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Ep 328CodeElo: Benchmarking Competition-level Code Generation of LLMs with Human-comparable Elo Ratings

🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CL Authors: Shanghaoran Quan, Jiaxi Yang, Bowen Yu, Bo Zheng, Dayiheng Liu, An Yang, Xuancheng Ren, Bofei Gao, Yibo Miao, Yunlong Feng, Zekun Wang, Jian Yang, Zeyu Cui, Yang Fan, Yichang Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin Title: CodeElo: Benchmarking Competition-level Code Generation of LLMs with Human-comparable Elo Ratings Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01257v1 Abstract: With the increasing code reasoning capabilities of existing large language models (LLMs) and breakthroughs in reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and o3, there is a growing need to develop more challenging and comprehensive benchmarks that effectively test their sophisticated competition-level coding abilities. Existing benchmarks, like LiveCodeBench and USACO, fall short due to the unavailability of private test cases, lack of support for special judges, and misaligned execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce CodeElo, a standardized competition-level code generation benchmark that effectively addresses all these challenges for the first time. CodeElo benchmark is mainly based on the official CodeForces platform and tries to align with the platform as much as possible. We compile the recent six months of contest problems on CodeForces with detailed information such as contest divisions, problem difficulty ratings, and problem algorithm tags. We introduce a unique judging method in which problems are submitted directly to the platform and develop a reliable Elo rating calculation system that aligns with the platform and is comparable with human participants but has lower variance. By testing on our CodeElo, we provide the Elo ratings of 30 existing popular open-source and 3 proprietary LLMs for the first time. The results show that o1-mini and QwQ-32B-Preview stand out significantly, achieving Elo ratings of 1578 and 1261, respectively, while other models struggle even with the easiest problems, placing in the lowest 20 percent among all human participants. Detailed analysis experiments are also conducted to provide insights into performance across algorithms and comparisons between using C++ and Python, which can suggest directions for future studies.

Jan 4, 202523 min

Ep 327VideoAnydoor: High-fidelity Video Object Insertion with Precise Motion Control

🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CV Authors: Yuanpeng Tu, Hao Luo, Xi Chen, Sihui Ji, Xiang Bai, Hengshuang Zhao Title: VideoAnydoor: High-fidelity Video Object Insertion with Precise Motion Control Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01427v1 Abstract: Despite significant advancements in video generation, inserting a given object into videos remains a challenging task. The difficulty lies in preserving the appearance details of the reference object and accurately modeling coherent motions at the same time. In this paper, we propose VideoAnydoor, a zero-shot video object insertion framework with high-fidelity detail preservation and precise motion control. Starting from a text-to-video model, we utilize an ID extractor to inject the global identity and leverage a box sequence to control the overall motion. To preserve the detailed appearance and meanwhile support fine-grained motion control, we design a pixel warper. It takes the reference image with arbitrary key-points and the corresponding key-point trajectories as inputs. It warps the pixel details according to the trajectories and fuses the warped features with the diffusion U-Net, thus improving detail preservation and supporting users in manipulating the motion trajectories. In addition, we propose a training strategy involving both videos and static images with a reweight reconstruction loss to enhance insertion quality. VideoAnydoor demonstrates significant superiority over existing methods and naturally supports various downstream applications (e.g., talking head generation, video virtual try-on, multi-region editing) without task-specific fine-tuning.

Jan 4, 202519 min

Ep 326Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models

🤗 Upvotes: 25 | cs.CV, cs.LG Authors: Jingfeng Yao, Xinggang Wang Title: Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01423v1 Abstract: Latent diffusion models with Transformer architectures excel at generating high-fidelity images. However, recent studies reveal an optimization dilemma in this two-stage design: while increasing the per-token feature dimension in visual tokenizers improves reconstruction quality, it requires substantially larger diffusion models and more training iterations to achieve comparable generation performance. Consequently, existing systems often settle for sub-optimal solutions, either producing visual artifacts due to information loss within tokenizers or failing to converge fully due to expensive computation costs. We argue that this dilemma stems from the inherent difficulty in learning unconstrained high-dimensional latent spaces. To address this, we propose aligning the latent space with pre-trained vision foundation models when training the visual tokenizers. Our proposed VA-VAE (Vision foundation model Aligned Variational AutoEncoder) significantly expands the reconstruction-generation frontier of latent diffusion models, enabling faster convergence of Diffusion Transformers (DiT) in high-dimensional latent spaces. To exploit the full potential of VA-VAE, we build an enhanced DiT baseline with improved training strategies and architecture designs, termed LightningDiT. The integrated system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on ImageNet 256x256 generation with an FID score of 1.35 while demonstrating remarkable training efficiency by reaching an FID score of 2.11 in just 64 epochs--representing an over 21 times convergence speedup compared to the original DiT. Models and codes are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT.

Jan 4, 202524 min

Ep 325ProgCo: Program Helps Self-Correction of Large Language Models

🤗 Upvotes: 17 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Xiaoshuai Song, Yanan Wu, Weixun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng Title: ProgCo: Program Helps Self-Correction of Large Language Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01264v1 Abstract: Self-Correction aims to enable large language models (LLMs) to self-verify and self-refine their initial responses without external feedback. However, LLMs often fail to effectively self-verify and generate correct feedback, further misleading refinement and leading to the failure of self-correction, especially in complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose Program-driven Self-Correction (ProgCo). First, program-driven verification (ProgVe) achieves complex verification logic and extensive validation through self-generated, self-executing verification pseudo-programs. Then, program-driven refinement (ProgRe) receives feedback from ProgVe, conducts dual reflection and refinement on both responses and verification programs to mitigate misleading of incorrect feedback in complex reasoning tasks. Experiments on three instruction-following and mathematical benchmarks indicate that ProgCo achieves effective self-correction, and can be further enhance performance when combined with real program tools.

Jan 4, 202520 min

Ep 324MapEval: A Map-Based Evaluation of Geo-Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models

🤗 Upvotes: 16 | cs.CL Authors: Mahir Labib Dihan, Md Tanvir Hassan, Md Tanvir Parvez, Md Hasebul Hasan, Md Almash Alam, Muhammad Aamir Cheema, Mohammed Eunus Ali, Md Rizwan Parvez Title: MapEval: A Map-Based Evaluation of Geo-Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00316v1 Abstract: Recent advancements in foundation models have enhanced AI systems' capabilities in autonomous tool usage and reasoning. However, their ability in location or map-based reasoning - which improves daily life by optimizing navigation, facilitating resource discovery, and streamlining logistics - has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we introduce MapEval, a benchmark designed to assess diverse and complex map-based user queries with geo-spatial reasoning. MapEval features three task types (textual, API-based, and visual) that require collecting world information via map tools, processing heterogeneous geo-spatial contexts (e.g., named entities, travel distances, user reviews or ratings, images), and compositional reasoning, which all state-of-the-art foundation models find challenging. Comprising 700 unique multiple-choice questions about locations across 180 cities and 54 countries, MapEval evaluates foundation models' ability to handle spatial relationships, map infographics, travel planning, and navigation challenges. Using MapEval, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 28 prominent foundation models. While no single model excelled across all tasks, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini-1.5-Pro achieved competitive performance overall. However, substantial performance gaps emerged, particularly in MapEval, where agents with Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperformed GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro by 16% and 21%, respectively, and the gaps became even more amplified when compared to open-source LLMs. Our detailed analyses provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current models, though all models still fall short of human performance by more than 20% on average, struggling with complex map images and rigorous geo-spatial reasoning. This gap highlights MapEval's critical role in advancing general-purpose foundation models with stronger geo-spatial understanding.

Jan 4, 202525 min

Ep 323A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents

🤗 Upvotes: 15 | cs.AI Authors: Yuxiang Chai, Hanhao Li, Jiayu Zhang, Liang Liu, Guozhi Wang, Shuai Ren, Siyuan Huang, Hongsheng Li Title: A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01149v1 Abstract: AI agents have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, driven by significant advancements in the field of large language models (LLMs). Mobile GUI agents, a subset of AI agents, are designed to autonomously perform tasks on mobile devices. While numerous studies have introduced agents, datasets, and benchmarks to advance mobile GUI agent research, many existing datasets focus on static frame evaluations and fail to provide a comprehensive platform for assessing performance on real-world, in-the-wild tasks. To address this gap, we present Android Agent Arena (A3), a novel evaluation platform. Unlike existing in-the-wild systems, A3 offers: (1) meaningful and practical tasks, such as real-time online information retrieval and operational instructions; (2) a larger, more flexible action space, enabling compatibility with agents trained on any dataset; and (3) automated business-level LLM-based evaluation process. A3 includes 21 widely used general third-party apps and 201 tasks representative of common user scenarios, providing a robust foundation for evaluating mobile GUI agents in real-world situations and a new autonomous evaluation process for less human labor and coding expertise. The project is available at \url{https://yuxiangchai.github.io/Android-Agent-Arena/}.

Jan 4, 202523 min

Ep 322MLLM-as-a-Judge for Image Safety without Human Labeling

🤗 Upvotes: 14 | cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG Authors: Zhenting Wang, Shuming Hu, Shiyu Zhao, Xiaowen Lin, Felix Juefei-Xu, Zhuowei Li, Ligong Han, Harihar Subramanyam, Li Chen, Jianfa Chen, Nan Jiang, Lingjuan Lyu, Shiqing Ma, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Ankit Jain Title: MLLM-as-a-Judge for Image Safety without Human Labeling Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00192v1 Abstract: Image content safety has become a significant challenge with the rise of visual media on online platforms. Meanwhile, in the age of AI-generated content (AIGC), many image generation models are capable of producing harmful content, such as images containing sexual or violent material. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify such unsafe images based on established safety rules. Pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer potential in this regard, given their strong pattern recognition abilities. Existing approaches typically fine-tune MLLMs with human-labeled datasets, which however brings a series of drawbacks. First, relying on human annotators to label data following intricate and detailed guidelines is both expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, users of safety judgment systems may need to frequently update safety rules, making fine-tuning on human-based annotation more challenging. This raises the research question: Can we detect unsafe images by querying MLLMs in a zero-shot setting using a predefined safety constitution (a set of safety rules)? Our research showed that simply querying pre-trained MLLMs does not yield satisfactory results. This lack of effectiveness stems from factors such as the subjectivity of safety rules, the complexity of lengthy constitutions, and the inherent biases in the models. To address these challenges, we propose a MLLM-based method includes objectifying safety rules, assessing the relevance between rules and images, making quick judgments based on debiased token probabilities with logically complete yet simplified precondition chains for safety rules, and conducting more in-depth reasoning with cascaded chain-of-thought processes if necessary. Experiment results demonstrate that our method is highly effective for zero-shot image safety judgment tasks.

Jan 4, 202522 min

Ep 321Dynamic Scaling of Unit Tests for Code Reward Modeling

🤗 Upvotes: 13 | cs.CL, cs.SE Authors: Zeyao Ma, Xiaokang Zhang, Jing Zhang, Jifan Yu, Sijia Luo, Jie Tang Title: Dynamic Scaling of Unit Tests for Code Reward Modeling Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01054v1 Abstract: Current large language models (LLMs) often struggle to produce accurate responses on the first attempt for complex reasoning tasks like code generation. Prior research tackles this challenge by generating multiple candidate solutions and validating them with LLM-generated unit tests. The execution results of unit tests serve as reward signals to identify correct solutions. As LLMs always confidently make mistakes, these unit tests are not reliable, thereby diminishing the quality of reward signals. Motivated by the observation that scaling the number of solutions improves LLM performance, we explore the impact of scaling unit tests to enhance reward signal quality. Our pioneer experiment reveals a positive correlation between the number of unit tests and reward signal quality, with greater benefits observed in more challenging problems. Based on these insights, we propose CodeRM-8B, a lightweight yet effective unit test generator that enables efficient and high-quality unit test scaling. Additionally, we implement a dynamic scaling mechanism that adapts the number of unit tests based on problem difficulty, further improving efficiency. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves performance across various models on three benchmarks (e.g., with gains of 18.43% for Llama3-8B and 3.42% for GPT-4o-mini on HumanEval Plus).

Jan 4, 202521 min

Ep 320OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis

🤗 Upvotes: 52 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.HC Authors: Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu Title: OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19723v1 Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. Despite their utility in advancing digital automation, a critical bottleneck persists: collecting high-quality trajectory data for training. Common practices for collecting such data rely on human supervision or synthetic data generation through executing pre-defined tasks, which are either resource-intensive or unable to guarantee data quality. Moreover, these methods suffer from limited data diversity and significant gaps between synthetic data and real-world environments. To address these challenges, we propose OS-Genesis, a novel GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverses the conventional trajectory collection process. Instead of relying on pre-defined tasks, OS-Genesis enables agents first to perceive environments and perform step-wise interactions, then retrospectively derive high-quality tasks to enable trajectory-level exploration. A trajectory reward model is then employed to ensure the quality of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with OS-Genesis significantly improves their performance on highly challenging online benchmarks. In-depth analysis further validates OS-Genesis's efficiency and its superior data quality and diversity compared to existing synthesis methods. Our codes, data, and checkpoints are available at \href{https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Genesis-Home/}{OS-Genesis Homepage}.

Jan 3, 202522 min

Ep 319Xmodel-2 Technical Report

🤗 Upvotes: 13 | cs.AI Authors: Wang Qun, Liu Yang, Lin Qingquan, Qu Zhijiu, Jiang Ling Title: Xmodel-2 Technical Report Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19638v1 Abstract: Xmodel-2 is a 1.2-billion-parameter large language model designed specifically for reasoning tasks. Its architecture enables different model scales to share a unified set of hyperparameters, allowing for extensive experimentation on smaller models and seamless transfer of optimal configurations to larger models. To maximize training efficiency and stability, Xmodel-2 employs the WSD learning rate scheduler from MiniCPM. Pretrained on 1.5 trillion tokens from diverse sources, Xmodel-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex reasoning and agent-based tasks, while maintaining low training costs. These results highlight the potential of efficient model design and training strategies in advancing reasoning capabilities. Model checkpoints and code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2

Jan 3, 202517 min

Ep 318Are Vision-Language Models Truly Understanding Multi-vision Sensor?

🤗 Upvotes: 9 | cs.CV Authors: Sangyun Chung, Youngjoon Yu, Youngchae Chee, Se Yeon Kim, Byung-Kwan Lee, Yong Man Ro Title: Are Vision-Language Models Truly Understanding Multi-vision Sensor? Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20750v1 Abstract: Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced by aligning vision inputs with text, significantly improving performance in computer vision tasks. Moreover, for VLMs to be effectively utilized in real-world applications, an understanding of diverse multi-vision sensor data, such as thermal, depth, and X-ray information, is essential. However, we find that current VLMs process multi-vision sensor images without deep understanding of sensor information, disregarding each sensor's unique physical properties. This limitation restricts their capacity to interpret and respond to complex questions requiring multi-vision sensor reasoning. To address this, we propose a novel Multi-vision Sensor Perception and Reasoning (MS-PR) benchmark, assessing VLMs on their capacity for sensor-specific reasoning. Moreover, we introduce Diverse Negative Attributes (DNA) optimization to enable VLMs to perform deep reasoning on multi-vision sensor tasks, helping to bridge the core information gap between images and sensor data. Extensive experimental results validate that the proposed DNA method can significantly improve the multi-vision sensor reasoning for VLMs.

Jan 3, 202524 min

Ep 317HUNYUANPROVER: A Scalable Data Synthesis Framework and Guided Tree Search for Automated Theorem Proving

🤗 Upvotes: 4 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Yang Li, Dong Du, Linfeng Song, Chen Li, Weikang Wang, Tao Yang, Haitao Mi Title: HUNYUANPROVER: A Scalable Data Synthesis Framework and Guided Tree Search for Automated Theorem Proving Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20735v2 Abstract: We introduce HunyuanProver, an language model finetuned from the Hunyuan 7B for interactive automatic theorem proving with LEAN4. To alleviate the data sparsity issue, we design a scalable framework to iterative synthesize data with low cost. Besides, guided tree search algorithms are designed to enable effective ``system 2 thinking`` of the prover. HunyuanProver achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances on major benchmarks. Specifically, it achieves a pass of 68.4% on the miniF2F-test compared to 65.9%, the current SOTA results. It proves 4 IMO statements (imo_1960_p2, imo_1962_p2}, imo_1964_p2 and imo_1983_p6) in miniF2F-test. To benefit the community, we will open-source a dataset of 30k synthesized instances, where each instance contains the original question in natural language, the converted statement by autoformalization, and the proof by HunyuanProver.

Jan 3, 202520 min

Ep 316VMix: Improving Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Cross-Attention Mixing Control

🤗 Upvotes: 2 | cs.CV Authors: Shaojin Wu, Fei Ding, Mengqi Huang, Wei Liu, Qian He Title: VMix: Improving Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Cross-Attention Mixing Control Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20800v1 Abstract: While diffusion models show extraordinary talents in text-to-image generation, they may still fail to generate highly aesthetic images. More specifically, there is still a gap between the generated images and the real-world aesthetic images in finer-grained dimensions including color, lighting, composition, etc. In this paper, we propose Cross-Attention Value Mixing Control (VMix) Adapter, a plug-and-play aesthetics adapter, to upgrade the quality of generated images while maintaining generality across visual concepts by (1) disentangling the input text prompt into the content description and aesthetic description by the initialization of aesthetic embedding, and (2) integrating aesthetic conditions into the denoising process through value-mixed cross-attention, with the network connected by zero-initialized linear layers. Our key insight is to enhance the aesthetic presentation of existing diffusion models by designing a superior condition control method, all while preserving the image-text alignment. Through our meticulous design, VMix is flexible enough to be applied to community models for better visual performance without retraining. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted extensive experiments, showing that VMix outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and is compatible with other community modules (e.g., LoRA, ControlNet, and IPAdapter) for image generation. The project page is https://vmix-diffusion.github.io/VMix/.

Jan 3, 202522 min

Ep 315Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs

🤗 Upvotes: 13 | cs.CL Authors: Xingyu Chen, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Jianhui Pang, Dian Yu, Linfeng Song, Qiuzhi Liu, Mengfei Zhou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu Title: Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21187v1 Abstract: The remarkable performance of models like the OpenAI o1 can be attributed to their ability to emulate human-like long-time thinking during inference. These models employ extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, exploring multiple strategies to enhance problem-solving capabilities. However, a critical question remains: How to intelligently and efficiently scale computational resources during testing. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the prevalent issue of overthinking in these models, where excessive computational resources are allocated for simple problems with minimal benefit. We introduce novel efficiency metrics from both outcome and process perspectives to evaluate the rational use of computational resources by o1-like models. Using a self-training paradigm, we propose strategies to mitigate overthinking, streamlining reasoning processes without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach successfully reduces computational overhead while preserving model performance across a range of testsets with varying difficulty levels, such as GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.

Jan 2, 202520 min

Ep 314OneKE: A Dockerized Schema-Guided LLM Agent-based Knowledge Extraction System

🤗 Upvotes: 11 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.DB, cs.IR, cs.LG Authors: Yujie Luo, Xiangyuan Ru, Kangwei Liu, Lin Yuan, Mengshu Sun, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Lanning Wei, Da Zheng, Haofen Wang, Huajun Chen Title: OneKE: A Dockerized Schema-Guided LLM Agent-based Knowledge Extraction System Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20005v1 Abstract: We introduce OneKE, a dockerized schema-guided knowledge extraction system, which can extract knowledge from the Web and raw PDF Books, and support various domains (science, news, etc.). Specifically, we design OneKE with multiple agents and a configure knowledge base. Different agents perform their respective roles, enabling support for various extraction scenarios. The configure knowledge base facilitates schema configuration, error case debugging and correction, further improving the performance. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate OneKE's efficacy, while case studies further elucidate its adaptability to diverse tasks across multiple domains, highlighting its potential for broad applications. We have open-sourced the Code at https://github.com/zjunlp/OneKE and released a Video at http://oneke.openkg.cn/demo.mp4.

Jan 2, 202518 min

Ep 313Explanatory Instructions: Towards Unified Vision Tasks Understanding and Zero-shot Generalization

🤗 Upvotes: 39 | cs.CV Authors: Yang Shen, Xiu-Shen Wei, Yifan Sun, Yuxin Song, Tao Yuan, Jian Jin, Heyang Xu, Yazhou Yao, Errui Ding Title: Explanatory Instructions: Towards Unified Vision Tasks Understanding and Zero-shot Generalization Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18525v2 Abstract: Computer Vision (CV) has yet to fully achieve the zero-shot task generalization observed in Natural Language Processing (NLP), despite following many of the milestones established in NLP, such as large transformer models, extensive pre-training, and the auto-regression paradigm, among others. In this paper, we explore the idea that CV adopts discrete and terminological task definitions (\eg, ``image segmentation''), which may be a key barrier to zero-shot task generalization. Our hypothesis is that without truly understanding previously-seen tasks--due to these terminological definitions--deep models struggle to generalize to novel tasks. To verify this, we introduce Explanatory Instructions, which provide an intuitive way to define CV task objectives through detailed linguistic transformations from input images to outputs. We create a large-scale dataset comprising 12 million ``image input $\to$ explanatory instruction $\to$ output'' triplets, and train an auto-regressive-based vision-language model (AR-based VLM) that takes both images and explanatory instructions as input. By learning to follow these instructions, the AR-based VLM achieves instruction-level zero-shot capabilities for previously-seen tasks and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization for unseen CV tasks. Code and dataset will be openly available on our GitHub repository.

Jan 1, 202525 min

Ep 312On the Compositional Generalization of Multimodal LLMs for Medical Imaging

🤗 Upvotes: 29 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Zhenyang Cai, Junying Chen, Rongsheng Wang, Weihong Wang, Yonglin Deng, Dingjie Song, Yize Chen, Zixu Zhang, Benyou Wang Title: On the Compositional Generalization of Multimodal LLMs for Medical Imaging Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20070v1 Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold significant potential in the medical field, but their capabilities are often limited by insufficient data in certain medical domains, highlighting the need for understanding what kinds of images can be used by MLLMs for generalization. Current research suggests that multi-task training outperforms single-task as different tasks can benefit each other, but they often overlook the internal relationships within these tasks, providing limited guidance on selecting datasets to enhance specific tasks. To analyze this phenomenon, we attempted to employ compositional generalization (CG)-the ability of models to understand novel combinations by recombining learned elements-as a guiding framework. Since medical images can be precisely defined by Modality, Anatomical area, and Task, naturally providing an environment for exploring CG. Therefore, we assembled 106 medical datasets to create Med-MAT for comprehensive experiments. The experiments confirmed that MLLMs can use CG to understand unseen medical images and identified CG as one of the main drivers of the generalization observed in multi-task training. Additionally, further studies demonstrated that CG effectively supports datasets with limited data and delivers consistent performance across different backbones, highlighting its versatility and broad applicability. Med-MAT is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Med-MAT.

Jan 1, 202522 min

Ep 311Bringing Objects to Life: 4D generation from 3D objects

🤗 Upvotes: 24 | cs.CV Authors: Ohad Rahamim, Ori Malca, Dvir Samuel, Gal Chechik Title: Bringing Objects to Life: 4D generation from 3D objects Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20422v1 Abstract: Recent advancements in generative modeling now enable the creation of 4D content (moving 3D objects) controlled with text prompts. 4D generation has large potential in applications like virtual worlds, media, and gaming, but existing methods provide limited control over the appearance and geometry of generated content. In this work, we introduce a method for animating user-provided 3D objects by conditioning on textual prompts to guide 4D generation, enabling custom animations while maintaining the identity of the original object. We first convert a 3D mesh into a ``static" 4D Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) that preserves the visual attributes of the input object. Then, we animate the object using an Image-to-Video diffusion model driven by text. To improve motion realism, we introduce an incremental viewpoint selection protocol for sampling perspectives to promote lifelike movement and a masked Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, which leverages attention maps to focus optimization on relevant regions. We evaluate our model in terms of temporal coherence, prompt adherence, and visual fidelity and find that our method outperforms baselines that are based on other approaches, achieving up to threefold improvements in identity preservation measured using LPIPS scores, and effectively balancing visual quality with dynamic content.

Jan 1, 202521 min

Ep 310Efficiently Serving LLM Reasoning Programs with Certaindex

🤗 Upvotes: 20 | cs.LG, cs.CL Authors: Yichao Fu, Junda Chen, Siqi Zhu, Zheyu Fu, Zhongdongming Dai, Aurick Qiao, Hao Zhang Title: Efficiently Serving LLM Reasoning Programs with Certaindex Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20993v1 Abstract: The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked their capabilities in advanced reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving, code generation, and legal analysis. Central to this progress are inference-time reasoning algorithms, which refine outputs by exploring multiple solution paths, at the cost of increasing compute demands and response latencies. Existing serving systems fail to adapt to the scaling behaviors of these algorithms or the varying difficulty of queries, leading to inefficient resource use and unmet latency targets. We present Dynasor, a system that optimizes inference-time compute for LLM reasoning queries. Unlike traditional engines, Dynasor tracks and schedules requests within reasoning queries and uses Certaindex, a proxy that measures statistical reasoning progress based on model certainty, to guide compute allocation dynamically. Dynasor co-adapts scheduling with reasoning progress: it allocates more compute to hard queries, reduces compute for simpler ones, and terminates unpromising queries early, balancing accuracy, latency, and cost. On diverse datasets and algorithms, Dynasor reduces compute by up to 50% in batch processing and sustaining 3.3x higher query rates or 4.7x tighter latency SLOs in online serving.

Jan 1, 202520 min

Ep 309TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization

🤗 Upvotes: 14 | cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.AS Authors: Chia-Yu Hung, Navonil Majumder, Zhifeng Kong, Ambuj Mehrish, Rafael Valle, Bryan Catanzaro, Soujanya Poria Title: TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21037v1 Abstract: We introduce TangoFlux, an efficient Text-to-Audio (TTA) generative model with 515M parameters, capable of generating up to 30 seconds of 44.1kHz audio in just 3.7 seconds on a single A40 GPU. A key challenge in aligning TTA models lies in the difficulty of creating preference pairs, as TTA lacks structured mechanisms like verifiable rewards or gold-standard answers available for Large Language Models (LLMs). To address this, we propose CLAP-Ranked Preference Optimization (CRPO), a novel framework that iteratively generates and optimizes preference data to enhance TTA alignment. We demonstrate that the audio preference dataset generated using CRPO outperforms existing alternatives. With this framework, TangoFlux achieves state-of-the-art performance across both objective and subjective benchmarks. We open source all code and models to support further research in TTA generation.

Jan 1, 202521 min

Ep 308Edicho: Consistent Image Editing in the Wild

🤗 Upvotes: 13 | cs.CV Authors: Qingyan Bai, Hao Ouyang, Yinghao Xu, Qiuyu Wang, Ceyuan Yang, Ka Leong Cheng, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen Title: Edicho: Consistent Image Editing in the Wild Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21079v1 Abstract: As a verified need, consistent editing across in-the-wild images remains a technical challenge arising from various unmanageable factors, like object poses, lighting conditions, and photography environments. Edicho steps in with a training-free solution based on diffusion models, featuring a fundamental design principle of using explicit image correspondence to direct editing. Specifically, the key components include an attention manipulation module and a carefully refined classifier-free guidance (CFG) denoising strategy, both of which take into account the pre-estimated correspondence. Such an inference-time algorithm enjoys a plug-and-play nature and is compatible to most diffusion-based editing methods, such as ControlNet and BrushNet. Extensive results demonstrate the efficacy of Edicho in consistent cross-image editing under diverse settings. We will release the code to facilitate future studies.

Jan 1, 202522 min

Ep 307Facilitating large language model Russian adaptation with Learned Embedding Propagation

🤗 Upvotes: 6 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Mikhail Tikhomirov, Daniil Chernyshev Title: Facilitating large language model Russian adaptation with Learned Embedding Propagation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21140v1 Abstract: Rapid advancements of large language model (LLM) technologies led to the introduction of powerful open-source instruction-tuned LLMs that have the same text generation quality as the state-of-the-art counterparts such as GPT-4. While the emergence of such models accelerates the adoption of LLM technologies in sensitive-information environments the authors of such models don not disclose the training data necessary for replication of the results thus making the achievements model-exclusive. Since those open-source models are also multilingual this in turn reduces the benefits of training a language specific LLMs as improved inference computation efficiency becomes the only guaranteed advantage of such costly procedure. More cost-efficient options such as vocabulary extension and subsequent continued pre-training are also inhibited by the lack of access to high-quality instruction-tuning data since it is the major factor behind the resulting LLM task-solving capabilities. To address the limitations and cut the costs of the language adaptation pipeline we propose Learned Embedding Propagation (LEP). Unlike existing approaches our method has lower training data size requirements due to minimal impact on existing LLM knowledge which we reinforce using novel ad-hoc embedding propagation procedure that allows to skip the instruction-tuning step and instead implant the new language knowledge directly into any existing instruct-tuned variant. We evaluated four Russian vocabulary adaptations for LLaMa-3-8B and Mistral-7B, showing that LEP is competitive with traditional instruction-tuning methods, achieving performance comparable to OpenChat 3.5 and LLaMa-3-8B-Instruct, with further improvements via self-calibration and continued tuning enhancing task-solving capabilities.

Jan 1, 202522 min

Ep 306Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym

🤗 Upvotes: 6 | cs.SE, cs.CL Authors: Jiayi Pan, Xingyao Wang, Graham Neubig, Navdeep Jaitly, Heng Ji, Alane Suhr, Yizhe Zhang Title: Training Software Engineering Agents and Verifiers with SWE-Gym Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21139v1 Abstract: We present SWE-Gym, the first environment for training real-world software engineering (SWE) agents. SWE-Gym contains 2,438 real-world Python task instances, each comprising a codebase with an executable runtime environment, unit tests, and a task specified in natural language. We use SWE-Gym to train language model based SWE agents , achieving up to 19% absolute gains in resolve rate on the popular SWE-Bench Verified and Lite test sets. We also experiment with inference-time scaling through verifiers trained on agent trajectories sampled from SWE-Gym. When combined with our fine-tuned SWE agents, we achieve 32.0% and 26.0% on SWE-Bench Verified and Lite, respectively, reflecting a new state-of-the-art for open-weight SWE agents. To facilitate further research, we publicly release SWE-Gym, models, and agent trajectories.

Jan 1, 202526 min

Ep 305HumanEval Pro and MBPP Pro: Evaluating Large Language Models on Self-invoking Code Generation

🤗 Upvotes: 5 | cs.SE, cs.CL Authors: Zhaojian Yu, Yilun Zhao, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Ping Zhang Title: HumanEval Pro and MBPP Pro: Evaluating Large Language Models on Self-invoking Code Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21199v1 Abstract: We introduce self-invoking code generation, a new task designed to evaluate the progressive reasoning and problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. In this task, models are presented with a base problem and a related, more complex problem. They must solve the base problem and then utilize its solution to address the more complex one. This work features three key contributions. First, we propose a general recipe for generating more challenging versions of existing benchmarks, resulting in three new benchmarks: HumanEval Pro, MBPP Pro, and BigCodeBench-Lite Pro, specifically designed to assess LLMs on self-invoking code generation. Second, from the analysis of experimental results over twenty LLMs on our benchmarks, we have two important observations: (i) Most LLMs excel in traditional code generation benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP, but their performance declines on self-invoking tasks. For example, o1-mini achieves 96.2% pass@1 on HumanEval but only 76.2% on HumanEval Pro. (ii) On self-invoking code generation task, the instruction-tuned models demonstrate only marginal improvements compared to the base models. Third, we disclose the types of failure modes that exist in our evaluation results. All these results underscore the need for further advancements in self-invoking code generation tasks and provide a new direction for future research on enhancing LLMs' code reasoning capabilities.

Jan 1, 202520 min

Ep 304Slow Perception: Let's Perceive Geometric Figures Step-by-step

🤗 Upvotes: 5 | cs.CV Authors: Haoran Wei, Youyang Yin, Yumeng Li, Jia Wang, Liang Zhao, Jianjian Sun, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang Title: Slow Perception: Let's Perceive Geometric Figures Step-by-step Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20631v1 Abstract: Recently, "visual o1" began to enter people's vision, with expectations that this slow-thinking design can solve visual reasoning tasks, especially geometric math problems. However, the reality is that current LVLMs (Large Vision Language Models) can hardly even accurately copy a geometric figure, let alone truly understand the complex inherent logic and spatial relationships within geometric shapes. We believe accurate copying (strong perception) is the first step to visual o1. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of "slow perception" (SP), which guides the model to gradually perceive basic point-line combinations, as our humans, reconstruct complex geometric structures progressively. There are two-fold stages in SP: a) perception decomposition. Perception is not instantaneous. In this stage, complex geometric figures are broken down into basic simple units to unify geometry representation. b) perception flow, which acknowledges that accurately tracing a line is not an easy task. This stage aims to avoid "long visual jumps" in regressing line segments by using a proposed "perceptual ruler" to trace each line stroke-by-stroke. Surprisingly, such a human-like perception manner enjoys an inference time scaling law -- the slower, the better. Researchers strive to speed up the model's perception in the past, but we slow it down again, allowing the model to read the image step-by-step and carefully.

Jan 1, 202523 min

Ep 303HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMs

🤗 Upvotes: 53 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Junying Chen, Zhenyang Cai, Ke Ji, Xidong Wang, Wanlong Liu, Rongsheng Wang, Jianye Hou, Benyou Wang Title: HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMs Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18925v1 Abstract: The breakthrough of OpenAI o1 highlights the potential of enhancing reasoning to improve LLM. Yet, most research in reasoning has focused on mathematical tasks, leaving domains like medicine underexplored. The medical domain, though distinct from mathematics, also demands robust reasoning to provide reliable answers, given the high standards of healthcare. However, verifying medical reasoning is challenging, unlike those in mathematics. To address this, we propose verifiable medical problems with a medical verifier to check the correctness of model outputs. This verifiable nature enables advancements in medical reasoning through a two-stage approach: (1) using the verifier to guide the search for a complex reasoning trajectory for fine-tuning LLMs, (2) applying reinforcement learning (RL) with verifier-based rewards to enhance complex reasoning further. Finally, we introduce HuatuoGPT-o1, a medical LLM capable of complex reasoning, which outperforms general and medical-specific baselines using only 40K verifiable problems. Experiments show complex reasoning improves medical problem-solving and benefits more from RL. We hope our approach inspires advancements in reasoning across medical and other specialized domains.

Dec 31, 202423 min

Ep 3021.58-bit FLUX

🤗 Upvotes: 24 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Chenglin Yang, Celong Liu, Xueqing Deng, Dongwon Kim, Xing Mei, Xiaohui Shen, Liang-Chieh Chen Title: 1.58-bit FLUX Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18653v1 Abstract: We present 1.58-bit FLUX, the first successful approach to quantizing the state-of-the-art text-to-image generation model, FLUX.1-dev, using 1.58-bit weights (i.e., values in {-1, 0, +1}) while maintaining comparable performance for generating 1024 x 1024 images. Notably, our quantization method operates without access to image data, relying solely on self-supervision from the FLUX.1-dev model. Additionally, we develop a custom kernel optimized for 1.58-bit operations, achieving a 7.7x reduction in model storage, a 5.1x reduction in inference memory, and improved inference latency. Extensive evaluations on the GenEval and T2I Compbench benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of 1.58-bit FLUX in maintaining generation quality while significantly enhancing computational efficiency.

Dec 31, 202422 min

Ep 301Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey

🤗 Upvotes: 17 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MM, eess.AS Authors: Liang Chen, Zekun Wang, Shuhuai Ren, Lei Li, Haozhe Zhao, Yunshui Li, Zefan Cai, Hongcheng Guo, Lei Zhang, Yizhe Xiong, Yichi Zhang, Ruoyu Wu, Qingxiu Dong, Ge Zhang, Jian Yang, Lingwei Meng, Shujie Hu, Yulong Chen, Junyang Lin, Shuai Bai, Andreas Vlachos, Xu Tan, Minjia Zhang, Wen Xiao, Aaron Yee, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang Title: Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18619v2 Abstract: Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

Dec 31, 202417 min

Ep 300Orient Anything: Learning Robust Object Orientation Estimation from Rendering 3D Models

🤗 Upvotes: 11 | cs.CV Authors: Zehan Wang, Ziang Zhang, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Hengshuang Zhao, Zhou Zhao Title: Orient Anything: Learning Robust Object Orientation Estimation from Rendering 3D Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18605v1 Abstract: Orientation is a key attribute of objects, crucial for understanding their spatial pose and arrangement in images. However, practical solutions for accurate orientation estimation from a single image remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce Orient Anything, the first expert and foundational model designed to estimate object orientation in a single- and free-view image. Due to the scarcity of labeled data, we propose extracting knowledge from the 3D world. By developing a pipeline to annotate the front face of 3D objects and render images from random views, we collect 2M images with precise orientation annotations. To fully leverage the dataset, we design a robust training objective that models the 3D orientation as probability distributions of three angles and predicts the object orientation by fitting these distributions. Besides, we employ several strategies to improve synthetic-to-real transfer. Our model achieves state-of-the-art orientation estimation accuracy in both rendered and real images and exhibits impressive zero-shot ability in various scenarios. More importantly, our model enhances many applications, such as comprehension and generation of complex spatial concepts and 3D object pose adjustment.

Dec 31, 202423 min

Ep 299Task Preference Optimization: Improving Multimodal Large Language Models with Vision Task Alignment

🤗 Upvotes: 11 | cs.CV Authors: Ziang Yan, Zhilin Li, Yinan He, Chenting Wang, Kunchang Li, Xinhao Li, Xiangyu Zeng, Zilei Wang, Yali Wang, Yu Qiao, Limin Wang, Yi Wang Title: Task Preference Optimization: Improving Multimodal Large Language Models with Vision Task Alignment Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19326v1 Abstract: Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with fine-grained or precise understanding of visuals though they give comprehensive perception and reasoning in a spectrum of vision applications. Recent studies either develop tool-using or unify specific visual tasks into the autoregressive framework, often at the expense of overall multimodal performance. To address this issue and enhance MLLMs with visual tasks in a scalable fashion, we propose Task Preference Optimization (TPO), a novel method that utilizes differentiable task preferences derived from typical fine-grained visual tasks. TPO introduces learnable task tokens that establish connections between multiple task-specific heads and the MLLM. By leveraging rich visual labels during training, TPO significantly enhances the MLLM's multimodal capabilities and task-specific performance. Through multi-task co-training within TPO, we observe synergistic benefits that elevate individual task performance beyond what is achievable through single-task training methodologies. Our instantiation of this approach with VideoChat and LLaVA demonstrates an overall 14.6% improvement in multimodal performance compared to baseline models. Additionally, MLLM-TPO demonstrates robust zero-shot capabilities across various tasks, performing comparably to state-of-the-art supervised models. The code will be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/TPO

Dec 31, 202425 min

Ep 298From Elements to Design: A Layered Approach for Automatic Graphic Design Composition

🤗 Upvotes: 11 | cs.CV Authors: Jiawei Lin, Shizhao Sun, Danqing Huang, Ting Liu, Ji Li, Jiang Bian Title: From Elements to Design: A Layered Approach for Automatic Graphic Design Composition Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19712v1 Abstract: In this work, we investigate automatic design composition from multimodal graphic elements. Although recent studies have developed various generative models for graphic design, they usually face the following limitations: they only focus on certain subtasks and are far from achieving the design composition task; they do not consider the hierarchical information of graphic designs during the generation process. To tackle these issues, we introduce the layered design principle into Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and propose a novel approach, called LaDeCo, to accomplish this challenging task. Specifically, LaDeCo first performs layer planning for a given element set, dividing the input elements into different semantic layers according to their contents. Based on the planning results, it subsequently predicts element attributes that control the design composition in a layer-wise manner, and includes the rendered image of previously generated layers into the context. With this insightful design, LaDeCo decomposes the difficult task into smaller manageable steps, making the generation process smoother and clearer. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LaDeCo in design composition. Furthermore, we show that LaDeCo enables some interesting applications in graphic design, such as resolution adjustment, element filling, design variation, etc. In addition, it even outperforms the specialized models in some design subtasks without any task-specific training.

Dec 31, 202422 min

Ep 297VideoMaker: Zero-shot Customized Video Generation with the Inherent Force of Video Diffusion Models

🤗 Upvotes: 8 | cs.CV Authors: Tao Wu, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Zhongang Qi, Junfu Pu, Huanzhang Dou, Guangcong Zheng, Ying Shan, Xi Li Title: VideoMaker: Zero-shot Customized Video Generation with the Inherent Force of Video Diffusion Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19645v2 Abstract: Zero-shot customized video generation has gained significant attention due to its substantial application potential. Existing methods rely on additional models to extract and inject reference subject features, assuming that the Video Diffusion Model (VDM) alone is insufficient for zero-shot customized video generation. However, these methods often struggle to maintain consistent subject appearance due to suboptimal feature extraction and injection techniques. In this paper, we reveal that VDM inherently possesses the force to extract and inject subject features. Departing from previous heuristic approaches, we introduce a novel framework that leverages VDM's inherent force to enable high-quality zero-shot customized video generation. Specifically, for feature extraction, we directly input reference images into VDM and use its intrinsic feature extraction process, which not only provides fine-grained features but also significantly aligns with VDM's pre-trained knowledge. For feature injection, we devise an innovative bidirectional interaction between subject features and generated content through spatial self-attention within VDM, ensuring that VDM has better subject fidelity while maintaining the diversity of the generated video. Experiments on both customized human and object video generation validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Dec 31, 202423 min

Ep 296The Superposition of Diffusion Models Using the Itô Density Estimator

🤗 Upvotes: 8 | cs.LG Authors: Marta Skreta, Lazar Atanackovic, Avishek Joey Bose, Alexander Tong, Kirill Neklyudov Title: The Superposition of Diffusion Models Using the Itô Density Estimator Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17762v1 Abstract: The Cambrian explosion of easily accessible pre-trained diffusion models suggests a demand for methods that combine multiple different pre-trained diffusion models without incurring the significant computational burden of re-training a larger combined model. In this paper, we cast the problem of combining multiple pre-trained diffusion models at the generation stage under a novel proposed framework termed superposition. Theoretically, we derive superposition from rigorous first principles stemming from the celebrated continuity equation and design two novel algorithms tailor-made for combining diffusion models in SuperDiff. SuperDiff leverages a new scalable It\^o density estimator for the log likelihood of the diffusion SDE which incurs no additional overhead compared to the well-known Hutchinson's estimator needed for divergence calculations. We demonstrate that SuperDiff is scalable to large pre-trained diffusion models as superposition is performed solely through composition during inference, and also enjoys painless implementation as it combines different pre-trained vector fields through an automated re-weighting scheme. Notably, we show that SuperDiff is efficient during inference time, and mimics traditional composition operators such as the logical OR and the logical AND. We empirically demonstrate the utility of using SuperDiff for generating more diverse images on CIFAR-10, more faithful prompt conditioned image editing using Stable Diffusion, and improved unconditional de novo structure design of proteins. https://github.com/necludov/super-diffusion

Dec 31, 202423 min

Ep 295Safeguard Fine-Tuned LLMs Through Pre- and Post-Tuning Model Merging

🤗 Upvotes: 6 | cs.CL Authors: Hua Farn, Hsuan Su, Shachi H Kumar, Saurav Sahay, Shang-Tse Chen, Hung-yi Lee Title: Safeguard Fine-Tuned LLMs Through Pre- and Post-Tuning Model Merging Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19512v1 Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is a widely adopted approach, but it often leads to safety degradation in safety-aligned LLMs. Currently, many solutions address this issue by incorporating additional safety data, which can be impractical in many cases. In this paper, we address the question: How can we improve downstream task performance while preserving safety in LLMs without relying on additional safety data? We propose a simple and effective method that maintains the inherent safety of LLMs while enhancing their downstream task performance: merging the weights of pre- and post-fine-tuned safety-aligned models. Experimental results across various downstream tasks, models, and merging methods demonstrate that this approach effectively mitigates safety degradation while improving downstream task performance, offering a practical solution for adapting safety-aligned LLMs.

Dec 31, 202419 min

Ep 294CypherBench: Towards Precise Retrieval over Full-scale Modern Knowledge Graphs in the LLM Era

🤗 Upvotes: 3 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.DB Authors: Yanlin Feng, Simone Papicchio, Sajjadur Rahman Title: CypherBench: Towards Precise Retrieval over Full-scale Modern Knowledge Graphs in the LLM Era Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18702v1 Abstract: Retrieval from graph data is crucial for augmenting large language models (LLM) with both open-domain knowledge and private enterprise data, and it is also a key component in the recent GraphRAG system (edge et al., 2024). Despite decades of research on knowledge graphs and knowledge base question answering, leading LLM frameworks (e.g. Langchain and LlamaIndex) have only minimal support for retrieval from modern encyclopedic knowledge graphs like Wikidata. In this paper, we analyze the root cause and suggest that modern RDF knowledge graphs (e.g. Wikidata, Freebase) are less efficient for LLMs due to overly large schemas that far exceed the typical LLM context window, use of resource identifiers, overlapping relation types and lack of normalization. As a solution, we propose property graph views on top of the underlying RDF graph that can be efficiently queried by LLMs using Cypher. We instantiated this idea on Wikidata and introduced CypherBench, the first benchmark with 11 large-scale, multi-domain property graphs with 7.8 million entities and over 10,000 questions. To achieve this, we tackled several key challenges, including developing an RDF-to-property graph conversion engine, creating a systematic pipeline for text-to-Cypher task generation, and designing new evaluation metrics.

Dec 31, 202425 min

Ep 293YuLan-Mini: An Open Data-efficient Language Model

🤗 Upvotes: 27 | cs.CL Authors: Yiwen Hu, Huatong Song, Jia Deng, Jiapeng Wang, Jie Chen, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Zican Dong, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen Title: YuLan-Mini: An Open Data-efficient Language Model Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17743v2 Abstract: Effective pre-training of large language models (LLMs) has been challenging due to the immense resource demands and the complexity of the technical processes involved. This paper presents a detailed technical report on YuLan-Mini, a highly capable base model with 2.42B parameters that achieves top-tier performance among models of similar parameter scale. Our pre-training approach focuses on enhancing training efficacy through three key technical contributions: an elaborate data pipeline combines data cleaning with data schedule strategies, a robust optimization method to mitigate training instability, and an effective annealing approach that incorporates targeted data selection and long context training. Remarkably, YuLan-Mini, trained on 1.08T tokens, achieves performance comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data. To facilitate reproduction, we release the full details of the data composition for each training phase. Project details can be accessed at the following link: https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-Mini.

Dec 28, 202419 min

Ep 292A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression

🤗 Upvotes: 17 | cs.CL Authors: Chenlong Deng, Zhisong Zhang, Kelong Mao, Shuaiyi Li, Xinting Huang, Dong Yu, Zhicheng Dou Title: A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17483v1 Abstract: In this work, we provide a thorough investigation of gist-based context compression methods to improve long-context processing in large language models. We focus on two key questions: (1) How well can these methods replace full attention models? and (2) What potential failure patterns arise due to compression? Through extensive experiments, we show that while gist-based compression can achieve near-lossless performance on tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA, it faces challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. Furthermore, we identify three key failure patterns: lost by the boundary, lost if surprise, and lost along the way. To mitigate these issues, we propose two effective strategies: fine-grained autoencoding, which enhances the reconstruction of original token information, and segment-wise token importance estimation, which adjusts optimization based on token dependencies. Our work provides valuable insights into the understanding of gist token-based context compression and offers practical strategies for improving compression capabilities.

Dec 28, 202421 min

Ep 291MMFactory: A Universal Solution Search Engine for Vision-Language Tasks

🤗 Upvotes: 4 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Wan-Cyuan Fan, Tanzila Rahman, Leonid Sigal Title: MMFactory: A Universal Solution Search Engine for Vision-Language Tasks Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18072v1 Abstract: With advances in foundational and vision-language models, and effective fine-tuning techniques, a large number of both general and special-purpose models have been developed for a variety of visual tasks. Despite the flexibility and accessibility of these models, no single model is able to handle all tasks and/or applications that may be envisioned by potential users. Recent approaches, such as visual programming and multimodal LLMs with integrated tools aim to tackle complex visual tasks, by way of program synthesis. However, such approaches overlook user constraints (e.g., performance / computational needs), produce test-time sample-specific solutions that are difficult to deploy, and, sometimes, require low-level instructions that maybe beyond the abilities of a naive user. To address these limitations, we introduce MMFactory, a universal framework that includes model and metrics routing components, acting like a solution search engine across various available models. Based on a task description and few sample input-output pairs and (optionally) resource and/or performance constraints, MMFactory can suggest a diverse pool of programmatic solutions by instantiating and combining visio-lingual tools from its model repository. In addition to synthesizing these solutions, MMFactory also proposes metrics and benchmarks performance / resource characteristics, allowing users to pick a solution that meets their unique design constraints. From the technical perspective, we also introduced a committee-based solution proposer that leverages multi-agent LLM conversation to generate executable, diverse, universal, and robust solutions for the user. Experimental results show that MMFactory outperforms existing methods by delivering state-of-the-art solutions tailored to user problem specifications. Project page is available at https://davidhalladay.github.io/mmfactory_demo.

Dec 28, 202421 min

Ep 290Molar: Multimodal LLMs with Collaborative Filtering Alignment for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation

🤗 Upvotes: 2 | cs.IR, cs.AI Authors: Yucong Luo, Qitao Qin, Hao Zhang, Mingyue Cheng, Ruiran Yan, Kefan Wang, Jie Ouyang Title: Molar: Multimodal LLMs with Collaborative Filtering Alignment for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18176v1 Abstract: Sequential recommendation (SR) systems have evolved significantly over the past decade, transitioning from traditional collaborative filtering to deep learning approaches and, more recently, to large language models (LLMs). While the adoption of LLMs has driven substantial advancements, these models inherently lack collaborative filtering information, relying primarily on textual content data neglecting other modalities and thus failing to achieve optimal recommendation performance. To address this limitation, we propose Molar, a Multimodal large language sequential recommendation framework that integrates multiple content modalities with ID information to capture collaborative signals effectively. Molar employs an MLLM to generate unified item representations from both textual and non-textual data, facilitating comprehensive multimodal modeling and enriching item embeddings. Additionally, it incorporates collaborative filtering signals through a post-alignment mechanism, which aligns user representations from content-based and ID-based models, ensuring precise personalization and robust performance. By seamlessly combining multimodal content with collaborative filtering insights, Molar captures both user interests and contextual semantics, leading to superior recommendation accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that Molar significantly outperforms traditional and LLM-based baselines, highlighting its strength in utilizing multimodal data and collaborative signals for sequential recommendation tasks. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Molar-8B06/.

Dec 28, 202422 min

Ep 289DepthLab: From Partial to Complete

🤗 Upvotes: 21 | cs.CV Authors: Zhiheng Liu, Ka Leong Cheng, Qiuyu Wang, Shuzhe Wang, Hao Ouyang, Bin Tan, Kai Zhu, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen, Ping Luo Title: DepthLab: From Partial to Complete Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18153v1 Abstract: Missing values remain a common challenge for depth data across its wide range of applications, stemming from various causes like incomplete data acquisition and perspective alteration. This work bridges this gap with DepthLab, a foundation depth inpainting model powered by image diffusion priors. Our model features two notable strengths: (1) it demonstrates resilience to depth-deficient regions, providing reliable completion for both continuous areas and isolated points, and (2) it faithfully preserves scale consistency with the conditioned known depth when filling in missing values. Drawing on these advantages, our approach proves its worth in various downstream tasks, including 3D scene inpainting, text-to-3D scene generation, sparse-view reconstruction with DUST3R, and LiDAR depth completion, exceeding current solutions in both numerical performance and visual quality. Our project page with source code is available at https://johanan528.github.io/depthlab_web/.

Dec 26, 202422 min

Ep 288Fourier Position Embedding: Enhancing Attention's Periodic Extension for Length Generalization

🤗 Upvotes: 20 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Ermo Hua, Che Jiang, Xingtai Lv, Kaiyan Zhang, Ning Ding, Youbang Sun, Biqing Qi, Yuchen Fan, Xue Kai Zhu, Bowen Zhou Title: Fourier Position Embedding: Enhancing Attention's Periodic Extension for Length Generalization Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17739v1 Abstract: Extending the context length of Language Models (LMs) by improving Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) has become a trend. While existing works mainly address RoPE's limitations within attention mechanism, this paper provides an analysis across nearly all parts of LMs, uncovering their adverse effects on length generalization for RoPE-based attention. Using Discrete Signal Processing theory, we show that RoPE enables periodic attention by implicitly achieving Non-Uniform Discrete Fourier Transform. However, this periodicity is undermined by the spectral damage caused by: 1) linear layers and activation functions outside of attention; 2) insufficiently trained frequency components brought by time-domain truncation. Building on our observations, we propose Fourier Position Embedding (FoPE), which enhances attention's frequency-domain properties to improve both its periodic extension and length generalization. FoPE constructs Fourier Series and zero-outs the destructive frequency components, increasing model robustness against the spectrum damage. Experiments across various model scales show that, within varying context windows, FoPE can maintain a more stable perplexity and a more consistent accuracy in a needle-in-haystack task compared to RoPE and ALiBi. Several analyses and ablations bring further support to our method and theoretical modeling.

Dec 26, 202421 min

Ep 287DiTCtrl: Exploring Attention Control in Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer for Tuning-Free Multi-Prompt Longer Video Generation

🤗 Upvotes: 10 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM Authors: Minghong Cai, Xiaodong Cun, Xiaoyu Li, Wenze Liu, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yong Zhang, Ying Shan, Xiangyu Yue Title: DiTCtrl: Exploring Attention Control in Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer for Tuning-Free Multi-Prompt Longer Video Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18597v1 Abstract: Sora-like video generation models have achieved remarkable progress with a Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer MM-DiT architecture. However, the current video generation models predominantly focus on single-prompt, struggling to generate coherent scenes with multiple sequential prompts that better reflect real-world dynamic scenarios. While some pioneering works have explored multi-prompt video generation, they face significant challenges including strict training data requirements, weak prompt following, and unnatural transitions. To address these problems, we propose DiTCtrl, a training-free multi-prompt video generation method under MM-DiT architectures for the first time. Our key idea is to take the multi-prompt video generation task as temporal video editing with smooth transitions. To achieve this goal, we first analyze MM-DiT's attention mechanism, finding that the 3D full attention behaves similarly to that of the cross/self-attention blocks in the UNet-like diffusion models, enabling mask-guided precise semantic control across different prompts with attention sharing for multi-prompt video generation. Based on our careful design, the video generated by DiTCtrl achieves smooth transitions and consistent object motion given multiple sequential prompts without additional training. Besides, we also present MPVBench, a new benchmark specially designed for multi-prompt video generation to evaluate the performance of multi-prompt generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without additional training.

Dec 26, 202422 min

Ep 286In Case You Missed It: ARC 'Challenge' Is Not That Challenging

🤗 Upvotes: 8 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Łukasz Borchmann Title: In Case You Missed It: ARC 'Challenge' Is Not That Challenging Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17758v1 Abstract: ARC Challenge appears more difficult than ARC Easy for modern LLMs primarily due to an evaluation setup that prevents direct comparison of answer choices rather than inherent complexity. Although some researchers have quietly shifted to a more appropriate scheme over the last year, the implications of this change have yet to be widely acknowledged. We highlight this overlooked shift, show how similar evaluation practices falsely imply reasoning deficits in other benchmarks, and demonstrate that fairer methods dramatically reduce performance gaps (e.g. on SIQA) and even yield superhuman results (OpenBookQA). In doing so, we reveal how evaluation shapes perceived difficulty and offer guidelines to ensure that multiple-choice evaluations accurately reflect actual model capabilities.

Dec 26, 202424 min

Ep 285ReMoE: Fully Differentiable Mixture-of-Experts with ReLU Routing

🤗 Upvotes: 8 | cs.LG Authors: Ziteng Wang, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu Title: ReMoE: Fully Differentiable Mixture-of-Experts with ReLU Routing Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14711v1 Abstract: Sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are widely adopted to scale up model capacity without increasing the computation budget. However, vanilla TopK routers are trained in a discontinuous, non-differentiable way, limiting their performance and scalability. To address this issue, we propose ReMoE, a fully differentiable MoE architecture that offers a simple yet effective drop-in replacement for the conventional TopK+Softmax routing, utilizing ReLU as the router instead. We further propose methods to regulate the router's sparsity while balancing the load among experts. ReMoE's continuous nature enables efficient dynamic allocation of computation across tokens and layers, while also exhibiting domain specialization. Our experiments demonstrate that ReMoE consistently outperforms vanilla TopK-routed MoE across various model sizes, expert counts, and levels of granularity. Furthermore, ReMoE exhibits superior scalability with respect to the number of experts, surpassing traditional MoE architectures. The implementation based on Megatron-LM is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/ReMoE.

Dec 26, 202420 min

Ep 284SKETCH: Structured Knowledge Enhanced Text Comprehension for Holistic Retrieval

🤗 Upvotes: 6 | cs.CL Authors: Aakash Mahalingam, Vinesh Kumar Gande, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain, Divya Chaudhary Title: SKETCH: Structured Knowledge Enhanced Text Comprehension for Holistic Retrieval Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15443v1 Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have become pivotal in leveraging vast corpora to generate informed and contextually relevant responses, notably reducing hallucinations in Large Language Models. Despite significant advancements, these systems struggle to efficiently process and retrieve information from large datasets while maintaining a comprehensive understanding of the context. This paper introduces SKETCH, a novel methodology that enhances the RAG retrieval process by integrating semantic text retrieval with knowledge graphs, thereby merging structured and unstructured data for a more holistic comprehension. SKETCH, demonstrates substantial improvements in retrieval performance and maintains superior context integrity compared to traditional methods. Evaluated across four diverse datasets: QuALITY, QASPER, NarrativeQA, and Italian Cuisine-SKETCH consistently outperforms baseline approaches on key RAGAS metrics such as answer_relevancy, faithfulness, context_precision and context_recall. Notably, on the Italian Cuisine dataset, SKETCH achieved an answer relevancy of 0.94 and a context precision of 0.99, representing the highest performance across all evaluated metrics. These results highlight SKETCH's capability in delivering more accurate and contextually relevant responses, setting new benchmarks for future retrieval systems.

Dec 26, 202422 min

Ep 283PartGen: Part-level 3D Generation and Reconstruction with Multi-View Diffusion Models

🤗 Upvotes: 5 | cs.CV Authors: Minghao Chen, Roman Shapovalov, Iro Laina, Tom Monnier, Jianyuan Wang, David Novotny, Andrea Vedaldi Title: PartGen: Part-level 3D Generation and Reconstruction with Multi-View Diffusion Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18608v1 Abstract: Text- or image-to-3D generators and 3D scanners can now produce 3D assets with high-quality shapes and textures. These assets typically consist of a single, fused representation, like an implicit neural field, a Gaussian mixture, or a mesh, without any useful structure. However, most applications and creative workflows require assets to be made of several meaningful parts that can be manipulated independently. To address this gap, we introduce PartGen, a novel approach that generates 3D objects composed of meaningful parts starting from text, an image, or an unstructured 3D object. First, given multiple views of a 3D object, generated or rendered, a multi-view diffusion model extracts a set of plausible and view-consistent part segmentations, dividing the object into parts. Then, a second multi-view diffusion model takes each part separately, fills in the occlusions, and uses those completed views for 3D reconstruction by feeding them to a 3D reconstruction network. This completion process considers the context of the entire object to ensure that the parts integrate cohesively. The generative completion model can make up for the information missing due to occlusions; in extreme cases, it can hallucinate entirely invisible parts based on the input 3D asset. We evaluate our method on generated and real 3D assets and show that it outperforms segmentation and part-extraction baselines by a large margin. We also showcase downstream applications such as 3D part editing.

Dec 26, 202426 min

Ep 282MotiF: Making Text Count in Image Animation with Motion Focal Loss

🤗 Upvotes: 3 | cs.CV, cs.AI Authors: Shijie Wang, Samaneh Azadi, Rohit Girdhar, Saketh Rambhatla, Chen Sun, Xi Yin Title: MotiF: Making Text Count in Image Animation with Motion Focal Loss Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16153v1 Abstract: Text-Image-to-Video (TI2V) generation aims to generate a video from an image following a text description, which is also referred to as text-guided image animation. Most existing methods struggle to generate videos that align well with the text prompts, particularly when motion is specified. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MotiF, a simple yet effective approach that directs the model's learning to the regions with more motion, thereby improving the text alignment and motion generation. We use optical flow to generate a motion heatmap and weight the loss according to the intensity of the motion. This modified objective leads to noticeable improvements and complements existing methods that utilize motion priors as model inputs. Additionally, due to the lack of a diverse benchmark for evaluating TI2V generation, we propose TI2V Bench, a dataset consists of 320 image-text pairs for robust evaluation. We present a human evaluation protocol that asks the annotators to select an overall preference between two videos followed by their justifications. Through a comprehensive evaluation on TI2V Bench, MotiF outperforms nine open-sourced models, achieving an average preference of 72%. The TI2V Bench is released in https://wang-sj16.github.io/motif/.

Dec 26, 202422 min

Ep 281Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video

🤗 Upvotes: 3 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG, cs.MM Authors: Shayne Longpre, Nikhil Singh, Manuel Cherep, Kushagra Tiwary, Joanna Materzynska, William Brannon, Robert Mahari, Manan Dey, Mohammed Hamdy, Nayan Saxena, Ahmad Mustafa Anis, Emad A. Alghamdi, Vu Minh Chien, Naana Obeng-Marnu, Da Yin, Kun Qian, Yizhi Li, Minnie Liang, An Dinh, Shrestha Mohanty, Deividas Mataciunas, Tobin South, Jianguo Zhang, Ariel N. Lee, Campbell S. Lund, Christopher Klamm, Damien Sileo, Diganta Misra, Enrico Shippole, Kevin Klyman, Lester JV Miranda, Niklas Muennighoff, Seonghyeon Ye, Seungone Kim, Vipul Gupta, Vivek Sharma, Xuhui Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Luis Villa, Stella Biderman, Alex Pentland, Sara Hooker, Jad Kabbara Title: Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17847v1 Abstract: Progress in AI is driven largely by the scale and quality of training data. Despite this, there is a deficit of empirical analysis examining the attributes of well-established datasets beyond text. In this work we conduct the largest and first-of-its-kind longitudinal audit across modalities--popular text, speech, and video datasets--from their detailed sourcing trends and use restrictions to their geographical and linguistic representation. Our manual analysis covers nearly 4000 public datasets between 1990-2024, spanning 608 languages, 798 sources, 659 organizations, and 67 countries. We find that multimodal machine learning applications have overwhelmingly turned to web-crawled, synthetic, and social media platforms, such as YouTube, for their training sets, eclipsing all other sources since 2019. Secondly, tracing the chain of dataset derivations we find that while less than 33% of datasets are restrictively licensed, over 80% of the source content in widely-used text, speech, and video datasets, carry non-commercial restrictions. Finally, counter to the rising number of languages and geographies represented in public AI training datasets, our audit demonstrates measures of relative geographical and multilingual representation have failed to significantly improve their coverage since 2013. We believe the breadth of our audit enables us to empirically examine trends in data sourcing, restrictions, and Western-centricity at an ecosystem-level, and that visibility into these questions are essential to progress in responsible AI. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire multimodal audit, allowing practitioners to trace data provenance across text, speech, and video.

Dec 26, 202425 min

Ep 280RobustFT: Robust Supervised Fine-tuning for Large Language Models under Noisy Response

🤗 Upvotes: 64 | cs.CL, cs.AI Authors: Junyu Luo, Xiao Luo, Kaize Ding, Jingyang Yuan, Zhiping Xiao, Ming Zhang Title: RobustFT: Robust Supervised Fine-tuning for Large Language Models under Noisy Response Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14922v1 Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a crucial role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains or tasks. However, as demonstrated by empirical experiments, the collected data inevitably contains noise in practical applications, which poses significant challenges to model performance on downstream tasks. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a noise-robust SFT framework to enhance model capabilities in downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce a robust SFT framework (RobustFT) that performs noise detection and relabeling on downstream task data. For noise identification, our approach employs a multi-expert collaborative system with inference-enhanced models to achieve superior noise detection. In the denoising phase, we utilize a context-enhanced strategy, which incorporates the most relevant and confident knowledge followed by careful assessment to generate reliable annotations. Additionally, we introduce an effective data selection mechanism based on response entropy, ensuring only high-quality samples are retained for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple LLMs across five datasets demonstrate RobustFT's exceptional performance in noisy scenarios.

Dec 25, 202421 min

Ep 279B-STaR: Monitoring and Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Self-Taught Reasoners

🤗 Upvotes: 29 | cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG Authors: Weihao Zeng, Yuzhen Huang, Lulu Zhao, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Junxian He Title: B-STaR: Monitoring and Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Self-Taught Reasoners Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17256v1 Abstract: In the absence of extensive human-annotated data for complex reasoning tasks, self-improvement -- where models are trained on their own outputs -- has emerged as a primary method for enhancing performance. However, the critical factors underlying the mechanism of these iterative self-improving methods remain poorly understood, such as under what conditions self-improvement is effective, and what are the bottlenecks in the current iterations. In this work, we identify and propose methods to monitor two pivotal factors in this iterative process: (1) the model's ability to generate sufficiently diverse responses (exploration); and (2) the effectiveness of external rewards in distinguishing high-quality candidates from lower-quality ones (exploitation). Using mathematical reasoning as a case study, we begin with a quantitative analysis to track the dynamics of exploration and exploitation, discovering that a model's exploratory capabilities rapidly deteriorate over iterations, and the effectiveness of exploiting external rewards diminishes as well. Motivated by these findings, we introduce B-STaR, a Self-Taught Reasoning framework that autonomously adjusts configurations across iterations to Balance exploration and exploitation, thereby optimizing the self-improving effectiveness based on the current policy model and available rewards. Our experiments on mathematical reasoning, coding, and commonsense reasoning demonstrate that B-STaR not only enhances the model's exploratory capabilities throughout training but also achieves a more effective balance between exploration and exploitation, leading to superior performance.

Dec 25, 202420 min