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SubscribeMMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models
We introduce MMaDA, a novel class of multimodal diffusion foundation models designed to achieve superior performance across diverse domains such as textual reasoning, multimodal understanding, and text-to-image generation. The approach is distinguished by three key innovations: (i) MMaDA adopts a unified diffusion architecture with a shared probabilistic formulation and a modality-agnostic design, eliminating the need for modality-specific components. This architecture ensures seamless integration and processing across different data types. (ii) We implement a mixed long chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning strategy that curates a unified CoT format across modalities. By aligning reasoning processes between textual and visual domains, this strategy facilitates cold-start training for the final reinforcement learning (RL) stage, thereby enhancing the model's ability to handle complex tasks from the outset. (iii) We propose UniGRPO, a unified policy-gradient-based RL algorithm specifically tailored for diffusion foundation models. Utilizing diversified reward modeling, UniGRPO unifies post-training across both reasoning and generation tasks, ensuring consistent performance improvements. Experimental results demonstrate that MMaDA-8B exhibits strong generalization capabilities as a unified multimodal foundation model. It surpasses powerful models like LLaMA-3-7B and Qwen2-7B in textual reasoning, outperforms Show-o and SEED-X in multimodal understanding, and excels over SDXL and Janus in text-to-image generation. These achievements highlight MMaDA's effectiveness in bridging the gap between pretraining and post-training within unified diffusion architectures, providing a comprehensive framework for future research and development. We open-source our code and trained models at: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/MMaDA
Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing
As textual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, there has been growing interest in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, existing methods primarily approach multimodal reasoning in a straightforward, text-centric manner, where both reasoning and answer derivation are conducted purely through text, with the only difference being the presence of multimodal input. As a result, these methods often encounter fundamental limitations in spatial reasoning tasks that demand precise geometric understanding and continuous spatial tracking-capabilities that humans achieve through mental visualization and manipulation. To address the limitations, we propose drawing to reason in space, a novel paradigm that enables LVLMs to reason through elementary drawing operations in the visual space. By equipping models with basic drawing operations, including annotating bounding boxes and drawing auxiliary lines, we empower them to express and analyze spatial relationships through direct visual manipulation, meanwhile avoiding the performance ceiling imposed by specialized perception tools in previous tool-integrated reasoning approaches. To cultivate this capability, we develop a three-stage training framework: cold-start training with synthetic data to establish basic drawing abilities, reflective rejection sampling to enhance self-reflection behaviors, and reinforcement learning to directly optimize for target rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, named VILASR, consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks, involving maze navigation, static spatial reasoning, video-based reasoning, and multi-view-based reasoning tasks, with an average improvement of 18.4%.
Advancing Multimodal Reasoning: From Optimized Cold Start to Staged Reinforcement Learning
Inspired by the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Deepseek-R1 in complex textual tasks, many works attempt to incentivize similar capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by directly applying reinforcement learning (RL). However, they still struggle to activate complex reasoning. In this paper, rather than examining multimodal RL in isolation, we delve into current training pipelines and identify three crucial phenomena: 1) Effective cold start initialization is critical for enhancing MLLM reasoning. Intriguingly, we find that initializing with carefully selected text data alone can lead to performance surpassing many recent multimodal reasoning models, even before multimodal RL. 2) Standard GRPO applied to multimodal RL suffers from gradient stagnation, which degrades training stability and performance. 3) Subsequent text-only RL training, following the multimodal RL phase, further enhances multimodal reasoning. This staged training approach effectively balances perceptual grounding and cognitive reasoning development. By incorporating the above insights and addressing multimodal RL issues, we introduce ReVisual-R1, achieving a new state-of-the-art among open-source 7B MLLMs on challenging benchmarks including MathVerse, MathVision, WeMath, LogicVista, DynaMath, and challenging AIME2024 and AIME2025.
Advancing Multimodal Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Cold Start
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities, with reinforcement learning (RL) playing a crucial role in this progress. While "aha moment" patterns--where models exhibit self-correction through reflection--are often attributed to emergent properties from RL, we first demonstrate that these patterns exist in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) prior to RL training but may not necessarily correlate with improved reasoning performance. Building on these insights, we present a comprehensive study on enhancing multimodal reasoning through a two-stage approach: (1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a cold start with structured chain-of-thought reasoning patterns, followed by (2) reinforcement learning via GRPO to further refine these capabilities. Our extensive experiments show that this combined approach consistently outperforms both SFT-only and RL-only methods across challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks. The resulting models achieve state-of-the-art performance among open-source MLLMs at both 3B and 7B scales, with our 7B model showing substantial improvements over base models (e.g., 66.3 %rightarrow73.4 % on MathVista, 62.9 %rightarrow70.4 % on We-Math) and our 3B model achieving performance competitive with several 7B models. Overall, this work provides practical guidance for building advanced multimodal reasoning models. Our code is available at https://github.com/waltonfuture/RL-with-Cold-Start.
Large Language Models are Competitive Near Cold-start Recommenders for Language- and Item-based Preferences
Traditional recommender systems leverage users' item preference history to recommend novel content that users may like. However, modern dialog interfaces that allow users to express language-based preferences offer a fundamentally different modality for preference input. Inspired by recent successes of prompting paradigms for large language models (LLMs), we study their use for making recommendations from both item-based and language-based preferences in comparison to state-of-the-art item-based collaborative filtering (CF) methods. To support this investigation, we collect a new dataset consisting of both item-based and language-based preferences elicited from users along with their ratings on a variety of (biased) recommended items and (unbiased) random items. Among numerous experimental results, we find that LLMs provide competitive recommendation performance for pure language-based preferences (no item preferences) in the near cold-start case in comparison to item-based CF methods, despite having no supervised training for this specific task (zero-shot) or only a few labels (few-shot). This is particularly promising as language-based preference representations are more explainable and scrutable than item-based or vector-based representations.
M2TRec: Metadata-aware Multi-task Transformer for Large-scale and Cold-start free Session-based Recommendations
Session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have shown superior performance over conventional methods. However, they show limited scalability on large-scale industrial datasets since most models learn one embedding per item. This leads to a large memory requirement (of storing one vector per item) and poor performance on sparse sessions with cold-start or unpopular items. Using one public and one large industrial dataset, we experimentally show that state-of-the-art SBRSs have low performance on sparse sessions with sparse items. We propose M2TRec, a Metadata-aware Multi-task Transformer model for session-based recommendations. Our proposed method learns a transformation function from item metadata to embeddings, and is thus, item-ID free (i.e., does not need to learn one embedding per item). It integrates item metadata to learn shared representations of diverse item attributes. During inference, new or unpopular items will be assigned identical representations for the attributes they share with items previously observed during training, and thus will have similar representations with those items, enabling recommendations of even cold-start and sparse items. Additionally, M2TRec is trained in a multi-task setting to predict the next item in the session along with its primary category and subcategories. Our multi-task strategy makes the model converge faster and significantly improves the overall performance. Experimental results show significant performance gains using our proposed approach on sparse items on the two datasets.
SQL-R1: Training Natural Language to SQL Reasoning Model By Reinforcement Learning
Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) enables intuitive interactions with databases by transforming natural language queries into structured SQL statements. Despite recent advancements in enhancing human-computer interaction within database applications, significant challenges persist, particularly regarding the inference performance in complex scenarios involving multi-table joins and nested queries. Current methodologies primarily utilize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to train the NL2SQL model, which may limit adaptability and interpretability in new environments (e.g., finance and healthcare). In order to enhance the reasoning performance of the NL2SQL model in the above complex situations, we introduce SQL-R1, a novel NL2SQL reasoning model trained by the reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We design a specialized RL-based reward function tailored for NL2SQL tasks and discussed the impact of cold start on the effectiveness of intensive training. In addition, we achieve competitive accuracy using only a tiny amount of synthetic NL2SQL data for augmented training and further explore data engineering for RL. In existing experiments, SQL-R1 achieves execution accuracy of 88.6% and 66.6% on the benchmark Spider and BIRD, respectively, only using the 7B base model.
ScreenExplorer: Training a Vision-Language Model for Diverse Exploration in Open GUI World
The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within Graphical User Interface (GUI) environments. However, existing GUI agents based on LLMs or vision-language models (VLMs) often fail to generalize to novel environments and rely heavily on manually curated, diverse datasets. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ScreenExplorer, a VLM trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) in real, dynamic, and open-ended GUI environments. Innovatively, we introduced a world-model-based curiosity reward function to help the agent overcome the cold-start phase of exploration. Additionally, distilling experience streams further enhances the model's exploration capabilities. Our training framework enhances model exploration in open GUI environments, with trained models showing better environmental adaptation and sustained exploration compared to static deployment models. Our findings offer a scalable pathway toward AGI systems with self-improving capabilities in complex interactive settings.
ReTool: Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Tool Use in LLMs
While reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek R1) trained with reinforcement learning (RL), excel in textual reasoning, they struggle in scenarios requiring structured problem-solving, such as geometric reasoning, concise computation, or complex equation solving-areas where computational tools like code interpreters (CI) demonstrate distinct advantages. To bridge this gap, we propose ReTool, which enhances long-form reasoning with tool-integrated learning, including two key features: (1) dynamic interleaving of real-time code execution within natural language reasoning processes, and (2) an automated RL paradigm that allows policy rollouts with multi-turn real-time code execution and teaches the model in learning when and how to invoke tools based on outcome feedback. ReTool employs a systematic training framework, beginning with synthetic cold-start data generation to produce code-augmented long-form reasoning traces for fine-tuning base models. Subsequent RL training leverages task outcomes as rewards to iteratively refine the model's tool use strategy, enabling autonomous discovery of optimal tool invocation patterns without human priors. Experiments on the challenging MATH Olympiad benchmark AIME demonstrate ReTool's superiority: Our 32B model achieves 67% accuracy with 400 training steps, outperforming text-based RL baseline (40% accuracy, 1080 steps) in efficiency and performance. Remarkably, ReTool-32B attains 72.5% accuracy in extended settings, surpassing OpenAI's o1-preview by 27.9%. Further analysis reveals emergent behaviors such as code self-correction, signaling an ''aha moment'' in which the model autonomously masters adaptive tool use. These findings highlight the promise of outcome-driven tool integration for advancing complex mathematical reasoning and offer new insights into hybrid neuro-symbolic systems.
R1-Searcher++: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods often are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the internal knowledge of the model. In this paper, we introduce R1-Searcher++, a novel framework designed to train LLMs to adaptively leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. R1-Searcher++ employs a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT Cold-start phase for preliminary format learning, followed by RL for Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition. The RL stage uses outcome-supervision to encourage exploration, incorporates a reward mechanism for internal knowledge utilization, and integrates a memorization mechanism to continuously assimilate retrieved information, thereby enriching the model's internal knowledge. By leveraging internal knowledge and external search engine, the model continuously improves its capabilities, enabling efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that R1-Searcher++ outperforms previous RAG and reasoning methods and achieves efficient retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/R1-Searcher-plus.
AdaCtrl: Towards Adaptive and Controllable Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Budgeting
Modern large reasoning models demonstrate impressive problem-solving capabilities by employing sophisticated reasoning strategies. However, they often struggle to balance efficiency and effectiveness, frequently generating unnecessarily lengthy reasoning chains for simple problems. In this work, we propose AdaCtrl, a novel framework to support both difficulty-aware adaptive reasoning budget allocation and explicit user control over reasoning depth. AdaCtrl dynamically adjusts its reasoning length based on self-assessed problem difficulty, while also allowing users to manually control the budget to prioritize either efficiency or effectiveness. This is achieved through a two-stage training pipeline: an initial cold-start fine-tuning phase to instill the ability to self-aware difficulty and adjust reasoning budget, followed by a difficulty-aware reinforcement learning (RL) stage that refines the model's adaptive reasoning strategies and calibrates its difficulty assessments based on its evolving capabilities during online training. To enable intuitive user interaction, we design explicit length-triggered tags that function as a natural interface for budget control. Empirical results show that AdaCtrl adapts reasoning length based on estimated difficulty, compared to the standard training baseline that also incorporates fine-tuning and RL, it yields performance improvements and simultaneously reduces response length by 10.06% and 12.14% on the more challenging AIME2024 and AIME2025 datasets, which require elaborate reasoning, and by 62.05% and 91.04% on the MATH500 and GSM8K datasets, where more concise responses are sufficient. Furthermore, AdaCtrl enables precise user control over the reasoning budget, allowing for tailored responses to meet specific needs.
Are Reasoning Models More Prone to Hallucination?
Recently evolved large reasoning models (LRMs) show powerful performance in solving complex tasks with long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capability. As these LRMs are mostly developed by post-training on formal reasoning tasks, whether they generalize the reasoning capability to help reduce hallucination in fact-seeking tasks remains unclear and debated. For instance, DeepSeek-R1 reports increased performance on SimpleQA, a fact-seeking benchmark, while OpenAI-o3 observes even severer hallucination. This discrepancy naturally raises the following research question: Are reasoning models more prone to hallucination? This paper addresses the question from three perspectives. (1) We first conduct a holistic evaluation for the hallucination in LRMs. Our analysis reveals that LRMs undergo a full post-training pipeline with cold start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and verifiable reward RL generally alleviate their hallucination. In contrast, both distillation alone and RL training without cold start fine-tuning introduce more nuanced hallucinations. (2) To explore why different post-training pipelines alters the impact on hallucination in LRMs, we conduct behavior analysis. We characterize two critical cognitive behaviors that directly affect the factuality of a LRM: Flaw Repetition, where the surface-level reasoning attempts repeatedly follow the same underlying flawed logic, and Think-Answer Mismatch, where the final answer fails to faithfully match the previous CoT process. (3) Further, we investigate the mechanism behind the hallucination of LRMs from the perspective of model uncertainty. We find that increased hallucination of LRMs is usually associated with the misalignment between model uncertainty and factual accuracy. Our work provides an initial understanding of the hallucination in LRMs.
Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs
Inspired by DeepSeek-R1's success in eliciting reasoning abilities through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce Video-R1 as the first attempt to systematically explore the R1 paradigm for eliciting video reasoning within multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, directly applying RL training with the GRPO algorithm to video reasoning presents two primary challenges: (i) a lack of temporal modeling for video reasoning, and (ii) the scarcity of high-quality video-reasoning data. To address these issues, we first propose the T-GRPO algorithm, which encourages models to utilize temporal information in videos for reasoning. Additionally, instead of relying solely on video data, we incorporate high-quality image-reasoning data into the training process. We have constructed two datasets: Video-R1-COT-165k for SFT cold start and Video-R1-260k for RL training, both comprising image and video data. Experimental results demonstrate that Video-R1 achieves significant improvements on video reasoning benchmarks such as VideoMMMU and VSI-Bench, as well as on general video benchmarks including MVBench and TempCompass, etc. Notably, Video-R1-7B attains a 35.8% accuracy on video spatial reasoning benchmark VSI-bench, surpassing the commercial proprietary model GPT-4o. All codes, models, data are released.
Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models
DeepSeek-R1-Zero has successfully demonstrated the emergence of reasoning capabilities in LLMs purely through Reinforcement Learning (RL). Inspired by this breakthrough, we explore how RL can be utilized to enhance the reasoning capability of MLLMs. However, direct training with RL struggles to activate complex reasoning capabilities such as questioning and reflection in MLLMs, due to the absence of substantial high-quality multimodal reasoning data. To address this issue, we propose the reasoning MLLM, Vision-R1, to improve multimodal reasoning capability. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality multimodal CoT dataset without human annotations by leveraging an existing MLLM and DeepSeek-R1 through modality bridging and data filtering to obtain a 200K multimodal CoT dataset, Vision-R1-cold dataset. It serves as cold-start initialization data for Vision-R1. To mitigate the optimization challenges caused by overthinking after cold start, we propose Progressive Thinking Suppression Training (PTST) strategy and employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with the hard formatting result reward function to gradually refine the model's ability to learn correct and complex reasoning processes on a 10K multimodal math dataset. Comprehensive experiments show our model achieves an average improvement of sim6% across various multimodal math reasoning benchmarks. Vision-R1-7B achieves a 73.5% accuracy on the widely used MathVista benchmark, which is only 0.4% lower than the leading reasoning model, OpenAI O1. The datasets and code will be released in: https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-R1 .
Think Only When You Need with Large Hybrid-Reasoning Models
Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown substantially improved reasoning capabilities over traditional Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extended thinking processes prior to producing final responses. However, excessively lengthy thinking introduces substantial overhead in terms of token consumption and latency, which is particularly unnecessary for simple queries. In this work, we introduce Large Hybrid-Reasoning Models (LHRMs), the first kind of model capable of adaptively determining whether to perform thinking based on the contextual information of user queries. To achieve this, we propose a two-stage training pipeline comprising Hybrid Fine-Tuning (HFT) as a cold start, followed by online reinforcement learning with the proposed Hybrid Group Policy Optimization (HGPO) to implicitly learn to select the appropriate thinking mode. Furthermore, we introduce a metric called Hybrid Accuracy to quantitatively assess the model's capability for hybrid thinking. Extensive experimental results show that LHRMs can adaptively perform hybrid thinking on queries of varying difficulty and type. It outperforms existing LRMs and LLMs in reasoning and general capabilities while significantly improving efficiency. Together, our work advocates for a reconsideration of the appropriate use of extended thinking processes and provides a solid starting point for building hybrid thinking systems.
Jailbreak-R1: Exploring the Jailbreak Capabilities of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
As large language models (LLMs) grow in power and influence, ensuring their safety and preventing harmful output becomes critical. Automated red teaming serves as a tool to detect security vulnerabilities in LLMs without manual labor. However, most existing methods struggle to balance the effectiveness and diversity of red-team generated attack prompts. To address this challenge, we propose \ourapproach, a novel automated red teaming training framework that utilizes reinforcement learning to explore and generate more effective attack prompts while balancing their diversity. Specifically, it consists of three training stages: (1) Cold Start: The red team model is supervised and fine-tuned on a jailbreak dataset obtained through imitation learning. (2) Warm-up Exploration: The model is trained in jailbreak instruction following and exploration, using diversity and consistency as reward signals. (3) Enhanced Jailbreak: Progressive jailbreak rewards are introduced to gradually enhance the jailbreak performance of the red-team model. Extensive experiments on a variety of LLMs show that \ourapproach effectively balances the diversity and effectiveness of jailbreak prompts compared to existing methods. Our work significantly improves the efficiency of red team exploration and provides a new perspective on automated red teaming.
Tool-Star: Empowering LLM-Brained Multi-Tool Reasoner via Reinforcement Learning
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL). However, leveraging the RL algorithm to empower effective multi-tool collaborative reasoning in LLMs remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce Tool-Star, an RL-based framework designed to empower LLMs to autonomously invoke multiple external tools during stepwise reasoning. Tool-Star integrates six types of tools and incorporates systematic designs in both data synthesis and training. To address the scarcity of tool-use data, we propose a general tool-integrated reasoning data synthesis pipeline, which combines tool-integrated prompting with hint-based sampling to automatically and scalably generate tool-use trajectories. A subsequent quality normalization and difficulty-aware classification process filters out low-quality samples and organizes the dataset from easy to hard. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training framework to enhance multi-tool collaborative reasoning by: (1) cold-start fine-tuning, which guides LLMs to explore reasoning patterns via tool-invocation feedback; and (2) a multi-tool self-critic RL algorithm with hierarchical reward design, which reinforces reward understanding and promotes effective tool collaboration. Experimental analyses on over 10 challenging reasoning benchmarks highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of Tool-Star. The code is available at https://github.com/dongguanting/Tool-Star.
CodeV-R1: Reasoning-Enhanced Verilog Generation
Large language models (LLMs) trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) have achieved breakthroughs on tasks with explicit, automatable verification, such as software programming and mathematical problems. Extending RLVR to electronic design automation (EDA), especially automatically generating hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog from natural-language (NL) specifications, however, poses three key challenges: the lack of automated and accurate verification environments, the scarcity of high-quality NL-code pairs, and the prohibitive computation cost of RLVR. To this end, we introduce CodeV-R1, an RLVR framework for training Verilog generation LLMs. First, we develop a rule-based testbench generator that performs robust equivalence checking against golden references. Second, we propose a round-trip data synthesis method that pairs open-source Verilog snippets with LLM-generated NL descriptions, verifies code-NL-code consistency via the generated testbench, and filters out inequivalent examples to yield a high-quality dataset. Third, we employ a two-stage "distill-then-RL" training pipeline: distillation for the cold start of reasoning abilities, followed by adaptive DAPO, our novel RLVR algorithm that can reduce training cost by adaptively adjusting sampling rate. The resulting model, CodeV-R1-7B, achieves 68.6% and 72.9% pass@1 on VerilogEval v2 and RTLLM v1.1, respectively, surpassing prior state-of-the-art by 12~20%, while matching or even exceeding the performance of 671B DeepSeek-R1. We will release our model, training pipeline, and dataset to facilitate research in EDA and LLM communities.
Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle: Empowering Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models
Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to model the sequential dependencies in users' historical interactions to better capture their evolving interests. However, existing SR approaches primarily rely on collaborative data, which leads to limitations such as the cold-start problem and sub-optimal performance. Meanwhile, despite the success of large language models (LLMs), their application in industrial recommender systems is hindered by high inference latency, inability to capture all distribution statistics, and catastrophic forgetting. To this end, we propose a novel Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle (PAD) paradigm to empower recommendation models with LLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train both the SR and LLM models to get collaborative and textual embeddings. Next, a characteristic recommendation-anchored alignment loss is proposed using multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy with Gaussian kernels. Finally, a triple-experts architecture, consisting aligned and modality-specific experts with disentangled embeddings, is fine-tuned in a frequency-aware manner. Experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PAD, showing significant improvements and compatibility with various SR backbone models, especially on cold items. The implementation code and datasets will be publicly available.
M2-Reasoning: Empowering MLLMs with Unified General and Spatial Reasoning
Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), have significantly enhanced their reasoning abilities. However, a critical gap persists: these models struggle with dynamic spatial interactions, a capability essential for real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce M2-Reasoning-7B, a model designed to excel in both general and spatial reasoning. Our approach integrates two key innovations: (1) a novel data pipeline that generates 294.2K high-quality data samples (168K for cold-start fine-tuning and 126.2K for RLVR), which feature logically coherent reasoning trajectories and have undergone comprehensive assessment; and (2) a dynamic multi-task training strategy with step-wise optimization to mitigate conflicts between data, and task-specific rewards for delivering tailored incentive signals. This combination of curated data and advanced training allows M2-Reasoning-7B to set a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across 8 benchmarks, showcasing superior performance in both general and spatial reasoning domains.
How Much Backtracking is Enough? Exploring the Interplay of SFT and RL in Enhancing LLM Reasoning
Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have effectively improved their reasoning abilities, particularly on mathematical and logical problems that have verifiable answers, through techniques such as supervised finetuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). Prior research indicates that RL effectively internalizes search strategies, enabling long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, with backtracking emerging naturally as a learned capability. However, the precise benefits of backtracking, specifically, how significantly it contributes to reasoning improvements and the optimal extent of its use, remain poorly understood. In this work, we systematically investigate the dynamics between SFT and RL on eight reasoning tasks: Countdown, Sudoku, Arc 1D, Geometry, Color Cube Rotation, List Functions, Zebra Puzzles, and Self Reference. Our findings highlight that short CoT sequences used in SFT as a warm-up do have moderate contribution to RL training, compared with cold-start RL; however such contribution diminishes when tasks become increasingly difficult. Motivated by this observation, we construct synthetic datasets varying systematically in the number of backtracking steps and conduct controlled experiments to isolate the influence of either the correctness (content) or the structure (i.e., backtrack frequency). We find that (1) longer CoT with backtracks generally induce better and more stable RL training, (2) more challenging problems with larger search space tend to need higher numbers of backtracks during the SFT stage. Additionally, we demonstrate through experiments on distilled data that RL training is largely unaffected by the correctness of long CoT sequences, suggesting that RL prioritizes structural patterns over content correctness. Collectively, our results offer practical insights into designing optimal training strategies to effectively scale reasoning in LLMs.
GThinker: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning via Cue-Guided Rethinking
Despite notable advancements in multimodal reasoning, leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still underperform on vision-centric multimodal reasoning tasks in general scenarios. This shortfall stems from their predominant reliance on logic- and knowledge-based slow thinking strategies, while effective for domains like math and science, fail to integrate visual information effectively during reasoning. Consequently, these models often fail to adequately ground visual cues, resulting in suboptimal performance in tasks that require multiple plausible visual interpretations and inferences. To address this, we present GThinker (General Thinker), a novel reasoning MLLM excelling in multimodal reasoning across general scenarios, mathematics, and science. GThinker introduces Cue-Rethinking, a flexible reasoning pattern that grounds inferences in visual cues and iteratively reinterprets these cues to resolve inconsistencies. Building on this pattern, we further propose a two-stage training pipeline, including pattern-guided cold start and incentive reinforcement learning, designed to enable multimodal reasoning capabilities across domains. Furthermore, to support the training, we construct GThinker-11K, comprising 7K high-quality, iteratively-annotated reasoning paths and 4K curated reinforcement learning samples, filling the data gap toward general multimodal reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GThinker achieves 81.5% on the challenging comprehensive multimodal reasoning benchmark M^3CoT, surpassing the latest O4-mini model. It also shows an average improvement of 2.1% on general scenario multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while maintaining on-par performance in mathematical reasoning compared to counterpart advanced reasoning models. The code, model, and data will be released soon at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/GThinker.
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities. Through RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerges with numerous powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviors. However, it encounters challenges such as poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates multi-stage training and cold-start data before RL. DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1-1217 on reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we open-source DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models (1.5B, 7B, 8B, 14B, 32B, 70B) distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Qwen and Llama.
WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agent
Transcending human cognitive limitations represents a critical frontier in LLM training. Proprietary agentic systems like DeepResearch have demonstrated superhuman capabilities on extremely complex information-seeking benchmarks such as BrowseComp, a feat previously unattainable. We posit that their success hinges on a sophisticated reasoning pattern absent in open-source models: the ability to systematically reduce extreme uncertainty when navigating vast information landscapes. Based on this insight, we introduce WebSailor, a complete post-training methodology designed to instill this crucial capability. Our approach involves generating novel, high-uncertainty tasks through structured sampling and information obfuscation, RFT cold start, and an efficient agentic RL training algorithm, Duplicating Sampling Policy Optimization (DUPO). With this integrated pipeline, WebSailor significantly outperforms all opensource agents in complex information-seeking tasks, matching proprietary agents' performance and closing the capability gap.
AdaptThink: Reasoning Models Can Learn When to Think
Recently, large reasoning models have achieved impressive performance on various tasks by employing human-like deep thinking. However, the lengthy thinking process substantially increases inference overhead, making efficiency a critical bottleneck. In this work, we first demonstrate that NoThinking, which prompts the reasoning model to skip thinking and directly generate the final solution, is a better choice for relatively simple tasks in terms of both performance and efficiency. Motivated by this, we propose AdaptThink, a novel RL algorithm to teach reasoning models to choose the optimal thinking mode adaptively based on problem difficulty. Specifically, AdaptThink features two core components: (1) a constrained optimization objective that encourages the model to choose NoThinking while maintaining the overall performance; (2) an importance sampling strategy that balances Thinking and NoThinking samples during on-policy training, thereby enabling cold start and allowing the model to explore and exploit both thinking modes throughout the training process. Our experiments indicate that AdaptThink significantly reduces the inference costs while further enhancing performance. Notably, on three math datasets, AdaptThink reduces the average response length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B by 53% and improves its accuracy by 2.4%, highlighting the promise of adaptive thinking-mode selection for optimizing the balance between reasoning quality and efficiency. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/AdaptThink.
ARC-Hunyuan-Video-7B: Structured Video Comprehension of Real-World Shorts
Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.
BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM
Recent advances in generative AI have dramatically improved image and video synthesis capabilities, significantly increasing the risk of misinformation through sophisticated fake content. In response, detection methods have evolved from traditional approaches to multimodal large language models (MLLMs), offering enhanced transparency and interpretability in identifying synthetic media. However, current detection systems remain fundamentally limited by their single-modality design. These approaches analyze images or videos separately, making them ineffective against synthetic content that combines multiple media formats. To address these challenges, we introduce BusterX++, a novel framework designed specifically for cross-modal detection and explanation of synthetic media. Our approach incorporates an advanced reinforcement learning (RL) post-training strategy that eliminates cold-start. Through Multi-stage Training, Thinking Reward, and Hybrid Reasoning, BusterX++ achieves stable and substantial performance improvements. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we also present GenBuster++, a cross-modal benchmark leveraging state-of-the-art image and video generation techniques. This benchmark comprises 4,000 images and video clips, meticulously curated by human experts using a novel filtering methodology to ensure high quality, diversity, and real-world applicability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.
MedITok: A Unified Tokenizer for Medical Image Synthesis and Interpretation
Advanced autoregressive models have reshaped multimodal AI. However, their transformative potential in medical imaging remains largely untapped due to the absence of a unified visual tokenizer -- one capable of capturing fine-grained visual structures for faithful image reconstruction and realistic image synthesis, as well as rich semantics for accurate diagnosis and image interpretation. To this end, we present MedITok, the first unified tokenizer tailored for medical images, encoding both low-level structural details and high-level clinical semantics within a unified latent space. To balance these competing objectives, we introduce a novel two-stage training framework: a visual representation alignment stage that cold-starts the tokenizer reconstruction learning with a visual semantic constraint, followed by a textual semantic representation alignment stage that infuses detailed clinical semantics into the latent space. Trained on the meticulously collected large-scale dataset with over 30 million medical images and 2 million image-caption pairs, MedITok achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than 30 datasets across 9 imaging modalities and 4 different tasks. By providing a unified token space for autoregressive modeling, MedITok supports a wide range of tasks in clinical diagnostics and generative healthcare applications. Model and code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/Masaaki-75/meditok.
KAT-V1: Kwai-AutoThink Technical Report
We present Kwaipilot-AutoThink (KAT), an open-source 40B large language model developed to address the overthinking problem in reasoning-intensive tasks, where an automatic thinking training paradigm is proposed to dynamically switch between reasoning and non-reasoning modes based on task complexity. Specifically, first, we construct the dual-regime dataset based on a novel tagging pipeline and a multi-agent synthesis strategy, and then we apply Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)-enhanced knowledge distillation, enabling efficient and fine-grained reasoning transfer with minimal pretraining cost. Besides, we implement a cold-start initialization strategy that introduces mode-selection priors using majority-vote signals and intent-aware prompting. Finally, we propose Step-SRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that incorporates intermediate supervision into the GRPO framework, offering structured guidance over both reasoning-mode selection and response accuracy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that KAT consistently matches or even outperforms current state-of-the-art models, including DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Qwen3-235B-A22B, across a wide range of reasoning-intensive tasks while reducing token usage by up to approximately 30\%. Beyond academic evaluation, KAT has been successfully deployed in Kwaipilot (i.e., Kuaishou's internal coding assistant), and improves real-world development workflows with high accuracy, efficiency, and controllable reasoning behaviors. Moreover, we are actively training a 200B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with 40B activation parameters, where the early-stage results already demonstrate promising improvements in performance and efficiency, further showing the scalability of the AutoThink paradigm.
Open Vision Reasoner: Transferring Linguistic Cognitive Behavior for Visual Reasoning
The remarkable reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) stems from cognitive behaviors that emerge through reinforcement with verifiable rewards. This work investigates how to transfer this principle to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to unlock advanced visual reasoning. We introduce a two-stage paradigm built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B: a massive linguistic cold-start fine-tuning, followed by multimodal reinforcement learning (RL) spanning nearly 1,000 steps, surpassing all previous open-source efforts in scale. This pioneering work reveals three fundamental insights: 1) Behavior transfer emerges surprisingly early in cold start due to linguistic mental imagery. 2) Cold start broadly memorizes visual behaviors, while RL critically discerns and scales up effective patterns. 3) Transfer strategically favors high-utility behaviors such as visual reflection. Our resulting model, Open-Vision-Reasoner (OVR), achieves state-of-the-art performance on a suite of reasoning benchmarks, including 95.3% on MATH500, 51.8% on MathVision and 54.6% on MathVerse. We release our model, data, and training dynamics to catalyze the development of more capable, behavior-aligned multimodal reasoners.
ColD Fusion: Collaborative Descent for Distributed Multitask Finetuning
Pretraining has been shown to scale well with compute, data size and data diversity. Multitask learning trains on a mixture of supervised datasets and produces improved performance compared to self-supervised pretraining. Until now, massively multitask learning required simultaneous access to all datasets in the mixture and heavy compute resources that are only available to well-resourced teams. In this paper, we propose ColD Fusion, a method that provides the benefits of multitask learning but leverages distributed computation and requires limited communication and no sharing of data. Consequentially, ColD Fusion can create a synergistic loop, where finetuned models can be recycled to continually improve the pretrained model they are based on. We show that ColD Fusion yields comparable benefits to multitask pretraining by producing a model that (a) attains strong performance on all of the datasets it was multitask trained on and (b) is a better starting point for finetuning on unseen datasets. We find ColD Fusion outperforms RoBERTa and even previous multitask models. Specifically, when training and testing on 35 diverse datasets, ColD Fusion-based model outperforms RoBERTa by 2.45 points in average without any changes to the architecture.
Balancing the Budget: Understanding Trade-offs Between Supervised and Preference-Based Finetuning
Post-training of Large Language Models often involves a pipeline of Supervised Finetuning (SFT) followed by Preference Finetuning (PFT) using methods like Direct Preference Optimization. Both stages require annotated data that are very different in structure and costs. We study how to optimally allocate a fixed training data budget between the two stages, through extensive experiments spanning four diverse tasks, multiple model sizes and various data annotation costs. Our findings reveal that just SFT on the base model dominates performance in low-data regimes (<1,000 annotated examples). With larger data-budgets, we observe that a combination of SFT and PFT, often with increasing portions allocated towards preference data yields optimal performance. However, completely eliminating SFT and running PFT directly on the base model yields suboptimal performance, described as the cold start problem on tasks like mathematics. We observe that this is due to the distribution shift arising from using DPO directly on the base model to elicit step-by-step reasoning. This limitation can be effectively addressed by allocating even a small portion (<10%) of the budget to SFT first, resulting in performance improvements of 15-20% on analytical benchmarks like GSM8k. These results provide actionable insights for researchers and practitioners optimizing model development under budget constraints, where high-quality data curation often represents a significant portion of the total costs of model development.
Fast Certified Robust Training with Short Warmup
Recently, bound propagation based certified robust training methods have been proposed for training neural networks with certifiable robustness guarantees. Despite that state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods including interval bound propagation (IBP) and CROWN-IBP have per-batch training complexity similar to standard neural network training, they usually use a long warmup schedule with hundreds or thousands epochs to reach SOTA performance and are thus still costly. In this paper, we identify two important issues in existing methods, namely exploded bounds at initialization, and the imbalance in ReLU activation states and improve IBP training. These two issues make certified training difficult and unstable, and thereby long warmup schedules were needed in prior works. To mitigate these issues and conduct faster certified training with shorter warmup, we propose three improvements based on IBP training: 1) We derive a new weight initialization method for IBP training; 2) We propose to fully add Batch Normalization (BN) to each layer in the model, since we find BN can reduce the imbalance in ReLU activation states; 3) We also design regularization to explicitly tighten certified bounds and balance ReLU activation states during wamrup. We are able to obtain 65.03% verified error on CIFAR-10 (epsilon=8{255}) and 82.36% verified error on TinyImageNet (epsilon=1{255}) using very short training schedules (160 and 80 total epochs, respectively), outperforming literature SOTA trained with hundreds or thousands epochs under the same network architecture. The code is available at https://github.com/shizhouxing/Fast-Certified-Robust-Training.
Contrastive Learning for Cold Start Recommendation with Adaptive Feature Fusion
This paper proposes a cold start recommendation model that integrates contrastive learning, aiming to solve the problem of performance degradation of recommendation systems in cold start scenarios due to the scarcity of user and item interaction data. The model dynamically adjusts the weights of key features through an adaptive feature selection module and effectively integrates user attributes, item meta-information, and contextual features by combining a multimodal feature fusion mechanism, thereby improving recommendation performance. In addition, the model introduces a contrastive learning mechanism to enhance the robustness and generalization ability of feature representation by constructing positive and negative sample pairs. Experiments are conducted on the MovieLens-1M dataset. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms mainstream recommendation methods such as Matrix Factorization, LightGBM, DeepFM, and AutoRec in terms of HR, NDCG, MRR, and Recall, especially in cold start scenarios. Ablation experiments further verify the key role of each module in improving model performance, and the learning rate sensitivity analysis shows that a moderate learning rate is crucial to the optimization effect of the model. This study not only provides a new solution to the cold start problem but also provides an important reference for the application of contrastive learning in recommendation systems. In the future, this model is expected to play a role in a wider range of scenarios, such as real-time recommendation and cross-domain recommendation.