new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

byAK and the research community

Mar 13

From Word Models to World Models: Translating from Natural Language to the Probabilistic Language of Thought

How does language inform our downstream thinking? In particular, how do humans make meaning from language -- and how can we leverage a theory of linguistic meaning to build machines that think in more human-like ways? In this paper, we propose rational meaning construction, a computational framework for language-informed thinking that combines neural models of language with probabilistic models for rational inference. We frame linguistic meaning as a context-sensitive mapping from natural language into a probabilistic language of thought (PLoT) -- a general-purpose symbolic substrate for probabilistic, generative world modeling. Our architecture integrates two powerful computational tools that have not previously come together: we model thinking with probabilistic programs, an expressive representation for flexible commonsense reasoning; and we model meaning construction with large language models (LLMs), which support broad-coverage translation from natural language utterances to code expressions in a probabilistic programming language. We illustrate our framework in action through examples covering four core domains from cognitive science: probabilistic reasoning, logical and relational reasoning, visual and physical reasoning, and social reasoning about agents and their plans. In each, we show that LLMs can generate context-sensitive translations that capture pragmatically-appropriate linguistic meanings, while Bayesian inference with the generated programs supports coherent and robust commonsense reasoning. We extend our framework to integrate cognitively-motivated symbolic modules to provide a unified commonsense thinking interface from language. Finally, we explore how language can drive the construction of world models themselves.

Consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts of conditional image generative models

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

AriGraph: Learning Knowledge Graph World Models with Episodic Memory for LLM Agents

Advancements in generative AI have broadened the potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the development of autonomous agents. Achieving true autonomy requires accumulating and updating knowledge gained from interactions with the environment and effectively utilizing it. Current LLM-based approaches leverage past experiences using a full history of observations, summarization or retrieval augmentation. However, these unstructured memory representations do not facilitate the reasoning and planning essential for complex decision-making. In our study, we introduce AriGraph, a novel method wherein the agent constructs a memory graph that integrates semantic and episodic memories while exploring the environment. This graph structure facilitates efficient associative retrieval of interconnected concepts, relevant to the agent's current state and goals, thus serving as an effective environmental model that enhances the agent's exploratory and planning capabilities. We demonstrate that our Ariadne LLM agent, equipped with this proposed memory architecture augmented with planning and decision-making, effectively handles complex tasks on a zero-shot basis in the TextWorld environment. Our approach markedly outperforms established methods such as full-history, summarization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation in various tasks, including the cooking challenge from the First TextWorld Problems competition and novel tasks like house cleaning and puzzle Treasure Hunting.

Is Sora a World Simulator? A Comprehensive Survey on General World Models and Beyond

General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.

Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation

Current efforts to learn scalable policies in robotic manipulation primarily fall into two categories: one focuses on "action," which involves behavior cloning from extensive collections of robotic data, while the other emphasizes "vision," enhancing model generalization by pre-training representations or generative models, also referred to as world models, using large-scale visual datasets. This paper presents an end-to-end paradigm that predicts actions using inverse dynamics models conditioned on the robot's forecasted visual states, named Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models (PIDM). By closing the loop between vision and action, the end-to-end PIDM can be a better scalable action learner. In practice, we use Transformers to process both visual states and actions, naming the model Seer. It is initially pre-trained on large-scale robotic datasets, such as DROID, and can be adapted to realworld scenarios with a little fine-tuning data. Thanks to large-scale, end-to-end training and the synergy between vision and action, Seer significantly outperforms previous methods across both simulation and real-world experiments. It achieves improvements of 13% on the LIBERO-LONG benchmark, 21% on CALVIN ABC-D, and 43% in real-world tasks. Notably, Seer sets a new state-of-the-art on CALVIN ABC-D benchmark, achieving an average length of 4.28, and exhibits superior generalization for novel objects, lighting conditions, and environments under high-intensity disturbances on real-world scenarios. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/Seer/.

Large Generative Graph Models

Large Generative Models (LGMs) such as GPT, Stable Diffusion, Sora, and Suno are trained on a huge amount of language corpus, images, videos, and audio that are extremely diverse from numerous domains. This training paradigm over diverse well-curated data lies at the heart of generating creative and sensible content. However, all previous graph generative models (e.g., GraphRNN, MDVAE, MoFlow, GDSS, and DiGress) have been trained only on one dataset each time, which cannot replicate the revolutionary success achieved by LGMs in other fields. To remedy this crucial gap, we propose a new class of graph generative model called Large Graph Generative Model (LGGM) that is trained on a large corpus of graphs (over 5000 graphs) from 13 different domains. We empirically demonstrate that the pre-trained LGGM has superior zero-shot generative capability to existing graph generative models. Furthermore, our pre-trained LGGM can be easily fine-tuned with graphs from target domains and demonstrate even better performance than those directly trained from scratch, behaving as a solid starting point for real-world customization. Inspired by Stable Diffusion, we further equip LGGM with the capability to generate graphs given text prompts (Text-to-Graph), such as the description of the network name and domain (i.e., "The power-1138-bus graph represents a network of buses in a power distribution system."), and network statistics (i.e., "The graph has a low average degree, suitable for modeling social media interactions."). This Text-to-Graph capability integrates the extensive world knowledge in the underlying language model, offering users fine-grained control of the generated graphs. We release the code, the model checkpoint, and the datasets at https://lggm-lg.github.io/.

IDEA-Bench: How Far are Generative Models from Professional Designing?

Real-world design tasks - such as picture book creation, film storyboard development using character sets, photo retouching, visual effects, and font transfer - are highly diverse and complex, requiring deep interpretation and extraction of various elements from instructions, descriptions, and reference images. The resulting images often implicitly capture key features from references or user inputs, making it challenging to develop models that can effectively address such varied tasks. While existing visual generative models can produce high-quality images based on prompts, they face significant limitations in professional design scenarios that involve varied forms and multiple inputs and outputs, even when enhanced with adapters like ControlNets and LoRAs. To address this, we introduce IDEA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing 100 real-world design tasks, including rendering, visual effects, storyboarding, picture books, fonts, style-based, and identity-preserving generation, with 275 test cases to thoroughly evaluate a model's general-purpose generation capabilities. Notably, even the best-performing model only achieves 22.48 on IDEA-Bench, while the best general-purpose model only achieves 6.81. We provide a detailed analysis of these results, highlighting the inherent challenges and providing actionable directions for improvement. Additionally, we provide a subset of 18 representative tasks equipped with multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based auto-evaluation techniques to facilitate rapid model development and comparison. We releases the benchmark data, evaluation toolkits, and an online leaderboard at https://github.com/ali-vilab/IDEA-Bench, aiming to drive the advancement of generative models toward more versatile and applicable intelligent design systems.

Towards Unified Multi-Modal Personalization: Large Vision-Language Models for Generative Recommendation and Beyond

Developing a universal model that can effectively harness heterogeneous resources and respond to a wide range of personalized needs has been a longstanding community aspiration. Our daily choices, especially in domains like fashion and retail, are substantially shaped by multi-modal data, such as pictures and textual descriptions. These modalities not only offer intuitive guidance but also cater to personalized user preferences. However, the predominant personalization approaches mainly focus on the ID or text-based recommendation problem, failing to comprehend the information spanning various tasks or modalities. In this paper, our goal is to establish a Unified paradigm for Multi-modal Personalization systems (UniMP), which effectively leverages multi-modal data while eliminating the complexities associated with task- and modality-specific customization. We argue that the advancements in foundational generative modeling have provided the flexibility and effectiveness necessary to achieve the objective. In light of this, we develop a generic and extensible personalization generative framework, that can handle a wide range of personalized needs including item recommendation, product search, preference prediction, explanation generation, and further user-guided image generation. Our methodology enhances the capabilities of foundational language models for personalized tasks by seamlessly ingesting interleaved cross-modal user history information, ensuring a more precise and customized experience for users. To train and evaluate the proposed multi-modal personalized tasks, we also introduce a novel and comprehensive benchmark covering a variety of user requirements. Our experiments on the real-world benchmark showcase the model's potential, outperforming competitive methods specialized for each task.

SLEDGE: Synthesizing Simulation Environments for Driving Agents with Generative Models

SLEDGE is the first generative simulator for vehicle motion planning trained on real-world driving logs. Its core component is a learned model that is able to generate agent bounding boxes and lane graphs. The model's outputs serve as an initial state for traffic simulation. The unique properties of the entities to be generated for SLEDGE, such as their connectivity and variable count per scene, render the naive application of most modern generative models to this task non-trivial. Therefore, together with a systematic study of existing lane graph representations, we introduce a novel raster-to-vector autoencoder (RVAE). It encodes agents and the lane graph into distinct channels in a rasterized latent map. This facilitates both lane-conditioned agent generation and combined generation of lanes and agents with a Diffusion Transformer. Using generated entities in SLEDGE enables greater control over the simulation, e.g. upsampling turns or increasing traffic density. Further, SLEDGE can support 500m long routes, a capability not found in existing data-driven simulators like nuPlan. It presents new challenges for planning algorithms, evidenced by failure rates of over 40% for PDM, the winner of the 2023 nuPlan challenge, when tested on hard routes and dense traffic generated by our model. Compared to nuPlan, SLEDGE requires 500times less storage to set up (<4GB), making it a more accessible option and helping with democratizing future research in this field.

Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation with Diffusion-based Generative Models

In this work, we build upon our previous publication and use diffusion-based generative models for speech enhancement. We present a detailed overview of the diffusion process that is based on a stochastic differential equation and delve into an extensive theoretical examination of its implications. Opposed to usual conditional generation tasks, we do not start the reverse process from pure Gaussian noise but from a mixture of noisy speech and Gaussian noise. This matches our forward process which moves from clean speech to noisy speech by including a drift term. We show that this procedure enables using only 30 diffusion steps to generate high-quality clean speech estimates. By adapting the network architecture, we are able to significantly improve the speech enhancement performance, indicating that the network, rather than the formalism, was the main limitation of our original approach. In an extensive cross-dataset evaluation, we show that the improved method can compete with recent discriminative models and achieves better generalization when evaluating on a different corpus than used for training. We complement the results with an instrumental evaluation using real-world noisy recordings and a listening experiment, in which our proposed method is rated best. Examining different sampler configurations for solving the reverse process allows us to balance the performance and computational speed of the proposed method. Moreover, we show that the proposed method is also suitable for dereverberation and thus not limited to additive background noise removal. Code and audio examples are available online, see https://github.com/sp-uhh/sgmse

NLEBench+NorGLM: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis and Benchmark Dataset for Generative Language Models in Norwegian

Recent advancements in Generative Language Models (GLMs) have transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP) by showcasing the effectiveness of the "pre-train, prompt, and predict" paradigm in utilizing pre-trained GLM knowledge for diverse applications. Despite their potential, these capabilities lack adequate quantitative characterization due to the absence of comprehensive benchmarks, particularly for low-resource languages. Existing low-resource benchmarks focus on discriminative language models like BERT, neglecting the evaluation of generative language models. Moreover, current benchmarks often overlook measuring generalization performance across multiple tasks, a crucial metric for GLMs. To bridge these gaps, we introduce NLEBench, a comprehensive benchmark tailored for evaluating natural language generation capabilities in Norwegian, a low-resource language. We use Norwegian as a case study to explore whether current GLMs and benchmarks in mainstream languages like English can reveal the unique characteristics of underrepresented languages. NLEBench encompasses a suite of real-world NLP tasks ranging from news storytelling, summarization, open-domain conversation, natural language understanding, instruction fine-tuning, toxicity and bias evaluation, to self-curated Chain-of-Thought investigation. It features two high-quality, human-annotated datasets: an instruction dataset covering traditional Norwegian cultures, idioms, slang, and special expressions, and a document-grounded multi-label dataset for topic classification, question answering, and summarization. This paper also introduces foundational Norwegian Generative Language Models (NorGLMs) developed with diverse parameter scales and Transformer-based architectures. Systematic evaluations on the proposed benchmark suite provide insights into the capabilities and scalability of NorGLMs across various downstream tasks.

SelfCheckAgent: Zero-Resource Hallucination Detection in Generative Large Language Models

Detecting hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge for their reliable deployment in real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SelfCheckAgent, a novel framework integrating three different agents: the Symbolic Agent, the Specialized Detection Agent, and the Contextual Consistency Agent. These agents provide a robust multi-dimensional approach to hallucination detection. Notable results include the Contextual Consistency Agent leveraging Llama 3.1 with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to achieve outstanding performance on the WikiBio dataset, with NonFactual hallucination detection scoring 93.64%, Factual 70.26%, and Ranking 78.48% respectively. On the AIME dataset, GPT-4o with CoT excels in NonFactual detection with 94.89% but reveals trade-offs in Factual with 30.58% and Ranking with 30.68%, underscoring the complexity of hallucination detection in the complex mathematical domains. The framework also incorporates a triangulation strategy, which increases the strengths of the SelfCheckAgent, yielding significant improvements in real-world hallucination identification. The comparative analysis demonstrates SelfCheckAgent's applicability across diverse domains, positioning it as a crucial advancement for trustworthy LLMs. These findings highlight the potentiality of consistency-driven methodologies in detecting hallucinations in LLMs.

Gen2Sim: Scaling up Robot Learning in Simulation with Generative Models

Generalist robot manipulators need to learn a wide variety of manipulation skills across diverse environments. Current robot training pipelines rely on humans to provide kinesthetic demonstrations or to program simulation environments and to code up reward functions for reinforcement learning. Such human involvement is an important bottleneck towards scaling up robot learning across diverse tasks and environments. We propose Generation to Simulation (Gen2Sim), a method for scaling up robot skill learning in simulation by automating generation of 3D assets, task descriptions, task decompositions and reward functions using large pre-trained generative models of language and vision. We generate 3D assets for simulation by lifting open-world 2D object-centric images to 3D using image diffusion models and querying LLMs to determine plausible physics parameters. Given URDF files of generated and human-developed assets, we chain-of-thought prompt LLMs to map these to relevant task descriptions, temporal decompositions, and corresponding python reward functions for reinforcement learning. We show Gen2Sim succeeds in learning policies for diverse long horizon tasks, where reinforcement learning with non temporally decomposed reward functions fails. Gen2Sim provides a viable path for scaling up reinforcement learning for robot manipulators in simulation, both by diversifying and expanding task and environment development, and by facilitating the discovery of reinforcement-learned behaviors through temporal task decomposition in RL. Our work contributes hundreds of simulated assets, tasks and demonstrations, taking a step towards fully autonomous robotic manipulation skill acquisition in simulation.

3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Synthetic Data Using Generative Models

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

It's All in The [MASK]: Simple Instruction-Tuning Enables BERT-like Masked Language Models As Generative Classifiers

While encoder-only models such as BERT and ModernBERT are ubiquitous in real-world NLP applications, their conventional reliance on task-specific classification heads can limit their applicability compared to decoder-based large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce ModernBERT-Large-Instruct, a 0.4B-parameter encoder model that leverages its masked language modelling (MLM) head for generative classification. Our approach employs an intentionally simple training loop and inference mechanism that requires no heavy pre-processing, heavily engineered prompting, or architectural modifications. ModernBERT-Large-Instruct exhibits strong zero-shot performance on both classification and knowledge-based tasks, outperforming similarly sized LLMs on MMLU and achieving 93% of Llama3-1B's MMLU performance with 60% less parameters. We also demonstrate that, when fine-tuned, the generative approach using the MLM head matches or even surpasses traditional classification-head methods across diverse NLU tasks.This capability emerges specifically in models trained on contemporary, diverse data mixes, with models trained on lower volume, less-diverse data yielding considerably weaker performance. Although preliminary, these results demonstrate the potential of using the original generative masked language modelling head over traditional task-specific heads for downstream tasks. Our work suggests that further exploration into this area is warranted, highlighting many avenues for future improvements.

T2VSafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Text-to-Video Generative Models

The recent development of Sora leads to a new era in text-to-video (T2V) generation. Along with this comes the rising concern about its security risks. The generated videos may contain illegal or unethical content, and there is a lack of comprehensive quantitative understanding of their safety, posing a challenge to their reliability and practical deployment. Previous evaluations primarily focus on the quality of video generation. While some evaluations of text-to-image models have considered safety, they cover fewer aspects and do not address the unique temporal risk inherent in video generation. To bridge this research gap, we introduce T2VSafetyBench, a new benchmark designed for conducting safety-critical assessments of text-to-video models. We define 12 critical aspects of video generation safety and construct a malicious prompt dataset including real-world prompts, LLM-generated prompts and jailbreak attack-based prompts. Based on our evaluation results, we draw several important findings, including: 1) no single model excels in all aspects, with different models showing various strengths; 2) the correlation between GPT-4 assessments and manual reviews is generally high; 3) there is a trade-off between the usability and safety of text-to-video generative models. This indicates that as the field of video generation rapidly advances, safety risks are set to surge, highlighting the urgency of prioritizing video safety. We hope that T2VSafetyBench can provide insights for better understanding the safety of video generation in the era of generative AI.

STAR: Spatial-Temporal Augmentation with Text-to-Video Models for Real-World Video Super-Resolution

Image diffusion models have been adapted for real-world video super-resolution to tackle over-smoothing issues in GAN-based methods. However, these models struggle to maintain temporal consistency, as they are trained on static images, limiting their ability to capture temporal dynamics effectively. Integrating text-to-video (T2V) models into video super-resolution for improved temporal modeling is straightforward. However, two key challenges remain: artifacts introduced by complex degradations in real-world scenarios, and compromised fidelity due to the strong generative capacity of powerful T2V models (e.g., CogVideoX-5B). To enhance the spatio-temporal quality of restored videos, we introduce~\name (Spatial-Temporal Augmentation with T2V models for Real-world video super-resolution), a novel approach that leverages T2V models for real-world video super-resolution, achieving realistic spatial details and robust temporal consistency. Specifically, we introduce a Local Information Enhancement Module (LIEM) before the global attention block to enrich local details and mitigate degradation artifacts. Moreover, we propose a Dynamic Frequency (DF) Loss to reinforce fidelity, guiding the model to focus on different frequency components across diffusion steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate~\name~outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

CoderEval: A Benchmark of Pragmatic Code Generation with Generative Pre-trained Models

Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, non-standalone functions, which typically are not included in the existing benchmarks, constitute more than 70% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models' effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect these models' effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios. To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three code generation models on CoderEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that in generating non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model's effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.

Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators

Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.

PROB: Probabilistic Objectness for Open World Object Detection

Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a new and challenging computer vision task that bridges the gap between classic object detection (OD) benchmarks and object detection in the real world. In addition to detecting and classifying seen/labeled objects, OWOD algorithms are expected to detect novel/unknown objects - which can be classified and incrementally learned. In standard OD, object proposals not overlapping with a labeled object are automatically classified as background. Therefore, simply applying OD methods to OWOD fails as unknown objects would be predicted as background. The challenge of detecting unknown objects stems from the lack of supervision in distinguishing unknown objects and background object proposals. Previous OWOD methods have attempted to overcome this issue by generating supervision using pseudo-labeling - however, unknown object detection has remained low. Probabilistic/generative models may provide a solution for this challenge. Herein, we introduce a novel probabilistic framework for objectness estimation, where we alternate between probability distribution estimation and objectness likelihood maximization of known objects in the embedded feature space - ultimately allowing us to estimate the objectness probability of different proposals. The resulting Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector, PROB, integrates our framework into traditional object detection models, adapting them for the open-world setting. Comprehensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks show that PROB outperforms all existing OWOD methods in both unknown object detection (sim 2times unknown recall) and known object detection (sim 10% mAP). Our code will be made available upon publication at https://github.com/orrzohar/PROB.

DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

HoloDreamer: Holistic 3D Panoramic World Generation from Text Descriptions

3D scene generation is in high demand across various domains, including virtual reality, gaming, and the film industry. Owing to the powerful generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models that provide reliable priors, the creation of 3D scenes using only text prompts has become viable, thereby significantly advancing researches in text-driven 3D scene generation. In order to obtain multiple-view supervision from 2D diffusion models, prevailing methods typically employ the diffusion model to generate an initial local image, followed by iteratively outpainting the local image using diffusion models to gradually generate scenes. Nevertheless, these outpainting-based approaches prone to produce global inconsistent scene generation results without high degree of completeness, restricting their broader applications. To tackle these problems, we introduce HoloDreamer, a framework that first generates high-definition panorama as a holistic initialization of the full 3D scene, then leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) to quickly reconstruct the 3D scene, thereby facilitating the creation of view-consistent and fully enclosed 3D scenes. Specifically, we propose Stylized Equirectangular Panorama Generation, a pipeline that combines multiple diffusion models to enable stylized and detailed equirectangular panorama generation from complex text prompts. Subsequently, Enhanced Two-Stage Panorama Reconstruction is introduced, conducting a two-stage optimization of 3D-GS to inpaint the missing region and enhance the integrity of the scene. Comprehensive experiments demonstrated that our method outperforms prior works in terms of overall visual consistency and harmony as well as reconstruction quality and rendering robustness when generating fully enclosed scenes.

Self-Improving Diffusion Models with Synthetic Data

The artificial intelligence (AI) world is running out of real data for training increasingly large generative models, resulting in accelerating pressure to train on synthetic data. Unfortunately, training new generative models with synthetic data from current or past generation models creates an autophagous (self-consuming) loop that degrades the quality and/or diversity of the synthetic data in what has been termed model autophagy disorder (MAD) and model collapse. Current thinking around model autophagy recommends that synthetic data is to be avoided for model training lest the system deteriorate into MADness. In this paper, we take a different tack that treats synthetic data differently from real data. Self-IMproving diffusion models with Synthetic data (SIMS) is a new training concept for diffusion models that uses self-synthesized data to provide negative guidance during the generation process to steer a model's generative process away from the non-ideal synthetic data manifold and towards the real data distribution. We demonstrate that SIMS is capable of self-improvement; it establishes new records based on the Fr\'echet inception distance (FID) metric for CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-64 generation and achieves competitive results on FFHQ-64 and ImageNet-512. Moreover, SIMS is, to the best of our knowledge, the first prophylactic generative AI algorithm that can be iteratively trained on self-generated synthetic data without going MAD. As a bonus, SIMS can adjust a diffusion model's synthetic data distribution to match any desired in-domain target distribution to help mitigate biases and ensure fairness.

Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement for Real-World Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (RWSR) is a long-standing problem as low-quality (LQ) images often have complex and unidentified degradations. Existing methods such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or continuous diffusion models present their own issues including GANs being difficult to train while continuous diffusion models requiring numerous inference steps. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement (ITER) framework for RWSR, which utilizes a discrete diffusion model operating in the discrete token representation space, i.e., indexes of features extracted from a VQGAN codebook pre-trained with high-quality (HQ) images. We show that ITER is easier to train than GANs and more efficient than continuous diffusion models. Specifically, we divide RWSR into two sub-tasks, i.e., distortion removal and texture generation. Distortion removal involves simple HQ token prediction with LQ images, while texture generation uses a discrete diffusion model to iteratively refine the distortion removal output with a token refinement network. In particular, we propose to include a token evaluation network in the discrete diffusion process. It learns to evaluate which tokens are good restorations and helps to improve the iterative refinement results. Moreover, the evaluation network can first check status of the distortion removal output and then adaptively select total refinement steps needed, thereby maintaining a good balance between distortion removal and texture generation. Extensive experimental results show that ITER is easy to train and performs well within just 8 iterative steps. Our codes will be available publicly.

Supervised Knowledge Makes Large Language Models Better In-context Learners

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the critical challenge of improving the generalizability and factuality of LLMs in natural language understanding and question answering remains under-explored. While previous in-context learning research has focused on enhancing models to adhere to users' specific instructions and quality expectations, and to avoid undesired outputs, little to no work has explored the use of task-Specific fine-tuned Language Models (SLMs) to improve LLMs' in-context learning during the inference stage. Our primary contribution is the establishment of a simple yet effective framework that enhances the reliability of LLMs as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution data, 2) elucidates how LLMs benefit from discriminative models, and 3) minimizes hallucinations in generative tasks. Using our proposed plug-in method, enhanced versions of Llama 2 and ChatGPT surpass their original versions regarding generalizability and factuality. We offer a comprehensive suite of resources, including 16 curated datasets, prompts, model checkpoints, and LLM outputs across 9 distinct tasks. Our empirical analysis sheds light on the advantages of incorporating discriminative models into LLMs and highlights the potential of our methodology in fostering more reliable LLMs.

Diffusion with Forward Models: Solving Stochastic Inverse Problems Without Direct Supervision

Denoising diffusion models are a powerful type of generative models used to capture complex distributions of real-world signals. However, their applicability is limited to scenarios where training samples are readily available, which is not always the case in real-world applications. For example, in inverse graphics, the goal is to generate samples from a distribution of 3D scenes that align with a given image, but ground-truth 3D scenes are unavailable and only 2D images are accessible. To address this limitation, we propose a novel class of denoising diffusion probabilistic models that learn to sample from distributions of signals that are never directly observed. Instead, these signals are measured indirectly through a known differentiable forward model, which produces partial observations of the unknown signal. Our approach involves integrating the forward model directly into the denoising process. This integration effectively connects the generative modeling of observations with the generative modeling of the underlying signals, allowing for end-to-end training of a conditional generative model over signals. During inference, our approach enables sampling from the distribution of underlying signals that are consistent with a given partial observation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three challenging computer vision tasks. For instance, in the context of inverse graphics, our model enables direct sampling from the distribution of 3D scenes that align with a single 2D input image.

Generative Causal Representation Learning for Out-of-Distribution Motion Forecasting

Conventional supervised learning methods typically assume i.i.d samples and are found to be sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. We propose Generative Causal Representation Learning (GCRL) which leverages causality to facilitate knowledge transfer under distribution shifts. While we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method in human trajectory prediction models, GCRL can be applied to other domains as well. First, we propose a novel causal model that explains the generative factors in motion forecasting datasets using features that are common across all environments and with features that are specific to each environment. Selection variables are used to determine which parts of the model can be directly transferred to a new environment without fine-tuning. Second, we propose an end-to-end variational learning paradigm to learn the causal mechanisms that generate observations from features. GCRL is supported by strong theoretical results that imply identifiability of the causal model under certain assumptions. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world motion forecasting datasets show the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed method for knowledge transfer under zero-shot and low-shot settings by substantially outperforming the prior motion forecasting models on out-of-distribution prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/sshirahmad/GCRL.

RAP-SR: RestorAtion Prior Enhancement in Diffusion Models for Realistic Image Super-Resolution

Benefiting from their powerful generative capabilities, pretrained diffusion models have garnered significant attention for real-world image super-resolution (Real-SR). Existing diffusion-based SR approaches typically utilize semantic information from degraded images and restoration prompts to activate prior for producing realistic high-resolution images. However, general-purpose pretrained diffusion models, not designed for restoration tasks, often have suboptimal prior, and manually defined prompts may fail to fully exploit the generated potential. To address these limitations, we introduce RAP-SR, a novel restoration prior enhancement approach in pretrained diffusion models for Real-SR. First, we develop the High-Fidelity Aesthetic Image Dataset (HFAID), curated through a Quality-Driven Aesthetic Image Selection Pipeline (QDAISP). Our dataset not only surpasses existing ones in fidelity but also excels in aesthetic quality. Second, we propose the Restoration Priors Enhancement Framework, which includes Restoration Priors Refinement (RPR) and Restoration-Oriented Prompt Optimization (ROPO) modules. RPR refines the restoration prior using the HFAID, while ROPO optimizes the unique restoration identifier, improving the quality of the resulting images. RAP-SR effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose models and the demands of Real-SR by enhancing restoration prior. Leveraging the plug-and-play nature of RAP-SR, our approach can be seamlessly integrated into existing diffusion-based SR methods, boosting their performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate its broad applicability and state-of-the-art results. Codes and datasets will be available upon acceptance.

Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs

A wide variety of deep generative models has been developed in the past decade. Yet, these models often struggle with simultaneously addressing three key requirements including: high sample quality, mode coverage, and fast sampling. We call the challenge imposed by these requirements the generative learning trilemma, as the existing models often trade some of them for others. Particularly, denoising diffusion models have shown impressive sample quality and diversity, but their expensive sampling does not yet allow them to be applied in many real-world applications. In this paper, we argue that slow sampling in these models is fundamentally attributed to the Gaussian assumption in the denoising step which is justified only for small step sizes. To enable denoising with large steps, and hence, to reduce the total number of denoising steps, we propose to model the denoising distribution using a complex multimodal distribution. We introduce denoising diffusion generative adversarial networks (denoising diffusion GANs) that model each denoising step using a multimodal conditional GAN. Through extensive evaluations, we show that denoising diffusion GANs obtain sample quality and diversity competitive with original diffusion models while being 2000times faster on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Compared to traditional GANs, our model exhibits better mode coverage and sample diversity. To the best of our knowledge, denoising diffusion GAN is the first model that reduces sampling cost in diffusion models to an extent that allows them to be applied to real-world applications inexpensively. Project page and code can be found at https://nvlabs.github.io/denoising-diffusion-gan

Generative Pre-Trained Diffusion Paradigm for Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, generative pre-trained paradigms such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs) have achieved revolutionary advancements and widespread real-world applications. Particularly, the emergence of pre-trained LLMs-based temporal works, compared to previous deep model approaches, has demonstrated superior generalization and robustness, showcasing the potential of generative pre-trained paradigms as foundation models for time series. However, those LLMs-based works mainly focus on cross-modal research, i.e., leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs in time series contexts. Although they have achieved impressive performance, there still exist the issues of concept drift caused by differences in data distribution and inflexibility caused by misalignment of dimensions. To this end, inspired by recent work on LVMs, we reconsider the paradigm of time series modeling. In this paper, we comprehensively explore, for the first time, the effectiveness and superiority of the Generative Pre-trained Diffusion (GPD) paradigm in real-world multivariate time series forecasting (TSF). Specifically, to mitigate performance bias introduced by sophisticated networks, we propose a straightforward MLP diffusion network for unconditional modeling of time series. Then we employ a zero-shot and tuning-free method to predict (generate) future data using historical data as prompts. The GPD paradigm is established on the time series modality, effectively preventing the phenomenon of concept drift, and enabling flexible forecasting of arbitrary lengths. We demonstrate that the GPD paradigm achieves comprehensive performance and generalization comparable to current SOTA LLM-based and deep model paradigms on mainstream benchmarks and various TSF tasks. Extensive experiments validate the potential of the GPD paradigm and its assistance in future related research.

VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video Models

Despite tremendous recent progress, generative video models still struggle to capture real-world motion, dynamics, and physics. We show that this limitation arises from the conventional pixel reconstruction objective, which biases models toward appearance fidelity at the expense of motion coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoJAM, a novel framework that instills an effective motion prior to video generators, by encouraging the model to learn a joint appearance-motion representation. VideoJAM is composed of two complementary units. During training, we extend the objective to predict both the generated pixels and their corresponding motion from a single learned representation. During inference, we introduce Inner-Guidance, a mechanism that steers the generation toward coherent motion by leveraging the model's own evolving motion prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. Notably, our framework can be applied to any video model with minimal adaptations, requiring no modifications to the training data or scaling of the model. VideoJAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion coherence, surpassing highly competitive proprietary models while also enhancing the perceived visual quality of the generations. These findings emphasize that appearance and motion can be complementary and, when effectively integrated, enhance both the visual quality and the coherence of video generation. Project website: https://hila-chefer.github.io/videojam-paper.github.io/

RAFT: Reward rAnked FineTuning for Generative Foundation Model Alignment

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially significant repercussions. Consequently, aligning these models with human ethics and preferences is an essential step toward ensuring their responsible and effective deployment in real-world applications. Prior research has primarily employed Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as a means of addressing this problem, wherein generative models are fine-tuned using RL algorithms guided by a human-feedback-informed reward model. However, the inefficiencies and instabilities associated with RL algorithms frequently present substantial obstacles to the successful alignment of generative models, necessitating the development of a more robust and streamlined approach. To this end, we introduce a new framework, Reward rAnked FineTuning (RAFT), designed to align generative models more effectively. Utilizing a reward model and a sufficient number of samples, our approach selects the high-quality samples, discarding those that exhibit undesired behavior, and subsequently assembles a streaming dataset. This dataset serves as the basis for aligning the generative model and can be employed under both offline and online settings. Notably, the sample generation process within RAFT is gradient-free, rendering it compatible with black-box generators. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm exhibits strong performance in the context of both large language models and diffusion models.

Rethinking the Up-Sampling Operations in CNN-based Generative Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection

Recently, the proliferation of highly realistic synthetic images, facilitated through a variety of GANs and Diffusions, has significantly heightened the susceptibility to misuse. While the primary focus of deepfake detection has traditionally centered on the design of detection algorithms, an investigative inquiry into the generator architectures has remained conspicuously absent in recent years. This paper contributes to this lacuna by rethinking the architectures of CNN-based generators, thereby establishing a generalized representation of synthetic artifacts. Our findings illuminate that the up-sampling operator can, beyond frequency-based artifacts, produce generalized forgery artifacts. In particular, the local interdependence among image pixels caused by upsampling operators is significantly demonstrated in synthetic images generated by GAN or diffusion. Building upon this observation, we introduce the concept of Neighboring Pixel Relationships(NPR) as a means to capture and characterize the generalized structural artifacts stemming from up-sampling operations. A comprehensive analysis is conducted on an open-world dataset, comprising samples generated by 28 distinct generative models. This analysis culminates in the establishment of a novel state-of-the-art performance, showcasing a remarkable 11.6\% improvement over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/chuangchuangtan/NPR-DeepfakeDetection.

Fighting Fire with Fire: Contrastive Debiasing without Bias-free Data via Generative Bias-transformation

Despite their remarkable ability to generalize with over-capacity networks, deep neural networks often learn to abuse spurious biases in the data instead of using the actual task-related information. Since such shortcuts are only effective within the collected dataset, the resulting biased model underperforms on real-world inputs, or cause unintended social repercussions such as gender discrimination. To counteract the influence of bias, existing methods either exploit auxiliary information which is rarely obtainable in practice, or sift for bias-free samples in the training data, hoping for the sufficient existence of clean samples. However, such presumptions about the data are not always guaranteed. In this paper, we propose Contrastive Debiasing via Generative Bias-transformation~(CDvG) which is capable of operating in more general environments where existing methods break down due to unmet presumptions such as insufficient bias-free samples. Motivated by our observation that not only discriminative models, as previously known, but also generative models tend to focus on the bias when possible, CDvG uses a translation model to transform the bias in the sample to another mode of bias while preserving task-relevant information. Through contrastive learning, we set transformed biased views against another, learning bias-invariant representations. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the current state-of-the-arts, and effectively prevents the models from being biased even when bias-free samples are extremely scarce.

LifeGPT: Topology-Agnostic Generative Pretrained Transformer Model for Cellular Automata

The Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model (LLM) framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.

Directed Chain Generative Adversarial Networks

Real-world data can be multimodal distributed, e.g., data describing the opinion divergence in a community, the interspike interval distribution of neurons, and the oscillators natural frequencies. Generating multimodal distributed real-world data has become a challenge to existing generative adversarial networks (GANs). For example, neural stochastic differential equations (Neural SDEs), treated as infinite-dimensional GANs, have demonstrated successful performance mainly in generating unimodal time series data. In this paper, we propose a novel time series generator, named directed chain GANs (DC-GANs), which inserts a time series dataset (called a neighborhood process of the directed chain or input) into the drift and diffusion coefficients of the directed chain SDEs with distributional constraints. DC-GANs can generate new time series of the same distribution as the neighborhood process, and the neighborhood process will provide the key step in learning and generating multimodal distributed time series. The proposed DC-GANs are examined on four datasets, including two stochastic models from social sciences and computational neuroscience, and two real-world datasets on stock prices and energy consumption. To our best knowledge, DC-GANs are the first work that can generate multimodal time series data and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks with respect to measures of distribution, data similarity, and predictive ability.

Semantically Controllable Augmentations for Generalizable Robot Learning

Generalization to unseen real-world scenarios for robot manipulation requires exposure to diverse datasets during training. However, collecting large real-world datasets is intractable due to high operational costs. For robot learning to generalize despite these challenges, it is essential to leverage sources of data or priors beyond the robot's direct experience. In this work, we posit that image-text generative models, which are pre-trained on large corpora of web-scraped data, can serve as such a data source. These generative models encompass a broad range of real-world scenarios beyond a robot's direct experience and can synthesize novel synthetic experiences that expose robotic agents to additional world priors aiding real-world generalization at no extra cost. In particular, our approach leverages pre-trained generative models as an effective tool for data augmentation. We propose a generative augmentation framework for semantically controllable augmentations and rapidly multiplying robot datasets while inducing rich variations that enable real-world generalization. Based on diverse augmentations of robot data, we show how scalable robot manipulation policies can be trained and deployed both in simulation and in unseen real-world environments such as kitchens and table-tops. By demonstrating the effectiveness of image-text generative models in diverse real-world robotic applications, our generative augmentation framework provides a scalable and efficient path for boosting generalization in robot learning at no extra human cost.

Tutor CoPilot: A Human-AI Approach for Scaling Real-Time Expertise

Generative AI, particularly Language Models (LMs), has the potential to transform real-world domains with societal impact, particularly where access to experts is limited. For example, in education, training novice educators with expert guidance is important for effectiveness but expensive, creating significant barriers to improving education quality at scale. This challenge disproportionately harms students from under-served communities, who stand to gain the most from high-quality education. We introduce Tutor CoPilot, a novel Human-AI approach that leverages a model of expert thinking to provide expert-like guidance to tutors as they tutor. This study is the first randomized controlled trial of a Human-AI system in live tutoring, involving 900 tutors and 1,800 K-12 students from historically under-served communities. Following a preregistered analysis plan, we find that students working with tutors that have access to Tutor CoPilot are 4 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to master topics (p<0.01). Notably, students of lower-rated tutors experienced the greatest benefit, improving mastery by 9 p.p. We find that Tutor CoPilot costs only $20 per-tutor annually. We analyze 550,000+ messages using classifiers to identify pedagogical strategies, and find that tutors with access to Tutor CoPilot are more likely to use high-quality strategies to foster student understanding (e.g., asking guiding questions) and less likely to give away the answer to the student. Tutor interviews highlight how Tutor CoPilot's guidance helps tutors to respond to student needs, though they flag issues in Tutor CoPilot, such as generating suggestions that are not grade-level appropriate. Altogether, our study of Tutor CoPilot demonstrates how Human-AI systems can scale expertise in real-world domains, bridge gaps in skills and create a future where high-quality education is accessible to all students.

Efficient and Economic Large Language Model Inference with Attention Offloading

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in generative tasks but introduce significant challenges in real-world serving due to inefficient use of the expensive, computation-optimized accelerators. This mismatch arises from the autoregressive nature of LLMs, where the generation phase comprises operators with varying resource demands. Specifically, the attention operator is memory-intensive, exhibiting a memory access pattern that clashes with the strengths of modern accelerators, especially as context length increases. To enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of LLM serving, we introduce the concept of attention offloading. This approach leverages a collection of cheap, memory-optimized devices for the attention operator while still utilizing high-end accelerators for other parts of the model. This heterogeneous setup ensures that each component is tailored to its specific workload, maximizing overall performance and cost efficiency. Our comprehensive analysis and experiments confirm the viability of splitting the attention computation over multiple devices. Also, the communication bandwidth required between heterogeneous devices proves to be manageable with prevalent networking technologies. To further validate our theory, we develop Lamina, an LLM inference system that incorporates attention offloading. Experimental results indicate that Lamina can provide 1.48x-12.1x higher estimated throughput per dollar than homogeneous solutions.

Diffusion Deepfake

Recent progress in generative AI, primarily through diffusion models, presents significant challenges for real-world deepfake detection. The increased realism in image details, diverse content, and widespread accessibility to the general public complicates the identification of these sophisticated deepfakes. Acknowledging the urgency to address the vulnerability of current deepfake detectors to this evolving threat, our paper introduces two extensive deepfake datasets generated by state-of-the-art diffusion models as other datasets are less diverse and low in quality. Our extensive experiments also showed that our dataset is more challenging compared to the other face deepfake datasets. Our strategic dataset creation not only challenge the deepfake detectors but also sets a new benchmark for more evaluation. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals the struggle of existing detection methods, often optimized for specific image domains and manipulations, to effectively adapt to the intricate nature of diffusion deepfakes, limiting their practical utility. To address this critical issue, we investigate the impact of enhancing training data diversity on representative detection methods. This involves expanding the diversity of both manipulation techniques and image domains. Our findings underscore that increasing training data diversity results in improved generalizability. Moreover, we propose a novel momentum difficulty boosting strategy to tackle the additional challenge posed by training data heterogeneity. This strategy dynamically assigns appropriate sample weights based on learning difficulty, enhancing the model's adaptability to both easy and challenging samples. Extensive experiments on both existing and newly proposed benchmarks demonstrate that our model optimization approach surpasses prior alternatives significantly.

NViST: In the Wild New View Synthesis from a Single Image with Transformers

We propose NViST, a transformer-based model for novel-view synthesis from a single image, trained on a large-scale dataset of in-the-wild images with complex backgrounds. NViST transforms image inputs directly into a radiance field, adopting a scalable transformer-based architecture. In practice, NViST exploits the self-supervised features learnt by a masked autoencoder (MAE), and learns a novel decoder that translates features to 3D tokens via cross-attention and adaptive layer normalization. Our model is efficient at inference since only a single forward-pass is needed to predict a 3D representation, unlike methods that require test-time optimization or sampling such as 3D-aware diffusion models. We tackle further limitations of current new-view synthesis models. First, unlike most generative models that are trained in a category-specific manner, often on synthetic datasets or on masked inputs, our model is trained on MVImgNet, a large-scale dataset of real-world, casually-captured videos containing hundreds of object categories with diverse backgrounds. Secondly, our model does not require canonicalization of the training data - i.e. aligning all objects with a frontal view - only needing relative pose at training time which removes a substantial barrier to it being used on casually captured datasets. We show results on unseen objects and categories on MVImgNet and even casual phone captures. We conduct qualitative and quantitative evaluations on MVImgNet and ShapeNet to show that our model represents a step forward towards enabling true in-the-wild novel-view synthesis from a single image.

HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them

Despite their impressive ability to generate high-quality and fluent text, generative large language models (LLMs) also produce hallucinations: statements that are misaligned with established world knowledge or provided input context. However, measuring hallucination can be challenging, as having humans verify model generations on-the-fly is both expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we release HALoGEN, a comprehensive hallucination benchmark consisting of: (1) 10,923 prompts for generative models spanning nine domains including programming, scientific attribution, and summarization, and (2) automatic high-precision verifiers for each use case that decompose LLM generations into atomic units, and verify each unit against a high-quality knowledge source. We use this framework to evaluate ~150,000 generations from 14 language models, finding that even the best-performing models are riddled with hallucinations (sometimes up to 86% of generated atomic facts depending on the domain). We further define a novel error classification for LLM hallucinations based on whether they likely stem from incorrect recollection of training data (Type A errors), or incorrect knowledge in training data (Type B errors), or are fabrication (Type C errors). We hope our framework provides a foundation to enable the principled study of why generative models hallucinate, and advances the development of trustworthy large language models.

TC-Bench: Benchmarking Temporal Compositionality in Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video Generation

Video generation has many unique challenges beyond those of image generation. The temporal dimension introduces extensive possible variations across frames, over which consistency and continuity may be violated. In this study, we move beyond evaluating simple actions and argue that generated videos should incorporate the emergence of new concepts and their relation transitions like in real-world videos as time progresses. To assess the Temporal Compositionality of video generation models, we propose TC-Bench, a benchmark of meticulously crafted text prompts, corresponding ground truth videos, and robust evaluation metrics. The prompts articulate the initial and final states of scenes, effectively reducing ambiguities for frame development and simplifying the assessment of transition completion. In addition, by collecting aligned real-world videos corresponding to the prompts, we expand TC-Bench's applicability from text-conditional models to image-conditional ones that can perform generative frame interpolation. We also develop new metrics to measure the completeness of component transitions in generated videos, which demonstrate significantly higher correlations with human judgments than existing metrics. Our comprehensive experimental results reveal that most video generators achieve less than 20% of the compositional changes, highlighting enormous space for future improvement. Our analysis indicates that current video generation models struggle to interpret descriptions of compositional changes and synthesize various components across different time steps.

PaintScene4D: Consistent 4D Scene Generation from Text Prompts

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized 2D and 3D content creation, yet generating photorealistic dynamic 4D scenes remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 4D generation methods typically rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, often fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. Consequently, the resulting scenes tend to be object-centric and lack photorealism. While text-to-video models can generate more realistic scenes with motion, they often struggle with spatial understanding and provide limited control over camera viewpoints during rendering. To address these limitations, we present PaintScene4D, a novel text-to-4D scene generation framework that departs from conventional multi-view generative models in favor of a streamlined architecture that harnesses video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method first generates a reference video using a video generation model, and then employs a strategic camera array selection for rendering. We apply a progressive warping and inpainting technique to ensure both spatial and temporal consistency across multiple viewpoints. Finally, we optimize multi-view images using a dynamic renderer, enabling flexible camera control based on user preferences. Adopting a training-free architecture, our PaintScene4D efficiently produces realistic 4D scenes that can be viewed from arbitrary trajectories. The code will be made publicly available. Our project page is at https://paintscene4d.github.io/

RealRAG: Retrieval-augmented Realistic Image Generation via Self-reflective Contrastive Learning

Recent text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion V3 and Flux, have achieved notable progress. However, these models are strongly restricted to their limited knowledge, a.k.a., their own fixed parameters, that are trained with closed datasets. This leads to significant hallucinations or distortions when facing fine-grained and unseen novel real-world objects, e.g., the appearance of the Tesla Cybertruck. To this end, we present the first real-object-based retrieval-augmented generation framework (RealRAG), which augments fine-grained and unseen novel object generation by learning and retrieving real-world images to overcome the knowledge gaps of generative models. Specifically, to integrate missing memory for unseen novel object generation, we train a reflective retriever by self-reflective contrastive learning, which injects the generator's knowledge into the sef-reflective negatives, ensuring that the retrieved augmented images compensate for the model's missing knowledge. Furthermore, the real-object-based framework integrates fine-grained visual knowledge for the generative models, tackling the distortion problem and improving the realism for fine-grained object generation. Our Real-RAG is superior in its modular application to all types of state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models and also delivers remarkable performance boosts with all of them, such as a gain of 16.18% FID score with the auto-regressive model on the Stanford Car benchmark.

Dropout's Dream Land: Generalization from Learned Simulators to Reality

A World Model is a generative model used to simulate an environment. World Models have proven capable of learning spatial and temporal representations of Reinforcement Learning environments. In some cases, a World Model offers an agent the opportunity to learn entirely inside of its own dream environment. In this work we explore improving the generalization capabilities from dream environments to real environments (Dream2Real). We present a general approach to improve a controller's ability to transfer from a neural network dream environment to reality at little additional cost. These improvements are gained by drawing on inspiration from Domain Randomization, where the basic idea is to randomize as much of a simulator as possible without fundamentally changing the task at hand. Generally, Domain Randomization assumes access to a pre-built simulator with configurable parameters but oftentimes this is not available. By training the World Model using dropout, the dream environment is capable of creating a nearly infinite number of different dream environments. Previous use cases of dropout either do not use dropout at inference time or averages the predictions generated by multiple sampled masks (Monte-Carlo Dropout). Dropout's Dream Land leverages each unique mask to create a diverse set of dream environments. Our experimental results show that Dropout's Dream Land is an effective technique to bridge the reality gap between dream environments and reality. Furthermore, we additionally perform an extensive set of ablation studies.

MaskGWM: A Generalizable Driving World Model with Video Mask Reconstruction

World models that forecast environmental changes from actions are vital for autonomous driving models with strong generalization. The prevailing driving world model mainly build on video prediction model. Although these models can produce high-fidelity video sequences with advanced diffusion-based generator, they are constrained by their predictive duration and overall generalization capabilities. In this paper, we explore to solve this problem by combining generation loss with MAE-style feature-level context learning. In particular, we instantiate this target with three key design: (1) A more scalable Diffusion Transformer (DiT) structure trained with extra mask construction task. (2) we devise diffusion-related mask tokens to deal with the fuzzy relations between mask reconstruction and generative diffusion process. (3) we extend mask construction task to spatial-temporal domain by utilizing row-wise mask for shifted self-attention rather than masked self-attention in MAE. Then, we adopt a row-wise cross-view module to align with this mask design. Based on above improvement, we propose MaskGWM: a Generalizable driving World Model embodied with Video Mask reconstruction. Our model contains two variants: MaskGWM-long, focusing on long-horizon prediction, and MaskGWM-mview, dedicated to multi-view generation. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which contain normal validation of Nuscene dataset, long-horizon rollout of OpenDV-2K dataset and zero-shot validation of Waymo dataset. Quantitative metrics on these datasets show our method notably improving state-of-the-art driving world model.

GINA-3D: Learning to Generate Implicit Neural Assets in the Wild

Modeling the 3D world from sensor data for simulation is a scalable way of developing testing and validation environments for robotic learning problems such as autonomous driving. However, manually creating or re-creating real-world-like environments is difficult, expensive, and not scalable. Recent generative model techniques have shown promising progress to address such challenges by learning 3D assets using only plentiful 2D images -- but still suffer limitations as they leverage either human-curated image datasets or renderings from manually-created synthetic 3D environments. In this paper, we introduce GINA-3D, a generative model that uses real-world driving data from camera and LiDAR sensors to create realistic 3D implicit neural assets of diverse vehicles and pedestrians. Compared to the existing image datasets, the real-world driving setting poses new challenges due to occlusions, lighting-variations and long-tail distributions. GINA-3D tackles these challenges by decoupling representation learning and generative modeling into two stages with a learned tri-plane latent structure, inspired by recent advances in generative modeling of images. To evaluate our approach, we construct a large-scale object-centric dataset containing over 1.2M images of vehicles and pedestrians from the Waymo Open Dataset, and a new set of 80K images of long-tail instances such as construction equipment, garbage trucks, and cable cars. We compare our model with existing approaches and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in quality and diversity for both generated images and geometries.

Facing Off World Model Backbones: RNNs, Transformers, and S4

World models are a fundamental component in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). To perform temporally extended and consistent simulations of the future in partially observable environments, world models need to possess long-term memory. However, state-of-the-art MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, predominantly employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as their world model backbone, which have limited memory capacity. In this paper, we seek to explore alternative world model backbones for improving long-term memory. In particular, we investigate the effectiveness of Transformers and Structured State Space Sequence (S4) models, motivated by their remarkable ability to capture long-range dependencies in low-dimensional sequences and their complementary strengths. We propose S4WM, the first world model compatible with parallelizable SSMs including S4 and its variants. By incorporating latent variable modeling, S4WM can efficiently generate high-dimensional image sequences through latent imagination. Furthermore, we extensively compare RNN-, Transformer-, and S4-based world models across four sets of environments, which we have tailored to assess crucial memory capabilities of world models, including long-term imagination, context-dependent recall, reward prediction, and memory-based reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that S4WM outperforms Transformer-based world models in terms of long-term memory, while exhibiting greater efficiency during training and imagination. These results pave the way for the development of stronger MBRL agents.

VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.

TEMPO: Prompt-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

The past decade has witnessed significant advances in time series modeling with deep learning. While achieving state-of-the-art results, the best-performing architectures vary highly across applications and domains. Meanwhile, for natural language processing, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has demonstrated impressive performance via training one general-purpose model across various textual datasets. It is intriguing to explore whether GPT-type architectures can be effective for time series, capturing the intrinsic dynamic attributes and leading to significant accuracy improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, TEMPO, that can effectively learn time series representations. We focus on utilizing two essential inductive biases of the time series task for pre-trained models: (i) decomposition of the complex interaction between trend, seasonal and residual components; and (ii) introducing the selection-based prompts to facilitate distribution adaptation in non-stationary time series. TEMPO expands the capability for dynamically modeling real-world temporal phenomena from data within diverse domains. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of TEMPO over state-of-the-art methods on a number of time series benchmark datasets. This performance gain is observed not only in standard supervised learning settings but also in scenarios involving previously unseen datasets as well as in scenarios with multi-modal inputs. This compelling finding highlights TEMPO's potential to constitute a foundational model-building framework.

Reinforcement Learning for Generative AI: A Survey

Deep Generative AI has been a long-standing essential topic in the machine learning community, which can impact a number of application areas like text generation and computer vision. The major paradigm to train a generative model is maximum likelihood estimation, which pushes the learner to capture and approximate the target data distribution by decreasing the divergence between the model distribution and the target distribution. This formulation successfully establishes the objective of generative tasks, while it is incapable of satisfying all the requirements that a user might expect from a generative model. Reinforcement learning, serving as a competitive option to inject new training signals by creating new objectives that exploit novel signals, has demonstrated its power and flexibility to incorporate human inductive bias from multiple angles, such as adversarial learning, hand-designed rules and learned reward model to build a performant model. Thereby, reinforcement learning has become a trending research field and has stretched the limits of generative AI in both model design and application. It is reasonable to summarize and conclude advances in recent years with a comprehensive review. Although there are surveys in different application areas recently, this survey aims to shed light on a high-level review that spans a range of application areas. We provide a rigorous taxonomy in this area and make sufficient coverage on various models and applications. Notably, we also surveyed the fast-developing large language model area. We conclude this survey by showing the potential directions that might tackle the limit of current models and expand the frontiers for generative AI.

Inspecting the Geographical Representativeness of Images from Text-to-Image Models

Recent progress in generative models has resulted in models that produce both realistic as well as relevant images for most textual inputs. These models are being used to generate millions of images everyday, and hold the potential to drastically impact areas such as generative art, digital marketing and data augmentation. Given their outsized impact, it is important to ensure that the generated content reflects the artifacts and surroundings across the globe, rather than over-representing certain parts of the world. In this paper, we measure the geographical representativeness of common nouns (e.g., a house) generated through DALL.E 2 and Stable Diffusion models using a crowdsourced study comprising 540 participants across 27 countries. For deliberately underspecified inputs without country names, the generated images most reflect the surroundings of the United States followed by India, and the top generations rarely reflect surroundings from all other countries (average score less than 3 out of 5). Specifying the country names in the input increases the representativeness by 1.44 points on average for DALL.E 2 and 0.75 for Stable Diffusion, however, the overall scores for many countries still remain low, highlighting the need for future models to be more geographically inclusive. Lastly, we examine the feasibility of quantifying the geographical representativeness of generated images without conducting user studies.

Cognitively Inspired Energy-Based World Models

One of the predominant methods for training world models is autoregressive prediction in the output space of the next element of a sequence. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), this takes the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) predicting the next token; in Computer Vision (CV), this takes the form of autoregressive models predicting the next frame/token/pixel. However, this approach differs from human cognition in several respects. First, human predictions about the future actively influence internal cognitive processes. Second, humans naturally evaluate the plausibility of predictions regarding future states. Based on this capability, and third, by assessing when predictions are sufficient, humans allocate a dynamic amount of time to make a prediction. This adaptive process is analogous to System 2 thinking in psychology. All these capabilities are fundamental to the success of humans at high-level reasoning and planning. Therefore, to address the limitations of traditional autoregressive models lacking these human-like capabilities, we introduce Energy-Based World Models (EBWM). EBWM involves training an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to predict the compatibility of a given context and a predicted future state. In doing so, EBWM enables models to achieve all three facets of human cognition described. Moreover, we developed a variant of the traditional autoregressive transformer tailored for Energy-Based models, termed the Energy-Based Transformer (EBT). Our results demonstrate that EBWM scales better with data and GPU Hours than traditional autoregressive transformers in CV, and that EBWM offers promising early scaling in NLP. Consequently, this approach offers an exciting path toward training future models capable of System 2 thinking and intelligently searching across state spaces.

Open-Universe Indoor Scene Generation using LLM Program Synthesis and Uncurated Object Databases

We present a system for generating indoor scenes in response to text prompts. The prompts are not limited to a fixed vocabulary of scene descriptions, and the objects in generated scenes are not restricted to a fixed set of object categories -- we call this setting indoor scene generation. Unlike most prior work on indoor scene generation, our system does not require a large training dataset of existing 3D scenes. Instead, it leverages the world knowledge encoded in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to synthesize programs in a domain-specific layout language that describe objects and spatial relations between them. Executing such a program produces a specification of a constraint satisfaction problem, which the system solves using a gradient-based optimization scheme to produce object positions and orientations. To produce object geometry, the system retrieves 3D meshes from a database. Unlike prior work which uses databases of category-annotated, mutually-aligned meshes, we develop a pipeline using vision-language models (VLMs) to retrieve meshes from massive databases of un-annotated, inconsistently-aligned meshes. Experimental evaluations show that our system outperforms generative models trained on 3D data for traditional, closed-universe scene generation tasks; it also outperforms a recent LLM-based layout generation method on open-universe scene generation.

Semi-Parametric Neural Image Synthesis

Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Much of this success is due to the scalability of these architectures and hence caused by a dramatic increase in model complexity and in the computational resources invested in training these models. Our work questions the underlying paradigm of compressing large training data into ever growing parametric representations. We rather present an orthogonal, semi-parametric approach. We complement comparably small diffusion or autoregressive models with a separate image database and a retrieval strategy. During training we retrieve a set of nearest neighbors from this external database for each training instance and condition the generative model on these informative samples. While the retrieval approach is providing the (local) content, the model is focusing on learning the composition of scenes based on this content. As demonstrated by our experiments, simply swapping the database for one with different contents transfers a trained model post-hoc to a novel domain. The evaluation shows competitive performance on tasks which the generative model has not been trained on, such as class-conditional synthesis, zero-shot stylization or text-to-image synthesis without requiring paired text-image data. With negligible memory and computational overhead for the external database and retrieval we can significantly reduce the parameter count of the generative model and still outperform the state-of-the-art.

Generative agent-based modeling with actions grounded in physical, social, or digital space using Concordia

Agent-based modeling has been around for decades, and applied widely across the social and natural sciences. The scope of this research method is now poised to grow dramatically as it absorbs the new affordances provided by Large Language Models (LLM)s. Generative Agent-Based Models (GABM) are not just classic Agent-Based Models (ABM)s where the agents talk to one another. Rather, GABMs are constructed using an LLM to apply common sense to situations, act "reasonably", recall common semantic knowledge, produce API calls to control digital technologies like apps, and communicate both within the simulation and to researchers viewing it from the outside. Here we present Concordia, a library to facilitate constructing and working with GABMs. Concordia makes it easy to construct language-mediated simulations of physically- or digitally-grounded environments. Concordia agents produce their behavior using a flexible component system which mediates between two fundamental operations: LLM calls and associative memory retrieval. A special agent called the Game Master (GM), which was inspired by tabletop role-playing games, is responsible for simulating the environment where the agents interact. Agents take actions by describing what they want to do in natural language. The GM then translates their actions into appropriate implementations. In a simulated physical world, the GM checks the physical plausibility of agent actions and describes their effects. In digital environments simulating technologies such as apps and services, the GM may handle API calls to integrate with external tools such as general AI assistants (e.g., Bard, ChatGPT), and digital apps (e.g., Calendar, Email, Search, etc.). Concordia was designed to support a wide array of applications both in scientific research and for evaluating performance of real digital services by simulating users and/or generating synthetic data.

Can Generative Agent-Based Modeling Replicate the Friendship Paradox in Social Media Simulations?

Generative Agent-Based Modeling (GABM) is an emerging simulation paradigm that combines the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models with traditional Agent-Based Modeling to replicate complex social behaviors, including interactions on social media. While prior work has focused on localized phenomena such as opinion formation and information spread, its potential to capture global network dynamics remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing GABM-based social media simulations through the lens of the Friendship Paradox (FP), a counterintuitive phenomenon where individuals, on average, have fewer friends than their friends. We propose a GABM framework for social media simulations, featuring generative agents that emulate real users with distinct personalities and interests. Using Twitter datasets on the US 2020 Election and the QAnon conspiracy, we show that the FP emerges naturally in GABM simulations. Consistent with real-world observations, the simulations unveil a hierarchical structure, where agents preferentially connect with others displaying higher activity or influence. Additionally, we find that infrequent connections primarily drive the FP, reflecting patterns in real networks. These findings validate GABM as a robust tool for modeling global social media phenomena and highlight its potential for advancing social science by enabling nuanced analysis of user behavior.

GENIE: Generative Note Information Extraction model for structuring EHR data

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold immense potential for advancing healthcare, offering rich, longitudinal data that combines structured information with valuable insights from unstructured clinical notes. However, the unstructured nature of clinical text poses significant challenges for secondary applications. Traditional methods for structuring EHR free-text data, such as rule-based systems and multi-stage pipelines, are often limited by their time-consuming configurations and inability to adapt across clinical notes from diverse healthcare settings. Few systems provide a comprehensive attribute extraction for terminologies. While giant large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA 405B excel at structuring tasks, they are slow, costly, and impractical for large-scale use. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GENIE, a Generative Note Information Extraction system that leverages LLMs to streamline the structuring of unstructured clinical text into usable data with standardized format. GENIE processes entire paragraphs in a single pass, extracting entities, assertion statuses, locations, modifiers, values, and purposes with high accuracy. Its unified, end-to-end approach simplifies workflows, reduces errors, and eliminates the need for extensive manual intervention. Using a robust data preparation pipeline and fine-tuned small scale LLMs, GENIE achieves competitive performance across multiple information extraction tasks, outperforming traditional tools like cTAKES and MetaMap and can handle extra attributes to be extracted. GENIE strongly enhances real-world applicability and scalability in healthcare systems. By open-sourcing the model and test data, we aim to encourage collaboration and drive further advancements in EHR structurization.

CityDreamer4D: Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 4D Cities

3D scene generation has garnered growing attention in recent years and has made significant progress. Generating 4D cities is more challenging than 3D scenes due to the presence of structurally complex, visually diverse objects like buildings and vehicles, and heightened human sensitivity to distortions in urban environments. To tackle these issues, we propose CityDreamer4D, a compositional generative model specifically tailored for generating unbounded 4D cities. Our main insights are 1) 4D city generation should separate dynamic objects (e.g., vehicles) from static scenes (e.g., buildings and roads), and 2) all objects in the 4D scene should be composed of different types of neural fields for buildings, vehicles, and background stuff. Specifically, we propose Traffic Scenario Generator and Unbounded Layout Generator to produce dynamic traffic scenarios and static city layouts using a highly compact BEV representation. Objects in 4D cities are generated by combining stuff-oriented and instance-oriented neural fields for background stuff, buildings, and vehicles. To suit the distinct characteristics of background stuff and instances, the neural fields employ customized generative hash grids and periodic positional embeddings as scene parameterizations. Furthermore, we offer a comprehensive suite of datasets for city generation, including OSM, GoogleEarth, and CityTopia. The OSM dataset provides a variety of real-world city layouts, while the Google Earth and CityTopia datasets deliver large-scale, high-quality city imagery complete with 3D instance annotations. Leveraging its compositional design, CityDreamer4D supports a range of downstream applications, such as instance editing, city stylization, and urban simulation, while delivering state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic 4D cities.

Bridging Different Language Models and Generative Vision Models for Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation has made significant advancements with the introduction of text-to-image diffusion models. These models typically consist of a language model that interprets user prompts and a vision model that generates corresponding images. As language and vision models continue to progress in their respective domains, there is a great potential in exploring the replacement of components in text-to-image diffusion models with more advanced counterparts. A broader research objective would therefore be to investigate the integration of any two unrelated language and generative vision models for text-to-image generation. In this paper, we explore this objective and propose LaVi-Bridge, a pipeline that enables the integration of diverse pre-trained language models and generative vision models for text-to-image generation. By leveraging LoRA and adapters, LaVi-Bridge offers a flexible and plug-and-play approach without requiring modifications to the original weights of the language and vision models. Our pipeline is compatible with various language models and generative vision models, accommodating different structures. Within this framework, we demonstrate that incorporating superior modules, such as more advanced language models or generative vision models, results in notable improvements in capabilities like text alignment or image quality. Extensive evaluations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of LaVi-Bridge. Code is available at https://github.com/ShihaoZhaoZSH/LaVi-Bridge.

Generative Modeling of Regular and Irregular Time Series Data via Koopman VAEs

Generating realistic time series data is important for many engineering and scientific applications. Existing work tackles this problem using generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, GANs are often unstable during training, and they can suffer from mode collapse. While variational autoencoders (VAEs) are known to be more robust to these issues, they are (surprisingly) less often considered for time series generation. In this work, we introduce Koopman VAE (KVAE), a new generative framework that is based on a novel design for the model prior, and that can be optimized for either regular and irregular training data. Inspired by Koopman theory, we represent the latent conditional prior dynamics using a linear map. Our approach enhances generative modeling with two desired features: (i) incorporating domain knowledge can be achieved by leverageing spectral tools that prescribe constraints on the eigenvalues of the linear map; and (ii) studying the qualitative behavior and stablity of the system can be performed using tools from dynamical systems theory. Our results show that KVAE outperforms state-of-the-art GAN and VAE methods across several challenging synthetic and real-world time series generation benchmarks. Whether trained on regular or irregular data, KVAE generates time series that improve both discriminative and predictive metrics. We also present visual evidence suggesting that KVAE learns probability density functions that better approximate empirical ground truth distributions.

ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions

To enable machines to learn how humans interact with the physical world in our daily activities, it is crucial to provide rich data that encompasses the 3D motion of humans as well as the motion of objects in a learnable 3D representation. Ideally, this data should be collected in a natural setup, capturing the authentic dynamic 3D signals during human-object interactions. To address this challenge, we introduce the ParaHome system, designed to capture and parameterize dynamic 3D movements of humans and objects within a common home environment. Our system consists of a multi-view setup with 70 synchronized RGB cameras, as well as wearable motion capture devices equipped with an IMU-based body suit and hand motion capture gloves. By leveraging the ParaHome system, we collect a novel large-scale dataset of human-object interaction. Notably, our dataset offers key advancement over existing datasets in three main aspects: (1) capturing 3D body and dexterous hand manipulation motion alongside 3D object movement within a contextual home environment during natural activities; (2) encompassing human interaction with multiple objects in various episodic scenarios with corresponding descriptions in texts; (3) including articulated objects with multiple parts expressed with parameterized articulations. Building upon our dataset, we introduce new research tasks aimed at building a generative model for learning and synthesizing human-object interactions in a real-world room setting.

Score-based Generative Modeling of Graphs via the System of Stochastic Differential Equations

Generating graph-structured data requires learning the underlying distribution of graphs. Yet, this is a challenging problem, and the previous graph generative methods either fail to capture the permutation-invariance property of graphs or cannot sufficiently model the complex dependency between nodes and edges, which is crucial for generating real-world graphs such as molecules. To overcome such limitations, we propose a novel score-based generative model for graphs with a continuous-time framework. Specifically, we propose a new graph diffusion process that models the joint distribution of the nodes and edges through a system of stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Then, we derive novel score matching objectives tailored for the proposed diffusion process to estimate the gradient of the joint log-density with respect to each component, and introduce a new solver for the system of SDEs to efficiently sample from the reverse diffusion process. We validate our graph generation method on diverse datasets, on which it either achieves significantly superior or competitive performance to the baselines. Further analysis shows that our method is able to generate molecules that lie close to the training distribution yet do not violate the chemical valency rule, demonstrating the effectiveness of the system of SDEs in modeling the node-edge relationships. Our code is available at https://github.com/harryjo97/GDSS.

Nightshade: Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Models

Data poisoning attacks manipulate training data to introduce unexpected behaviors into machine learning models at training time. For text-to-image generative models with massive training datasets, current understanding of poisoning attacks suggests that a successful attack would require injecting millions of poison samples into their training pipeline. In this paper, we show that poisoning attacks can be successful on generative models. We observe that training data per concept can be quite limited in these models, making them vulnerable to prompt-specific poisoning attacks, which target a model's ability to respond to individual prompts. We introduce Nightshade, an optimized prompt-specific poisoning attack where poison samples look visually identical to benign images with matching text prompts. Nightshade poison samples are also optimized for potency and can corrupt an Stable Diffusion SDXL prompt in <100 poison samples. Nightshade poison effects "bleed through" to related concepts, and multiple attacks can composed together in a single prompt. Surprisingly, we show that a moderate number of Nightshade attacks can destabilize general features in a text-to-image generative model, effectively disabling its ability to generate meaningful images. Finally, we propose the use of Nightshade and similar tools as a last defense for content creators against web scrapers that ignore opt-out/do-not-crawl directives, and discuss possible implications for model trainers and content creators.

From Word Vectors to Multimodal Embeddings: Techniques, Applications, and Future Directions For Large Language Models

Word embeddings and language models have transformed natural language processing (NLP) by facilitating the representation of linguistic elements in continuous vector spaces. This review visits foundational concepts such as the distributional hypothesis and contextual similarity, tracing the evolution from sparse representations like one-hot encoding to dense embeddings including Word2Vec, GloVe, and fastText. We examine both static and contextualized embeddings, underscoring advancements in models such as ELMo, BERT, and GPT and their adaptations for cross-lingual and personalized applications. The discussion extends to sentence and document embeddings, covering aggregation methods and generative topic models, along with the application of embeddings in multimodal domains, including vision, robotics, and cognitive science. Advanced topics such as model compression, interpretability, numerical encoding, and bias mitigation are analyzed, addressing both technical challenges and ethical implications. Additionally, we identify future research directions, emphasizing the need for scalable training techniques, enhanced interpretability, and robust grounding in non-textual modalities. By synthesizing current methodologies and emerging trends, this survey offers researchers and practitioners an in-depth resource to push the boundaries of embedding-based language models.

HyPoradise: An Open Baseline for Generative Speech Recognition with Large Language Models

Advancements in deep neural networks have allowed automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to attain human parity on several publicly available clean speech datasets. However, even state-of-the-art ASR systems experience performance degradation when confronted with adverse conditions, as a well-trained acoustic model is sensitive to variations in the speech domain, e.g., background noise. Intuitively, humans address this issue by relying on their linguistic knowledge: the meaning of ambiguous spoken terms is usually inferred from contextual cues thereby reducing the dependency on the auditory system. Inspired by this observation, we introduce the first open-source benchmark to utilize external large language models (LLMs) for ASR error correction, where N-best decoding hypotheses provide informative elements for true transcription prediction. This approach is a paradigm shift from the traditional language model rescoring strategy that can only select one candidate hypothesis as the output transcription. The proposed benchmark contains a novel dataset, HyPoradise (HP), encompassing more than 334,000 pairs of N-best hypotheses and corresponding accurate transcriptions across prevalent speech domains. Given this dataset, we examine three types of error correction techniques based on LLMs with varying amounts of labeled hypotheses-transcription pairs, which gains a significant word error rate (WER) reduction. Experimental evidence demonstrates the proposed technique achieves a breakthrough by surpassing the upper bound of traditional re-ranking based methods. More surprisingly, LLM with reasonable prompt and its generative capability can even correct those tokens that are missing in N-best list. We make our results publicly accessible for reproducible pipelines with released pre-trained models, thus providing a new evaluation paradigm for ASR error correction with LLMs.

Scalable Diffusion for Materials Generation

Generative models trained on internet-scale data are capable of generating novel and realistic texts, images, and videos. A natural next question is whether these models can advance science, for example by generating novel stable materials. Traditionally, models with explicit structures (e.g., graphs) have been used in modeling structural relationships in scientific data (e.g., atoms and bonds in crystals), but generating structures can be difficult to scale to large and complex systems. Another challenge in generating materials is the mismatch between standard generative modeling metrics and downstream applications. For instance, common metrics such as the reconstruction error do not correlate well with the downstream goal of discovering stable materials. In this work, we tackle the scalability challenge by developing a unified crystal representation that can represent any crystal structure (UniMat), followed by training a diffusion probabilistic model on these UniMat representations. Our empirical results suggest that despite the lack of explicit structure modeling, UniMat can generate high fidelity crystal structures from larger and more complex chemical systems, outperforming previous graph-based approaches under various generative modeling metrics. To better connect the generation quality of materials to downstream applications, such as discovering novel stable materials, we propose additional metrics for evaluating generative models of materials, including per-composition formation energy and stability with respect to convex hulls through decomposition energy from Density Function Theory (DFT). Lastly, we show that conditional generation with UniMat can scale to previously established crystal datasets with up to millions of crystals structures, outperforming random structure search (the current leading method for structure discovery) in discovering new stable materials.

GenEx: Generating an Explorable World

Understanding, navigating, and exploring the 3D physical real world has long been a central challenge in the development of artificial intelligence. In this work, we take a step toward this goal by introducing GenEx, a system capable of planning complex embodied world exploration, guided by its generative imagination that forms priors (expectations) about the surrounding environments. GenEx generates an entire 3D-consistent imaginative environment from as little as a single RGB image, bringing it to life through panoramic video streams. Leveraging scalable 3D world data curated from Unreal Engine, our generative model is rounded in the physical world. It captures a continuous 360-degree environment with little effort, offering a boundless landscape for AI agents to explore and interact with. GenEx achieves high-quality world generation, robust loop consistency over long trajectories, and demonstrates strong 3D capabilities such as consistency and active 3D mapping. Powered by generative imagination of the world, GPT-assisted agents are equipped to perform complex embodied tasks, including both goal-agnostic exploration and goal-driven navigation. These agents utilize predictive expectation regarding unseen parts of the physical world to refine their beliefs, simulate different outcomes based on potential decisions, and make more informed choices. In summary, we demonstrate that GenEx provides a transformative platform for advancing embodied AI in imaginative spaces and brings potential for extending these capabilities to real-world exploration.

LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

MetaDreamer: Efficient Text-to-3D Creation With Disentangling Geometry and Texture

Generative models for 3D object synthesis have seen significant advancements with the incorporation of prior knowledge distilled from 2D diffusion models. Nevertheless, challenges persist in the form of multi-view geometric inconsistencies and slow generation speeds within the existing 3D synthesis frameworks. This can be attributed to two factors: firstly, the deficiency of abundant geometric a priori knowledge in optimization, and secondly, the entanglement issue between geometry and texture in conventional 3D generation methods.In response, we introduce MetaDreammer, a two-stage optimization approach that leverages rich 2D and 3D prior knowledge. In the first stage, our emphasis is on optimizing the geometric representation to ensure multi-view consistency and accuracy of 3D objects. In the second stage, we concentrate on fine-tuning the geometry and optimizing the texture, thereby achieving a more refined 3D object. Through leveraging 2D and 3D prior knowledge in two stages, respectively, we effectively mitigate the interdependence between geometry and texture. MetaDreamer establishes clear optimization objectives for each stage, resulting in significant time savings in the 3D generation process. Ultimately, MetaDreamer can generate high-quality 3D objects based on textual prompts within 20 minutes, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the most efficient text-to-3D generation method. Furthermore, we introduce image control into the process, enhancing the controllability of 3D generation. Extensive empirical evidence confirms that our method is not only highly efficient but also achieves a quality level that is at the forefront of current state-of-the-art 3D generation techniques.

Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially expanded the range of tasks they can address. In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), researchers have shifted their focus from conventional NLP tasks (e.g., sequence tagging and parsing) towards tasks that revolve around aligning with human needs (e.g., brainstorming and email writing). This shift in task distribution imposes new requirements on evaluating these aligned models regarding generality (i.e., assessing performance across diverse scenarios), flexibility (i.e., examining under different protocols), and interpretability (i.e., scrutinizing models with explanations). In this paper, we propose a generative judge with 13B parameters, Auto-J, designed to address these challenges. Our model is trained on user queries and LLM-generated responses under massive real-world scenarios and accommodates diverse evaluation protocols (e.g., pairwise response comparison and single-response evaluation) with well-structured natural language critiques. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we construct a new testbed covering 58 different scenarios. Experimentally, Auto-J outperforms a series of strong competitors, including both open-source and closed-source models, by a large margin. We also provide detailed analysis and case studies to further reveal the potential of our method and make a variety of resources public at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/auto-j.

The Best of Both Worlds: Toward an Honest and Helpful Large Language Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various industries due to their exceptional generative capabilities. However, for safe and effective real-world deployments, ensuring honesty and helpfulness is critical. This paper addresses the question: Can we prioritize the helpfulness of LLMs while preserving their honesty? To begin with, we establish exhaustive principles aimed at guaranteeing the honesty of LLM. Additionally, we introduce a novel dataset, referred to as HoneSet, comprising 930 queries spanning six categories meticulously crafted to assess an LLM's capacity for maintaining honesty. Subsequently, we present two approaches to augmenting honesty and helpfulness in LLMs: a training-free enhancement and a fine-tuning-based improvement. The training-free approach, which is based on curiosity-driven prompting, empowers LLMs to articulate internal confusion and uncertainty regarding queries, thereby optimizing their responses. Conversely, the fine-tuning-based method employs a two-stage process inspired by curriculum learning: initially instructing LLMs to discern between honest and dishonest responses, then refining their training to enhance helpfulness. Experiments conducted on nine prominent LLMs demonstrate a significant improvement in alignment with honesty across all models through the implementation of our proposed enhancements. Particularly noteworthy is the 65.3% enhancement observed in Llama3-8b and the remarkable 124.7% improvement in Mistral-7b, as measured by the H^{2} (honest and helpful) assessment. We believe that our work can pave the way for developing more trustworthy LLMs for real-world applications.

Generative Compositional Augmentations for Scene Graph Prediction

Inferring objects and their relationships from an image in the form of a scene graph is useful in many applications at the intersection of vision and language. We consider a challenging problem of compositional generalization that emerges in this task due to a long tail data distribution. Current scene graph generation models are trained on a tiny fraction of the distribution corresponding to the most frequent compositions, e.g. <cup, on, table>. However, test images might contain zero- and few-shot compositions of objects and relationships, e.g. <cup, on, surfboard>. Despite each of the object categories and the predicate (e.g. 'on') being frequent in the training data, the models often fail to properly understand such unseen or rare compositions. To improve generalization, it is natural to attempt increasing the diversity of the training distribution. However, in the graph domain this is non-trivial. To that end, we propose a method to synthesize rare yet plausible scene graphs by perturbing real ones. We then propose and empirically study a model based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) that allows us to generate visual features of perturbed scene graphs and learn from them in a joint fashion. When evaluated on the Visual Genome dataset, our approach yields marginal, but consistent improvements in zero- and few-shot metrics. We analyze the limitations of our approach indicating promising directions for future research.

The Generative AI Paradox: "What It Can Create, It May Not Understand"

The recent wave of generative AI has sparked unprecedented global attention, with both excitement and concern over potentially superhuman levels of artificial intelligence: models now take only seconds to produce outputs that would challenge or exceed the capabilities even of expert humans. At the same time, models still show basic errors in understanding that would not be expected even in non-expert humans. This presents us with an apparent paradox: how do we reconcile seemingly superhuman capabilities with the persistence of errors that few humans would make? In this work, we posit that this tension reflects a divergence in the configuration of intelligence in today's generative models relative to intelligence in humans. Specifically, we propose and test the Generative AI Paradox hypothesis: generative models, having been trained directly to reproduce expert-like outputs, acquire generative capabilities that are not contingent upon -- and can therefore exceed -- their ability to understand those same types of outputs. This contrasts with humans, for whom basic understanding almost always precedes the ability to generate expert-level outputs. We test this hypothesis through controlled experiments analyzing generation vs. understanding in generative models, across both language and image modalities. Our results show that although models can outperform humans in generation, they consistently fall short of human capabilities in measures of understanding, as well as weaker correlation between generation and understanding performance, and more brittleness to adversarial inputs. Our findings support the hypothesis that models' generative capability may not be contingent upon understanding capability, and call for caution in interpreting artificial intelligence by analogy to human intelligence.

STAG4D: Spatial-Temporal Anchored Generative 4D Gaussians

Recent progress in pre-trained diffusion models and 3D generation have spurred interest in 4D content creation. However, achieving high-fidelity 4D generation with spatial-temporal consistency remains a challenge. In this work, we propose STAG4D, a novel framework that combines pre-trained diffusion models with dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting for high-fidelity 4D generation. Drawing inspiration from 3D generation techniques, we utilize a multi-view diffusion model to initialize multi-view images anchoring on the input video frames, where the video can be either real-world captured or generated by a video diffusion model. To ensure the temporal consistency of the multi-view sequence initialization, we introduce a simple yet effective fusion strategy to leverage the first frame as a temporal anchor in the self-attention computation. With the almost consistent multi-view sequences, we then apply the score distillation sampling to optimize the 4D Gaussian point cloud. The 4D Gaussian spatting is specially crafted for the generation task, where an adaptive densification strategy is proposed to mitigate the unstable Gaussian gradient for robust optimization. Notably, the proposed pipeline does not require any pre-training or fine-tuning of diffusion networks, offering a more accessible and practical solution for the 4D generation task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior 4D generation works in rendering quality, spatial-temporal consistency, and generation robustness, setting a new state-of-the-art for 4D generation from diverse inputs, including text, image, and video.

A Generative Self-Supervised Framework using Functional Connectivity in fMRI Data

Deep neural networks trained on Functional Connectivity (FC) networks extracted from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data have gained popularity due to the increasing availability of data and advances in model architectures, including Graph Neural Network (GNN). Recent research on the application of GNN to FC suggests that exploiting the time-varying properties of the FC could significantly improve the accuracy and interpretability of the model prediction. However, the high cost of acquiring high-quality fMRI data and corresponding phenotypic labels poses a hurdle to their application in real-world settings, such that a model na\"ively trained in a supervised fashion can suffer from insufficient performance or a lack of generalization on a small number of data. In addition, most Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approaches for GNNs to date adopt a contrastive strategy, which tends to lose appropriate semantic information when the graph structure is perturbed or does not leverage both spatial and temporal information simultaneously. In light of these challenges, we propose a generative SSL approach that is tailored to effectively harness spatio-temporal information within dynamic FC. Our empirical results, experimented with large-scale (>50,000) fMRI datasets, demonstrate that our approach learns valuable representations and enables the construction of accurate and robust models when fine-tuned for downstream tasks.

OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignment

Recently, generative retrieval-based recommendation systems have emerged as a promising paradigm. However, most modern recommender systems adopt a retrieve-and-rank strategy, where the generative model functions only as a selector during the retrieval stage. In this paper, we propose OneRec, which replaces the cascaded learning framework with a unified generative model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end generative model that significantly surpasses current complex and well-designed recommender systems in real-world scenarios. Specifically, OneRec includes: 1) an encoder-decoder structure, which encodes the user's historical behavior sequences and gradually decodes the videos that the user may be interested in. We adopt sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to scale model capacity without proportionally increasing computational FLOPs. 2) a session-wise generation approach. In contrast to traditional next-item prediction, we propose a session-wise generation, which is more elegant and contextually coherent than point-by-point generation that relies on hand-crafted rules to properly combine the generated results. 3) an Iterative Preference Alignment module combined with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enhance the quality of the generated results. Unlike DPO in NLP, a recommendation system typically has only one opportunity to display results for each user's browsing request, making it impossible to obtain positive and negative samples simultaneously. To address this limitation, We design a reward model to simulate user generation and customize the sampling strategy. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that a limited number of DPO samples can align user interest preferences and significantly improve the quality of generated results. We deployed OneRec in the main scene of Kuaishou, achieving a 1.6\% increase in watch-time, which is a substantial improvement.

Large-Vocabulary 3D Diffusion Model with Transformer

Creating diverse and high-quality 3D assets with an automatic generative model is highly desirable. Despite extensive efforts on 3D generation, most existing works focus on the generation of a single category or a few categories. In this paper, we introduce a diffusion-based feed-forward framework for synthesizing massive categories of real-world 3D objects with a single generative model. Notably, there are three major challenges for this large-vocabulary 3D generation: a) the need for expressive yet efficient 3D representation; b) large diversity in geometry and texture across categories; c) complexity in the appearances of real-world objects. To this end, we propose a novel triplane-based 3D-aware Diffusion model with TransFormer, DiffTF, for handling challenges via three aspects. 1) Considering efficiency and robustness, we adopt a revised triplane representation and improve the fitting speed and accuracy. 2) To handle the drastic variations in geometry and texture, we regard the features of all 3D objects as a combination of generalized 3D knowledge and specialized 3D features. To extract generalized 3D knowledge from diverse categories, we propose a novel 3D-aware transformer with shared cross-plane attention. It learns the cross-plane relations across different planes and aggregates the generalized 3D knowledge with specialized 3D features. 3) In addition, we devise the 3D-aware encoder/decoder to enhance the generalized 3D knowledge in the encoded triplanes for handling categories with complex appearances. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and OmniObject3D (over 200 diverse real-world categories) convincingly demonstrate that a single DiffTF model achieves state-of-the-art large-vocabulary 3D object generation performance with large diversity, rich semantics, and high quality.

Semantic Consistency for Assuring Reliability of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable fluency and competence across various natural language tasks. However, recent research has highlighted their sensitivity to variations in input prompts. To deploy LLMs in a safe and reliable manner, it is crucial for their outputs to be consistent when prompted with expressions that carry the same meaning or intent. While some existing work has explored how state-of-the-art LLMs address this issue, their evaluations have been confined to assessing lexical equality of single- or multi-word answers, overlooking the consistency of generative text sequences. For a more comprehensive understanding of the consistency of LLMs in open-ended text generation scenarios, we introduce a general measure of semantic consistency, and formulate multiple versions of this metric to evaluate the performance of various LLMs. Our proposal demonstrates significantly higher consistency and stronger correlation with human evaluations of output consistency than traditional metrics based on lexical consistency. Finally, we propose a novel prompting strategy, called Ask-to-Choose (A2C), to enhance semantic consistency. When evaluated for closed-book question answering based on answer variations from the TruthfulQA benchmark, A2C increases accuracy metrics for pretrained and finetuned LLMs by up to 47%, and semantic consistency metrics for instruction-tuned models by up to 7-fold.

Generative Marginalization Models

We introduce marginalization models (MaMs), a new family of generative models for high-dimensional discrete data. They offer scalable and flexible generative modeling with tractable likelihoods by explicitly modeling all induced marginal distributions. Marginalization models enable fast evaluation of arbitrary marginal probabilities with a single forward pass of the neural network, which overcomes a major limitation of methods with exact marginal inference, such as autoregressive models (ARMs). We propose scalable methods for learning the marginals, grounded in the concept of "marginalization self-consistency". Unlike previous methods, MaMs support scalable training of any-order generative models for high-dimensional problems under the setting of energy-based training, where the goal is to match the learned distribution to a given desired probability (specified by an unnormalized (log) probability function such as energy function or reward function). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on a variety of discrete data distributions, including binary images, language, physical systems, and molecules, for maximum likelihood and energy-based training settings. MaMs achieve orders of magnitude speedup in evaluating the marginal probabilities on both settings. For energy-based training tasks, MaMs enable any-order generative modeling of high-dimensional problems beyond the capability of previous methods. Code is at https://github.com/PrincetonLIPS/MaM.

Taming Feed-forward Reconstruction Models as Latent Encoders for 3D Generative Models

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

Improving Geo-diversity of Generated Images with Contextualized Vendi Score Guidance

With the growing popularity of text-to-image generative models, there has been increasing focus on understanding their risks and biases. Recent work has found that state-of-the-art models struggle to depict everyday objects with the true diversity of the real world and have notable gaps between geographic regions. In this work, we aim to increase the diversity of generated images of common objects such that per-region variations are representative of the real world. We introduce an inference time intervention, contextualized Vendi Score Guidance (c-VSG), that guides the backwards steps of latent diffusion models to increase the diversity of a sample as compared to a "memory bank" of previously generated images while constraining the amount of variation within that of an exemplar set of real-world contextualizing images. We evaluate c-VSG with two geographically representative datasets and find that it substantially increases the diversity of generated images, both for the worst performing regions and on average, while simultaneously maintaining or improving image quality and consistency. Additionally, qualitative analyses reveal that diversity of generated images is significantly improved, including along the lines of reductive region portrayals present in the original model. We hope that this work is a step towards text-to-image generative models that reflect the true geographic diversity of the world.

How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective

OpenAI's Sora highlights the potential of video generation for developing world models that adhere to fundamental physical laws. However, the ability of video generation models to discover such laws purely from visual data without human priors can be questioned. A world model learning the true law should give predictions robust to nuances and correctly extrapolate on unseen scenarios. In this work, we evaluate across three key scenarios: in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and combinatorial generalization. We developed a 2D simulation testbed for object movement and collisions to generate videos deterministically governed by one or more classical mechanics laws. This provides an unlimited supply of data for large-scale experimentation and enables quantitative evaluation of whether the generated videos adhere to physical laws. We trained diffusion-based video generation models to predict object movements based on initial frames. Our scaling experiments show perfect generalization within the distribution, measurable scaling behavior for combinatorial generalization, but failure in out-of-distribution scenarios. Further experiments reveal two key insights about the generalization mechanisms of these models: (1) the models fail to abstract general physical rules and instead exhibit "case-based" generalization behavior, i.e., mimicking the closest training example; (2) when generalizing to new cases, models are observed to prioritize different factors when referencing training data: color > size > velocity > shape. Our study suggests that scaling alone is insufficient for video generation models to uncover fundamental physical laws, despite its role in Sora's broader success. See our project page at https://phyworld.github.io

DreamCreature: Crafting Photorealistic Virtual Creatures from Imagination

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generative models allow for high-quality synthesis following either text instructions or visual examples. Despite their capabilities, these models face limitations in creating new, detailed creatures within specific categories (e.g., virtual dog or bird species), which are valuable in digital asset creation and biodiversity analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task, Virtual Creatures Generation: Given a set of unlabeled images of the target concepts (e.g., 200 bird species), we aim to train a T2I model capable of creating new, hybrid concepts within diverse backgrounds and contexts. We propose a new method called DreamCreature, which identifies and extracts the underlying sub-concepts (e.g., body parts of a specific species) in an unsupervised manner. The T2I thus adapts to generate novel concepts (e.g., new bird species) with faithful structures and photorealistic appearance by seamlessly and flexibly composing learned sub-concepts. To enhance sub-concept fidelity and disentanglement, we extend the textual inversion technique by incorporating an additional projector and tailored attention loss regularization. Extensive experiments on two fine-grained image benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DreamCreature over prior methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Ultimately, the learned sub-concepts facilitate diverse creative applications, including innovative consumer product designs and nuanced property modifications.

Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

Physics3D: Learning Physical Properties of 3D Gaussians via Video Diffusion

In recent years, there has been rapid development in 3D generation models, opening up new possibilities for applications such as simulating the dynamic movements of 3D objects and customizing their behaviors. However, current 3D generative models tend to focus only on surface features such as color and shape, neglecting the inherent physical properties that govern the behavior of objects in the real world. To accurately simulate physics-aligned dynamics, it is essential to predict the physical properties of materials and incorporate them into the behavior prediction process. Nonetheless, predicting the diverse materials of real-world objects is still challenging due to the complex nature of their physical attributes. In this paper, we propose Physics3D, a novel method for learning various physical properties of 3D objects through a video diffusion model. Our approach involves designing a highly generalizable physical simulation system based on a viscoelastic material model, which enables us to simulate a wide range of materials with high-fidelity capabilities. Moreover, we distill the physical priors from a video diffusion model that contains more understanding of realistic object materials. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with both elastic and plastic materials. Physics3D shows great potential for bridging the gap between the physical world and virtual neural space, providing a better integration and application of realistic physical principles in virtual environments. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Physics3D.

Conditional GANs with Auxiliary Discriminative Classifier

Conditional generative models aim to learn the underlying joint distribution of data and labels to achieve conditional data generation. Among them, the auxiliary classifier generative adversarial network (AC-GAN) has been widely used, but suffers from the problem of low intra-class diversity of the generated samples. The fundamental reason pointed out in this paper is that the classifier of AC-GAN is generator-agnostic, which therefore cannot provide informative guidance for the generator to approach the joint distribution, resulting in a minimization of the conditional entropy that decreases the intra-class diversity. Motivated by this understanding, we propose a novel conditional GAN with an auxiliary discriminative classifier (ADC-GAN) to resolve the above problem. Specifically, the proposed auxiliary discriminative classifier becomes generator-aware by recognizing the class-labels of the real data and the generated data discriminatively. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the generator can faithfully learn the joint distribution even without the original discriminator, making the proposed ADC-GAN robust to the value of the coefficient hyperparameter and the selection of the GAN loss, and stable during training. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of ADC-GAN in conditional generative modeling compared to state-of-the-art classifier-based and projection-based conditional GANs.

Leveraging Intrinsic Properties for Non-Rigid Garment Alignment

We address the problem of aligning real-world 3D data of garments, which benefits many applications such as texture learning, physical parameter estimation, generative modeling of garments, etc. Existing extrinsic methods typically perform non-rigid iterative closest point and struggle to align details due to incorrect closest matches and rigidity constraints. While intrinsic methods based on functional maps can produce high-quality correspondences, they work under isometric assumptions and become unreliable for garment deformations which are highly non-isometric. To achieve wrinkle-level as well as texture-level alignment, we present a novel coarse-to-fine two-stage method that leverages intrinsic manifold properties with two neural deformation fields, in the 3D space and the intrinsic space, respectively. The coarse stage performs a 3D fitting, where we leverage intrinsic manifold properties to define a manifold deformation field. The coarse fitting then induces a functional map that produces an alignment of intrinsic embeddings. We further refine the intrinsic alignment with a second neural deformation field for higher accuracy. We evaluate our method with our captured garment dataset, GarmCap. The method achieves accurate wrinkle-level and texture-level alignment and works for difficult garment types such as long coats. Our project page is https://jsnln.github.io/iccv2023_intrinsic/index.html.

NCHO: Unsupervised Learning for Neural 3D Composition of Humans and Objects

Deep generative models have been recently extended to synthesizing 3D digital humans. However, previous approaches treat clothed humans as a single chunk of geometry without considering the compositionality of clothing and accessories. As a result, individual items cannot be naturally composed into novel identities, leading to limited expressiveness and controllability of generative 3D avatars. While several methods attempt to address this by leveraging synthetic data, the interaction between humans and objects is not authentic due to the domain gap, and manual asset creation is difficult to scale for a wide variety of objects. In this work, we present a novel framework for learning a compositional generative model of humans and objects (backpacks, coats, scarves, and more) from real-world 3D scans. Our compositional model is interaction-aware, meaning the spatial relationship between humans and objects, and the mutual shape change by physical contact is fully incorporated. The key challenge is that, since humans and objects are in contact, their 3D scans are merged into a single piece. To decompose them without manual annotations, we propose to leverage two sets of 3D scans of a single person with and without objects. Our approach learns to decompose objects and naturally compose them back into a generative human model in an unsupervised manner. Despite our simple setup requiring only the capture of a single subject with objects, our experiments demonstrate the strong generalization of our model by enabling the natural composition of objects to diverse identities in various poses and the composition of multiple objects, which is unseen in training data. https://taeksuu.github.io/ncho/

Multi-Modal Generative AI: Multi-modal LLM, Diffusion and Beyond

Multi-modal generative AI has received increasing attention in both academia and industry. Particularly, two dominant families of techniques are: i) The multi-modal large language model (MLLM) such as GPT-4V, which shows impressive ability for multi-modal understanding; ii) The diffusion model such as Sora, which exhibits remarkable multi-modal powers, especially with respect to visual generation. As such, one natural question arises: Is it possible to have a unified model for both understanding and generation? To answer this question, in this paper, we first provide a detailed review of both MLLM and diffusion models, including their probabilistic modeling procedure, multi-modal architecture design, and advanced applications to image/video large language models as well as text-to-image/video generation. Then, we discuss the two important questions on the unified model: i) whether the unified model should adopt the auto-regressive or diffusion probabilistic modeling, and ii) whether the model should utilize a dense architecture or the Mixture of Experts(MoE) architectures to better support generation and understanding, two objectives. We further provide several possible strategies for building a unified model and analyze their potential advantages and disadvantages. We also summarize existing large-scale multi-modal datasets for better model pretraining in the future. To conclude the paper, we present several challenging future directions, which we believe can contribute to the ongoing advancement of multi-modal generative AI.

DDMI: Domain-Agnostic Latent Diffusion Models for Synthesizing High-Quality Implicit Neural Representations

Recent studies have introduced a new class of generative models for synthesizing implicit neural representations (INRs) that capture arbitrary continuous signals in various domains. These models opened the door for domain-agnostic generative models, but they often fail to achieve high-quality generation. We observed that the existing methods generate the weights of neural networks to parameterize INRs and evaluate the network with fixed positional embeddings (PEs). Arguably, this architecture limits the expressive power of generative models and results in low-quality INR generation. To address this limitation, we propose Domain-agnostic Latent Diffusion Model for INRs (DDMI) that generates adaptive positional embeddings instead of neural networks' weights. Specifically, we develop a Discrete-to-continuous space Variational AutoEncoder (D2C-VAE), which seamlessly connects discrete data and the continuous signal functions in the shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel conditioning mechanism for evaluating INRs with the hierarchically decomposed PEs to further enhance expressive power. Extensive experiments across four modalities, e.g., 2D images, 3D shapes, Neural Radiance Fields, and videos, with seven benchmark datasets, demonstrate the versatility of DDMI and its superior performance compared to the existing INR generative models.

State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing

The field of visual computing is rapidly advancing due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which unlocks unprecedented capabilities for the generation, editing, and reconstruction of images, videos, and 3D scenes. In these domains, diffusion models are the generative AI architecture of choice. Within the last year alone, the literature on diffusion-based tools and applications has seen exponential growth and relevant papers are published across the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities with new works appearing daily on arXiv. This rapid growth of the field makes it difficult to keep up with all recent developments. The goal of this state-of-the-art report (STAR) is to introduce the basic mathematical concepts of diffusion models, implementation details and design choices of the popular Stable Diffusion model, as well as overview important aspects of these generative AI tools, including personalization, conditioning, inversion, among others. Moreover, we give a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on diffusion-based generation and editing, categorized by the type of generated medium, including 2D images, videos, 3D objects, locomotion, and 4D scenes. Finally, we discuss available datasets, metrics, open challenges, and social implications. This STAR provides an intuitive starting point to explore this exciting topic for researchers, artists, and practitioners alike.

Self-Consuming Generative Models with Curated Data Provably Optimize Human Preferences

The rapid progress in generative models has resulted in impressive leaps in generation quality, blurring the lines between synthetic and real data. Web-scale datasets are now prone to the inevitable contamination by synthetic data, directly impacting the training of future generated models. Already, some theoretical results on self-consuming generative models (a.k.a., iterative retraining) have emerged in the literature, showcasing that either model collapse or stability could be possible depending on the fraction of generated data used at each retraining step. However, in practice, synthetic data is often subject to human feedback and curated by users before being used and uploaded online. For instance, many interfaces of popular text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, produce several variations of an image for a given query which can eventually be curated by the users. In this paper, we theoretically study the impact of data curation on iterated retraining of generative models and show that it can be seen as an implicit preference optimization mechanism. However, unlike standard preference optimization, the generative model does not have access to the reward function or negative samples needed for pairwise comparisons. Moreover, our study doesn't require access to the density function, only to samples. We prove that, if the data is curated according to a reward model, then the expected reward of the iterative retraining procedure is maximized. We further provide theoretical results on the stability of the retraining loop when using a positive fraction of real data at each step. Finally, we conduct illustrative experiments on both synthetic datasets and on CIFAR10 showing that such a procedure amplifies biases of the reward model.

Is Your LLM Secretly a World Model of the Internet? Model-Based Planning for Web Agents

Language agents have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating web-based tasks, though their current reactive approaches still underperform largely compared to humans. While incorporating advanced planning algorithms, particularly tree search methods, could enhance these agents' performance, implementing tree search directly on live websites poses significant safety risks and practical constraints due to irreversible actions such as confirming a purchase. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm that augments language agents with model-based planning, pioneering the innovative use of large language models (LLMs) as world models in complex web environments. Our method, WebDreamer, builds on the key insight that LLMs inherently encode comprehensive knowledge about website structures and functionalities. Specifically, WebDreamer uses LLMs to simulate outcomes for each candidate action (e.g., "what would happen if I click this button?") using natural language descriptions, and then evaluates these imagined outcomes to determine the optimal action at each step. Empirical results on two representative web agent benchmarks with online interaction -- VisualWebArena and Mind2Web-live -- demonstrate that WebDreamer achieves substantial improvements over reactive baselines. By establishing the viability of LLMs as world models in web environments, this work lays the groundwork for a paradigm shift in automated web interaction. More broadly, our findings open exciting new avenues for future research into 1) optimizing LLMs specifically for world modeling in complex, dynamic environments, and 2) model-based speculative planning for language agents.

PFGM++: Unlocking the Potential of Physics-Inspired Generative Models

We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N{+}D dimensional space while still controlling the progression with a simple scalar norm of the D additional variables. The new models reduce to PFGM when D{=}1 and to diffusion models when D{to}infty. The flexibility of choosing D allows us to trade off robustness against rigidity as increasing D results in more concentrated coupling between the data and the additional variable norms. We dispense with the biased large batch field targets used in PFGM and instead provide an unbiased perturbation-based objective similar to diffusion models. To explore different choices of D, we provide a direct alignment method for transferring well-tuned hyperparameters from diffusion models (D{to} infty) to any finite D values. Our experiments show that models with finite D can be superior to previous state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR-10/FFHQ 64{times}64 datasets, with FID scores of 1.91/2.43 when D{=}2048/128. In class-conditional setting, D{=}2048 yields current state-of-the-art FID of 1.74 on CIFAR-10. In addition, we demonstrate that models with smaller D exhibit improved robustness against modeling errors. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/pfgmpp

Generative AI for Medical Imaging: extending the MONAI Framework

Recent advances in generative AI have brought incredible breakthroughs in several areas, including medical imaging. These generative models have tremendous potential not only to help safely share medical data via synthetic datasets but also to perform an array of diverse applications, such as anomaly detection, image-to-image translation, denoising, and MRI reconstruction. However, due to the complexity of these models, their implementation and reproducibility can be difficult. This complexity can hinder progress, act as a use barrier, and dissuade the comparison of new methods with existing works. In this study, we present MONAI Generative Models, a freely available open-source platform that allows researchers and developers to easily train, evaluate, and deploy generative models and related applications. Our platform reproduces state-of-art studies in a standardised way involving different architectures (such as diffusion models, autoregressive transformers, and GANs), and provides pre-trained models for the community. We have implemented these models in a generalisable fashion, illustrating that their results can be extended to 2D or 3D scenarios, including medical images with different modalities (like CT, MRI, and X-Ray data) and from different anatomical areas. Finally, we adopt a modular and extensible approach, ensuring long-term maintainability and the extension of current applications for future features.

Generative Visual Prompt: Unifying Distributional Control of Pre-Trained Generative Models

Generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) learn the underlying data distribution in an unsupervised manner. However, many applications of interest require sampling from a particular region of the output space or sampling evenly over a range of characteristics. For efficient sampling in these scenarios, we propose Generative Visual Prompt (PromptGen), a framework for distributional control over pre-trained generative models by incorporating knowledge of other off-the-shelf models. PromptGen defines control as energy-based models (EBMs) and samples images in a feed-forward manner by approximating the EBM with invertible neural networks, avoiding optimization at inference. Our experiments demonstrate how PromptGen can efficiently sample from several unconditional generative models (e.g., StyleGAN2, StyleNeRF, diffusion autoencoder, NVAE) in a controlled or/and de-biased manner using various off-the-shelf models: (1) with the CLIP model as control, PromptGen can sample images guided by text, (2) with image classifiers as control, PromptGen can de-bias generative models across a set of attributes or attribute combinations, and (3) with inverse graphics models as control, PromptGen can sample images of the same identity in different poses. (4) Finally, PromptGen reveals that the CLIP model shows a "reporting bias" when used as control, and PromptGen can further de-bias this controlled distribution in an iterative manner. The code is available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/Generative-Visual-Prompt.

DrivingWorld: Constructing World Model for Autonomous Driving via Video GPT

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

AI-Generated Images as Data Source: The Dawn of Synthetic Era

The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .

Emergence of Hidden Capabilities: Exploring Learning Dynamics in Concept Space

Modern generative models demonstrate impressive capabilities, likely stemming from an ability to identify and manipulate abstract concepts underlying their training data. However, fundamental questions remain: what determines the concepts a model learns, the order in which it learns them, and its ability to manipulate those concepts? To address these questions, we propose analyzing a model's learning dynamics via a framework we call the concept space, where each axis represents an independent concept underlying the data generating process. By characterizing learning dynamics in this space, we identify how the speed at which a concept is learned, and hence the order of concept learning, is controlled by properties of the data we term concept signal. Further, we observe moments of sudden turns in the direction of a model's learning dynamics in concept space. Surprisingly, these points precisely correspond to the emergence of hidden capabilities, i.e., where latent interventions show the model possesses the capability to manipulate a concept, but these capabilities cannot yet be elicited via naive input prompting. While our results focus on synthetically defined toy datasets, we hypothesize a general claim on emergence of hidden capabilities may hold: generative models possess latent capabilities that emerge suddenly and consistently during training, though a model might not exhibit these capabilities under naive input prompting.

GenCA: A Text-conditioned Generative Model for Realistic and Drivable Codec Avatars

Photo-realistic and controllable 3D avatars are crucial for various applications such as virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR), telepresence, gaming, and film production. Traditional methods for avatar creation often involve time-consuming scanning and reconstruction processes for each avatar, which limits their scalability. Furthermore, these methods do not offer the flexibility to sample new identities or modify existing ones. On the other hand, by learning a strong prior from data, generative models provide a promising alternative to traditional reconstruction methods, easing the time constraints for both data capture and processing. Additionally, generative methods enable downstream applications beyond reconstruction, such as editing and stylization. Nonetheless, the research on generative 3D avatars is still in its infancy, and therefore current methods still have limitations such as creating static avatars, lacking photo-realism, having incomplete facial details, or having limited drivability. To address this, we propose a text-conditioned generative model that can generate photo-realistic facial avatars of diverse identities, with more complete details like hair, eyes and mouth interior, and which can be driven through a powerful non-parametric latent expression space. Specifically, we integrate the generative and editing capabilities of latent diffusion models with a strong prior model for avatar expression driving. Our model can generate and control high-fidelity avatars, even those out-of-distribution. We also highlight its potential for downstream applications, including avatar editing and single-shot avatar reconstruction.

I2D2: Inductive Knowledge Distillation with NeuroLogic and Self-Imitation

Pre-trained language models, despite their rapid advancements powered by scale, still fall short of robust commonsense capabilities. And yet, scale appears to be the winning recipe; after all, the largest models seem to have acquired the largest amount of commonsense capabilities. Or is it? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of a seemingly impossible match: can smaller language models with dismal commonsense capabilities (i.e., GPT-2), ever win over models that are orders of magnitude larger and better (i.e., GPT-3), if the smaller models are powered with novel commonsense distillation algorithms? The key intellectual question we ask here is whether it is possible, if at all, to design a learning algorithm that does not benefit from scale, yet leads to a competitive level of commonsense acquisition. In this work, we study the generative models of commonsense knowledge, focusing on the task of generating generics, statements of commonsense facts about everyday concepts, e.g., birds can fly. We introduce a novel commonsense distillation framework, I2D2, that loosely follows the Symbolic Knowledge Distillation of West et al. but breaks the dependence on the extreme-scale models as the teacher model by two innovations: (1) the novel adaptation of NeuroLogic Decoding to enhance the generation quality of the weak, off-the-shelf language models, and (2) self-imitation learning to iteratively learn from the model's own enhanced commonsense acquisition capabilities. Empirical results suggest that scale is not the only way, as novel algorithms can be a promising alternative. Moreover, our study leads to a new corpus of generics, Gen-A-Tomic, that is of the largest and highest quality available to date.