Daily Papers

Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, directly influencing crop yields and global food security. However, challenges such as interdisciplinary complexity and high costs with limited returns hinder progress, leading to a shortage of experts and insufficient technological support. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise across various fields, their application in seed science remains limited due to the scarcity of digital resources, complex gene-trait relationships, and the lack of standardized benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce SeedBench -- the first multi-task benchmark specifically designed for seed science. Developed in collaboration with domain experts, SeedBench focuses on seed breeding and simulates key aspects of modern breeding processes. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 26 leading LLMs, encompassing proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific fine-tuned models. Our findings not only highlight the substantial gaps between the power of LLMs and the real-world seed science problems, but also make a foundational step for research on LLMs for seed design.

Analyzing and detecting cannabis seed variants is crucial for the agriculture industry. It enables precision breeding, allowing cultivators to selectively enhance desirable traits. Accurate identification of seed variants also ensures regulatory compliance, facilitating the cultivation of specific cannabis strains with defined characteristics, ultimately improving agricultural productivity and meeting diverse market demands. This paper presents a study on cannabis seed variant detection by employing a state-of-the-art object detection model Faster R-CNN. This study implemented the model on a locally sourced cannabis seed dataset in Thailand, comprising 17 distinct classes. We evaluate six Faster R-CNN models by comparing performance on various metrics and achieving a mAP score of 94.08\% and an F1 score of 95.66\%. This paper presents the first known application of deep neural network object detection models to the novel task of visually identifying cannabis seed types.

Wheat varieties show a large diversity of traits and phenotypes. Linking them to genetic variability is essential for shorter and more efficient wheat breeding programs. Newly desirable wheat variety traits include disease resistance to reduce pesticide use, adaptation to climate change, resistance to heat and drought stresses, or low gluten content of grains. Wheat breeding experiments are documented by a large body of scientific literature and observational data obtained in-field and under controlled conditions. The cross-referencing of complementary information from the literature and observational data is essential to the study of the genotype-phenotype relationship and to the improvement of wheat selection. The scientific literature on genetic marker-assisted selection describes much information about the genotype-phenotype relationship. However, the variety of expressions used to refer to traits and phenotype values in scientific articles is a hinder to finding information and cross-referencing it. When trained adequately by annotated examples, recent text mining methods perform highly in named entity recognition and linking in the scientific domain. While several corpora contain annotations of human and animal phenotypes, currently, no corpus is available for training and evaluating named entity recognition and entity-linking methods in plant phenotype literature. The Triticum aestivum trait Corpus is a new gold standard for traits and phenotypes of wheat. It consists of 540 PubMed references fully annotated for trait, phenotype, and species named entities using the Wheat Trait and Phenotype Ontology and the species taxonomy of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A study of the performance of tools trained on the Triticum aestivum trait Corpus shows that the corpus is suitable for the training and evaluation of named entity recognition and linking.

In this paper I investigate the effect of random seed selection on the accuracy when using popular deep learning architectures for computer vision. I scan a large amount of seeds (up to 10^4) on CIFAR 10 and I also scan fewer seeds on Imagenet using pre-trained models to investigate large scale datasets. The conclusions are that even if the variance is not very large, it is surprisingly easy to find an outlier that performs much better or much worse than the average.

Motivation The genotype assignment problem consists of predicting, from the genotype of an individual, which of a known set of populations it originated from. The problem arises in a variety of contexts, including wildlife forensics, invasive species detection and biodiversity monitoring. Existing approaches perform well under ideal conditions but are sensitive to a variety of common violations of the assumptions they rely on. Results In this article, we introduce Mycorrhiza, a machine learning approach for the genotype assignment problem. Our algorithm makes use of phylogenetic networks to engineer features that encode the evolutionary relationships among samples. Those features are then used as input to a Random Forests classifier. The classification accuracy was assessed on multiple published empirical SNP, microsatellite or consensus sequence datasets with wide ranges of size, geographical distribution and population structure and on simulated datasets. It compared favorably against widely used assessment tests or mixture analysis methods such as STRUCTURE and Admixture, and against another machine-learning based approach using principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction. Mycorrhiza yields particularly significant gains on datasets with a large average fixation index (FST) or deviation from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Moreover, the phylogenetic network approach estimates mixture proportions with good accuracy.

Quality assessment of agricultural produce is a crucial step in minimizing food stock wastage. However, this is currently done manually and often requires expert supervision, especially in smaller seeds like corn. We propose a novel computer vision-based system for automating this process. We build a novel seed image acquisition setup, which captures both the top and bottom views. Dataset collection for this problem has challenges of data annotation costs/time and class imbalance. We address these challenges by i.) using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) to generate real-looking images for the classes with lesser images and ii.) annotate a large dataset with minimal expert human intervention by using a Batch Active Learning (BAL) based annotation tool. We benchmark different image classification models on the dataset obtained. We are able to get accuracies of up to 91.6% for testing the physical purity of seed samples.

Developing embodied AI agents requires scalable training environments that balance content diversity with physics accuracy. World simulators provide such environments but face distinct limitations: video-based methods generate diverse content but lack real-time physics feedback for interactive learning, while physics-based engines provide accurate dynamics but face scalability limitations from costly manual asset creation. We present Seed3D 1.0, a foundation model that generates simulation-ready 3D assets from single images, addressing the scalability challenge while maintaining physics rigor. Unlike existing 3D generation models, our system produces assets with accurate geometry, well-aligned textures, and realistic physically-based materials. These assets can be directly integrated into physics engines with minimal configuration, enabling deployment in robotic manipulation and simulation training. Beyond individual objects, the system scales to complete scene generation through assembling objects into coherent environments. By enabling scalable simulation-ready content creation, Seed3D 1.0 provides a foundation for advancing physics-based world simulators. Seed3D 1.0 is now available on https://console.volcengine.com/ark/region:ark+cn-beijing/experience/vision?modelId=doubao-seed3d-1-0-250928&tab=Gen3D

Maintaining genetic diversity as a means to avoid premature convergence is critical in Genetic Programming. Several approaches have been proposed to achieve this, with some focusing on the mating phase from coupling dissimilar solutions to some form of self-adaptive selection mechanism. In nature, genetic diversity can be the consequence of many different factors, but when considering reproduction Sexual Selection can have an impact on promoting variety within a species. Specifically, Mate Choice often results in different selective pressures between sexes, which in turn may trigger evolutionary differences among them. Although some mechanisms of Sexual Selection have been applied to Genetic Programming in the past, the literature is scarce when it comes to mate choice. Recently, a way of modelling mating preferences by ideal mate representations was proposed, achieving good results when compared to a standard approach. These mating preferences evolve freely in a self-adaptive fashion, creating an evolutionary driving force of its own alongside fitness pressure. The inner mechanisms of this approach operate from personal choice, as each individual has its own representation of a perfect mate which affects the mate to be selected. In this paper, we compare this method against a random mate choice to assess whether there are advantages in evolving personal preferences. We conducted experiments using three symbolic regression problems and different mutation rates. The results show that self-adaptive mating preferences are able to create a more diverse set of solutions when compared to the traditional approach and a random mate approach (with statistically significant differences) and have a higher success rate in three of the six instances tested.

In this technical report, we introduce SEED-Data-Edit: a unique hybrid dataset for instruction-guided image editing, which aims to facilitate image manipulation using open-form language. SEED-Data-Edit is composed of three distinct types of data: (1) High-quality editing data produced by an automated pipeline, ensuring a substantial volume of diverse image editing pairs. (2) Real-world scenario data collected from the internet, which captures the intricacies of user intentions for promoting the practical application of image editing in the real world. (3) High-precision multi-turn editing data annotated by humans, which involves multiple rounds of edits for simulating iterative editing processes. The combination of these diverse data sources makes SEED-Data-Edit a comprehensive and versatile dataset for training language-guided image editing model. We fine-tune a pretrained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that unifies comprehension and generation with SEED-Data-Edit. The instruction tuned model demonstrates promising results, indicating the potential and effectiveness of SEED-Data-Edit in advancing the field of instructional image editing. The datasets are released in https://huggingface.co/datasets/AILab-CVC/SEED-Data-Edit.

P. Kabamba developed generation theory as a tool for studying self-reproducing systems. We provide an alternative definition of a generation system and give a complete solution to the problem of finding optimal seeds for a finite self-replicating system. We also exhibit examples illustrating a connection between self-replication and fixed-point theory.

Class-incremental learning is becoming more popular as it helps models widen their applicability while not forgetting what they already know. A trend in this area is to use a mixture-of-expert technique, where different models work together to solve the task. However, the experts are usually trained all at once using whole task data, which makes them all prone to forgetting and increasing computational burden. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel approach named SEED. SEED selects only one, the most optimal expert for a considered task, and uses data from this task to fine-tune only this expert. For this purpose, each expert represents each class with a Gaussian distribution, and the optimal expert is selected based on the similarity of those distributions. Consequently, SEED increases diversity and heterogeneity within the experts while maintaining the high stability of this ensemble method. The extensive experiments demonstrate that SEED achieves state-of-the-art performance in exemplar-free settings across various scenarios, showing the potential of expert diversification through data in continual learning.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have facilitated creative and photorealistic image synthesis. By varying the random seeds, we can generate various images for a fixed text prompt. Technically, the seed controls the initial noise and, in multi-step diffusion inference, the noise used for reparameterization at intermediate timesteps in the reverse diffusion process. However, the specific impact of the random seed on the generated images remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we conduct a large-scale scientific study into the impact of random seeds during diffusion inference. Remarkably, we reveal that the best 'golden' seed achieved an impressive FID of 21.60, compared to the worst 'inferior' seed's FID of 31.97. Additionally, a classifier can predict the seed number used to generate an image with over 99.9% accuracy in just a few epochs, establishing that seeds are highly distinguishable based on generated images. Encouraged by these findings, we examined the influence of seeds on interpretable visual dimensions. We find that certain seeds consistently produce grayscale images, prominent sky regions, or image borders. Seeds also affect image composition, including object location, size, and depth. Moreover, by leveraging these 'golden' seeds, we demonstrate improved image generation such as high-fidelity inference and diversified sampling. Our investigation extends to inpainting tasks, where we uncover some seeds that tend to insert unwanted text artifacts. Overall, our extensive analyses highlight the importance of selecting good seeds and offer practical utility for image generation.

We present Seedream 3.0, a high-performance Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model. We develop several technical improvements to address existing challenges in Seedream 2.0, including alignment with complicated prompts, fine-grained typography generation, suboptimal visual aesthetics and fidelity, and limited image resolutions. Specifically, the advancements of Seedream 3.0 stem from improvements across the entire pipeline, from data construction to model deployment. At the data stratum, we double the dataset using a defect-aware training paradigm and a dual-axis collaborative data-sampling framework. Furthermore, we adopt several effective techniques such as mixed-resolution training, cross-modality RoPE, representation alignment loss, and resolution-aware timestep sampling in the pre-training phase. During the post-training stage, we utilize diversified aesthetic captions in SFT, and a VLM-based reward model with scaling, thereby achieving outputs that well align with human preferences. Furthermore, Seedream 3.0 pioneers a novel acceleration paradigm. By employing consistent noise expectation and importance-aware timestep sampling, we achieve a 4 to 8 times speedup while maintaining image quality. Seedream 3.0 demonstrates significant improvements over Seedream 2.0: it enhances overall capabilities, in particular for text-rendering in complicated Chinese characters which is important to professional typography generation. In addition, it provides native high-resolution output (up to 2K), allowing it to generate images with high visual quality.

We introduce Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata (CA). In Biomaker CA, morphogenesis is a first class citizen and small seeds need to grow into plant-like organisms to survive in a nutrient starved environment and eventually reproduce with variation so that a biome survives for long timelines. We simulate complex biomes by means of CA rules in 2D grids and parallelize all of its computation on GPUs through the Python JAX framework. We show how this project allows for several different kinds of environments and laws of 'physics', alongside different model architectures and mutation strategies. We further analyze some configurations to show how plant agents can grow, survive, reproduce, and evolve, forming stable and unstable biomes. We then demonstrate how one can meta-evolve models to survive in a harsh environment either through end-to-end meta-evolution or by a more surgical and efficient approach, called Petri dish meta-evolution. Finally, we show how to perform interactive evolution, where the user decides how to evolve a plant model interactively and then deploys it in a larger environment. We open source Biomaker CA at: https://tinyurl.com/2x8yu34s .

Precise crop yield prediction is essential for improving agricultural practices and ensuring crop resilience in varying climates. Integrating weather data across the growing season, especially for different crop varieties, is crucial for understanding their adaptability in the face of climate change. In the MLCAS2021 Crop Yield Prediction Challenge, we utilized a dataset comprising 93,028 training records to forecast yields for 10,337 test records, covering 159 locations across 28 U.S. states and Canadian provinces over 13 years (2003-2015). This dataset included details on 5,838 distinct genotypes and daily weather data for a 214-day growing season, enabling comprehensive analysis. As one of the winning teams, we developed two novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: the CNN-DNN model, combining CNN and fully-connected networks, and the CNN-LSTM-DNN model, with an added LSTM layer for weather variables. Leveraging the Generalized Ensemble Method (GEM), we determined optimal model weights, resulting in superior performance compared to baseline models. The GEM model achieved lower RMSE (5.55% to 39.88%), reduced MAE (5.34% to 43.76%), and higher correlation coefficients (1.1% to 10.79%) when evaluated on test data. We applied the CNN-DNN model to identify top-performing genotypes for various locations and weather conditions, aiding genotype selection based on weather variables. Our data-driven approach is valuable for scenarios with limited testing years. Additionally, a feature importance analysis using RMSE change highlighted the significance of location, MG, year, and genotype, along with the importance of weather variables MDNI and AP.

Several recent advances in AI systems (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts and Program-Aided Language Models) solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as Python. In this work, we use a language-model-infused scaffolding program to improve itself. We start with a seed "improver" that improves an input program according to a given utility function by querying a language model several times and returning the best solution. We then run this seed improver to improve itself. Across a small set of downstream tasks, the resulting improved improver generates programs with significantly better performance than its seed improver. Afterward, we analyze the variety of self-improvement strategies proposed by the language model, including beam search, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing. Since the language models themselves are not altered, this is not full recursive self-improvement. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that a modern language model, GPT-4 in our proof-of-concept experiments, is capable of writing code that can call itself to improve itself. We critically consider concerns around the development of self-improving technologies and evaluate the frequency with which the generated code bypasses a sandbox.

Plant developmental plasticity, particularly in root system architecture, is fundamental to understanding adaptability and agricultural sustainability. ChronoRoot 2.0 builds upon established low-cost hardware while significantly enhancing software capabilities and usability. The system employs nnUNet architecture for multi-class segmentation, demonstrating significant accuracy improvements while simultaneously tracking six distinct plant structures encompassing root, shoot, and seed components: main root, lateral roots, seed, hypocotyl, leaves, and petiole. This architecture enables easy retraining and incorporation of additional training data without requiring machine learning expertise. The platform introduces dual specialized graphical interfaces: a Standard Interface for detailed architectural analysis with novel gravitropic response parameters, and a Screening Interface enabling high-throughput analysis of multiple plants through automated tracking. Functional Principal Component Analysis integration enables discovery of novel phenotypic parameters through temporal pattern comparison. We demonstrate multi-species analysis, with Arabidopsis thaliana and Solanum lycopersicum, both morphologically distinct plant species. Three use cases in Arabidopsis thaliana and validation with tomato seedlings demonstrate enhanced capabilities: circadian growth pattern characterization, gravitropic response analysis in transgenic plants, and high-throughput etiolation screening across multiple genotypes.ChronoRoot 2.0 maintains the low-cost, modular hardware advantages of its predecessor while dramatically improving accessibility through intuitive graphical interfaces and expanded analytical capabilities. The open-source platform makes sophisticated temporal plant phenotyping more accessible to researchers without computational expertise.

Developing computer vision-based rice phenotyping techniques is crucial for precision field management and accelerating breeding, thereby continuously advancing rice production. Among phenotyping tasks, distinguishing image components is a key prerequisite for characterizing plant growth and development at the organ scale, enabling deeper insights into eco-physiological processes. However, due to the fine structure of rice organs and complex illumination within the canopy, this task remains highly challenging, underscoring the need for a high-quality training dataset. Such datasets are scarce, both due to a lack of large, representative collections of rice field images and the time-intensive nature of annotation. To address this gap, we established the first comprehensive multi-class rice semantic segmentation dataset, RiceSEG. We gathered nearly 50,000 high-resolution, ground-based images from five major rice-growing countries (China, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania), encompassing over 6,000 genotypes across all growth stages. From these original images, 3,078 representative samples were selected and annotated with six classes (background, green vegetation, senescent vegetation, panicle, weeds, and duckweed) to form the RiceSEG dataset. Notably, the sub-dataset from China spans all major genotypes and rice-growing environments from the northeast to the south. Both state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and transformer-based semantic segmentation models were used as baselines. While these models perform reasonably well in segmenting background and green vegetation, they face difficulties during the reproductive stage, when canopy structures are more complex and multiple classes are involved. These findings highlight the importance of our dataset for developing specialized segmentation models for rice and other crops.

Recent advances in Conditional Diffusion Models have led to substantial capabilities in various domains. However, understanding the impact of variations in the initial seed vector remains an underexplored area of concern. Particularly, latent-based diffusion models display inconsistencies in image generation under standard conditions when initialized with suboptimal initial seed vectors. To understand the impact of the initial seed vector on generated samples, we propose a reliability evaluation framework that evaluates the generated samples of a diffusion model when the initial seed vector is subjected to various synthetic shifts. Our results indicate that slight manipulations to the initial seed vector of the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion (Rombach et al., 2022) can lead to significant disturbances in the generated samples, consequently creating images without the effect of conditioning variables. In contrast, GLIDE (Nichol et al., 2022) stands out in generating reliable samples even when the initial seed vector is transformed. Thus, our study sheds light on the importance of the selection and the impact of the initial seed vector in the latent-based diffusion model.

Despite recent advances in diffusion models, achieving reliable image generation and editing remains challenging due to the inherent diversity induced by stochastic noise in the sampling process. Instruction-guided image editing with diffusion models offers user-friendly capabilities, yet editing failures, such as background distortion, frequently occur. Users often resort to trial and error, adjusting seeds or prompts to achieve satisfactory results, which is inefficient. While seed selection methods exist for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation, they depend on external verifiers, limiting applicability, and evaluating multiple seeds increases computational complexity. To address this, we first establish a multiple-seed-based image editing baseline using background consistency scores, achieving Best-of-N performance without supervision. Building on this, we introduce ELECT (Early-timestep Latent Evaluation for Candidate Selection), a zero-shot framework that selects reliable seeds by estimating background mismatches at early diffusion timesteps, identifying the seed that retains the background while modifying only the foreground. ELECT ranks seed candidates by a background inconsistency score, filtering unsuitable samples early based on background consistency while preserving editability. Beyond standalone seed selection, ELECT integrates into instruction-guided editing pipelines and extends to Multimodal Large-Language Models (MLLMs) for joint seed and prompt selection, further improving results when seed selection alone is insufficient. Experiments show that ELECT reduces computational costs (by 41 percent on average and up to 61 percent) while improving background consistency and instruction adherence, achieving around 40 percent success rates in previously failed cases - without any external supervision or training.

We investigate the utility of Large Language Models for automated taxonomy generation and completion specifically applied to taxonomies from the food technology industry. We explore the extent to which taxonomies can be completed from a seed taxonomy or generated without a seed from a set of known concepts, in an iterative fashion using recent prompting techniques. Experiments on five taxonomies using an open-source LLM (Llama-3), while promising, point to the difficulty of correctly placing inner nodes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable emergent abilities across various tasks, yet fall short of complex reasoning and planning tasks. The tree-search-based reasoning methods address this by surpassing the capabilities of chain-of-thought prompting, encouraging exploration of intermediate steps. However, such methods introduce significant inference latency due to the systematic exploration and evaluation of multiple thought paths. This paper introduces SeeD, a novel and efficient inference framework to optimize runtime speed and GPU memory management concurrently. By employing a scheduled speculative execution, SeeD efficiently handles multiple iterations for the thought generation and the state evaluation, leveraging a rounds-scheduled strategy to manage draft model dispatching. Extensive experimental evaluations on three reasoning datasets demonstrate superior speedup performance of SeeD, providing a viable path for batched inference in training-free speculative decoding.

We introduce Seed-Music, a suite of music generation systems capable of producing high-quality music with fine-grained style control. Our unified framework leverages both auto-regressive language modeling and diffusion approaches to support two key music creation workflows: controlled music generation and post-production editing. For controlled music generation, our system enables vocal music generation with performance controls from multi-modal inputs, including style descriptions, audio references, musical scores, and voice prompts. For post-production editing, it offers interactive tools for editing lyrics and vocal melodies directly in the generated audio. We encourage readers to listen to demo audio examples at https://team.doubao.com/seed-music .

Based on powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), recent generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained prominence as a pivotal research area, exhibiting remarkable capability for both comprehension and generation. In this work, we address the evaluation of generative comprehension in MLLMs as a preliminary step towards a comprehensive assessment of generative models, by introducing a benchmark named SEED-Bench. SEED-Bench consists of 19K multiple choice questions with accurate human annotations (x 6 larger than existing benchmarks), which spans 12 evaluation dimensions including the comprehension of both the image and video modality. We develop an advanced pipeline for generating multiple-choice questions that target specific evaluation dimensions, integrating both automatic filtering and manual verification processes. Multiple-choice questions with groundtruth options derived from human annotation enables an objective and efficient assessment of model performance, eliminating the need for human or GPT intervention during evaluation. We further evaluate the performance of 18 models across all 12 dimensions, covering both the spatial and temporal understanding. By revealing the limitations of existing MLLMs through evaluation results, we aim for SEED-Bench to provide insights for motivating future research. We will launch and consistently maintain a leaderboard to provide a platform for the community to assess and investigate model capability.

Mycotoxin contamination poses a significant risk to cereal crop quality, food safety, and agricultural productivity. Accurate prediction of mycotoxin levels can support early intervention strategies and reduce economic losses. This study investigates the use of neural networks and transfer learning models to predict mycotoxin contamination in Irish oat crops as a multi-response prediction task. Our dataset comprises oat samples collected in Ireland, containing a mix of environmental, agronomic, and geographical predictors. Five modelling approaches were evaluated: a baseline multilayer perceptron (MLP), an MLP with pre-training, and three transfer learning models; TabPFN, TabNet, and FT-Transformer. Model performance was evaluated using regression (RMSE, R^2) and classification (AUC, F1) metrics, with results reported per toxin and on average. Additionally, permutation-based variable importance analysis was conducted to identify the most influential predictors across both prediction tasks. The transfer learning approach TabPFN provided the overall best performance, followed by the baseline MLP. Our variable importance analysis revealed that weather history patterns in the 90-day pre-harvest period were the most important predictors, alongside seed moisture content.

The rapid evolution of multimodal foundation model has demonstrated significant progresses in vision-language understanding and generation, e.g., our previous work SEED-LLaMA. However, there remains a gap between its capability and the real-world applicability, primarily due to the model's limited capacity to effectively respond to various user instructions and interact with diverse visual data. In this work, we focus on bridging this gap through integrating two enhanced features: (1) comprehending images of arbitrary sizes and ratios, and (2) enabling multi-granularity image generation. We present a unified and versatile foundation model, namely, SEED-X, which is able to model multi-granularity visual semantics for comprehension and generation tasks. Besides the competitive results on public benchmarks, SEED-X demonstrates its effectiveness in handling real-world applications across various domains after instruction tuning. We hope that our work will inspire future research into what can be achieved by versatile multimodal foundation models in real-world applications. The models, codes, and datasets will be released in https://github.com/AILab-CVC/SEED-X.

Rapid advancement of diffusion models has catalyzed remarkable progress in the field of image generation. However, prevalent models such as Flux, SD3.5 and Midjourney, still grapple with issues like model bias, limited text rendering capabilities, and insufficient understanding of Chinese cultural nuances. To address these limitations, we present Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model that excels across diverse dimensions, which adeptly manages text prompt in both Chinese and English, supporting bilingual image generation and text rendering. We develop a powerful data system that facilitates knowledge integration, and a caption system that balances the accuracy and richness for image description. Particularly, Seedream is integrated with a self-developed bilingual large language model as a text encoder, allowing it to learn native knowledge directly from massive data. This enable it to generate high-fidelity images with accurate cultural nuances and aesthetic expressions described in either Chinese or English. Beside, Glyph-Aligned ByT5 is applied for flexible character-level text rendering, while a Scaled ROPE generalizes well to untrained resolutions. Multi-phase post-training optimizations, including SFT and RLHF iterations, further improve the overall capability. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Seedream 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple aspects, including prompt-following, aesthetics, text rendering, and structural correctness. Furthermore, Seedream 2.0 has been optimized through multiple RLHF iterations to closely align its output with human preferences, as revealed by its outstanding ELO score. In addition, it can be readily adapted to an instruction-based image editing model, such as SeedEdit, with strong editing capability that balances instruction-following and image consistency.

We introduce Seed1.5-Thinking, capable of reasoning through thinking before responding, resulting in improved performance on a wide range of benchmarks. Seed1.5-Thinking achieves 86.7 on AIME 2024, 55.0 on Codeforces and 77.3 on GPQA, demonstrating excellent reasoning abilities in STEM and coding. Beyond reasoning tasks, the method demonstrates notable generalization across diverse domains. For instance, it surpasses DeepSeek R1 by 8% in win rate on non-reasoning tasks, indicating its broader applicability. Compared to other state-of-the-art reasoning models, Seed1.5-Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with a relatively small size, featuring 20B activated and 200B total parameters. As part of our effort to assess generalized reasoning, we develop two internal benchmarks, BeyondAIME and Codeforces, both of which will be publicly released to support future research. Model trial link: https://www.volcengine.com/experience/ark.

The rapid advancement of transformer-based language models has catalyzed breakthroughs in biomedical and clinical natural language processing; however, plant science remains markedly underserved by such domain-adapted tools. In this work, we present PlantBert, a high-performance, open-source language model specifically tailored for extracting structured knowledge from plant stress-response literature. Built upon the DeBERTa architecture-known for its disentangled attention and robust contextual encoding-PlantBert is fine-tuned on a meticulously curated corpus of expert-annotated abstracts, with a primary focus on lentil (Lens culinaris) responses to diverse abiotic and biotic stressors. Our methodology combines transformer-based modeling with rule-enhanced linguistic post-processing and ontology-grounded entity normalization, enabling PlantBert to capture biologically meaningful relationships with precision and semantic fidelity. The underlying corpus is annotated using a hierarchical schema aligned with the Crop Ontology, encompassing molecular, physiological, biochemical, and agronomic dimensions of plant adaptation. PlantBert exhibits strong generalization capabilities across entity types and demonstrates the feasibility of robust domain adaptation in low-resource scientific fields. By providing a scalable and reproducible framework for high-resolution entity recognition, PlantBert bridges a critical gap in agricultural NLP and paves the way for intelligent, data-driven systems in plant genomics, phenomics, and agronomic knowledge discovery. Our model is publicly released to promote transparency and accelerate cross-disciplinary innovation in computational plant science.

Data augmentation techniques are widely used for enhancing the performance of machine learning models by tackling class imbalance issues and data sparsity. State-of-the-art generative language models have been shown to provide significant gains across different NLP tasks. However, their applicability to data augmentation for text classification tasks in few-shot settings have not been fully explored, especially for specialised domains. In this paper, we leverage GPT-2 (Radford A et al, 2019) for generating artificial training instances in order to improve classification performance. Our aim is to analyse the impact the selection process of seed training examples have over the quality of GPT-generated samples and consequently the classifier performance. We perform experiments with several seed selection strategies that, among others, exploit class hierarchical structures and domain expert selection. Our results show that fine-tuning GPT-2 in a handful of label instances leads to consistent classification improvements and outperform competitive baselines. Finally, we show that guiding this process through domain expert selection can lead to further improvements, which opens up interesting research avenues for combining generative models and active learning.

Fine-tuning pretrained contextual word embedding models to supervised downstream tasks has become commonplace in natural language processing. This process, however, is often brittle: even with the same hyperparameter values, distinct random seeds can lead to substantially different results. To better understand this phenomenon, we experiment with four datasets from the GLUE benchmark, fine-tuning BERT hundreds of times on each while varying only the random seeds. We find substantial performance increases compared to previously reported results, and we quantify how the performance of the best-found model varies as a function of the number of fine-tuning trials. Further, we examine two factors influenced by the choice of random seed: weight initialization and training data order. We find that both contribute comparably to the variance of out-of-sample performance, and that some weight initializations perform well across all tasks explored. On small datasets, we observe that many fine-tuning trials diverge part of the way through training, and we offer best practices for practitioners to stop training less promising runs early. We publicly release all of our experimental data, including training and validation scores for 2,100 trials, to encourage further analysis of training dynamics during fine-tuning.