Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks.However, closer scrutiny reveals persistent failure modes compromising performance and cost: I) Intra-step level, marked by calculation or derivation errors; II) Inter-step level, involving oscillation and stagnation; and III) Instance level, causing maladaptive over-thinking.Existing endeavors target isolated levels without unification, while their black-box nature and reliance on RL hinder explainability and controllability.To bridge these gaps, we conduct an in-depth white-box analysis, identifying key neurons (Mixture of Neurons, MoN) and their fluctuation patterns associated with distinct failures.Building upon these insights, we propose NeuReasoner, an explainable, controllable, and unified reasoning framework driven by MoN.Technically, NeuReasoner integrates lightweight MLPs for failure detection with a special token-triggered self-correction mechanism learned via SFT.During inference, special tokens are inserted upon failure detection to actuate controllable remedial behaviors.Extensive evaluations across six benchmarks, six backbone models (8B∼70B) against nine competitive baselines, demonstrate that NeuReasoner achieves performance gains of up to 27.0% while reducing token consumption by 19.6% ∼ 63.3%.... Correct Answer...

Human values and their measurement are long-standing interdisciplinary inquiry. Recent advances in AI have sparked renewed interest in this area, with large language models (LLMs) emerging as both tools and subjects of value measurement. This work introduces Generative Psychometrics for Values (GPV), an LLM-based, data-driven value measurement paradigm, theoretically grounded in text-revealed selective perceptions. The core idea is to dynamically parse unstructured texts into perceptions akin to static stimuli in traditional psychometrics, measure the value orientations they reveal, and aggregate the results. Applying GPV to human-authored blogs, we demonstrate its stability, validity, and superiority over prior psychological tools. Then, extending GPV to LLM value measurement, we advance the current art with 1) a psychometric methodology that measures LLM values based on their scalable and free-form outputs, enabling context-specific measurement; 2) a comparative analysis of measurement paradigms, indicating response biases of prior methods; and 3) an attempt to bridge LLM values and their safety, revealing the predictive power of different value systems and the impacts of various values on LLM safety. Through interdisciplinary efforts, we aim to leverage AI for next-generation psychometrics and psychometrics for value-aligned AI.

Values are core drivers of individual and collective perception, cognition, and behavior. Value systems, such as Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values, delineate the hierarchy and interplay among these values, enabling cross-disciplinary investigations into decision-making and societal dynamics. Recently, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns regarding their elusive intrinsic values. Despite growing efforts in evaluating, understanding, and aligning LLM values, a psychologically grounded LLM value system remains underexplored. This study addresses the gap by introducing the Generative Psycho-Lexical Approach (GPLA), a scalable, adaptable, and theoretically informed method for constructing value systems. Leveraging GPLA, we propose a psychologically grounded five-factor value system tailored for LLMs. For systematic validation, we present three benchmarking tasks that integrate psychological principles with cutting-edge AI priorities. Our results reveal that the proposed value system meets standard psychological criteria, better captures LLM values, improves LLM safety prediction, and enhances LLM alignment, when compared to the canonical Schwartz’s values.

Combinatorial optimization (CO) is fundamental to several realworld applications, from logistics and scheduling to hardware design and resource allocation.Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown significant benefits in solving CO problems, reducing reliance on domain expertise and improving computational efficiency.However, the absence of a unified benchmarking framework leads to inconsistent evaluations, limits reproducibility, and increases engineering overhead, raising barriers to adoption for new researchers.To address these challenges, we introduce RL4CO, a unified and extensive benchmark with in-depth library coverage of 27 CO problem environments and 23 state-of-the-art baselines.Built on efficient software libraries and best practices in implementation, RL4CO features modularized implementation and flexible configurations of diverse environments, policy architectures, RL algorithms, and utilities with extensive documentation.RL4CO helps researchers build on existing successes while exploring and developing their own designs, facilitating the entire research process by decoupling science from heavy engineering.We finally provide extensive benchmark studies to inspire new insights and future work.RL4CO has already attracted numerous researchers in the community and is open-sourced at https://github.com/ai4co/rl4co 1 .

Global placement, a critical step in designing the physical layout of computer chips, is essential to optimize chip performance. Prior global placement methods optimize each circuit design individually from scratch. Their neglect of transferable knowledge limits solution efficiency and chip performance as circuit complexity drastically increases. This study presents TransPlace, a global placement framework that learns to place millions of mixed-size cells in continuous space. TransPlace introduces i) Netlist Graph to efficiently model netlist topology, ii) Cell-flow and relative position encoding to learn SE(2)-invariant representation, iii) a tailored graph neural network architecture for informed parameterization of placement knowledge, and iv) a two-stage strategy for coarse-to-fine placement. Compared to state-of-the-art placement methods, TransPlace-trained on a few high-quality placements-can place unseen circuits with 1.2x speedup while reducing congestion by 30%, timing by 9%, and wirelength by 5%.

The recent end-to-end neural solvers have shown promise for small-scale routing problems but suffered from limited real-time scaling-up performance. This paper proposes GLOP (Global and Local Optimization Policies), a unified hierarchical framework that efficiently scales toward large-scale routing problems. GLOP hierarchically partitions large routing problems into Travelling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and TSPs into Shortest Hamiltonian Path Problems. For the first time, we hybridize non-autoregressive neural heuristics for coarse-grained problem partitions and autoregressive neural heuristics for fine-grained route constructions, leveraging the scalability of the former and the meticulousness of the latter. Experimental results show that GLOP achieves competitive and state-of-the-art real-time performance on large-scale routing problems, including TSP, ATSP, CVRP, and PCTSP. Our code is available at: https://github.com/henry-yeh/GLOP.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming diverse fields and gaining increasing influence as human proxies.This development underscores the urgent need for evaluating value orientations and understanding of LLMs to ensure their responsible integration into public-facing applications.This work introduces ValueBench, the first comprehensive psychometric benchmark for evaluating value orientations and value understanding in LLMs.ValueBench collects data from 44 established psychometric inventories, encompassing 453 multifaceted value dimensions.We propose an evaluation pipeline grounded in realistic human-AI interactions to probe value orientations, along with novel tasks for evaluating value understanding in an open-ended value space.With extensive experiments conducted on six representative LLMs, we unveil their shared and distinctive value orientations and exhibit their ability to approximate expert conclusions in value-related extraction and generation tasks.ValueBench is openly accessible at https://github.com/Value4AI/ValueBench.

Placement is a critical and challenging step of modern chip design, with routability being an essential indicator of placement quality. Current routability-oriented placers typically apply an iterative two-stage approach, wherein the first stage generates a placement solution, and the second stage provides non-differentiable routing results to heuristically improve the solution quality. This method hinders jointly optimizing the routability aspect during placement. To address this problem, this work introduces RoutePlacer, an end-to-end routability-aware placement method. It trains RouteGNN, a customized graph neural network, to efficiently and accurately predict routability by capturing and fusing geometric and topological representations of placements. Well-trained RouteGNN then serves as a differentiable approximation of routability, enabling end-to-end gradient-based routability optimization. In addition, RouteGNN can improve two-stage placers as a plug-and-play alternative to external routers. Our experiments on DREAMPlace, an open-source AI4EDA platform, show that RoutePlacer can reduce Total Overflow by up to 16% while maintaining routed wirelength, compared to the state-of-the-art; integrating RouteGNN within two-stage placers leads to a 44% reduction in Total Overflow without compromising wirelength.

The omnipresence of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) compels domain experts to engage in trial-and-error heuristic design. The long-standing endeavor of design automation has gained new momentum with the rise of large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces Language Hyper-Heuristics (LHHs), an emerging variant of Hyper-Heuristics that leverages LLMs for heuristic generation, featuring minimal manual intervention and open-ended heuristic spaces. To empower LHHs, we present Reflective Evolution (ReEvo), a novel integration of evolutionary search for efficiently exploring the heuristic space, and LLM reflections to provide verbal gradients within the space. Across five heterogeneous algorithmic types, six different COPs, and both white-box and black-box views of COPs, ReEvo yields state-of-the-art and competitive meta-heuristics, evolutionary algorithms, heuristics, and neural solvers, while being more sample-efficient than prior LHHs.

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a meta-heuristic algorithm that has been successfully applied to various Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs). Traditionally, customizing ACO for a specific problem requires the expert design of knowledge-driven heuristics. In this paper, we propose DeepACO, a generic framework that leverages deep reinforcement learning to automate heuristic designs. DeepACO serves to strengthen the heuristic measures of existing ACO algorithms and dispense with laborious manual design in future ACO applications. As a neural-enhanced meta-heuristic, DeepACO consistently outperforms its ACO counterparts on eight COPs using a single neural model and a single set of hyperparameters. As a Neural Combinatorial Optimization method, DeepACO performs better than or on par with problem-specific methods on canonical routing problems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/henry-yeh/DeepACO.