We now have a Deep Research for academia: SurveyX automatically writes academic surveys nearly indistinguishable from human-written ones 🔥
Researchers from Beijing and Shanghai just published the first application of a deep research system to academia: their algorithm, given a question, can give you a survey of all papers on the subject.
To make a research survey, you generally follow two steps, preparation (collect and organize papers) and writing (outline creation, writing, polishing). Researchers followed the same two steps and automated them.
🎯 For the preparation part, a key part is find all the important references on the given subject. Researchers first cast a wide net of all relevant papers. But then finding the really important ones is like distilling knowledge from a haystack of information. To solve this challenge, they built an “AttributeTree” object that structures key information from citations. Ablating these AttributeTrees significantly decreased structure and synthesis scores, so they were really useful!
📝 For the writing part, key was to get a synthesis that's both short and true. This is not easy to get with LLMs! So they used methods like LLM-based deduplication to shorten the too verbose listings made by LLMs, and RAG to grab original quotes instead of made-up ones.
As a result, their system outperforms previous approaches by far!
As assessed by LLM-judges, the quality score os SurveyX even approaches this of human experts, with 4.59/5 vs 4.75/5 🏆
Less is More for Reasoning (LIMO): a 32B model fine-tuned with 817 examples can beat o1-preview on math reasoning! 🤯
Do we really need o1's huge RL procedure to see reasoning emerge? It seems not. Researchers from Shanghai Jiaotong University just demonstrated that carefully selected examples can boost math performance in large language models using SFT —no huge datasets or RL procedures needed.
Their procedure allows Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct to jump from 6.5% to 57% on AIME and from 59% to 95% on MATH, while using only 1% of the data in previous approaches.
⚡ The Less-is-More Reasoning Hypothesis: ‣ Minimal but precise examples that showcase optimal reasoning patterns matter more than sheer quantity ‣ Pre-training knowledge plus sufficient computational resources at inference levels up math skills
➡️ Core techniques: ‣ High-quality reasoning chains with self-verification steps ‣ 817 handpicked problems that encourage deeper reasoning ‣ Enough inference-time computation to allow extended reasoning
💪 Efficiency gains: ‣ Only 817 examples instead of 100k+ ‣ 40.5% absolute improvement across 10 diverse benchmarks, outperforming models trained on 100x more data
This really challenges the notion that SFT leads to memorization rather than generalization! And opens up reasoning to GPU-poor researchers 🚀
𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘁: you can now share agents to the Hub! 🥳🥳
And any agent pushed to Hub get a cool Space interface to directly chat with it.
This was a real technical challenge: for instance, serializing tools to export them meant that you needed to get all the source code for a tool, verify that it was standalone (not relying on external variables), and gathering all the packages required to make it run.