new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jul 28

Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Data scaling has revolutionized fields like natural language processing and computer vision, providing models with remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we investigate whether similar data scaling laws exist in robotics, particularly in robotic manipulation, and whether appropriate data scaling can yield single-task robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot for any object within the same category in any environment. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on data scaling in imitation learning. By collecting data across numerous environments and objects, we study how a policy's generalization performance changes with the number of training environments, objects, and demonstrations. Throughout our research, we collect over 40,000 demonstrations and execute more than 15,000 real-world robot rollouts under a rigorous evaluation protocol. Our findings reveal several intriguing results: the generalization performance of the policy follows a roughly power-law relationship with the number of environments and objects. The diversity of environments and objects is far more important than the absolute number of demonstrations; once the number of demonstrations per environment or object reaches a certain threshold, additional demonstrations have minimal effect. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient data collection strategy. With four data collectors working for one afternoon, we collect sufficient data to enable the policies for two tasks to achieve approximately 90% success rates in novel environments with unseen objects.

Skywork-SWE: Unveiling Data Scaling Laws for Software Engineering in LLMs

Software engineering (SWE) has recently emerged as a crucial testbed for next-generation LLM agents, demanding inherent capabilities in two critical dimensions: sustained iterative problem-solving (e.g., >50 interaction rounds) and long-context dependency resolution (e.g., >32k tokens). However, the data curation process in SWE remains notoriously time-consuming, as it heavily relies on manual annotation for code file filtering and the setup of dedicated runtime environments to execute and validate unit tests. Consequently, most existing datasets are limited to only a few thousand GitHub-sourced instances. To this end, we propose an incremental, automated data-curation pipeline that systematically scales both the volume and diversity of SWE datasets. Our dataset comprises 10,169 real-world Python task instances from 2,531 distinct GitHub repositories, each accompanied by a task specified in natural language and a dedicated runtime-environment image for automated unit-test validation. We have carefully curated over 8,000 successfully runtime-validated training trajectories from our proposed SWE dataset. When fine-tuning the Skywork-SWE model on these trajectories, we uncover a striking data scaling phenomenon: the trained model's performance for software engineering capabilities in LLMs continues to improve as the data size increases, showing no signs of saturation. Notably, our Skywork-SWE model achieves 38.0% pass@1 accuracy on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark without using verifiers or multiple rollouts, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among the Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-based LLMs built on the OpenHands agent framework. Furthermore, with the incorporation of test-time scaling techniques, the performance further improves to 47.0% accuracy, surpassing the previous SOTA results for sub-32B parameter models. We release the Skywork-SWE-32B model checkpoint to accelerate future research.

How much is a noisy image worth? Data Scaling Laws for Ambient Diffusion

The quality of generative models depends on the quality of the data they are trained on. Creating large-scale, high-quality datasets is often expensive and sometimes impossible, e.g. in certain scientific applications where there is no access to clean data due to physical or instrumentation constraints. Ambient Diffusion and related frameworks train diffusion models with solely corrupted data (which are usually cheaper to acquire) but ambient models significantly underperform models trained on clean data. We study this phenomenon at scale by training more than 80 models on data with different corruption levels across three datasets ranging from 30,000 to approx 1.3M samples. We show that it is impossible, at these sample sizes, to match the performance of models trained on clean data when only training on noisy data. Yet, a combination of a small set of clean data (e.g.~10% of the total dataset) and a large set of highly noisy data suffices to reach the performance of models trained solely on similar-size datasets of clean data, and in particular to achieve near state-of-the-art performance. We provide theoretical evidence for our findings by developing novel sample complexity bounds for learning from Gaussian Mixtures with heterogeneous variances. Our theoretical model suggests that, for large enough datasets, the effective marginal utility of a noisy sample is exponentially worse than that of a clean sample. Providing a small set of clean samples can significantly reduce the sample size requirements for noisy data, as we also observe in our experiments.

HAM-TTS: Hierarchical Acoustic Modeling for Token-Based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Model and Data Scaling

Token-based text-to-speech (TTS) models have emerged as a promising avenue for generating natural and realistic speech, yet they grapple with low pronunciation accuracy, speaking style and timbre inconsistency, and a substantial need for diverse training data. In response, we introduce a novel hierarchical acoustic modeling approach complemented by a tailored data augmentation strategy and train it on the combination of real and synthetic data, scaling the data size up to 650k hours, leading to the zero-shot TTS model with 0.8B parameters. Specifically, our method incorporates a latent variable sequence containing supplementary acoustic information based on refined self-supervised learning (SSL) discrete units into the TTS model by a predictor. This significantly mitigates pronunciation errors and style mutations in synthesized speech. During training, we strategically replace and duplicate segments of the data to enhance timbre uniformity. Moreover, a pretrained few-shot voice conversion model is utilized to generate a plethora of voices with identical content yet varied timbres. This facilitates the explicit learning of utterance-level one-to-many mappings, enriching speech diversity and also ensuring consistency in timbre. Comparative experiments (Demo page: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/ham-tts/)demonstrate our model's superiority over VALL-E in pronunciation precision and maintaining speaking style, as well as timbre continuity.

SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods still depend largely on a confined set of training datasets. In this work, we investigate scaling up EHPS towards the first generalist foundation model (dubbed SMPLer-X), with up to ViT-Huge as the backbone and training with up to 4.5M instances from diverse data sources. With big data and the large model, SMPLer-X exhibits strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. 1) For the data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 32 EHPS datasets, including a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. 2) For the model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turn SMPLer-X into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation model SMPLer-X consistently delivers state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA (107.2 mm NMVE), UBody (57.4 mm PVE), EgoBody (63.6 mm PVE), and EHF (62.3 mm PVE without finetuning). Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/SMPLer-X/

Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents

Recent success in large multimodal models (LMMs) has sparked promising applications of agents capable of autonomously completing complex web tasks. While open-source LMM agents have made significant advances in offline evaluation benchmarks, their performance still falls substantially short of human-level capabilities in more realistic online settings. A key bottleneck is the lack of diverse and large-scale trajectory-level datasets across various domains, which are expensive to collect. In this paper, we address this challenge by developing a scalable recipe to synthesize the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date, containing over 94K successful multimodal web trajectories, spanning 49K unique URLs, 720K screenshots, and 33M web elements. In particular, we leverage extensive web exploration and refinement to obtain diverse task intents. The average cost is 28 cents per successful trajectory, making it affordable to a wide range of users in the community. Leveraging this dataset, we train Explorer, a multimodal web agent, and demonstrate strong performance on both offline and online web agent benchmarks such as Mind2Web-Live, Multimodal-Mind2Web, and MiniWob++. Additionally, our experiments highlight data scaling as a key driver for improving web agent capabilities. We hope this study makes state-of-the-art LMM-based agent research at a larger scale more accessible.

SMPLest-X: Ultimate Scaling for Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods focus on training innovative architectural designs on confined datasets. In this work, we investigate the impact of scaling up EHPS towards a family of generalist foundation models. 1) For data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 40 EHPS datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. Ultimately, we achieve diminishing returns at 10M training instances from diverse data sources. 2) For model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers (up to ViT-Huge as the backbone) to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. To exclude the influence of algorithmic design, we base our experiments on two minimalist architectures: SMPLer-X, which consists of an intermediate step for hand and face localization, and SMPLest-X, an even simpler version that reduces the network to its bare essentials and highlights significant advances in the capture of articulated hands. With big data and the large model, the foundation models exhibit strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turns the generalist into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation models consistently deliver state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA, UBody, EgoBody, and our proposed SynHand dataset for comprehensive hand evaluation. (Code is available at: https://github.com/wqyin/SMPLest-X).

DiffusionEngine: Diffusion Model is Scalable Data Engine for Object Detection

Data is the cornerstone of deep learning. This paper reveals that the recently developed Diffusion Model is a scalable data engine for object detection. Existing methods for scaling up detection-oriented data often require manual collection or generative models to obtain target images, followed by data augmentation and labeling to produce training pairs, which are costly, complex, or lacking diversity. To address these issues, we presentDiffusionEngine (DE), a data scaling-up engine that provides high-quality detection-oriented training pairs in a single stage. DE consists of a pre-trained diffusion model and an effective Detection-Adapter, contributing to generating scalable, diverse and generalizable detection data in a plug-and-play manner. Detection-Adapter is learned to align the implicit semantic and location knowledge in off-the-shelf diffusion models with detection-aware signals to make better bounding-box predictions. Additionally, we contribute two datasets, i.e., COCO-DE and VOC-DE, to scale up existing detection benchmarks for facilitating follow-up research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that data scaling-up via DE can achieve significant improvements in diverse scenarios, such as various detection algorithms, self-supervised pre-training, data-sparse, label-scarce, cross-domain, and semi-supervised learning. For example, when using DE with a DINO-based adapter to scale up data, mAP is improved by 3.1% on COCO, 7.6% on VOC, and 11.5% on Clipart.

DataMan: Data Manager for Pre-training Large Language Models

The performance emergence of large language models (LLMs) driven by data scaling laws makes the selection of pre-training data increasingly important. However, existing methods rely on limited heuristics and human intuition, lacking comprehensive and clear guidelines. To address this, we are inspired by ``reverse thinking'' -- prompting LLMs to self-identify which criteria benefit its performance. As its pre-training capabilities are related to perplexity (PPL), we derive 14 quality criteria from the causes of text perplexity anomalies and introduce 15 common application domains to support domain mixing. In this paper, we train a Data Manager (DataMan) to learn quality ratings and domain recognition from pointwise rating, and use it to annotate a 447B token pre-training corpus with 14 quality ratings and domain type. Our experiments validate our approach, using DataMan to select 30B tokens to train a 1.3B-parameter language model, demonstrating significant improvements in in-context learning (ICL), perplexity, and instruction-following ability over the state-of-the-art baseline. The best-performing model, based on the Overall Score l=5 surpasses a model trained with 50% more data using uniform sampling. We continue pre-training with high-rated, domain-specific data annotated by DataMan to enhance domain-specific ICL performance and thus verify DataMan's domain mixing ability. Our findings emphasize the importance of quality ranking, the complementary nature of quality criteria, and their low correlation with perplexity, analyzing misalignment between PPL and ICL performance. We also thoroughly analyzed our pre-training dataset, examining its composition, the distribution of quality ratings, and the original document sources.

Video-RTS: Rethinking Reinforcement Learning and Test-Time Scaling for Efficient and Enhanced Video Reasoning

Despite advances in reinforcement learning (RL)-based video reasoning with large language models (LLMs), data collection and finetuning remain significant challenges. These methods often rely on large-scale supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with extensive video data and long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations, making them costly and hard to scale. To address this, we present Video-RTS, a new approach to improve video reasoning capability with drastically improved data efficiency by combining data-efficient RL with a video-adaptive test-time scaling (TTS) strategy. Based on observations about the data scaling of RL samples, we skip the resource-intensive SFT step and employ efficient pure-RL training with output-based rewards, requiring no additional annotations or extensive fine-tuning. Furthermore, to utilize computational resources more efficiently, we introduce a sparse-to-dense video TTS strategy that improves inference by iteratively adding frames based on output consistency. We validate our approach on multiple video reasoning benchmarks, showing that Video-RTS surpasses existing video reasoning models by an average of 2.4% in accuracy using only 3.6% training samples. For example, Video-RTS achieves a 4.2% improvement on Video-Holmes, a recent and challenging video reasoning benchmark, and a 2.6% improvement on MMVU. Notably, our pure RL training and adaptive video TTS offer complementary strengths, enabling Video-RTS's strong reasoning performance.

OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction Data

Mathematical reasoning continues to be a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) development with significant interest. However, most of the cutting-edge progress in mathematical reasoning with LLMs has become closed-source due to lack of access to training data. This lack of data access limits researchers from understanding the impact of different choices for synthesizing and utilizing the data. With the goal of creating a high-quality finetuning (SFT) dataset for math reasoning, we conduct careful ablation experiments on data synthesis using the recently released Llama3.1 family of models. Our experiments show that: (a) solution format matters, with excessively verbose solutions proving detrimental to SFT performance, (b) data generated by a strong teacher outperforms on-policy data generated by a weak student model, (c) SFT is robust to low-quality solutions, allowing for imprecise data filtering, and (d) question diversity is crucial for achieving data scaling gains. Based on these insights, we create the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset, which consists of 14M question-solution pairs (approx 600K unique questions), making it nearly eight times larger than the previous largest open-source math reasoning dataset. Finetuning the Llama-3.1-8B-Base using OpenMathInstruct-2 outperforms Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on MATH by an absolute 15.9\% (51.9\% rightarrow 67.8\%). Finally, to accelerate the open-source efforts, we release the code, the finetuned models, and the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?

Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the nuanced role of data diversity in robot learning by examining three critical dimensions-task (what to do), embodiment (which robot to use), and expert (who demonstrates)-challenging the conventional intuition of "more diverse is better". Throughout extensive experiments on various robot platforms, we reveal that (1) task diversity proves more critical than per-task demonstration quantity, benefiting transfer from diverse pre-training tasks to novel downstream scenarios; (2) multi-embodiment pre-training data is optional for cross-embodiment transfer-models trained on high-quality single-embodiment data can efficiently transfer to different platforms, showing more desirable scaling property during fine-tuning than multi-embodiment pre-trained models; and (3) expert diversity, arising from individual operational preferences and stochastic variations in human demonstrations, can be confounding to policy learning, with velocity multimodality emerging as a key contributing factor. Based on this insight, we propose a distribution debiasing method to mitigate velocity ambiguity, the yielding GO-1-Pro achieves substantial performance gains of 15%, equivalent to using 2.5 times pre-training data. Collectively, these findings provide new perspectives and offer practical guidance on how to scale robotic manipulation datasets effectively.

RoboVerse: Towards a Unified Platform, Dataset and Benchmark for Scalable and Generalizable Robot Learning

Data scaling and standardized evaluation benchmarks have driven significant advances in natural language processing and computer vision. However, robotics faces unique challenges in scaling data and establishing evaluation protocols. Collecting real-world data is resource-intensive and inefficient, while benchmarking in real-world scenarios remains highly complex. Synthetic data and simulation offer promising alternatives, yet existing efforts often fall short in data quality, diversity, and benchmark standardization. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboVerse, a comprehensive framework comprising a simulation platform, a synthetic dataset, and unified benchmarks. Our simulation platform supports multiple simulators and robotic embodiments, enabling seamless transitions between different environments. The synthetic dataset, featuring high-fidelity physics and photorealistic rendering, is constructed through multiple approaches. Additionally, we propose unified benchmarks for imitation learning and reinforcement learning, enabling evaluation across different levels of generalization. At the core of the simulation platform is MetaSim, an infrastructure that abstracts diverse simulation environments into a universal interface. It restructures existing simulation environments into a simulator-agnostic configuration system, as well as an API aligning different simulator functionalities, such as launching simulation environments, loading assets with initial states, stepping the physics engine, etc. This abstraction ensures interoperability and extensibility. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RoboVerse enhances the performance of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world model learning, and sim-to-real transfer. These results validate the reliability of our dataset and benchmarks, establishing RoboVerse as a robust solution for advancing robot learning.

MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies

The burgeoning interest in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with up to trillion parameters has been met with concerns regarding resource efficiency and practical expense, particularly given the immense cost of experimentation. This scenario underscores the importance of exploring the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as a resource-efficient alternative. In this context, we introduce MiniCPM, specifically the 1.2B and 2.4B non-embedding parameter variants, not only excel in their respective categories but also demonstrate capabilities on par with 7B-13B LLMs. While focusing on SLMs, our approach exhibits scalability in both model and data dimensions for future LLM research. Regarding model scaling, we employ extensive model wind tunnel experiments for stable and optimal scaling. For data scaling, we introduce a Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler (LRS), conducive to continuous training and domain adaptation. We present an in-depth analysis of the intriguing training dynamics that occurred in the WSD LRS. With WSD LRS, we are now able to efficiently study data-model scaling law without extensive retraining experiments on both axes of model and data, from which we derive the much higher compute optimal data-model ratio than Chinchilla Optimal. Additionally, we introduce MiniCPM family, including MiniCPM-DPO, MiniCPM-MoE and MiniCPM-128K, whose excellent performance further cementing MiniCPM's foundation in diverse SLM applications. MiniCPM models are available publicly at https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM .

Amplifying Pathological Detection in EEG Signaling Pathways through Cross-Dataset Transfer Learning

Pathology diagnosis based on EEG signals and decoding brain activity holds immense importance in understanding neurological disorders. With the advancement of artificial intelligence methods and machine learning techniques, the potential for accurate data-driven diagnoses and effective treatments has grown significantly. However, applying machine learning algorithms to real-world datasets presents diverse challenges at multiple levels. The scarcity of labelled data, especially in low regime scenarios with limited availability of real patient cohorts due to high costs of recruitment, underscores the vital deployment of scaling and transfer learning techniques. In this study, we explore a real-world pathology classification task to highlight the effectiveness of data and model scaling and cross-dataset knowledge transfer. As such, we observe varying performance improvements through data scaling, indicating the need for careful evaluation and labelling. Additionally, we identify the challenges of possible negative transfer and emphasize the significance of some key components to overcome distribution shifts and potential spurious correlations and achieve positive transfer. We see improvement in the performance of the target model on the target (NMT) datasets by using the knowledge from the source dataset (TUAB) when a low amount of labelled data was available. Our findings indicate a small and generic model (e.g. ShallowNet) performs well on a single dataset, however, a larger model (e.g. TCN) performs better on transfer and learning from a larger and diverse dataset.

TouchTTS: An Embarrassingly Simple TTS Framework that Everyone Can Touch

It is well known that LLM-based systems are data-hungry. Recent LLM-based TTS works typically employ complex data processing pipelines to obtain high-quality training data. These sophisticated pipelines require excellent models at each stage (e.g., speech denoising, speech enhancement, speaker diarization, and punctuation models), which themselves demand high-quality training data and are rarely open-sourced. Even with state-of-the-art models, issues persist, such as incomplete background noise removal and misalignment between punctuation and actual speech pauses. Moreover, the stringent filtering strategies often retain only 10-30\% of the original data, significantly impeding data scaling efforts. In this work, we leverage a noise-robust audio tokenizer (S3Tokenizer) to design a simplified yet effective TTS data processing pipeline that maintains data quality while substantially reducing data acquisition costs, achieving a data retention rate of over 50\%. Beyond data scaling challenges, LLM-based TTS systems also incur higher deployment costs compared to conventional approaches. Current systems typically use LLMs solely for text-to-token generation, while requiring separate models (e.g., flow matching models) for token-to-waveform generation, which cannot be directly executed by LLM inference engines, further complicating deployment. To address these challenges, we eliminate redundant modules in both LLM and flow components, replacing the flow model backbone with an LLM architecture. Building upon this simplified flow backbone, we propose a unified architecture for both streaming and non-streaming inference, significantly reducing deployment costs. Finally, we explore the feasibility of unifying TTS and ASR tasks using the same data for training, thanks to the simplified pipeline and the S3Tokenizer that reduces the quality requirements for TTS training data.

On the Scalability of Diffusion-based Text-to-Image Generation

Scaling up model and data size has been quite successful for the evolution of LLMs. However, the scaling law for the diffusion based text-to-image (T2I) models is not fully explored. It is also unclear how to efficiently scale the model for better performance at reduced cost. The different training settings and expensive training cost make a fair model comparison extremely difficult. In this work, we empirically study the scaling properties of diffusion based T2I models by performing extensive and rigours ablations on scaling both denoising backbones and training set, including training scaled UNet and Transformer variants ranging from 0.4B to 4B parameters on datasets upto 600M images. For model scaling, we find the location and amount of cross attention distinguishes the performance of existing UNet designs. And increasing the transformer blocks is more parameter-efficient for improving text-image alignment than increasing channel numbers. We then identify an efficient UNet variant, which is 45% smaller and 28% faster than SDXL's UNet. On the data scaling side, we show the quality and diversity of the training set matters more than simply dataset size. Increasing caption density and diversity improves text-image alignment performance and the learning efficiency. Finally, we provide scaling functions to predict the text-image alignment performance as functions of the scale of model size, compute and dataset size.

Language-Image Models with 3D Understanding

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown incredible capabilities in a variety of 2D vision and language tasks. We extend MLLMs' perceptual capabilities to ground and reason about images in 3-dimensional space. To that end, we first develop a large-scale pre-training dataset for 2D and 3D called LV3D by combining multiple existing 2D and 3D recognition datasets under a common task formulation: as multi-turn question-answering. Next, we introduce a new MLLM named Cube-LLM and pre-train it on LV3D. We show that pure data scaling makes a strong 3D perception capability without 3D specific architectural design or training objective. Cube-LLM exhibits intriguing properties similar to LLMs: (1) Cube-LLM can apply chain-of-thought prompting to improve 3D understanding from 2D context information. (2) Cube-LLM can follow complex and diverse instructions and adapt to versatile input and output formats. (3) Cube-LLM can be visually prompted such as 2D box or a set of candidate 3D boxes from specialists. Our experiments on outdoor benchmarks demonstrate that Cube-LLM significantly outperforms existing baselines by 21.3 points of AP-BEV on the Talk2Car dataset for 3D grounded reasoning and 17.7 points on the DriveLM dataset for complex reasoning about driving scenarios, respectively. Cube-LLM also shows competitive results in general MLLM benchmarks such as refCOCO for 2D grounding with (87.0) average score, as well as visual question answering benchmarks such as VQAv2, GQA, SQA, POPE, etc. for complex reasoning. Our project is available at https://janghyuncho.github.io/Cube-LLM.

Merlin: A Vision Language Foundation Model for 3D Computed Tomography

Over 85 million computed tomography (CT) scans are performed annually in the US, of which approximately one quarter focus on the abdomen. Given the current radiologist shortage, there is a large impetus to use artificial intelligence to alleviate the burden of interpreting these complex imaging studies. Prior state-of-the-art approaches for automated medical image interpretation leverage vision language models (VLMs). However, current medical VLMs are generally limited to 2D images and short reports, and do not leverage electronic health record (EHR) data for supervision. We introduce Merlin - a 3D VLM that we train using paired CT scans (6+ million images from 15,331 CTs), EHR diagnosis codes (1.8+ million codes), and radiology reports (6+ million tokens). We evaluate Merlin on 6 task types and 752 individual tasks. The non-adapted (off-the-shelf) tasks include zero-shot findings classification (31 findings), phenotype classification (692 phenotypes), and zero-shot cross-modal retrieval (image to findings and image to impressions), while model adapted tasks include 5-year disease prediction (6 diseases), radiology report generation, and 3D semantic segmentation (20 organs). We perform internal validation on a test set of 5,137 CTs, and external validation on 7,000 clinical CTs and on two public CT datasets (VerSe, TotalSegmentator). Beyond these clinically-relevant evaluations, we assess the efficacy of various network architectures and training strategies to depict that Merlin has favorable performance to existing task-specific baselines. We derive data scaling laws to empirically assess training data needs for requisite downstream task performance. Furthermore, unlike conventional VLMs that require hundreds of GPUs for training, we perform all training on a single GPU.

RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing

General-purpose foundation models have become increasingly important in the field of artificial intelligence. While self-supervised learning (SSL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM) have led to promising results in building such foundation models for remote sensing, these models primarily learn low-level features, require annotated data for fine-tuning, and not applicable for retrieval and zero-shot applications due to the lack of language understanding. In response to these limitations, we propose RemoteCLIP, the first vision-language foundation model for remote sensing that aims to learn robust visual features with rich semantics, as well as aligned text embeddings for seamless downstream application. To address the scarcity of pre-training data, we leverage data scaling, converting heterogeneous annotations based on Box-to-Caption (B2C) and Mask-to-Box (M2B) conversion, and further incorporating UAV imagery, resulting a 12xlarger pretraining dataset. RemoteCLIP can be applied to a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification, linear probing, k-NN classification, few-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and object counting. Evaluations on 16 datasets, including a newly introduced RemoteCount benchmark to test the object counting ability, show that RemoteCLIP consistently outperforms baseline foundation models across different model scales. Impressively, RemoteCLIP outperform previous SoTA by 9.14% mean recall on RSICD dataset and by 8.92% on RSICD dataset. For zero-shot classification, our RemoteCLIP outperform CLIP baseline by up to 6.39% average accuracy on 12 downstream datasets.

Phikon-v2, A large and public feature extractor for biomarker prediction

Gathering histopathology slides from over 100 publicly available cohorts, we compile a diverse dataset of 460 million pathology tiles covering more than 30 cancer sites. Using this dataset, we train a large self-supervised vision transformer using DINOv2 and publicly release one iteration of this model for further experimentation, coined Phikon-v2. While trained on publicly available histology slides, Phikon-v2 surpasses our previously released model (Phikon) and performs on par with other histopathology foundation models (FM) trained on proprietary data. Our benchmarks include eight slide-level tasks with results reported on external validation cohorts avoiding any data contamination between pre-training and evaluation datasets. Our downstream training procedure follows a simple yet robust ensembling strategy yielding a +1.75 AUC increase across tasks and models compared to one-shot retraining (p<0.001). We compare Phikon (ViT-B) and Phikon-v2 (ViT-L) against 14 different histology feature extractors, making our evaluation the most comprehensive to date. Our result support evidences that DINOv2 handles joint model and data scaling better than iBOT. Also, we show that recent scaling efforts are overall beneficial to downstream performance in the context of biomarker prediction with GigaPath and H-Optimus-0 (two ViT-g with 1.1B parameters each) standing out. However, the statistical margins between the latest top-performing FMs remain mostly non-significant; some even underperform on specific indications or tasks such as MSI prediction - deposed by a 13x smaller model developed internally. While latest foundation models may exhibit limitations for clinical deployment, they nonetheless offer excellent grounds for the development of more specialized and cost-efficient histology encoders fueling AI-guided diagnostic tools.

FreeTumor: Advance Tumor Segmentation via Large-Scale Tumor Synthesis

AI-driven tumor analysis has garnered increasing attention in healthcare. However, its progress is significantly hindered by the lack of annotated tumor cases, which requires radiologists to invest a lot of effort in collecting and annotation. In this paper, we introduce a highly practical solution for robust tumor synthesis and segmentation, termed FreeTumor, which refers to annotation-free synthetic tumors and our desire to free patients that suffering from tumors. Instead of pursuing sophisticated technical synthesis modules, we aim to design a simple yet effective tumor synthesis paradigm to unleash the power of large-scale data. Specifically, FreeTumor advances existing methods mainly from three aspects: (1) Existing methods only leverage small-scale labeled data for synthesis training, which limits their ability to generalize well on unseen data from different sources. To this end, we introduce the adversarial training strategy to leverage large-scale and diversified unlabeled data in synthesis training, significantly improving tumor synthesis. (2) Existing methods largely ignored the negative impact of low-quality synthetic tumors in segmentation training. Thus, we employ an adversarial-based discriminator to automatically filter out the low-quality synthetic tumors, which effectively alleviates their negative impact. (3) Existing methods only used hundreds of cases in tumor segmentation. In FreeTumor, we investigate the data scaling law in tumor segmentation by scaling up the dataset to 11k cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FreeTumor, e.g., on three tumor segmentation benchmarks, average +8.9% DSC over the baseline that only using real tumors and +6.6% DSC over the state-of-the-art tumor synthesis method. Code will be available.

Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments

Robot models, particularly those trained with large amounts of data, have recently shown a plethora of real-world manipulation and navigation capabilities. Several independent efforts have shown that given sufficient training data in an environment, robot policies can generalize to demonstrated variations in that environment. However, needing to finetune robot models to every new environment stands in stark contrast to models in language or vision that can be deployed zero-shot for open-world problems. In this work, we present Robot Utility Models (RUMs), a framework for training and deploying zero-shot robot policies that can directly generalize to new environments without any finetuning. To create RUMs efficiently, we develop new tools to quickly collect data for mobile manipulation tasks, integrate such data into a policy with multi-modal imitation learning, and deploy policies on-device on Hello Robot Stretch, a cheap commodity robot, with an external mLLM verifier for retrying. We train five such utility models for opening cabinet doors, opening drawers, picking up napkins, picking up paper bags, and reorienting fallen objects. Our system, on average, achieves 90% success rate in unseen, novel environments interacting with unseen objects. Moreover, the utility models can also succeed in different robot and camera set-ups with no further data, training, or fine-tuning. Primary among our lessons are the importance of training data over training algorithm and policy class, guidance about data scaling, necessity for diverse yet high-quality demonstrations, and a recipe for robot introspection and retrying to improve performance on individual environments. Our code, data, models, hardware designs, as well as our experiment and deployment videos are open sourced and can be found on our project website: https://robotutilitymodels.com

MINIMA: Modality Invariant Image Matching

Image matching for both cross-view and cross-modality plays a critical role in multimodal perception. In practice, the modality gap caused by different imaging systems/styles poses great challenges to the matching task. Existing works try to extract invariant features for specific modalities and train on limited datasets, showing poor generalization. In this paper, we present MINIMA, a unified image matching framework for multiple cross-modal cases. Without pursuing fancy modules, our MINIMA aims to enhance universal performance from the perspective of data scaling up. For such purpose, we propose a simple yet effective data engine that can freely produce a large dataset containing multiple modalities, rich scenarios, and accurate matching labels. Specifically, we scale up the modalities from cheap but rich RGB-only matching data, by means of generative models. Under this setting, the matching labels and rich diversity of the RGB dataset are well inherited by the generated multimodal data. Benefiting from this, we construct MD-syn, a new comprehensive dataset that fills the data gap for general multimodal image matching. With MD-syn, we can directly train any advanced matching pipeline on randomly selected modality pairs to obtain cross-modal ability. Extensive experiments on in-domain and zero-shot matching tasks, including 19 cross-modal cases, demonstrate that our MINIMA can significantly outperform the baselines and even surpass modality-specific methods. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LSXI7/MINIMA .

DreamOmni: Unified Image Generation and Editing

Currently, the success of large language models (LLMs) illustrates that a unified multitasking approach can significantly enhance model usability, streamline deployment, and foster synergistic benefits across different tasks. However, in computer vision, while text-to-image (T2I) models have significantly improved generation quality through scaling up, their framework design did not initially consider how to unify with downstream tasks, such as various types of editing. To address this, we introduce DreamOmni, a unified model for image generation and editing. We begin by analyzing existing frameworks and the requirements of downstream tasks, proposing a unified framework that integrates both T2I models and various editing tasks. Furthermore, another key challenge is the efficient creation of high-quality editing data, particularly for instruction-based and drag-based editing. To this end, we develop a synthetic data pipeline using sticker-like elements to synthesize accurate, high-quality datasets efficiently, which enables editing data scaling up for unified model training. For training, DreamOmni jointly trains T2I generation and downstream tasks. T2I training enhances the model's understanding of specific concepts and improves generation quality, while editing training helps the model grasp the nuances of the editing task. This collaboration significantly boosts editing performance. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of DreamOmni. The code and model will be released.

Group Diffusion Transformers are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

While large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their task-agnostic capabilities, visual generation tasks such as image translation, style transfer, and character customization still rely heavily on supervised, task-specific datasets. In this work, we introduce Group Diffusion Transformers (GDTs), a novel framework that unifies diverse visual generation tasks by redefining them as a group generation problem. In this approach, a set of related images is generated simultaneously, optionally conditioned on a subset of the group. GDTs build upon diffusion transformers with minimal architectural modifications by concatenating self-attention tokens across images. This allows the model to implicitly capture cross-image relationships (e.g., identities, styles, layouts, surroundings, and color schemes) through caption-based correlations. Our design enables scalable, unsupervised, and task-agnostic pretraining using extensive collections of image groups sourced from multimodal internet articles, image galleries, and video frames. We evaluate GDTs on a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 200 instructions across 30 distinct visual generation tasks, including picture book creation, font design, style transfer, sketching, colorization, drawing sequence generation, and character customization. Our models achieve competitive zero-shot performance without any additional fine-tuning or gradient updates. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of key components such as data scaling, group size, and model design. These results demonstrate the potential of GDTs as scalable, general-purpose visual generation systems.

RedOne: Revealing Domain-specific LLM Post-Training in Social Networking Services

As a primary medium for modern information dissemination, social networking services (SNS) have experienced rapid growth, which has proposed significant challenges for platform content management and interaction quality improvement. Recently, the development of large language models (LLMs) has offered potential solutions but existing studies focus on isolated tasks, which not only encounter diminishing benefit from the data scaling within individual scenarios but also fail to flexibly adapt to diverse real-world context. To address these challenges, we introduce RedOne, a domain-specific LLM designed to break the performance bottleneck of single-task baselines and establish a comprehensive foundation for the SNS. RedOne was developed through a three-stage training strategy consisting of continue pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization, using a large-scale real-world dataset. Through extensive experiments, RedOne maintains strong general capabilities, and achieves an average improvement up to 14.02% across 8 major SNS tasks and 7.56% in SNS bilingual evaluation benchmark, compared with base models. Furthermore, through online testing, RedOne reduced the exposure rate in harmful content detection by 11.23% and improved the click page rate in post-view search by 14.95% compared with single-tasks finetuned baseline models. These results establish RedOne as a robust domain-specific LLM for SNS, demonstrating excellent generalization across various tasks and promising applicability in real-world scenarios.

Re-Aligning Language to Visual Objects with an Agentic Workflow

Language-based object detection (LOD) aims to align visual objects with language expressions. A large amount of paired data is utilized to improve LOD model generalizations. During the training process, recent studies leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to automatically generate human-like expressions for visual objects, facilitating training data scaling up. In this process, we observe that VLM hallucinations bring inaccurate object descriptions (e.g., object name, color, and shape) to deteriorate VL alignment quality. To reduce VLM hallucinations, we propose an agentic workflow controlled by an LLM to re-align language to visual objects via adaptively adjusting image and text prompts. We name this workflow Real-LOD, which includes planning, tool use, and reflection steps. Given an image with detected objects and VLM raw language expressions, Real-LOD reasons its state automatically and arranges action based on our neural symbolic designs (i.e., planning). The action will adaptively adjust the image and text prompts and send them to VLMs for object re-description (i.e., tool use). Then, we use another LLM to analyze these refined expressions for feedback (i.e., reflection). These steps are conducted in a cyclic form to gradually improve language descriptions for re-aligning to visual objects. We construct a dataset that contains a tiny amount of 0.18M images with re-aligned language expression and train a prevalent LOD model to surpass existing LOD methods by around 50% on the standard benchmarks. Our Real-LOD workflow, with automatic VL refinement, reveals a potential to preserve data quality along with scaling up data quantity, which further improves LOD performance from a data-alignment perspective.

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. AutoSDT leverages the coding capabilities and parametric knowledge of LLMs to search for diverse sources, select ecologically valid tasks, and synthesize accurate task instructions and code solutions. Using our pipeline, we construct AutoSDT-5K, a dataset of 5,404 coding tasks for data-driven discovery that covers four scientific disciplines and 756 unique Python packages. To the best of our knowledge, AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. Expert feedback on a subset of 256 tasks shows the effectiveness of AutoSDT: 93% of the collected tasks are ecologically valid, and 92.2% of the synthesized programs are functionally correct. Trained on AutoSDT-5K, the Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct LLM series, dubbed AutoSDT-Coder, show substantial improvement on two challenging data-driven discovery benchmarks, ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench. Most notably, AutoSDT-Coder-32B reaches the same level of performance as GPT-4o on ScienceAgentBench with a success rate of 7.8%, doubling the performance of its base model. On DiscoveryBench, it lifts the hypothesis matching score to 8.1, bringing a 17.4% relative improvement and closing the gap between open-weight models and GPT-4o.

Scaling may be all you need for achieving human-level object recognition capacity with human-like visual experience

This paper asks whether current self-supervised learning methods, if sufficiently scaled up, would be able to reach human-level visual object recognition capabilities with the same type and amount of visual experience humans learn from. Previous work on this question only considered the scaling of data size. Here, we consider the simultaneous scaling of data size, model size, and image resolution. We perform a scaling experiment with vision transformers up to 633M parameters in size (ViT-H/14) trained with up to 5K hours of human-like video data (long, continuous, mostly egocentric videos) with image resolutions of up to 476x476 pixels. The efficiency of masked autoencoders (MAEs) as a self-supervised learning algorithm makes it possible to run this scaling experiment on an unassuming academic budget. We find that it is feasible to reach human-level object recognition capacity at sub-human scales of model size, data size, and image size, if these factors are scaled up simultaneously. To give a concrete example, we estimate that a 2.5B parameter ViT model trained with 20K hours (2.3 years) of human-like video data with a spatial resolution of 952x952 pixels should be able to reach roughly human-level accuracy on ImageNet. Human-level competence is thus achievable for a fundamental perceptual capability from human-like perceptual experience (human-like in both amount and type) with extremely generic learning algorithms and architectures and without any substantive inductive biases.

Combined Scaling for Zero-shot Transfer Learning

We present a combined scaling method - named BASIC - that achieves 85.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 validation set without learning from any labeled ImageNet example. This accuracy surpasses best published similar models - CLIP and ALIGN - by 9.3%. Our BASIC model also shows significant improvements in robustness benchmarks. For instance, on 5 test sets with natural distribution shifts such as ImageNet-{A,R,V2,Sketch} and ObjectNet, our model achieves 84.3% top-1 average accuracy, only a small drop from its original ImageNet accuracy. To achieve these results, we scale up the contrastive learning framework of CLIP and ALIGN in three dimensions: data size, model size, and batch size. Our dataset has 6.6B noisy image-text pairs, which is 4x larger than ALIGN, and 16x larger than CLIP. Our largest model has 3B weights, which is 3.75x larger in parameters and 8x larger in FLOPs than ALIGN and CLIP. Finally, our batch size is 65536 which is 2x more than CLIP and 4x more than ALIGN. We encountered two main challenges with the scaling rules of BASIC. First, the main challenge with implementing the combined scaling rules of BASIC is the limited memory of accelerators, such as GPUs and TPUs. To overcome the memory limit, we propose two simple methods which make use of gradient checkpointing and model parallelism. Second, while increasing the dataset size and the model size has been the defacto method to improve the performance of deep learning models like BASIC, the effect of a large contrastive batch size on such contrastive-trained image-text models is not well-understood. To shed light on the benefits of large contrastive batch sizes, we develop a theoretical framework which shows that larger contrastive batch sizes lead to smaller generalization gaps for image-text models such as BASIC.

Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation

We present the Pathways Autoregressive Text-to-Image (Parti) model, which generates high-fidelity photorealistic images and supports content-rich synthesis involving complex compositions and world knowledge. Parti treats text-to-image generation as a sequence-to-sequence modeling problem, akin to machine translation, with sequences of image tokens as the target outputs rather than text tokens in another language. This strategy can naturally tap into the rich body of prior work on large language models, which have seen continued advances in capabilities and performance through scaling data and model sizes. Our approach is simple: First, Parti uses a Transformer-based image tokenizer, ViT-VQGAN, to encode images as sequences of discrete tokens. Second, we achieve consistent quality improvements by scaling the encoder-decoder Transformer model up to 20B parameters, with a new state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 7.23 and finetuned FID score of 3.22 on MS-COCO. Our detailed analysis on Localized Narratives as well as PartiPrompts (P2), a new holistic benchmark of over 1600 English prompts, demonstrate the effectiveness of Parti across a wide variety of categories and difficulty aspects. We also explore and highlight limitations of our models in order to define and exemplify key areas of focus for further improvements. See https://parti.research.google/ for high-resolution images.

A Survey of Scaling in Large Language Model Reasoning

The rapid advancements in large Language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their reasoning capabilities, driven by various strategies such as multi-agent collaboration. However, unlike the well-established performance improvements achieved through scaling data and model size, the scaling of reasoning in LLMs is more complex and can even negatively impact reasoning performance, introducing new challenges in model alignment and robustness. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive examination of scaling in LLM reasoning, categorizing it into multiple dimensions and analyzing how and to what extent different scaling strategies contribute to improving reasoning capabilities. We begin by exploring scaling in input size, which enables LLMs to process and utilize more extensive context for improved reasoning. Next, we analyze scaling in reasoning steps that improves multi-step inference and logical consistency. We then examine scaling in reasoning rounds, where iterative interactions refine reasoning outcomes. Furthermore, we discuss scaling in training-enabled reasoning, focusing on optimization through iterative model improvement. Finally, we review applications of scaling across domains and outline future directions for further advancing LLM reasoning. By synthesizing these diverse perspectives, this survey aims to provide insights into how scaling strategies fundamentally enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and further guide the development of next-generation AI systems.

Scalable Vision Language Model Training via High Quality Data Curation

In this paper, we introduce SAIL-VL (ScAlable Vision Language Model TraIning via High QuaLity Data Curation), an open-source vision language model (VLM) of state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with 2B parameters. We introduce three key improvements that contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a visual understanding data construction pipeline, which enables hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation. Equipped with this pipeline, we curate SAIL-Caption, a large-scale caption dataset with large quantity and the highest data quality compared with opensource caption datasets. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 131B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting expected data size scaling laws in visual understanding and instruction following performance. (3) Scalable SFT via quantity and quality scaling: We introduce general guidance for instruction data curation to scale up instruction data continuously, allowing us to construct a large SFT dataset with the highest quality. To further improve SAIL-VL's performance, we propose quality scaling, a multi-stage training recipe with curriculum learning, to improve model performance scaling curves w.r.t. data sizes from logarithmic to be near-linear. SAIL-VL obtains the highest average score in 19 commonly used benchmarks in our evaluation and achieves top1 performance among VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass (https://rank.opencompass.org.cn/leaderboard-multimodal). We release our SAIL-VL-2B model at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent/SAIL-VL-2B).

Expand VSR Benchmark for VLLM to Expertize in Spatial Rules

Distinguishing spatial relations is a basic part of human cognition which requires fine-grained perception on cross-instance. Although benchmarks like MME, MMBench and SEED comprehensively have evaluated various capabilities which already include visual spatial reasoning(VSR). There is still a lack of sufficient quantity and quality evaluation and optimization datasets for Vision Large Language Models(VLLMs) specifically targeting visual positional reasoning. To handle this, we first diagnosed current VLLMs with the VSR dataset and proposed a unified test set. We found current VLLMs to exhibit a contradiction of over-sensitivity to language instructions and under-sensitivity to visual positional information. By expanding the original benchmark from two aspects of tunning data and model structure, we mitigated this phenomenon. To our knowledge, we expanded spatially positioned image data controllably using diffusion models for the first time and integrated original visual encoding(CLIP) with other 3 powerful visual encoders(SigLIP, SAM and DINO). After conducting combination experiments on scaling data and models, we obtained a VLLM VSR Expert(VSRE) that not only generalizes better to different instructions but also accurately distinguishes differences in visual positional information. VSRE achieved over a 27\% increase in accuracy on the VSR test set. It becomes a performant VLLM on the position reasoning of both the VSR dataset and relevant subsets of other evaluation benchmarks. We open-sourced the expanded model with data and Appendix at https://github.com/peijin360/vsre and hope it will accelerate advancements in VLLM on VSR learning.

Reasoning to Learn from Latent Thoughts

Compute scaling for language model (LM) pretraining has outpaced the growth of human-written texts, leading to concerns that data will become the bottleneck to LM scaling. To continue scaling pretraining in this data-constrained regime, we propose that explicitly modeling and inferring the latent thoughts that underlie the text generation process can significantly improve pretraining data efficiency. Intuitively, our approach views web text as the compressed final outcome of a verbose human thought process and that the latent thoughts contain important contextual knowledge and reasoning steps that are critical to data-efficient learning. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through data-constrained continued pretraining for math. We first show that synthetic data approaches to inferring latent thoughts significantly improve data efficiency, outperforming training on the same amount of raw data (5.7\% rightarrow 25.4\% on MATH). Furthermore, we demonstrate latent thought inference without a strong teacher, where an LM bootstraps its own performance by using an EM algorithm to iteratively improve the capability of the trained LM and the quality of thought-augmented pretraining data. We show that a 1B LM can bootstrap its performance across at least three iterations and significantly outperform baselines trained on raw data, with increasing gains from additional inference compute when performing the E-step. The gains from inference scaling and EM iterations suggest new opportunities for scaling data-constrained pretraining.

A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulation

Robot manipulation has seen tremendous progress in recent years, with imitation learning policies enabling successful performance of dexterous and hard-to-model tasks. Concurrently, scaling data and model size has led to the development of capable language and vision foundation models, motivating large-scale efforts to create general-purpose robot foundation models. While these models have garnered significant enthusiasm and investment, meaningful evaluation of real-world performance remains a challenge, limiting both the pace of development and inhibiting a nuanced understanding of current capabilities. In this paper, we rigorously evaluate multitask robot manipulation policies, referred to as Large Behavior Models (LBMs), by extending the Diffusion Policy paradigm across a corpus of simulated and real-world robot data. We propose and validate an evaluation pipeline to rigorously analyze the capabilities of these models with statistical confidence. We compare against single-task baselines through blind, randomized trials in a controlled setting, using both simulation and real-world experiments. We find that multi-task pretraining makes the policies more successful and robust, and enables teaching complex new tasks more quickly, using a fraction of the data when compared to single-task baselines. Moreover, performance predictably increases as pretraining scale and diversity grows. Project page: https://toyotaresearchinstitute.github.io/lbm1/

Window-Based Early-Exit Cascades for Uncertainty Estimation: When Deep Ensembles are More Efficient than Single Models

Deep Ensembles are a simple, reliable, and effective method of improving both the predictive performance and uncertainty estimates of deep learning approaches. However, they are widely criticised as being computationally expensive, due to the need to deploy multiple independent models. Recent work has challenged this view, showing that for predictive accuracy, ensembles can be more computationally efficient (at inference) than scaling single models within an architecture family. This is achieved by cascading ensemble members via an early-exit approach. In this work, we investigate extending these efficiency gains to tasks related to uncertainty estimation. As many such tasks, e.g. selective classification, are binary classification, our key novel insight is to only pass samples within a window close to the binary decision boundary to later cascade stages. Experiments on ImageNet-scale data across a number of network architectures and uncertainty tasks show that the proposed window-based early-exit approach is able to achieve a superior uncertainty-computation trade-off compared to scaling single models. For example, a cascaded EfficientNet-B2 ensemble is able to achieve similar coverage at 5% risk as a single EfficientNet-B4 with <30% the number of MACs. We also find that cascades/ensembles give more reliable improvements on OOD data vs scaling models up. Code for this work is available at: https://github.com/Guoxoug/window-early-exit.

Mogo: RQ Hierarchical Causal Transformer for High-Quality 3D Human Motion Generation

In the field of text-to-motion generation, Bert-type Masked Models (MoMask, MMM) currently produce higher-quality outputs compared to GPT-type autoregressive models (T2M-GPT). However, these Bert-type models often lack the streaming output capability required for applications in video game and multimedia environments, a feature inherent to GPT-type models. Additionally, they demonstrate weaker performance in out-of-distribution generation. To surpass the quality of BERT-type models while leveraging a GPT-type structure, without adding extra refinement models that complicate scaling data, we propose a novel architecture, Mogo (Motion Only Generate Once), which generates high-quality lifelike 3D human motions by training a single transformer model. Mogo consists of only two main components: 1) RVQ-VAE, a hierarchical residual vector quantization variational autoencoder, which discretizes continuous motion sequences with high precision; 2) Hierarchical Causal Transformer, responsible for generating the base motion sequences in an autoregressive manner while simultaneously inferring residuals across different layers. Experimental results demonstrate that Mogo can generate continuous and cyclic motion sequences up to 260 frames (13 seconds), surpassing the 196 frames (10 seconds) length limitation of existing datasets like HumanML3D. On the HumanML3D test set, Mogo achieves a FID score of 0.079, outperforming both the GPT-type model T2M-GPT (FID = 0.116), AttT2M (FID = 0.112) and the BERT-type model MMM (FID = 0.080). Furthermore, our model achieves the best quantitative performance in out-of-distribution generation.

VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video Models

Despite tremendous recent progress, generative video models still struggle to capture real-world motion, dynamics, and physics. We show that this limitation arises from the conventional pixel reconstruction objective, which biases models toward appearance fidelity at the expense of motion coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoJAM, a novel framework that instills an effective motion prior to video generators, by encouraging the model to learn a joint appearance-motion representation. VideoJAM is composed of two complementary units. During training, we extend the objective to predict both the generated pixels and their corresponding motion from a single learned representation. During inference, we introduce Inner-Guidance, a mechanism that steers the generation toward coherent motion by leveraging the model's own evolving motion prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. Notably, our framework can be applied to any video model with minimal adaptations, requiring no modifications to the training data or scaling of the model. VideoJAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion coherence, surpassing highly competitive proprietary models while also enhancing the perceived visual quality of the generations. These findings emphasize that appearance and motion can be complementary and, when effectively integrated, enhance both the visual quality and the coherence of video generation. Project website: https://hila-chefer.github.io/videojam-paper.github.io/

Self-supervised learning of video representations from a child's perspective

Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they require strong inductive biases? Recent advances in collecting large-scale, longitudinal, developmentally realistic video datasets and generic self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms are allowing us to begin to tackle this nature vs. nurture question. However, existing work typically focuses on image-based SSL algorithms and visual capabilities that can be learned from static images (e.g. object recognition), thus ignoring temporal aspects of the world. To close this gap, here we train self-supervised video models on longitudinal, egocentric headcam recordings collected from a child over a two year period in their early development (6-31 months). The resulting models are highly effective at facilitating the learning of action concepts from a small number of labeled examples; they have favorable data size scaling properties; and they display emergent video interpolation capabilities. Video models also learn more robust object representations than image-based models trained with the exact same data. These results suggest that important temporal aspects of a child's internal model of the world may be learnable from their visual experience using highly generic learning algorithms and without strong inductive biases.

Scaling Laws for Data Filtering -- Data Curation cannot be Compute Agnostic

Vision-language models (VLMs) are trained for thousands of GPU hours on carefully curated web datasets. In recent times, data curation has gained prominence with several works developing strategies to retain 'high-quality' subsets of 'raw' scraped data. For instance, the LAION public dataset retained only 10% of the total crawled data. However, these strategies are typically developed agnostic of the available compute for training. In this paper, we first demonstrate that making filtering decisions independent of training compute is often suboptimal: the limited high-quality data rapidly loses its utility when repeated, eventually requiring the inclusion of 'unseen' but 'lower-quality' data. To address this quality-quantity tradeoff (QQT), we introduce neural scaling laws that account for the non-homogeneous nature of web data, an angle ignored in existing literature. Our scaling laws (i) characterize the differing 'utility' of various quality subsets of web data; (ii) account for how utility diminishes for a data point at its 'nth' repetition; and (iii) formulate the mutual interaction of various data pools when combined, enabling the estimation of model performance on a combination of multiple data pools without ever jointly training on them. Our key message is that data curation cannot be agnostic of the total compute that a model will be trained for. Our scaling laws allow us to curate the best possible pool for achieving top performance on Datacomp at various compute budgets, carving out a pareto-frontier for data curation. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/scaling_laws_data_filtering.

Skywork-Reward-V2: Scaling Preference Data Curation via Human-AI Synergy

Despite the critical role of reward models (RMs) in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), current state-of-the-art open RMs perform poorly on most existing evaluation benchmarks, failing to capture the spectrum of nuanced and sophisticated human preferences. Even approaches that incorporate advanced training techniques have not yielded meaningful performance improvements. We hypothesize that this brittleness stems primarily from limitations in preference datasets, which are often narrowly scoped, synthetically labeled, or lack rigorous quality control. To address these challenges, we present a large-scale preference dataset comprising 40 million preference pairs, named SynPref-40M. To enable data curation at scale, we design a human-AI synergistic two-stage pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of human annotation quality and AI scalability. In this pipeline, humans provide verified annotations, while large language models perform automatic curation based on human guidance. Training on this preference mixture, we introduce Skywork-Reward-V2, a suite of eight reward models ranging from 0.6B to 8B parameters, trained on a carefully curated subset of 26 million preference pairs from SynPref-40M. We demonstrate that Skywork-Reward-V2 is versatile across a wide range of capabilities, including alignment with human preferences, objective correctness, safety, resistance to stylistic biases, and best-of-N scaling, achieving state-of-the-art performance across seven major reward model benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that the effectiveness of our approach stems not only from data scale but also from high-quality curation. The Skywork-Reward-V2 series represents substantial progress in open reward models, highlighting the untapped potential of existing preference datasets and demonstrating how human-AI curation synergy can unlock significantly higher data quality.

Visual Data-Type Understanding does not emerge from Scaling Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in the development of vision-language models (VLMs) are yielding remarkable success in recognizing visual semantic content, including impressive instances of compositional image understanding. Here, we introduce the novel task of Visual Data-Type Identification, a basic perceptual skill with implications for data curation (e.g., noisy data-removal from large datasets, domain-specific retrieval) and autonomous vision (e.g., distinguishing changing weather conditions from camera lens staining). We develop two datasets consisting of animal images altered across a diverse set of 27 visual data-types, spanning four broad categories. An extensive zero-shot evaluation of 39 VLMs, ranging from 100M to 80B parameters, shows a nuanced performance landscape. While VLMs are reasonably good at identifying certain stylistic data-types, such as cartoons and sketches, they struggle with simpler data-types arising from basic manipulations like image rotations or additive noise. Our findings reveal that (i) model scaling alone yields marginal gains for contrastively-trained models like CLIP, and (ii) there is a pronounced drop in performance for the largest auto-regressively trained VLMs like OpenFlamingo. This finding points to a blind spot in current frontier VLMs: they excel in recognizing semantic content but fail to acquire an understanding of visual data-types through scaling. By analyzing the pre-training distributions of these models and incorporating data-type information into the captions during fine-tuning, we achieve a significant enhancement in performance. By exploring this previously uncharted task, we aim to set the stage for further advancing VLMs to equip them with visual data-type understanding. Code and datasets are released at https://github.com/bethgelab/DataTypeIdentification.

Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning

Widely observed neural scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training set size, model size, or both, have driven substantial performance improvements in deep learning. However, these improvements through scaling alone require considerable costs in compute and energy. Here we focus on the scaling of error with dataset size and show how in theory we can break beyond power law scaling and potentially even reduce it to exponential scaling instead if we have access to a high-quality data pruning metric that ranks the order in which training examples should be discarded to achieve any pruned dataset size. We then test this improved scaling prediction with pruned dataset size empirically, and indeed observe better than power law scaling in practice on ResNets trained on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. Next, given the importance of finding high-quality pruning metrics, we perform the first large-scale benchmarking study of ten different data pruning metrics on ImageNet. We find most existing high performing metrics scale poorly to ImageNet, while the best are computationally intensive and require labels for every image. We therefore developed a new simple, cheap and scalable self-supervised pruning metric that demonstrates comparable performance to the best supervised metrics. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of good data-pruning metrics may provide a viable path forward to substantially improved neural scaling laws, thereby reducing the resource costs of modern deep learning.

CodeMonkeys: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Software Engineering

Scaling test-time compute is a promising axis for improving LLM capabilities. However, test-time compute can be scaled in a variety of ways, and effectively combining different approaches remains an active area of research. Here, we explore this problem in the context of solving real-world GitHub issues from the SWE-bench dataset. Our system, named CodeMonkeys, allows models to iteratively edit a codebase by jointly generating and running a testing script alongside their draft edit. We sample many of these multi-turn trajectories for every issue to generate a collection of candidate edits. This approach lets us scale "serial" test-time compute by increasing the number of iterations per trajectory and "parallel" test-time compute by increasing the number of trajectories per problem. With parallel scaling, we can amortize up-front costs across multiple downstream samples, allowing us to identify relevant codebase context using the simple method of letting an LLM read every file. In order to select between candidate edits, we combine voting using model-generated tests with a final multi-turn trajectory dedicated to selection. Overall, CodeMonkeys resolves 57.4% of issues from SWE-bench Verified using a budget of approximately 2300 USD. Our selection method can also be used to combine candidates from different sources. Selecting over an ensemble of edits from existing top SWE-bench Verified submissions obtains a score of 66.2% and outperforms the best member of the ensemble on its own. We fully release our code and data at https://scalingintelligence.stanford.edu/pubs/codemonkeys.

Scaling Image and Video Generation via Test-Time Evolutionary Search

As the marginal cost of scaling computation (data and parameters) during model pre-training continues to increase substantially, test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a promising direction for improving generative model performance by allocating additional computation at inference time. While TTS has demonstrated significant success across multiple language tasks, there remains a notable gap in understanding the test-time scaling behaviors of image and video generative models (diffusion-based or flow-based models). Although recent works have initiated exploration into inference-time strategies for vision tasks, these approaches face critical limitations: being constrained to task-specific domains, exhibiting poor scalability, or falling into reward over-optimization that sacrifices sample diversity. In this paper, we propose Evolutionary Search (EvoSearch), a novel, generalist, and efficient TTS method that effectively enhances the scalability of both image and video generation across diffusion and flow models, without requiring additional training or model expansion. EvoSearch reformulates test-time scaling for diffusion and flow models as an evolutionary search problem, leveraging principles from biological evolution to efficiently explore and refine the denoising trajectory. By incorporating carefully designed selection and mutation mechanisms tailored to the stochastic differential equation denoising process, EvoSearch iteratively generates higher-quality offspring while preserving population diversity. Through extensive evaluation across both diffusion and flow architectures for image and video generation tasks, we demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieves higher diversity, and shows strong generalizability to unseen evaluation metrics. Our project is available at the website https://tinnerhrhe.github.io/evosearch.

Scaling Laws of Synthetic Images for Model Training ... for Now

Recent significant advances in text-to-image models unlock the possibility of training vision systems using synthetic images, potentially overcoming the difficulty of collecting curated data at scale. It is unclear, however, how these models behave at scale, as more synthetic data is added to the training set. In this paper we study the scaling laws of synthetic images generated by state of the art text-to-image models, for the training of supervised models: image classifiers with label supervision, and CLIP with language supervision. We identify several factors, including text prompts, classifier-free guidance scale, and types of text-to-image models, that significantly affect scaling behavior. After tuning these factors, we observe that synthetic images demonstrate a scaling trend similar to, but slightly less effective than, real images in CLIP training, while they significantly underperform in scaling when training supervised image classifiers. Our analysis indicates that the main reason for this underperformance is the inability of off-the-shelf text-to-image models to generate certain concepts, a limitation that significantly impairs the training of image classifiers. Our findings also suggest that scaling synthetic data can be particularly effective in scenarios such as: (1) when there is a limited supply of real images for a supervised problem (e.g., fewer than 0.5 million images in ImageNet), (2) when the evaluation dataset diverges significantly from the training data, indicating the out-of-distribution scenario, or (3) when synthetic data is used in conjunction with real images, as demonstrated in the training of CLIP models.

RoMA: Scaling up Mamba-based Foundation Models for Remote Sensing

Recent advances in self-supervised learning for Vision Transformers (ViTs) have fueled breakthroughs in remote sensing (RS) foundation models. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention poses a significant barrier to scalability, particularly for large models and high-resolution images. While the linear-complexity Mamba architecture offers a promising alternative, existing RS applications of Mamba remain limited to supervised tasks on small, domain-specific datasets. To address these challenges, we propose RoMA, a framework that enables scalable self-supervised pretraining of Mamba-based RS foundation models using large-scale, diverse, unlabeled data. RoMA enhances scalability for high-resolution images through a tailored auto-regressive learning strategy, incorporating two key innovations: 1) a rotation-aware pretraining mechanism combining adaptive cropping with angular embeddings to handle sparsely distributed objects with arbitrary orientations, and 2) multi-scale token prediction objectives that address the extreme variations in object scales inherent to RS imagery. Systematic empirical studies validate that Mamba adheres to RS data and parameter scaling laws, with performance scaling reliably as model and data size increase. Furthermore, experiments across scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate that RoMA-pretrained Mamba models consistently outperform ViT-based counterparts in both accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code and pretrained models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/RoMA.

What, How, Where, and How Well? A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models

As enthusiasm for scaling computation (data and parameters) in the pretraining era gradually diminished, test-time scaling (TTS), also referred to as ``test-time computing'' has emerged as a prominent research focus. Recent studies demonstrate that TTS can further elicit the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling significant breakthroughs not only in specialized reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, but also in general tasks like open-ended Q&A. However, despite the explosion of recent efforts in this area, there remains an urgent need for a comprehensive survey offering a systemic understanding. To fill this gap, we propose a unified, multidimensional framework structured along four core dimensions of TTS research: what to scale, how to scale, where to scale, and how well to scale. Building upon this taxonomy, we conduct an extensive review of methods, application scenarios, and assessment aspects, and present an organized decomposition that highlights the unique functional roles of individual techniques within the broader TTS landscape. From this analysis, we distill the major developmental trajectories of TTS to date and offer hands-on guidelines for practical deployment. Furthermore, we identify several open challenges and offer insights into promising future directions, including further scaling, clarifying the functional essence of techniques, generalizing to more tasks, and more attributions.

UniBench: Visual Reasoning Requires Rethinking Vision-Language Beyond Scaling

Significant research efforts have been made to scale and improve vision-language model (VLM) training approaches. Yet, with an ever-growing number of benchmarks, researchers are tasked with the heavy burden of implementing each protocol, bearing a non-trivial computational cost, and making sense of how all these benchmarks translate into meaningful axes of progress. To facilitate a systematic evaluation of VLM progress, we introduce UniBench: a unified implementation of 50+ VLM benchmarks spanning a comprehensive range of carefully categorized capabilities from object recognition to spatial awareness, counting, and much more. We showcase the utility of UniBench for measuring progress by evaluating nearly 60 publicly available vision-language models, trained on scales of up to 12.8B samples. We find that while scaling training data or model size can boost many vision-language model capabilities, scaling offers little benefit for reasoning or relations. Surprisingly, we also discover today's best VLMs struggle on simple digit recognition and counting tasks, e.g. MNIST, which much simpler networks can solve. Where scale falls short, we find that more precise interventions, such as data quality or tailored-learning objectives offer more promise. For practitioners, we also offer guidance on selecting a suitable VLM for a given application. Finally, we release an easy-to-run UniBench code-base with the full set of 50+ benchmarks and comparisons across 59 models as well as a distilled, representative set of benchmarks that runs in 5 minutes on a single GPU.

CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training

In our prior works, we introduced a scalable streaming speech synthesis model, CosyVoice 2, which integrates a large language model (LLM) and a chunk-aware flow matching (FM) model, and achieves low-latency bi-streaming speech synthesis and human-parity quality. Despite these advancements, CosyVoice 2 exhibits limitations in language coverage, domain diversity, data volume, text formats, and post-training techniques. In this paper, we present CosyVoice 3, an improved model designed for zero-shot multilingual speech synthesis in the wild, surpassing its predecessor in content consistency, speaker similarity, and prosody naturalness. Key features of CosyVoice 3 include: 1) A novel speech tokenizer to improve prosody naturalness, developed via supervised multi-task training, including automatic speech recognition, speech emotion recognition, language identification, audio event detection, and speaker analysis. 2) A new differentiable reward model for post-training applicable not only to CosyVoice 3 but also to other LLM-based speech synthesis models. 3) Dataset Size Scaling: Training data is expanded from ten thousand hours to one million hours, encompassing 9 languages and 18 Chinese dialects across various domains and text formats. 4) Model Size Scaling: Model parameters are increased from 0.5 billion to 1.5 billion, resulting in enhanced performance on our multilingual benchmark due to the larger model capacity. These advancements contribute significantly to the progress of speech synthesis in the wild. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://funaudiollm.github.io/cosyvoice3.

Class Machine Unlearning for Complex Data via Concepts Inference and Data Poisoning

In current AI era, users may request AI companies to delete their data from the training dataset due to the privacy concerns. As a model owner, retraining a model will consume significant computational resources. Therefore, machine unlearning is a new emerged technology to allow model owner to delete requested training data or a class with little affecting on the model performance. However, for large-scaling complex data, such as image or text data, unlearning a class from a model leads to a inferior performance due to the difficulty to identify the link between classes and model. An inaccurate class deleting may lead to over or under unlearning. In this paper, to accurately defining the unlearning class of complex data, we apply the definition of Concept, rather than an image feature or a token of text data, to represent the semantic information of unlearning class. This new representation can cut the link between the model and the class, leading to a complete erasing of the impact of a class. To analyze the impact of the concept of complex data, we adopt a Post-hoc Concept Bottleneck Model, and Integrated Gradients to precisely identify concepts across different classes. Next, we take advantage of data poisoning with random and targeted labels to propose unlearning methods. We test our methods on both image classification models and large language models (LLMs). The results consistently show that the proposed methods can accurately erase targeted information from models and can largely maintain the performance of the models.

A Data-Efficient Pan-Tumor Foundation Model for Oncology CT Interpretation

Artificial intelligence-assisted imaging analysis has made substantial strides in tumor diagnosis and management. Here we present PASTA, a pan-tumor CT foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on 45 of 46 representative oncology tasks -- including lesion segmentation, tumor detection in plain CT, tumor staging, survival prediction, structured report generation, and cross-modality transfer learning, significantly outperforming the second-best models on 35 tasks. This remarkable advancement is driven by our development of PASTA-Gen, an innovative synthetic tumor generation framework that produces a comprehensive dataset of 30,000 CT scans with pixel-level annotated lesions and paired structured reports, encompassing malignancies across ten organs and five benign lesion types. By leveraging this rich, high-quality synthetic data, we overcome a longstanding bottleneck in the development of CT foundation models -- specifically, the scarcity of publicly available, high-quality annotated datasets due to privacy constraints and the substantial labor required for scaling precise data annotation. Encouragingly, PASTA demonstrates exceptional data efficiency with promising practical value, markedly improving performance on various tasks with only a small amount of real-world data. The open release of both the synthetic dataset and PASTA foundation model effectively addresses the challenge of data scarcity, thereby advancing oncological research and clinical translation.

Unleashing Reasoning Capability of LLMs via Scalable Question Synthesis from Scratch

The availability of high-quality data is one of the most important factors in improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing works have demonstrated the effectiveness of creating more instruction data from seed questions or knowledge bases. Recent research indicates that continually scaling up data synthesis from strong models (e.g., GPT-4) can further elicit reasoning performance. Though promising, the open-sourced community still lacks high-quality data at scale and scalable data synthesis methods with affordable costs. To address this, we introduce ScaleQuest, a scalable and novel data synthesis method that utilizes "small-size" (e.g., 7B) open-source models to generate questions from scratch without the need for seed data with complex augmentation constraints. With the efficient ScaleQuest, we automatically constructed a mathematical reasoning dataset consisting of 1 million problem-solution pairs, which are more effective than existing open-sourced datasets. It can universally increase the performance of mainstream open-source models (i.e., Mistral, Llama3, DeepSeekMath, and Qwen2-Math) by achieving 29.2% to 46.4% gains on MATH. Notably, simply fine-tuning the Qwen2-Math-7B-Base model with our dataset can even surpass Qwen2-Math-7B-Instruct, a strong and well-aligned model on closed-source data, and proprietary models such as GPT-4-Turbo and Claude-3.5 Sonnet.

AceReason-Nemotron 1.1: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through SFT and RL Synergy

In this work, we investigate the synergy between supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) in developing strong reasoning models. We begin by curating the SFT training data through two scaling strategies: increasing the number of collected prompts and the number of generated responses per prompt. Both approaches yield notable improvements in reasoning performance, with scaling the number of prompts resulting in more substantial gains. We then explore the following questions regarding the synergy between SFT and RL: (i) Does a stronger SFT model consistently lead to better final performance after large-scale RL training? (ii) How can we determine an appropriate sampling temperature during RL training to effectively balance exploration and exploitation for a given SFT initialization? Our findings suggest that (i) holds true, provided effective RL training is conducted, particularly when the sampling temperature is carefully chosen to maintain the temperature-adjusted entropy around 0.3, a setting that strikes a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Notably, the performance gap between initial SFT models narrows significantly throughout the RL process. Leveraging a strong SFT foundation and insights into the synergistic interplay between SFT and RL, our AceReason-Nemotron-1.1 7B model significantly outperforms AceReason-Nemotron-1.0 and achieves new state-of-the-art performance among Qwen2.5-7B-based reasoning models on challenging math and code benchmarks, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our post-training recipe. We release the model and data at: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/AceReason-Nemotron-1.1-7B

Performance Scaling via Optimal Transport: Enabling Data Selection from Partially Revealed Sources

Traditionally, data selection has been studied in settings where all samples from prospective sources are fully revealed to a machine learning developer. However, in practical data exchange scenarios, data providers often reveal only a limited subset of samples before an acquisition decision is made. Recently, there have been efforts to fit scaling laws that predict model performance at any size and data source composition using the limited available samples. However, these scaling functions are black-box, computationally expensive to fit, highly susceptible to overfitting, or/and difficult to optimize for data selection. This paper proposes a framework called <projektor>, which predicts model performance and supports data selection decisions based on partial samples of prospective data sources. Our approach distinguishes itself from existing work by introducing a novel *two-stage* performance inference process. In the first stage, we leverage the Optimal Transport distance to predict the model's performance for any data mixture ratio within the range of disclosed data sizes. In the second stage, we extrapolate the performance to larger undisclosed data sizes based on a novel parameter-free mapping technique inspired by neural scaling laws. We further derive an efficient gradient-based method to select data sources based on the projected model performance. Evaluation over a diverse range of applications demonstrates that <projektor> significantly improves existing performance scaling approaches in terms of both the accuracy of performance inference and the computation costs associated with constructing the performance predictor. Also, <projektor> outperforms by a wide margin in data selection effectiveness compared to a range of other off-the-shelf solutions.

Dynamic Chunking for End-to-End Hierarchical Sequence Modeling

Despite incredible progress in language models (LMs) in recent years, largely resulting from moving away from specialized models designed for specific tasks to general models based on powerful architectures (e.g. the Transformer) that learn everything from raw data, pre-processing steps such as tokenization remain a barrier to true end-to-end foundation models. We introduce a collection of new techniques that enable a dynamic chunking mechanism which automatically learns content -- and context -- dependent segmentation strategies learned jointly with the rest of the model. Incorporating this into an explicit hierarchical network (H-Net) allows replacing the (implicitly hierarchical) tokenization-LM-detokenization pipeline with a single model learned fully end-to-end. When compute- and data- matched, an H-Net with one stage of hierarchy operating at the byte level outperforms a strong Transformer language model operating over BPE tokens. Iterating the hierarchy to multiple stages further increases its performance by modeling multiple levels of abstraction, demonstrating significantly better scaling with data and matching a token-based Transformer of twice its size. H-Nets pretrained on English show significantly increased character-level robustness, and qualitatively learn meaningful data-dependent chunking strategies without any heuristics or explicit supervision. Finally, the H-Net's improvement over tokenized pipelines is further increased in languages and modalities with weaker tokenization heuristics, such as Chinese and code, or DNA sequences (nearly 4x improvement in data efficiency over baselines), showing the potential of true end-to-end models that learn and scale better from unprocessed data.

Does Progress On Object Recognition Benchmarks Improve Real-World Generalization?

For more than a decade, researchers have measured progress in object recognition on ImageNet-based generalization benchmarks such as ImageNet-A, -C, and -R. Recent advances in foundation models, trained on orders of magnitude more data, have begun to saturate these standard benchmarks, but remain brittle in practice. This suggests standard benchmarks, which tend to focus on predefined or synthetic changes, may not be sufficient for measuring real world generalization. Consequently, we propose studying generalization across geography as a more realistic measure of progress using two datasets of objects from households across the globe. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of progress across nearly 100 vision models up to most recent foundation models. We first identify a progress gap between standard benchmarks and real-world, geographical shifts: progress on ImageNet results in up to 2.5x more progress on standard generalization benchmarks than real-world distribution shifts. Second, we study model generalization across geographies by measuring the disparities in performance across regions, a more fine-grained measure of real world generalization. We observe all models have large geographic disparities, even foundation CLIP models, with differences of 7-20% in accuracy between regions. Counter to modern intuition, we discover progress on standard benchmarks fails to improve geographic disparities and often exacerbates them: geographic disparities between the least performant models and today's best models have more than tripled. Our results suggest scaling alone is insufficient for consistent robustness to real-world distribution shifts. Finally, we highlight in early experiments how simple last layer retraining on more representative, curated data can complement scaling as a promising direction of future work, reducing geographic disparity on both benchmarks by over two-thirds.

Toward Stable and Consistent Evaluation Results: A New Methodology for Base Model Evaluation

This paper poses two critical issues in evaluating base models (without post-training): (1) Unstable evaluation during training: in the early stages of pre-training, the models lack the capability to answer questions as required, leading to unstable evaluation results. This instability makes it difficult to provide solid conclusions to guide the training, especially for key experiments such as data ablation and scaling law. (2) Inconsistency between base and instruct models: base models generally exhibit poorer evaluation performance compared to corresponding instruct models. This gap poses a challenge for assessing whether a base model with better evaluation can truly lead to a better instruct model. To address these issues, we propose Base model Oriented Systematic Evaluation (BOSE), a method specifically designed to optimize the evaluation of base models. Specifically, BOSE introduces two key innovations: In-Context Light-instruction Prompt (ICLiP) for open-ended tasks and Blank-ppl for multi-choice tasks with candidate options, which transforms the standard perplexity (ppl) metric into a fill-in-the-blank format to mitigate early-stage evaluation fluctuations. Furthermore, we are the first to propose Kendall's rank correlation to quantitatively measure the evaluation stability and consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that BOSE significantly enhances both the stability of evaluations during pre-training and the consistency between base and instruct models, thereby providing more reliable guidance for the LLMs' training.

Experience of Training a 1.7B-Parameter LLaMa Model From Scratch

Pretraining large language models is a complex endeavor influenced by multiple factors, including model architecture, data quality, training continuity, and hardware constraints. In this paper, we share insights gained from the experience of training DMaS-LLaMa-Lite, a fully open source, 1.7-billion-parameter, LLaMa-based model, on approximately 20 billion tokens of carefully curated data. We chronicle the full training trajectory, documenting how evolving validation loss levels and downstream benchmarks reflect transitions from incoherent text to fluent, contextually grounded output. Beyond standard quantitative metrics, we highlight practical considerations such as the importance of restoring optimizer states when resuming from checkpoints, and the impact of hardware changes on training stability and throughput. While qualitative evaluation provides an intuitive understanding of model improvements, our analysis extends to various performance benchmarks, demonstrating how high-quality data and thoughtful scaling enable competitive results with significantly fewer training tokens. By detailing these experiences and offering training logs, checkpoints, and sample outputs, we aim to guide future researchers and practitioners in refining their pretraining strategies. The training script is available on Github at https://github.com/McGill-DMaS/DMaS-LLaMa-Lite-Training-Code. The model checkpoints are available on Huggingface at https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-DMaS/dmas-llama-lite-6761d97ba903f82341954ceb.

Scaling Laws of Synthetic Data for Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by high-quality web data used in pre-training. However, recent studies indicate this data source is rapidly depleting. Synthetic data emerges as a promising alternative, but it remains unclear whether synthetic datasets exhibit predictable scalability comparable to raw pre-training data. In this work, we systematically investigate the scaling laws of synthetic data by introducing SynthLLM, a scalable framework that transforms pre-training corpora into diverse, high-quality synthetic datasets. Our approach achieves this by automatically extracting and recombining high-level concepts across multiple documents using a graph algorithm. Key findings from our extensive mathematical experiments on SynthLLM include: (1) SynthLLM generates synthetic data that reliably adheres to the rectified scaling law across various model sizes; (2) Performance improvements plateau near 300B tokens; and (3) Larger models approach optimal performance with fewer training tokens. For instance, an 8B model peaks at 1T tokens, while a 3B model requires 4T. Moreover, comparisons with existing synthetic data generation and augmentation methods demonstrate that SynthLLM achieves superior performance and scalability. Our findings highlight synthetic data as a scalable and reliable alternative to organic pre-training corpora, offering a viable path toward continued improvement in model performance.

RedStar: Does Scaling Long-CoT Data Unlock Better Slow-Reasoning Systems?

Can scaling transform reasoning? In this work, we explore the untapped potential of scaling Long Chain-of-Thought (Long-CoT) data to 1000k samples, pioneering the development of a slow-thinking model, RedStar. Through extensive experiments with various LLMs and different sizes, we uncover the ingredients for specialization and scale for Long-CoT training. Surprisingly, even smaller models show significant performance gains with limited data, revealing the sample efficiency of Long-CoT and the critical role of sample difficulty in the learning process. Our findings demonstrate that Long-CoT reasoning can be effectively triggered with just a few thousand examples, while larger models achieve unparalleled improvements. We also introduce reinforcement learning (RL)-scale training as a promising direction for advancing slow-thinking systems. RedStar shines across domains: on the MATH-Hard benchmark, RedStar-code-math boosts performance from 66.2\% to 81.6\%, and on the USA Math Olympiad (AIME), it solves 46.7\% of problems using only 21k mixed-code-math datasets. In multimodal tasks like GeoQA and MathVista-GEO, RedStar-Geo achieves competitive results with minimal Long-CoT data, outperforming other slow-thinking systems like QvQ-Preview. Compared to QwQ, RedStar strikes the perfect balance between reasoning and generalizability. Our work highlights that, with careful tuning, scaling Long-CoT can unlock extraordinary reasoning capabilities-even with limited dataset and set a new standard for slow-thinking models across diverse challenges. Our data and models are released at https://huggingface.co/RedStar-Reasoning.

VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks, however, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks seem to be limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity issue of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct - a novel approach that leverages search engine to create a diverse, and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines like math, physics, finance, chemistry, etc. Starting with meticulously selected 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process the HTMLs from over 700K unique URL sources. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering and synthesis, we build a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer pairs, with 40% being visual QA pairs and the rest as text QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance gains: (1) training from Llava-OV-mid shows 10-20% absolute point gains across benchmarks, (2) training from MAmmoTH-VL shows 5% absoluate gain. Our best model MAmmoTH-VL2 shows state-of-the-art performance within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro-std (40.7%), MathVerse (42.6%), and DynaMath (55.7%). These remarkable results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing VLMs' reasoning capabilities for complex multimodal tasks.

ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Models

With the rise of multimodal applications, instruction data has become critical for training multimodal language models capable of understanding complex image-based queries. Existing practices rely on powerful but costly large language models (LLMs) or multimodal language models (MLMs) to produce instruction data. These are often prone to hallucinations, licensing issues and the generation process is often hard to scale and interpret. In this work, we present a programmatic approach that employs scene graphs as symbolic representations of images and human-written programs to systematically synthesize vision-centric instruction data. Our approach ensures the interpretability and controllability of the data generation process and scales efficiently while maintaining factual accuracy. By implementing a suite of 24 single-image, 14 multi-image instruction generators, and a scene graph generation pipeline, we build a scalable, cost-effective system: ProVision which produces diverse question-answer pairs concerning objects, attributes, relations, depth, etc., for any given image. Applied to Visual Genome and DataComp datasets, we generate over 10 million instruction data points, ProVision-10M, and leverage them in both pretraining and instruction tuning stages of MLMs. When adopted in the instruction tuning stage, our single-image instruction data yields up to a 7% improvement on the 2D split and 8% on the 3D split of CVBench, along with a 3% increase in performance on QBench2, RealWorldQA, and MMMU. Our multi-image instruction data leads to an 8% improvement on Mantis-Eval. Incorporation of our data in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages of xGen-MM-4B leads to an averaged improvement of 1.6% across 11 benchmarks.

RSTeller: Scaling Up Visual Language Modeling in Remote Sensing with Rich Linguistic Semantics from Openly Available Data and Large Language Models

Abundant, well-annotated multimodal data in remote sensing are pivotal for aligning complex visual remote sensing (RS) scenes with human language, enabling the development of specialized vision language models across diverse RS interpretation tasks. However, annotating RS images with rich linguistic semantics at scale demands expertise in RS and substantial human labor, making it costly and often impractical. In this study, we propose a workflow that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate multimodal datasets with semantically rich captions at scale from plain OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for images sourced from the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. This approach facilitates the generation of paired remote sensing data and can be readily scaled up using openly available data. Within this framework, we present RSTeller, a multimodal dataset comprising over 1 million RS images, each accompanied by multiple descriptive captions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSTeller enhances the performance of multiple existing vision language models for RS scene understanding through continual pre-training. Our methodology significantly reduces the manual effort and expertise needed for annotating remote sensing imagery while democratizing access to high-quality annotated data. This advancement fosters progress in visual language modeling and encourages broader participation in remote sensing research and applications. The RSTeller dataset is available at https://github.com/SlytherinGe/RSTeller.

Scaling Laws and Interpretability of Learning from Repeated Data

Recent large language models have been trained on vast datasets, but also often on repeated data, either intentionally for the purpose of upweighting higher quality data, or unintentionally because data deduplication is not perfect and the model is exposed to repeated data at the sentence, paragraph, or document level. Some works have reported substantial negative performance effects of this repeated data. In this paper we attempt to study repeated data systematically and to understand its effects mechanistically. To do this, we train a family of models where most of the data is unique but a small fraction of it is repeated many times. We find a strong double descent phenomenon, in which repeated data can lead test loss to increase midway through training. A predictable range of repetition frequency leads to surprisingly severe degradation in performance. For instance, performance of an 800M parameter model can be degraded to that of a 2x smaller model (400M params) by repeating 0.1% of the data 100 times, despite the other 90% of the training tokens remaining unique. We suspect there is a range in the middle where the data can be memorized and doing so consumes a large fraction of the model's capacity, and this may be where the peak of degradation occurs. Finally, we connect these observations to recent mechanistic interpretability work - attempting to reverse engineer the detailed computations performed by the model - by showing that data repetition disproportionately damages copying and internal structures associated with generalization, such as induction heads, providing a possible mechanism for the shift from generalization to memorization. Taken together, these results provide a hypothesis for why repeating a relatively small fraction of data in large language models could lead to disproportionately large harms to performance.

Scaling Speech-Text Pre-training with Synthetic Interleaved Data

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are constrained by the limited availability of unsupervised speech data and parallel speech-text data, which are significantly less abundant than text pre-training data, thereby limiting their scalability as LLMs. We propose a novel approach to scaling speech-text pre-training by leveraging large-scale synthetic interleaved data derived from text corpora, eliminating the need for parallel speech-text datasets. Our method efficiently constructs speech-text interleaved data by sampling text spans from existing text corpora and synthesizing corresponding speech spans using a text-to-token model, bypassing the need to generate actual speech. We also employ a supervised speech tokenizer derived from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model by incorporating a vector-quantized bottleneck into the encoder. This supervised training approach results in discrete speech tokens with strong semantic preservation even at lower sampling rates (e.g. 12.5Hz), while still maintaining speech reconstruction quality. Starting from a pre-trained language model and scaling our pre-training to 1 trillion tokens (with 600B synthetic interleaved speech-text data), we achieve state-of-the-art performance in speech language modeling and spoken question answering, improving performance on spoken questions tasks from the previous SOTA of 13% (Moshi) to 31%. We further demonstrate that by fine-tuning the pre-trained model with speech dialogue data, we can develop an end-to-end spoken chatbot that achieves competitive performance comparable to existing baselines in both conversational abilities and speech quality, even operating exclusively in the speech domain.