remains a primary bottleneck in large language model (LLM) serving, motivating speculative decoding methods that reduce expensive teacher-model invocations by verifying multiple candidate tokens per step. Tree-structured speculation further increases parallelism, but is often brittle when ported across heterogeneous backends and accelerator stacks, where attention masking, KV-cache layouts, and indexing semantics are not interchangeable. We present EAGLE-Pangu, a reproducible system that ports EAGLE-3-style tree speculative decoding to a Pangu teacher backend on Ascend NPUs. EAGLE-Pangu contributes (i) an explicit branch/commit cache manager built on the Cache API, (ii) accelerator-safe tree tensorization that removes undefined negative indices by construction and validates structural invariants, and (iii) a fused-kernel-compatible teacher verification path with a debuggable eager fallback. On 240 turns from MT-Bench and HumanEval-style prompts, EAGLE-Pangu improves end-to-end decoding throughput by 1.27x on average, up to 2.46x at p99, over teacher-only greedy decoding in the fused-kernel performance path. We also provide a fused-kernel-free reference path with structured traces and invariant checks to support reproducible debugging and ablation across execution modes and tree budgets.

We propose MindVL, a multimodal large langauge model trained on Ascend NPUs. Similar to Qwen2.5-VL, MindVL adopts native-resolution Vision Transformers, which enables it to process images at their original variable resolutions. This design avoids the degradation caused by fixed-resolution tiling while preserving fine-grained details and global layouts, which is crucial for visually dense content such as complex charts and diagrams. To ensure the smooth training of MindVL on Ascend NPUs, we develop Mindspeed-MLLM, a distributed multimodal training framework tailored for Ascend NPUs. To maintain training accuracy, we implement equivalent replacements for certain operators. MindVL undergoes a three-phase training process, namely the warm-up phase, multitask training phase, and supervised instruction tuning phase, to gradually enhance its capabilities. This process starts with basic visual and multimodal pre-training, followed by large-scale multiask trainging and instruction tuning. We also adopt multimodal data packaging and hybrid parallelism techniques, which significantly improve end-to-end training speed. To further boost model performance, we specifically introduce test-time resolution search and model weight averaging. Notably, despite using about 1/10 of the training data required by Qwen2.5-VL, MindVL achieves performance on par with Qwen2.5-VL in evaluations of general multimodal understanding and document/table comprehension. Beyond overall scores, MindVL also delivers leading performance in OCR assessments.

Image super-resolution is one of the most popular computer vision problems with many important applications to mobile devices. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually not optimized even for common smartphone AI hardware, not to mention more constrained smart TV platforms that are often supporting INT8 inference only. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image super-resolution solutions that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile or edge NPUs. For this, the participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained quantized models to do an efficient 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with all major mobile AI accelerators and are capable of reconstructing Full HD images under 40-60 ms while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for cre- ating dynamic non-player characters (NPCs) in gaming environments, enabling both func- tional task execution and persona-consistent dialogue generation. In this paper, we (Tu_Character_lab) report our participation in the Commonsense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) 2025 Round 2, which eval- uates agents across three tracks: task-oriented dialogue, context-aware dialogue, and their integration. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: (i) lightweight prompting techniques in the API track, including a Deflanderization prompting method to suppress excessive role-play and improve task fidelity, and (ii) fine-tuned large models in the GPU track, leveraging Qwen3-14B with supervisedfinetuning (SFT) and Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA). Our best submissions ranked 2nd on Task 1, 2nd on Task 3 (API track), and 4th on Task 3 (GPU track).

Recent advancements in Speech Large Language Models have significantly enhanced multi-dimensional speech understanding. However, the majority of high-performance frameworks are predominantly optimized for GPU centric ecosystems and proprietary backbones, creating a significant gap for deployment on non-CUDA computing infrastructures. In this paper, we present OSUM-Pangu, a fully open-source speech understanding foundation model developed on a completely non-CUDA software and hardware stack. By integrating an audio encoder with the openPangu-7B LLM backbone, we successfully implement the entire training and inference pipeline on the Ascend NPU platform. To facilitate efficient task alignment under non-CUDA resource constraints, we adopt a practical training process that sequentially bridges speech perception and user intent recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that OSUM-Pangu achieves task accuracy comparable to mainstream GPU-based models while maintaining robust natural language interaction capabilities. Our work provides a reproducible, non-CUDA baseline for the open-source speech community, promoting the independent evolution of multimodal intelligence.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale, weight-only quantization (W4A16: 4-bit weights, 16-bit activations) becomes critical for reducing memory footprint with minimal accuracy loss. However, its efficient deployment on Huawei's Ascend 910 Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is challenging due to limited native mixed-precision support and the accelerator's decoupled compute architecture. To enable quantization on such architecture, we present the first practical W4A16 matrix multiplication kernel tailored for the Ascend 910 NPU. Our design leverages vector cores for on-the-fly INT4-to-FP16 dequantization, cube cores for high-throughput GEMM, and Split-K parallelization to mitigate memory latency. Performance evaluations across diverse matrix shapes and batch sizes show our method outperforms data-parallel approaches when K >> N, a typical scenario in LLM decoding. Specially, our method can achieve a speedup ranging from 1.01x to 1.74x. In addition, our profile reveals the primary bottleneck is not dequantization compution itself, but extra global memory transfer for the weight, making W4A16 only reaching a maximum speedup of 1.48x over native FP16xFP16 matrix multiplication in PyTorch. In the long run, our method lays a solid foundation and provides insightful views for the efficient deployment of quantized large language models on various domain-specific accelerators.