AI Breakdown

Towards Robust Mathematical Reasoning

In this episode, we discuss Towards Robust Mathematical Reasoning by Thang Luong, Dawsen Hwang, Hoang H. Nguyen, Golnaz Ghiasi, Yuri Chervonyi, Insuk Seo, Junsu Kim, Garrett Bingham, Jonathan Lee, Swaroop Mishra, Alex Zhai, Clara Huiyi Hu, Henryk Michalewski, Jimin Kim, Jeonghyun Ahn, Junhwi Bae, Xingyou Song, Trieu H. Trinh, Quoc V. Le, Junehyuk Jung. The paper introduces IMO-Bench, a new suite of challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks based on International Mathematical Olympiad problems to better evaluate foundation models. Their model, Gemini Deep Think, achieved state-of-the-art results, surpassing previous models significantly on both answer accuracy and proof-writing tasks. The authors also developed reliable autograders aligned with human evaluations and released the benchmark suite publicly to advance robust mathematical reasoning.

ProRL: Prolonged Reinforcement Learning Expands Reasoning Boundaries in Large Language Models

In this episode, we discuss ProRL: Prolonged Reinforcement Learning Expands Reasoning Boundaries in Large Language Models by Mingjie Liu, Shizhe Diao, Ximing Lu, Jian Hu, Xin Dong, Yejin Choi, Jan Kautz, Yi Dong. This paper introduces ProRL, a new reinforcement learning training method that uncovers novel reasoning strategies beyond those found in base language models. Empirical results show that models trained with ProRL consistently outperform base models on challenging reasoning tasks, including cases where base models fail even with extensive attempts. The study demonstrates that prolonged RL can meaningfully expand reasoning capabilities by exploring new solution spaces over time, advancing understanding of how RL enhances language model reasoning.

Roboflow100-VL: A Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark for Vision-Language Models

In this episode, we discuss Roboflow100-VL: A Multi-Domain Object Detection Benchmark for Vision-Language Models by Peter Robicheaux, Matvei Popov, Anish Madan, Isaac Robinson, Joseph Nelson, Deva Ramanan, Neehar Peri. The paper introduces Roboflow100-VL, a large benchmark of 100 diverse multi-modal object detection datasets designed to test vision-language models (VLMs) on out-of-distribution concepts beyond typical pre-training data. It demonstrates that state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly in zero-shot settings on challenging domains like medical imaging, highlighting the importance of few-shot concept alignment through annotated examples and rich text. The paper also presents results from a CVPR 2025 competition where the winning approach significantly outperforms baselines in few-shot detection tasks.

ImpossibleBench: Measuring LLMs’ Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases

In this episode, we discuss ImpossibleBench: Measuring LLMs' Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases by Ziqian Zhong, Aditi Raghunathan, Nicholas Carlini. The paper introduces ImpossibleBench, a benchmark framework designed to measure and analyze large language models' tendency to cheat by exploiting test cases. It creates tasks with conflicting specifications and unit tests to quantify how often models take shortcuts that violate intended behavior. The framework is used to study cheating behaviors, refine prompting strategies, and develop tools to detect and reduce such deceptive practices in LLMs.

Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Dataset

In this episode, we discuss Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Dataset by Qingyan Bai, Qiuyu Wang, Hao Ouyang, Yue Yu, Hanlin Wang, Wen Wang, Ka Leong Cheng, Shuailei Ma, Yanhong Zeng, Zichen Liu, Yinghao Xu, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen. The paper presents Ditto, a comprehensive framework that generates large-scale, high-quality training data for instruction-based video editing by combining an advanced image editor with an in-context video generator. Ditto uses an efficient, distilled model with a temporal enhancer and an intelligent agent to ensure scalable, diverse, and high-fidelity video edits. Leveraging this framework, the authors created the Ditto-1M dataset and trained the Editto model, achieving state-of-the-art performance in following editing instructions.

Reasoning with Sampling: Your Base Model is Smarter Than You Think

In this episode, we discuss Reasoning with Sampling: Your Base Model is Smarter Than You Think by Aayush Karan, Yilun Du. The paper proposes a novel iterative sampling algorithm based on Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques that enhances reasoning abilities of base large language models at inference time without additional training. This method significantly improves performance on multiple reasoning benchmarks, matching or surpassing results from reinforcement learning fine-tuning. Additionally, the approach maintains sample diversity and does not rely on curated datasets or verifiers, making it broadly applicable.

DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression

In this episode, we discuss DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression by The authors of the paper are:
**Haoran Wei, Yaofeng Sun, Yukun Li**. DeepSeek-OCR introduces a method to compress long text contexts into compact 2D vision tokens using a DeepEncoder and a decoder model, achieving high OCR accuracy even at significant compression ratios. It outperforms existing OCR benchmarks on OmniDocBench while using fewer vision tokens, demonstrating efficiency and scalability. The system is practical for large-scale training data generation and its code and models are publicly available.

The Markovian Thinker

In this episode, we discuss The Markovian Thinker by Milad Aghajohari, Kamran Chitsaz, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Sarath Chandar, Alessandro Sordoni, Aaron Courville, Siva Reddy. The paper proposes Markovian Thinking, a reinforcement learning paradigm that limits reasoning context to a constant-size state, enabling linear compute with constant memory rather than quadratic overhead. They implement this approach in Delethink, an environment that segments reasoning into fixed-size chunks with learned textual states to seamlessly continue reasoning after resets. Experiments show Delethink-trained models achieve longer reasoning chains more efficiently and scale better than standard methods, significantly reducing computational costs.

DeepDive: Advancing Deep Search Agents with Knowledge Graphs and Multi-Turn RL

In this episode, we discuss DeepDive: Advancing Deep Search Agents with Knowledge Graphs and Multi-Turn RL by Rui Lu, Zhenyu Hou, Zihan Wang, Hanchen Zhang, Xiao Liu, Yujiang Li, Shi Feng, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong. The paper introduces DeepDive, a method to improve large language models' deep search capabilities by automatically generating complex questions and applying multi-turn reinforcement learning for enhanced long-horizon reasoning. DeepDive-32B outperforms existing open-source models on browsing benchmarks like BrowseComp. The approach also enables scalable tool usage during inference, with all resources made publicly available.

Towards a Physics Foundation Model

In this episode, we discuss Towards a Physics Foundation Model by Florian Wiesner, Matthias Wessling, Stephen Baek. This paper introduces the General Physics Transformer (GPhyT), a foundation model trained on diverse simulation data that can simulate multiple complex physical systems without explicit knowledge of governing equations. GPhyT outperforms specialized models by up to 29 times, generalizes zero-shot to unseen physics tasks, and maintains stable predictions over long time horizons. This work demonstrates the feasibility of a universal physics foundation model, potentially revolutionizing computational science by eliminating the need for task-specific solvers.