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SubscribeSciMaster: Towards General-Purpose Scientific AI Agents, Part I. X-Master as Foundation: Can We Lead on Humanity's Last Exam?
The rapid advancements of AI agents have ignited the long-held ambition of leveraging them to accelerate scientific discovery. Achieving this goal requires a deep understanding of the frontiers of human knowledge. As such, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) provides an exceptionally challenging touchstone for evaluating scientific AI agents. In this work, we aim to construct the foundational architecture for general-purpose agents and validate the capabilities through leading performance on HLE. To achieve this, we introduce X-Master, a tool-augmented reasoning agent designed to emulate human researchers by interacting flexibly with external tools during its reasoning process. This agent, guided by the conceptualization of code as an interaction language, can flexibly leverage built-in Python libraries and our customized tools to augment the reasoning. We further scale its capabilities through X-Masters, a scattered-and-stacked agentic workflow that systematically enhances breadth and depth of reasoning. Our open-source solution, X-Masters, sets a new state-of-the-art record on HLE with a score of 32.1%, surpassing OpenAI's and Google's Deep Research (26.6% and 26.9%) and becoming the first to exceed the 30% threshold. This work allows us to gain a deeper understanding of complex task-solving and accumulates valuable experience that can inform future advancements, guiding subsequent model training.
OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation
Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce Workforce, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities. This decoupling enables cross-domain transferability during both inference and training phases: During inference, Workforce seamlessly adapts to new domains by adding or modifying worker agents; For training, we introduce Optimized Workforce Learning (OWL), which improves generalization across domains by optimizing a domain-agnostic planner with reinforcement learning from real-world feedback. To validate our approach, we evaluate Workforce on the GAIA benchmark, covering various realistic, multi-domain agentic tasks. Experimental results demonstrate Workforce achieves open-source state-of-the-art performance (69.70%), outperforming commercial systems like OpenAI's Deep Research by 2.34%. More notably, our OWL-trained 32B model achieves 52.73% accuracy (+16.37%) and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4o on challenging tasks. To summarize, by enabling scalable generalization and modular domain transfer, our work establishes a foundation for the next generation of general-purpose AI assistants.
Characterizing Deep Research: A Benchmark and Formal Definition
Information tasks such as writing surveys or analytical reports require complex search and reasoning, and have recently been grouped under the umbrella of deep research -- a term also adopted by recent models targeting these capabilities. Despite growing interest, the scope of the deep research task remains underdefined and its distinction from other reasoning-intensive problems is poorly understood. In this paper, we propose a formal characterization of the deep research (DR) task and introduce a benchmark to evaluate the performance of DR systems. We argue that the core defining feature of deep research is not the production of lengthy report-style outputs, but rather the high fan-out over concepts required during the search process, i.e., broad and reasoning-intensive exploration. To enable objective evaluation, we define DR using an intermediate output representation that encodes key claims uncovered during search-separating the reasoning challenge from surface-level report generation. Based on this formulation, we propose a diverse, challenging benchmark LiveDRBench with 100 challenging tasks over scientific topics (e.g., datasets, materials discovery, prior art search) and public interest events (e.g., flight incidents, movie awards). Across state-of-the-art DR systems, F1 score ranges between 0.02 and 0.72 for any sub-category. OpenAI's model performs the best with an overall F1 score of 0.55. Analysis of reasoning traces reveals the distribution over the number of referenced sources, branching, and backtracking events executed by current DR systems, motivating future directions for improving their search mechanisms and grounding capabilities. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LiveDRBench.
ResearchRubrics: A Benchmark of Prompts and Rubrics For Evaluating Deep Research Agents
Deep Research (DR) is an emerging agent application that leverages large language models (LLMs) to address open-ended queries. It requires the integration of several capabilities, including multi-step reasoning, cross-document synthesis, and the generation of evidence-backed, long-form answers. Evaluating DR remains challenging because responses are lengthy and diverse, admit many valid solutions, and often depend on dynamic information sources. We introduce ResearchRubrics, a standardized benchmark for DR built with over 2,800+ hours of human labor that pairs realistic, domain-diverse prompts with 2,500+ expert-written, fine-grained rubrics to assess factual grounding, reasoning soundness, and clarity. We also propose a new complexity framework for categorizing DR tasks along three axes: conceptual breadth, logical nesting, and exploration. In addition, we develop human and model-based evaluation protocols that measure rubric adherence for DR agents. We evaluate several state-of-the-art DR systems and find that even leading agents like Gemini's DR and OpenAI's DR achieve under 68% average compliance with our rubrics, primarily due to missed implicit context and inadequate reasoning about retrieved information. Our results highlight the need for robust, scalable assessment of deep research capabilities, to which end we release ResearchRubrics(including all prompts, rubrics, and evaluation code) to facilitate progress toward well-justified research assistants.
ResearStudio: A Human-Intervenable Framework for Building Controllable Deep-Research Agents
Current deep-research agents run in a ''fire-and-forget'' mode: once started, they give users no way to fix errors or add expert knowledge during execution. We present ResearStudio, the first open-source framework that places real-time human control at its core. The system follows a Collaborative Workshop design. A hierarchical Planner-Executor writes every step to a live ''plan-as-document,'' a fast communication layer streams each action, file change, and tool call to a web interface. At any moment, the user can pause the run, edit the plan or code, run custom commands, and resume -- switching smoothly between AI-led, human-assisted and human-led, AI-assisted modes. In fully autonomous mode, ResearStudio achieves state-of-the-art results on the GAIA benchmark, surpassing systems like OpenAI's DeepResearch and Manus. These results show that strong automated performance and fine-grained human control can coexist. The full code, protocol, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ResearAI/ResearStudio. We will continue to update the repository to encourage further work on safe and controllable research agents. Our live demo is publicly accessible at http://ai-researcher.net:3000/. We support the development of DeepScientist, which can be accessed at https://github.com/ResearAI/DeepScientist.
BrowseComp-ZH: Benchmarking Web Browsing Ability of Large Language Models in Chinese
As large language models (LLMs) evolve into tool-using agents, the ability to browse the web in real-time has become a critical yardstick for measuring their reasoning and retrieval competence. Existing benchmarks such as BrowseComp concentrate on English and overlook the linguistic, infrastructural, and censorship-related complexities of other major information ecosystems -- most notably Chinese. To address this gap, we introduce BrowseComp-ZH, a high-difficulty benchmark purpose-built to comprehensively evaluate LLM agents on the Chinese web. BrowseComp-ZH consists of 289 multi-hop questions spanning 11 diverse domains. Each question is reverse-engineered from a short, objective, and easily verifiable answer (e.g., a date, number, or proper noun). A two-stage quality control protocol is applied to strive for high question difficulty and answer uniqueness. We benchmark over 20 state-of-the-art language models and agentic search systems on our proposed BrowseComp-ZH. Despite their strong conversational and retrieval capabilities, most models struggle severely: a large number achieve accuracy rates below 10%, and only a handful exceed 20%. Even the best-performing system, OpenAI's DeepResearch, reaches just 42.9%. These results demonstrate the considerable difficulty of BrowseComp-ZH, where success demands not only effective retrieval strategies, but also sophisticated reasoning and information reconciliation -- capabilities that current models still struggle to master. Our dataset, construction guidelines, and benchmark results have been publicly released at https://github.com/PALIN2018/BrowseComp-ZH.
DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis
The ability to research and synthesize knowledge is central to human expertise and progress. An emerging class of systems promises these exciting capabilities through generative research synthesis, performing retrieval over the live web and synthesizing discovered sources into long-form, cited summaries. However, evaluating such systems remains an open challenge: existing question-answering benchmarks focus on short-form factual responses, while expert-curated datasets risk staleness and data contamination. Both fail to capture the complexity and evolving nature of real research synthesis tasks. In this work, we introduce DeepScholar-bench, a live benchmark and holistic, automated evaluation framework designed to evaluate generative research synthesis. DeepScholar-bench draws queries from recent, high-quality ArXiv papers and focuses on a real research synthesis task: generating the related work sections of a paper by retrieving, synthesizing, and citing prior research. Our evaluation framework holistically assesses performance across three key dimensions, knowledge synthesis, retrieval quality, and verifiability. We also develop DeepScholar-base, a reference pipeline implemented efficiently using the LOTUS API. Using the DeepScholar-bench framework, we perform a systematic evaluation of prior open-source systems, search AI's, OpenAI's DeepResearch, and DeepScholar-base. We find that DeepScholar-base establishes a strong baseline, attaining competitive or higher performance than each other method. We also find that DeepScholar-bench remains far from saturated, with no system exceeding a score of 19% across all metrics. These results underscore the difficulty of DeepScholar-bench, as well as its importance for progress towards AI systems capable of generative research synthesis. We make our code available at https://github.com/guestrin-lab/deepscholar-bench.
A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Research: Systems, Methodologies, and Applications
This survey examines the rapidly evolving field of Deep Research systems -- AI-powered applications that automate complex research workflows through the integration of large language models, advanced information retrieval, and autonomous reasoning capabilities. We analyze more than 80 commercial and non-commercial implementations that have emerged since 2023, including OpenAI/Deep Research, Gemini/Deep Research, Perplexity/Deep Research, and numerous open-source alternatives. Through comprehensive examination, we propose a novel hierarchical taxonomy that categorizes systems according to four fundamental technical dimensions: foundation models and reasoning engines, tool utilization and environmental interaction, task planning and execution control, and knowledge synthesis and output generation. We explore the architectural patterns, implementation approaches, and domain-specific adaptations that characterize these systems across academic, scientific, business, and educational applications. Our analysis reveals both the significant capabilities of current implementations and the technical and ethical challenges they present regarding information accuracy, privacy, intellectual property, and accessibility. The survey concludes by identifying promising research directions in advanced reasoning architectures, multimodal integration, domain specialization, human-AI collaboration, and ecosystem standardization that will likely shape the future evolution of this transformative technology. By providing a comprehensive framework for understanding Deep Research systems, this survey contributes to both the theoretical understanding of AI-augmented knowledge work and the practical development of more capable, responsible, and accessible research technologies. The paper resources can be viewed at https://github.com/scienceaix/deepresearch.
Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge
Agentic search such as Deep Research systems, where large language models autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers, represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1,000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of nine frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, showing a great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems.
Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap
The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has given rise to a new category of autonomous AI systems, referred to as Deep Research (DR) agents. These agents are designed to tackle complex, multi-turn informational research tasks by leveraging a combination of dynamic reasoning, adaptive long-horizon planning, multi-hop information retrieval, iterative tool use, and the generation of structured analytical reports. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the foundational technologies and architectural components that constitute Deep Research agents. We begin by reviewing information acquisition strategies, contrasting API-based retrieval methods with browser-based exploration. We then examine modular tool-use frameworks, including code execution, multimodal input processing, and the integration of Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to support extensibility and ecosystem development. To systematize existing approaches, we propose a taxonomy that differentiates between static and dynamic workflows, and we classify agent architectures based on planning strategies and agent composition, including single-agent and multi-agent configurations. We also provide a critical evaluation of current benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as restricted access to external knowledge, sequential execution inefficiencies, and misalignment between evaluation metrics and the practical objectives of DR agents. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising directions for future research. A curated and continuously updated repository of DR agent research is available at: {https://github.com/ai-agents-2030/awesome-deep-research-agent}.
ResearcherBench: Evaluating Deep AI Research Systems on the Frontiers of Scientific Inquiry
The emergence of deep research systems presents significant capabilities in problem-solving, extending from basic queries to sophisticated research tasks. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate these systems as agents for web retrieval and report generation, overlooking their potential to discover novel insights on the frontiers of scientific research. To address this gap, we introduce ResearcherBench, the first benchmark focused on evaluating the capabilities of these advanced, agentic systems - which we refer to as Deep AI Research Systems (DARS) - on frontier AI scientific questions. We compiled a dataset of 65 research questions expertly selected from real-world scientific scenarios such as laboratory discussions and interviews, spanning 35 different AI subjects and categorized into three types: technical details, literature review, and open consulting. Our dual evaluation framework combines rubric assessment, which uses expert-designed criteria to evaluate insight quality, with factual assessment, which measures citation accuracy (faithfulness) and coverage (groundedness). We evaluated several leading commercial DARS and baseline systems. Results show that OpenAI Deep Research and Gemini Deep Research significantly outperform other systems, with particular strength in open-ended consulting questions. Such capabilities represent a meaningful step toward AI self-improvement, aligning with the vision of ASI for AI. We open-source ResearcherBench to provide a standardized platform for promoting the development of next-generation AI research assistants, hoping to foster a new perspective in AI research evaluation for a novel pattern of scientific collaboration: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/ResearcherBench.
Visual Analytics in Deep Learning: An Interrogative Survey for the Next Frontiers
Deep learning has recently seen rapid development and received significant attention due to its state-of-the-art performance on previously-thought hard problems. However, because of the internal complexity and nonlinear structure of deep neural networks, the underlying decision making processes for why these models are achieving such performance are challenging and sometimes mystifying to interpret. As deep learning spreads across domains, it is of paramount importance that we equip users of deep learning with tools for understanding when a model works correctly, when it fails, and ultimately how to improve its performance. Standardized toolkits for building neural networks have helped democratize deep learning; visual analytics systems have now been developed to support model explanation, interpretation, debugging, and improvement. We present a survey of the role of visual analytics in deep learning research, which highlights its short yet impactful history and thoroughly summarizes the state-of-the-art using a human-centered interrogative framework, focusing on the Five W's and How (Why, Who, What, How, When, and Where). We conclude by highlighting research directions and open research problems. This survey helps researchers and practitioners in both visual analytics and deep learning to quickly learn key aspects of this young and rapidly growing body of research, whose impact spans a diverse range of domains.
WebWeaver: Structuring Web-Scale Evidence with Dynamic Outlines for Open-Ended Deep Research
This paper tackles open-ended deep research (OEDR), a complex challenge where AI agents must synthesize vast web-scale information into insightful reports. Current approaches are plagued by dual-fold limitations: static research pipelines that decouple planning from evidence acquisition and one-shot generation paradigms that easily suffer from long-context failure issues like "loss in the middle" and hallucinations. To address these challenges, we introduce WebWeaver, a novel dual-agent framework that emulates the human research process. The planner operates in a dynamic cycle, iteratively interleaving evidence acquisition with outline optimization to produce a comprehensive, source-grounded outline linking to a memory bank of evidence. The writer then executes a hierarchical retrieval and writing process, composing the report section by section. By performing targeted retrieval of only the necessary evidence from the memory bank for each part, it effectively mitigates long-context issues. Our framework establishes a new state-of-the-art across major OEDR benchmarks, including DeepResearch Bench, DeepConsult, and DeepResearchGym. These results validate our human-centric, iterative methodology, demonstrating that adaptive planning and focused synthesis are crucial for producing high-quality, reliable, and well-structured reports.
Understanding DeepResearch via Reports
DeepResearch agents represent a transformative AI paradigm, conducting expert-level research through sophisticated reasoning and multi-tool integration. However, evaluating these systems remains critically challenging due to open-ended research scenarios and existing benchmarks that focus on isolated capabilities rather than holistic performance. Unlike traditional LLM tasks, DeepResearch systems must synthesize diverse sources, generate insights, and present coherent findings, which are capabilities that resist simple verification. To address this gap, we introduce DeepResearch-ReportEval, a comprehensive framework designed to assess DeepResearch systems through their most representative outputs: research reports. Our approach systematically measures three dimensions: quality, redundancy, and factuality, using an innovative LLM-as-a-Judge methodology achieving strong expert concordance. We contribute a standardized benchmark of 100 curated queries spanning 12 real-world categories, enabling systematic capability comparison. Our evaluation of four leading commercial systems reveals distinct design philosophies and performance trade-offs, establishing foundational insights as DeepResearch evolves from information assistants toward intelligent research partners. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepResearch-Eval.
Deep Research: A Systematic Survey
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved from text generators into powerful problem solvers. Yet, many open tasks demand critical thinking, multi-source, and verifiable outputs, which are beyond single-shot prompting or standard retrieval-augmented generation. Recently, numerous studies have explored Deep Research (DR), which aims to combine the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with external tools, such as search engines, thereby empowering LLMs to act as research agents capable of completing complex, open-ended tasks. This survey presents a comprehensive and systematic overview of deep research systems, including a clear roadmap, foundational components, practical implementation techniques, important challenges, and future directions. Specifically, our main contributions are as follows: (i) we formalize a three-stage roadmap and distinguish deep research from related paradigms; (ii) we introduce four key components: query planning, information acquisition, memory management, and answer generation, each paired with fine-grained sub-taxonomies; (iii) we summarize optimization techniques, including prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and agentic reinforcement learning; and (iv) we consolidate evaluation criteria and open challenges, aiming to guide and facilitate future development. As the field of deep research continues to evolve rapidly, we are committed to continuously updating this survey to reflect the latest progress in this area.
DeepResearchGym: A Free, Transparent, and Reproducible Evaluation Sandbox for Deep Research
Deep research systems represent an emerging class of agentic information retrieval methods that generate comprehensive and well-supported reports to complex queries. However, most existing frameworks rely on dynamic commercial search APIs, which pose reproducibility and transparency challenges in addition to their cost. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepResearchGym, an open-source sandbox that combines a reproducible search API with a rigorous evaluation protocol for benchmarking deep research systems. The API indexes large-scale public web corpora, namely ClueWeb22 and FineWeb, using a state-of-the-art dense retriever and approximate nearest neighbor search via DiskANN. It achieves lower latency than popular commercial APIs while ensuring stable document rankings across runs, and is freely available for research use. To evaluate deep research systems' outputs, we extend the Researchy Questions benchmark with automatic metrics through LLM-as-a-judge assessments to measure alignment with users' information needs, retrieval faithfulness, and report quality. Experimental results show that systems integrated with DeepResearchGym achieve performance comparable to those using commercial APIs, with performance rankings remaining consistent across evaluation metrics. A human evaluation study further confirms that our automatic protocol aligns with human preferences, validating the framework's ability to help support controlled assessment of deep research systems. Our code and API documentation are available at https://www.deepresearchgym.ai.
From Web Search towards Agentic Deep Research: Incentivizing Search with Reasoning Agents
Information retrieval is a cornerstone of modern knowledge acquisition, enabling billions of queries each day across diverse domains. However, traditional keyword-based search engines are increasingly inadequate for handling complex, multi-step information needs. Our position is that Large Language Models (LLMs), endowed with reasoning and agentic capabilities, are ushering in a new paradigm termed Agentic Deep Research. These systems transcend conventional information search techniques by tightly integrating autonomous reasoning, iterative retrieval, and information synthesis into a dynamic feedback loop. We trace the evolution from static web search to interactive, agent-based systems that plan, explore, and learn. We also introduce a test-time scaling law to formalize the impact of computational depth on reasoning and search. Supported by benchmark results and the rise of open-source implementations, we demonstrate that Agentic Deep Research not only significantly outperforms existing approaches, but is also poised to become the dominant paradigm for future information seeking. All the related resources, including industry products, research papers, benchmark datasets, and open-source implementations, are collected for the community in https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-Deep-Research.
WebResearcher: Unleashing unbounded reasoning capability in Long-Horizon Agents
Recent advances in deep-research systems have demonstrated the potential for AI agents to autonomously discover and synthesize knowledge from external sources. In this paper, we introduce WebResearcher, a novel framework for building such agents through two key components: (1) WebResearcher, an iterative deep-research paradigm that reformulates deep research as a Markov Decision Process, where agents periodically consolidate findings into evolving reports while maintaining focused workspaces, overcoming the context suffocation and noise contamination that plague existing mono-contextual approaches; and (2) WebFrontier, a scalable data synthesis engine that generates high-quality training data through tool-augmented complexity escalation, enabling systematic creation of research tasks that bridge the gap between passive knowledge recall and active knowledge construction. Notably, we find that the training data from our paradigm significantly enhances tool-use capabilities even for traditional mono-contextual methods. Furthermore, our paradigm naturally scales through parallel thinking, enabling concurrent multi-agent exploration for more comprehensive conclusions. Extensive experiments across 6 challenging benchmarks demonstrate that WebResearcher achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing frontier proprietary systems.
Rank1: Test-Time Compute for Reranking in Information Retrieval
We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation in order to rapidly improve the performance of a smaller model. We gather and open-source a dataset of more than 600,000 examples of R1 reasoning traces from queries and passages in MS MARCO. Models trained on this dataset show: (1) state-of-the-art performance on advanced reasoning and instruction following datasets; (2) work remarkably well out of distribution due to the ability to respond to user-input prompts; and (3) have explainable reasoning chains that can be given to users or RAG-based systems. Further, we demonstrate that quantized versions of these models retain strong performance while using less compute/memory. Overall, Rank1 shows that test-time compute allows for a fundamentally new type of explainable and performant reranker model for search.
Open Deep Search: Democratizing Search with Open-source Reasoning Agents
We introduce Open Deep Search (ODS) to close the increasing gap between the proprietary search AI solutions, such as Perplexity's Sonar Reasoning Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o Search Preview, and their open-source counterparts. The main innovation introduced in ODS is to augment the reasoning capabilities of the latest open-source LLMs with reasoning agents that can judiciously use web search tools to answer queries. Concretely, ODS consists of two components that work with a base LLM chosen by the user: Open Search Tool and Open Reasoning Agent. Open Reasoning Agent interprets the given task and completes it by orchestrating a sequence of actions that includes calling tools, one of which is the Open Search Tool. Open Search Tool is a novel web search tool that outperforms proprietary counterparts. Together with powerful open-source reasoning LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1, ODS nearly matches and sometimes surpasses the existing state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks: SimpleQA and FRAMES. For example, on the FRAMES evaluation benchmark, ODS improves the best existing baseline of the recently released GPT-4o Search Preview by 9.7% in accuracy. ODS is a general framework for seamlessly augmenting any LLMs -- for example, DeepSeek-R1 that achieves 82.4% on SimpleQA and 30.1% on FRAMES -- with search and reasoning capabilities to achieve state-of-the-art performance: 88.3% on SimpleQA and 75.3% on FRAMES.
DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research Agents
Deep Research Agents are a prominent category of LLM-based agents. By autonomously orchestrating multistep web exploration, targeted retrieval, and higher-order synthesis, they transform vast amounts of online information into analyst-grade, citation-rich reports--compressing hours of manual desk research into minutes. However, a comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating the capabilities of these agents remains absent. To bridge this gap, we present DeepResearch Bench, a benchmark consisting of 100 PhD-level research tasks, each meticulously crafted by domain experts across 22 distinct fields. Evaluating DRAs is inherently complex and labor-intensive. We therefore propose two novel methodologies that achieve strong alignment with human judgment. The first is a reference-based method with adaptive criteria to assess the quality of generated research reports. The other framework is introduced to evaluate DRA's information retrieval and collection capabilities by assessing its effective citation count and overall citation accuracy. We have open-sourced DeepResearch Bench and key components of these frameworks at https://github.com/Ayanami0730/deep_research_bench to accelerate the development of practical LLM-based agents.
Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI
This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include: -83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts. -Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models. -100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions. -Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine. -Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis. -Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields. -Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills. -Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.
AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.
On Efficient Language and Vision Assistants for Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding: What Matters in Reading and Reasoning
Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks effectively, they face challenges with the high computational demands of complex visually-situated text understanding. Such tasks often require increased token inputs and large vision modules to harness high-resolution information. Striking a balance between model size and data importance remains an open question. This study aims to redefine the design of vision-language models by identifying key components and creating efficient models with constrained inference costs. By strategically formulating datasets, optimizing vision modules, and enhancing supervision techniques, we achieve significant improvements in inference throughput while maintaining high performance. Extensive experiments across models ranging from 160M to 13B parameters offer insights into model optimization. We will fully open-source our codebase, models, and datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/elva.
ScholarEval: Research Idea Evaluation Grounded in Literature
As AI tools become increasingly common for research ideation, robust evaluation is critical to ensure the validity and usefulness of generated ideas. We introduce ScholarEval, a retrieval augmented evaluation framework that assesses research ideas based on two fundamental criteria: soundness - the empirical validity of proposed methods based on existing literature, and contribution - the degree of advancement made by the idea across different dimensions relative to prior research. To evaluate ScholarEval, we introduce ScholarIdeas, the first expert-annotated dataset of multi-domain research ideas and reviews, comprised of 117 ideas across four disciplines: artificial intelligence, neuroscience, biochemistry, and ecology. Our evaluation shows that ScholarEval achieves significantly higher coverage of points mentioned in the human expert annotated rubrics in ScholarIdeas compared to all baselines. Furthermore, ScholarEval is consistently preferred over our strongest baseline o4-mini-deep-research, a reasoning and search-enabled agentic system by OpenAI, in terms of evaluation actionability, depth, and evidence support. Our large-scale user study also shows that ScholarEval significantly outperforms deep research in literature engagement, idea refinement, and usefulness. We openly release our code, dataset, and ScholarEval tool for the community to use and build on.
OpenR: An Open Source Framework for Advanced Reasoning with Large Language Models
In this technical report, we introduce OpenR, an open-source framework designed to integrate key components for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). OpenR unifies data acquisition, reinforcement learning training (both online and offline), and non-autoregressive decoding into a cohesive software platform. Our goal is to establish an open-source platform and community to accelerate the development of LLM reasoning. Inspired by the success of OpenAI's o1 model, which demonstrated improved reasoning abilities through step-by-step reasoning and reinforcement learning, OpenR integrates test-time compute, reinforcement learning, and process supervision to improve reasoning in LLMs. Our work is the first to provide an open-source framework that explores the core techniques of OpenAI's o1 model with reinforcement learning, achieving advanced reasoning capabilities beyond traditional autoregressive methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of OpenR by evaluating it on the MATH dataset, utilising publicly available data and search methods. Our initial experiments confirm substantial gains, with relative improvements in reasoning and performance driven by test-time computation and reinforcement learning through process reward models. The OpenR framework, including code, models, and datasets, is accessible at https://openreasoner.github.io.
Towards Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Data Mining Perspective
Given the complexity and lack of transparency in deep neural networks (DNNs), extensive efforts have been made to make these systems more interpretable or explain their behaviors in accessible terms. Unlike most reviews, which focus on algorithmic and model-centric perspectives, this work takes a "data-centric" view, examining how data collection, processing, and analysis contribute to explainable AI (XAI). We categorize existing work into three categories subject to their purposes: interpretations of deep models, referring to feature attributions and reasoning processes that correlate data points with model outputs; influences of training data, examining the impact of training data nuances, such as data valuation and sample anomalies, on decision-making processes; and insights of domain knowledge, discovering latent patterns and fostering new knowledge from data and models to advance social values and scientific discovery. Specifically, we distill XAI methodologies into data mining operations on training and testing data across modalities, such as images, text, and tabular data, as well as on training logs, checkpoints, models and other DNN behavior descriptors. In this way, our study offers a comprehensive, data-centric examination of XAI from a lens of data mining methods and applications.
DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments
Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with web search capabilities have demonstrated impressive potential for deep research tasks. However, current approaches predominantly rely on either manually engineered prompts (prompt engineering-based) with brittle performance or reinforcement learning within controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) environments (RAG-based) that fail to capture the complexities of real-world interaction. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG-based approaches that assume all necessary information exists within a fixed corpus, our method trains agents to navigate the noisy, unstructured, and dynamic nature of the open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, including the ability to formulate plans, cross-validate information from multiple sources, engage in self-reflection to redirect research, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is not merely an implementation detail but a fundamental requirement for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. We release DeepResearcher at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher.
A Survey on Computationally Efficient Neural Architecture Search
Neural architecture search (NAS) has become increasingly popular in the deep learning community recently, mainly because it can provide an opportunity to allow interested users without rich expertise to benefit from the success of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, NAS is still laborious and time-consuming because a large number of performance estimations are required during the search process of NAS, and training DNNs is computationally intensive. To solve this major limitation of NAS, improving the computational efficiency is essential in the design of NAS. However, a systematic overview of computationally efficient NAS (CE-NAS) methods still lacks. To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art on CE-NAS by categorizing the existing work into proxy-based and surrogate-assisted NAS methods, together with a thorough discussion of their design principles and a quantitative comparison of their performances and computational complexities. The remaining challenges and open research questions are also discussed, and promising research topics in this emerging field are suggested.
Vector Search with OpenAI Embeddings: Lucene Is All You Need
We provide a reproducible, end-to-end demonstration of vector search with OpenAI embeddings using Lucene on the popular MS MARCO passage ranking test collection. The main goal of our work is to challenge the prevailing narrative that a dedicated vector store is necessary to take advantage of recent advances in deep neural networks as applied to search. Quite the contrary, we show that hierarchical navigable small-world network (HNSW) indexes in Lucene are adequate to provide vector search capabilities in a standard bi-encoder architecture. This suggests that, from a simple cost-benefit analysis, there does not appear to be a compelling reason to introduce a dedicated vector store into a modern "AI stack" for search, since such applications have already received substantial investments in existing, widely deployed infrastructure.
MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering
We introduce MLE-bench, a benchmark for measuring how well AI agents perform at machine learning engineering. To this end, we curate 75 ML engineering-related competitions from Kaggle, creating a diverse set of challenging tasks that test real-world ML engineering skills such as training models, preparing datasets, and running experiments. We establish human baselines for each competition using Kaggle's publicly available leaderboards. We use open-source agent scaffolds to evaluate several frontier language models on our benchmark, finding that the best-performing setup--OpenAI's o1-preview with AIDE scaffolding--achieves at least the level of a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions. In addition to our main results, we investigate various forms of resource scaling for AI agents and the impact of contamination from pre-training. We open-source our benchmark code (github.com/openai/mle-bench/) to facilitate future research in understanding the ML engineering capabilities of AI agents.
O1 Replication Journey -- Part 2: Surpassing O1-preview through Simple Distillation, Big Progress or Bitter Lesson?
This paper presents a critical examination of current approaches to replicating OpenAI's O1 model capabilities, with particular focus on the widespread but often undisclosed use of knowledge distillation techniques. While our previous work explored the fundamental technical path to O1 replication, this study reveals how simple distillation from O1's API, combined with supervised fine-tuning, can achieve superior performance on complex mathematical reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that a base model fine-tuned on simply tens of thousands of samples O1-distilled long-thought chains outperforms O1-preview on the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) with minimal technical complexity. Moreover, our investigation extends beyond mathematical reasoning to explore the generalization capabilities of O1-distilled models across diverse tasks: hallucination, safety and open-domain QA. Notably, despite training only on mathematical problem-solving data, our models demonstrated strong generalization to open-ended QA tasks and became significantly less susceptible to sycophancy after fine-tuning. We deliberately make this finding public to promote transparency in AI research and to challenge the current trend of obscured technical claims in the field. Our work includes: (1) A detailed technical exposition of the distillation process and its effectiveness, (2) A comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating and categorizing O1 replication attempts based on their technical transparency and reproducibility, (3) A critical discussion of the limitations and potential risks of over-relying on distillation approaches, our analysis culminates in a crucial bitter lesson: while the pursuit of more capable AI systems is important, the development of researchers grounded in first-principles thinking is paramount.
O1 Replication Journey: A Strategic Progress Report -- Part 1
This paper introduces a pioneering approach to artificial intelligence research, embodied in our O1 Replication Journey. In response to the announcement of OpenAI's groundbreaking O1 model, we embark on a transparent, real-time exploration to replicate its capabilities while reimagining the process of conducting and communicating AI research. Our methodology addresses critical challenges in modern AI research, including the insularity of prolonged team-based projects, delayed information sharing, and the lack of recognition for diverse contributions. By providing comprehensive, real-time documentation of our replication efforts, including both successes and failures, we aim to foster open science, accelerate collective advancement, and lay the groundwork for AI-driven scientific discovery. Our research progress report diverges significantly from traditional research papers, offering continuous updates, full process transparency, and active community engagement throughout the research journey. Technologically, we proposed the journey learning paradigm, which encourages models to learn not just shortcuts, but the complete exploration process, including trial and error, reflection, and backtracking. With only 327 training samples and without any additional tricks, journey learning outperformed conventional supervised learning by over 8\% on the MATH dataset, demonstrating its extremely powerful potential. We believe this to be the most crucial component of O1 technology that we have successfully decoded. We share valuable resources including technical hypotheses and insights, cognitive exploration maps, custom-developed tools, etc at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/O1-Journey.
ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework
Recent advances in web-augmented large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong performance in complex reasoning tasks, yet these capabilities are mostly locked in proprietary systems with opaque architectures. In this work, we propose ManuSearch, a transparent and modular multi-agent framework designed to democratize deep search for LLMs. ManuSearch decomposes the search and reasoning process into three collaborative agents: (1) a solution planning agent that iteratively formulates sub-queries, (2) an Internet search agent that retrieves relevant documents via real-time web search, and (3) a structured webpage reading agent that extracts key evidence from raw web content. To rigorously evaluate deep reasoning abilities, we introduce ORION, a challenging benchmark focused on open-web reasoning over long-tail entities, covering both English and Chinese. Experimental results show that ManuSearch substantially outperforms prior open-source baselines and even surpasses leading closed-source systems. Our work paves the way for reproducible, extensible research in open deep search systems. We release the data and code in https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ManuSearch
A Rigorous Benchmark with Multidimensional Evaluation for Deep Research Agents: From Answers to Reports
Artificial intelligence is undergoing the paradigm shift from closed language models to interconnected agent systems capable of external perception and information integration. As a representative embodiment, Deep Research Agents (DRAs) systematically exhibit the capabilities for task decomposition, cross-source retrieval, multi-stage reasoning, and structured output, which markedly enhance performance on complex and open-ended tasks. However, existing benchmarks remain deficient in evaluation dimensions, response formatting, and scoring mechanisms, limiting their capacity to assess such systems effectively. This paper introduces a rigorous benchmark and a multidimensional evaluation framework tailored to DRAs and report-style responses. The benchmark comprises 214 expert-curated challenging queries distributed across 10 broad thematic domains, each accompanied by manually constructed reference bundles to support composite evaluation. The framework enables comprehensive evaluation of long-form reports generated by DRAs, incorporating integrated scoring metrics for semantic quality, topical focus, and retrieval trustworthiness. Extensive experimentation confirms the superior performance of mainstream DRAs over web-search-tool-augmented reasoning models, yet reveals considerable scope for further improvement. This study provides a robust foundation for capability assessment, architectural refinement, and paradigm advancement in DRA systems.
SFR-DeepResearch: Towards Effective Reinforcement Learning for Autonomously Reasoning Single Agents
Equipping large language models (LLMs) with complex, interleaved reasoning and tool-use capabilities has become a key focus in agentic AI research, especially with recent advances in reasoning-oriented (``thinking'') models. Such capabilities are key to unlocking a number of important applications. One such application is Deep Research (DR), which requires extensive search and reasoning over many sources. Our work in this paper focuses on the development of native Autonomous Single-Agent models for DR featuring minimal web crawling and Python tool integration. Unlike multi-agent systems, where agents take up pre-defined roles and are told what to do at each step in a static workflow, an autonomous single-agent determines its next action dynamically based on context, without manual directive. While prior work has proposed training recipes for base or instruction-tuned LLMs, we focus on continual reinforcement learning (RL) of reasoning-optimized models to further enhance agentic skills while preserving reasoning ability. Towards this end, we propose a simple RL recipe with entirely synthetic data, which we apply to various open-source LLMs. Our best variant SFR-DR-20B achieves up to 28.7% on Humanity's Last Exam benchmark. In addition, we conduct key analysis experiments to provide more insights into our methodologies.
AlphaGo Moment for Model Architecture Discovery
While AI systems demonstrate exponentially improving capabilities, the pace of AI research itself remains linearly bounded by human cognitive capacity, creating an increasingly severe development bottleneck. We present ASI-Arch, the first demonstration of Artificial Superintelligence for AI research (ASI4AI) in the critical domain of neural architecture discovery--a fully autonomous system that shatters this fundamental constraint by enabling AI to conduct its own architectural innovation. Moving beyond traditional Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which is fundamentally limited to exploring human-defined spaces, we introduce a paradigm shift from automated optimization to automated innovation. ASI-Arch can conduct end-to-end scientific research in the domain of architecture discovery, autonomously hypothesizing novel architectural concepts, implementing them as executable code, training and empirically validating their performance through rigorous experimentation and past experience. ASI-Arch conducted 1,773 autonomous experiments over 20,000 GPU hours, culminating in the discovery of 106 innovative, state-of-the-art (SOTA) linear attention architectures. Like AlphaGo's Move 37 that revealed unexpected strategic insights invisible to human players, our AI-discovered architectures demonstrate emergent design principles that systematically surpass human-designed baselines and illuminate previously unknown pathways for architectural innovation. Crucially, we establish the first empirical scaling law for scientific discovery itself--demonstrating that architectural breakthroughs can be scaled computationally, transforming research progress from a human-limited to a computation-scalable process. We provide comprehensive analysis of the emergent design patterns and autonomous research capabilities that enabled these breakthroughs, establishing a blueprint for self-accelerating AI systems.
Tongyi DeepResearch Technical Report
We present Tongyi DeepResearch, an agentic large language model, which is specifically designed for long-horizon, deep information-seeking research tasks. To incentivize autonomous deep research agency, Tongyi DeepResearch is developed through an end-to-end training framework that combines agentic mid-training and agentic post-training, enabling scalable reasoning and information seeking across complex tasks. We design a highly scalable data synthesis pipeline that is fully automatic, without relying on costly human annotation, and empowers all training stages. By constructing customized environments for each stage, our system enables stable and consistent interactions throughout. Tongyi DeepResearch, featuring 30.5 billion total parameters, with only 3.3 billion activated per token, achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of agentic deep research benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam, BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, WebWalkerQA, xbench-DeepSearch, FRAMES and xbench-DeepSearch-2510. We open-source the model, framework, and complete solutions to empower the community.
Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency
In this paper, we identify and characterize the emerging area of representation engineering (RepE), an approach to enhancing the transparency of AI systems that draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience. RepE places population-level representations, rather than neurons or circuits, at the center of analysis, equipping us with novel methods for monitoring and manipulating high-level cognitive phenomena in deep neural networks (DNNs). We provide baselines and an initial analysis of RepE techniques, showing that they offer simple yet effective solutions for improving our understanding and control of large language models. We showcase how these methods can provide traction on a wide range of safety-relevant problems, including honesty, harmlessness, power-seeking, and more, demonstrating the promise of top-down transparency research. We hope that this work catalyzes further exploration of RepE and fosters advancements in the transparency and safety of AI systems.
DeepWideSearch: Benchmarking Depth and Width in Agentic Information Seeking
Current search agents fundamentally lack the ability to simultaneously perform deep reasoning over multi-hop retrieval and wide-scale information collection-a critical deficiency for real-world applications like comprehensive market analysis and business development. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepWideSearch, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agents to integrate depth and width in information seeking. In DeepWideSearch, agents must process a large volume of data, each requiring deep reasoning over multi-hop retrieval paths. Specifically, we propose two methods to converse established datasets, resulting in a curated collection of 220 questions spanning 15 diverse domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art agents achieve only 2.39% average success rate on DeepWideSearch, highlighting the substantial challenge of integrating depth and width search in information-seeking tasks. Furthermore, our error analysis reveals four failure modes: lack of reflection, overreliance on internal knowledge, insufficient retrieval, and context overflow-exposing key limitations in current agent architectures. We publicly release DeepWideSearch to catalyze future research on more capable and robust information-seeking agents.
DatasetResearch: Benchmarking Agent Systems for Demand-Driven Dataset Discovery
The rapid advancement of large language models has fundamentally shifted the bottleneck in AI development from computational power to data availability-with countless valuable datasets remaining hidden across specialized repositories, research appendices, and domain platforms. As reasoning capabilities and deep research methodologies continue to evolve, a critical question emerges: can AI agents transcend conventional search to systematically discover any dataset that meets specific user requirements, enabling truly autonomous demand-driven data curation? We introduce DatasetResearch, the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to discover and synthesize datasets from 208 real-world demands across knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our tri-dimensional evaluation framework reveals a stark reality: even advanced deep research systems achieve only 22% score on our challenging DatasetResearch-pro subset, exposing the vast gap between current capabilities and perfect dataset discovery. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental dichotomy-search agents excel at knowledge tasks through retrieval breadth, while synthesis agents dominate reasoning challenges via structured generation-yet both catastrophically fail on "corner cases" outside existing distributions. These findings establish the first rigorous baseline for dataset discovery agents and illuminate the path toward AI systems capable of finding any dataset in the digital universe. Our benchmark and comprehensive analysis provide the foundation for the next generation of self-improving AI systems and are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DatasetResearch.
BrowseComp-Plus: A More Fair and Transparent Evaluation Benchmark of Deep-Research Agent
Deep-Research agents, which integrate large language models (LLMs) with search tools, have shown success in improving the effectiveness of handling complex queries that require iterative search planning and reasoning over search results. Evaluations on current benchmarks like BrowseComp relies on black-box live web search APIs, have notable limitations in (1) fairness: dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder fair comparisons and reproducibility of deep research methods; (2) transparency: lack of control over the document corpus makes it difficult to isolate retriever contributions. In other words, the current evaluations may compare a complete deep research system at a given time, but they do not foster well-controlled experiments to provide insights into the capability of underlying deep research LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce BrowseComp-Plus, a benchmark derived from BrowseComp, employing a fixed, carefully curated corpus. Each query in BrowseComp-Plus includes human-verified supporting documents and mined challenging negatives, enabling controlled experimentation. The benchmark is shown to be effective in distinguishing the performance of deep research systems. For instance, the open-source model Search-R1, when paired with the BM25 retriever, achieves 3.86% accuracy, whereas the GPT-5 achieves 55.9%. Integrating the GPT-5 with the Qwen3-Embedding-8B retriever further enhances its accuracy to 70.1% with fewer search calls. This benchmark allows comprehensive evaluation and disentangled analysis of deep research agents and retrieval methods, fostering insights into retrieval effectiveness, citation accuracy, and context engineering in Deep-Research system.
A Review of Multi-Modal Large Language and Vision Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a focal point of research and application, driven by their unprecedented ability to understand and generate text with human-like quality. Even more recently, LLMs have been extended into multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs) which extends their capabilities to deal with image, video and audio information, in addition to text. This opens up applications like text-to-video generation, image captioning, text-to-speech, and more and is achieved either by retro-fitting an LLM with multi-modal capabilities, or building a MM-LLM from scratch. This paper provides an extensive review of the current state of those LLMs with multi-modal capabilities as well as the very recent MM-LLMs. It covers the historical development of LLMs especially the advances enabled by transformer-based architectures like OpenAI's GPT series and Google's BERT, as well as the role of attention mechanisms in enhancing model performance. The paper includes coverage of the major and most important of the LLMs and MM-LLMs and also covers the techniques of model tuning, including fine-tuning and prompt engineering, which tailor pre-trained models to specific tasks or domains. Ethical considerations and challenges, such as data bias and model misuse, are also analysed to underscore the importance of responsible AI development and deployment. Finally, we discuss the implications of open-source versus proprietary models in AI research. Through this review, we provide insights into the transformative potential of MM-LLMs in various applications.
DeepDive: Advancing Deep Search Agents with Knowledge Graphs and Multi-Turn RL
Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with browsing tools substantially improves their potential as deep search agents to solve complex, real-world tasks. Yet, open LLMs still perform poorly in such settings due to limited long-horizon reasoning capacity with browsing tools and the lack of sufficiently difficult supervised data. To address these challenges, we present DeepDive to advance deep search agents. First, we propose a strategy to automatically synthesize complex, difficult, and hard-to-find questions from open knowledge graphs. Second, we apply end-to-end multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance LLMs' long-horizon reasoning with deep search. Experiments show that DeepDive-32B achieves a new open-source competitive result on BrowseComp, outperforming WebSailor, DeepSeek-R1-Browse, and Search-o1. We demonstrate that multi-turn RL training improves deep search ability and significantly contributes to the performance improvements across multiple benchmarks. We observe that DeepDive enables test-time scaling of tool calls and parallel sampling. All datasets, models, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/THUDM/DeepDive.
A Wholistic View of Continual Learning with Deep Neural Networks: Forgotten Lessons and the Bridge to Active and Open World Learning
Current deep learning methods are regarded as favorable if they empirically perform well on dedicated test sets. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving data is investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless performed in isolation from the real world by monitoring accumulated benchmark test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant, i.e. models are evaluated on data that is guaranteed to originate from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown and corrupted instances. In this work we critically survey the literature and argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, identifying unknown examples outside of the observed set, and the adjacent field of active learning, querying data to maximize the expected performance gain, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Hence, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Finally, the established synergies are supported empirically, showing joint improvement in alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application.
ScholarSearch: Benchmarking Scholar Searching Ability of LLMs
Large Language Models (LLMs)' search capabilities have garnered significant attention. Existing benchmarks, such as OpenAI's BrowseComp, primarily focus on general search scenarios and fail to adequately address the specific demands of academic search. These demands include deeper literature tracing and organization, professional support for academic databases, the ability to navigate long-tail academic knowledge, and ensuring academic rigor. Here, we proposed ScholarSearch, the first dataset specifically designed to evaluate the complex information retrieval capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic research. ScholarSearch possesses the following key characteristics: Academic Practicality, where question content closely mirrors real academic learning and research environments, avoiding deliberately misleading models; High Difficulty, with answers that are challenging for single models (e.g., Grok DeepSearch or Gemini Deep Research) to provide directly, often requiring at least three deep searches to derive; Concise Evaluation, where limiting conditions ensure answers are as unique as possible, accompanied by clear sources and brief solution explanations, greatly facilitating subsequent audit and verification, surpassing the current lack of analyzed search datasets both domestically and internationally; and Broad Coverage, as the dataset spans at least 15 different academic disciplines. Through ScholarSearch, we expect to more precisely measure and promote the performance improvement of LLMs in complex academic information retrieval tasks. The data is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/PKU-DS-LAB/ScholarSearch
Iterative Deepening Sampling for Large Language Models
The recent release of OpenAI's o1 models and other similar frameworks showcasing test-time scaling laws has demonstrated their exceptional capability to tackle complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by this, subsequent research has revealed that such test-time scaling laws hinge on the model's ability to search both within a single response (intra-response) and across multiple responses (inter-response) during training. Crucially, beyond selecting a single optimal response, the model must also develop robust self-correction capabilities within its own outputs. However, training models to achieve effective self-evaluation and self-correction remains a significant challenge, heavily dependent on the quality of self-reflection data. In this paper, we address this challenge by focusing on enhancing the quality of self-reflection data generation for complex problem-solving, which can subsequently improve the training of next-generation large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we explore how manually triggering a model's self-correction mechanisms can improve performance on challenging reasoning tasks. To this end, we propose a novel iterative deepening sampling algorithm framework designed to enhance self-correction and generate higher-quality samples. Through extensive experiments on Math500 and AIME benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method achieves a higher success rate on difficult tasks and provide detailed ablation studies to analyze its effectiveness across diverse settings.
Towards Personalized Deep Research: Benchmarks and Evaluations
Deep Research Agents (DRAs) can autonomously conduct complex investigations and generate comprehensive reports, demonstrating strong real-world potential. However, existing evaluations mostly rely on close-ended benchmarks, while open-ended deep research benchmarks remain scarce and typically neglect personalized scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce Personalized Deep Research Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating personalization in DRAs. It pairs 50 diverse research tasks across 10 domains with 25 authentic user profiles that combine structured persona attributes with dynamic real-world contexts, yielding 250 realistic user-task queries. To assess system performance, we propose the PQR Evaluation Framework, which jointly measures (P) Personalization Alignment, (Q) Content Quality, and (R) Factual Reliability. Our experiments on a range of systems highlight current capabilities and limitations in handling personalized deep research. This work establishes a rigorous foundation for developing and evaluating the next generation of truly personalized AI research assistants.
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.
PhD Knowledge Not Required: A Reasoning Challenge for Large Language Models
Existing benchmarks for frontier models often test specialized, ``PhD-level'' knowledge that is difficult for non-experts to grasp. In contrast, we present a benchmark based on the NPR Sunday Puzzle Challenge that requires only general knowledge. Our benchmark is challenging for both humans and models, however correct solutions are easy to verify, and models' mistakes are easy to spot. Our work reveals capability gaps that are not evident in existing benchmarks: OpenAI o1 significantly outperforms other reasoning models that are on par on benchmarks that test specialized knowledge. Furthermore, our analysis of reasoning outputs uncovers new kinds of failures. DeepSeek R1, for instance, often concedes with ``I give up'' before providing an answer that it knows is wrong. R1 can also be remarkably ``uncertain'' in its output and in rare cases, it does not ``finish thinking,'' which suggests the need for an inference-time technique to ``wrap up'' before the context window limit is reached. We also quantify the effectiveness of reasoning longer with R1 and Gemini Thinking to identify the point beyond which more reasoning is unlikely to improve accuracy on our benchmark.
A Comparative Study on Reasoning Patterns of OpenAI's o1 Model
Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle a wider range of complex tasks (e.g., coding, math) has drawn great attention from many researchers. As LLMs continue to evolve, merely increasing the number of model parameters yields diminishing performance improvements and heavy computational costs. Recently, OpenAI's o1 model has shown that inference strategies (i.e., Test-time Compute methods) can also significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, the mechanisms behind these methods are still unexplored. In our work, to investigate the reasoning patterns of o1, we compare o1 with existing Test-time Compute methods (BoN, Step-wise BoN, Agent Workflow, and Self-Refine) by using OpenAI's GPT-4o as a backbone on general reasoning benchmarks in three domains (i.e., math, coding, commonsense reasoning). Specifically, first, our experiments show that the o1 model has achieved the best performance on most datasets. Second, as for the methods of searching diverse responses (e.g., BoN), we find the reward models' capability and the search space both limit the upper boundary of these methods. Third, as for the methods that break the problem into many sub-problems, the Agent Workflow has achieved better performance than Step-wise BoN due to the domain-specific system prompt for planning better reasoning processes. Fourth, it is worth mentioning that we have summarized six reasoning patterns of o1, and provided a detailed analysis on several reasoning benchmarks.
The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. While frontier models have already been used as aids to human scientists, e.g. for brainstorming ideas, writing code, or prediction tasks, they still conduct only a small part of the scientific process. This paper presents the first comprehensive framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, enabling frontier large language models to perform research independently and communicate their findings. We introduce The AI Scientist, which generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments, visualizes results, describes its findings by writing a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process for evaluation. In principle, this process can be repeated to iteratively develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper. To evaluate the generated papers, we design and validate an automated reviewer, which we show achieves near-human performance in evaluating paper scores. The AI Scientist can produce papers that exceed the acceptance threshold at a top machine learning conference as judged by our automated reviewer. This approach signifies the beginning of a new era in scientific discovery in machine learning: bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the entire research process of AI itself, and taking us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world's most challenging problems. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist
Unleashing Artificial Cognition: Integrating Multiple AI Systems
In this study, we present an innovative fusion of language models and query analysis techniques to unlock cognition in artificial intelligence. Our system seamlessly integrates a Chess engine with a language model, enabling it to predict moves and provide strategic explanations. Leveraging a vector database to achieve retrievable answer generation, our OpenSI AI system elucidates its decision-making process, bridging the gap between raw computation and human-like understanding. Our choice of Chess as the demonstration environment underscores the versatility of our approach. Beyond Chess, our system holds promise for diverse applications, from medical diagnostics to financial forecasting.
Explainability in Deep Reinforcement Learning
A large set of the explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) literature is emerging on feature relevance techniques to explain a deep neural network (DNN) output or explaining models that ingest image source data. However, assessing how XAI techniques can help understand models beyond classification tasks, e.g. for reinforcement learning (RL), has not been extensively studied. We review recent works in the direction to attain Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL), a relatively new subfield of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, intended to be used in general public applications, with diverse audiences, requiring ethical, responsible and trustable algorithms. In critical situations where it is essential to justify and explain the agent's behaviour, better explainability and interpretability of RL models could help gain scientific insight on the inner workings of what is still considered a black box. We evaluate mainly studies directly linking explainability to RL, and split these into two categories according to the way the explanations are generated: transparent algorithms and post-hoc explainaility. We also review the most prominent XAI works from the lenses of how they could potentially enlighten the further deployment of the latest advances in RL, in the demanding present and future of everyday problems.
Is open source software culture enough to make AI a common ?
Language models (LM or LLM) are increasingly deployed in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications, but the question arises as to whether they can be a common resource managed and maintained by a community of users. Indeed, the dominance of private companies with exclusive access to massive data and language processing resources can create inequalities and biases in LM, as well as obstacles to innovation for those who do not have the same resources necessary for their implementation. In this contribution, we examine the concept of the commons and its relevance for thinking about LM. We highlight the potential benefits of treating the data and resources needed to create LMs as commons, including increased accessibility, equity, and transparency in the development and use of AI technologies. Finally, we present a case study centered on the Hugging Face platform, an open-source platform for deep learning designed to encourage collaboration and sharing among AI designers.
UniWorld: High-Resolution Semantic Encoders for Unified Visual Understanding and Generation
Although existing unified models deliver strong performance on vision-language understanding and text-to-image generation, their models are limited in exploring image perception and manipulation tasks, which are urgently desired by users for wide applications. Recently, OpenAI released their powerful GPT-4o-Image model for comprehensive image perception and manipulation, achieving expressive capability and attracting community interests. By observing the performance of GPT-4o-Image in our carefully constructed experiments, we infer that GPT-4o-Image leverages features extracted by semantic encoders instead of VAE, while VAEs are considered essential components in many image manipulation models. Motivated by such inspiring observations, we present a unified generative framework named UniWorld based on semantic features provided by powerful visual-language models and contrastive semantic encoders. As a result, we build a strong unified model using only 1% amount of BAGEL's data, which consistently outperforms BAGEL on image editing benchmarks. UniWorld also maintains competitive image understanding and generation capabilities, achieving strong performance across multiple image perception tasks. We fully open-source our models, including model weights, training and evaluation scripts, and datasets.
Scaling of Search and Learning: A Roadmap to Reproduce o1 from Reinforcement Learning Perspective
OpenAI o1 represents a significant milestone in Artificial Inteiligence, which achieves expert-level performances on many challanging tasks that require strong reasoning ability.OpenAI has claimed that the main techinique behinds o1 is the reinforcement learining. Recent works use alternative approaches like knowledge distillation to imitate o1's reasoning style, but their effectiveness is limited by the capability ceiling of the teacher model. Therefore, this paper analyzes the roadmap to achieving o1 from the perspective of reinforcement learning, focusing on four key components: policy initialization, reward design, search, and learning. Policy initialization enables models to develop human-like reasoning behaviors, equipping them with the ability to effectively explore solution spaces for complex problems. Reward design provides dense and effective signals via reward shaping or reward modeling, which is the guidance for both search and learning. Search plays a crucial role in generating high-quality solutions during both training and testing phases, which can produce better solutions with more computation. Learning utilizes the data generated by search for improving policy, which can achieve the better performance with more parameters and more searched data. Existing open-source projects that attempt to reproduce o1 can be seem as a part or a variant of our roadmap. Collectively, these components underscore how learning and search drive o1's advancement, making meaningful contributions to the development of LLM.
Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning
There has recently been a surge of work in explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI). This research area tackles the important problem that complex machines and algorithms often cannot provide insights into their behavior and thought processes. XAI allows users and parts of the internal system to be more transparent, providing explanations of their decisions in some level of detail. These explanations are important to ensure algorithmic fairness, identify potential bias/problems in the training data, and to ensure that the algorithms perform as expected. However, explanations produced by these systems is neither standardized nor systematically assessed. In an effort to create best practices and identify open challenges, we provide our definition of explainability and show how it can be used to classify existing literature. We discuss why current approaches to explanatory methods especially for deep neural networks are insufficient. Finally, based on our survey, we conclude with suggested future research directions for explanatory artificial intelligence.
Is GPT-OSS Good? A Comprehensive Evaluation of OpenAI's Latest Open Source Models
In August 2025, OpenAI released GPT-OSS models, its first open weight large language models since GPT-2 in 2019, comprising two mixture of experts architectures with 120B and 20B parameters. We evaluated both variants against six contemporary open source large language models ranging from 14.7B to 235B parameters, representing both dense and sparse designs, across ten benchmarks covering general knowledge, mathematical reasoning, code generation, multilingual understanding, and conversational ability. All models were tested in unquantised form under standardised inference settings, with statistical validation using McNemars test and effect size analysis. Results show that gpt-oss-20B consistently outperforms gpt-oss-120B on several benchmarks, such as HumanEval and MMLU, despite requiring substantially less memory and energy per response. Both models demonstrate mid-tier overall performance within the current open source landscape, with relative strength in code generation and notable weaknesses in multilingual tasks. These findings provide empirical evidence that scaling in sparse architectures may not yield proportional performance gains, underscoring the need for further investigation into optimisation strategies and informing more efficient model selection for future open source deployments.
Universal Deep Research: Bring Your Own Model and Strategy
Deep research tools are among the most impactful and most commonly encountered agentic systems today. We observe, however, that each deep research agent introduced so far is hard-coded to carry out a particular research strategy using a fixed choice of tools. We introduce Universal Deep Research (UDR), a generalist agentic system that wraps around any language model and enables the user to create, edit, and refine their own entirely custom deep research strategies without any need for additional training or finetuning. To showcase the generality of our system, we equip UDR with example minimal, expansive, and intensive research strategies, and provide a user interface to facilitate experimentation with the system.
FinDeepResearch: Evaluating Deep Research Agents in Rigorous Financial Analysis
Deep Research (DR) agents, powered by advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), have recently garnered increasing attention for their capability in conducting complex research tasks. However, existing literature lacks a rigorous and systematic evaluation of DR Agent's capabilities in critical research analysis. To address this gap, we first propose HisRubric, a novel evaluation framework with a hierarchical analytical structure and a fine-grained grading rubric for rigorously assessing DR agents' capabilities in corporate financial analysis. This framework mirrors the professional analyst's workflow, progressing from data recognition to metric calculation, and finally to strategic summarization and interpretation. Built on this framework, we construct a FinDeepResearch benchmark that comprises 64 listed companies from 8 financial markets across 4 languages, encompassing a total of 15,808 grading items. We further conduct extensive experiments on the FinDeepResearch using 16 representative methods, including 6 DR agents, 5 LLMs equipped with both deep reasoning and search capabilities, and 5 LLMs with deep reasoning capabilities only. The results reveal the strengths and limitations of these approaches across diverse capabilities, financial markets, and languages, offering valuable insights for future research and development. The benchmark and evaluation code will be made publicly available.
OpenAGI: When LLM Meets Domain Experts
Human intelligence excels at combining basic skills to solve complex tasks. This capability is vital for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and should be embedded in comprehensive intelligent models, enabling them to harness expert models for complex task-solving towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities, and can effectively use external models, tools or APIs to tackle complex problems. In this work, we introduce OpenAGI, an open-source AGI research platform designed for multi-step, real-world tasks. Specifically, OpenAGI uses a dual strategy, integrating standard benchmark tasks for benchmarking and evaluation, and open-ended tasks including more expandable models, tools or APIs for creative problem-solving. Tasks are presented as natural language queries to the LLM, which then selects and executes appropriate models. We also propose a Reinforcement Learning from Task Feedback (RLTF) mechanism that uses task results to improve the LLM's ability, which creates a self-improving AI feedback loop. While we acknowledge that AGI is a broad and multifaceted research challenge with no singularly defined solution path, the integration of LLMs with domain-specific expert models, inspired by mirroring the blend of general and specialized intelligence in humans, offers a promising approach towards AGI. We are open-sourcing the OpenAGI project's code, dataset, benchmarks, evaluation methods, and demo to foster community involvement in AGI advancement: https://github.com/agiresearch/OpenAGI.
Automated Deep Learning: Neural Architecture Search Is Not the End
Deep learning (DL) has proven to be a highly effective approach for developing models in diverse contexts, including visual perception, speech recognition, and machine translation. However, the end-to-end process for applying DL is not trivial. It requires grappling with problem formulation and context understanding, data engineering, model development, deployment, continuous monitoring and maintenance, and so on. Moreover, each of these steps typically relies heavily on humans, in terms of both knowledge and interactions, which impedes the further advancement and democratization of DL. Consequently, in response to these issues, a new field has emerged over the last few years: automated deep learning (AutoDL). This endeavor seeks to minimize the need for human involvement and is best known for its achievements in neural architecture search (NAS), a topic that has been the focus of several surveys. That stated, NAS is not the be-all and end-all of AutoDL. Accordingly, this review adopts an overarching perspective, examining research efforts into automation across the entirety of an archetypal DL workflow. In so doing, this work also proposes a comprehensive set of ten criteria by which to assess existing work in both individual publications and broader research areas. These criteria are: novelty, solution quality, efficiency, stability, interpretability, reproducibility, engineering quality, scalability, generalizability, and eco-friendliness. Thus, ultimately, this review provides an evaluative overview of AutoDL in the early 2020s, identifying where future opportunities for progress may exist.
Technical Report: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Reward-guided Tree Search
Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference phase, large language models~(LLMs) can extensively explore the solution space by generating more thought tokens or diverse solutions, thereby producing more accurate responses. However, developing an o1-like reasoning approach is challenging, and researchers have been making various attempts to advance this open area of research. In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration into enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs through reward-guided tree search algorithms. This framework is implemented by integrating the policy model, reward model, and search algorithm. It is primarily constructed around a tree search algorithm, where the policy model navigates a dynamically expanding tree guided by a specially trained reward model. We thoroughly explore various design considerations necessary for implementing this framework and provide a detailed report of the technical aspects. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we focus on mathematical reasoning tasks and conduct extensive evaluations on four challenging datasets, significantly enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs.
A Case Study of Web App Coding with OpenAI Reasoning Models
This paper presents a case study of coding tasks by the latest reasoning models of OpenAI, i.e. o1-preview and o1-mini, in comparison with other frontier models. The o1 models deliver SOTA results for WebApp1K, a single-task benchmark. To this end, we introduce WebApp1K-Duo, a harder benchmark doubling number of tasks and test cases. The new benchmark causes the o1 model performances to decline significantly, falling behind Claude 3.5. Moreover, they consistently fail when confronted with atypical yet correct test cases, a trap non-reasoning models occasionally avoid. We hypothesize that the performance variability is due to instruction comprehension. Specifically, the reasoning mechanism boosts performance when all expectations are captured, meanwhile exacerbates errors when key expectations are missed, potentially impacted by input lengths. As such, we argue that the coding success of reasoning models hinges on the top-notch base model and SFT to ensure meticulous adherence to instructions.
DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding
We present DeepSeek-VL, an open-source Vision-Language (VL) Model designed for real-world vision and language understanding applications. Our approach is structured around three key dimensions: We strive to ensure our data is diverse, scalable, and extensively covers real-world scenarios including web screenshots, PDFs, OCR, charts, and knowledge-based content, aiming for a comprehensive representation of practical contexts. Further, we create a use case taxonomy from real user scenarios and construct an instruction tuning dataset accordingly. The fine-tuning with this dataset substantially improves the model's user experience in practical applications. Considering efficiency and the demands of most real-world scenarios, DeepSeek-VL incorporates a hybrid vision encoder that efficiently processes high-resolution images (1024 x 1024), while maintaining a relatively low computational overhead. This design choice ensures the model's ability to capture critical semantic and detailed information across various visual tasks. We posit that a proficient Vision-Language Model should, foremost, possess strong language abilities. To ensure the preservation of LLM capabilities during pretraining, we investigate an effective VL pretraining strategy by integrating LLM training from the beginning and carefully managing the competitive dynamics observed between vision and language modalities. The DeepSeek-VL family (both 1.3B and 7B models) showcases superior user experiences as a vision-language chatbot in real-world applications, achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of visual-language benchmarks at the same model size while maintaining robust performance on language-centric benchmarks. We have made both 1.3B and 7B models publicly accessible to foster innovations based on this foundation model.
ReportBench: Evaluating Deep Research Agents via Academic Survey Tasks
The advent of Deep Research agents has substantially reduced the time required for conducting extensive research tasks. However, these tasks inherently demand rigorous standards of factual accuracy and comprehensiveness, necessitating thorough evaluation before widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose ReportBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the content quality of research reports generated by large language models (LLMs). Our evaluation focuses on two critical dimensions: (1) the quality and relevance of cited literature, and (2) the faithfulness and veracity of the statements within the generated reports. ReportBench leverages high-quality published survey papers available on arXiv as gold-standard references, from which we apply reverse prompt engineering to derive domain-specific prompts and establish a comprehensive evaluation corpus. Furthermore, we develop an agent-based automated framework within ReportBench that systematically analyzes generated reports by extracting citations and statements, checking the faithfulness of cited content against original sources, and validating non-cited claims using web-based resources. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that commercial Deep Research agents such as those developed by OpenAI and Google consistently generate more comprehensive and reliable reports than standalone LLMs augmented with search or browsing tools. However, there remains substantial room for improvement in terms of the breadth and depth of research coverage, as well as factual consistency. The complete code and data will be released at the following link: https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/ReportBench
Deep Learning for Code Intelligence: Survey, Benchmark and Toolkit
Code intelligence leverages machine learning techniques to extract knowledge from extensive code corpora, with the aim of developing intelligent tools to improve the quality and productivity of computer programming. Currently, there is already a thriving research community focusing on code intelligence, with efforts ranging from software engineering, machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, and programming languages. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on deep learning for code intelligence, from the aspects of code representation learning, deep learning techniques, and application tasks. We also benchmark several state-of-the-art neural models for code intelligence, and provide an open-source toolkit tailored for the rapid prototyping of deep-learning-based code intelligence models. In particular, we inspect the existing code intelligence models under the basis of code representation learning, and provide a comprehensive overview to enhance comprehension of the present state of code intelligence. Furthermore, we publicly release the source code and data resources to provide the community with a ready-to-use benchmark, which can facilitate the evaluation and comparison of existing and future code intelligence models (https://xcodemind.github.io). At last, we also point out several challenging and promising directions for future research.
LMentry: A Language Model Benchmark of Elementary Language Tasks
As the performance of large language models rapidly improves, benchmarks are getting larger and more complex as well. We present LMentry, a benchmark that avoids this "arms race" by focusing on a compact set of tasks that are trivial to humans, e.g. writing a sentence containing a specific word, identifying which words in a list belong to a specific category, or choosing which of two words is longer. LMentry is specifically designed to provide quick and interpretable insights into the capabilities and robustness of large language models. Our experiments reveal a wide variety of failure cases that, while immediately obvious to humans, pose a considerable challenge for large language models, including OpenAI's latest 175B-parameter instruction-tuned model, TextDavinci002. LMentry complements contemporary evaluation approaches of large language models, providing a quick, automatic, and easy-to-run "unit test", without resorting to large benchmark suites of complex tasks.
Efficient Deep Learning: A Survey on Making Deep Learning Models Smaller, Faster, and Better
Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition, information retrieval and more. However, with the progressive improvements in deep learning models, their number of parameters, latency, resources required to train, etc. have all have increased significantly. Consequently, it has become important to pay attention to these footprint metrics of a model as well, not just its quality. We present and motivate the problem of efficiency in deep learning, followed by a thorough survey of the five core areas of model efficiency (spanning modeling techniques, infrastructure, and hardware) and the seminal work there. We also present an experiment-based guide along with code, for practitioners to optimize their model training and deployment. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey in the efficient deep learning space that covers the landscape of model efficiency from modeling techniques to hardware support. Our hope is that this survey would provide the reader with the mental model and the necessary understanding of the field to apply generic efficiency techniques to immediately get significant improvements, and also equip them with ideas for further research and experimentation to achieve additional gains.
Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make a preliminary attempt in this direction by introducing Thyme (Think Beyond Images), a novel paradigm for enabling MLLMs to transcend existing ``think with images'' approaches by autonomously generating and executing diverse image processing and computational operations via executable code. This approach not only facilitates a rich, on-the-fly set of image manipulations (e.g., cropping, rotation, contrast enhancement) but also allows for mathematical computations, all while maintaining high autonomy in deciding when and how to apply these operations. We activate this capability through a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT on a curated dataset of 500K samples to teach code generation, followed by a RL phase to refine decision-making. For the RL stage, we manually collect and design high-resolution question-answer pairs to increase the learning difficulty, and we propose GRPO-ATS (Group Relative Policy Optimization with Adaptive Temperature Sampling), an algorithm that applies distinct temperatures to text and code generation to balance reasoning exploration with code execution precision. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and ablation studies. Comprehensive evaluations on nearly 20 benchmarks show that Thyme yields significant and consistent performance gains, particularly in challenging high-resolution perception and complex reasoning tasks.
Real-World Gaps in AI Governance Research
Drawing on 1,178 safety and reliability papers from 9,439 generative AI papers (January 2020 - March 2025), we compare research outputs of leading AI companies (Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI) and AI universities (CMU, MIT, NYU, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and University of Washington). We find that corporate AI research increasingly concentrates on pre-deployment areas -- model alignment and testing & evaluation -- while attention to deployment-stage issues such as model bias has waned. Significant research gaps exist in high-risk deployment domains, including healthcare, finance, misinformation, persuasive and addictive features, hallucinations, and copyright. Without improved observability into deployed AI, growing corporate concentration could deepen knowledge deficits. We recommend expanding external researcher access to deployment data and systematic observability of in-market AI behaviors.
HierSearch: A Hierarchical Enterprise Deep Search Framework Integrating Local and Web Searches
Recently, large reasoning models have demonstrated strong mathematical and coding abilities, and deep search leverages their reasoning capabilities in challenging information retrieval tasks. Existing deep search works are generally limited to a single knowledge source, either local or the Web. However, enterprises often require private deep search systems that can leverage search tools over both local and the Web corpus. Simply training an agent equipped with multiple search tools using flat reinforcement learning (RL) is a straightforward idea, but it has problems such as low training data efficiency and poor mastery of complex tools. To address the above issue, we propose a hierarchical agentic deep search framework, HierSearch, trained with hierarchical RL. At the low level, a local deep search agent and a Web deep search agent are trained to retrieve evidence from their corresponding domains. At the high level, a planner agent coordinates low-level agents and provides the final answer. Moreover, to prevent direct answer copying and error propagation, we design a knowledge refiner that filters out hallucinations and irrelevant evidence returned by low-level agents. Experiments show that HierSearch achieves better performance compared to flat RL, and outperforms various deep search and multi-source retrieval-augmented generation baselines in six benchmarks across general, finance, and medical domains.
Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects
Massive data corpora like WebText, Wikipedia, Conceptual Captions, WebImageText, and LAION have propelled recent dramatic progress in AI. Large neural models trained on such datasets produce impressive results and top many of today's benchmarks. A notable omission within this family of large-scale datasets is 3D data. Despite considerable interest and potential applications in 3D vision, datasets of high-fidelity 3D models continue to be mid-sized with limited diversity of object categories. Addressing this gap, we present Objaverse 1.0, a large dataset of objects with 800K+ (and growing) 3D models with descriptive captions, tags, and animations. Objaverse improves upon present day 3D repositories in terms of scale, number of categories, and in the visual diversity of instances within a category. We demonstrate the large potential of Objaverse via four diverse applications: training generative 3D models, improving tail category segmentation on the LVIS benchmark, training open-vocabulary object-navigation models for Embodied AI, and creating a new benchmark for robustness analysis of vision models. Objaverse can open new directions for research and enable new applications across the field of AI.
Training Transformers Together
The infrastructure necessary for training state-of-the-art models is becoming overly expensive, which makes training such models affordable only to large corporations and institutions. Recent work proposes several methods for training such models collaboratively, i.e., by pooling together hardware from many independent parties and training a shared model over the Internet. In this demonstration, we collaboratively trained a text-to-image transformer similar to OpenAI DALL-E. We invited the viewers to join the ongoing training run, showing them instructions on how to contribute using the available hardware. We explained how to address the engineering challenges associated with such a training run (slow communication, limited memory, uneven performance between devices, and security concerns) and discussed how the viewers can set up collaborative training runs themselves. Finally, we show that the resulting model generates images of reasonable quality on a number of prompts.
NeuralArTS: Structuring Neural Architecture Search with Type Theory
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms automate the task of finding optimal deep learning architectures given an initial search space of possible operations. Developing these search spaces is usually a manual affair with pre-optimized search spaces being more efficient, rather than searching from scratch. In this paper we present a new framework called Neural Architecture Type System (NeuralArTS) that categorizes the infinite set of network operations in a structured type system. We further demonstrate how NeuralArTS can be applied to convolutional layers and propose several future directions.
Self-Attention Between Datapoints: Going Beyond Individual Input-Output Pairs in Deep Learning
We challenge a common assumption underlying most supervised deep learning: that a model makes a prediction depending only on its parameters and the features of a single input. To this end, we introduce a general-purpose deep learning architecture that takes as input the entire dataset instead of processing one datapoint at a time. Our approach uses self-attention to reason about relationships between datapoints explicitly, which can be seen as realizing non-parametric models using parametric attention mechanisms. However, unlike conventional non-parametric models, we let the model learn end-to-end from the data how to make use of other datapoints for prediction. Empirically, our models solve cross-datapoint lookup and complex reasoning tasks unsolvable by traditional deep learning models. We show highly competitive results on tabular data, early results on CIFAR-10, and give insight into how the model makes use of the interactions between points.
OpenJAI-v1.0: An Open Thai Large Language Model
We introduce OpenJAI-v1.0, an open-source large language model for Thai and English, developed from the Qwen3-14B model. Our work focuses on boosting performance on practical tasks through carefully curated data across three key use cases: instruction following, long-context understanding, and tool use. Evaluation results show that OpenJAI-v1.0 improves on the capabilities of its base model and outperforms other leading open-source Thai models on a diverse suite of benchmarks, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. OpenJAI-v1.0 is publicly released as another alternative NLP resource for the Thai AI community.
Reinforcement Learning Foundations for Deep Research Systems: A Survey
Deep research systems, agentic AI that solve complex, multi-step tasks by coordinating reasoning, search across the open web and user files, and tool use, are moving toward hierarchical deployments with a Planner, Coordinator, and Executors. In practice, training entire stacks end-to-end remains impractical, so most work trains a single planner connected to core tools such as search, browsing, and code. While SFT imparts protocol fidelity, it suffers from imitation and exposure biases and underuses environment feedback. Preference alignment methods such as DPO are schema and proxy-dependent, off-policy, and weak for long-horizon credit assignment and multi-objective trade-offs. A further limitation of SFT and DPO is their reliance on human defined decision points and subskills through schema design and labeled comparisons. Reinforcement learning aligns with closed-loop, tool-interaction research by optimizing trajectory-level policies, enabling exploration, recovery behaviors, and principled credit assignment, and it reduces dependence on such human priors and rater biases. This survey is, to our knowledge, the first dedicated to the RL foundations of deep research systems. It systematizes work after DeepSeek-R1 along three axes: (i) data synthesis and curation; (ii) RL methods for agentic research covering stability, sample efficiency, long context handling, reward and credit design, multi-objective optimization, and multimodal integration; and (iii) agentic RL training systems and frameworks. We also cover agent architecture and coordination, as well as evaluation and benchmarks, including recent QA, VQA, long-form synthesis, and domain-grounded, tool-interaction tasks. We distill recurring patterns, surface infrastructure bottlenecks, and offer practical guidance for training robust, transparent deep research agents with RL.
AlphaResearch: Accelerating New Algorithm Discovery with Language Models
Large language models have made significant progress in complex but easy-to-verify problems, yet they still struggle with discovering the unknown. In this paper, we present AlphaResearch, an autonomous research agent designed to discover new algorithms on open-ended problems. To synergize the feasibility and innovation of the discovery process, we construct a novel dual research environment by combining the execution-based verify and simulated real-world peer review environment. AlphaResearch discovers new algorithm by iteratively running the following steps: (1) propose new ideas (2) verify the ideas in the dual research environment (3) optimize the research proposals for better performance. To promote a transparent evaluation process, we construct AlphaResearchComp, a new evaluation benchmark that includes an eight open-ended algorithmic problems competition, with each problem carefully curated and verified through executable pipelines, objective metrics, and reproducibility checks. AlphaResearch gets a 2/8 win rate in head-to-head comparison with human researchers, demonstrate the possibility of accelerating algorithm discovery with LLMs. Notably, the algorithm discovered by AlphaResearch on the ``packing circles'' problem achieves the best-of-known performance, surpassing the results of human researchers and strong baselines from recent work (e.g., AlphaEvolve). Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the remaining challenges of the 6/8 failure cases, providing valuable insights for future research.
Real Deep Research for AI, Robotics and Beyond
With the rapid growth of research in AI and robotics now producing over 10,000 papers annually it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to stay up to date. Fast evolving trends, the rise of interdisciplinary work, and the need to explore domains beyond one's expertise all contribute to this challenge. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable pipeline capable of systematically analyzing any research area: identifying emerging trends, uncovering cross domain opportunities, and offering concrete starting points for new inquiry. In this work, we present Real Deep Research (RDR) a comprehensive framework applied to the domains of AI and robotics, with a particular focus on foundation models and robotics advancements. We also briefly extend our analysis to other areas of science. The main paper details the construction of the RDR pipeline, while the appendix provides extensive results across each analyzed topic. We hope this work sheds light for researchers working in the field of AI and beyond.
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.
Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker
We present Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker, a 15-billion parameter open-weights multimodal reasoning model that achieves frontier-level performance through training design rather than sheer scale. Starting from Pixtral-12B, we apply a progressive three-stage methodology: (1) depth upscaling to expand reasoning capacity without pretraining from scratch, (2) staged continual pre-training that first develops foundational text and vision understanding, then enhances visual reasoning through targeted synthetic data generation addressing spatial structure, compositional understanding, and fine-grained perception, and (3) high-quality text-only supervised fine-tuning on curated instruction-response pairs with explicit reasoning traces spanning mathematics, coding, science, and tool use. Notably, our model achieves competitive results without reinforcement learning or preference optimization, isolating the contribution of our data-centric continual pre-training approach. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Apriel-1.5-15B-Thinker attains a score of 52, matching DeepSeek-R1-0528 despite requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Across ten image benchmarks, its performance is on average within five points of Gemini-2.5-Flash and Claude Sonnet-3.7, a key achievement for a model operating within single-GPU deployment constraints. Our results demonstrate that thoughtful mid-training 2 design can close substantial capability gaps without massive scale, making frontier-level multimodal reasoning accessible to organizations with limited infrastructure. We release the model checkpoint, all training recipes, and evaluation protocols under the MIT license to to advance open-source research.
Aria: An Open Multimodal Native Mixture-of-Experts Model
Information comes in diverse modalities. Multimodal native AI models are essential to integrate real-world information and deliver comprehensive understanding. While proprietary multimodal native models exist, their lack of openness imposes obstacles for adoptions, let alone adaptations. To fill this gap, we introduce Aria, an open multimodal native model with best-in-class performance across a wide range of multimodal, language, and coding tasks. Aria is a mixture-of-expert model with 3.9B and 3.5B activated parameters per visual token and text token, respectively. It outperforms Pixtral-12B and Llama3.2-11B, and is competitive against the best proprietary models on various multimodal tasks. We pre-train Aria from scratch following a 4-stage pipeline, which progressively equips the model with strong capabilities in language understanding, multimodal understanding, long context window, and instruction following. We open-source the model weights along with a codebase that facilitates easy adoptions and adaptations of Aria in real-world applications.
The Jumping Reasoning Curve? Tracking the Evolution of Reasoning Performance in GPT-[n] and o-[n] Models on Multimodal Puzzles
The releases of OpenAI's o1 and o3 mark a significant paradigm shift in Large Language Models towards advanced reasoning capabilities. Notably, o3 outperformed humans in novel problem-solving and skill acquisition on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). However, this benchmark is limited to symbolic patterns, whereas humans often perceive and reason about multimodal scenarios involving both vision and language data. Thus, there is an urgent need to investigate advanced reasoning capabilities in multimodal tasks. To this end, we track the evolution of the GPT-[n] and o-[n] series models on challenging multimodal puzzles, requiring fine-grained visual perception with abstract or algorithmic reasoning. The superior performance of o1 comes at nearly 750 times the computational cost of GPT-4o, raising concerns about its efficiency. Our results reveal a clear upward trend in reasoning capabilities across model iterations, with notable performance jumps across GPT-series models and subsequently to o1. Nonetheless, we observe that the o1 model still struggles with simple multimodal puzzles requiring abstract reasoning. Furthermore, its performance in algorithmic puzzles remains poor. We plan to continuously track new models in the series and update our results in this paper accordingly. All resources used in this evaluation are openly available https://github.com/declare-lab/LLM-PuzzleTest.
Dedicated Feedback and Edit Models Empower Inference-Time Scaling for Open-Ended General-Domain Tasks
Inference-Time Scaling has been critical to the success of recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1. However, many techniques used to train models for inference-time scaling require tasks to have answers that can be verified, limiting their application to domains such as math, coding and logical reasoning. We take inspiration from how humans make first attempts, ask for detailed feedback from others and make improvements based on such feedback across a wide spectrum of open-ended endeavors. To this end, we collect data for and train dedicated Feedback and Edit Models that are capable of performing inference-time scaling for open-ended general-domain tasks. In our setup, one model generates an initial response, which are given feedback by a second model, that are then used by a third model to edit the response. We show that performance on Arena Hard, a benchmark strongly predictive of Chatbot Arena Elo can be boosted by scaling the number of initial response drafts, effective feedback and edited responses. When scaled optimally, our setup based on 70B models from the Llama 3 family can reach SoTA performance on Arena Hard at 92.7 as of 5 Mar 2025, surpassing OpenAI o1-preview-2024-09-12 with 90.4 and DeepSeek R1 with 92.3.
Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking openness, transparency, and accountability in instruction-tuned text generators
Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model for text generation fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (LLM+RLHF). We review the risks of relying on proprietary software and survey the first crop of open-source projects of comparable architecture and functionality. The main contribution of this paper is to show that openness is differentiated, and to offer scientific documentation of degrees of openness in this fast-moving field. We evaluate projects in terms of openness of code, training data, model weights, RLHF data, licensing, scientific documentation, and access methods. We find that while there is a fast-growing list of projects billing themselves as 'open source', many inherit undocumented data of dubious legality, few share the all-important instruction-tuning (a key site where human annotation labour is involved), and careful scientific documentation is exceedingly rare. Degrees of openness are relevant to fairness and accountability at all points, from data collection and curation to model architecture, and from training and fine-tuning to release and deployment.
ResearchGPT: Benchmarking and Training LLMs for End-to-End Computer Science Research Workflows
As large language models (LLMs) advance, the ultimate vision for their role in science is emerging: we could build an AI collaborator to effectively assist human beings throughout the entire scientific research process. We refer to this envisioned system as ResearchGPT. Given that scientific research progresses through multiple interdependent phases, achieving this vision requires rigorous benchmarks that evaluate the end-to-end workflow rather than isolated sub-tasks. To this end, we contribute CS-54k, a high-quality corpus of scientific Q&A pairs in computer science, built from 14k CC-licensed papers. It is constructed through a scalable, paper-grounded pipeline that combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with multi-stage quality control to ensure factual grounding. From this unified corpus, we derive two complementary subsets: CS-4k, a carefully curated benchmark for evaluating AI's ability to assist scientific research, and CS-50k, a large-scale training dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CS-4k stratifies state-of-the-art LLMs into distinct capability tiers. Open models trained on CS-50k with supervised training and reinforcement learning demonstrate substantial improvements. Even 7B-scale models, when properly trained, outperform many larger proprietary systems, such as GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. This indicates that making AI models better research assistants relies more on domain-aligned training with high-quality data than on pretraining scale or general benchmark performance. We release CS-4k and CS-50k in the hope of fostering AI systems as reliable collaborators in CS research.
Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4
In this work, we carry out a data archaeology to infer books that are known to ChatGPT and GPT-4 using a name cloze membership inference query. We find that OpenAI models have memorized a wide collection of copyrighted materials, and that the degree of memorization is tied to the frequency with which passages of those books appear on the web. The ability of these models to memorize an unknown set of books complicates assessments of measurement validity for cultural analytics by contaminating test data; we show that models perform much better on memorized books than on non-memorized books for downstream tasks. We argue that this supports a case for open models whose training data is known.
Declarative Experimentation in Information Retrieval using PyTerrier
The advent of deep machine learning platforms such as Tensorflow and Pytorch, developed in expressive high-level languages such as Python, have allowed more expressive representations of deep neural network architectures. We argue that such a powerful formalism is missing in information retrieval (IR), and propose a framework called PyTerrier that allows advanced retrieval pipelines to be expressed, and evaluated, in a declarative manner close to their conceptual design. Like the aforementioned frameworks that compile deep learning experiments into primitive GPU operations, our framework targets IR platforms as backends in order to execute and evaluate retrieval pipelines. Further, we can automatically optimise the retrieval pipelines to increase their efficiency to suite a particular IR platform backend. Our experiments, conducted on TREC Robust and ClueWeb09 test collections, demonstrate the efficiency benefits of these optimisations for retrieval pipelines involving both the Anserini and Terrier IR platforms.
REL: Working out is all you need
Recent developments, particularly OpenAI's O1 model, have demonstrated the remarkable potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning tasks. Through analysis of O1's outputs and provided sample Chain-of-Thought (CoT) demonstrations, we observe that it approaches problem-solving in a distinctly human-like manner, systematically brainstorming ideas, testing hypotheses, verifying results, and planning comprehensive solutions. These sophisticated reasoning capabilities remain notably absent in other state-of-the-art language models. In this paper, we hypothesize that this performance gap stems from the limited availability of high-quality reasoning process data in current training sets. We demonstrate that by constructing a specialized dataset focused on explicit problem-solving workflows ("worked solutions"), we can elicit substantially improved planning capabilities from existing models. Additionally, we propose the Reasoning Enhancement Loop (REL), a method for generating synthetic worked solutions.
Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs
The remarkable performance of models like the OpenAI o1 can be attributed to their ability to emulate human-like long-time thinking during inference. These models employ extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, exploring multiple strategies to enhance problem-solving capabilities. However, a critical question remains: How to intelligently and efficiently scale computational resources during testing. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the prevalent issue of overthinking in these models, where excessive computational resources are allocated for simple problems with minimal benefit. We introduce novel efficiency metrics from both outcome and process perspectives to evaluate the rational use of computational resources by o1-like models. Using a self-training paradigm, we propose strategies to mitigate overthinking, streamlining reasoning processes without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach successfully reduces computational overhead while preserving model performance across a range of testsets with varying difficulty levels, such as GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.
Thoughts Are All Over the Place: On the Underthinking of o1-Like LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's o1 have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute and exhibiting human-like deep thinking. However, we identify a phenomenon we term underthinking, where o1-like LLMs frequently switch between different reasoning thoughts without sufficiently exploring promising paths to reach a correct solution. This behavior leads to inadequate depth of reasoning and decreased performance, particularly on challenging mathematical problems. To systematically analyze this issue, we conduct experiments on three challenging test sets and two representative open-source o1-like models, revealing that frequent thought switching correlates with incorrect responses. We introduce a novel metric to quantify underthinking by measuring token efficiency in incorrect answers. To address underthinking, we propose a decoding strategy with thought switching penalty TIP that discourages premature transitions between thoughts, encouraging deeper exploration of each reasoning path. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves accuracy across challenging datasets without requiring model fine-tuning. Our findings contribute to understanding reasoning inefficiencies in o1-like LLMs and offer a practical solution to enhance their problem-solving capabilities.
DRBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Enterprise Deep Research
We introduce DRBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on complex, open-ended deep research tasks in enterprise settings. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on simple questions or web-only queries, DRBench evaluates agents on multi-step queries (for example, ``What changes should we make to our product roadmap to ensure compliance with this standard?") that require identifying supporting facts from both the public web and private company knowledge base. Each task is grounded in realistic user personas and enterprise context, spanning a heterogeneous search space that includes productivity software, cloud file systems, emails, chat conversations, and the open web. Tasks are generated through a carefully designed synthesis pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, and agents are evaluated on their ability to recall relevant insights, maintain factual accuracy, and produce coherent, well-structured reports. We release 15 deep research tasks across 10 domains, such as Sales, Cybersecurity, and Compliance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DRBench by evaluating diverse DR agents across open- and closed-source models (such as GPT, Llama, and Qwen) and DR strategies, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and the critical path for advancing enterprise deep research. Code is available at https://github.com/ServiceNow/drbench.
Mini-o3: Scaling Up Reasoning Patterns and Interaction Turns for Visual Search
Recent advances in large multimodal models have leveraged image-based tools with reinforcement learning to tackle visual problems. However, existing open-source approaches often exhibit monotonous reasoning patterns and allow only a limited number of interaction turns, making them inadequate for difficult tasks that require trial-and-error exploration. In this work, we address this limitation by scaling up tool-based interactions and introduce Mini-o3, a system that executes deep, multi-turn reasoning -- spanning tens of steps -- and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging visual search tasks. Our recipe for reproducing OpenAI o3-style behaviors comprises three key components. First, we construct the Visual Probe Dataset, a collection of thousands of challenging visual search problems designed for exploratory reasoning. Second, we develop an iterative data collection pipeline to obtain cold-start trajectories that exhibit diverse reasoning patterns, including depth-first search, trial-and-error, and goal maintenance. Third, we propose an over-turn masking strategy that prevents penalization of over-turn responses (those that hit the maximum number of turns) during reinforcement learning, thereby balancing training-time efficiency with test-time scalability. Despite training with an upper bound of only six interaction turns, our model generates trajectories that naturally scale to tens of turns at inference time, with accuracy improving as the number of turns increases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mini-o3 produces rich reasoning patterns and deep thinking paths, effectively solving challenging visual search problems.
AI-Researcher: Autonomous Scientific Innovation
The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated. Our framework seamlessly orchestrates the complete research pipeline--from literature review and hypothesis generation to algorithm implementation and publication-ready manuscript preparation--with minimal human intervention. To rigorously assess autonomous research capabilities, we develop Scientist-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising state-of-the-art papers across diverse AI research domains, featuring both guided innovation and open-ended exploration tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AI-Researcher achieves remarkable implementation success rates and produces research papers that approach human-level quality. This work establishes new foundations for autonomous scientific innovation that can complement human researchers by systematically exploring solution spaces beyond cognitive limitations.
O1 Embedder: Let Retrievers Think Before Action
The growing power of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized how people access and utilize information. Notably, the LLMs excel at performing fine-grained data representation, which facilitates precise retrieval of information. They also generate high-quality answers based on external references, enabling the production of useful knowledge. The recent introduction of reasoning models, like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, marks another leap forward, highlighting LLMs' ability to think progressively before delivering final answers. This breakthrough significantly improves the ability to address complex tasks, e.g., coding and math proofs. Inspired by this progress, we aim to develop similar capabilities for retrieval models, which hold great promise for tackling critical challenges in the field, including multi-task retrieval, zero-shot retrieval, and tasks requiring intensive reasoning of complex relationships. With this motivation, we propose a novel approach called O1 Embedder, which generates useful thoughts for the input query before making retrieval for the target documents. To realize this objective, we conquer two technical difficulties. First, we design a data synthesis workflow, creating training signals for O1 Embedder by generating initial thoughts from an LLM-expert and subsequently refining them using a retrieval committee. Second, we optimize the training process, enabling a pre-trained model to be jointly fine-tuned to generate retrieval thoughts via behavior cloning and perform dense retrieval through contrastive learning. Our approach is evaluated by comprehensive experiments, where substantial improvements are achieved across 12 popular datasets, spanning both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. These results highlight O1 Embedder's remarkable accuracy and generalizability, paving the way for the development of next-generation IR foundation models.
einspace: Searching for Neural Architectures from Fundamental Operations
Neural architecture search (NAS) finds high performing networks for a given task. Yet the results of NAS are fairly prosaic; they did not e.g. create a shift from convolutional structures to transformers. This is not least because the search spaces in NAS often aren't diverse enough to include such transformations a priori. Instead, for NAS to provide greater potential for fundamental design shifts, we need a novel expressive search space design which is built from more fundamental operations. To this end, we introduce einspace, a search space based on a parameterised probabilistic context-free grammar. Our space is versatile, supporting architectures of various sizes and complexities, while also containing diverse network operations which allow it to model convolutions, attention components and more. It contains many existing competitive architectures, and provides flexibility for discovering new ones. Using this search space, we perform experiments to find novel architectures as well as improvements on existing ones on the diverse Unseen NAS datasets. We show that competitive architectures can be obtained by searching from scratch, and we consistently find large improvements when initialising the search with strong baselines. We believe that this work is an important advancement towards a transformative NAS paradigm where search space expressivity and strategic search initialisation play key roles.
A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis
Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for future research are discussed.
Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence Using Code-Generating Language Models
Recent progress in large-scale language models has enabled breakthroughs in previously intractable computer programming tasks. Prior work in meta-learning and neural architecture search has led to substantial successes across various task domains, spawning myriad approaches for algorithmically optimizing the design and learning dynamics of deep learning models. At the intersection of these research areas, we implement a code-generating language model with the ability to modify its own source code. Self-programming AI algorithms have been of interest since the dawn of AI itself. Although various theoretical formulations of generalized self-programming AI have been posed, no such system has been successfully implemented to date under real-world computational constraints. Applying AI-based code generation to AI itself, we develop and experimentally validate the first practical implementation of a self-programming AI system. We empirically show that a self-programming AI implemented using a code generation model can successfully modify its own source code to improve performance and program sub-models to perform auxiliary tasks. Our model can self-modify various properties including model architecture, computational capacity, and learning dynamics.
DeepScientist: Advancing Frontier-Pushing Scientific Findings Progressively
While previous AI Scientist systems can generate novel findings, they often lack the focus to produce scientifically valuable contributions that address pressing human-defined challenges. We introduce DeepScientist, a system designed to overcome this by conducting goal-oriented, fully autonomous scientific discovery over month-long timelines. It formalizes discovery as a Bayesian Optimization problem, operationalized through a hierarchical evaluation process consisting of "hypothesize, verify, and analyze". Leveraging a cumulative Findings Memory, this loop intelligently balances the exploration of novel hypotheses with exploitation, selectively promoting the most promising findings to higher-fidelity levels of validation. Consuming over 20,000 GPU hours, the system generated about 5,000 unique scientific ideas and experimentally validated approximately 1100 of them, ultimately surpassing human-designed state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three frontier AI tasks by 183.7\%, 1.9\%, and 7.9\%. This work provides the first large-scale evidence of an AI achieving discoveries that progressively surpass human SOTA on scientific tasks, producing valuable findings that genuinely push the frontier of scientific discovery. To facilitate further research into this process, we will open-source all experimental logs and system code at https://github.com/ResearAI/DeepScientist/.
Dolphin: Closed-loop Open-ended Auto-research through Thinking, Practice, and Feedback
The scientific research paradigm is undergoing a profound transformation owing to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent works demonstrate that various AI-assisted research methods can largely improve research efficiency by improving data analysis, accelerating computation, and fostering novel idea generation. To further move towards the ultimate goal (i.e., automatic scientific research), in this paper, we propose Dolphin, the first closed-loop open-ended auto-research framework to further build the entire process of human scientific research. Dolphin can generate research ideas, perform experiments, and get feedback from experimental results to generate higher-quality ideas. More specifically, Dolphin first generates novel ideas based on relevant papers which are ranked by the topic and task attributes. Then, the codes are automatically generated and debugged with the exception-traceback-guided local code structure. Finally, Dolphin automatically analyzes the results of each idea and feeds the results back to the next round of idea generation. Experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets of different topics and results show that Dolphin can generate novel ideas continuously and complete the experiment in a loop. We highlight that Dolphin can automatically propose methods that are comparable to the state-of-the-art in some tasks such as 2D image classification and 3D point classification.
"Help Me Help the AI": Understanding How Explainability Can Support Human-AI Interaction
Despite the proliferation of explainable AI (XAI) methods, little is understood about end-users' explainability needs and behaviors around XAI explanations. To address this gap and contribute to understanding how explainability can support human-AI interaction, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 20 end-users of a real-world AI application, the Merlin bird identification app, and inquired about their XAI needs, uses, and perceptions. We found that participants desire practically useful information that can improve their collaboration with the AI, more so than technical system details. Relatedly, participants intended to use XAI explanations for various purposes beyond understanding the AI's outputs: calibrating trust, improving their task skills, changing their behavior to supply better inputs to the AI, and giving constructive feedback to developers. Finally, among existing XAI approaches, participants preferred part-based explanations that resemble human reasoning and explanations. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future XAI design.
Dialogue Agents 101: A Beginner's Guide to Critical Ingredients for Designing Effective Conversational Systems
Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of conversational tasks, datasets, and methods. However, with numerous tasks being explored simultaneously, the current landscape of conversational AI becomes fragmented. Therefore, initiating a well-thought-out model for a dialogue agent can pose significant challenges for a practitioner. Towards highlighting the critical ingredients needed for a practitioner to design a dialogue agent from scratch, the current study provides a comprehensive overview of the primary characteristics of a dialogue agent, the supporting tasks, their corresponding open-domain datasets, and the methods used to benchmark these datasets. We observe that different methods have been used to tackle distinct dialogue tasks. However, building separate models for each task is costly and does not leverage the correlation among the several tasks of a dialogue agent. As a result, recent trends suggest a shift towards building unified foundation models. To this end, we propose UNIT, a UNified dIalogue dataseT constructed from conversations of existing datasets for different dialogue tasks capturing the nuances for each of them. We also examine the evaluation strategies used to measure the performance of dialogue agents and highlight the scope for future research in the area of conversational AI.
Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey
In the field of visual scene understanding, deep neural networks have made impressive advancements in various core tasks like segmentation, tracking, and detection. However, most approaches operate on the close-set assumption, meaning that the model can only identify pre-defined categories that are present in the training set. Recently, open vocabulary settings were proposed due to the rapid progress of vision language pre-training. These new approaches seek to locate and recognize categories beyond the annotated label space. The open vocabulary approach is more general, practical, and effective compared to weakly supervised and zero-shot settings. This paper provides a thorough review of open vocabulary learning, summarizing and analyzing recent developments in the field. In particular, we begin by comparing it to related concepts such as zero-shot learning, open-set recognition, and out-of-distribution detection. Then, we review several closely related tasks in the case of segmentation and detection, including long-tail problems, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. For the method survey, we first present the basic knowledge of detection and segmentation in close-set as the preliminary knowledge. Next, we examine various scenarios in which open vocabulary learning is used, identifying common design elements and core ideas. Then, we compare the recent detection and segmentation approaches in commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we conclude with insights, issues, and discussions regarding future research directions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive literature review of open vocabulary learning. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/jianzongwu/Awesome-Open-Vocabulary.
InDL: A New Dataset and Benchmark for In-Diagram Logic Interpretation based on Visual Illusion
This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating deep learning models' capacity for in-diagram logic interpretation. Leveraging the intriguing realm of visual illusions, we establish a unique dataset, InDL, designed to rigorously test and benchmark these models. Deep learning has witnessed remarkable progress in domains such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, models often stumble in tasks requiring logical reasoning due to their inherent 'black box' characteristics, which obscure the decision-making process. Our work presents a new lens to understand these models better by focusing on their handling of visual illusions -- a complex interplay of perception and logic. We utilize six classic geometric optical illusions to create a comparative framework between human and machine visual perception. This methodology offers a quantifiable measure to rank models, elucidating potential weaknesses and providing actionable insights for model improvements. Our experimental results affirm the efficacy of our benchmarking strategy, demonstrating its ability to effectively rank models based on their logic interpretation ability. As part of our commitment to reproducible research, the source code and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/rabbit-magic-wh/InDL
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) for code have become indispensable in various domains, including code generation, reasoning tasks and agent systems.While open-access code LLMs are increasingly approaching the performance levels of proprietary models, high-quality code LLMs suitable for rigorous scientific investigation, particularly those with reproducible data processing pipelines and transparent training protocols, remain limited. The scarcity is due to various challenges, including resource constraints, ethical considerations, and the competitive advantages of keeping models advanced. To address the gap, we introduce OpenCoder, a top-tier code LLM that not only achieves performance comparable to leading models but also serves as an ``open cookbook'' for the research community. Unlike most prior efforts, we release not only model weights and inference code, but also the reproducible training data, complete data processing pipeline, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols for open scientific research. Through this comprehensive release, we identify the key ingredients for building a top-tier code LLM: (1) code optimized heuristic rules for data cleaning and methods for data deduplication, (2) recall of text corpus related to code and (3) high-quality synthetic data in both annealing and supervised fine-tuning stages. By offering this level of openness, we aim to broaden access to all aspects of a top-tier code LLM, with OpenCoder serving as both a powerful model and an open foundation to accelerate research, and enable reproducible advancements in code AI.
OpenCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents
Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AgentNet, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales. Our end-to-end agent models demonstrate strong performance across CUA benchmarks. In particular, OpenCUA-32B achieves an average success rate of 34.8% on OSWorld-Verified, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among open-source models and surpassing OpenAI CUA (GPT-4o). Further analysis confirms that our approach generalizes well across domains and benefits significantly from increased test-time computation. We release our annotation tool, datasets, code, and models to build open foundations for further CUA research.
Decoupled Planning and Execution: A Hierarchical Reasoning Framework for Deep Search
Complex information needs in real-world search scenarios demand deep reasoning and knowledge synthesis across diverse sources, which traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines struggle to address effectively. Current reasoning-based approaches suffer from a fundamental limitation: they use a single model to handle both high-level planning and detailed execution, leading to inefficient reasoning and limited scalability. In this paper, we introduce HiRA, a hierarchical framework that separates strategic planning from specialized execution. Our approach decomposes complex search tasks into focused subtasks, assigns each subtask to domain-specific agents equipped with external tools and reasoning capabilities, and coordinates the results through a structured integration mechanism. This separation prevents execution details from disrupting high-level reasoning while enabling the system to leverage specialized expertise for different types of information processing. Experiments on four complex, cross-modal deep search benchmarks demonstrate that HiRA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RAG and agent-based systems. Our results show improvements in both answer quality and system efficiency, highlighting the effectiveness of decoupled planning and execution for multi-step information seeking tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/HiRA.
Augmenting LLMs with Knowledge: A survey on hallucination prevention
Large pre-trained language models have demonstrated their proficiency in storing factual knowledge within their parameters and achieving remarkable results when fine-tuned for downstream natural language processing tasks. Nonetheless, their capacity to access and manipulate knowledge with precision remains constrained, resulting in performance disparities on knowledge-intensive tasks when compared to task-specific architectures. Additionally, the challenges of providing provenance for model decisions and maintaining up-to-date world knowledge persist as open research frontiers. To address these limitations, the integration of pre-trained models with differentiable access mechanisms to explicit non-parametric memory emerges as a promising solution. This survey delves into the realm of language models (LMs) augmented with the ability to tap into external knowledge sources, including external knowledge bases and search engines. While adhering to the standard objective of predicting missing tokens, these augmented LMs leverage diverse, possibly non-parametric external modules to augment their contextual processing capabilities, departing from the conventional language modeling paradigm. Through an exploration of current advancements in augmenting large language models with knowledge, this work concludes that this emerging research direction holds the potential to address prevalent issues in traditional LMs, such as hallucinations, un-grounded responses, and scalability challenges.
Layer by Layer: Uncovering Hidden Representations in Language Models
From extracting features to generating text, the outputs of large language models (LLMs) typically rely on their final layers, following the conventional wisdom that earlier layers capture only low-level cues. However, our analysis shows that intermediate layers can encode even richer representations, often improving performance on a wide range of downstream tasks. To explain and quantify these hidden-layer properties, we propose a unified framework of representation quality metrics based on information theory, geometry, and invariance to input perturbations. Our framework highlights how each model layer balances information compression and signal preservation, revealing why mid-depth embeddings can exceed the last layer's performance. Through extensive experiments on 32 text-embedding tasks and comparisons across model architectures (transformers, state-space models) and domains (language, vision), we demonstrate that intermediate layers consistently provide stronger features. These findings challenge the standard focus on final-layer embeddings and open new directions for model analysis and optimization, including strategic use of mid-layer representations for more robust and accurate AI systems.
DeepResearch Arena: The First Exam of LLMs' Research Abilities via Seminar-Grounded Tasks
Deep research agents have attracted growing attention for their potential to orchestrate multi-stage research workflows, spanning literature synthesis, methodological design, and empirical verification. Despite these strides, evaluating their research capability faithfully is rather challenging due to the difficulty of collecting frontier research questions that genuinely capture researchers' attention and intellectual curiosity. To address this gap, we introduce DeepResearch Arena, a benchmark grounded in academic seminars that capture rich expert discourse and interaction, better reflecting real-world research environments and reducing the risk of data leakage. To automatically construct DeepResearch Arena, we propose a Multi-Agent Hierarchical Task Generation (MAHTG) system that extracts research-worthy inspirations from seminar transcripts. The MAHTG system further translates research-worthy inspirations into high-quality research tasks, ensuring the traceability of research task formulation while filtering noise. With the MAHTG system, we curate DeepResearch Arena with over 10,000 high-quality research tasks from over 200 academic seminars, spanning 12 disciplines, such as literature, history, and science. Our extensive evaluation shows that DeepResearch Arena presents substantial challenges for current state-of-the-art agents, with clear performance gaps observed across different models.
Adding Gradient Noise Improves Learning for Very Deep Networks
Deep feedforward and recurrent networks have achieved impressive results in many perception and language processing applications. This success is partially attributed to architectural innovations such as convolutional and long short-term memory networks. The main motivation for these architectural innovations is that they capture better domain knowledge, and importantly are easier to optimize than more basic architectures. Recently, more complex architectures such as Neural Turing Machines and Memory Networks have been proposed for tasks including question answering and general computation, creating a new set of optimization challenges. In this paper, we discuss a low-overhead and easy-to-implement technique of adding gradient noise which we find to be surprisingly effective when training these very deep architectures. The technique not only helps to avoid overfitting, but also can result in lower training loss. This method alone allows a fully-connected 20-layer deep network to be trained with standard gradient descent, even starting from a poor initialization. We see consistent improvements for many complex models, including a 72% relative reduction in error rate over a carefully-tuned baseline on a challenging question-answering task, and a doubling of the number of accurate binary multiplication models learned across 7,000 random restarts. We encourage further application of this technique to additional complex modern architectures.
MedReseacher-R1: Expert-Level Medical Deep Researcher via A Knowledge-Informed Trajectory Synthesis Framework
Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have shown impressive capabilities spanning multiple domains, exemplified by deep research systems that demonstrate superior performance on complex information-seeking and synthesis tasks. While general-purpose deep research agents have shown impressive capabilities, they struggle significantly with medical domain challenges, as evidenced by leading proprietary systems achieving limited accuracy on complex medical benchmarks. The key limitations are: (1) the model lacks sufficient dense medical knowledge for clinical reasoning, and (2) the framework is constrained by the absence of specialized retrieval tools tailored for medical contexts.We present a medical deep research agent that addresses these challenges through two core innovations. First, we develop a novel data synthesis framework using medical knowledge graphs, extracting the longest chains from subgraphs around rare medical entities to generate complex multi-hop question-answer pairs. Second, we integrate a custom-built private medical retrieval engine alongside general-purpose tools, enabling accurate medical information synthesis. Our approach generates 2100+ diverse trajectories across 12 medical specialties, each averaging 4.2 tool interactions.Through a two-stage training paradigm combining supervised fine-tuning and online reinforcement learning with composite rewards, our MedResearcher-R1-32B model demonstrates exceptional performance, establishing new state-of-the-art results on medical benchmarks while maintaining competitive performance on general deep research tasks. Our work demonstrates that strategic domain-specific innovations in architecture, tool design, and training data construction can enable smaller open-source models to outperform much larger proprietary systems in specialized domains.
Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models
Sora is a text-to-video generative AI model, released by OpenAI in February 2024. The model is trained to generate videos of realistic or imaginative scenes from text instructions and show potential in simulating the physical world. Based on public technical reports and reverse engineering, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the model's background, related technologies, applications, remaining challenges, and future directions of text-to-video AI models. We first trace Sora's development and investigate the underlying technologies used to build this "world simulator". Then, we describe in detail the applications and potential impact of Sora in multiple industries ranging from film-making and education to marketing. We discuss the main challenges and limitations that need to be addressed to widely deploy Sora, such as ensuring safe and unbiased video generation. Lastly, we discuss the future development of Sora and video generation models in general, and how advancements in the field could enable new ways of human-AI interaction, boosting productivity and creativity of video generation.
Language Models for Code Optimization: Survey, Challenges and Future Directions
Language models (LMs) built upon deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently demonstrated breakthrough effectiveness in software engineering tasks such as code generation, completion, and repair. This has paved the way for the emergence of LM-based code optimization techniques, which are crucial for enhancing the performance of existing programs, such as accelerating program execution time. However, a comprehensive survey dedicated to this specific application has been lacking. To fill this gap, we present a systematic literature review of over 50 primary studies, identifying emerging trends and addressing 11 specialized questions. Our findings reveal five critical open challenges, such as balancing model complexity with practical usability, cross-language/performance generalizability, and building trust in AI-driven solutions. Furthermore, we provide eight future research directions to facilitate more efficient, robust, and reliable LM-based code optimization. Thereby, this study aims to provide actionable insights and foundational references for both researchers and practitioners in this rapidly evolving field.
Beyond Ten Turns: Unlocking Long-Horizon Agentic Search with Large-Scale Asynchronous RL
Recent advancements in LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external tools. Among diverse choices of tools, search tools play a pivotal role in accessing vast external knowledge. However, open-source agents still fall short of achieving expert-level Search Intelligence, the ability to resolve ambiguous queries, generate precise searches, analyze results, and conduct thorough exploration. Existing approaches fall short in scalability, efficiency, and data quality. For example, small turn limits in existing online RL methods, e.g. <=10, restrict complex strategy learning. This paper introduces ASearcher, an open-source project for large-scale RL training of search agents. Our key contributions include: (1) Scalable fully asynchronous RL training that enables long-horizon search while maintaining high training efficiency. (2) A prompt-based LLM agent that autonomously synthesizes high-quality and challenging QAs, creating a large-scale QA dataset. Through RL training, our prompt-based QwQ-32B agent achieves substantial improvements, with 46.7% and 20.8% Avg@4 gains on xBench and GAIA, respectively. Notably, our agent exhibits extreme long-horizon search, with tool calls exceeding 40 turns and output tokens exceeding 150k during training time. With a simple agent design and no external LLMs, ASearcher-Web-QwQ achieves Avg@4 scores of 42.1 on xBench and 52.8 on GAIA, surpassing existing open-source 32B agents. We open-source our models, training data, and codes in https://github.com/inclusionAI/ASearcher.
DeepArchitect: Automatically Designing and Training Deep Architectures
In deep learning, performance is strongly affected by the choice of architecture and hyperparameters. While there has been extensive work on automatic hyperparameter optimization for simple spaces, complex spaces such as the space of deep architectures remain largely unexplored. As a result, the choice of architecture is done manually by the human expert through a slow trial and error process guided mainly by intuition. In this paper we describe a framework for automatically designing and training deep models. We propose an extensible and modular language that allows the human expert to compactly represent complex search spaces over architectures and their hyperparameters. The resulting search spaces are tree-structured and therefore easy to traverse. Models can be automatically compiled to computational graphs once values for all hyperparameters have been chosen. We can leverage the structure of the search space to introduce different model search algorithms, such as random search, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), and sequential model-based optimization (SMBO). We present experiments comparing the different algorithms on CIFAR-10 and show that MCTS and SMBO outperform random search. In addition, these experiments show that our framework can be used effectively for model discovery, as it is possible to describe expressive search spaces and discover competitive models without much effort from the human expert. Code for our framework and experiments has been made publicly available.
MERA: A Comprehensive LLM Evaluation in Russian
Over the past few years, one of the most notable advancements in AI research has been in foundation models (FMs), headlined by the rise of language models (LMs). As the models' size increases, LMs demonstrate enhancements in measurable aspects and the development of new qualitative features. However, despite researchers' attention and the rapid growth in LM application, the capabilities, limitations, and associated risks still need to be better understood. To address these issues, we introduce an open Multimodal Evaluation of Russian-language Architectures (MERA), a new instruction benchmark for evaluating foundation models oriented towards the Russian language. The benchmark encompasses 21 evaluation tasks for generative models in 11 skill domains and is designed as a black-box test to ensure the exclusion of data leakage. The paper introduces a methodology to evaluate FMs and LMs in zero- and few-shot fixed instruction settings that can be extended to other modalities. We propose an evaluation methodology, an open-source code base for the MERA assessment, and a leaderboard with a submission system. We evaluate open LMs as baselines and find that they are still far behind the human level. We publicly release MERA to guide forthcoming research, anticipate groundbreaking model features, standardize the evaluation procedure, and address potential societal drawbacks.
