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Jul 20

Lite Any Stereo V2: Faster and Stronger Efficient Zero-Shot Stereo Matching

Recent advances in stereo matching have achieved remarkable accuracy, but often rely on large models, heavy computation, or additional foundation-model priors, making them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained platforms. In contrast, efficient stereo models offer faster inference but are commonly considered less capable of strong zero-shot generalization. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by introducing Lite Any Stereo V2 (LAS2), an ultra-fast model series designed for efficient zero-shot stereo matching. LAS2 is developed from both architecture and training perspectives. Architecturally, we revisit efficient stereo design under practical deployment settings and propose a 2D-only cost aggregation framework, optimized for real inference latency rather than theoretical MACs alone. For training, we develop a three-stage strategy that combines synthetic supervision, self-distillation, and real-world knowledge distillation. To improve the reliability of real-world pseudo supervision, we further introduce pseudo-label filtering and an error-clamping operation, enabling smoother synthetic-to-real transfer. We instantiate LAS2 as a family of models, including feed-forward variants for different efficiency budgets and an iterative variant for higher accuracy. Extensive experiments show that LAS2 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among efficient stereo methods while maintaining significantly lower latency. Specifically, LAS2-H achieves stronger overall zero-shot performance than the iterative method Fast-FoundationStereo, with 1.8x and 2.7x faster inference on H200 and Orin, respectively. The project page, demos, and code are available at https://tomtomtommi.github.io/LiteAnyStereoV2/.

Lite Pose: Efficient Architecture Design for 2D Human Pose Estimation

Pose estimation plays a critical role in human-centered vision applications. However, it is difficult to deploy state-of-the-art HRNet-based pose estimation models on resource-constrained edge devices due to the high computational cost (more than 150 GMACs per frame). In this paper, we study efficient architecture design for real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. We reveal that HRNet's high-resolution branches are redundant for models at the low-computation region via our gradual shrinking experiments. Removing them improves both efficiency and performance. Inspired by this finding, we design LitePose, an efficient single-branch architecture for pose estimation, and introduce two simple approaches to enhance the capacity of LitePose, including Fusion Deconv Head and Large Kernel Convs. Fusion Deconv Head removes the redundancy in high-resolution branches, allowing scale-aware feature fusion with low overhead. Large Kernel Convs significantly improve the model's capacity and receptive field while maintaining a low computational cost. With only 25% computation increment, 7x7 kernels achieve +14.0 mAP better than 3x3 kernels on the CrowdPose dataset. On mobile platforms, LitePose reduces the latency by up to 5.0x without sacrificing performance, compared with prior state-of-the-art efficient pose estimation models, pushing the frontier of real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/litepose.

  • 5 authors
·
May 2, 2022

LiteCoder-Terminal: Scaling Long-Horizon Terminal Environments for Learning Language Agents

Mastering terminal environments requires language agents capable of multi-step planning, feedback-grounded execution, and dynamic state adaptation. However, training such agents is currently bottlenecked by a reliance on scraped external repositories, which limits domain diversity, environment controllability, and the targeting of specific capability deficits. We introduce LiteCoder-Terminal-Gen, a zero-dependency synthesis pipeline that autonomously generates executable and verifiable terminal training environments directly from domain specifications. Using this framework, we construct two large-scale resources: LiteCoder-Terminal-SFT, comprising 11,255 expert trajectories across 10 domains, and LiteCoder-Terminal-RL, featuring 602 verifiable environments for trajectory-level preference optimization. Supervised fine-tuning of Qwen-family models on our SFT dataset yields agents that significantly outperform their base counterparts. Notably, our 32B variant achieves 29.06%, 18.54%, and 34.00% pass@1 on Terminal Bench 1.0, 2.0, and Pro, respectively. Furthermore, applying Direct Multi-turn Preference Optimization (DMPO) on our RL environments yields additional performance gains. These results systematically demonstrate that fully synthetic, executable environments offer a scalable and verifiable supervision signal for mastering complex, real-world command-line workflows.

  • 8 authors
·
May 27 2

LiteReality: Graphics-Ready 3D Scene Reconstruction from RGB-D Scans

We propose LiteReality, a novel pipeline that converts RGB-D scans of indoor environments into compact, realistic, and interactive 3D virtual replicas. LiteReality not only reconstructs scenes that visually resemble reality but also supports key features essential for graphics pipelines -- such as object individuality, articulation, high-quality physically based rendering materials, and physically based interaction. At its core, LiteReality first performs scene understanding and parses the results into a coherent 3D layout and objects with the help of a structured scene graph. It then reconstructs the scene by retrieving the most visually similar 3D artist-crafted models from a curated asset database. Next, the Material Painting module enhances realism by recovering high-quality, spatially varying materials. Finally, the reconstructed scene is integrated into a simulation engine with basic physical properties to enable interactive behavior. The resulting scenes are compact, editable, and fully compatible with standard graphics pipelines, making them suitable for applications in AR/VR, gaming, robotics, and digital twins. In addition, LiteReality introduces a training-free object retrieval module that achieves state-of-the-art similarity performance on the Scan2CAD benchmark, along with a robust material painting module capable of transferring appearances from images of any style to 3D assets -- even under severe misalignment, occlusion, and poor lighting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LiteReality on both real-life scans and public datasets. Project page: https://litereality.github.io; Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecK9m3LXg2c

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?

Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Our project page including a demonstration system and toolkit can be accessed here: https://litllm.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 14, 2024

Lite3R: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Efficient Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

Transformer-based 3D reconstruction has emerged as a powerful paradigm for recovering geometry and appearance from multi-view observations, offering strong performance across challenging visual conditions. As these models scale to larger backbones and higher-resolution inputs, improving their efficiency becomes increasingly important for practical deployment. However, modern 3D transformer pipelines face two coupled challenges: dense multi-view attention creates substantial token-mixing overhead, and low-precision execution can destabilize geometry-sensitive representations and degrade depth, pose, and 3D consistency. To address the first challenge, we propose Lite3R, a model-agnostic teacher-student framework that replaces dense attention with Sparse Linear Attention to preserve important geometric interactions while reducing attention cost. To address the second challenge, we introduce a parameter-efficient FP8-aware quantization-aware training (FP8-aware QAT) strategy with partial attention distillation, which freezes the vast majority of pretrained backbone parameters and trains only lightweight linear-branch projection layers, enabling stable low-precision deployment while retaining pretrained geometric priors. We further evaluate Lite3R on two representative backbones, VGGT and DA3-Large, over BlendedMVS and DTU64, showing that it substantially reduces latency (1.7-2.0x) and memory usage (1.9-2.4x) while preserving competitive reconstruction quality overall. These results demonstrate that Lite3R provides an effective algorithm-system co-design approach for practical transformer-based 3D reconstruction. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/Lite3R. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/Lite3R.

LiteVSR: Lightweight Adaptation of Frozen Diffusion Transformers for Video Super-Resolution

Adapting large-scale pre-trained video generators for Video Super-Resolution (VSR) in novel domains remains computationally prohibitive. Methods that reformulate generation as direct Low-Quality to High-Quality mappings deviate from the original generative formulation, demanding extensive fine-tuning. ControlNet-style adapters lose their efficiency under modern Diffusion Transformers since the absence of encoder-decoder hierarchy forces duplication of the entire backbone. We observe that flow matching offers a principled alternative for cross-domain VSR adaptation. By predicting a constant velocity field across all timesteps, the adaptation task reduces to learning a fixed injection pattern rather than time-varying transformations. Building on this insight, we propose LiteVSR, a minimalist framework that performs VSR using a completely frozen Diffusion Transformer with a lightweight State-Aware Adapter. The adapter employs a dual-stream architecture that extracts static structural cues from the LQ input and dynamic cues from intermediate denoising states, aligning them through time-dependent cross-attention to enable adaptive transition from structural alignment to texture refinement as denoising proceeds. LiteVSR achieves competitive restoration quality with only 11.25% trainable parameters and 12 GPU-hours of training on a single A100, while maintaining fast sampling (down to a single step) compatibility.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 7

LiteMedCoT-VL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for Medical Visual Question Answering

The reasoning gap between large and compact vision-language models (VLMs) limits the deployment of medical AI on portable clinical devices. Compact VLMs of 2--4B parameters can run on resource-constrained hardware but lack the multi-step reasoning capacity needed for interpretable clinical decision support. Existing knowledge distillation methods transfer answers without the reasoning process behind them. Medical visual question answering (VQA) serves as a testbed for this problem, as it requires models to integrate visual evidence with clinical knowledge through structured reasoning chains. We introduce LiteMedCoT-VL, a pipeline that transfers chain-of-thought reasoning from a 235B teacher model to 2B student models through LoRA-based fine-tuning on explanation-enriched training data. All inference is conducted without image captions by default, simulating the clinical scenario in which a physician interprets a medical image directly without an accompanying radiology report. On the PMC-VQA benchmark, LiteMedCoT-VL achieves 64.9% accuracy, exceeding the zero-shot Qwen3-VL-4B baseline of 53.9% by 11.0 percentage points and outperforming all published baselines. This result indicates that a 2B model with reasoning distillation can match or exceed models with twice the parameters. Visual grounding analysis shows that the model relies on image content rather than exploiting textual priors. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LiteMedCoT-VL.

  • 5 authors
·
May 9

LiteGUI: Distilling Compact GUI Agents with Reinforcement Learning

Developing lightweight, on-device vision-language GUI agents is essential for efficient cross-platform automated interaction. However, current on-device agents are constrained by limited model capacity, and further performance improvements remain urgently needed. Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for small-scale models often leads to overfitting, catastrophic forgetting and policy rigidity, and thus fails to fully address these challenges. In this work, we propose a novel SFT-free training paradigm that significantly enhances the performance of small-scale models. We first present the initial systematic integration of generalized knowledge distillation into the GUI agent domain via Guided On-policy Distillation. By incorporating oracle reference trajectories together with a dynamic retrieval mechanism, our method reduces hallucinations and mitigates the cognitive misalignment inherent in multi-solution GUI tasks. Building on this foundation, we further introduce a Multi-solution Dual-level GRPO framework that jointly aligns macro-level subtask planning with micro-level execution matching, thereby improving exploration in long-horizon GUI agent scenarios. In addition, we construct an automated data generation pipeline to synthesize GUI task trajectories with rich multi-solution annotations. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among lightweight models while remaining competitive with substantially larger-scale models across all benchmarks. Ablation studies further demonstrate that structured on-policy distillation and multi-solution dual-level exploration can fully unlock the capabilities of 2B/3B scale agents, surpassing the performance limits of conventional imitation learning.

  • 7 authors
·
May 7

Building Large-Scale English-Romanian Literary Translation Resources with Open Models

Literary translation has recently gained attention as a distinct and complex task in machine translation research. However, the translation by small open models remains an open problem. We contribute to this ongoing research by introducing TINYFABULIST TRANSLATION FRAMEWORK (TF2), a unified framework for dataset creation, fine-tuning, and evaluation in English-Romanian literary translations, centred on the creation and open release of both a compact, fine-tuned language model (TF2-12B) and large-scale synthetic parallel datasets (DS-TF2-EN-RO-3M and DS-TF2-EN-RO-15K). Building on DS-TF1-EN-3M (TF1), the largest collection of synthetic English fables to date, we address the need for rich, high-quality literary datasets in low-resource languages such as Romanian. Our pipeline first generates 15k high-quality Romanian references from the TF1 pool using a high-performing LLM. We then apply a two-stage fine-tuning process to a 12B-parameter open-weight model: (i) instruction tuning to capture genre-specific narrative style, and (ii) adapter compression for efficient deployment. Evaluation combines corpus-level BLEU and a five-dimension LLM-based rubric (accuracy, fluency, coherence, style, cultural adaptation) to provide a nuanced assessment of translation quality. Results show that our fine-tuned model achieves strong fluency and adequacy, narrowing the gap to top-performing proprietary models under automated and human-anchored evaluation, while being open, accessible, and significantly more cost-effective. Alongside the finetuned model, and both datasets, we publicly release all scripts and evaluation prompts. TF2 thus provides an end-to-end, reproducible pipeline for research on cost-efficient translation, cross-lingual narrative generation, and the broad adoption of open models for culturally significant literary content in low-resource settings.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 18

LiteCUA: Computer as MCP Server for Computer-Use Agent on AIOS

We present AIOS 1.0, a novel platform designed to advance computer-use agent (CUA) capabilities through environmental contextualization. While existing approaches primarily focus on building more powerful agent frameworks or enhancing agent models, we identify a fundamental limitation: the semantic disconnect between how language models understand the world and how computer interfaces are structured. AIOS 1.0 addresses this challenge by transforming computers into contextual environments that language models can natively comprehend, implementing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server architecture to abstract computer states and actions. This approach effectively decouples interface complexity from decision complexity, enabling agents to reason more effectively about computing environments. To demonstrate our platform's effectiveness, we introduce LiteCUA, a lightweight computer-use agent built on AIOS 1.0 that achieves a 14.66% success rate on the OSWorld benchmark, outperforming several specialized agent frameworks despite its simple architecture. Our results suggest that contextualizing computer environments for language models represents a promising direction for developing more capable computer-use agents and advancing toward AI that can interact with digital systems. The source code of LiteCUA is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/LiteCUA, and it is also integrated into the AIOS main branch as part of AIOS at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

  • 5 authors
·
May 24, 2025

LiteLMGuard: Seamless and Lightweight On-Device Prompt Filtering for Safeguarding Small Language Models against Quantization-induced Risks and Vulnerabilities

The growing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has influenced the development of their lighter counterparts-Small Language Models (SLMs)-to enable on-device deployment across smartphones and edge devices. These SLMs offer enhanced privacy, reduced latency, server-free functionality, and improved user experience. However, due to resource constraints of on-device environment, SLMs undergo size optimization through compression techniques like quantization, which can inadvertently introduce fairness, ethical and privacy risks. Critically, quantized SLMs may respond to harmful queries directly, without requiring adversarial manipulation, raising significant safety and trust concerns. To address this, we propose LiteLMGuard (LLMG), an on-device prompt guard that provides real-time, prompt-level defense for quantized SLMs. Additionally, our prompt guard is designed to be model-agnostic such that it can be seamlessly integrated with any SLM, operating independently of underlying architectures. Our LLMG formalizes prompt filtering as a deep learning (DL)-based prompt answerability classification task, leveraging semantic understanding to determine whether a query should be answered by any SLM. Using our curated dataset, Answerable-or-Not, we trained and fine-tuned several DL models and selected ELECTRA as the candidate, with 97.75% answerability classification accuracy. Our safety effectiveness evaluations demonstrate that LLMG defends against over 87% of harmful prompts, including both direct instruction and jailbreak attack strategies. We further showcase its ability to mitigate the Open Knowledge Attacks, where compromised SLMs provide unsafe responses without adversarial prompting. In terms of prompt filtering effectiveness, LLMG achieves near state-of-the-art filtering accuracy of 94%, with an average latency of 135 ms, incurring negligible overhead for users.

  • 4 authors
·
May 8, 2025

CHIME: LLM-Assisted Hierarchical Organization of Scientific Studies for Literature Review Support

Literature review requires researchers to synthesize a large amount of information and is increasingly challenging as the scientific literature expands. In this work, we investigate the potential of LLMs for producing hierarchical organizations of scientific studies to assist researchers with literature review. We define hierarchical organizations as tree structures where nodes refer to topical categories and every node is linked to the studies assigned to that category. Our naive LLM-based pipeline for hierarchy generation from a set of studies produces promising yet imperfect hierarchies, motivating us to collect CHIME, an expert-curated dataset for this task focused on biomedicine. Given the challenging and time-consuming nature of building hierarchies from scratch, we use a human-in-the-loop process in which experts correct errors (both links between categories and study assignment) in LLM-generated hierarchies. CHIME contains 2,174 LLM-generated hierarchies covering 472 topics, and expert-corrected hierarchies for a subset of 100 topics. Expert corrections allow us to quantify LLM performance, and we find that while they are quite good at generating and organizing categories, their assignment of studies to categories could be improved. We attempt to train a corrector model with human feedback which improves study assignment by 12.6 F1 points. We release our dataset and models to encourage research on developing better assistive tools for literature review.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 22, 2024

LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search

Literature search questions, such as "where can I find research on the evaluation of consistency in generated summaries?" pose significant challenges for modern search engines and retrieval systems. These questions often require a deep understanding of research concepts and the ability to reason over entire articles. In this work, we introduce LitSearch, a retrieval benchmark comprising 597 realistic literature search queries about recent ML and NLP papers. LitSearch is constructed using a combination of (1) questions generated by GPT-4 based on paragraphs containing inline citations from research papers and (2) questions about recently published papers, manually written by their authors. All LitSearch questions were manually examined or edited by experts to ensure high quality. We extensively benchmark state-of-the-art retrieval models and also evaluate two LLM-based reranking pipelines. We find a significant performance gap between BM25 and state-of-the-art dense retrievers, with a 24.8% difference in absolute recall@5. The LLM-based reranking strategies further improve the best-performing dense retriever by 4.4%. Additionally, commercial search engines and research tools like Google Search perform poorly on LitSearch, lagging behind the best dense retriever by 32 points. Taken together, these results show that LitSearch is an informative new testbed for retrieval systems while catering to a real-world use case.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

SkillOpt-Lite: Better and Faster Agent Self-evolution via One Line of Vibe

While skill optimization for autonomous agents has gained traction, existing methods rely on complex pipelines. This leaves a fundamental question unaddressed: What constitutes a minimal viable pipeline for skill optimization, where every component is justified by theory or empirical necessity? We formalize skill optimization via Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, mapping classical counterparts (central difference, trust regions) to recent literature. Noting that unlike blind numerical perturbations in classical ZO, skill trajectories serve as interpretable debugging feedback. Grounded in Claude Code philosophy and PAC learning, we establish three principles for convergence and generalization: file-system-based trajectory exploration, consensus attribute mining, and independent validation gating. Eliminating redundancies, we propose SkillOpt-Lite. It accelerates convergence and outperforms full SkillOpt: improving LiveMath by +8.8 points on GPT-5.5 and +25.4 points on GPT-5.4-nano, allowing the nano model to surpass standard GPT-5.4 optimized by SkillOpt. Finally, we integrate our framework into production coding agents like VSCode Copilot, enabling developers to evolve agent skills via one line of vibe. Because our framework treats all agent components simply as standard editable code, this minimal pipeline naturally generalizes to full harness optimization (HarnessOpt). On SpreadsheetBench, HarnessOpt enables GPT-5.4-nano to achieve 0.7758 accuracy, outperforming the larger GPT-5.5 running standard pipelines (0.7620). Code is available at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/SkillOpt-Lite.

lmms-lab LMMs-Lab
·
Jul 2 2

Ring-lite: Scalable Reasoning via C3PO-Stabilized Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

We present Ring-lite, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based large language model optimized via reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve efficient and robust reasoning capabilities. Built upon the publicly available Ling-lite model, a 16.8 billion parameter model with 2.75 billion activated parameters, our approach matches the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) small-scale reasoning models on challenging benchmarks (e.g., AIME, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond) while activating only one-third of the parameters required by comparable models. To accomplish this, we introduce a joint training pipeline integrating distillation with RL, revealing undocumented challenges in MoE RL training. First, we identify optimization instability during RL training, and we propose Constrained Contextual Computation Policy Optimization(C3PO), a novel approach that enhances training stability and improves computational throughput via algorithm-system co-design methodology. Second, we empirically demonstrate that selecting distillation checkpoints based on entropy loss for RL training, rather than validation metrics, yields superior performance-efficiency trade-offs in subsequent RL training. Finally, we develop a two-stage training paradigm to harmonize multi-domain data integration, addressing domain conflicts that arise in training with mixed dataset. We will release the model, dataset, and code.

  • 46 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025 2

mHC-lite: You Don't Need 20 Sinkhorn-Knopp Iterations

Hyper-Connections (HC) generalizes residual connections by introducing dynamic residual matrices that mix information across multiple residual streams, accelerating convergence in deep neural networks. However, unconstrained residual matrices can compromise training stability. To address this, DeepSeek's Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) approximately projects these matrices onto the Birkhoff polytope via iterative Sinkhorn--Knopp (SK) normalization. We identify two limitations of this approach: (i) finite SK iterations do not guarantee exact doubly stochasticity, leaving an approximation gap that can accumulate through network depth and undermine stability; (ii) efficient SK implementation requires highly specialized CUDA kernels, raising engineering barriers and reducing portability. Motivated by the Birkhoff--von Neumann theorem, we propose mHC-lite, a simple reparameterization that explicitly constructs doubly stochastic matrices as convex combinations of permutation matrices. This approach guarantees exact doubly stochasticity by construction and can be implemented using only native matrix operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mHC-lite matches or exceeds mHC in performance while achieving higher training throughput with a naive implementation and eliminating the residual instabilities observed in both HC and mHC. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FFTYYY/mhc-lite.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 9

LiST: Lite Prompted Self-training Makes Parameter-Efficient Few-shot Learners

We present a new method LiST is short for Lite Prompted Self-Training for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) for few-shot learning. LiST improves over recent methods that adopt prompt-based fine-tuning (FN) using two key techniques. The first is the use of self-training to leverage large amounts of unlabeled data for prompt-based FN in few-shot settings. We use self-training in conjunction with meta-learning for re-weighting noisy pseudo-prompt labels. Self-training is expensive as it requires updating all the model parameters repetitively. Therefore, we use a second technique for light-weight fine-tuning where we introduce a small number of task-specific parameters that are fine-tuned during self-training while keeping the PLM encoder frozen. Our experiments show that LiST can effectively leverage unlabeled data to improve the model performance for few-shot learning. Additionally, the fine-tuning is efficient as it only updates a small percentage of parameters and the overall model footprint is reduced since several tasks can share a common PLM encoder as backbone. A comprehensive study on six NLU tasks demonstrate LiST to improve by 35% over classic fine-tuning and 6% over prompt-based FN with 96% reduction in number of trainable parameters when fine-tuned with no more than 30 labeled examples from each task. With only 14M tunable parameters, LiST outperforms GPT-3 in-context learning by 33% on few-shot NLU tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 12, 2021

MapCoder-Lite: Distilling Multi-Agent Coding into a Single Small LLM

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced code generation from single-function tasks to competitive-programming problems, but existing multi-agent solutions either rely on costly large-scale (>30B) models or collapse when downsized to small open-source models. We present MapCoder-Lite, a framework for distilling the complex reasoning of large, multi-agent coding systems into a single 7B model. Our contribution is a novel, three-pillar methodology that synergistically generates, refines, and encodes multi-agent knowledge: (i) pass-based trajectory distillation from strong LLMs fixes format fragility in retrieval and reduces failures in debugging, (ii) supervisor-guided correction with global feedback strengthens planning and coding agents, and (iii) agent-wise LoRA fine-tuning delivers memory-efficient specialisation. Comprehensive evaluation on xCodeEval, APPS, and CodeContests shows that MapCoder-Lite more than doubles xCodeEval accuracy (from 13.2% to 28.3%), eliminates all format failures, while reducing GPU memory and token-generation time by 4x compared to a 32B model. It also achieves over 10% gains on simpler coding benchmarks, demonstrating broad improvements beyond competitive programming. These results demonstrate that careful agent-wise fine-tuning unleashes high-quality multi-agent coding on a small language model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/MapCoder-Lite.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025

PRISM Lite: A lightweight model for interactive 3D placenta segmentation in ultrasound

Placenta volume measured from 3D ultrasound (3DUS) images is an important tool for tracking the growth trajectory and is associated with pregnancy outcomes. Manual segmentation is the gold standard, but it is time-consuming and subjective. Although fully automated deep learning algorithms perform well, they do not always yield high-quality results for each case. Interactive segmentation models could address this issue. However, there is limited work on interactive segmentation models for the placenta. Despite their segmentation accuracy, these methods may not be feasible for clinical use as they require relatively large computational power which may be especially prohibitive in low-resource environments, or on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight interactive segmentation model aiming for clinical use to interactively segment the placenta from 3DUS images in real-time. The proposed model adopts the segmentation from our fully automated model for initialization and is designed in a human-in-the-loop manner to achieve iterative improvements. The Dice score and normalized surface Dice are used as evaluation metrics. The results show that our model can achieve superior performance in segmentation compared to state-of-the-art models while using significantly fewer parameters. Additionally, the proposed model is much faster for inference and robust to poor initial masks. The code is available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/PRISM-placenta.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 9, 2024

SALSA-Lite: A Fast and Effective Feature for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection with Microphone Arrays

Polyphonic sound event localization and detection (SELD) has many practical applications in acoustic sensing and monitoring. However, the development of real-time SELD has been limited by the demanding computational requirement of most recent SELD systems. In this work, we introduce SALSA-Lite, a fast and effective feature for polyphonic SELD using microphone array inputs. SALSA-Lite is a lightweight variation of a previously proposed SALSA feature for polyphonic SELD. SALSA, which stands for Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram, consists of multichannel log-spectrograms stacked channelwise with the normalized principal eigenvectors of the spectrotemporally corresponding spatial covariance matrices. In contrast to SALSA, which uses eigenvector-based spatial features, SALSA-Lite uses normalized inter-channel phase differences as spatial features, allowing a 30-fold speedup compared to the original SALSA feature. Experimental results on the TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2021 dataset showed that the SALSA-Lite feature achieved competitive performance compared to the full SALSA feature, and significantly outperformed the traditional feature set of multichannel log-mel spectrograms with generalized cross-correlation spectra. Specifically, using SALSA-Lite features increased localization-dependent F1 score and class-dependent localization recall by 15% and 5%, respectively, compared to using multichannel log-mel spectrograms with generalized cross-correlation spectra.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 15, 2021

SciLitLLM: How to Adapt LLMs for Scientific Literature Understanding

Scientific literature understanding is crucial for extracting targeted information and garnering insights, thereby significantly advancing scientific discovery. Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they face challenges in scientific literature understanding, primarily due to (1) a lack of scientific knowledge and (2) unfamiliarity with specialized scientific tasks. To develop an LLM specialized in scientific literature understanding, we propose a hybrid strategy that integrates continual pre-training (CPT) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to simultaneously infuse scientific domain knowledge and enhance instruction-following capabilities for domain-specific tasks.cIn this process, we identify two key challenges: (1) constructing high-quality CPT corpora, and (2) generating diverse SFT instructions. We address these challenges through a meticulous pipeline, including PDF text extraction, parsing content error correction, quality filtering, and synthetic instruction creation. Applying this strategy, we present a suite of LLMs: SciLitLLM, specialized in scientific literature understanding. These models demonstrate promising performance on scientific literature understanding benchmarks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present an effective framework that integrates CPT and SFT to adapt LLMs to scientific literature understanding, which can also be easily adapted to other domains. (2) We propose an LLM-based synthesis method to generate diverse and high-quality scientific instructions, resulting in a new instruction set -- SciLitIns -- for supervised fine-tuning in less-represented scientific domains. (3) SciLitLLM achieves promising performance improvements on scientific literature understanding benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024 1

pathfinder: A Semantic Framework for Literature Review and Knowledge Discovery in Astronomy

The exponential growth of astronomical literature poses significant challenges for researchers navigating and synthesizing general insights or even domain-specific knowledge. We present Pathfinder, a machine learning framework designed to enable literature review and knowledge discovery in astronomy, focusing on semantic searching with natural language instead of syntactic searches with keywords. Utilizing state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) and a corpus of 350,000 peer-reviewed papers from the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), Pathfinder offers an innovative approach to scientific inquiry and literature exploration. Our framework couples advanced retrieval techniques with LLM-based synthesis to search astronomical literature by semantic context as a complement to currently existing methods that use keywords or citation graphs. It addresses complexities of jargon, named entities, and temporal aspects through time-based and citation-based weighting schemes. We demonstrate the tool's versatility through case studies, showcasing its application in various research scenarios. The system's performance is evaluated using custom benchmarks, including single-paper and multi-paper tasks. Beyond literature review, Pathfinder offers unique capabilities for reformatting answers in ways that are accessible to various audiences (e.g. in a different language or as simplified text), visualizing research landscapes, and tracking the impact of observatories and methodologies. This tool represents a significant advancement in applying AI to astronomical research, aiding researchers at all career stages in navigating modern astronomy literature.

  • 30 authors
·
Aug 2, 2024

A foundation model for human-AI collaboration in medical literature mining

Systematic literature review is essential for evidence-based medicine, requiring comprehensive analysis of clinical trial publications. However, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) models for medical literature mining has been limited by insufficient training and evaluation across broad therapeutic areas and diverse tasks. Here, we present LEADS, an AI foundation model for study search, screening, and data extraction from medical literature. The model is trained on 633,759 instruction data points in LEADSInstruct, curated from 21,335 systematic reviews, 453,625 clinical trial publications, and 27,015 clinical trial registries. We showed that LEADS demonstrates consistent improvements over four cutting-edge generic large language models (LLMs) on six tasks. Furthermore, LEADS enhances expert workflows by providing supportive references following expert requests, streamlining processes while maintaining high-quality results. A study with 16 clinicians and medical researchers from 14 different institutions revealed that experts collaborating with LEADS achieved a recall of 0.81 compared to 0.77 experts working alone in study selection, with a time savings of 22.6%. In data extraction tasks, experts using LEADS achieved an accuracy of 0.85 versus 0.80 without using LEADS, alongside a 26.9% time savings. These findings highlight the potential of specialized medical literature foundation models to outperform generic models, delivering significant quality and efficiency benefits when integrated into expert workflows for medical literature mining.

  • 23 authors
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Jan 27, 2025

Sub-Billion, Super-Frontier: Small Language Models Rival Zero-Shot Frontier LLMs on General and Literary Relation Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong relation extraction (RE), but their computational demands and reliance on proprietary APIs limit deployment in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive settings. We investigate how far small language models (SLMs) can close this gap across general-domain and literary text. We evaluate five models from 360M to 3B parameters under three domain-composition regimes and two prompt-conditioned tuning styles (30 configurations), comparing them with zero-shot frontier LLMs and a discriminative RoBERTa baseline. Across nine benchmarks, the best sub-billion model, Qwen2.5-0.5B fine-tuned on pooled general-domain data, achieves a general-domain positive-class micro-F1 of 0.83, versus 0.69 for GPT-5.4 and 0.66 for Claude Sonnet 4.6 evaluated zero-shot. This does not imply that SLMs are intrinsically stronger; rather, targeted task adaptation enables 4-bit models deployable on a single consumer GPU to outperform general-purpose frontier systems under this protocol. An in-domain RoBERTa baseline also exceeds both frontier models, indicating that the gain stems from task adaptation rather than generative decoding. On literary RE, tuned SLMs reach 0.92 on the human-annotated Biographical benchmark versus 0.83 for GPT-5.4, and 0.833 versus 0.578 on the two-benchmark literary average. A targeted domain-adaptive pretraining case study yields no practically meaningful gain over supervised fine-tuning, while the cleanest within-family scale comparison shows only marginal improvement. These results show that, when task-specific data are available, compact task-adapted models can provide accurate, private, and hardware-efficient RE.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 20

TopVenues: A Reproducible Corpus and Tooling Substrate for Cybersecurity Literature Reviews

Cybersecurity literature reviews require a reproducible denominator: the set of papers that a protocol includes before screening and synthesis begin. Today, that denominator is often reconstructed from publisher portals, bibliographic indices, and scholarly application programming interfaces (APIs) whose coverage, formats, and query semantics change over time. This paper presents TopVenues, an open-source system that materializes corpus construction as a versioned research artifact. TopVenues declares a venue and year scope, uses DBLP Computer Science Bibliography (DBLP) as the metadata spine, enriches records with abstracts and BibTeX entries via open scholarly APIs and publisher-specific extractors, and stores the results in a monotonic SQLite snapshot, accessible via a command-line interface (CLI), a web interface, and export paths for review workflows. The May 2026 snapshot contains 9,925 papers from 11 cybersecurity sources over 2017 to 2026, with 99.86% abstract coverage and 99.99% BibTeX coverage; keyword search over the full corpus completes in under 31 ms, and a 250-test suite validates the data-integrity invariants. The fixed denominator also enables repeatable measurement: 29.2% of 2024 to 2025 papers from the four top-ranked security conferences in our scope appear as arXiv preprints, with a median of five months before publication, and a prior-author-track-record filter yields a 16.5x precision gain at 90% recall for triaging preprints that later appear in the same venue set. TopVenues links corpus construction to auditable cybersecurity measurement by making the corpus itself executable, inspectable, and citable. The artifact is available at https://github.com/sidneibarbieri/topVenues.

  • 3 authors
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Jun 15

Beyond Literal Translation: Evaluating Cultural Effectiveness in Social Media UGC

Social media platforms enable large-scale cross-lingual communication, but translating user-generated content (UGC) remains challenging due to its informal style, cultural references, and interaction-based expressions. While recent LLMs have improved translation quality, existing benchmarks and metrics often fail to capture whether translations convey intended meaning and cultural resonance in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce CULTURE-MT, a benchmark for social media translation that focuses on both CULtural Transmission and UGC-specific emotion REsonance. CULTURE-MT consists of 1,002 UGC notes across 14 domains, categorized into four types based on culture-loaded symbols and linguistic style features. We also construct UGC-oriented training data to fine-tune Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B as baselines. We propose cultural effectiveness as a new evaluation criterion, focusing on expression accuracy and cultural adaptability. Testing 15 models, including the baselines, we find that traditional metrics fail to capture cultural effectiveness. We also observe that cultural effectiveness on base LLMs correlates with model size. Our work provides a comprehensive evaluation system for UGC translation models and will offer an open evaluation platform to advance research in this area. We release the CULTURE-MT benchmark and provide an online leaderboard where submitted translation results can be evaluated by our trained JUDGER.

  • 10 authors
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May 24

Deep literature reviews: an application of fine-tuned language models to migration research

This paper presents a hybrid framework for literature reviews that augments traditional bibliometric methods with large language models (LLMs). By fine-tuning open-source LLMs, our approach enables scalable extraction of qualitative insights from large volumes of research content, enhancing both the breadth and depth of knowledge synthesis. To improve annotation efficiency and consistency, we introduce an error-focused validation process in which LLMs generate initial labels and human reviewers correct misclassifications. Applying this framework to over 20000 scientific articles about human migration, we demonstrate that a domain-adapted LLM can serve as a "specialist" model - capable of accurately selecting relevant studies, detecting emerging trends, and identifying critical research gaps. Notably, the LLM-assisted review reveals a growing scholarly interest in climate-induced migration. However, existing literature disproportionately centers on a narrow set of environmental hazards (e.g., floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and land degradation), while overlooking others that more directly affect human health and well-being, such as air and water pollution or infectious diseases. This imbalance highlights the need for more comprehensive research that goes beyond physical environmental changes to examine their ecological and societal consequences, particularly in shaping migration as an adaptive response. Overall, our proposed framework demonstrates the potential of fine-tuned LLMs to conduct more efficient, consistent, and insightful literature reviews across disciplines, ultimately accelerating knowledge synthesis and scientific discovery.

  • 3 authors
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Apr 17, 2025

A Literature Review of Literature Reviews in Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

By consolidating scattered knowledge, the literature review provides a comprehensive understanding of the investigated topic. However, reading, conducting, or peer-reviewing review papers generally demands a significant investment of time and effort from researchers. To improve efficiency, this paper aims to provide a thorough review of reviews in the PAMI field from diverse perspectives. First, this paper proposes several article-level, field-normalized, and large language model-empowered bibliometric indicators to evaluate reviews. To facilitate this, a meta-data database dubbed RiPAMI, and a topic dataset are constructed. Second, based on these indicators, the study presents comparative analyses of representative reviews, unveiling the characteristics of publications across various fields, periods, and journals. The newly emerging AI-generated literature reviews are also appraised, and the observed differences suggest that most AI-generated reviews still lag behind human-authored reviews in multiple aspects. Third, we briefly provide a subjective evaluation of representative PAMI reviews and introduce a paper structure-based typology of literature reviews. This typology may improve the clarity and effectiveness for scholars in reading and writing reviews, while also serving as a guide for AI systems in generating well-organized reviews. Finally, this work offers insights into the current challenges of literature reviews and envisions future directions for their development.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 20, 2024

Demonstrating Berkeley Humanoid Lite: An Open-source, Accessible, and Customizable 3D-printed Humanoid Robot

Despite significant interest and advancements in humanoid robotics, most existing commercially available hardware remains high-cost, closed-source, and non-transparent within the robotics community. This lack of accessibility and customization hinders the growth of the field and the broader development of humanoid technologies. To address these challenges and promote democratization in humanoid robotics, we demonstrate Berkeley Humanoid Lite, an open-source humanoid robot designed to be accessible, customizable, and beneficial for the entire community. The core of this design is a modular 3D-printed gearbox for the actuators and robot body. All components can be sourced from widely available e-commerce platforms and fabricated using standard desktop 3D printers, keeping the total hardware cost under $5,000 (based on U.S. market prices). The design emphasizes modularity and ease of fabrication. To address the inherent limitations of 3D-printed gearboxes, such as reduced strength and durability compared to metal alternatives, we adopted a cycloidal gear design, which provides an optimal form factor in this context. Extensive testing was conducted on the 3D-printed actuators to validate their durability and alleviate concerns about the reliability of plastic components. To demonstrate the capabilities of Berkeley Humanoid Lite, we conducted a series of experiments, including the development of a locomotion controller using reinforcement learning. These experiments successfully showcased zero-shot policy transfer from simulation to hardware, highlighting the platform's suitability for research validation. By fully open-sourcing the hardware design, embedded code, and training and deployment frameworks, we aim for Berkeley Humanoid Lite to serve as a pivotal step toward democratizing the development of humanoid robotics. All resources are available at https://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org.

  • 8 authors
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Apr 24, 2025

An Automated Pipeline for Character and Relationship Extraction from Readers' Literary Book Reviews on Goodreads.com

Reader reviews of literary fiction on social media, especially those in persistent, dedicated forums, create and are in turn driven by underlying narrative frameworks. In their comments about a novel, readers generally include only a subset of characters and their relationships, thus offering a limited perspective on that work. Yet in aggregate, these reviews capture an underlying narrative framework comprised of different actants (people, places, things), their roles, and interactions that we label the "consensus narrative framework". We represent this framework in the form of an actant-relationship story graph. Extracting this graph is a challenging computational problem, which we pose as a latent graphical model estimation problem. Posts and reviews are viewed as samples of sub graphs/networks of the hidden narrative framework. Inspired by the qualitative narrative theory of Greimas, we formulate a graphical generative Machine Learning (ML) model where nodes represent actants, and multi-edges and self-loops among nodes capture context-specific relationships. We develop a pipeline of interlocking automated methods to extract key actants and their relationships, and apply it to thousands of reviews and comments posted on Goodreads.com. We manually derive the ground truth narrative framework from SparkNotes, and then use word embedding tools to compare relationships in ground truth networks with our extracted networks. We find that our automated methodology generates highly accurate consensus narrative frameworks: for our four target novels, with approximately 2900 reviews per novel, we report average coverage/recall of important relationships of > 80% and an average edge detection rate of >89\%. These extracted narrative frameworks can generate insight into how people (or classes of people) read and how they recount what they have read to others.

  • 8 authors
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Apr 20, 2020