Daily Papers

Although In-Context Learning (ICL) brings remarkable performance gains to Large Language Models (LLMs), the improvements remain lower than fine-tuning on downstream tasks. This paper introduces Multi-Modal In-Context Tuning (MMICT), a novel multi-modal fine-tuning paradigm that boosts multi-modal fine-tuning by fully leveraging the promising ICL capability of multi-modal LLMs (MM-LLMs). We propose the Multi-Modal Hub (M-Hub), a unified module that captures various multi-modal features according to different inputs and objectives. Based on M-Hub, MMICT enables MM-LLMs to learn from in-context visual-guided textual features and subsequently generate outputs conditioned on the textual-guided visual features. Moreover, leveraging the flexibility of M-Hub, we design a variety of in-context demonstrations. Extensive experiments on a diverse range of downstream multi-modal tasks demonstrate that MMICT significantly outperforms traditional fine-tuning strategy and the vanilla ICT method that directly takes the concatenation of all information from different modalities as input.

This paper introduces a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) framework for multi-modal, multi-task transfer learning with pre-trained language models. PEFT techniques such as LoRA, BitFit and IA3 have demonstrated comparable performance to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models for specific downstream tasks, all while demanding significantly fewer trainable parameters and reduced GPU memory consumption. However, in the context of multi-modal fine-tuning, the need for architectural modifications or full fine-tuning often becomes apparent. To address this we propose Context-PEFT, which learns different groups of adaptor parameters based on the token's domain. This approach enables LoRA-like weight injection without requiring additional architectural changes. Our method is evaluated on the COCO captioning task, where it outperforms full fine-tuning under similar data constraints while simultaneously offering a substantially more parameter-efficient and computationally economical solution.

Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) is crucial for understanding human behavior. However, current methods exhibit limited performance mainly due to the scarcity of high-quality data, the insufficient utilization of facial dynamics, and the ambiguity of expression semantics, etc. To this end, we propose a novel framework, named Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs (FineCLIPER), incorporating the following novel designs: 1) To better distinguish between similar facial expressions, we extend the class labels to textual descriptions from both positive and negative aspects, and obtain supervision by calculating the cross-modal similarity based on the CLIP model; 2) Our FineCLIPER adopts a hierarchical manner to effectively mine useful cues from DFE videos. Specifically, besides directly embedding video frames as input (low semantic level), we propose to extract the face segmentation masks and landmarks based on each frame (middle semantic level) and utilize the Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) to further generate detailed descriptions of facial changes across frames with designed prompts (high semantic level). Additionally, we also adopt Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to enable efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models (i.e., CLIP) for this task. Our FineCLIPER achieves SOTA performance on the DFEW, FERV39k, and MAFW datasets in both supervised and zero-shot settings with few tunable parameters. Project Page: https://haroldchen19.github.io/FineCLIPER-Page/

Prior research on out-of-distribution detection (OoDD) has primarily focused on single-modality models. Recently, with the advent of large-scale pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP, OoDD methods utilizing such multi-modal representations through zero-shot and prompt learning strategies have emerged. However, these methods typically involve either freezing the pretrained weights or only partially tuning them, which can be suboptimal for downstream datasets. In this paper, we highlight that multi-modal fine-tuning (MMFT) can achieve notable OoDD performance. Despite some recent works demonstrating the impact of fine-tuning methods for OoDD, there remains significant potential for performance improvement. We investigate the limitation of na\"ive fine-tuning methods, examining why they fail to fully leverage the pretrained knowledge. Our empirical analysis suggests that this issue could stem from the modality gap within in-distribution (ID) embeddings. To address this, we propose a training objective that enhances cross-modal alignment by regularizing the distances between image and text embeddings of ID data. This adjustment helps in better utilizing pretrained textual information by aligning similar semantics from different modalities (i.e., text and image) more closely in the hyperspherical representation space. We theoretically demonstrate that the proposed regularization corresponds to the maximum likelihood estimation of an energy-based model on a hypersphere. Utilizing ImageNet-1k OoD benchmark datasets, we show that our method, combined with post-hoc OoDD approaches leveraging pretrained knowledge (e.g., NegLabel), significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art OoDD performance and leading ID accuracy.

We present mSLAM, a multilingual Speech and LAnguage Model that learns cross-lingual cross-modal representations of speech and text by pre-training jointly on large amounts of unlabeled speech and text in multiple languages. mSLAM combines w2v-BERT pre-training on speech with SpanBERT pre-training on character-level text, along with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) losses on paired speech and transcript data, to learn a single model capable of learning from and representing both speech and text signals in a shared representation space. We evaluate mSLAM on several downstream speech understanding tasks and find that joint pre-training with text improves quality on speech translation, speech intent classification and speech language-ID while being competitive on multilingual ASR, when compared against speech-only pre-training. Our speech translation model demonstrates zero-shot text translation without seeing any text translation data, providing evidence for cross-modal alignment of representations. mSLAM also benefits from multi-modal fine-tuning, further improving the quality of speech translation by directly leveraging text translation data during the fine-tuning process. Our empirical analysis highlights several opportunities and challenges arising from large-scale multimodal pre-training, suggesting directions for future research.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) has been significantly advanced from the scaling of recent Large Language Models (LLMs). The key idea is to convert the visual information into the language feature space so that the capacity of LLMs can be fully exploited. Existing VideoQA methods typically take two paradigms: (1) learning cross-modal alignment, and (2) using an off-the-shelf captioning model to describe the visual data. However, the first design needs costly training on many extra multi-modal data, whilst the second is further limited by limited domain generalization. To address these limitations, a simple yet effective Retrieving-to-Answer (R2A) framework is proposed.Given an input video, R2A first retrieves a set of semantically similar texts from a generic text corpus using a pre-trained multi-modal model (e.g., CLIP). With both the question and the retrieved texts, a LLM (e.g., DeBERTa) can be directly used to yield a desired answer. Without the need for cross-modal fine-tuning, R2A allows for all the key components (e.g., LLM, retrieval model, and text corpus) to plug-and-play. Extensive experiments on several VideoQA benchmarks show that despite with 1.3B parameters and no fine-tuning, our R2A can outperform the 61 times larger Flamingo-80B model even additionally trained on nearly 2.1B multi-modal data.

Multimodal visual language models are gaining prominence in open-world applications, driven by advancements in model architectures, training techniques, and high-quality data. However, their performance is often limited by insufficient task-specific data, leading to poor generalization and biased outputs. Existing efforts to increase task diversity in fine-tuning datasets are hindered by the labor-intensive process of manual task labeling, which typically produces only a few hundred task types. To address this, we propose TaskGalaxy, a large-scale multimodal instruction fine-tuning dataset comprising 19,227 hierarchical task types and 413,648 samples. TaskGalaxy utilizes GPT-4o to enrich task diversity by expanding from a small set of manually defined tasks, with CLIP and GPT-4o filtering those that best match open-source images, and generating relevant question-answer pairs. Multiple models are employed to ensure sample quality. This automated process enhances both task diversity and data quality, reducing manual intervention. Incorporating TaskGalaxy into LLaVA-v1.5 and InternVL-Chat-v1.0 models shows substantial performance improvements across 16 benchmarks, demonstrating the critical importance of task diversity. TaskGalaxy is publicly released at https://github.com/Kwai-YuanQi/TaskGalaxy.

Spurious correlations that degrade model generalization or lead the model to be right for the wrong reasons are one of the main robustness concerns for real-world deployments. However, mitigating these correlations during pre-training for large-scale models can be costly and impractical, particularly for those without access to high-performance computing resources. This paper proposes a novel approach to address spurious correlations during fine-tuning for a given domain of interest. With a focus on multi-modal models (e.g., CLIP), the proposed method leverages different modalities in these models to detect and explicitly set apart spurious attributes from the affected class, achieved through a multi-modal contrastive loss function that expresses spurious relationships through language. Our experimental results and in-depth visualizations on CLIP show that such an intervention can effectively i) improve the model's accuracy when spurious attributes are not present, and ii) directs the model's activation maps towards the actual class rather than the spurious attribute when present. In particular, on the Waterbirds dataset, our algorithm achieved a worst-group accuracy 23% higher than ERM on CLIP with a ResNet-50 backbone, and 32% higher on CLIP with a ViT backbone, while maintaining the same average accuracy as ERM.

Mitigating hallucinations of Large Multi-modal Models(LMMs) is crucial to enhance their reliability for general-purpose assistants. This paper shows that such hallucinations of LMMs can be significantly exacerbated by preceding user-system dialogues. To precisely measure this, we first present an evaluation benchmark by extending popular multi-modal benchmark datasets with prepended hallucinatory dialogues generated by our novel Adversarial Question Generator, which can automatically generate image-related yet adversarial dialogues by adopting adversarial attacks on LMMs. On our benchmark, the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art LMMs dropped significantly for both the VQA and Captioning tasks. Next, we further reveal this hallucination is mainly due to the prediction bias toward preceding dialogues rather than visual content. To reduce this bias, we propose Adversarial Instruction Tuning that robustly fine-tunes LMMs on augmented multi-modal instruction-following datasets with hallucinatory dialogues. Extensive experiments show that our proposed approach successfully reduces dialogue hallucination while maintaining or even improving performance.

Pre-trained multi-modal models, such as CLIP, provide transferable embeddings and show promising results in diverse applications. However, the analysis of learned multi-modal embeddings is relatively unexplored, and the embedding transferability can be improved. In this work, we observe that CLIP holds separated embedding subspaces for two different modalities, and then we investigate it through the lens of uniformity-alignment to measure the quality of learned representation. Both theoretically and empirically, we show that CLIP retains poor uniformity and alignment even after fine-tuning. Such a lack of alignment and uniformity might restrict the transferability and robustness of embeddings. To this end, we devise a new fine-tuning method for robust representation equipping better alignment and uniformity. First, we propose a Geodesic Multi-Modal Mixup that mixes the embeddings of image and text to generate hard negative samples on the hypersphere. Then, we fine-tune the model on hard negatives as well as original negatives and positives with contrastive loss. Based on the theoretical analysis about hardness guarantee and limiting behavior, we justify the use of our method. Extensive experiments on retrieval, calibration, few- or zero-shot classification (under distribution shift), embedding arithmetic, and image captioning further show that our method provides transferable representations, enabling robust model adaptation on diverse tasks. Code: https://github.com/changdaeoh/multimodal-mixup

The field of object detection and understanding is rapidly evolving, driven by advances in both traditional CNN-based models and emerging multi-modal large language models (LLMs). While CNNs like ResNet and YOLO remain highly effective for image-based tasks, recent transformer-based LLMs introduce new capabilities such as dynamic context reasoning, language-guided prompts, and holistic scene understanding. However, when used out-of-the-box, the full potential of LLMs remains underexploited, often resulting in suboptimal performance on specialized visual tasks. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of fine-tuned traditional CNNs, zero-shot pre-trained multi-modal LLMs, and fine-tuned multi-modal LLMs on the challenging task of artificial text overlay detection in images. A key contribution of our study is demonstrating that LLMs can be effectively fine-tuned on very limited data (fewer than 1,000 images) to achieve up to 36% accuracy improvement, matching or surpassing CNN-based baselines that typically require orders of magnitude more data. By exploring how language-guided models can be adapted for precise visual understanding with minimal supervision, our work contributes to the broader effort of bridging vision and language, offering novel insights into efficient cross-modal learning strategies. These findings highlight the adaptability and data efficiency of LLM-based approaches for real-world object detection tasks and provide actionable guidance for applying multi-modal transformers in low-resource visual environments. To support continued progress in this area, we have made the code used to fine-tune the models available in our GitHub, enabling future improvements and reuse in related applications.

The hypothesis that pretrained large language models (LLMs) necessitate only minimal supervision during the fine-tuning (SFT) stage (Zhou et al., 2024) has been substantiated by recent advancements in data curation and selection research. However, their stability and generalizability are compromised due to the vulnerability to experimental setups and validation protocols, falling short of surpassing random sampling (Diddee & Ippolito, 2024; Xia et al., 2024b). Built upon LLMs, multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs), combined with the sheer token volume and heightened heterogeneity of data sources, amplify both the significance and complexity of data selection. To harvest multi-modal instructional data in a robust and efficient manner, we re-define the granularity of the quality metric by decomposing it into 14 vision-language-related capabilities, and introduce multi-modal rich scorers to evaluate the capabilities of each data candidate. To promote diversity, in light of the inherent objective of the alignment stage, we take interaction style as diversity indicator and use a multi-modal rich styler to identify data instruction patterns. In doing so, our multi-modal rich scorers and styler (mmSSR) guarantee that high-scoring information is conveyed to users in diversified forms. Free from embedding-based clustering or greedy sampling, mmSSR efficiently scales to millions of data with varying budget constraints, supports customization for general or specific capability acquisition, and facilitates training-free generalization to new domains for curation. Across 10+ experimental settings, validated by 14 multi-modal benchmarks, we demonstrate consistent improvements over random sampling, baseline strategies and state-of-the-art selection methods, achieving 99.1% of full performance with only 30% of the 2.6M data.

Instruction tuning, a new learning paradigm that fine-tunes pre-trained language models on tasks specified through instructions, has shown promising zero-shot performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it has yet to be explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, we introduce MUL-TIINSTRUCT, the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark dataset that consists of 62 diverse multimodal tasks in a unified seq-to-seq format covering 10 broad categories. The tasks are derived from 21 existing open-source datasets and each task is equipped with 5 expert-written instructions. We take OFA as the base pre-trained model for multimodal instruction tuning, and to further improve its zero-shot performance, we explore multiple transfer learning strategies to leverage the large-scale NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate strong zero-shot performance on various unseen multimodal tasks and the benefit of transfer learning from a text-only instruction dataset. We also design a new evaluation metric - Sensitivity, to evaluate how sensitive the model is to the variety of instructions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning the model on a diverse set of tasks and instructions leads to a reduced sensitivity to variations in instructions for each task.

Despite the effectiveness of vision-language supervised fine-tuning in enhancing the performance of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). However, existing visual instruction tuning datasets include the following limitations: (1) Instruction annotation quality: despite existing VLLMs exhibiting strong performance, instructions generated by those advanced VLLMs may still suffer from inaccuracies, such as hallucinations. (2) Instructions and image diversity: the limited range of instruction types and the lack of diversity in image data may impact the model's ability to generate diversified and closer to real-world scenarios outputs. To address these challenges, we construct a high-quality, diverse visual instruction tuning dataset MMInstruct, which consists of 973K instructions from 24 domains. There are four instruction types: Judgement, Multiple-Choice, Long Visual Question Answering and Short Visual Question Answering. To construct MMInstruct, we propose an instruction generation data engine that leverages GPT-4V, GPT-3.5, and manual correction. Our instruction generation engine enables semi-automatic, low-cost, and multi-domain instruction generation at 1/6 the cost of manual construction. Through extensive experiment validation and ablation experiments, we demonstrate that MMInstruct could significantly improve the performance of VLLMs, e.g., the model fine-tuning on MMInstruct achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 12 benchmarks. The code and data shall be available at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMInstruct.

In production, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to support multi-turn queries of interchanging image and text modalities. However, the current MLLMs trained with visual-question-answering (VQA) datasets could suffer from degradation, as VQA datasets lack the diversity and complexity of the original text instruction datasets which the underlying language model had been trained with. To address this challenging degradation, we first collect a lightweight (6k entries) VQA preference dataset where answers were annotated by Gemini for 5 quality metrics in a granular fashion, and investigate standard Supervised Fine-tuning, rejection sampling, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and SteerLM. Our findings indicate that the with DPO we are able to surpass instruction-following capabilities of the language model, achieving a 6.73 score on MT-Bench, compared to Vicuna's 6.57 and LLaVA's 5.99 despite small data scale. This enhancement in textual instruction proficiency correlates with boosted visual instruction performance (+4.9\% on MM-Vet, +6\% on LLaVA-Bench), with minimal alignment tax on visual knowledge benchmarks compared to previous RLHF approach. In conclusion, we propose a distillation-based multi-modal alignment model with fine-grained annotations on a small dataset that reconciles the textual and visual performance of MLLMs, restoring and boosting language capability after visual instruction tuning.

We present CM3Leon (pronounced "Chameleon"), a retrieval-augmented, token-based, decoder-only multi-modal language model capable of generating and infilling both text and images. CM3Leon uses the CM3 multi-modal architecture but additionally shows the extreme benefits of scaling up and tuning on more diverse instruction-style data. It is the first multi-modal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. It is also a general-purpose model that can do both text-to-image and image-to-text generation, allowing us to introduce self-contained contrastive decoding methods that produce high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this recipe is highly effective for multi-modal models. CM3Leon achieves state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image generation with 5x less training compute than comparable methods (zero-shot MS-COCO FID of 4.88). After SFT, CM3Leon can also demonstrate unprecedented levels of controllability in tasks ranging from language-guided image editing to image-controlled generation and segmentation.

As multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors when solving scientific problems, evaluating the validity of their reasoning processes is critical for ensuring reliability and uncovering fine-grained model weaknesses. Since human evaluation is laborious and costly, prompting MLLMs as automated process judges has become a common practice. However, the reliability of these model-based judges remains uncertain. To address this, we introduce ProJudgeBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating abilities of MLLM-based process judges. ProJudgeBench comprises 2,400 test cases and 50,118 step-level labels, spanning four scientific disciplines with diverse difficulty levels and multi-modal content. In ProJudgeBench, each step is meticulously annotated by human experts for correctness, error type, and explanation, enabling a systematic evaluation of judges' capabilities to detect, classify and diagnose errors. Evaluation on ProJudgeBench reveals a significant performance gap between open-source and proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we further propose ProJudge-173k, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a Dynamic Dual-Phase fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to explicitly reason through problem-solving before assessing solutions. Both contributions significantly enhance the process evaluation capabilities of open-source models. All the resources will be released to foster future research of reliable multi-modal process evaluation.

Despite encouraging progress in 3D scene understanding, it remains challenging to develop an effective Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of understanding and reasoning in complex 3D environments. Most previous methods typically encode 3D point and 2D image features separately, neglecting interactions between 2D semantics and 3D object properties, as well as the spatial relationships within the 3D environment. This limitation not only hinders comprehensive representations of 3D scene, but also compromises training and inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a unified Instance-aware 3D Large Multi-modal Model (Inst3D-LMM) to deal with multiple 3D scene understanding tasks simultaneously. To obtain the fine-grained instance-level visual tokens, we first introduce a novel Multi-view Cross-Modal Fusion (MCMF) module to inject the multi-view 2D semantics into their corresponding 3D geometric features. For scene-level relation-aware tokens, we further present a 3D Instance Spatial Relation (3D-ISR) module to capture the intricate pairwise spatial relationships among objects. Additionally, we perform end-to-end multi-task instruction tuning simultaneously without the subsequent task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across 3D scene understanding, reasoning and grounding tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/hanxunyu/Inst3D-LMM

In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance compositional understanding in pre-trained vision and language models (VLMs) without sacrificing performance in zero-shot multi-modal tasks. Traditional fine-tuning approaches often improve compositional reasoning at the cost of degrading multi-modal capabilities, primarily due to the use of global hard negative (HN) loss, which contrasts global representations of images and texts. This global HN loss pushes HN texts that are highly similar to the original ones, damaging the model's multi-modal representations. To overcome this limitation, we propose Fine-grained Selective Calibrated CLIP (FSC-CLIP), which integrates local hard negative loss and selective calibrated regularization. These innovations provide fine-grained negative supervision while preserving the model's representational integrity. Our extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks for both compositionality and multi-modal tasks show that FSC-CLIP not only achieves compositionality on par with state-of-the-art models but also retains strong multi-modal capabilities. Code is available at: https://github.com/ytaek-oh/fsc-clip.

A multi-modal guardrail must effectively filter image content based on user-defined policies, identifying material that may be hateful, reinforce harmful stereotypes, contain explicit material, or spread misinformation. Deploying such guardrails in real-world applications, however, poses significant challenges. Users often require varied and highly customizable policies and typically cannot provide abundant examples for each custom policy. Consequently, an ideal guardrail should be scalable to the multiple policies and adaptable to evolving user standards with minimal retraining. Existing fine-tuning methods typically condition predictions on pre-defined policies, restricting their generalizability to new policies or necessitating extensive retraining to adapt. Conversely, training-free methods struggle with limited context lengths, making it difficult to incorporate all the policies comprehensively. To overcome these limitations, we propose to condition model's judgment on "precedents", which are the reasoning processes of prior data points similar to the given input. By leveraging precedents instead of fixed policies, our approach greatly enhances the flexibility and adaptability of the guardrail. In this paper, we introduce a critique-revise mechanism for collecting high-quality precedents and two strategies that utilize precedents for robust prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods across both few-shot and full-dataset scenarios and exhibits superior generalization to novel policies.

Multi-modal foundation models like OpenFlamingo, LLaVA, and GPT-4 are increasingly used for various real-world tasks. Prior work has shown that these models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the vision modality. These attacks can be leveraged to spread fake information or defraud users, and thus pose a significant risk, which makes the robustness of large multi-modal foundation models a pressing problem. The CLIP model, or one of its variants, is used as a frozen vision encoder in many vision-language models (VLMs), e.g. LLaVA and OpenFlamingo. We propose an unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning scheme to obtain a robust CLIP vision encoder, which yields robustness on all vision down-stream tasks (VLMs, zero-shot classification) that rely on CLIP. In particular, we show that stealth-attacks on users of VLMs by a malicious third party providing manipulated images are no longer possible once one replaces the original CLIP model with our robust one. No retraining or fine-tuning of the VLM is required. The code and robust models are available at https://github.com/chs20/RobustVLM

A key trend in Large Reasoning Models (e.g., OpenAI's o3) is the native agentic ability to use external tools such as web browsers for searching and writing/executing code for image manipulation to think with images. In the open-source research community, while significant progress has been made in language-only agentic abilities such as function calling and tool integration, the development of multi-modal agentic capabilities that involve truly thinking with images, and their corresponding benchmarks, are still less explored. This work highlights the effectiveness of Visual Agentic Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-ARFT) for enabling flexible and adaptive reasoning abilities for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). With Visual-ARFT, open-source LVLMs gain the ability to browse websites for real-time information updates and write code to manipulate and analyze input images through cropping, rotation, and other image processing techniques. We also present a Multi-modal Agentic Tool Bench (MAT) with two settings (MAT-Search and MAT-Coding) designed to evaluate LVLMs' agentic search and coding abilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that Visual-ARFT outperforms its baseline by +18.6% F1 / +13.0% EM on MAT-Coding and +10.3% F1 / +8.7% EM on MAT-Search, ultimately surpassing GPT-4o. Visual-ARFT also achieves +29.3 F1% / +25.9% EM gains on existing multi-hop QA benchmarks such as 2Wiki and HotpotQA, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities. Our findings suggest that Visual-ARFT offers a promising path toward building robust and generalizable multimodal agents.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly prominent in the field of artificial intelligence. Visual instruction fine-tuning (IFT) is a vital process for aligning MLLMs' output with user's intentions. High-quality and diversified instruction following data is the key to this fine-tuning process. Recent studies propose to construct visual IFT datasets through a multifaceted approach: transforming existing datasets with rule-based templates, employing GPT-4 for rewriting annotations, and utilizing GPT-4V for visual dataset pseudo-labeling. LLaVA-1.5 adopted similar approach and construct LLaVA-mix-665k, which is one of the simplest, most widely used, yet most effective IFT datasets today. Notably, when properly fine-tuned with this dataset, MLLMs can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks. However, we noticed that models trained with this dataset often struggle to follow user instructions properly in multi-round dialog. In addition, tradition caption and VQA evaluation benchmarks, with their closed-form evaluation structure, are not fully equipped to assess the capabilities of modern open-ended generative MLLMs. This problem is not unique to the LLaVA-mix-665k dataset, but may be a potential issue in all IFT datasets constructed from image captioning or VQA sources, though the extent of this issue may vary. We argue that datasets with diverse and high-quality detailed instruction following annotations are essential and adequate for MLLMs IFT. In this work, we establish a new IFT dataset, with images sourced from the COCO dataset along with more diverse instructions. Our experiments show that when fine-tuned with out proposed dataset, MLLMs achieve better performance on open-ended evaluation benchmarks in both single-round and multi-round dialog setting.

Web development involves turning UI designs into functional webpages, which can be difficult for both beginners and experienced developers due to the complexity of HTML's hierarchical structures and styles. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating source code, two major challenges persist in UI-to-HTML code generation: (1) effectively representing HTML's hierarchical structure for LLMs, and (2) bridging the gap between the visual nature of UI designs and the text-based format of HTML code. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Waffle, a new fine-tuning strategy that uses a structure-aware attention mechanism to improve LLMs' understanding of HTML's structure and a contrastive fine-tuning approach to align LLMs' understanding of UI images and HTML code. Models fine-tuned with Waffle show up to 9.00 pp (percentage point) higher HTML match, 0.0982 higher CW-SSIM, 32.99 higher CLIP, and 27.12 pp higher LLEM on our new benchmark WebSight-Test and an existing benchmark Design2Code, outperforming current fine-tuning methods.

Multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) is a rapidly evolving field, where significant progress, particularly in image-text pairing, has been made through advanced representation learning and cross-modality alignment research. However, current benchmarks for evaluating MMIR performance in image-text pairing within the scientific domain show a notable gap, where chart and table images described in scholarly language usually do not play a significant role. To bridge this gap, we develop a specialised scientific MMIR (SciMMIR) benchmark by leveraging open-access paper collections to extract data relevant to the scientific domain. This benchmark comprises 530K meticulously curated image-text pairs, extracted from figures and tables with detailed captions in scientific documents. We further annotate the image-text pairs with two-level subset-subcategory hierarchy annotations to facilitate a more comprehensive evaluation of the baselines. We conducted zero-shot and fine-tuning evaluations on prominent multi-modal image-captioning and visual language models, such as CLIP and BLIP. Our analysis offers critical insights for MMIR in the scientific domain, including the impact of pre-training and fine-tuning settings and the influence of the visual and textual encoders. All our data and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/Wusiwei0410/SciMMIR.

As the size of Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) increases consistently, the adaptation of these pre-trained models to specialized tasks has become a computationally and memory-intensive challenge. Traditional fine-tuning methods require isolated, exhaustive retuning for each new task, limiting the models' versatility. Moreover, current efficient adaptation techniques often overlook modality alignment, focusing only on the knowledge extraction of new tasks. To tackle these issues, we introduce Multiway-Adapter, an innovative framework incorporating an 'Alignment Enhancer' to deepen modality alignment, enabling high transferability without tuning pre-trained parameters. Our method adds fewer than 1.25\% of additional parameters to LMMs, exemplified by the BEiT-3 model in our study. This leads to superior zero-shot image-text retrieval performance compared to fully fine-tuned models, while achieving up to a 57\% reduction in fine-tuning time. Our approach offers a resource-efficient and effective adaptation pathway for LMMs, broadening their applicability. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/longkukuhi/MultiWay-Adapter.

Pre-trained on extensive text and image corpora, current Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLM) have shown strong capabilities in general visual reasoning tasks. However, their performance is still lacking in physical domains that require understanding diagrams with complex physical structures and quantitative analysis based on multi-modal information. To address this, we develop a new framework, named Multi-Modal Scientific Reasoning with Physics Perception and Simulation (MAPS) based on an MLLM. MAPS decomposes expert-level multi-modal reasoning task into physical diagram understanding via a Physical Perception Model (PPM) and reasoning with physical knowledge via a simulator. The PPM module is obtained by fine-tuning a visual language model using carefully designed synthetic data with paired physical diagrams and corresponding simulation language descriptions. At the inference stage, MAPS integrates the simulation language description of the input diagram provided by PPM and results obtained through a Chain-of-Simulation process with MLLM to derive the underlying rationale and the final answer. Validated using our collected college-level circuit analysis problems, MAPS significantly improves reasoning accuracy of MLLM and outperforms all existing models. The results confirm MAPS offers a promising direction for enhancing multi-modal scientific reasoning ability of MLLMs. We will release our code, model and dataset used for our experiments upon publishing of this paper.

During surgical training, real-time feedback from trainers to trainees is important for preventing errors and enhancing long-term skill acquisition. Accurately predicting the effectiveness of this feedback, specifically whether it leads to a change in trainee behavior, is crucial for developing methods for improving surgical training and education. However, relying on human annotations to assess feedback effectiveness is laborious and prone to biases, underscoring the need for an automated, scalable, and objective method. Creating such an automated system poses challenges, as it requires an understanding of both the verbal feedback delivered by the trainer and the visual context of the real-time surgical scene. To address this, we propose a method that integrates information from transcribed verbal feedback and corresponding surgical video to predict feedback effectiveness. Our findings show that both transcribed feedback and surgical video are individually predictive of trainee behavior changes, and their combination achieves an AUROC of 0.70+/-0.02, improving prediction accuracy by up to 6.6%. Additionally, we introduce self-supervised fine-tuning as a strategy for enhancing surgical video representation learning, which is scalable and further enhances prediction performance. Our results demonstrate the potential of multi-modal learning to advance the automated assessment of surgical feedback.

As user content and queries become increasingly multi-modal, the need for effective multi-modal search systems has grown. Traditional search systems often rely on textual and metadata annotations for indexed images, while multi-modal embeddings like CLIP enable direct search using text and image embeddings. However, embedding-based approaches face challenges in integrating contextual features such as user locale and recency. Building a scalable multi-modal search system requires fine-tuning several components. This paper presents a multi-modal search architecture and a series of AB tests that optimize embeddings and multi-modal technologies in Adobe Express template search. We address considerations such as embedding model selection, the roles of embeddings in matching and ranking, and the balance between dense and sparse embeddings. Our iterative approach demonstrates how utilizing sparse, dense, and contextual features enhances short and long query search, significantly reduces null rates (over 70\%), and increases click-through rates (CTR). Our findings provide insights into developing robust multi-modal search systems, thereby enhancing relevance for complex queries.

Recent work in open-domain conversational agents has demonstrated that significant improvements in model engagingness and humanness metrics can be achieved via massive scaling in both pre-training data and model size (Adiwardana et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2020). However, if we want to build agents with human-like abilities, we must expand beyond handling just text. A particularly important topic is the ability to see images and communicate about what is perceived. With the goal of engaging humans in multi-modal dialogue, we investigate combining components from state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue agents with those from state-of-the-art vision models. We study incorporating different image fusion schemes and domain-adaptive pre-training and fine-tuning strategies, and show that our best resulting model outperforms strong existing models in multi-modal dialogue while simultaneously performing as well as its predecessor (text-only) BlenderBot (Roller et al., 2020) in text-based conversation. We additionally investigate and incorporate safety components in our final model, and show that such efforts do not diminish model performance with respect to engagingness metrics.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a central role in engineering and manufacturing, making it possible to create precise and editable 3D models. Using a variety of sensor or user-provided data as inputs for CAD reconstruction can democratize access to design applications. However, existing methods typically focus on a single input modality, such as point clouds, images, or text, which limits their generalizability and robustness. Leveraging recent advances in vision-language models (VLM), we propose a multi-modal CAD reconstruction model that simultaneously processes all three input modalities. Inspired by large language model (LLM) training paradigms, we adopt a two-stage pipeline: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on large-scale procedurally generated data, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning using online feedback, obtained programatically. Furthermore, we are the first to explore RL fine-tuning of LLMs for CAD tasks demonstrating that online RL algorithms such as Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO) outperform offline alternatives. In the DeepCAD benchmark, our SFT model outperforms existing single-modal approaches in all three input modalities simultaneously. More importantly, after RL fine-tuning, cadrille sets new state-of-the-art on three challenging datasets, including a real-world one.

This paper presents instruct-imagen, a model that tackles heterogeneous image generation tasks and generalizes across unseen tasks. We introduce *multi-modal instruction* for image generation, a task representation articulating a range of generation intents with precision. It uses natural language to amalgamate disparate modalities (e.g., text, edge, style, subject, etc.), such that abundant generation intents can be standardized in a uniform format. We then build instruct-imagen by fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model with a two-stage framework. First, we adapt the model using the retrieval-augmented training, to enhance model's capabilities to ground its generation on external multimodal context. Subsequently, we fine-tune the adapted model on diverse image generation tasks that requires vision-language understanding (e.g., subject-driven generation, etc.), each paired with a multi-modal instruction encapsulating the task's essence. Human evaluation on various image generation datasets reveals that instruct-imagen matches or surpasses prior task-specific models in-domain and demonstrates promising generalization to unseen and more complex tasks.

In the realm of large multi-modal models (LMMs), efficient modality alignment is crucial yet often constrained by the scarcity of high-quality image-text data. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the ShareGPT4V dataset, a pioneering large-scale resource featuring 1.2 million highly descriptive captions, which surpasses existing datasets in diversity and information content, covering world knowledge, object properties, spatial relationships, and aesthetic evaluations. Specifically, ShareGPT4V originates from a curated 100K high-quality captions collected from advanced GPT4-Vision and has been expanded to 1.2M with a superb caption model trained on this subset. ShareGPT4V first demonstrates its effectiveness for the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase, by substituting an equivalent quantity of detailed captions in existing SFT datasets with a subset of our high-quality captions, significantly enhancing the LMMs like LLaVA-7B, LLaVA-1.5-13B, and Qwen-VL-Chat-7B on the MME and MMBench benchmarks, with respective gains of 222.8/22.0/22.3 and 2.7/1.3/1.5. We further incorporate ShareGPT4V data into both the pre-training and SFT phases, obtaining ShareGPT4V-7B, a superior LMM based on a simple architecture that has remarkable performance across a majority of the multi-modal benchmarks. This project is available at https://ShareGPT4V.github.io to serve as a pivotal resource for advancing the LMMs community.

Accurate multi-modal document retrieval is crucial for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), yet existing benchmarks do not fully capture real-world challenges with their current design. We introduce REAL-MM-RAG, an automatically generated benchmark designed to address four key properties essential for real-world retrieval: (i) multi-modal documents, (ii) enhanced difficulty, (iii) Realistic-RAG queries and (iv) accurate labeling. Additionally, we propose a multi-difficulty-level scheme based on query rephrasing to evaluate models' semantic understanding beyond keyword matching. Our benchmark reveals significant model weaknesses, particularly in handling table-heavy documents and robustness to query rephrasing. To mitigate these shortcomings, we curate a rephrased training set and introduce a new finance-focused, table-heavy dataset. Fine-tuning on these datasets enables models to achieve state-of-the-art retrieval performance on REAL-MM-RAG benchmark. Our work offers a better way to evaluate and improve retrieval in multi-modal RAG systems while also providing training data and models that address current limitations.

In the field of speaker diarization, the development of technology is constrained by two problems: insufficient data resources and poor generalization ability of deep learning models. To address these two problems, firstly, we propose an automated method for constructing speaker diarization datasets, which generates more accurate pseudo-labels for massive data through the combination of audio and video. Relying on this method, we have released Multi-modal, Multi-scenario and Multi-language Speaker Diarization (M3SD) datasets. This dataset is derived from real network videos and is highly diverse. In addition, we further propose a scenario-related model fine-tuning strategy. Based on the general model pre-trained using the above dataset, we combine the specific data of the target scenario (e.g., meetings) and achieve targeted optimization by using Adapter and LoRA joint fine-tuning, thus achieving the model's domain adaptation. Our dataset and code have been open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/spaces/OldDragon/m3sd.

Understanding accurate atomic temporal event is essential for video comprehension. However, current video-language benchmarks often fall short to evaluate Large Multi-modal Models' (LMMs) temporal event understanding capabilities, as they can be effectively addressed using image-language models. In this paper, we introduce RTime-QA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the atomic temporal event understanding ability of LMMs. RTime-QA comprises 822 high-quality, carefully-curated video-text questions, each meticulously annotated by human experts. Each question features a video depicting an atomic temporal event, paired with both correct answers and temporal negative descriptions, specifically designed to evaluate temporal understanding. To advance LMMs' temporal event understanding ability, we further introduce RTime-IT, a 14k instruction-tuning dataset that employs a similar annotation process as RTime-QA. Extensive experimental analysis demonstrates that RTime-QA presents a significant challenge for LMMs: the state-of-the-art model Qwen2-VL achieves only 34.6 on strict-ACC metric, substantially lagging behind human performance. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that RTime-IT effectively enhance LMMs' capacity in temporal understanding. By fine-tuning on RTime-IT, our Qwen2-VL achieves 65.9 on RTime-QA.

The field of 4D world modeling - aiming to jointly capture spatial geometry and temporal dynamics - has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in large-scale generative models and multimodal learning. However, the development of truly general 4D world models remains fundamentally constrained by the availability of high-quality data. Existing datasets and benchmarks often lack the dynamic complexity, multi-domain diversity, and spatial-temporal annotations required to support key tasks such as 4D geometric reconstruction, future prediction, and camera-control video generation. To address this gap, we introduce OmniWorld, a large-scale, multi-domain, multi-modal dataset specifically designed for 4D world modeling. OmniWorld consists of a newly collected OmniWorld-Game dataset and several curated public datasets spanning diverse domains. Compared with existing synthetic datasets, OmniWorld-Game provides richer modality coverage, larger scale, and more realistic dynamic interactions. Based on this dataset, we establish a challenging benchmark that exposes the limitations of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in modeling complex 4D environments. Moreover, fine-tuning existing SOTA methods on OmniWorld leads to significant performance gains across 4D reconstruction and video generation tasks, strongly validating OmniWorld as a powerful resource for training and evaluation. We envision OmniWorld as a catalyst for accelerating the development of general-purpose 4D world models, ultimately advancing machines' holistic understanding of the physical world.

Recent development in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have leverage Attention-based Transformer architectures and achieved superior performance and generalization capabilities. They have since covered extensive areas of traditional learning tasks. For instance, text-based tasks such as text-classification and sequence-labeling, as well as multi-modal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which were previously addressed using different models, can now be tackled based on one foundation model. Consequently, the training and lightweight fine-tuning of LLMs and MLLMs, especially those based on Transformer architecture, has become particularly important. In recognition of these overwhelming needs, we develop SWIFT, a customizable one-stop infrastructure for large models. With support of over 300+ LLMs and 50+ MLLMs, SWIFT stands as the open-source framework that provide the most comprehensive support for fine-tuning large models. In particular, it is the first training framework that provides systematic support for MLLMs. In addition to the core functionalities of fine-tuning, SWIFT also integrates post-training processes such as inference, evaluation, and model quantization, to facilitate fast adoptions of large models in various application scenarios. With a systematic integration of various training techniques, SWIFT offers helpful utilities such as benchmark comparisons among different training techniques for large models. For fine-tuning models specialized in agent framework, we show that notable improvements on the ToolBench leader-board can be achieved by training with customized dataset on SWIFT, with an increase of 5.2%-21.8% in the Act.EM metric over various baseline models, a reduction in hallucination by 1.6%-14.1%, and an average performance improvement of 8%-17%.

Foundation models in computational pathology promise to unlock the development of new clinical decision support systems and models for precision medicine. However, there is a mismatch between most clinical analysis, which is defined at the level of one or more whole slide images, and foundation models to date, which process the thousands of image tiles contained in a whole slide image separately. The requirement to train a network to aggregate information across a large number of tiles in multiple whole slide images limits these models' impact. In this work, we present a slide-level foundation model for H&E-stained histopathology, PRISM, that builds on Virchow tile embeddings and leverages clinical report text for pre-training. Using the tile embeddings, PRISM produces slide-level embeddings with the ability to generate clinical reports, resulting in several modes of use. Using text prompts, PRISM achieves zero-shot cancer detection and sub-typing performance approaching and surpassing that of a supervised aggregator model. Using the slide embeddings with linear classifiers, PRISM surpasses supervised aggregator models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that fine-tuning of the PRISM slide encoder yields label-efficient training for biomarker prediction, a task that typically suffers from low availability of training data; an aggregator initialized with PRISM and trained on as little as 10% of the training data can outperform a supervised baseline that uses all of the data.

We present LLaMA-Adapter, a lightweight adaption method to efficiently fine-tune LLaMA into an instruction-following model. Using 52K self-instruct demonstrations, LLaMA-Adapter only introduces 1.2M learnable parameters upon the frozen LLaMA 7B model, and costs less than one hour for fine-tuning on 8 A100 GPUs. Specifically, we adopt a set of learnable adaption prompts, and prepend them to the input text tokens at higher transformer layers. Then, a zero-init attention mechanism with zero gating is proposed, which adaptively injects the new instructional cues into LLaMA, while effectively preserves its pre-trained knowledge. With efficient training, LLaMA-Adapter generates high-quality responses, comparable to Alpaca with fully fine-tuned 7B parameters. Furthermore, our approach can be simply extended to multi-modal input, e.g., images, for image-conditioned LLaMA, which achieves superior reasoning capacity on ScienceQA. We release our code at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/LLaMA-Adapter.

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). However, these supervised methods require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately unsustainable resource. While recent efforts have explored unsupervised post-training, their methods are complex and difficult to iterate. In this work, we are the first to investigate the use of GRPO, a stable and scalable online RL algorithm, for enabling continual self-improvement without any external supervision. We propose MM-UPT, a simple yet effective framework for unsupervised post-training of MLLMs. MM-UPT builds upon GRPO, replacing traditional reward signals with a self-rewarding mechanism based on majority voting over multiple sampled responses. Our experiments demonstrate that MM-UPT significantly improves the reasoning ability of Qwen2.5-VL-7B (e.g., 66.3 %rightarrow72.9 % on MathVista, 62.9 %rightarrow68.7 % on We-Math), using standard dataset without ground truth labels. MM-UPT also outperforms prior unsupervised baselines and even approaches the results of supervised GRPO. Furthermore, we show that incorporating synthetic questions, generated solely by MLLM itself, can boost performance as well, highlighting a promising approach for scalable self-improvement. Overall, MM-UPT offers a new paradigm for continual, autonomous enhancement of MLLMs in the absence of external supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/waltonfuture/MM-UPT.

Vision-language alignment in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). SFT is stable and efficient but requires large-scale human annotations and cannot capture subtle preferences, while RL brings in a reward signal for training, but suffers from overhead and instability. These limitations highlight a trade-off between scalability, robustness, and alignment quality. To address this, we propose MergeMix, a training-time augmentation paradigm that bridges SFT and RL. It first applies an attention-aware image mixing via token merge with more cluster representation and spatial context, and then presents a preference-driven training paradigm for MLLMs by building preference pairs with mixed images and raw images, and optimizing via SimPO loss. As a mixup augmentation, MergeMix enhances attention consistency and efficiency, surpassing other heuristic-based methods in classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MergeMix achieves competitive accuracy with improved efficiency, providing a scalable approach to preference alignment in classification and MLLMs.

Developing generative models for interleaved image-text data has both research and practical value. It requires models to understand the interleaved sequences and subsequently generate images and text. However, existing attempts are limited by the issue that the fixed number of visual tokens cannot efficiently capture image details, which is particularly problematic in the multi-image scenarios. To address this, this paper presents MM-Interleaved, an end-to-end generative model for interleaved image-text data. It introduces a multi-scale and multi-image feature synchronizer module, allowing direct access to fine-grained image features in the previous context during the generation process. MM-Interleaved is end-to-end pre-trained on both paired and interleaved image-text corpora. It is further enhanced through a supervised fine-tuning phase, wherein the model improves its ability to follow complex multi-modal instructions. Experiments demonstrate the versatility of MM-Interleaved in recognizing visual details following multi-modal instructions and generating consistent images following both textual and visual conditions. Code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/MM-Interleaved.

Music source separation demixes a piece of music into its individual sound sources (vocals, percussion, melodic instruments, etc.), a task with no simple mathematical solution. It requires deep learning methods involving training on large datasets of isolated music stems. The most commonly available datasets are made from commercial Western music, limiting the models' applications to non-Western genres like Carnatic music. Carnatic music is a live tradition, with the available multi-track recordings containing overlapping sounds and bleeds between the sources. This poses a challenge to commercially available source separation models like Spleeter and Hybrid Demucs. In this work, we introduce 'Sanidha', the first open-source novel dataset for Carnatic music, offering studio-quality, multi-track recordings with minimal to no overlap or bleed. Along with the audio files, we provide high-definition videos of the artists' performances. Additionally, we fine-tuned Spleeter, one of the most commonly used source separation models, on our dataset and observed improved SDR performance compared to fine-tuning on a pre-existing Carnatic multi-track dataset. The outputs of the fine-tuned model with 'Sanidha' are evaluated through a listening study.

Recent advancements in surgical computer vision have been driven by vision-only models, which lack language semantics, relying on manually annotated videos to predict fixed object categories. This limits their generalizability to unseen surgical procedures and tasks. We propose leveraging surgical video lectures from e-learning platforms to provide effective vision and language supervisory signals for multi-modal representation learning, bypassing manual annotations. We address surgery-specific linguistic challenges using multiple automatic speech recognition systems for text transcriptions. We introduce SurgVLP - Surgical Vision Language Pre-training - a novel method for multi-modal representation learning. SurgVLP employs a new contrastive learning objective, aligning video clip embeddings with corresponding multiple text embeddings in a joint latent space. We demonstrate the representational capability of this space through several vision-and-language surgical tasks and vision-only tasks specific to surgery. Unlike current fully supervised approaches, SurgVLP adapts to different surgical procedures and tasks without specific fine-tuning, achieving zero-shot adaptation to tasks such as surgical tool, phase, and triplet recognition without manual annotation. These results highlight the transferability and versatility of the learned multi-modal representations in surgical video analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SurgVLP

Foundation image-text models such as CLIP with zero-shot capabilities enable a wide array of applications. MobileCLIP is a recent family of image-text models at 3-15ms latency and 50-150M parameters with state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy. The main ingredients in MobileCLIP were its low-latency and light architectures and a novel multi-modal reinforced training that made knowledge distillation from multiple caption-generators and CLIP teachers efficient, scalable, and reproducible. In this paper, we improve the multi-modal reinforced training of MobileCLIP through: 1) better CLIP teacher ensembles trained on the DFN dataset, 2) improved captioner teachers trained on the DFN dataset and fine-tuned on a diverse selection of high-quality image-caption datasets. We discover new insights through ablations such as the importance of temperature tuning in contrastive knowledge distillation, the effectiveness of caption-generator fine-tuning for caption diversity, and the additive improvement from combining synthetic captions generated by multiple models. We train a new family of models called MobileCLIP2 and achieve state-of-the-art ImageNet-1k zero-shot accuracies at low latencies. In particular, we observe 2.2% improvement in ImageNet-1k accuracy for MobileCLIP2-B compared with MobileCLIP-B architecture. Notably, MobileCLIP2-S4 matches the zero-shot accuracy of SigLIP-SO400M/14 on ImageNet-1k while being 2times smaller and improves on DFN ViT-L/14 at 2.5times lower latency. We release our pretrained models (https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileclip) and the data generation code (https://github.com/apple/ml-mobileclip-dr). The data generation code makes it easy to create new reinforced datasets with arbitrary teachers using distributed scalable processing.

Recent advances in machine learning have demonstrated that multi-modal pre-training can improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance compared to randomly initialized models, even when models are fine-tuned on uni-modal tasks. Existing multi-modal pre-training methods for the ASR task have primarily focused on single-stage pre-training where a single unsupervised task is used for pre-training followed by fine-tuning on the downstream task. In this work, we introduce a novel method combining multi-modal and multi-task unsupervised pre-training with a translation-based supervised mid-training approach. We empirically demonstrate that such a multi-stage approach leads to relative word error rate (WER) improvements of up to 38.45% over baselines on both Librispeech and SUPERB. Additionally, we share several important findings for choosing pre-training methods and datasets.

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in Large Reasoning Models like OpenAI o1 learns from feedback on its answers, which is especially useful in applications when fine-tuning data is scarce. Recent open-source work like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is one key direction in reproducing o1. While the R1-style model has demonstrated success in language models, its application in multi-modal domains remains under-explored. This work introduces Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT), which further extends the application areas of RFT on visual tasks. Specifically, Visual-RFT first uses Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multiple responses containing reasoning tokens and final answers for each input, and then uses our proposed visual perception verifiable reward functions to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We design different verifiable reward functions for different perception tasks, such as the Intersection over Union (IoU) reward for object detection. Experimental results on fine-grained image classification, few-shot object detection, reasoning grounding, as well as open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced generalization ability of Visual-RFT compared with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). For example, Visual-RFT improves accuracy by 24.3% over the baseline in one-shot fine-grained image classification with around 100 samples. In few-shot object detection, Visual-RFT also exceeds the baseline by 21.9 on COCO's two-shot setting and 15.4 on LVIS. Our Visual-RFT represents a paradigm shift in fine-tuning LVLMs, offering a data-efficient, reward-driven approach that enhances reasoning and adaptability for domain-specific tasks.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly in recent years. However, existing approaches for vision tasks often rely on indirect representations, such as generating coordinates as text for detection, which limits performance and prevents dense prediction tasks like segmentation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Patch-as-Decodable Token (PaDT), a unified paradigm that enables MLLMs to directly generate both textual and diverse visual outputs. Central to PaDT are Visual Reference Tokens (VRTs), derived from visual patch embeddings of query images and interleaved seamlessly with LLM's output textual tokens. A lightweight decoder then transforms LLM's outputs into detection, segmentation, and grounding predictions. Unlike prior methods, PaDT processes VRTs independently at each forward pass and dynamically expands the embedding table, thus improving localization and differentiation among similar objects. We further tailor a training strategy for PaDT by randomly selecting VRTs for supervised fine-tuning and introducing a robust per-token cross-entropy loss. Our empirical studies across four visual perception and understanding tasks suggest PaDT consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, even compared with significantly larger MLLM models. The code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/PaDT.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) quickly evolved as the new de-facto standard for the task of novel view synthesis when trained on a set of RGB images. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of neural scene representations, such as NeRFs, in the context of multi-modal learning. Specifically, we present four different strategies of how to incorporate a second modality, other than RGB, into NeRFs: (1) training from scratch independently on both modalities; (2) pre-training on RGB and fine-tuning on the second modality; (3) adding a second branch; and (4) adding a separate component to predict (color) values of the additional modality. We chose thermal imaging as second modality since it strongly differs from RGB in terms of radiosity, making it challenging to integrate into neural scene representations. For the evaluation of the proposed strategies, we captured a new publicly available multi-view dataset, ThermalMix, consisting of six common objects and about 360 RGB and thermal images in total. We employ cross-modality calibration prior to data capturing, leading to high-quality alignments between RGB and thermal images. Our findings reveal that adding a second branch to NeRF performs best for novel view synthesis on thermal images while also yielding compelling results on RGB. Finally, we also show that our analysis generalizes to other modalities, including near-infrared images and depth maps. Project page: https://mert-o.github.io/ThermalNeRF/.

Does the prior knowledge of the vision encoder constrain the capability boundary of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs)? While most existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, the impact of vision encoder's prior knowledge is seldom investigated. In this work, we introduce a novel metric, Rank_e, to quantify the effect of the vision encoder's prior knowledge on MLLM performance. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between prior knowledge and MLLM performance. Moreover, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning using solely end-to-end visual question answering (VQA) data is insufficient--particularly for entities with low inherent visual prior knowledge. To address this issue, we propose VisPRE (Vision Prior Remediation), a two-stage training framework that explicitly incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level. Experimental results demonstrate that augmenting vision encoder's prior knowledge substantially boosts the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs, offering a novel and effective strategy for improving performance, especially in scenarios involving uncommon visual entities.

The continuous operation of Earth-orbiting satellites generates vast and ever-growing archives of Remote Sensing (RS) images. Natural language presents an intuitive interface for accessing, querying, and interpreting the data from such archives. However, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are predominantly trained on web-scraped, noisy image-text data, exhibiting limited exposure to the specialized domain of RS. This deficiency results in poor performance on RS-specific tasks, as commonly used datasets often lack detailed, scientifically accurate textual descriptions and instead emphasize solely on attributes like date and location. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce GAIA, a novel dataset designed for multi-scale, multi-sensor, and multi-modal RS image analysis. GAIA comprises of 205,150 meticulously curated RS image-text pairs, representing a diverse range of RS modalities associated to different spatial resolutions. Unlike existing vision-language datasets in RS, GAIA specifically focuses on capturing a diverse range of RS applications, providing unique information about environmental changes, natural disasters, and various other dynamic phenomena. The dataset provides a spatially and temporally balanced distribution, spanning across the globe, covering the last 25 years with a balanced temporal distribution of observations. GAIA's construction involved a two-stage process: (1) targeted web-scraping of images and accompanying text from reputable RS-related sources, and (2) generation of five high-quality, scientifically grounded synthetic captions for each image using carefully crafted prompts that leverage the advanced vision-language capabilities of GPT-4o. Our extensive experiments, including fine-tuning of CLIP and BLIP2 models, demonstrate that GAIA significantly improves performance on RS image classification, cross-modal retrieval and image captioning tasks.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of online recipe sharing within a globalized context, there has been a notable surge in research towards comprehending and generating food recipes. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-2 and LLaVA have paved the way for Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to delve deeper into various facets of food-related tasks, encompassing ingredient recognition and comprehensive recipe generation. Despite impressive performance and multi-modal adaptability of LLMs, domain-specific training remains paramount for their effective application. This work evaluates existing LLMs for recipe generation and proposes LLaVA-Chef, a novel model trained on a curated dataset of diverse recipe prompts in a multi-stage approach. First, we refine the mapping of visual food image embeddings to the language space. Second, we adapt LLaVA to the food domain by fine-tuning it on relevant recipe data. Third, we utilize diverse prompts to enhance the model's recipe comprehension. Finally, we improve the linguistic quality of generated recipes by penalizing the model with a custom loss function. LLaVA-Chef demonstrates impressive improvements over pretrained LLMs and prior works. A detailed qualitative analysis reveals that LLaVA-Chef generates more detailed recipes with precise ingredient mentions, compared to existing approaches.

Real-world data often exhibit extreme imbalances and out-of-distribution (OOD) instances, which significantly biases the model training. While it has been extensively studied in vision and language domains separately, the impact of long-tailed open worlds on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first demonstrate the susceptibility and vulnerability of vision-language models to significant biases caused by tail drift and out-of-distribution (OOD) drift during both the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. To eliminate the bias from different sources, we integrate the tailed drift adaptation and OOD drift detection into a unified framework by extending the concept drift theory to multi-modal. Specifically, a T-distribution-based drift adapter is proposed to effectively mitigate the bias induced by the long-tailed problem, which also facilitates the model in distinguishing OOD data through explicit distribution modelling. Extensive experiments show significant improvements in our model's ability to adapt to tailed drift and OOD drift. Moreover, it enhances the efficiency and accuracy of image-text alignment in vision language model pre-training, particularly in the long-tail open world scenario. Furthermore, we create a set of multi-modal datasets called OpenMMlo, specifically tailored for the long-tailed open world scenario, to validate our findings. To foster the development of the multi-modal community, we have made both OpenMMlo datasets and our code publicly available at: https://github.com/Anonymous0Knight/ConceptDriftMLLMs.

One-Shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms often rely on training a hardware agnostic super-network for a domain specific task. Optimal sub-networks are then extracted from the trained super-network for different hardware platforms. However, training super-networks from scratch can be extremely time consuming and compute intensive especially for large models that rely on a two-stage training process of pre-training and fine-tuning. State of the art pre-trained models are available for a wide range of tasks, but their large sizes significantly limits their applicability on various hardware platforms. We propose InstaTune, a method that leverages off-the-shelf pre-trained weights for large models and generates a super-network during the fine-tuning stage. InstaTune has multiple benefits. Firstly, since the process happens during fine-tuning, it minimizes the overall time and compute resources required for NAS. Secondly, the sub-networks extracted are optimized for the target task, unlike prior work that optimizes on the pre-training objective. Finally, InstaTune is easy to "plug and play" in existing frameworks. By using multi-objective evolutionary search algorithms along with lightly trained predictors, we find Pareto-optimal sub-networks that outperform their respective baselines across different performance objectives such as accuracy and MACs. Specifically, we demonstrate that our approach performs well across both unimodal (ViT and BERT) and multi-modal (BEiT-3) transformer based architectures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a focal point of research and application, driven by their unprecedented ability to understand and generate text with human-like quality. Even more recently, LLMs have been extended into multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs) which extends their capabilities to deal with image, video and audio information, in addition to text. This opens up applications like text-to-video generation, image captioning, text-to-speech, and more and is achieved either by retro-fitting an LLM with multi-modal capabilities, or building a MM-LLM from scratch. This paper provides an extensive review of the current state of those LLMs with multi-modal capabilities as well as the very recent MM-LLMs. It covers the historical development of LLMs especially the advances enabled by transformer-based architectures like OpenAI's GPT series and Google's BERT, as well as the role of attention mechanisms in enhancing model performance. The paper includes coverage of the major and most important of the LLMs and MM-LLMs and also covers the techniques of model tuning, including fine-tuning and prompt engineering, which tailor pre-trained models to specific tasks or domains. Ethical considerations and challenges, such as data bias and model misuse, are also analysed to underscore the importance of responsible AI development and deployment. Finally, we discuss the implications of open-source versus proprietary models in AI research. Through this review, we provide insights into the transformative potential of MM-LLMs in various applications.

The increasing demand for intelligent systems capable of interpreting and reasoning about visual content requires the development of Large Multi-Modal Models (LMMs) that are not only accurate but also have explicit reasoning capabilities. This paper presents a novel approach to imbue an LMM with the ability to conduct explicit reasoning based on visual content and textual instructions. We introduce a system that can ask a question to acquire necessary knowledge, thereby enhancing the robustness and explicability of the reasoning process. Our method comprises the development of a novel dataset generated by a Large Language Model (LLM), designed to promote chain-of-thought reasoning combined with a question-asking mechanism. We designed an LMM, which has high capabilities on region awareness to address the intricate requirements of image-text alignment. The model undergoes a three-stage training phase, starting with large-scale image-text alignment using a large-scale datasets, followed by instruction tuning, and fine-tuning with a focus on chain-of-thought reasoning. The results demonstrate a stride toward a more robust, accurate, and interpretable LMM, capable of reasoning explicitly and seeking information proactively when confronted with ambiguous visual input.

Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to generate personalized image captions, even when trained on high-quality captions. In this work, we observe that such limitations persist in existing post-training-based MLLM personalization methods. Specifically, despite being post-tuned with large-scale caption data through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models frequently fail to produce faithful descriptions in real-world scenarios, such as multi-concept image captioning. However, acquiring large-scale, high-quality captions for such complex settings is both costly and difficult. To address the data-centric nature of SFT, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first RL-based approach to post-train MLLMs for personalized image captioning. Our method significantly enhances both visual recognition and personalized generation capabilities of MLLMs, and consistently outperforms existing SFT-based baselines, especially in the challenging multi-concept image captioning task.

This paper delves into the pressing need in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) for Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs possess remarkable capabilities, their extensive parameter requirements and associated computational demands hinder their practicality and scalability for real-world applications. Our position paper highlights current states and the necessity of further studying into the topic, and recognizes significant challenges and open issues that must be addressed to fully harness the powerful abilities of LLMs. These challenges encompass novel efficient PEFT architectures, PEFT for different learning settings, PEFT combined with model compression techniques, and the exploration of PEFT for multi-modal LLMs. By presenting this position paper, we aim to stimulate further research and foster discussions surrounding more efficient and accessible PEFT for LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in mathematical reasoning, particularly with text-based mathematical problems. However, current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), especially those specialized in mathematics, tend to focus predominantly on solving geometric problems but ignore the diversity of visual information available in other areas of mathematics. Moreover, the geometric information for these specialized mathematical MLLMs is derived from several public datasets, which are typically limited in diversity and complexity. To address these limitations, we aim to construct a fine-tuning dataset named MathVL, and develop a series of specialized mathematical MLLMs termed MathGLM-Vision by conducting Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on MathVL with various parameter-scale backbones. To extensively evaluate the effectiveness of MathGLM-Vision, we conduct experiments on several public benchmarks and our curated MathVL-test consisting of 2,000 problems. Experimental results demonstrate that MathGLM-Vision achieves significant improvements compared with some existing models, including backbone models and open-source mathematical MLLMs. These findings indicate the importance of diversity dataset in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of MLLMs.

We introduce OmniFlow, a novel generative model designed for any-to-any generation tasks such as text-to-image, text-to-audio, and audio-to-image synthesis. OmniFlow advances the rectified flow (RF) framework used in text-to-image models to handle the joint distribution of multiple modalities. It outperforms previous any-to-any models on a wide range of tasks, such as text-to-image and text-to-audio synthesis. Our work offers three key contributions: First, we extend RF to a multi-modal setting and introduce a novel guidance mechanism, enabling users to flexibly control the alignment between different modalities in the generated outputs. Second, we propose a novel architecture that extends the text-to-image MMDiT architecture of Stable Diffusion 3 and enables audio and text generation. The extended modules can be efficiently pretrained individually and merged with the vanilla text-to-image MMDiT for fine-tuning. Lastly, we conduct a comprehensive study on the design choices of rectified flow transformers for large-scale audio and text generation, providing valuable insights into optimizing performance across diverse modalities. The Code will be available at https://github.com/jacklishufan/OmniFlows.

Synthetic video generation with foundation models has gained attention for its realism and wide applications. While these models produce high-quality frames, they often fail to respect common sense and physical laws, resulting in abnormal content. Existing metrics like VideoScore emphasize general quality but ignore such violations and lack interpretability. A more insightful approach is using multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) as interpretable evaluators, as seen in FactScore. Yet, MLLMs' ability to detect abnormalities in synthetic videos remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce VideoHallu, a benchmark featuring synthetic videos from models like Veo2, Sora, and Kling, paired with expert-designed QA tasks solvable via human-level reasoning across various categories. We assess several SoTA MLLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, Qwen-2.5-VL, and newer models like Video-R1 and VideoChat-R1. Despite strong real-world performance on MVBench and MovieChat, these models still hallucinate on basic commonsense and physics tasks in synthetic settings, underscoring the challenge of hallucination. We further fine-tune SoTA MLLMs using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on real and synthetic commonsense/physics data. Results show notable accuracy gains, especially with counterexample integration, advancing MLLMs' reasoning capabilities. Our data is available at https://github.com/zli12321/VideoHallu.

We introduce Long-VITA, a simple yet effective large multi-modal model for long-context visual-language understanding tasks. It is adept at concurrently processing and analyzing modalities of image, video, and text over 4K frames or 1M tokens while delivering advanced performances on short-context multi-modal tasks. We propose an effective multi-modal training schema that starts with large language models and proceeds through vision-language alignment, general knowledge learning, and two sequential stages of long-sequence fine-tuning. We further implement context-parallelism distributed inference and logits-masked language modeling head to scale Long-VITA to infinitely long inputs of images and texts during model inference. Regarding training data, Long-VITA is built on a mix of 17M samples from public datasets only and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on various multi-modal benchmarks, compared against recent cutting-edge models with internal data. Long-VITA is fully reproducible and supports both NPU and GPU platforms for training and testing. By leveraging our inference designs, Long-VITA models achieve a remarkable 2x prefill speedup and 4x context length extension in single node with 8 GPUs. We hope Long-VITA can serve as a competitive baseline and offer valuable insights for the open-source community in advancing long-context multi-modal understanding.

Preference alignment has emerged as an effective strategy to enhance the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) following supervised fine-tuning. While existing preference alignment methods predominantly target hallucination factors, they overlook the factors essential for multi-modal comprehension capabilities, often narrowing their improvements on hallucination mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-oriented Preference Alignment (IPA), a scalable framework designed to automatically construct alignment preferences grounded in instruction fulfillment efficacy. Our method involves an automated preference construction coupled with a dedicated verification process that identifies instruction-oriented factors, avoiding significant variability in response representations. Additionally, IPA incorporates a progressive preference collection pipeline, further recalling challenging samples through model self-evolution and reference-guided refinement. Experiments conducted on Qwen2VL-7B demonstrate IPA's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks, including hallucination evaluation, visual question answering, and text understanding tasks, highlighting its capability to enhance general comprehension.

In the contemporary era of widespread online recruitment, resume understanding has been widely acknowledged as a fundamental and crucial task, which aims to extract structured information from resume documents automatically. Compared to the traditional rule-based approaches, the utilization of recently proposed pre-trained document understanding models can greatly enhance the effectiveness of resume understanding. The present approaches have, however, disregarded the hierarchical relations within the structured information presented in resumes, and have difficulty parsing resumes in an efficient manner. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel model, namely ERU, to achieve efficient resume understanding. Specifically, we first introduce a layout-aware multi-modal fusion transformer for encoding the segments in the resume with integrated textual, visual, and layout information. Then, we design three self-supervised tasks to pre-train this module via a large number of unlabeled resumes. Next, we fine-tune the model with a multi-granularity sequence labeling task to extract structured information from resumes. Finally, extensive experiments on a real-world dataset clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of ERU.

In this work, we investigate extending the comprehension of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to regional objects. To this end, we propose to extract features corresponding to regional objects as soft prompts for LLM, which provides a straightforward and scalable approach and eliminates the need for LLM fine-tuning. To effectively extract regional features from regular image features and irregular point cloud features, we present a novel and unified position-assisted feature extraction module. Furthermore, training an MLLM from scratch is highly time-consuming. Thus, we propose incrementally extending existing pre-trained MLLMs to comprehend more modalities and the regional objects of those modalities. Specifically, we freeze the Q-Former from BLIP-2, an impressive MLLM, and optimize the modality-specific Lora parameters in Q-Former and LLM for each newly introduced modality. The freezing of the Q-Former eliminates the need for extensive pre-training on massive image-text data. The freezed Q-Former pre-trained from massive image-text data is also beneficial for the pre-training on image-region-text data. We name our framework RegionBLIP. We pre-train RegionBLIP on image-region-text, point-cloud-text, and point-cloud-region-text data. Experimental results verify that can preserve the image comprehension capability of BILP-2 and further gain a comprehension of the newly introduced point cloud modality and regional objects. The Data, Code, and Pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/mightyzau/RegionBLIP.

The computer vision domain has greatly benefited from an abundance of data across many modalities to improve on various visual tasks. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on self-supervised pre-training methods through Masked Autoencoders (MAE) he2022masked,bachmann2022multimae, usually used as a first step before optimizing for a downstream task, such as classification or regression. This is very useful as it doesn't require any manually labeled data. In this work, we introduce Probabilistic Hyper-Graphs using Masked Autoencoders (PHG-MAE): a novel model that unifies the classical work on neural graphs leordeanu2021semi with the modern approach of masked autoencoders under a common theoretical framework. Through random masking of entire modalities, not just patches, the model samples from the distribution of hyper-edges on each forward pass. Additionally, the model adapts the standard MAE algorithm by combining pre-training and fine-tuning into a single training loop. Moreover, our approach enables the creation of inference-time ensembles which, through aggregation, boost the final prediction performance and consistency. Lastly, we show that we can apply knowledge distillation on top of the ensembles with little loss in performance, even with models that have fewer than 1M parameters. While our work mostly focuses on outdoor UAV scenes that contain multiple world interpretations and modalities, the same steps can be followed in other similar domains, such as autonomous driving or indoor robotics. In order to streamline the process of integrating external pre-trained experts for computer vision multi-modal multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios, we developed a data-pipeline software. Using this tool, we have created and released a fully-automated extension of the Dronescapes dataset. All the technical details, code and reproduction steps are publicly released.

Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) have made impressive progress in many vision-language tasks. Nevertheless, the performance of general LMMs in specific domains is still far from satisfactory. This paper proposes FoodLMM, a versatile food assistant based on LMMs with various capabilities, including food recognition, ingredient recognition, recipe generation, nutrition estimation, food segmentation and multi-round conversation. To facilitate FoodLMM to deal with tasks beyond pure text output, we introduce a series of novel task-specific tokens and heads, enabling the model to predict food nutritional values and multiple segmentation masks. We adopt a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we utilize multiple public food benchmarks for multi-task learning by leveraging the instruct-following paradigm. In the second stage, we construct a multi-round conversation dataset and a reasoning segmentation dataset to fine-tune the model, enabling it to conduct professional dialogues and generate segmentation masks based on complex reasoning in the food domain. Our fine-tuned FoodLMM achieves state-of-the-art results across several food benchmarks. We will make our code, models and datasets publicly available.

Endoscopic procedures are essential for diagnosing and treating internal diseases, and multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly applied to assist in endoscopy analysis. However, current benchmarks are limited, as they typically cover specific endoscopic scenarios and a small set of clinical tasks, failing to capture the real-world diversity of endoscopic scenarios and the full range of skills needed in clinical workflows. To address these issues, we introduce EndoBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess MLLMs across the full spectrum of endoscopic practice with multi-dimensional capacities. EndoBench encompasses 4 distinct endoscopic scenarios, 12 specialized clinical tasks with 12 secondary subtasks, and 5 levels of visual prompting granularities, resulting in 6,832 rigorously validated VQA pairs from 21 diverse datasets. Our multi-dimensional evaluation framework mirrors the clinical workflow--spanning anatomical recognition, lesion analysis, spatial localization, and surgical operations--to holistically gauge the perceptual and diagnostic abilities of MLLMs in realistic scenarios. We benchmark 23 state-of-the-art models, including general-purpose, medical-specialized, and proprietary MLLMs, and establish human clinician performance as a reference standard. Our extensive experiments reveal: (1) proprietary MLLMs outperform open-source and medical-specialized models overall, but still trail human experts; (2) medical-domain supervised fine-tuning substantially boosts task-specific accuracy; and (3) model performance remains sensitive to prompt format and clinical task complexity. EndoBench establishes a new standard for evaluating and advancing MLLMs in endoscopy, highlighting both progress and persistent gaps between current models and expert clinical reasoning. We publicly release our benchmark and code.

This paper introduces M^{3}-20M, a large-scale Multi-Modal Molecular dataset that contains over 20 million molecules. Designed to support AI-driven drug design and discovery, M^{3}-20M is 71 times more in the number of molecules than the largest existing dataset, providing an unprecedented scale that can highly benefit training or fine-tuning large (language) models with superior performance for drug design and discovery. This dataset integrates one-dimensional SMILES, two-dimensional molecular graphs, three-dimensional molecular structures, physicochemical properties, and textual descriptions collected through web crawling and generated by using GPT-3.5, offering a comprehensive view of each molecule. To demonstrate the power of M^{3}-20M in drug design and discovery, we conduct extensive experiments on two key tasks: molecule generation and molecular property prediction, using large language models including GLM4, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our experimental results show that M^{3}-20M can significantly boost model performance in both tasks. Specifically, it enables the models to generate more diverse and valid molecular structures and achieve higher property prediction accuracy than the existing single-modal datasets, which validates the value and potential of M^{3}-20M in supporting AI-driven drug design and discovery. The dataset is available at https://github.com/bz99bz/M-3.

Understanding protein solubility is essential for their functional applications. Computational methods for predicting protein solubility are crucial for reducing experimental costs and enhancing the efficiency and success rates of protein engineering. Existing methods either construct a supervised learning scheme on small-scale datasets with manually processed physicochemical properties, or blindly apply pre-trained protein language models to extract amino acid interaction information. The scale and quality of available training datasets leave significant room for improvement in terms of accuracy and generalization. To address these research gaps, we propose \sol, a novel deep learning method that combines pre-training and fine-tuning schemes for protein solubility prediction. ProtSolM integrates information from multiple dimensions, including physicochemical properties, amino acid sequences, and protein backbone structures. Our model is trained using \data, the largest solubility dataset that we have constructed. PDBSol includes over 60,000 protein sequences and structures. We provide a comprehensive leaderboard of existing statistical learning and deep learning methods on independent datasets with computational and experimental labels. ProtSolM achieved state-of-the-art performance across various evaluation metrics, demonstrating its potential to significantly advance the accuracy of protein solubility prediction.

The recent advancements in Large Language Models(LLMs) have had a significant impact on a wide range of fields, from general domains to specialized areas. However, these advancements have also significantly increased the potential for malicious users to exploit harmful and jailbreak prompts for malicious attacks. Although there have been many efforts to prevent harmful prompts and jailbreak prompts, protecting LLMs from such malicious attacks remains an important and challenging task. In this paper, we propose QGuard, a simple yet effective safety guard method, that utilizes question prompting to block harmful prompts in a zero-shot manner. Our method can defend LLMs not only from text-based harmful prompts but also from multi-modal harmful prompt attacks. Moreover, by diversifying and modifying guard questions, our approach remains robust against the latest harmful prompts without fine-tuning. Experimental results show that our model performs competitively on both text-only and multi-modal harmful datasets. Additionally, by providing an analysis of question prompting, we enable a white-box analysis of user inputs. We believe our method provides valuable insights for real-world LLM services in mitigating security risks associated with harmful prompts.

The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://github.com/HHYHRHY/OWMM-Agent

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in multimodal tasks such as visual question answering, visual grounding, and complex reasoning. However, they remain limited by static training data, susceptibility to hallucinations, and inability to verify claims against up-to-date, external evidence, compromising their performance in dynamic real-world applications. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a practical solution to mitigate these challenges by allowing the LVLMs to access large-scale knowledge databases via retrieval mechanisms, thereby grounding model outputs in factual, contextually relevant information. Here in this paper, we conduct the first systematic dissection of the multimodal RAG pipeline for LVLMs, explicitly investigating (1) the retrieval phase: on the modality configurations and retrieval strategies, (2) the re-ranking stage: on strategies to mitigate positional biases and improve the relevance of retrieved evidence, and (3) the generation phase: we further investigate how to best integrate retrieved candidates into the final generation process. Finally, we extend to explore a unified agentic framework that integrates re-ranking and generation through self-reflection, enabling LVLMs to select relevant evidence and suppress irrelevant context dynamically. Our full-stack exploration of RAG for LVLMs yields substantial insights, resulting in an average performance boost of 5% without any fine-tuning.

The advanced processing and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have driven substantial progress in vision-language (VL) understanding tasks. However, while effective for tasks governed by straightforward logic, MLLMs often encounter challenges when reasoning over complex, interdependent logic structures. To address this limitation, we introduce AgentPS, a novel framework that integrates Agentic Process Supervision into MLLMs via multi-round question answering during fine-tuning. AgentPS demonstrates significant performance improvements over baseline MLLMs on proprietary TikTok datasets, due to its integration of process supervision and structured sequential reasoning. Furthermore, we show that replacing human-annotated labels with LLM-generated labels retains much of the performance gain, highlighting the framework's practical scalability in industrial applications. These results position AgentPS as a highly effective and efficient architecture for multimodal classification tasks. Its adaptability and scalability, especially when enhanced by automated annotation generation, make it a powerful tool for handling large-scale, real-world challenges.

The rising importance of 3D representation learning, pivotal in computer vision, autonomous driving, and robotics, is evident. However, a prevailing trend, which straightforwardly resorted to transferring 2D alignment strategies to the 3D domain, encounters three distinct challenges: (1) Information Degradation: This arises from the alignment of 3D data with mere single-view 2D images and generic texts, neglecting the need for multi-view images and detailed subcategory texts. (2) Insufficient Synergy: These strategies align 3D representations to image and text features individually, hampering the overall optimization for 3D models. (3) Underutilization: The fine-grained information inherent in the learned representations is often not fully exploited, indicating a potential loss in detail. To address these issues, we introduce JM3D, a comprehensive approach integrating point cloud, text, and image. Key contributions include the Structured Multimodal Organizer (SMO), enriching vision-language representation with multiple views and hierarchical text, and the Joint Multi-modal Alignment (JMA), combining language understanding with visual representation. Our advanced model, JM3D-LLM, marries 3D representation with large language models via efficient fine-tuning. Evaluations on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN establish JM3D's superiority. The superior performance of JM3D-LLM further underscores the effectiveness of our representation transfer approach. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Mr-Neko/JM3D.

Recent works of music representation learning mainly focus on learning acoustic music representations with unlabeled audios or further attempt to acquire multi-modal music representations with scarce annotated audio-text pairs. They either ignore the language semantics or rely on labeled audio datasets that are difficult and expensive to create. Moreover, merely modeling semantic space usually fails to achieve satisfactory performance on music recommendation tasks since the user preference space is ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Two-stage Contrastive Learning (HTCL) method that models similarity from the semantic perspective to the user perspective hierarchically to learn a comprehensive music representation bridging the gap between semantic and user preference spaces. We devise a scalable audio encoder and leverage a pre-trained BERT model as the text encoder to learn audio-text semantics via large-scale contrastive pre-training. Further, we explore a simple yet effective way to exploit interaction data from our online music platform to adapt the semantic space to user preference space via contrastive fine-tuning, which differs from previous works that follow the idea of collaborative filtering. As a result, we obtain a powerful audio encoder that not only distills language semantics from the text encoder but also models similarity in user preference space with the integrity of semantic space preserved. Experimental results on both music semantic and recommendation tasks confirm the effectiveness of our method.

While the integration of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with robotic systems has significantly improved robots' ability to understand and execute natural language instructions, their performance in manipulation tasks remains limited due to a lack of robotics-specific knowledge. Conventional MLLMs are typically trained on generic image-text pairs, leaving them deficient in understanding affordances and physical concepts crucial for manipulation. To address this gap, we propose ManipVQA, a novel framework that infuses MLLMs with manipulation-centric knowledge through a Visual Question-Answering (VQA) format. This approach encompasses tool detection, affordance recognition, and a broader understanding of physical concepts. We curated a diverse dataset of images depicting interactive objects, to challenge robotic understanding in tool detection, affordance prediction, and physical concept comprehension. To effectively integrate this robotics-specific knowledge with the inherent vision-reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we leverage a unified VQA format and devise a fine-tuning strategy. This strategy preserves the original vision-reasoning abilities while incorporating the newly acquired robotic insights. Empirical evaluations conducted in robotic simulators and across various vision task benchmarks demonstrate the robust performance of ManipVQA. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/ManipVQA.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is becoming increasingly essential for Question Answering (QA) in the financial sector, where accurate and contextually grounded insights from complex public disclosures are crucial. However, existing financial RAG systems face two significant challenges: (1) they struggle to process heterogeneous data formats, such as text, tables, and figures; and (2) they encounter difficulties in balancing general-domain applicability with company-specific adaptation. To overcome these challenges, we present VeritasFi, an innovative hybrid RAG framework that incorporates a multi-modal preprocessing pipeline alongside a cutting-edge two-stage training strategy for its re-ranking component. VeritasFi enhances financial QA through three key innovations: (1) A multi-modal preprocessing pipeline that seamlessly transforms heterogeneous data into a coherent, machine-readable format. (2) A tripartite hybrid retrieval engine that operates in parallel, combining deep multi-path retrieval over a semantically indexed document corpus, real-time data acquisition through tool utilization, and an expert-curated memory bank for high-frequency questions, ensuring comprehensive scope, accuracy, and efficiency. (3) A two-stage training strategy for the document re-ranker, which initially constructs a general, domain-specific model using anonymized data, followed by rapid fine-tuning on company-specific data for targeted applications. By integrating our proposed designs, VeritasFi presents a groundbreaking framework that greatly enhances the adaptability and robustness of financial RAG systems, providing a scalable solution for both general-domain and company-specific QA tasks. Code accompanying this work is available at https://github.com/simplew4y/VeritasFi.git.

Modern astronomical surveys, such as the Euclid mission, produce high-dimensional, multi-modal data sets that include imaging and spectroscopic information for millions of galaxies. These data serve as an ideal benchmark for large, pre-trained multi-modal models, which can leverage vast amounts of unlabelled data. In this work, we present the first exploration of Euclid data with AstroPT, an autoregressive multi-modal foundation model trained on approximately 300 000 optical and infrared Euclid images and spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from the first Euclid Quick Data Release. We compare self-supervised pre-training with baseline fully supervised training across several tasks: galaxy morphology classification; redshift estimation; similarity searches; and outlier detection. Our results show that: (a) AstroPT embeddings are highly informative, correlating with morphology and effectively isolating outliers; (b) including infrared data helps to isolate stars, but degrades the identification of edge-on galaxies, which are better captured by optical images; (c) simple fine-tuning of these embeddings for photometric redshift and stellar mass estimation outperforms a fully supervised approach, even when using only 1% of the training labels; and (d) incorporating SED data into AstroPT via a straightforward multi-modal token-chaining method improves photo-z predictions, and allow us to identify potentially more interesting anomalies (such as ringed or interacting galaxies) compared to a model pre-trained solely on imaging data.

We propose Unified-IO, a model that performs a large variety of AI tasks spanning classical computer vision tasks, including pose estimation, object detection, depth estimation and image generation, vision-and-language tasks such as region captioning and referring expression, to natural language processing tasks such as question answering and paraphrasing. Developing a single unified model for such a large variety of tasks poses unique challenges due to the heterogeneous inputs and outputs pertaining to each task, including RGB images, per-pixel maps, binary masks, bounding boxes, and language. We achieve this unification by homogenizing every supported input and output into a sequence of discrete vocabulary tokens. This common representation across all tasks allows us to train a single transformer-based architecture, jointly on over 90 diverse datasets in the vision and language fields. Unified-IO is the first model capable of performing all 7 tasks on the GRIT benchmark and produces strong results across 16 diverse benchmarks like NYUv2-Depth, ImageNet, VQA2.0, OK-VQA, Swig, VizWizGround, BoolQ, and SciTail, with no task-specific fine-tuning. Code and demos for Unified-IO are available at: https://unified-io.allenai.org.

Recent research has demonstrated that the multi-task fine-tuning of multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) using an assortment of annotated downstream vision-language datasets significantly enhances their performance. Yet, during this process, a side effect, which we termed as the "multi-modal alignment tax", surfaces. This side effect negatively impacts the model's ability to format responses appropriately -- for instance, its "politeness" -- due to the overly succinct and unformatted nature of raw annotations, resulting in reduced human preference. In this paper, we introduce Polite Flamingo, a multi-modal response rewriter that transforms raw annotations into a more appealing, "polite" format. Polite Flamingo is trained to reconstruct high-quality responses from their automatically distorted counterparts and is subsequently applied to a vast array of vision-language datasets for response rewriting. After rigorous filtering, we generate the PF-1M dataset and further validate its value by fine-tuning a multi-modal LLM with it. Combined with novel methodologies including U-shaped multi-stage tuning and multi-turn augmentation, the resulting model, Clever Flamingo, demonstrates its advantages in both multi-modal understanding and response politeness according to automated and human evaluations.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in various vision-language dialogue scenarios. However, the absence of fine-grained visual object detection hinders the model from understanding the details of images, leading to irreparable visual hallucinations and factual errors. In this paper, we propose Lyrics, a novel multi-modal pre-training and instruction fine-tuning paradigm that bootstraps vision-language alignment from fine-grained cross-modal collaboration. Building on the foundation of BLIP-2, Lyrics infuses local visual features extracted from a visual refiner that includes image tagging, object detection and semantic segmentation modules into the Querying Transformer, while on the text side, the language inputs equip the boundary boxes and tags derived from the visual refiner. We further introduce a two-stage training scheme, in which the pre-training stage bridges the modality gap through explicit and comprehensive vision-language alignment targets. During the instruction fine-tuning stage, we introduce semantic-aware visual feature extraction, a crucial method that enables the model to extract informative features from concrete visual objects. Our approach achieves strong performance on 13 held-out datasets across various vision-language tasks, and demonstrates promising multi-modal understanding and detailed depiction capabilities in real dialogue scenarios.

We introduce Point-Bind, a 3D multi-modality model aligning point clouds with 2D image, language, audio, and video. Guided by ImageBind, we construct a joint embedding space between 3D and multi-modalities, enabling many promising applications, e.g., any-to-3D generation, 3D embedding arithmetic, and 3D open-world understanding. On top of this, we further present Point-LLM, the first 3D large language model (LLM) following 3D multi-modal instructions. By parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, Point-LLM injects the semantics of Point-Bind into pre-trained LLMs, e.g., LLaMA, which requires no 3D instruction data, but exhibits superior 3D and multi-modal question-answering capacity. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for extending 3D point clouds to multi-modality applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LLM.

3D visual grounding allows an embodied agent to understand visual information in real-world 3D environments based on human instructions, which is crucial for embodied intelligence. Existing 3D visual grounding methods typically rely on separate encoders for different modalities (e.g., RGB images, text, and 3D point clouds), resulting in large and complex models that are inefficient to train. While some approaches use pre-trained 2D multi-modal models like CLIP for 3D tasks, they still struggle with aligning point cloud data to 2D encoders. As a result, these methods continue to depend on 3D encoders for feature extraction, further increasing model complexity and training inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a unified 2D pre-trained multi-modal network to process all three modalities (RGB images, text, and point clouds), significantly simplifying the architecture. By leveraging a 2D CLIP bi-modal model with adapter-based fine-tuning, this framework effectively adapts to the tri-modal setting, improving both adaptability and performance across modalities. Our Geometric-Aware 2D-3D Feature Recovery and Fusion (GARF) module is designed to fuse geometric multi-scale features from point clouds and images. We then integrate textual features for final modality fusion and introduce a multi-modal decoder to facilitate deep cross-modal understanding. Together, our method achieves unified feature extraction and fusion across the three modalities, enabling an end-to-end 3D visual grounding model. Compared to the baseline, our method reduces the number of trainable parameters by approximately 58\%, while achieving a 6.52\% improvement in the 3D detection task and a 6.25\% improvement in the 3D visual grounding task.

The emerging trend of advancing generalist artificial intelligence, such as GPTv4 and Gemini, has reshaped the landscape of research (academia and industry) in machine learning and many other research areas. However, domain-specific applications of such foundation models (e.g., in medicine) remain untouched or often at their very early stages. It will require an individual set of transfer learning and model adaptation techniques by further expanding and injecting these models with domain knowledge and data. The development of such technologies could be largely accelerated if the bundle of data, algorithms, and pre-trained foundation models were gathered together and open-sourced in an organized manner. In this work, we present OpenMEDLab, an open-source platform for multi-modality foundation models. It encapsulates not only solutions of pioneering attempts in prompting and fine-tuning large language and vision models for frontline clinical and bioinformatic applications but also building domain-specific foundation models with large-scale multi-modal medical data. Importantly, it opens access to a group of pre-trained foundation models for various medical image modalities, clinical text, protein engineering, etc. Inspiring and competitive results are also demonstrated for each collected approach and model in a variety of benchmarks for downstream tasks. We welcome researchers in the field of medical artificial intelligence to continuously contribute cutting-edge methods and models to OpenMEDLab, which can be accessed via https://github.com/openmedlab.

Understanding objects through multiple sensory modalities is fundamental to human perception, enabling cross-sensory integration and richer comprehension. For AI and robotic systems to replicate this ability, access to diverse, high-quality multi-sensory data is critical. Existing datasets are often limited by their focus on controlled environments, simulated objects, or restricted modality pairings. We introduce X-Capture, an open-source, portable, and cost-effective device for real-world multi-sensory data collection, capable of capturing correlated RGBD images, tactile readings, and impact audio. With a build cost under $1,000, X-Capture democratizes the creation of multi-sensory datasets, requiring only consumer-grade tools for assembly. Using X-Capture, we curate a sample dataset of 3,000 total points on 500 everyday objects from diverse, real-world environments, offering both richness and variety. Our experiments demonstrate the value of both the quantity and the sensory breadth of our data for both pretraining and fine-tuning multi-modal representations for object-centric tasks such as cross-sensory retrieval and reconstruction. X-Capture lays the groundwork for advancing human-like sensory representations in AI, emphasizing scalability, accessibility, and real-world applicability.

The development of AI-Generated Video (AIGV) technology has been remarkable in recent years, significantly transforming the paradigm of video content production. However, AIGVs still suffer from noticeable visual quality defects, such as noise, blurriness, frame jitter and low dynamic degree, which severely impact the user's viewing experience. Therefore, an effective automatic visual quality assessment is of great importance for AIGV content regulation and generative model improvement. In this work, we decompose the visual quality of AIGVs into three dimensions: technical quality, motion quality, and video semantics. For each dimension, we design corresponding encoder to achieve effective feature representation. Moreover, considering the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) in various vision and language tasks, we introduce a LLM as the quality regression module. To better enable the LLM to establish reasoning associations between multi-dimensional features and visual quality, we propose a specially designed multi-modal prompt engineering framework. Additionally, we incorporate LoRA fine-tuning technology during the training phase, allowing the LLM to better adapt to specific tasks. Our proposed method achieved second place in the NTIRE 2025 Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Content Challenge: Track 2 AI Generated video, demonstrating its effectiveness. Codes can be obtained at https://github.com/QiZelu/AIGVEval.

Visual-language pre-training (VLP) has achieved remarkable success in multi-modal tasks, largely attributed to the availability of large-scale image-text datasets. In this work, we demonstrate that multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) can enhance visual-language representation learning by improving data quality. Our approach is simple, utilizing MLLMs to extend multiple captions for each image. To prevent the bias introduced by MLLMs' hallucinations and intrinsic caption styles, we propose "text shearing" to maintain the same length for extended captions as that of the original captions. In image-text retrieval, our method consistently obtains 5.6 ~ 35.0% and 16.8 ~ 46.1% improvement on R@1 under the fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, respectively. Notably, we obtain zero-shot results that are comparable to fine-tuning on target datasets, which encourages more exploration of the versatile use of MLLMs.

Segmentation of anatomical structures and pathological regions in medical images is essential for modern clinical diagnosis, disease research, and treatment planning. While significant advancements have been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, many of these methods still suffer from limitations in data efficiency, generalizability, and interactivity. As a result, developing precise segmentation methods that require fewer labeled datasets remains a critical challenge in medical image analysis. Recently, the introduction of foundation models like CLIP and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), with robust cross-domain representations, has paved the way for interactive and universal image segmentation. However, further exploration of these models for data-efficient segmentation in medical imaging is still needed and highly relevant. In this paper, we introduce MedCLIP-SAMv2, a novel framework that integrates the CLIP and SAM models to perform segmentation on clinical scans using text prompts, in both zero-shot and weakly supervised settings. Our approach includes fine-tuning the BiomedCLIP model with a new Decoupled Hard Negative Noise Contrastive Estimation (DHN-NCE) loss, and leveraging the Multi-modal Information Bottleneck (M2IB) to create visual prompts for generating segmentation masks from SAM in the zero-shot setting. We also investigate using zero-shot segmentation labels within a weakly supervised paradigm to enhance segmentation quality further. Extensive testing across four diverse segmentation tasks and medical imaging modalities (breast tumor ultrasound, brain tumor MRI, lung X-ray, and lung CT) demonstrates the high accuracy of our proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/MedCLIP-SAMv2.

Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) aims to detect objects beyond a predefined set of categories. As a pioneering model incorporating the YOLO series into OVD, YOLO-World is well-suited for scenarios prioritizing speed and efficiency.However, its performance is hindered by its neck feature fusion mechanism, which causes the quadratic complexity and the limited guided receptive fields.To address these limitations, we present Mamba-YOLO-World, a novel YOLO-based OVD model employing the proposed MambaFusion Path Aggregation Network (MambaFusion-PAN) as its neck architecture. Specifically, we introduce an innovative State Space Model-based feature fusion mechanism consisting of a Parallel-Guided Selective Scan algorithm and a Serial-Guided Selective Scan algorithm with linear complexity and globally guided receptive fields. It leverages multi-modal input sequences and mamba hidden states to guide the selective scanning process.Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the original YOLO-World on the COCO and LVIS benchmarks in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings while maintaining comparable parameters and FLOPs. Additionally, it surpasses existing state-of-the-art OVD methods with fewer parameters and FLOPs.

Visual-Language Alignment (VLA) has gained a lot of attention since CLIP's groundbreaking work. Although CLIP performs well, the typical direct latent feature alignment lacks clarity in its representation and similarity scores. On the other hand, lexical representation, a vector whose element represents the similarity between the sample and a word from the vocabulary, is a natural sparse representation and interpretable, providing exact matches for individual words. However, lexical representations is difficult to learn due to no ground-truth supervision and false-discovery issues, and thus requires complex design to train effectively. In this paper, we introduce LexVLA, a more interpretable VLA framework by learning a unified lexical representation for both modalities without complex design. We use DINOv2 as our visual model for its local-inclined features and Llama 2, a generative language model, to leverage its in-context lexical prediction ability. To avoid the false discovery, we propose an overuse penalty to refrain the lexical representation from falsely frequently activating meaningless words. We demonstrate that these two pre-trained uni-modal models can be well-aligned by fine-tuning on modest multi-modal dataset and avoid intricate training configurations. On cross-modal retrieval benchmarks, LexVLA, trained on the CC-12M multi-modal dataset, outperforms baselines fine-tuned on larger datasets (e.g., YFCC15M) and those trained from scratch on even bigger datasets (e.g., 1.1B data, including CC-12M). We conduct extensive experiments to analyze LexVLA.

Large language models have demonstrated an emergent capability in answering knowledge intensive questions. With recent progress on web-scale visual and language pre-training, do these models also understand how to answer visual information seeking questions? To answer this question, we present InfoSeek, a Visual Question Answering dataset that focuses on asking information-seeking questions, where the information can not be answered by common sense knowledge. We perform a multi-stage human annotation to collect a natural distribution of high-quality visual information seeking question-answer pairs. We also construct a large-scale, automatically collected dataset by combining existing visual entity recognition datasets and Wikidata, which provides over one million examples for model fine-tuning and validation. Based on InfoSeek, we analyzed various pre-trained Visual QA systems to gain insights into the characteristics of different pre-trained models. Our analysis shows that it is challenging for the state-of-the-art multi-modal pre-trained models to answer visual information seeking questions, but this capability is improved through fine-tuning on the automated InfoSeek dataset. We hope our analysis paves the way to understand and develop the next generation of multi-modal pre-training.

Current architectures for multi-modality tasks such as visual question answering suffer from their high complexity. As a result, these architectures are difficult to train and require high computational resources. To address these problems we present a CLIP-based architecture that does not require any fine-tuning of the feature extractors. A simple linear classifier is used on the concatenated features of the image and text encoder. During training an auxiliary loss is added which operates on the answer types. The resulting classification is then used as an attention gate on the answer class selection. On the VizWiz 2022 Visual Question Answering Challenge we achieve 60.15 % accuracy on Task 1: Predict Answer to a Visual Question and AP score of 83.78 % on Task 2: Predict Answerability of a Visual Question.

We introduce CM3, a family of causally masked generative models trained over a large corpus of structured multi-modal documents that can contain both text and image tokens. Our new causally masked approach generates tokens left to right while also masking out a small number of long token spans that are generated at the end of the string, instead of their original positions. The casual masking object provides a type of hybrid of the more common causal and masked language models, by enabling full generative modeling while also providing bidirectional context when generating the masked spans. We train causally masked language-image models on large-scale web and Wikipedia articles, where each document contains all of the text, hypertext markup, hyperlinks, and image tokens (from a VQVAE-GAN), provided in the order they appear in the original HTML source (before masking). The resulting CM3 models can generate rich structured, multi-modal outputs while conditioning on arbitrary masked document contexts, and thereby implicitly learn a wide range of text, image, and cross modal tasks. They can be prompted to recover, in a zero-shot fashion, the functionality of models such as DALL-E, GENRE, and HTLM. We set the new state-of-the-art in zero-shot summarization, entity linking, and entity disambiguation while maintaining competitive performance in the fine-tuning setting. We can generate images unconditionally, conditioned on text (like DALL-E) and do captioning all in a zero-shot setting with a single model.

Quantitative chemistry is central to modern chemical research, yet the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform its rigorous, step-by-step calculations remains underexplored. To fill this blank, we propose QCBench, a Quantitative Chemistry oriented benchmark comprising 350 computational chemistry problems across 7 chemistry subfields, which contains analytical chemistry, bio/organic chemistry, general chemistry, inorganic chemistry, physical chemistry, polymer chemistry and quantum chemistry. To systematically evaluate the mathematical reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), they are categorized into three tiers: easy, medium, and difficult. Each problem, rooted in realistic chemical scenarios, is structured to prevent heuristic shortcuts and demand explicit numerical reasoning. QCBench enables fine-grained diagnosis of computational weaknesses, reveals model-specific limitations across difficulty levels, and lays the groundwork for future improvements such as domain-adaptive fine-tuning or multi-modal integration. Evaluations on 24 LLMs demonstrate a consistent performance degradation with increasing task complexity, highlighting the current gap between language fluency and scientific computation accuracy. Code for QCBench is available at https://github.com/jiaqingxie/QCBench.

In this paper, we design and train a Generative Image-to-text Transformer, GIT, to unify vision-language tasks such as image/video captioning and question answering. While generative models provide a consistent network architecture between pre-training and fine-tuning, existing work typically contains complex structures (uni/multi-modal encoder/decoder) and depends on external modules such as object detectors/taggers and optical character recognition (OCR). In GIT, we simplify the architecture as one image encoder and one text decoder under a single language modeling task. We also scale up the pre-training data and the model size to boost the model performance. Without bells and whistles, our GIT establishes new state of the arts on 12 challenging benchmarks with a large margin. For instance, our model surpasses the human performance for the first time on TextCaps (138.2 vs. 125.5 in CIDEr). Furthermore, we present a new scheme of generation-based image classification and scene text recognition, achieving decent performance on standard benchmarks. Codes are released at https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text.

Effective interactive tool use requires agents to master Tool Integrated Reasoning (TIR): a complex process involving multi-turn planning and long-context dialogue management. To train agents for this dynamic process, particularly in multi-modal contexts, we introduce a sandbox environment for reinforcement learning (RL) that supports interleaved speech-text rollouts. Our core strategy, Turn-level Adjudicated Reinforcement Learning (TARL), addresses the challenge of credit assignment in long-horizon tasks by employing a Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge to provide turn-level evaluation. To enhance exploration, we integrate a mixed-task training curriculum with mathematical reasoning problems. This unified approach boosts the task pass rate on the text-based τ-bench by over 6% compared to strong RL baselines. Crucially, we demonstrate our framework's suitability for fine-tuning a multi-modal foundation model for agentic tasks. By training a base multi-modal LLM on interleaved speech-text rollouts, we equip it with tool-use abilities, paving the way for more natural, voice-driven interactive agents.

This paper introduces TinyEmo, a family of small multi-modal language models for emotional reasoning and classification. Our approach features: (1) a synthetic emotional instruct dataset for both pre-training and fine-tuning stages, (2) a Metric Projector that delegates classification from the language model allowing for more efficient training and inference, (3) a multi-modal large language model (MM-LLM) for emotional reasoning, and (4) a semi-automated framework for bias detection. TinyEmo is able to perform emotion classification and emotional reasoning, all while using substantially fewer parameters than comparable models. This efficiency allows us to freely incorporate more diverse emotional datasets, enabling strong performance on classification tasks, with our smallest model (700M parameters) outperforming larger state-of-the-art models based on general-purpose MM-LLMs with over 7B parameters. Additionally, the Metric Projector allows for interpretability and indirect bias detection in large models without additional training, offering an approach to understand and improve AI systems. We release code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/ggcr/TinyEmo

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the field of Recommendation Systems (RSs). Most existing studies have focused on converting user behavior logs into textual prompts and leveraging techniques such as prompt tuning to enable LLMs for recommendation tasks. Meanwhile, research interest has recently grown in multimodal recommendation systems that integrate data from images, text, and other sources using modality fusion techniques. This introduces new challenges to the existing LLM-based recommendation paradigm which relies solely on text modality information. Moreover, although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of processing multi-modal inputs have emerged, how to equip MLLMs with multi-modal recommendation capabilities remains largely unexplored. To this end, in this paper, we propose the Multimodal Large Language Model-enhanced Multimodaln Sequential Recommendation (MLLM-MSR) model. To capture the dynamic user preference, we design a two-stage user preference summarization method. Specifically, we first utilize an MLLM-based item-summarizer to extract image feature given an item and convert the image into text. Then, we employ a recurrent user preference summarization generation paradigm to capture the dynamic changes in user preferences based on an LLM-based user-summarizer. Finally, to enable the MLLM for multi-modal recommendation task, we propose to fine-tune a MLLM-based recommender using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) techniques. Extensive evaluations across various datasets validate the effectiveness of MLLM-MSR, showcasing its superior ability to capture and adapt to the evolving dynamics of user preferences.

The Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task aims to retrieve target images using a composed query consisting of a reference image and a modified text. Advanced methods often utilize contrastive learning as the optimization objective, which benefits from adequate positive and negative examples. However, the triplet for CIR incurs high manual annotation costs, resulting in limited positive examples. Furthermore, existing methods commonly use in-batch negative sampling, which reduces the negative number available for the model. To address the problem of lack of positives, we propose a data generation method by leveraging a multi-modal large language model to construct triplets for CIR. To introduce more negatives during fine-tuning, we design a two-stage fine-tuning framework for CIR, whose second stage introduces plenty of static representations of negatives to optimize the representation space rapidly. The above two improvements can be effectively stacked and designed to be plug-and-play, easily applied to existing CIR models without changing their original architectures. Extensive experiments and ablation analysis demonstrate that our method effectively scales positives and negatives and achieves state-of-the-art results on both FashionIQ and CIRR datasets. In addition, our method also performs well in zero-shot composed image retrieval, providing a new CIR solution for the low-resources scenario. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/BUAADreamer/SPN4CIR.

Groundbreaking language-vision architectures like CLIP and DALL-E proved the utility of training on large amounts of noisy image-text data, without relying on expensive accurate labels used in standard vision unimodal supervised learning. The resulting models showed capabilities of strong text-guided image generation and transfer to downstream tasks, while performing remarkably at zero-shot classification with noteworthy out-of-distribution robustness. Since then, large-scale language-vision models like ALIGN, BASIC, GLIDE, Flamingo and Imagen made further improvements. Studying the training and capabilities of such models requires datasets containing billions of image-text pairs. Until now, no datasets of this size have been made openly available for the broader research community. To address this problem and democratize research on large-scale multi-modal models, we present LAION-5B - a dataset consisting of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs, of which 2.32B contain English language. We show successful replication and fine-tuning of foundational models like CLIP, GLIDE and Stable Diffusion using the dataset, and discuss further experiments enabled with an openly available dataset of this scale. Additionally we provide several nearest neighbor indices, an improved web-interface for dataset exploration and subset generation, and detection scores for watermark, NSFW, and toxic content detection. Announcement page https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in composing various modules together to create programs that can perform complex reasoning tasks on images. In this paper, we propose TANGO, an approach that extends the program composition via LLMs already observed for images, aiming to integrate those capabilities into embodied agents capable of observing and acting in the world. Specifically, by employing a simple PointGoal Navigation model combined with a memory-based exploration policy as a foundational primitive for guiding an agent through the world, we show how a single model can address diverse tasks without additional training. We task an LLM with composing the provided primitives to solve a specific task, using only a few in-context examples in the prompt. We evaluate our approach on three key Embodied AI tasks: Open-Set ObjectGoal Navigation, Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation, and Open Embodied Question Answering, achieving state-of-the-art results without any specific fine-tuning in challenging zero-shot scenarios.

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented natural language understanding and generation capabilities. However, existing surveys on LLMs in biomedicine often focus on specific applications or model architectures, lacking a comprehensive analysis that integrates the latest advancements across various biomedical domains. This review, based on an analysis of 484 publications sourced from databases including PubMed, Web of Science, and arXiv, provides an in-depth examination of the current landscape, applications, challenges, and prospects of LLMs in biomedicine, distinguishing itself by focusing on the practical implications of these models in real-world biomedical contexts. Firstly, we explore the capabilities of LLMs in zero-shot learning across a broad spectrum of biomedical tasks, including diagnostic assistance, drug discovery, and personalized medicine, among others, with insights drawn from 137 key studies. Then, we discuss adaptation strategies of LLMs, including fine-tuning methods for both uni-modal and multi-modal LLMs to enhance their performance in specialized biomedical contexts where zero-shot fails to achieve, such as medical question answering and efficient processing of biomedical literature. Finally, we discuss the challenges that LLMs face in the biomedicine domain including data privacy concerns, limited model interpretability, issues with dataset quality, and ethics due to the sensitive nature of biomedical data, the need for highly reliable model outputs, and the ethical implications of deploying AI in healthcare. To address these challenges, we also identify future research directions of LLM in biomedicine including federated learning methods to preserve data privacy and integrating explainable AI methodologies to enhance the transparency of LLMs.

Despite representing nearly one-third of the world's languages, African languages remain critically underserved by modern NLP technologies, with 88\% classified as severely underrepresented or completely ignored in computational linguistics. We present the African Languages Lab (All Lab), a comprehensive research initiative that addresses this technological gap through systematic data collection, model development, and capacity building. Our contributions include: (1) a quality-controlled data collection pipeline, yielding the largest validated African multi-modal speech and text dataset spanning 40 languages with 19 billion tokens of monolingual text and 12,628 hours of aligned speech data; (2) extensive experimental validation demonstrating that our dataset, combined with fine-tuning, achieves substantial improvements over baseline models, averaging +23.69 ChrF++, +0.33 COMET, and +15.34 BLEU points across 31 evaluated languages; and (3) a structured research program that has successfully mentored fifteen early-career researchers, establishing sustainable local capacity. Our comparative evaluation against Google Translate reveals competitive performance in several languages while identifying areas that require continued development.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks and beyond. This success of LLMs has led to a large influx of research contributions in this direction. These works encompass diverse topics such as architectural innovations, better training strategies, context length improvements, fine-tuning, multi-modal LLMs, robotics, datasets, benchmarking, efficiency, and more. With the rapid development of techniques and regular breakthroughs in LLM research, it has become considerably challenging to perceive the bigger picture of the advances in this direction. Considering the rapidly emerging plethora of literature on LLMs, it is imperative that the research community is able to benefit from a concise yet comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this field. This article provides an overview of the existing literature on a broad range of LLM-related concepts. Our self-contained comprehensive overview of LLMs discusses relevant background concepts along with covering the advanced topics at the frontier of research in LLMs. This review article is intended to not only provide a systematic survey but also a quick comprehensive reference for the researchers and practitioners to draw insights from extensive informative summaries of the existing works to advance the LLM research.

Despite the recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), understanding inter-object relations, i.e., interactions or associations between distinct objects, remains a major challenge for such models. This issue significantly hinders their advanced reasoning capabilities and is primarily due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality, and diverse multi-modal data essential for training and evaluating MLLMs. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of inter-object relations and introduce Multi-Modal Relation Understanding (MMRel), a comprehensive dataset designed to bridge this gap by providing large-scale, high-quality and diverse data for studying inter-object relations with MLLMs. MMRel features three distinctive attributes: (i) It includes over 15K question-answer pairs, which are sourced from three distinct domains, ensuring large scale and high diversity; (ii) It contains a subset featuring highly unusual relations, on which MLLMs often fail due to hallucinations, thus are very challenging; (iii) It provides manually verified high-quality labels for inter-object relations. Thanks to these features, MMRel is ideal for evaluating MLLMs on relation understanding, as well as being used to fine-tune MLLMs to enhance relation understanding and even benefit overall performance in various vision-language tasks. Extensive experiments on various popular MLLMs validate the effectiveness of MMRel. Both MMRel dataset and the complete labeling scripts have been made publicly available.

Multimodal question answering (QA) often requires identifying which video, audio, or sensor tokens are relevant to the question. Yet modality disagreements are common: off-camera speech, background noise, or motion outside the field of view often mislead fusion models that weight all streams equally. We present RAVEN, a unified QA architecture whose core is QuART, a query-conditioned cross-modal gating module that assigns scalar relevance scores to each token across modalities, enabling the model to amplify informative signals and suppress distractors before fusion. RAVEN is trained through a three-stage pipeline comprising unimodal pretraining, query-aligned fusion, and disagreement-oriented fine-tuning -- each stage targeting a distinct challenge in multi-modal reasoning: representation quality, cross-modal relevance, and robustness to modality mismatch. To support training and evaluation, we release AVS-QA, a dataset of 300K synchronized Audio--Video-Sensor streams paired with automatically generated question-answer pairs. Experimental results on seven multi-modal QA benchmarks -- including egocentric and exocentric tasks -- show that RAVEN achieves up to 14.5\% and 8.0\% gains in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models, respectively. Incorporating sensor data provides an additional 16.4\% boost, and the model remains robust under modality corruption, outperforming SOTA baselines by 50.23\%. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BASHLab/RAVEN.

In this work, we investigate the potential of a large language model (LLM) to directly comprehend visual signals without the necessity of fine-tuning on multi-modal datasets. The foundational concept of our method views an image as a linguistic entity, and translates it to a set of discrete words derived from the LLM's vocabulary. To achieve this, we present the Vision-to-Language Tokenizer, abbreviated as V2T Tokenizer, which transforms an image into a ``foreign language'' with the combined aid of an encoder-decoder, the LLM vocabulary, and a CLIP model. With this innovative image encoding, the LLM gains the ability not only for visual comprehension but also for image denoising and restoration in an auto-regressive fashion-crucially, without any fine-tuning. We undertake rigorous experiments to validate our method, encompassing understanding tasks like image recognition, image captioning, and visual question answering, as well as image denoising tasks like inpainting, outpainting, deblurring, and shift restoration. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zh460045050/V2L-Tokenizer.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have made remarkable progress in generating images from text prompts, but their output quality and safety still depend heavily on how prompts are phrased. Existing safety methods typically refine prompts using large language models (LLMs), but they overlook the images produced, which can result in unsafe outputs or unnecessary changes to already safe prompts. To address this, we propose an iterative prompt refinement algorithm that uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) to analyze both the input prompts and the generated images. By leveraging visual feedback, our method refines prompts more effectively, improving safety while maintaining user intent and reliability comparable to existing LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset labeled with both textual and visual safety signals using off-the-shelf multi-modal LLM, enabling supervised fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces safer outputs without compromising alignment with user intent, offering a practical solution for generating safer T2I content. Our code is available at https://github.com/ku-dmlab/IPR. \textcolor{redWARNING: This paper contains examples of harmful or inappropriate images generated by models.

We introduce a full-stack framework that scales up reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) to long videos, leveraging reinforcement learning. We address the unique challenges of long video reasoning by integrating three critical components: (1) a large-scale dataset, LongVideo-Reason, comprising 52K long video QA pairs with high-quality reasoning annotations across diverse domains such as sports, games, and vlogs; (2) a two-stage training pipeline that extends VLMs with chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning (CoT-SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL); and (3) a training infrastructure for long video RL, named Multi-modal Reinforcement Sequence Parallelism (MR-SP), which incorporates sequence parallelism and a vLLM-based engine tailored for long video, using cached video embeddings for efficient rollout and prefilling. In experiments, LongVILA-R1-7B achieves strong performance on long video QA benchmarks such as VideoMME. It also outperforms Video-R1-7B and even matches Gemini-1.5-Pro across temporal reasoning, goal and purpose reasoning, spatial reasoning, and plot reasoning on our LongVideo-Reason-eval benchmark. Notably, our MR-SP system achieves up to 2.1x speedup on long video RL training. LongVILA-R1 demonstrates consistent performance gains as the number of input video frames scales. LongVILA-R1 marks a firm step towards long video reasoning in VLMs. In addition, we release our training system for public availability that supports RL training on various modalities (video, text, and audio), various models (VILA and Qwen series), and even image and video generation models. On a single A100 node (8 GPUs), it supports RL training on hour-long videos (e.g., 3,600 frames / around 256k tokens).

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable generalizability across diverse tasks, yet genomic foundation models (GFMs) still require separate finetuning for each downstream application, creating significant overhead as model sizes grow. Moreover, existing GFMs are constrained by rigid output formats, limiting their applicability to various genomic tasks. In this work, we revisit the transformer-based auto-regressive models and introduce Omni-DNA, a family of cross-modal multi-task models ranging from 20 million to 1 billion parameters. Our approach consists of two stages: (i) pretraining on DNA sequences with next token prediction objective, and (ii) expanding the multi-modal task-specific tokens and finetuning for multiple downstream tasks simultaneously. When evaluated on the Nucleotide Transformer and GB benchmarks, Omni-DNA achieves state-of-the-art performance on 18 out of 26 tasks. Through multi-task finetuning, Omni-DNA addresses 10 acetylation and methylation tasks at once, surpassing models trained on each task individually. Finally, we design two complex genomic tasks, DNA2Function and Needle-in-DNA, which map DNA sequences to textual functional descriptions and images, respectively, indicating Omni-DNA's cross-modal capabilities to broaden the scope of genomic applications. All the models are available through https://huggingface.co/collections/zehui127

Remote Sensing Large Multi-Modal Models (RSLMMs) are developing rapidly and showcase significant capabilities in remote sensing imagery (RSI) comprehension. However, due to the limitations of existing datasets, RSLMMs have shortcomings in understanding the rich semantic relations among objects in complex remote sensing scenes. To unlock RSLMMs' complex comprehension ability, we propose a large-scale instruction tuning dataset FIT-RS, containing 1,800,851 instruction samples. FIT-RS covers common interpretation tasks and innovatively introduces several complex comprehension tasks of escalating difficulty, ranging from relation reasoning to image-level scene graph generation. Based on FIT-RS, we build the FIT-RSFG benchmark. Furthermore, we establish a new benchmark to evaluate the fine-grained relation comprehension capabilities of LMMs, named FIT-RSRC. Based on combined instruction data, we propose SkySenseGPT, which achieves outstanding performance on both public datasets and FIT-RSFG, surpassing existing RSLMMs. We hope the FIT-RS dataset can enhance the relation comprehension capability of RSLMMs and provide a large-scale fine-grained data source for the remote sensing community. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/Luo-Z13/SkySenseGPT

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become an essential approach for adapting large-scale pre-trained models while reducing computational costs. Among PEFT methods, LoRA significantly reduces trainable parameters by decomposing weight updates into low-rank matrices. However, traditional LoRA applies a fixed rank across all layers, failing to account for the varying complexity of hierarchical information, which leads to inefficient adaptation and redundancy. To address this, we propose MSPLoRA (Multi-Scale Pyramid LoRA), which introduces Global Shared LoRA, Mid-Level Shared LoRA, and Layer-Specific LoRA to capture global patterns, mid-level features, and fine-grained information, respectively. This hierarchical structure reduces inter-layer redundancy while maintaining strong adaptation capability. Experiments on various NLP tasks demonstrate that MSPLoRA achieves more efficient adaptation and better performance while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, additional analyses based on Singular Value Decomposition validate its information decoupling ability, highlighting MSPLoRA as a scalable and effective optimization strategy for parameter-efficient fine-tuning in large language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Oblivioniss/MSPLoRA.

Both encoder-only models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa) and large language models (LLMs, e.g., Llama3) have been widely used for text classification tasks. However, there is a lack of systematic studies comparing the performance of encoder-based models and LLMs in text classification, particularly when fine-tuning is involved. This study employed a diverse range of models and methods, varying in size and architecture, and including both fine-tuned and pre-trained approaches. We first assessed the performances of these LLMs on the 20 Newsgroups (20NG) and MASSIVE datasets, comparing them to encoder-only RoBERTa models. Additionally, we explored the multi-task capabilities of both model types by combining multiple classification tasks, including intent detection and slot-filling, into a single model using data from both datasets. Our results indicate that fully fine-tuned Llama3-70B models outperform RoBERTa-large and other decoder LLMs across various classification tasks and datasets. Moreover, the consolidated multi-task fine-tuned LLMs matched the performance of dual-model setups in both tasks across both datasets. Overall, our study provides a comprehensive benchmark of encoder-only and LLM models on text classification tasks and demonstrates a method to combine two or more fully fine-tuned decoder LLMs for reduced latency and equivalent performance.

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are strong in-context learners that are able to perform few-shot learning without changing model parameters. However, as we show, fine-tuning an LLM on any specific task generally destroys its in-context ability. We discover an important cause of this loss, format specialization, where the model overfits to the format of the fine-tuned task and is unable to output anything beyond this format. We further show that format specialization happens at the beginning of fine-tuning. To solve this problem, we propose Prompt Tuning with MOdel Tuning (ProMoT), a simple yet effective two-stage fine-tuning framework that preserves in-context abilities of the pretrained model. ProMoT first trains a soft prompt for the fine-tuning target task, and then fine-tunes the model itself with this soft prompt attached. ProMoT offloads task-specific formats into the soft prompt that can be removed when doing other in-context tasks. We fine-tune mT5 XXL with ProMoT on natural language inference (NLI) and English-French translation and evaluate the in-context abilities of the resulting models on 8 different NLP tasks. ProMoT achieves similar performance on the fine-tuned tasks compared with vanilla fine-tuning, but with much less reduction of in-context learning performances across the board. More importantly, ProMoT shows remarkable generalization ability on tasks that have different formats, e.g. fine-tuning on a NLI binary classification task improves the model's in-context ability to do summarization (+0.53 Rouge-2 score compared to the pretrained model), making ProMoT a promising method to build general purpose capabilities such as grounding and reasoning into LLMs with small but high quality datasets. When extended to sequential or multi-task training, ProMoT can achieve even better out-of-domain generalization performance.

Despite their success in many natural language tasks, solving math problems remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). A large gap exists between LLMs' pass-at-one and pass-at-N performance in solving math problems, suggesting LLMs might be close to finding correct solutions, motivating our exploration of fine-tuning methods to unlock LLMs' performance. Using the challenging MATH dataset, we investigate three fine-tuning strategies: (1) solution fine-tuning, where we fine-tune to generate a detailed solution for a given math problem; (2) solution-cluster re-ranking, where the LLM is fine-tuned as a solution verifier/evaluator to choose among generated candidate solution clusters; (3) multi-task sequential fine-tuning, which integrates both solution generation and evaluation tasks together efficiently to enhance the LLM performance. With these methods, we present a thorough empirical study on a series of PaLM 2 models and find: (1) The quality and style of the step-by-step solutions used for fine-tuning can make a significant impact on the model performance; (2) While solution re-ranking and majority voting are both effective for improving the model performance when used separately, they can also be used together for an even greater performance boost; (3) Multi-task fine-tuning that sequentially separates the solution generation and evaluation tasks can offer improved performance compared with the solution fine-tuning baseline. Guided by these insights, we design a fine-tuning recipe that yields approximately 58.8% accuracy on the MATH dataset with fine-tuned PaLM 2-L models, an 11.2% accuracy improvement over the few-shot performance of pre-trained PaLM 2-L model with majority voting.

The recent surge in large-scale foundation models has spurred the development of efficient methods for adapting these models to various downstream tasks. Low-rank adaptation methods, such as LoRA, have gained significant attention due to their outstanding parameter efficiency and no additional inference latency. This paper investigates a more general form of adapter module based on the analysis that parallel and sequential adaptation branches learn novel and general features during fine-tuning, respectively. The proposed method, named Hydra, due to its multi-head computational branches, combines parallel and sequential branch to integrate capabilities, which is more expressive than existing single branch methods and enables the exploration of a broader range of optimal points in the fine-tuning process. In addition, the proposed adaptation method explicitly leverages the pre-trained weights by performing a linear combination of the pre-trained features. It allows the learned features to have better generalization performance across diverse downstream tasks. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the characteristics of each adaptation branch with empirical evidence. Through an extensive range of experiments, encompassing comparisons and ablation studies, we substantiate the efficiency and demonstrate the superior performance of Hydra. This comprehensive evaluation underscores the potential impact and effectiveness of Hydra in a variety of applications. Our code is available on https://github.com/extremebird/Hydra

Scientific document classification is a critical task and often involves many classes. However, collecting human-labeled data for many classes is expensive and usually leads to label-scarce scenarios. Moreover, recent work has shown that sentence embedding model fine-tuning for few-shot classification is efficient, robust, and effective. In this work, we propose FusionSent (Fusion-based Sentence Embedding Fine-tuning), an efficient and prompt-free approach for few-shot classification of scientific documents with many classes. FusionSent uses available training examples and their respective label texts to contrastively fine-tune two different sentence embedding models. Afterward, the parameters of both fine-tuned models are fused to combine the complementary knowledge from the separate fine-tuning steps into a single model. Finally, the resulting sentence embedding model is frozen to embed the training instances, which are then used as input features to train a classification head. Our experiments show that FusionSent significantly outperforms strong baselines by an average of 6.0 F_{1} points across multiple scientific document classification datasets. In addition, we introduce a new dataset for multi-label classification of scientific documents, which contains 183,565 scientific articles and 130 classes from the arXiv category taxonomy. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sebischair/FusionSent.

With the advancements in denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), image inpainting has significantly evolved from merely filling information based on nearby regions to generating content conditioned on various prompts such as text, exemplar images, and sketches. However, existing methods, such as model fine-tuning and simple concatenation of latent vectors, often result in generation failures due to overfitting and inconsistency between the inpainted region and the background. In this paper, we argue that the current large diffusion models are sufficiently powerful to generate realistic images without further tuning. Hence, we introduce PILOT (inPainting vIa Latent OpTimization), an optimization approach grounded on a novel semantic centralization and background preservation loss. Our method searches latent spaces capable of generating inpainted regions that exhibit high fidelity to user-provided prompts while maintaining coherence with the background. Furthermore, we propose a strategy to balance optimization expense and image quality, significantly enhancing generation efficiency. Our method seamlessly integrates with any pre-trained model, including ControlNet and DreamBooth, making it suitable for deployment in multi-modal editing tools. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that PILOT outperforms existing approaches by generating more coherent, diverse, and faithful inpainted regions in response to provided prompts.