Fan Bai

Multimodal LLMs can read text in images, but why do they often perform worse than when the same text is given as tokens? Our work studies the modality gap of models perceiving text as pixels and shows how to close it. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2603.09095 🧵👇 #NLProc #LLM #ComputerVision

I packaged up the "autoresearch" project into a new self-contained minimal repo if people would like to play over the weekend. It's basically nanochat LLM training core stripped down to a single-GPU, one file version of ~630 lines of code, then: - the human iterates on the prompt (.md) - the AI agent iterates on the training code (.py) The goal is to engineer your agents to make the fastest research progress indefinitely and without any of your own involvement. In the image, every dot is a complete LLM training run that lasts exactly 5 minutes. The agent works in an autonomous loop on a git feature branch and accumulates git commits to the training script as it finds better settings (of lower validation loss by the end) of the neural network architecture, the optimizer, all the hyperparameters, etc. You can imagine comparing the research progress of different prompts, different agents, etc. github.com/karpathy/autor… Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis :)

Meet KARL, an RL'd model for document-centric tasks at frontier quality and open source cost/speed. Great for @databricks customers and scientists (77-page tech report!) As usual, this isn't just one model - it's an RL assembly line to churn out models for us and our customers 🧵

🤖🔬 Can AI actually do science end-to-end? 🧠📈 And how would we know when it matches, or surpasses, humans? ⚡🧪 AI is rapidly automating scientific discovery, but benchmarking full-cycle discovery, from 💡 ideation → 🧑‍💻 execution → 📊 conclusions, remains unsolved: 🧐🧐🧐 ❌🛠️ Open-ended discovery → manual validation (costly, unscalable) ❌📏 Metric-driven benchmarks (e.g., MLE-Bench) → convenient but narrow (is higher accuracy really enough?) ❌🤖⚖️ LLM-as-judge → useful, but fundamentally risky if used alone 🔥🚀 Introducing FIRE-Bench🔥: Fullcycle Insight Rediscovery Evaluation 👉🌐 firebench.github.io 📚✨ A benchmark that turns fresh, human-verified insights from recent 🏆 NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML papers into masked, end-to-end discovery challenges 🧩 🌍🔐 Constrained open-ended discovery–backed by ground truth. 📌 Key takeaways: 1⃣ 📖🧱 Reference-based evaluation still matters: constrained LLM judging helps, but human-grounded references remain essential until agents can consistently match human conclusions 2⃣ 🏆🧠 Expert-validated ground truth: all tasks come from recent NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML papers, with contamination carefully controlled 3⃣ 🔁🎭 Rediscovery, not reproduction: original 🧪 methods, 📊 experiments, 💻 implementations, and 📈 analyses are fully masked to create real discovery challenges 🔑 Key empirical findings: 💡 The "Science Gap" is Real: Even the best setup (Claude Code + Sonnet-4) caps out at an F1 score of 46.7. On hard tasks, agents struggle to break 30 💡 Success is a "Lottery": Performance has incredibly high variance. Reliability is a major unsolved issue. 💡 Coding is no longer the bottleneck; high-level reasoning and analysis are: ~74% of errors stem from flawed planning, not coding ⚙️ How it works: 🔹 Research-Problem Trees: We parse papers into trees (from broad roots to concrete leaves). This allows us to select intermediate nodes that perfectly balance open-ended exploration with verifiable ground truth. 🔹 Claim-Level Evaluation: We match AI conclusions against human conclusions using granular claim decomposition (F1 score). 🔹 Creativity Check: We score false positives to see if agents are finding novel truths (Spoiler🚨: they aren’t creative yet). 🔹 New Diagnostic Taxonomy: failures traced across four stages: 🧠 Planning → 🛠️ Implementation → ▶️ Execution → 🧾 Conclusion 🔹 Additional Analyses: cost efficiency, contamination checks, and more. 👀 The Future: 🚀 Live-FIRE-Bench: a live, continuously updated FIRE-Bench to track real-time progress on the latest research (Newest LLMs should be benchmarked with the newest research) 🚀 Stronger scaffolding (search + planning + coding) 🧠🧰 and converting FIRE-Bench into interactive environments for training research agents 🚀 Toward real creativity: We want better systems that can produce genuinely novel conclusions toward creativity 🎨⏳ 🚀 Better systems 🧠✨ and better benchmarks 📏 must co-evolve 🔄 over time 📜🎥 Paper, video, demo, and research trees: 👉🌐 firebench.github.io #AI 🤖 #MachineLearning 📚 #AI4Science 🔬 #LLMs 🧠 #Research 🧪 #AgenticAI 🚀 #FireBench 🔥

Today at #ML42024: Clinical QA can help doctors find critical information in patient records. But where do we get training data for these systems? Generating this data from an LLM is hard. 🧵 @loadingfan

Congratulations to @ychenNLP for successfully defending his PhD! Yang has done exciting work advancing both the multilingual and multimodal capabilities of LLMs. Many thanks to his committee: @cocoweixu (co-advisor), @mchang21, @Hexiang_Hu, @kartik_goyal_