Daily Papers

While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 4.0% , achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools.

Autoformalization is the task of translating natural language materials into machine-verifiable formalisations. Progress in autoformalization research is hindered by the lack of a sizeable dataset consisting of informal-formal pairs expressing the same essence. Existing methods tend to circumvent this challenge by manually curating small corpora or using few-shot learning with large language models. But these methods suffer from data scarcity and formal language acquisition difficulty. In this work, we create MMA, a large, flexible, multilingual, and multi-domain dataset of informal-formal pairs, by using a language model to translate in the reverse direction, that is, from formal mathematical statements into corresponding informal ones. Experiments show that language models fine-tuned on MMA produce 16-18% of statements acceptable with minimal corrections on the miniF2F and ProofNet benchmarks, up from 0% with the base model. We demonstrate that fine-tuning on multilingual formal data results in more capable autoformalization models even when deployed on monolingual tasks.

Autoformalization, which translates natural language mathematics into machine-verifiable formal statements, is critical for using formal mathematical reasoning to solve math problems stated in natural language. While Large Language Models can generate syntactically correct formal statements, they often fail to preserve the original problem's semantic intent. This limitation arises from the LLM approaches' treating autoformalization as a simplistic translation task which lacks mechanisms for self-reflection and iterative refinement that human experts naturally employ. To address these issues, we propose ReForm, a Reflective Autoformalization method that tightly integrates semantic consistency evaluation into the autoformalization process. This enables the model to iteratively generate formal statements, assess its semantic fidelity, and self-correct identified errors through progressive refinement. To effectively train this reflective model, we introduce Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization (PBSO), which employs different rewards at different sequence positions to ensure that the model develops both accurate autoformalization and correct semantic validations, preventing superficial critiques that would undermine the purpose of reflection. Extensive experiments across four autoformalization benchmarks demonstrate that ReForm achieves an average improvement of 17.2 percentage points over the strongest baselines. To further ensure evaluation reliability, we introduce ConsistencyCheck, a benchmark of 859 expert-annotated items that not only validates LLMs as judges but also reveals that autoformalization is inherently difficult: even human experts produce semantic errors in up to 38.5% of cases.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on complex reasoning tasks. However, despite their strong reasoning capabilities in high-resource languages (e.g., English and Chinese), a significant performance gap persists in other languages. To investigate this gap in Korean, we introduce HRM8K, a benchmark comprising 8,011 English-Korean parallel bilingual math problems. Through systematic analysis of model behaviors, we identify a key finding: these performance disparities stem primarily from difficulties in comprehending non-English inputs, rather than limitations in reasoning capabilities. Based on these findings, we propose UST (Understand, Solve, and Translate), a method that strategically uses English as an anchor for reasoning and solution generation. By fine-tuning the model on 130k synthetically generated data points, UST achieves a 10.91% improvement on the HRM8K benchmark and reduces the multilingual performance gap from 11.6% to 0.7%. Additionally, we show that improvements from UST generalize effectively to different Korean domains, demonstrating that capabilities acquired from machine-verifiable content can be generalized to other areas. We publicly release the benchmark, training dataset, and models.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for advancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, a critical paradox clouds its efficacy: RLVR-tuned models often underperform their base models on the Pass@K metric for solution-finding, leading to the hypothesis that RLVR merely re-weights existing reasoning paths at the cost of reasoning diversity. In this work, we resolve this contradiction by identifying the source of the problem: the Pass@K metric itself is a flawed measure of reasoning, as it credits correct final answers that probably arise from inaccurate or incomplete chains of thought (CoTs). To address this, we introduce a more precise evaluation metric, CoT-Pass@K, which mandates that both the reasoning path and the final answer be correct. We provide a new theoretical foundation that formalizes how RLVR, unlike traditional RL, is uniquely structured to incentivize logical integrity. Our empirical results are supportive: using CoT-Pass@K, we observe that RLVR can incentivize the generalization of correct reasoning for all values of K. Furthermore, by analyzing the training dynamics, we find that this enhanced reasoning capability emerges early in the training process and smoothly generalizes. Our work provides a clear perspective on the role of RLVR, offers a more reliable method for its evaluation, and confirms its potential to genuinely advance machine reasoning.

While reinforcement learning has advanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), these gains are largely confined to English, creating a significant performance disparity across languages. To address this, we introduce Pivot-Based Reinforcement Learning with Semantically Verifiable Rewards (PB-RLSVR), a novel framework that enhances multilingual reasoning by circumventing the need for human-annotated data in target languages. Our approach employs a high-performing English LLM as a "pivot" model to generate reference responses for reasoning tasks. A multilingual model is then rewarded based on the semantic equivalence of its responses to the English reference, effectively transferring the pivot model's reasoning capabilities across languages. We investigate several cross-lingual semantic reward functions, including those based on embeddings and machine translation. Extensive experiments on a suite of multilingual reasoning benchmarks show that our method significantly narrows the performance gap between English and other languages, substantially outperforming traditional PPO baselines. Specifically, our PB-RLSVR framework improves the average multilingual performance of Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen3-32B by 16.41% and 10.17%, respectively, demonstrating a powerful and data-efficient approach to building truly multilingual reasoning agents.

Large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) methods have proven highly effective in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for tasks with verifiable solutions such as mathematics and coding. However, applying this idea to machine translation (MT), where outputs are flexibly formatted and difficult to automatically evaluate with explicit rules, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce MT-R1-Zero, the first open-source adaptation of the R1-Zero RL framework for MT without supervised fine-tuning or cold-start. We propose a rule-metric mixed reward mechanism to guide LLMs towards improved translation quality via emergent reasoning. On the WMT 24 English-Chinese benchmark, our MT-R1-Zero-3B-Mix achieves competitive performance, surpassing TowerInstruct-7B-v0.2 by an average of 1.26 points. Meanwhile, our MT-R1-Zero-7B-Mix attains a high average score of 62.25 across all metrics, placing it on par with advanced proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet, while the MT-R1-Zero-7B-Sem variant achieves state-of-the-art scores on semantic metrics. Moreover, our work exhibits strong generalization capabilities on out-of-distribution MT tasks, robustly supporting multilingual and low-resource settings. Extensive analysis of model behavior across different initializations and reward metrics offers pioneering insight into the critical role of reward design, LLM adaptability, training dynamics, and emergent reasoning patterns within the R1-Zero paradigm for MT. Our code is available at https://github.com/fzp0424/MT-R1-Zero.

Jupyter notebooks are widely used for machine learning (ML) prototyping. Yet few debugging tools are designed for ML code in notebooks, potentially due to the lack of benchmarks. We introduce JunoBench, the first benchmark dataset of real-world crashes in Python-based ML notebooks. JunoBench has 111 curated and reproducible crashes from public Kaggle notebooks, each paired with a verifiable fix, ranging over popular ML libraries, including TensorFlow/Keras, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Pandas, and NumPy, as well as notebook-specific out-of-order execution issue. To support reproducibility and ease of use, JunoBench offers a unified execution environment where crashes and fixes can be reliably reproduced. By providing realistic crashes and their resolutions, JunoBench facilitates bug detection, localization, and repair tailored to the interactive and iterative nature of notebook-based ML development.

We consider a project (model) owner that would like to train a model by utilizing the local private data and compute power of interested data owners, i.e., trainers. Our goal is to design a data marketplace for such decentralized collaborative/federated learning applications that simultaneously provides i) proof-of-contribution based reward allocation so that the trainers are compensated based on their contributions to the trained model; ii) privacy-preserving decentralized model training by avoiding any data movement from data owners; iii) robustness against malicious parties (e.g., trainers aiming to poison the model); iv) verifiability in the sense that the integrity, i.e., correctness, of all computations in the data market protocol including contribution assessment and outlier detection are verifiable through zero-knowledge proofs; and v) efficient and universal design. We propose a blockchain-based marketplace design to achieve all five objectives mentioned above. In our design, we utilize a distributed storage infrastructure and an aggregator aside from the project owner and the trainers. The aggregator is a processing node that performs certain computations, including assessing trainer contributions, removing outliers, and updating hyper-parameters. We execute the proposed data market through a blockchain smart contract. The deployed smart contract ensures that the project owner cannot evade payment, and honest trainers are rewarded based on their contributions at the end of training. Finally, we implement the building blocks of the proposed data market and demonstrate their applicability in practical scenarios through extensive experiments.

The open-world deployment of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles needs to address a variety of ML vulnerabilities such as interpretability, verifiability, and performance limitations. Research explores different approaches to improve ML dependability by proposing new models and training techniques to reduce generalization error, achieve domain adaptation, and detect outlier examples and adversarial attacks. However, there is a missing connection between ongoing ML research and well-established safety principles. In this paper, we present a structured and comprehensive review of ML techniques to improve the dependability of ML algorithms in uncontrolled open-world settings. From this review, we propose the Taxonomy of ML Safety that maps state-of-the-art ML techniques to key engineering safety strategies. Our taxonomy of ML safety presents a safety-oriented categorization of ML techniques to provide guidance for improving dependability of the ML design and development. The proposed taxonomy can serve as a safety checklist to aid designers in improving coverage and diversity of safety strategies employed in any given ML system.