Daily Papers

Biological intelligence systems of animals perceive the world by integrating information in different modalities and processing simultaneously for various tasks. In contrast, current machine learning research follows a task-specific paradigm, leading to inefficient collaboration between tasks and high marginal costs of developing perception models for new tasks. In this paper, we present a generic perception architecture named Uni-Perceiver, which processes a variety of modalities and tasks with unified modeling and shared parameters. Specifically, Uni-Perceiver encodes different task inputs and targets from arbitrary modalities into a unified representation space with a modality-agnostic Transformer encoder and lightweight modality-specific tokenizers. Different perception tasks are modeled as the same formulation, that is, finding the maximum likelihood target for each input through the similarity of their representations. The model is pre-trained on several uni-modal and multi-modal tasks, and evaluated on a variety of downstream tasks, including novel tasks that did not appear in the pre-training stage. Results show that our pre-trained model without any tuning can achieve reasonable performance even on novel tasks. The performance can be improved to a level close to state-of-the-art methods by conducting prompt tuning on 1% of downstream task data. Full-data fine-tuning further delivers results on par with or better than state-of-the-art results. Code shall be released.

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is far less likely to predict false detections where nothing exists. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms all other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, by a wide margin when generalizing from natural images to artwork on both the Picasso Dataset and the People-Art Dataset.

In this work, we present Uni3DL, a unified model for 3D and Language understanding. Distinct from existing unified vision-language models in 3D which are limited in task variety and predominantly dependent on projected multi-view images, Uni3DL operates directly on point clouds. This approach significantly expands the range of supported tasks in 3D, encompassing both vision and vision-language tasks in 3D. At the core of Uni3DL, a query transformer is designed to learn task-agnostic semantic and mask outputs by attending to 3D visual features, and a task router is employed to selectively generate task-specific outputs required for diverse tasks. With a unified architecture, our Uni3DL model enjoys seamless task decomposition and substantial parameter sharing across tasks. Uni3DL has been rigorously evaluated across diverse 3D vision-language understanding tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, visual grounding, 3D captioning, and text-3D cross-modal retrieval. It demonstrates performance on par with or surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. We hope our benchmark and Uni3DL model will serve as a solid step to ease future research in unified models in the realm of 3D and language understanding. Project page: https://uni3dl.github.io.

Self-supervised pre-training techniques have achieved remarkable progress in Document AI. Most multimodal pre-trained models use a masked language modeling objective to learn bidirectional representations on the text modality, but they differ in pre-training objectives for the image modality. This discrepancy adds difficulty to multimodal representation learning. In this paper, we propose LayoutLMv3 to pre-train multimodal Transformers for Document AI with unified text and image masking. Additionally, LayoutLMv3 is pre-trained with a word-patch alignment objective to learn cross-modal alignment by predicting whether the corresponding image patch of a text word is masked. The simple unified architecture and training objectives make LayoutLMv3 a general-purpose pre-trained model for both text-centric and image-centric Document AI tasks. Experimental results show that LayoutLMv3 achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in text-centric tasks, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document visual question answering, but also in image-centric tasks such as document image classification and document layout analysis. The code and models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutlmv3.

Drug discovery typically consists of multiple steps, including identifying a target protein key to a disease's etiology, validating that interacting with this target could prevent symptoms or cure the disease, discovering a small molecule or biologic therapeutic to interact with it, and optimizing the candidate molecule through a complex landscape of required properties. Drug discovery related tasks often involve prediction and generation while considering multiple entities that potentially interact, which poses a challenge for typical AI models. For this purpose we present MAMMAL - Molecular Aligned Multi-Modal Architecture and Language - a method that we applied to create a versatile multi-task foundation model ibm/biomed.omics.bl.sm.ma-ted-458m that learns from large-scale biological datasets (2 billion samples) across diverse modalities, including proteins, small molecules, and genes. We introduce a prompt syntax that supports a wide range of classification, regression, and generation tasks. It allows combining different modalities and entity types as inputs and/or outputs. Our model handles combinations of tokens and scalars and enables the generation of small molecules and proteins, property prediction, and transcriptomic lab test predictions. We evaluated the model on 11 diverse downstream tasks spanning different steps within a typical drug discovery pipeline, where it reaches new SOTA in 9 tasks and is comparable to SOTA in 2 tasks. This performance is achieved while using a unified architecture serving all tasks, in contrast to the original SOTA performance achieved using tailored architectures. The model code and pretrained weights are publicly available at https://github.com/BiomedSciAI/biomed-multi-alignment and https://huggingface.co/ibm/biomed.omics.bl.sm.ma-ted-458m.

This work presents DAVINCI, a unified architecture for single-stage Computer-Aided Design (CAD) sketch parameterization and constraint inference directly from raster sketch images. By jointly learning both outputs, DAVINCI minimizes error accumulation and enhances the performance of constrained CAD sketch inference. Notably, DAVINCI achieves state-of-the-art results on the large-scale SketchGraphs dataset, demonstrating effectiveness on both precise and hand-drawn raster CAD sketches. To reduce DAVINCI's reliance on large-scale annotated datasets, we explore the efficacy of CAD sketch augmentations. We introduce Constraint-Preserving Transformations (CPTs), i.e. random permutations of the parametric primitives of a CAD sketch that preserve its constraints. This data augmentation strategy allows DAVINCI to achieve reasonable performance when trained with only 0.1% of the SketchGraphs dataset. Furthermore, this work contributes a new version of SketchGraphs, augmented with CPTs. The newly introduced CPTSketchGraphs dataset includes 80 million CPT-augmented sketches, thus providing a rich resource for future research in the CAD sketch domain.

Recently, a few open-vocabulary methods have been proposed by employing a unified architecture to tackle generic segmentation and detection tasks. However, their performance still lags behind the task-specific models due to the conflict between different tasks, and their open-vocabulary capability is limited due to the inadequate use of CLIP. To address these challenges, we present a universal transformer-based framework, abbreviated as OpenSD, which utilizes the same architecture and network parameters to handle open-vocabulary segmentation and detection tasks. First, we introduce a decoder decoupled learning strategy to alleviate the semantic conflict between thing and staff categories so that each individual task can be learned more effectively under the same framework. Second, to better leverage CLIP for end-to-end segmentation and detection, we propose dual classifiers to handle the in-vocabulary domain and out-of-vocabulary domain, respectively. The text encoder is further trained to be region-aware for both thing and stuff categories through decoupled prompt learning, enabling them to filter out duplicated and low-quality predictions, which is important to end-to-end segmentation and detection. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple datasets under various circumstances. The results demonstrate that OpenSD outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary segmentation and detection methods in both closed- and open-vocabulary settings. Code is available at https://github.com/strongwolf/OpenSD

Point clouds have shown significant potential in various domains, including Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). However, existing approaches either rely on dense point clouds to achieve high localization accuracy or use generalized descriptors to reduce map size. Unfortunately, these two aspects seem to conflict with each other. To address this limitation, we propose a unified architecture, DeepPointMap, achieving excellent preference on both aspects. We utilize neural network to extract highly representative and sparse neural descriptors from point clouds, enabling memory-efficient map representation and accurate multi-scale localization tasks (e.g., odometry and loop-closure). Moreover, we showcase the versatility of our framework by extending it to more challenging multi-agent collaborative SLAM. The promising results obtained in these scenarios further emphasize the effectiveness and potential of our approach.

The integration of molecule and language has garnered increasing attention in molecular science. Recent advancements in Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated potential for the comprehensive modeling of molecule and language. However, existing works exhibit notable limitations. Most existing works overlook the modeling of 3D information, which is crucial for understanding molecular structures and also functions. While some attempts have been made to leverage external structure encoding modules to inject the 3D molecular information into LMs, there exist obvious difficulties that hinder the integration of molecular structure and language text, such as modality alignment and separate tuning. To bridge this gap, we propose 3D-MolT5, a unified framework designed to model both 1D molecular sequence and 3D molecular structure. The key innovation lies in our methodology for mapping fine-grained 3D substructure representations (based on 3D molecular fingerprints) to a specialized 3D token vocabulary for 3D-MolT5. This 3D structure token vocabulary enables the seamless combination of 1D sequence and 3D structure representations in a tokenized format, allowing 3D-MolT5 to encode molecular sequence (SELFIES), molecular structure, and text sequences within a unified architecture. Alongside, we further introduce 1D and 3D joint pre-training to enhance the model's comprehension of these diverse modalities in a joint representation space and better generalize to various tasks for our foundation model. Through instruction tuning on multiple downstream datasets, our proposed 3D-MolT5 shows superior performance than existing methods in molecular property prediction, molecule captioning, and text-based molecule generation tasks. Our code will be available on GitHub soon.

In this work, we introduce FaceXformer, an end-to-end unified transformer model for a comprehensive range of facial analysis tasks such as face parsing, landmark detection, head pose estimation, attributes recognition, and estimation of age, gender, race, and landmarks visibility. Conventional methods in face analysis have often relied on task-specific designs and preprocessing techniques, which limit their approach to a unified architecture. Unlike these conventional methods, our FaceXformer leverages a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture where each task is treated as a learnable token, enabling the integration of multiple tasks within a single framework. Moreover, we propose a parameter-efficient decoder, FaceX, which jointly processes face and task tokens, thereby learning generalized and robust face representations across different tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a single model capable of handling all these facial analysis tasks using transformers. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of effective backbones for unified face task processing and evaluated different task queries and the synergy between them. We conduct experiments against state-of-the-art specialized models and previous multi-task models in both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations across multiple benchmarks. Additionally, our model effectively handles images "in-the-wild," demonstrating its robustness and generalizability across eight different tasks, all while maintaining the real-time performance of 37 FPS.

Large-scale Transformer models bring significant improvements for various downstream vision language tasks with a unified architecture. The performance improvements come with increasing model size, resulting in slow inference speed and increased cost for severing. While some certain predictions benefit from the full complexity of the large-scale model, not all of inputs need the same amount of computation to conduct, potentially leading to computation resource waste. To handle this challenge, early exiting is proposed to adaptively allocate computational power in term of input complexity to improve inference efficiency. The existing early exiting strategies usually adopt output confidence based on intermediate layers as a proxy of input complexity to incur the decision of skipping following layers. However, such strategies cannot apply to encoder in the widely-used unified architecture with both encoder and decoder due to difficulty of output confidence estimation in the encoder. It is suboptimal in term of saving computation power to ignore the early exiting in encoder component. To handle this challenge, we propose a novel early exiting strategy for unified visual language models, which allows dynamically skip the layers in encoder and decoder simultaneously in term of input layer-wise similarities with multiple times of early exiting, namely MuE. By decomposing the image and text modalities in the encoder, MuE is flexible and can skip different layers in term of modalities, advancing the inference efficiency while minimizing performance drop. Experiments on the SNLI-VE and MS COCO datasets show that the proposed approach MuE can reduce expected inference time by up to 50\% and 40\% while maintaining 99\% and 96\% performance respectively.

In the domain of audio processing, Transfer Learning has facilitated the rise of Self-Supervised Learning and Zero-Shot Learning techniques. These approaches have led to the development of versatile models capable of tackling a wide array of tasks, while delivering state-of-the-art performance. However, current models inherently lack the capacity to produce the requisite language for open-ended tasks, such as Audio Captioning or Audio Question & Answering. We introduce Pengi, a novel Audio Language Model that leverages Transfer Learning by framing all audio tasks as text-generation tasks. It takes as input, an audio recording, and text, and generates free-form text as output. The input audio is represented as a sequence of continuous embeddings by an audio encoder. A text encoder does the same for the corresponding text input. Both sequences are combined as a prefix to prompt a pre-trained frozen language model. The unified architecture of Pengi enables open-ended tasks and close-ended tasks without any additional fine-tuning or task-specific extensions. When evaluated on 22 downstream tasks, our approach yields state-of-the-art performance in several of them. Our results show that connecting language models with audio models is a major step towards general-purpose audio understanding

We present the Decoupled VIdeo Segmentation (DVIS) framework, a novel approach for the challenging task of universal video segmentation, including video instance segmentation (VIS), video semantic segmentation (VSS), and video panoptic segmentation (VPS). Unlike previous methods that model video segmentation in an end-to-end manner, our approach decouples video segmentation into three cascaded sub-tasks: segmentation, tracking, and refinement. This decoupling design allows for simpler and more effective modeling of the spatio-temporal representations of objects, especially in complex scenes and long videos. Accordingly, we introduce two novel components: the referring tracker and the temporal refiner. These components track objects frame by frame and model spatio-temporal representations based on pre-aligned features. To improve the tracking capability of DVIS, we propose a denoising training strategy and introduce contrastive learning, resulting in a more robust framework named DVIS++. Furthermore, we evaluate DVIS++ in various settings, including open vocabulary and using a frozen pre-trained backbone. By integrating CLIP with DVIS++, we present OV-DVIS++, the first open-vocabulary universal video segmentation framework. We conduct extensive experiments on six mainstream benchmarks, including the VIS, VSS, and VPS datasets. Using a unified architecture, DVIS++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art specialized methods on these benchmarks in both close- and open-vocabulary settings. Code:~https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS_Plus.

PennyLane is a Python 3 software framework for differentiable programming of quantum computers. The library provides a unified architecture for near-term quantum computing devices, supporting both qubit and continuous-variable paradigms. PennyLane's core feature is the ability to compute gradients of variational quantum circuits in a way that is compatible with classical techniques such as backpropagation. PennyLane thus extends the automatic differentiation algorithms common in optimization and machine learning to include quantum and hybrid computations. A plugin system makes the framework compatible with any gate-based quantum simulator or hardware. We provide plugins for hardware providers including the Xanadu Cloud, Amazon Braket, and IBM Quantum, allowing PennyLane optimizations to be run on publicly accessible quantum devices. On the classical front, PennyLane interfaces with accelerated machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and Autograd. PennyLane can be used for the optimization of variational quantum eigensolvers, quantum approximate optimization, quantum machine learning models, and many other applications.

Building scalable vision-language models to learn from diverse, multimodal data remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce an Efficient Vision-languagE foundation model, namely EVE, which is one unified multimodal Transformer pre-trained solely by one unified pre-training task. Specifically, EVE encodes both vision and language within a shared Transformer network integrated with modality-aware sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules, which capture modality-specific information by selectively switching to different experts. To unify pre-training tasks of vision and language, EVE performs masked signal modeling on image-text pairs to reconstruct masked signals, i.e., image pixels and text tokens, given visible signals. This simple yet effective pre-training objective accelerates training by 3.5x compared to the model pre-trained with Image-Text Contrastive and Image-Text Matching losses. Owing to the combination of the unified architecture and pre-training task, EVE is easy to scale up, enabling better downstream performance with fewer resources and faster training speed. Despite its simplicity, EVE achieves state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language downstream tasks, including visual question answering, visual reasoning, and image-text retrieval.

Temporal Action Detection (TAD) focuses on detecting pre-defined actions, while Moment Retrieval (MR) aims to identify the events described by open-ended natural language within untrimmed videos. Despite that they focus on different events, we observe they have a significant connection. For instance, most descriptions in MR involve multiple actions from TAD. In this paper, we aim to investigate the potential synergy between TAD and MR. Firstly, we propose a unified architecture, termed Unified Moment Detection (UniMD), for both TAD and MR. It transforms the inputs of the two tasks, namely actions for TAD or events for MR, into a common embedding space, and utilizes two novel query-dependent decoders to generate a uniform output of classification score and temporal segments. Secondly, we explore the efficacy of two task fusion learning approaches, pre-training and co-training, in order to enhance the mutual benefits between TAD and MR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed task fusion learning scheme enables the two tasks to help each other and outperform the separately trained counterparts. Impressively, UniMD achieves state-of-the-art results on three paired datasets Ego4D, Charades-STA, and ActivityNet. Our code is available at https://github.com/yingsen1/UniMD.

As the task of 2D-to-3D reconstruction has gained significant attention in various real-world scenarios, it becomes crucial to be able to generate high-quality point clouds. Despite the recent success of deep learning models in generating point clouds, there are still challenges in producing high-fidelity results due to the disparities between images and point clouds. While vision transformers (ViT) and diffusion models have shown promise in various vision tasks, their benefits for reconstructing point clouds from images have not been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we first propose a neat and powerful architecture called DiffPoint that combines ViT and diffusion models for the task of point cloud reconstruction. At each diffusion step, we divide the noisy point clouds into irregular patches. Then, using a standard ViT backbone that treats all inputs as tokens (including time information, image embeddings, and noisy patches), we train our model to predict target points based on input images. We evaluate DiffPoint on both single-view and multi-view reconstruction tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we introduce a unified and flexible feature fusion module for aggregating image features from single or multiple input images. Furthermore, our work demonstrates the feasibility of applying unified architectures across languages and images to improve 3D reconstruction tasks.

Generating 3D scenes is a challenging open problem, which requires synthesizing plausible content that is fully consistent in 3D space. While recent methods such as neural radiance fields excel at view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, they cannot synthesize plausible details in unobserved regions since they lack a generative capability. Conversely, existing generative methods are typically not capable of reconstructing detailed, large-scale scenes in the wild, as they use limited-capacity 3D scene representations, require aligned camera poses, or rely on additional regularizers. In this work, we introduce the first diffusion model able to perform fast, detailed reconstruction and generation of real-world 3D scenes. To achieve this, we make three contributions. First, we introduce a new neural scene representation, IB-planes, that can efficiently and accurately represent large 3D scenes, dynamically allocating more capacity as needed to capture details visible in each image. Second, we propose a denoising-diffusion framework to learn a prior over this novel 3D scene representation, using only 2D images without the need for any additional supervision signal such as masks or depths. This supports 3D reconstruction and generation in a unified architecture. Third, we develop a principled approach to avoid trivial 3D solutions when integrating the image-based rendering with the diffusion model, by dropping out representations of some images. We evaluate the model on several challenging datasets of real and synthetic images, and demonstrate superior results on generation, novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

Vision transformers have gained popularity recently, leading to the development of new vision backbones with improved features and consistent performance gains. However, these advancements are not solely attributable to novel feature transformation designs; certain benefits also arise from advanced network-level and block-level architectures. This paper aims to identify the real gains of popular convolution and attention operators through a detailed study. We find that the key difference among these feature transformation modules, such as attention or convolution, lies in their spatial feature aggregation approach, known as the "spatial token mixer" (STM). To facilitate an impartial comparison, we introduce a unified architecture to neutralize the impact of divergent network-level and block-level designs. Subsequently, various STMs are integrated into this unified framework for comprehensive comparative analysis. Our experiments on various tasks and an analysis of inductive bias show a significant performance boost due to advanced network-level and block-level designs, but performance differences persist among different STMs. Our detailed analysis also reveals various findings about different STMs, such as effective receptive fields and invariance tests. All models and codes used in this study are publicly available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/STM-Evaluation.

It is well known that LLM-based systems are data-hungry. Recent LLM-based TTS works typically employ complex data processing pipelines to obtain high-quality training data. These sophisticated pipelines require excellent models at each stage (e.g., speech denoising, speech enhancement, speaker diarization, and punctuation models), which themselves demand high-quality training data and are rarely open-sourced. Even with state-of-the-art models, issues persist, such as incomplete background noise removal and misalignment between punctuation and actual speech pauses. Moreover, the stringent filtering strategies often retain only 10-30\% of the original data, significantly impeding data scaling efforts. In this work, we leverage a noise-robust audio tokenizer (S3Tokenizer) to design a simplified yet effective TTS data processing pipeline that maintains data quality while substantially reducing data acquisition costs, achieving a data retention rate of over 50\%. Beyond data scaling challenges, LLM-based TTS systems also incur higher deployment costs compared to conventional approaches. Current systems typically use LLMs solely for text-to-token generation, while requiring separate models (e.g., flow matching models) for token-to-waveform generation, which cannot be directly executed by LLM inference engines, further complicating deployment. To address these challenges, we eliminate redundant modules in both LLM and flow components, replacing the flow model backbone with an LLM architecture. Building upon this simplified flow backbone, we propose a unified architecture for both streaming and non-streaming inference, significantly reducing deployment costs. Finally, we explore the feasibility of unifying TTS and ASR tasks using the same data for training, thanks to the simplified pipeline and the S3Tokenizer that reduces the quality requirements for TTS training data.

In this paper, we study Multiscale Vision Transformers (MViTv2) as a unified architecture for image and video classification, as well as object detection. We present an improved version of MViT that incorporates decomposed relative positional embeddings and residual pooling connections. We instantiate this architecture in five sizes and evaluate it for ImageNet classification, COCO detection and Kinetics video recognition where it outperforms prior work. We further compare MViTv2s' pooling attention to window attention mechanisms where it outperforms the latter in accuracy/compute. Without bells-and-whistles, MViTv2 has state-of-the-art performance in 3 domains: 88.8% accuracy on ImageNet classification, 58.7 boxAP on COCO object detection as well as 86.1% on Kinetics-400 video classification. Code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/mvit.

Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds and well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption.

Multi-hand semantic grasp generation aims to generate feasible and semantically appropriate grasp poses for different robotic hands based on natural language instructions. Although the task is highly valuable, due to the lack of multi-hand grasp datasets with fine-grained contact description between robotic hands and objects, it is still a long-standing difficult task. In this paper, we present Multi-GraspSet, the first large-scale multi-hand grasp dataset with automatically contact annotations. Based on Multi-GraspSet, we propose Multi-GraspLLM, a unified language-guided grasp generation framework. It leverages large language models (LLM) to handle variable-length sequences, generating grasp poses for diverse robotic hands in a single unified architecture. Multi-GraspLLM first aligns the encoded point cloud features and text features into a unified semantic space. It then generates grasp bin tokens which are subsequently converted into grasp pose for each robotic hand via hand-aware linear mapping. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods on Multi-GraspSet. More information can be found on our project page https://multi-graspllm.github.io.

Content-aware graphic layout generation aims to automatically arrange visual elements along with a given content, such as an e-commerce product image. In this paper, we argue that the current layout generation approaches suffer from the limited training data for the high-dimensional layout structure. We show that a simple retrieval augmentation can significantly improve the generation quality. Our model, which is named Retrieval-Augmented Layout Transformer (RALF), retrieves nearest neighbor layout examples based on an input image and feeds these results into an autoregressive generator. Our model can apply retrieval augmentation to various controllable generation tasks and yield high-quality layouts within a unified architecture. Our extensive experiments show that RALF successfully generates content-aware layouts in both constrained and unconstrained settings and significantly outperforms the baselines.

To advance models of multimodal context, we introduce a simple yet powerful neural architecture for data that combines vision and natural language. The "Bounding Boxes in Text Transformer" (B2T2) also leverages referential information binding words to portions of the image in a single unified architecture. B2T2 is highly effective on the Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark (https://visualcommonsense.com), achieving a new state-of-the-art with a 25% relative reduction in error rate compared to published baselines and obtaining the best performance to date on the public leaderboard (as of May 22, 2019). A detailed ablation analysis shows that the early integration of the visual features into the text analysis is key to the effectiveness of the new architecture. A reference implementation of our models is provided (https://github.com/google-research/language/tree/master/language/question_answering/b2t2).

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on multimodal financial data have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in various financial tasks. However, they often struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets, such as trading, where complex agentic approaches are required to improve decision-making. To address this, we propose FLAG-Trader, a unified architecture integrating linguistic processing (via LLMs) with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization, in which a partially fine-tuned LLM acts as the policy network, leveraging pre-trained knowledge while adapting to the financial domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Through policy gradient optimization driven by trading rewards, our framework not only enhances LLM performance in trading but also improves results on other financial-domain tasks. We present extensive empirical evidence to validate these enhancements.

Deep learning for time series forecasting has seen significant advancements over the past decades. However, despite the success of large-scale pre-training in language and vision domains, pre-trained time series models remain limited in scale and operate at a high cost, hindering the development of larger capable forecasting models in real-world applications. In response, we introduce Time-MoE, a scalable and unified architecture designed to pre-train larger, more capable forecasting foundation models while reducing inference costs. By leveraging a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) design, Time-MoE enhances computational efficiency by activating only a subset of networks for each prediction, reducing computational load while maintaining high model capacity. This allows Time-MoE to scale effectively without a corresponding increase in inference costs. Time-MoE comprises a family of decoder-only transformer models that operate in an auto-regressive manner and support flexible forecasting horizons with varying input context lengths. We pre-trained these models on our newly introduced large-scale data Time-300B, which spans over 9 domains and encompassing over 300 billion time points. For the first time, we scaled a time series foundation model up to 2.4 billion parameters, achieving significantly improved forecasting precision. Our results validate the applicability of scaling laws for training tokens and model size in the context of time series forecasting. Compared to dense models with the same number of activated parameters or equivalent computation budgets, our models consistently outperform them by large margin. These advancements position Time-MoE as a state-of-the-art solution for tackling real-world time series forecasting challenges with superior capability, efficiency, and flexibility.

Recently, stable diffusion (SD) models have typically flourished in the field of image synthesis and personalized editing, with a range of photorealistic and unprecedented images being successfully generated. As a result, widespread interest has been ignited to develop and use various SD-based tools for visual content creation. However, the exposure of AI-created content on public platforms could raise both legal and ethical risks. In this regard, the traditional methods of adding watermarks to the already generated images (i.e. post-processing) may face a dilemma (e.g., being erased or modified) in terms of copyright protection and content monitoring, since the powerful image inversion and text-to-image editing techniques have been widely explored in SD-based methods. In this work, we propose a Safe and high-traceable Stable Diffusion framework (namely Safe-SD) to adaptively implant the graphical watermarks (e.g., QR code) into the imperceptible structure-related pixels during the generative diffusion process for supporting text-driven invisible watermarking and detection. Different from the previous high-cost injection-then-detection training framework, we design a simple and unified architecture, which makes it possible to simultaneously train watermark injection and detection in a single network, greatly improving the efficiency and convenience of use. Moreover, to further support text-driven generative watermarking and deeply explore its robustness and high-traceability, we elaborately design lambda sampling and encryption algorithm to fine-tune a latent diffuser wrapped by a VAE for balancing high-fidelity image synthesis and high-traceable watermark detection. We present our quantitative and qualitative results on two representative datasets LSUN, COCO and FFHQ, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance of Safe-SD and showing it significantly outperforms the previous approaches.

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have greatly enhanced their proficiency in 2D visual understanding tasks, enabling them to effectively process and understand images and videos. However, the development of LMMs with 3D-awareness for 3D scene understanding has been hindered by the lack of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets and powerful 3D encoders. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective framework called LLaVA-3D. Leveraging the strong 2D understanding priors from LLaVA, our LLaVA-3D efficiently adapts LLaVA for 3D scene understanding without compromising 2D understanding capabilities. To achieve this, we employ a simple yet effective representation, 3D Patch, which connects 2D CLIP patch features with their corresponding positions in 3D space. By integrating the 3D Patches into 2D LMMs and employing joint 2D and 3D vision-language instruction tuning, we establish a unified architecture for both 2D image understanding and 3D scene understanding. Experimental results show that LLaVA-3D converges 3.5x faster than existing 3D LMMs when trained on 3D vision-language datasets. Moreover, LLaVA-3D not only achieves state-of-the-art performance across various 3D tasks but also maintains comparable 2D image understanding and vision-language conversation capabilities with LLaVA.

This paper introduces BiMediX2, a bilingual (Arabic-English) Bio-Medical EXpert Large Multimodal Model (LMM) with a unified architecture that integrates text and visual modalities, enabling advanced image understanding and medical applications. BiMediX2 leverages the Llama3.1 architecture and integrates text and visual capabilities to facilitate seamless interactions in both English and Arabic, supporting text-based inputs and multi-turn conversations involving medical images. The model is trained on an extensive bilingual healthcare dataset consisting of 1.6M samples of diverse medical interactions for both text and image modalities, mixed in Arabic and English. We also propose the first bilingual GPT-4o based medical LMM benchmark named BiMed-MBench. BiMediX2 is benchmarked on both text-based and image-based tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across several medical benchmarks. It outperforms recent state-of-the-art models in medical LLM evaluation benchmarks. Our model also sets a new benchmark in multimodal medical evaluations with over 9% improvement in English and over 20% in Arabic evaluations. Additionally, it surpasses GPT-4 by around 9% in UPHILL factual accuracy evaluations and excels in various medical Visual Question Answering, Report Generation, and Report Summarization tasks. The project page including source code and the trained model, is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/BiMediX2.

Reading text from images (either natural scenes or documents) has been a long-standing research topic for decades, due to the high technical challenge and wide application range. Previously, individual specialist models are developed to tackle the sub-tasks of text reading (e.g., scene text recognition, handwritten text recognition and mathematical expression recognition). However, such specialist models usually cannot effectively generalize across different sub-tasks. Recently, generalist models (such as GPT-4V), trained on tremendous data in a unified way, have shown enormous potential in reading text in various scenarios, but with the drawbacks of limited accuracy and low efficiency. In this work, we propose Platypus, a generalized specialist model for text reading. Specifically, Platypus combines the best of both worlds: being able to recognize text of various forms with a single unified architecture, while achieving excellent accuracy and high efficiency. To better exploit the advantage of Platypus, we also construct a text reading dataset (called Worms), the images of which are curated from previous datasets and partially re-labeled. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed Platypus model. Model and data will be made publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/OCR/Platypus.

Motivated by the paradigm of reservoir computing, we consider randomly initialized controlled ResNets defined as Euler-discretizations of neural controlled differential equations (Neural CDEs), a unified architecture which enconpasses both RNNs and ResNets. We show that in the infinite-width-depth limit and under proper scaling, these architectures converge weakly to Gaussian processes indexed on some spaces of continuous paths and with kernels satisfying certain partial differential equations (PDEs) varying according to the choice of activation function, extending the results of Hayou (2022); Hayou & Yang (2023) to the controlled and homogeneous case. In the special, homogeneous, case where the activation is the identity, we show that the equation reduces to a linear PDE and the limiting kernel agrees with the signature kernel of Salvi et al. (2021a). We name this new family of limiting kernels neural signature kernels. Finally, we show that in the infinite-depth regime, finite-width controlled ResNets converge in distribution to Neural CDEs with random vector fields which, depending on whether the weights are shared across layers, are either time-independent and Gaussian or behave like a matrix-valued Brownian motion.

Existing methods for vision-and-language learning typically require designing task-specific architectures and objectives for each task. For example, a multi-label answer classifier for visual question answering, a region scorer for referring expression comprehension, and a language decoder for image captioning, etc. To alleviate these hassles, in this work, we propose a unified framework that learns different tasks in a single architecture with the same language modeling objective, i.e., multimodal conditional text generation, where our models learn to generate labels in text based on the visual and textual inputs. On 7 popular vision-and-language benchmarks, including visual question answering, referring expression comprehension, visual commonsense reasoning, most of which have been previously modeled as discriminative tasks, our generative approach (with a single unified architecture) reaches comparable performance to recent task-specific state-of-the-art vision-and-language models. Moreover, our generative approach shows better generalization ability on questions that have rare answers. Also, we show that our framework allows multi-task learning in a single architecture with a single set of parameters, achieving similar performance to separately optimized single-task models. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/j-min/VL-T5

While most approaches to semantic reasoning have focused on improving performance, in this paper we argue that computational times are very important in order to enable real time applications such as autonomous driving. Towards this goal, we present an approach to joint classification, detection and semantic segmentation via a unified architecture where the encoder is shared amongst the three tasks. Our approach is very simple, can be trained end-to-end and performs extremely well in the challenging KITTI dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art in the road segmentation task. Our approach is also very efficient, taking less than 100 ms to perform all tasks.

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance in generating high-quality videos from text prompts or images. However, precise control over the video generation process, such as camera manipulation or content editing, remains a significant challenge. Existing methods for controlled video generation are typically limited to a single control type, lacking the flexibility to handle diverse control demands. In this paper, we introduce Diffusion as Shader (DaS), a novel approach that supports multiple video control tasks within a unified architecture. Our key insight is that achieving versatile video control necessitates leveraging 3D control signals, as videos are fundamentally 2D renderings of dynamic 3D content. Unlike prior methods limited to 2D control signals, DaS leverages 3D tracking videos as control inputs, making the video diffusion process inherently 3D-aware. This innovation allows DaS to achieve a wide range of video controls by simply manipulating the 3D tracking videos. A further advantage of using 3D tracking videos is their ability to effectively link frames, significantly enhancing the temporal consistency of the generated videos. With just 3 days of fine-tuning on 8 H800 GPUs using less than 10k videos, DaS demonstrates strong control capabilities across diverse tasks, including mesh-to-video generation, camera control, motion transfer, and object manipulation.

This book is the result of a seminar in which we reviewed multimodal approaches and attempted to create a solid overview of the field, starting with the current state-of-the-art approaches in the two subfields of Deep Learning individually. Further, modeling frameworks are discussed where one modality is transformed into the other, as well as models in which one modality is utilized to enhance representation learning for the other. To conclude the second part, architectures with a focus on handling both modalities simultaneously are introduced. Finally, we also cover other modalities as well as general-purpose multi-modal models, which are able to handle different tasks on different modalities within one unified architecture. One interesting application (Generative Art) eventually caps off this booklet.

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in image-to-image translation for two domains. However, existing approaches have limited scalability and robustness in handling more than two domains, since different models should be built independently for every pair of image domains. To address this limitation, we propose StarGAN, a novel and scalable approach that can perform image-to-image translations for multiple domains using only a single model. Such a unified model architecture of StarGAN allows simultaneous training of multiple datasets with different domains within a single network. This leads to StarGAN's superior quality of translated images compared to existing models as well as the novel capability of flexibly translating an input image to any desired target domain. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a facial attribute transfer and a facial expression synthesis tasks.

The general domain of video segmentation is currently fragmented into different tasks spanning multiple benchmarks. Despite rapid progress in the state-of-the-art, current methods are overwhelmingly task-specific and cannot conceptually generalize to other tasks. Inspired by recent approaches with multi-task capability, we propose TarViS: a novel, unified network architecture that can be applied to any task that requires segmenting a set of arbitrarily defined 'targets' in video. Our approach is flexible with respect to how tasks define these targets, since it models the latter as abstract 'queries' which are then used to predict pixel-precise target masks. A single TarViS model can be trained jointly on a collection of datasets spanning different tasks, and can hot-swap between tasks during inference without any task-specific retraining. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply TarViS to four different tasks, namely Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), Video Panoptic Segmentation (VPS), Video Object Segmentation (VOS) and Point Exemplar-guided Tracking (PET). Our unified, jointly trained model achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5/7 benchmarks spanning these four tasks, and competitive performance on the remaining two. Code and model weights are available at: https://github.com/Ali2500/TarViS

Mainstream Video-Language Pre-training models actbert,clipbert,violet consist of three parts, a video encoder, a text encoder, and a video-text fusion Transformer. They pursue better performance via utilizing heavier unimodal encoders or multimodal fusion Transformers, resulting in increased parameters with lower efficiency in downstream tasks. In this work, we for the first time introduce an end-to-end video-language model, namely all-in-one Transformer, that embeds raw video and textual signals into joint representations using a unified backbone architecture. We argue that the unique temporal information of video data turns out to be a key barrier hindering the design of a modality-agnostic Transformer. To overcome the challenge, we introduce a novel and effective token rolling operation to encode temporal representations from video clips in a non-parametric manner. The careful design enables the representation learning of both video-text multimodal inputs and unimodal inputs using a unified backbone model. Our pre-trained all-in-one Transformer is transferred to various downstream video-text tasks after fine-tuning, including text-video retrieval, video-question answering, multiple choice and visual commonsense reasoning. State-of-the-art performances with the minimal model FLOPs on nine datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the competitive counterparts. The code and pretrained model have been released in https://github.com/showlab/all-in-one.

In this paper, we introduce Janus, an autoregressive framework that unifies multimodal understanding and generation. Prior research often relies on a single visual encoder for both tasks, such as Chameleon. However, due to the differing levels of information granularity required by multimodal understanding and generation, this approach can lead to suboptimal performance, particularly in multimodal understanding. To address this issue, we decouple visual encoding into separate pathways, while still leveraging a single, unified transformer architecture for processing. The decoupling not only alleviates the conflict between the visual encoder's roles in understanding and generation, but also enhances the framework's flexibility. For instance, both the multimodal understanding and generation components can independently select their most suitable encoding methods. Experiments show that Janus surpasses previous unified model and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. The simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness of Janus make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models.

The integration of tools in LLM-based agents overcame the difficulties of standalone LLMs and traditional agents' limited capabilities. However, the conjunction of these technologies and the proposed enhancements in several state-of-the-art works followed a non-unified software architecture resulting in a lack of modularity. Indeed, they focused mainly on functionalities and overlooked the definition of the component's boundaries within the agent. This caused terminological and architectural ambiguities between researchers which we addressed in this paper by proposing a unified framework that establishes a clear foundation for LLM-based agents' development from both functional and software architectural perspectives. Our framework, LLM-Agent-UMF (LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework), clearly distinguishes between the different components of an agent, setting LLMs, and tools apart from a newly introduced element: the core-agent, playing the role of the central coordinator of the agent which comprises five modules: planning, memory, profile, action, and security, the latter often neglected in previous works. Differences in the internal structure of core-agents led us to classify them into a taxonomy of passive and active types. Based on this, we proposed different multi-core agent architectures combining unique characteristics of various individual agents. For evaluation purposes, we applied this framework to a selection of state-of-the-art agents, thereby demonstrating its alignment with their functionalities and clarifying the overlooked architectural aspects. Moreover, we thoroughly assessed four of our proposed architectures by integrating distinctive agents into hybrid active/passive core-agents' systems. This analysis provided clear insights into potential improvements and highlighted the challenges involved in the combination of specific agents.

The reference-based object segmentation tasks, namely referring image segmentation (RIS), few-shot image segmentation (FSS), referring video object segmentation (RVOS), and video object segmentation (VOS), aim to segment a specific object by utilizing either language or annotated masks as references. Despite significant progress in each respective field, current methods are task-specifically designed and developed in different directions, which hinders the activation of multi-task capabilities for these tasks. In this work, we end the current fragmented situation and propose UniRef++ to unify the four reference-based object segmentation tasks with a single architecture. At the heart of our approach is the proposed UniFusion module which performs multiway-fusion for handling different tasks with respect to their specified references. And a unified Transformer architecture is then adopted for achieving instance-level segmentation. With the unified designs, UniRef++ can be jointly trained on a broad range of benchmarks and can flexibly complete multiple tasks at run-time by specifying the corresponding references. We evaluate our unified models on various benchmarks. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed UniRef++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on RIS and RVOS, and performs competitively on FSS and VOS with a parameter-shared network. Moreover, we showcase that the proposed UniFusion module could be easily incorporated into the current advanced foundation model SAM and obtain satisfactory results with parameter-efficient finetuning. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniRef.

We present Attention Mesh, a lightweight architecture for 3D face mesh prediction that uses attention to semantically meaningful regions. Our neural network is designed for real-time on-device inference and runs at over 50 FPS on a Pixel 2 phone. Our solution enables applications like AR makeup, eye tracking and AR puppeteering that rely on highly accurate landmarks for eye and lips regions. Our main contribution is a unified network architecture that achieves the same accuracy on facial landmarks as a multi-stage cascaded approach, while being 30 percent faster.

Current autonomous driving vehicles rely mainly on their individual sensors to understand surrounding scenes and plan for future trajectories, which can be unreliable when the sensors are malfunctioning or occluded. To address this problem, cooperative perception methods via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication have been proposed, but they have tended to focus on detection and tracking. How those approaches contribute to overall cooperative planning performance is still under-explored. Inspired by recent progress using Large Language Models (LLMs) to build autonomous driving systems, we propose a novel problem setting that integrates an LLM into cooperative autonomous driving, with the proposed Vehicle-to-Vehicle Question-Answering (V2V-QA) dataset and benchmark. We also propose our baseline method Vehicle-to-Vehicle Large Language Model (V2V-LLM), which uses an LLM to fuse perception information from multiple connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and answer driving-related questions: grounding, notable object identification, and planning. Experimental results show that our proposed V2V-LLM can be a promising unified model architecture for performing various tasks in cooperative autonomous driving, and outperforms other baseline methods that use different fusion approaches. Our work also creates a new research direction that can improve the safety of future autonomous driving systems. Our project website: https://eddyhkchiu.github.io/v2vllm.github.io/ .

Video-text retrieval is a class of cross-modal representation learning problems, where the goal is to select the video which corresponds to the text query between a given text query and a pool of candidate videos. The contrastive paradigm of vision-language pretraining has shown promising success with large-scale datasets and unified transformer architecture, and demonstrated the power of a joint latent space. Despite this, the intrinsic divergence between the visual domain and textual domain is still far from being eliminated, and projecting different modalities into a joint latent space might result in the distorting of the information inside the single modality. To overcome the above issue, we present a novel mechanism for learning the translation relationship from a source modality space S to a target modality space T without the need for a joint latent space, which bridges the gap between visual and textual domains. Furthermore, to keep cycle consistency between translations, we adopt a cycle loss involving both forward translations from S to the predicted target space T', and backward translations from T' back to S. Extensive experiments conducted on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and DiDeMo datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our LaT approach compared with vanilla state-of-the-art methods.

Visual data comes in various forms, ranging from small icons of just a few pixels to long videos spanning hours. Existing multi-modal LLMs usually standardize these diverse visual inputs to a fixed resolution for visual encoders and yield similar numbers of tokens for LLMs. This approach is non-optimal for multimodal understanding and inefficient for processing inputs with long and short visual contents. To solve the problem, we propose Oryx, a unified multimodal architecture for the spatial-temporal understanding of images, videos, and multi-view 3D scenes. Oryx offers an on-demand solution to seamlessly and efficiently process visual inputs with arbitrary spatial sizes and temporal lengths through two core innovations: 1) a pre-trained OryxViT model that can encode images at any resolution into LLM-friendly visual representations; 2) a dynamic compressor module that supports 1x to 16x compression on visual tokens by request. These design features enable Oryx to accommodate extremely long visual contexts, such as videos, with lower resolution and high compression while maintaining high recognition precision for tasks like document understanding with native resolution and no compression. Beyond the architectural improvements, enhanced data curation and specialized training on long-context retrieval and spatial-aware data help Oryx achieve strong capabilities in image, video, and 3D multimodal understanding simultaneously. Our work is open-sourced at https://github.com/Oryx-mllm/Oryx.

We introduce AudioPaLM, a large language model for speech understanding and generation. AudioPaLM fuses text-based and speech-based language models, PaLM-2 [Anil et al., 2023] and AudioLM [Borsos et al., 2022], into a unified multimodal architecture that can process and generate text and speech with applications including speech recognition and speech-to-speech translation. AudioPaLM inherits the capability to preserve paralinguistic information such as speaker identity and intonation from AudioLM and the linguistic knowledge present only in text large language models such as PaLM-2. We demonstrate that initializing AudioPaLM with the weights of a text-only large language model improves speech processing, successfully leveraging the larger quantity of text training data used in pretraining to assist with the speech tasks. The resulting model significantly outperforms existing systems for speech translation tasks and has the ability to perform zero-shot speech-to-text translation for many languages for which input/target language combinations were not seen in training. AudioPaLM also demonstrates features of audio language models, such as transferring a voice across languages based on a short spoken prompt. We release examples of our method at https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples

We propose DyGFormer, a new Transformer-based architecture for dynamic graph learning. DyGFormer is conceptually simple and only needs to learn from nodes' historical first-hop interactions by: (1) a neighbor co-occurrence encoding scheme that explores the correlations of the source node and destination node based on their historical sequences; (2) a patching technique that divides each sequence into multiple patches and feeds them to Transformer, allowing the model to effectively and efficiently benefit from longer histories. We also introduce DyGLib, a unified library with standard training pipelines, extensible coding interfaces, and comprehensive evaluating protocols to promote reproducible, scalable, and credible dynamic graph learning research. By performing exhaustive experiments on thirteen datasets for dynamic link prediction and dynamic node classification tasks, we find that DyGFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on most of the datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing nodes' correlations and long-term temporal dependencies. Moreover, some results of baselines are inconsistent with previous reports, which may be caused by their diverse but less rigorous implementations, showing the importance of DyGLib. All the used resources are publicly available at https://github.com/yule-BUAA/DyGLib.

Recently, visually-situated text parsing (VsTP) has experienced notable advancements, driven by the increasing demand for automated document understanding and the emergence of Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of processing document-based questions. Various methods have been proposed to address the challenging problem of VsTP. However, due to the diversified targets and heterogeneous schemas, previous works usually design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, which inadvertently leads to modal isolation and complex workflow. In this paper, we propose a unified paradigm for parsing visually-situated text across diverse scenarios. Specifically, we devise a universal model, called OmniParser, which can simultaneously handle three typical visually-situated text parsing tasks: text spotting, key information extraction, and table recognition. In OmniParser, all tasks share the unified encoder-decoder architecture, the unified objective: point-conditioned text generation, and the unified input & output representation: prompt & structured sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed OmniParser achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) or highly competitive performances on 7 datasets for the three visually-situated text parsing tasks, despite its unified, concise design. The code is available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery.

Performing 3D dense captioning and visual grounding requires a common and shared understanding of the underlying multimodal relationships. However, despite some previous attempts on connecting these two related tasks with highly task-specific neural modules, it remains understudied how to explicitly depict their shared nature to learn them simultaneously. In this work, we propose UniT3D, a simple yet effective fully unified transformer-based architecture for jointly solving 3D visual grounding and dense captioning. UniT3D enables learning a strong multimodal representation across the two tasks through a supervised joint pre-training scheme with bidirectional and seq-to-seq objectives. With a generic architecture design, UniT3D allows expanding the pre-training scope to more various training sources such as the synthesized data from 2D prior knowledge to benefit 3D vision-language tasks. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that UniT3D obtains significant gains for 3D dense captioning and visual grounding.

We present SOLO, a single transformer for Scalable visiOn-Language mOdeling. Current large vision-language models (LVLMs) such as LLaVA mostly employ heterogeneous architectures that connect pre-trained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs) to facilitate visual recognition and complex reasoning. Although achieving remarkable performance with relatively lightweight training, we identify four primary scalability limitations: (1) The visual capacity is constrained by pre-trained visual encoders, which are typically an order of magnitude smaller than LLMs. (2) The heterogeneous architecture complicates the use of established hardware and software infrastructure. (3) Study of scaling laws on such architecture must consider three separate components - visual encoder, connector, and LLMs, which complicates the analysis. (4) The use of existing visual encoders typically requires following a pre-defined specification of image inputs pre-processing, for example, by reshaping inputs to fixed-resolution square images, which presents difficulties in processing and training on high-resolution images or those with unusual aspect ratio. A unified single Transformer architecture, like SOLO, effectively addresses these scalability concerns in LVLMs; however, its limited adoption in the modern context likely stems from the absence of reliable training recipes that balance both modalities and ensure stable training for billion-scale models. In this paper, we introduce the first open-source training recipe for developing SOLO, an open-source 7B LVLM using moderate academic resources. The training recipe involves initializing from LLMs, sequential pre-training on ImageNet and web-scale data, and instruction fine-tuning on our curated high-quality datasets. On extensive evaluation, SOLO demonstrates performance comparable to LLaVA-v1.5-7B, particularly excelling in visual mathematical reasoning.

Fine urban change segmentation using multi-temporal remote sensing images is essential for understanding human-environment interactions in urban areas. Although there have been advances in high-quality land cover datasets that reveal the physical features of urban landscapes, the lack of fine-grained land use datasets hinders a deeper understanding of how human activities are distributed across the landscape and the impact of these activities on the environment, thus constraining proper technique development. To address this, we introduce FUSU, the first fine-grained land use change segmentation dataset for Fine-grained Urban Semantic Understanding. FUSU features the most detailed land use classification system to date, with 17 classes and 30 billion pixels of annotations. It includes bi-temporal high-resolution satellite images with 0.2-0.5 m ground sample distance and monthly optical and radar satellite time series, covering 847 km^2 across five urban areas in the southern and northern of China with different geographical features. The fine-grained land use pixel-wise annotations and high spatial-temporal resolution data provide a robust foundation for developing proper deep learning models to provide contextual insights on human activities and urbanization. To fully leverage FUSU, we propose a unified time-series architecture for both change detection and segmentation. We benchmark FUSU on various methods for several tasks. Dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/yuanshuai0914/FUSU.

To explore the limit of dialogue generation pre-training, we present the models of PLATO-XL with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on both Chinese and English social media conversations. To train such large models, we adopt the architecture of unified transformer with high computation and parameter efficiency. In addition, we carry out multi-party aware pre-training to better distinguish the characteristic information in social media conversations. With such designs, PLATO-XL successfully achieves superior performances as compared to other approaches in both Chinese and English chitchat. We further explore the capacity of PLATO-XL on other conversational tasks, such as knowledge grounded dialogue and task-oriented conversation. The experimental results indicate that PLATO-XL obtains state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI.

Blending multiple convolutional kernels is proved advantageous in neural architecture design. However, current two-stage neural architecture search methods are mainly limited to single-path search spaces. How to efficiently search models of multi-path structures remains a difficult problem. In this paper, we are motivated to train a one-shot multi-path supernet to accurately evaluate the candidate architectures. Specifically, we discover that in the studied search spaces, feature vectors summed from multiple paths are nearly multiples of those from a single path. Such disparity perturbs the supernet training and its ranking ability. Therefore, we propose a novel mechanism called Shadow Batch Normalization (SBN) to regularize the disparate feature statistics. Extensive experiments prove that SBNs are capable of stabilizing the optimization and improving ranking performance. We call our unified multi-path one-shot approach as MixPath, which generates a series of models that achieve state-of-the-art results on ImageNet.

Motions in a video primarily consist of camera motion, induced by camera movement, and object motion, resulting from object movement. Accurate control of both camera and object motion is essential for video generation. However, existing works either mainly focus on one type of motion or do not clearly distinguish between the two, limiting their control capabilities and diversity. Therefore, this paper presents MotionCtrl, a unified and flexible motion controller for video generation designed to effectively and independently control camera and object motion. The architecture and training strategy of MotionCtrl are carefully devised, taking into account the inherent properties of camera motion, object motion, and imperfect training data. Compared to previous methods, MotionCtrl offers three main advantages: 1) It effectively and independently controls camera motion and object motion, enabling more fine-grained motion control and facilitating flexible and diverse combinations of both types of motion. 2) Its motion conditions are determined by camera poses and trajectories, which are appearance-free and minimally impact the appearance or shape of objects in generated videos. 3) It is a relatively generalizable model that can adapt to a wide array of camera poses and trajectories once trained. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of MotionCtrl over existing methods.

Human motion generation, a cornerstone technique in animation and video production, has widespread applications in various tasks like text-to-motion and music-to-dance. Previous works focus on developing specialist models tailored for each task without scalability. In this work, we present Large Motion Model (LMM), a motion-centric, multi-modal framework that unifies mainstream motion generation tasks into a generalist model. A unified motion model is appealing since it can leverage a wide range of motion data to achieve broad generalization beyond a single task. However, it is also challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of substantially different motion data and tasks. LMM tackles these challenges from three principled aspects: 1) Data: We consolidate datasets with different modalities, formats and tasks into a comprehensive yet unified motion generation dataset, MotionVerse, comprising 10 tasks, 16 datasets, a total of 320k sequences, and 100 million frames. 2) Architecture: We design an articulated attention mechanism ArtAttention that incorporates body part-aware modeling into Diffusion Transformer backbone. 3) Pre-Training: We propose a novel pre-training strategy for LMM, which employs variable frame rates and masking forms, to better exploit knowledge from diverse training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our generalist LMM achieves competitive performance across various standard motion generation tasks over state-of-the-art specialist models. Notably, LMM exhibits strong generalization capabilities and emerging properties across many unseen tasks. Additionally, our ablation studies reveal valuable insights about training and scaling up large motion models for future research.

In this work, we introduce OmniGen, a new diffusion model for unified image generation. Unlike popular diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion), OmniGen no longer requires additional modules such as ControlNet or IP-Adapter to process diverse control conditions. OmniGenis characterized by the following features: 1) Unification: OmniGen not only demonstrates text-to-image generation capabilities but also inherently supports other downstream tasks, such as image editing, subject-driven generation, and visual-conditional generation. Additionally, OmniGen can handle classical computer vision tasks by transforming them into image generation tasks, such as edge detection and human pose recognition. 2) Simplicity: The architecture of OmniGen is highly simplified, eliminating the need for additional text encoders. Moreover, it is more user-friendly compared to existing diffusion models, enabling complex tasks to be accomplished through instructions without the need for extra preprocessing steps (e.g., human pose estimation), thereby significantly simplifying the workflow of image generation. 3) Knowledge Transfer: Through learning in a unified format, OmniGen effectively transfers knowledge across different tasks, manages unseen tasks and domains, and exhibits novel capabilities. We also explore the model's reasoning capabilities and potential applications of chain-of-thought mechanism. This work represents the first attempt at a general-purpose image generation model, and there remain several unresolved issues. We will open-source the related resources at https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/OmniGen to foster advancements in this field.

Current speech large language models build upon discrete speech representations, which can be categorized into semantic tokens and acoustic tokens. However, existing speech tokens are not specifically designed for speech language modeling. To assess the suitability of speech tokens for building speech language models, we established the first benchmark, SLMTokBench. Our results indicate that neither semantic nor acoustic tokens are ideal for this purpose. Therefore, we propose SpeechTokenizer, a unified speech tokenizer for speech large language models. SpeechTokenizer adopts the Encoder-Decoder architecture with residual vector quantization (RVQ). Unifying semantic and acoustic tokens, SpeechTokenizer disentangles different aspects of speech information hierarchically across different RVQ layers. Furthermore, We construct a Unified Speech Language Model (USLM) leveraging SpeechTokenizer. Experiments show that SpeechTokenizer performs comparably to EnCodec in speech reconstruction and demonstrates strong performance on the SLMTokBench benchmark. Also, USLM outperforms VALL-E in zero-shot Text-to-Speech tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ZhangXInFD/SpeechTokenizer/.

We present VARGPT, a novel multimodal large language model (MLLM) that unifies visual understanding and generation within a single autoregressive framework. VARGPT employs a next-token prediction paradigm for visual understanding and a next-scale prediction paradigm for visual autoregressive generation. VARGPT innovatively extends the LLaVA architecture, achieving efficient scale-wise autoregressive visual generation within MLLMs while seamlessly accommodating mixed-modal input and output within a single model framework. Our VARGPT undergoes a three-stage unified training process on specially curated datasets, comprising a pre-training phase and two mixed visual instruction-tuning phases. The unified training strategy are designed to achieve alignment between visual and textual features, enhance instruction following for both understanding and generation, and improve visual generation quality, respectively. Despite its LLAVA-based architecture for multimodel understanding, VARGPT significantly outperforms LLaVA-1.5 across various vision-centric benchmarks, such as visual question-answering and reasoning tasks. Notably, VARGPT naturally supports capabilities in autoregressive visual generation and instruction-to-image synthesis, showcasing its versatility in both visual understanding and generation tasks. Project page is at: https://vargpt-1.github.io/

Dexterous grasping aims to produce diverse grasping postures with a high grasping success rate. Regression-based methods that directly predict grasping parameters given the object may achieve a high success rate but often lack diversity. Generation-based methods that generate grasping postures conditioned on the object can often produce diverse grasping, but they are insufficient for high grasping success due to lack of discriminative information. To mitigate, we introduce a unified diffusion-based dexterous grasp generation model, dubbed the name UGG, which operates within the object point cloud and hand parameter spaces. Our all-transformer architecture unifies the information from the object, the hand, and the contacts, introducing a novel representation of contact points for improved contact modeling. The flexibility and quality of our model enable the integration of a lightweight discriminator, benefiting from simulated discriminative data, which pushes for a high success rate while preserving high diversity. Beyond grasp generation, our model can also generate objects based on hand information, offering valuable insights into object design and studying how the generative model perceives objects. Our model achieves state-of-the-art dexterous grasping on the large-scale DexGraspNet dataset while facilitating human-centric object design, marking a significant advancement in dexterous grasping research. Our project page is https://jiaxin-lu.github.io/ugg/ .

Solid results from Transformers have made them prevailing architectures in various natural language and vision tasks. As a default component in Transformers, Layer Normalization (LN) normalizes activations within each token to boost the robustness. However, LN requires on-the-fly statistics calculation in inference as well as division and square root operations, leading to inefficiency on hardware. What is more, replacing LN with other hardware-efficient normalization schemes (e.g., Batch Normalization) results in inferior performance, even collapse in training. We find that this dilemma is caused by abnormal behaviors of activation statistics, including large fluctuations over iterations and extreme outliers across layers. To tackle these issues, we propose Unified Normalization (UN), which can speed up the inference by being fused with other linear operations and achieve comparable performance on par with LN. UN strives to boost performance by calibrating the activation and gradient statistics with a tailored fluctuation smoothing strategy. Meanwhile, an adaptive outlier filtration strategy is applied to avoid collapse in training whose effectiveness is theoretically proved and experimentally verified in this paper. We demonstrate that UN can be an efficient drop-in alternative to LN by conducting extensive experiments on language and vision tasks. Besides, we evaluate the efficiency of our method on GPU. Transformers equipped with UN enjoy about 31% inference speedup and nearly 18% memory reduction. Code will be released at https://github.com/hikvision-research/Unified-Normalization.

Recent advances in efficient sequence modeling have led to attention-free layers, such as Mamba, RWKV, and various gated RNNs, all featuring sub-quadratic complexity in sequence length and excellent scaling properties, enabling the construction of a new type of foundation models. In this paper, we present a unified view of these models, formulating such layers as implicit causal self-attention layers. The formulation includes most of their sub-components and is not limited to a specific part of the architecture. The framework compares the underlying mechanisms on similar grounds for different layers and provides a direct means for applying explainability methods. Our experiments show that our attention matrices and attribution method outperform an alternative and a more limited formulation that was recently proposed for Mamba. For the other architectures for which our method is the first to provide such a view, our method is effective and competitive in the relevant metrics compared to the results obtained by state-of-the-art transformer explainability methods. Our code is publicly available.

Humans use different modalities, such as speech, text, images, videos, etc., to communicate their intent and goals with teammates. For robots to become better assistants, we aim to endow them with the ability to follow instructions and understand tasks specified by their human partners. Most robotic policy learning methods have focused on one single modality of task specification while ignoring the rich cross-modal information. We present MUTEX, a unified approach to policy learning from multimodal task specifications. It trains a transformer-based architecture to facilitate cross-modal reasoning, combining masked modeling and cross-modal matching objectives in a two-stage training procedure. After training, MUTEX can follow a task specification in any of the six learned modalities (video demonstrations, goal images, text goal descriptions, text instructions, speech goal descriptions, and speech instructions) or a combination of them. We systematically evaluate the benefits of MUTEX in a newly designed dataset with 100 tasks in simulation and 50 tasks in the real world, annotated with multiple instances of task specifications in different modalities, and observe improved performance over methods trained specifically for any single modality. More information at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/MUTEX/

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), which focuses on finding collision-free paths for multiple robots, is crucial for applications ranging from aerial swarms to warehouse automation. Solving MAPF is NP-hard so learning-based approaches for MAPF have gained attention, particularly those leveraging deep neural networks. Nonetheless, despite the community's continued efforts, all learning-based MAPF planners still rely on decentralized planning due to variability in the number of agents and map sizes. We have developed the first centralized learning-based policy for MAPF problem called RAILGUN. RAILGUN is not an agent-based policy but a map-based policy. By leveraging a CNN-based architecture, RAILGUN can generalize across different maps and handle any number of agents. We collect trajectories from rule-based methods to train our model in a supervised way. In experiments, RAILGUN outperforms most baseline methods and demonstrates great zero-shot generalization capabilities on various tasks, maps and agent numbers that were not seen in the training dataset.

Remote sensing (RS) visual grounding aims to use natural language expression to locate specific objects (in the form of the bounding box or segmentation mask) in RS images, enhancing human interaction with intelligent RS interpretation systems. Early research in this area was primarily based on horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs), but as more diverse RS datasets have become available, tasks involving oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) and segmentation masks have emerged. In practical applications, different targets require different grounding types: HBB can localize an object's position, OBB provides its orientation, and mask depicts its shape. However, existing specialized methods are typically tailored to a single type of RS visual grounding task and are hard to generalize across tasks. In contrast, large vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit powerful multi-task learning capabilities but struggle to handle dense prediction tasks like segmentation. This paper proposes GeoGround, a novel framework that unifies support for HBB, OBB, and mask RS visual grounding tasks, allowing flexible output selection. Rather than customizing the architecture of VLM, our work aims to elegantly support pixel-level visual grounding output through the Text-Mask technique. We define prompt-assisted and geometry-guided learning to enhance consistency across different signals. To support model training, we present refGeo, a large-scale RS visual instruction-following dataset containing 161k image-text pairs. Experimental results show that GeoGround demonstrates strong performance across four RS visual grounding tasks, matching or surpassing the performance of specialized methods on multiple benchmarks. Code available at https://github.com/zytx121/GeoGround

Scaling up representations for images or text has been extensively investigated in the past few years and has led to revolutions in learning vision and language. However, scalable representation for 3D objects and scenes is relatively unexplored. In this work, we present Uni3D, a 3D foundation model to explore the unified 3D representation at scale. Uni3D uses a 2D initialized ViT end-to-end pretrained to align the 3D point cloud features with the image-text aligned features. Via the simple architecture and pretext task, Uni3D can leverage abundant 2D pretrained models as initialization and image-text aligned models as the target, unlocking the great potential of 2D models and scaling-up strategies to the 3D world. We efficiently scale up Uni3D to one billion parameters, and set new records on a broad range of 3D tasks, such as zero-shot classification, few-shot classification, open-world understanding and part segmentation. We show that the strong Uni3D representation also enables applications such as 3D painting and retrieval in the wild. We believe that Uni3D provides a new direction for exploring both scaling up and efficiency of the representation in 3D domain.

Recent years have witnessed the prevailing progress of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in image-to-image translation. However, the success of these GAN models hinges on ponderous computational costs and labor-expensive training data. Current efficient GAN learning techniques often fall into two orthogonal aspects: i) model slimming via reduced calculation costs; ii)data/label-efficient learning with fewer training data/labels. To combine the best of both worlds, we propose a new learning paradigm, Unified GAN Compression (UGC), with a unified optimization objective to seamlessly prompt the synergy of model-efficient and label-efficient learning. UGC sets up semi-supervised-driven network architecture search and adaptive online semi-supervised distillation stages sequentially, which formulates a heterogeneous mutual learning scheme to obtain an architecture-flexible, label-efficient, and performance-excellent model.

Detecting dental diseases through panoramic X-rays images is a standard procedure for dentists. Normally, a dentist need to identify diseases and find the infected teeth. While numerous machine learning models adopting this two-step procedure have been developed, there has not been an end-to-end model that can identify teeth and their associated diseases at the same time. To fill the gap, we develop YOLOrtho, a unified framework for teeth enumeration and dental disease detection. We develop our model on Dentex Challenge 2023 data, which consists of three distinct types of annotated data. The first part is labeled with quadrant, and the second part is labeled with quadrant and enumeration and the third part is labeled with quadrant, enumeration and disease. To further improve detection, we make use of Tufts Dental public dataset. To fully utilize the data and learn both teeth detection and disease identification simultaneously, we formulate diseases as attributes attached to their corresponding teeth. Due to the nature of position relation in teeth enumeration, We replace convolution layer with CoordConv in our model to provide more position information for the model. We also adjust the model architecture and insert one more upsampling layer in FPN in favor of large object detection. Finally, we propose a post-process strategy for teeth layout that corrects teeth enumeration based on linear sum assignment. Results from experiments show that our model exceeds large Diffusion-based model.

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have recently advanced the research progress in mathematical reasoning, they are not specially designed as a capable multi-task solver, suffering from high cost for multi-task deployment (\eg a model copy for a task) and inferior performance on complex mathematical problems in practical applications. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose JiuZhang~2.0, a unified Chinese PLM specially for multi-task mathematical problem solving. Our idea is to maintain a moderate-sized model and employ the cross-task knowledge sharing to improve the model capacity in a multi-task setting. Specially, we construct a Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture for modeling mathematical text, so as to capture the common mathematical knowledge across tasks. For optimizing the MoE architecture, we design multi-task continual pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategies for multi-task adaptation. These training strategies can effectively decompose the knowledge from the task data and establish the cross-task sharing via expert networks. In order to further improve the general capacity of solving different complex tasks, we leverage large language models~(LLMs) as complementary models to iteratively refine the generated solution by our PLM, via in-context learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

Human readers or radiologists routinely perform full-body multi-organ multi-disease detection and diagnosis in clinical practice, while most medical AI systems are built to focus on single organs with a narrow list of a few diseases. This might severely limit AI's clinical adoption. A certain number of AI models need to be assembled non-trivially to match the diagnostic process of a human reading a CT scan. In this paper, we construct a Unified Tumor Transformer (UniT) model to detect (tumor existence and location) and diagnose (tumor characteristics) eight major cancer-prevalent organs in CT scans. UniT is a query-based Mask Transformer model with the output of multi-organ and multi-tumor semantic segmentation. We decouple the object queries into organ queries, detection queries and diagnosis queries, and further establish hierarchical relationships among the three groups. This clinically-inspired architecture effectively assists inter- and intra-organ representation learning of tumors and facilitates the resolution of these complex, anatomically related multi-organ cancer image reading tasks. UniT is trained end-to-end using a curated large-scale CT images of 10,042 patients including eight major types of cancers and occurring non-cancer tumors (all are pathology-confirmed with 3D tumor masks annotated by radiologists). On the test set of 631 patients, UniT has demonstrated strong performance under a set of clinically relevant evaluation metrics, substantially outperforming both multi-organ segmentation methods and an assembly of eight single-organ expert models in tumor detection, segmentation, and diagnosis. Such a unified multi-cancer image reading model (UniT) can significantly reduce the number of false positives produced by combined multi-system models. This moves one step closer towards a universal high-performance cancer screening tool.

The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter count and computational requirement form two independent axes along which an increase leads to better performance. In this work we derive and justify scaling laws defined on these two variables which generalize those known for standard language models and describe the performance of a wide range of routing architectures trained via three different techniques. Afterwards we provide two applications of these laws: first deriving an Effective Parameter Count along which all models scale at the same rate, and then using the scaling coefficients to give a quantitative comparison of the three routing techniques considered. Our analysis derives from an extensive evaluation of Routing Networks across five orders of magnitude of size, including models with hundreds of experts and hundreds of billions of parameters.

This report introduces PixelBytes Embedding, a novel approach for unified multimodal representation learning. Our method captures diverse inputs in a single, cohesive representation, enabling emergent properties for multimodal sequence generation, particularly for text and pixelated images. Inspired by state-of-the-art sequence models such as Image Transformers, PixelCNN, and Mamba-Bytes, PixelBytes aims to address the challenges of integrating different data types. We explore various model architectures, including Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), State Space Models (SSMs), and Attention-based models, focusing on bidirectional processing and our innovative PxBy embedding technique. Our experiments, conducted on a specialized PixelBytes Pok{\'e}mon dataset, demonstrate that bidirectional sequence models with PxBy embedding and convolutional layers can generate coherent multimodal sequences. This work contributes to the advancement of integrated AI models capable of understanding and generating multimodal data in a unified manner.

Recently, open-vocabulary learning has emerged to accomplish segmentation for arbitrary categories of text-based descriptions, which popularizes the segmentation system to more general-purpose application scenarios. However, existing methods devote to designing specialized architectures or parameters for specific segmentation tasks. These customized design paradigms lead to fragmentation between various segmentation tasks, thus hindering the uniformity of segmentation models. Hence in this paper, we propose FreeSeg, a generic framework to accomplish Unified, Universal and Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation. FreeSeg optimizes an all-in-one network via one-shot training and employs the same architecture and parameters to handle diverse segmentation tasks seamlessly in the inference procedure. Additionally, adaptive prompt learning facilitates the unified model to capture task-aware and category-sensitive concepts, improving model robustness in multi-task and varied scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FreeSeg establishes new state-of-the-art results in performance and generalization on three segmentation tasks, which outperforms the best task-specific architectures by a large margin: 5.5% mIoU on semantic segmentation, 17.6% mAP on instance segmentation, 20.1% PQ on panoptic segmentation for the unseen class on COCO.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to proactively elicit user preference and recommend high-quality items through natural language conversations. Typically, a CRS consists of a recommendation module to predict preferred items for users and a conversation module to generate appropriate responses. To develop an effective CRS, it is essential to seamlessly integrate the two modules. Existing works either design semantic alignment strategies, or share knowledge resources and representations between the two modules. However, these approaches still rely on different architectures or techniques to develop the two modules, making it difficult for effective module integration. To address this problem, we propose a unified CRS model named UniCRS based on knowledge-enhanced prompt learning. Our approach unifies the recommendation and conversation subtasks into the prompt learning paradigm, and utilizes knowledge-enhanced prompts based on a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to fulfill both subtasks in a unified approach. In the prompt design, we include fused knowledge representations, task-specific soft tokens, and the dialogue context, which can provide sufficient contextual information to adapt the PLM for the CRS task. Besides, for the recommendation subtask, we also incorporate the generated response template as an important part of the prompt, to enhance the information interaction between the two subtasks. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

We present TokenFlow, a novel unified image tokenizer that bridges the long-standing gap between multimodal understanding and generation. Prior research attempt to employ a single reconstruction-targeted Vector Quantization (VQ) encoder for unifying these two tasks. We observe that understanding and generation require fundamentally different granularities of visual information. This leads to a critical trade-off, particularly compromising performance in multimodal understanding tasks. TokenFlow addresses this challenge through an innovative dual-codebook architecture that decouples semantic and pixel-level feature learning while maintaining their alignment via a shared mapping mechanism. This design enables direct access to both high-level semantic representations crucial for understanding tasks and fine-grained visual features essential for generation through shared indices. Our extensive experiments demonstrate TokenFlow's superiority across multiple dimensions. Leveraging TokenFlow, we demonstrate for the first time that discrete visual input can surpass LLaVA-1.5 13B in understanding performance, achieving a 7.2\% average improvement. For image reconstruction, we achieve a strong FID score of 0.63 at 384*384 resolution. Moreover, TokenFlow establishes state-of-the-art performance in autoregressive image generation with a GenEval score of 0.55 at 256*256 resolution, achieving comparable results to SDXL.

We present JanusFlow, a powerful framework that unifies image understanding and generation in a single model. JanusFlow introduces a minimalist architecture that integrates autoregressive language models with rectified flow, a state-of-the-art method in generative modeling. Our key finding demonstrates that rectified flow can be straightforwardly trained within the large language model framework, eliminating the need for complex architectural modifications. To further improve the performance of our unified model, we adopt two key strategies: (i) decoupling the understanding and generation encoders, and (ii) aligning their representations during unified training. Extensive experiments show that JanusFlow achieves comparable or superior performance to specialized models in their respective domains, while significantly outperforming existing unified approaches across standard benchmarks. This work represents a step toward more efficient and versatile vision-language models.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) underscore the significance of scalable models and data to boost performance, yet this often incurs substantial computational costs. Although the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has been employed to efficiently scale large language and image-text models, these efforts typically involve fewer experts and limited modalities. To address this, our work presents the pioneering attempt to develop a unified MLLM with the MoE architecture, named Uni-MoE that can handle a wide array of modalities. Specifically, it features modality-specific encoders with connectors for a unified multimodal representation. We also implement a sparse MoE architecture within the LLMs to enable efficient training and inference through modality-level data parallelism and expert-level model parallelism. To enhance the multi-expert collaboration and generalization, we present a progressive training strategy: 1) Cross-modality alignment using various connectors with different cross-modality data, 2) Training modality-specific experts with cross-modality instruction data to activate experts' preferences, and 3) Tuning the Uni-MoE framework utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on mixed multimodal instruction data. We evaluate the instruction-tuned Uni-MoE on a comprehensive set of multimodal datasets. The extensive experimental results demonstrate Uni-MoE's principal advantage of significantly reducing performance bias in handling mixed multimodal datasets, alongside improved multi-expert collaboration and generalization. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of MoE frameworks in advancing MLLMs and the code is available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/UMOE-Scaling-Unified-Multimodal-LLMs.

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

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated the emergence of in-context learning (ICL) as a cutting-edge approach in the natural language processing domain. Recently, ICL has been employed in visual understanding tasks, such as semantic segmentation and image captioning, yielding promising results. However, existing visual ICL framework can not enable producing content across multiple modalities, which limits their potential usage scenarios. To address this issue, we present a new ICL framework for visual understanding with multi-modal output enabled. First, we quantize and embed both text and visual prompt into a unified representational space, structured as interleaved in-context sequences. Then a decoder-only sparse transformer architecture is employed to perform generative modeling on them, facilitating in-context learning. Thanks to this design, the model is capable of handling in-context vision understanding tasks with multimodal output in a unified pipeline. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance compared with specialized models and previous ICL baselines. Overall, our research takes a further step toward unified multimodal in-context learning.

ImageNet serves as the primary dataset for evaluating the quality of computer-vision models. The common practice today is training each architecture with a tailor-made scheme, designed and tuned by an expert. In this paper, we present a unified scheme for training any backbone on ImageNet. The scheme, named USI (Unified Scheme for ImageNet), is based on knowledge distillation and modern tricks. It requires no adjustments or hyper-parameters tuning between different models, and is efficient in terms of training times. We test USI on a wide variety of architectures, including CNNs, Transformers, Mobile-oriented and MLP-only. On all models tested, USI outperforms previous state-of-the-art results. Hence, we are able to transform training on ImageNet from an expert-oriented task to an automatic seamless routine. Since USI accepts any backbone and trains it to top results, it also enables to perform methodical comparisons, and identify the most efficient backbones along the speed-accuracy Pareto curve. Implementation is available at:https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/Solving_ImageNet

The performance of algorithms for neural architecture search strongly depends on the parametrization of the search space. We use contrastive learning to identify networks across different initializations based on their data Jacobians, and automatically produce the first architecture embeddings independent from the parametrization of the search space. Using our contrastive embeddings, we show that traditional black-box optimization algorithms, without modification, can reach state-of-the-art performance in Neural Architecture Search. As our method provides a unified embedding space, we perform for the first time transfer learning between search spaces. Finally, we show the evolution of embeddings during training, motivating future studies into using embeddings at different training stages to gain a deeper understanding of the networks in a search space.

Large language models are built on top of a transformer-based architecture to process textual inputs. For example, the LLaMA stands out among many open-source implementations. Can the same transformer be used to process 2D images? In this paper, we answer this question by unveiling a LLaMA-like vision transformer in plain and pyramid forms, termed VisionLLaMA, which is tailored for this purpose. VisionLLaMA is a unified and generic modelling framework for solving most vision tasks. We extensively evaluate its effectiveness using typical pre-training paradigms in a good portion of downstream tasks of image perception and especially image generation. In many cases, VisionLLaMA have exhibited substantial gains over the previous state-of-the-art vision transformers. We believe that VisionLLaMA can serve as a strong new baseline model for vision generation and understanding. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/VisionLLaMA.

We introduce AnyGPT, an any-to-any multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for the unified processing of various modalities, including speech, text, images, and music. AnyGPT can be trained stably without any alterations to the current large language model (LLM) architecture or training paradigms. Instead, it relies exclusively on data-level preprocessing, facilitating the seamless integration of new modalities into LLMs, akin to the incorporation of new languages. We build a multimodal text-centric dataset for multimodal alignment pre-training. Utilizing generative models, we synthesize the first large-scale any-to-any multimodal instruction dataset. It consists of 108k samples of multi-turn conversations that intricately interweave various modalities, thus equipping the model to handle arbitrary combinations of multimodal inputs and outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that AnyGPT is capable of facilitating any-to-any multimodal conversation while achieving performance comparable to specialized models across all modalities, proving that discrete representations can effectively and conveniently unify multiple modalities within a language model. Demos are shown in https://junzhan2000.github.io/AnyGPT.github.io/

In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, both improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

Deep learning for time series forecasting has traditionally operated within a one-model-per-dataset framework, limiting its potential to leverage the game-changing impact of large pre-trained models. The concept of universal forecasting, emerging from pre-training on a vast collection of time series datasets, envisions a single Large Time Series Model capable of addressing diverse downstream forecasting tasks. However, constructing such a model poses unique challenges specific to time series data: i) cross-frequency learning, ii) accommodating an arbitrary number of variates for multivariate time series, and iii) addressing the varying distributional properties inherent in large-scale data. To address these challenges, we present novel enhancements to the conventional time series Transformer architecture, resulting in our proposed Masked Encoder-based Universal Time Series Forecasting Transformer (Moirai). Trained on our newly introduced Large-scale Open Time Series Archive (LOTSA) featuring over 27B observations across nine domains, Moirai achieves competitive or superior performance as a zero-shot forecaster when compared to full-shot models. Code, model weights, and data will be released.

We introduce a novel state-space architecture for diffusion models, effectively harnessing spatial and frequency information to enhance the inductive bias towards local features in input images for image generation tasks. While state-space networks, including Mamba, a revolutionary advancement in recurrent neural networks, typically scan input sequences from left to right, they face difficulties in designing effective scanning strategies, especially in the processing of image data. Our method demonstrates that integrating wavelet transformation into Mamba enhances the local structure awareness of visual inputs and better captures long-range relations of frequencies by disentangling them into wavelet subbands, representing both low- and high-frequency components. These wavelet-based outputs are then processed and seamlessly fused with the original Mamba outputs through a cross-attention fusion layer, combining both spatial and frequency information to optimize the order awareness of state-space models which is essential for the details and overall quality of image generation. Besides, we introduce a globally-shared transformer to supercharge the performance of Mamba, harnessing its exceptional power to capture global relationships. Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, our method demonstrates superior results compared to DiT and DIFFUSSM, achieving faster training convergence and delivering high-quality outputs. The codes and pretrained models are released at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/DiMSUM.git.

While large-scale image-text pretrained models such as CLIP have been used for multiple video-level tasks on trimmed videos, their use for temporal localization in untrimmed videos is still a relatively unexplored task. We design a new approach for this called UnLoc, which uses pretrained image and text towers, and feeds tokens to a video-text fusion model. The output of the fusion module are then used to construct a feature pyramid in which each level connects to a head to predict a per-frame relevancy score and start/end time displacements. Unlike previous works, our architecture enables Moment Retrieval, Temporal Localization, and Action Segmentation with a single stage model, without the need for action proposals, motion based pretrained features or representation masking. Unlike specialized models, we achieve state of the art results on all three different localization tasks with a unified approach. Code will be available at: https://github.com/google-research/scenic.

In this paper, we present a novel sequence generation-based framework for lane detection, called Lane2Seq. It unifies various lane detection formats by casting lane detection as a sequence generation task. This is different from previous lane detection methods, which depend on well-designed task-specific head networks and corresponding loss functions. Lane2Seq only adopts a plain transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture with a simple cross-entropy loss. Additionally, we propose a new multi-format model tuning based on reinforcement learning to incorporate the task-specific knowledge into Lane2Seq. Experimental results demonstrate that such a simple sequence generation paradigm not only unifies lane detection but also achieves competitive performance on benchmarks. For example, Lane2Seq gets 97.95\% and 97.42\% F1 score on Tusimple and LLAMAS datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art result for two benchmarks.

In this paper we present Mask DINO, a unified object detection and segmentation framework. Mask DINO extends DINO (DETR with Improved Denoising Anchor Boxes) by adding a mask prediction branch which supports all image segmentation tasks (instance, panoptic, and semantic). It makes use of the query embeddings from DINO to dot-product a high-resolution pixel embedding map to predict a set of binary masks. Some key components in DINO are extended for segmentation through a shared architecture and training process. Mask DINO is simple, efficient, and scalable, and it can benefit from joint large-scale detection and segmentation datasets. Our experiments show that Mask DINO significantly outperforms all existing specialized segmentation methods, both on a ResNet-50 backbone and a pre-trained model with SwinL backbone. Notably, Mask DINO establishes the best results to date on instance segmentation (54.5 AP on COCO), panoptic segmentation (59.4 PQ on COCO), and semantic segmentation (60.8 mIoU on ADE20K) among models under one billion parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/IDEACVR/MaskDINO.

Structured pruning and quantization are promising approaches for reducing the inference time and memory footprint of neural networks. However, most existing methods require the original training dataset to fine-tune the model. This not only brings heavy resource consumption but also is not possible for applications with sensitive or proprietary data due to privacy and security concerns. Therefore, a few data-free methods are proposed to address this problem, but they perform data-free pruning and quantization separately, which does not explore the complementarity of pruning and quantization. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Unified Data-Free Compression(UDFC), which performs pruning and quantization simultaneously without any data and fine-tuning process. Specifically, UDFC starts with the assumption that the partial information of a damaged(e.g., pruned or quantized) channel can be preserved by a linear combination of other channels, and then derives the reconstruction form from the assumption to restore the information loss due to compression. Finally, we formulate the reconstruction error between the original network and its compressed network, and theoretically deduce the closed-form solution. We evaluate the UDFC on the large-scale image classification task and obtain significant improvements over various network architectures and compression methods. For example, we achieve a 20.54% accuracy improvement on ImageNet dataset compared to SOTA method with 30% pruning ratio and 6-bit quantization on ResNet-34.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify test examples that do not belong to the training distribution and are thus unlikely to be predicted reliably. Despite a plethora of existing works, most of them focused only on the scenario where OOD examples come from semantic shift (e.g., unseen categories), ignoring other possible causes (e.g., covariate shift). In this paper, we present a novel, unifying framework to study OOD detection in a broader scope. Instead of detecting OOD examples from a particular cause, we propose to detect examples that a deployed machine learning model (e.g., an image classifier) is unable to predict correctly. That is, whether a test example should be detected and rejected or not is ``model-specific''. We show that this framework unifies the detection of OOD examples caused by semantic shift and covariate shift, and closely addresses the concern of applying a machine learning model to uncontrolled environments. We provide an extensive analysis that involves a variety of models (e.g., different architectures and training strategies), sources of OOD examples, and OOD detection approaches, and reveal several insights into improving and understanding OOD detection in uncontrolled environments.

Real-world data contains a vast amount of multimodal information, among which vision and language are the two most representative modalities. Moreover, increasingly heavier models, e.g., Transformers, have attracted the attention of researchers to model compression. However, how to compress multimodal models, especially vison-language Transformers, is still under-explored. This paper proposes the Unified and Progressive Pruning (\emph{UPop}) as a universal vison-language Transformer compression framework, which incorporates 1) unifiedly searching multimodal subnets in a continuous optimization space from the original model, which enables automatic assignment of pruning ratios among compressible modalities and structures; 2) progressively searching and retraining the subnet, which maintains convergence between the search and retrain to attain higher compression ratios. Experiments on various tasks, datasets, and model architectures demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed UPop framework. The code is available at https://github.com/sdc17/UPop.

In this work, we pursue a unified paradigm for multimodal pretraining to break the scaffolds of complex task/modality-specific customization. We propose OFA, a Task-Agnostic and Modality-Agnostic framework that supports Task Comprehensiveness. OFA unifies a diverse set of cross-modal and unimodal tasks, including image generation, visual grounding, image captioning, image classification, language modeling, etc., in a simple sequence-to-sequence learning framework. OFA follows the instruction-based learning in both pretraining and finetuning stages, requiring no extra task-specific layers for downstream tasks. In comparison with the recent state-of-the-art vision & language models that rely on extremely large cross-modal datasets, OFA is pretrained on only 20M publicly available image-text pairs. Despite its simplicity and relatively small-scale training data, OFA achieves new SOTAs in a series of cross-modal tasks while attaining highly competitive performances on uni-modal tasks. Our further analysis indicates that OFA can also effectively transfer to unseen tasks and unseen domains. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/OFA.

We introduce UniMuMo, a unified multimodal model capable of taking arbitrary text, music, and motion data as input conditions to generate outputs across all three modalities. To address the lack of time-synchronized data, we align unpaired music and motion data based on rhythmic patterns to leverage existing large-scale music-only and motion-only datasets. By converting music, motion, and text into token-based representation, our model bridges these modalities through a unified encoder-decoder transformer architecture. To support multiple generation tasks within a single framework, we introduce several architectural improvements. We propose encoding motion with a music codebook, mapping motion into the same feature space as music. We introduce a music-motion parallel generation scheme that unifies all music and motion generation tasks into a single transformer decoder architecture with a single training task of music-motion joint generation. Moreover, the model is designed by fine-tuning existing pre-trained single-modality models, significantly reducing computational demands. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniMuMo achieves competitive results on all unidirectional generation benchmarks across music, motion, and text modalities. Quantitative results are available in the https://hanyangclarence.github.io/unimumo_demo/{project page}.

The field of Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) has recently attained impressive results, including the discovery of state-of-the-art machine learning solutions, such as neural image classifiers. This is often done by applying an evolutionary search method, which samples multiple candidate solutions from a large space and evaluates the quality of each candidate through a long training process. As a result, the search tends to be slow. In this paper, we show that large efficiency gains can be obtained by employing a fast unified functional hash, especially through the functional equivalence caching technique, which we also present. The central idea is to detect by hashing when the search method produces equivalent candidates, which occurs very frequently, and this way avoid their costly re-evaluation. Our hash is "functional" in that it identifies equivalent candidates even if they were represented or coded differently, and it is "unified" in that the same algorithm can hash arbitrary representations; e.g. compute graphs, imperative code, or lambda functions. As evidence, we show dramatic improvements on multiple AutoML domains, including neural architecture search and algorithm discovery. Finally, we consider the effect of hash collisions, evaluation noise, and search distribution through empirical analysis. Altogether, we hope this paper may serve as a guide to hashing techniques in AutoML.

Efficient hyperparameter or architecture search methods have shown remarkable results, but each of them is only applicable to searching for either hyperparameters (HPs) or architectures. In this work, we propose a unified pipeline, AutoHAS, to efficiently search for both architectures and hyperparameters. AutoHAS learns to alternately update the shared network weights and a reinforcement learning (RL) controller, which learns the probability distribution for the architecture candidates and HP candidates. A temporary weight is introduced to store the updated weight from the selected HPs (by the controller), and a validation accuracy based on this temporary weight serves as a reward to update the controller. In experiments, we show AutoHAS is efficient and generalizable to different search spaces, baselines and datasets. In particular, AutoHAS can improve the accuracy over popular network architectures, such as ResNet and EfficientNet, on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and four more other datasets.

Grounding-DINO is a state-of-the-art open-set detection model that tackles multiple vision tasks including Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD), Phrase Grounding (PG), and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). Its effectiveness has led to its widespread adoption as a mainstream architecture for various downstream applications. However, despite its significance, the original Grounding-DINO model lacks comprehensive public technical details due to the unavailability of its training code. To bridge this gap, we present MM-Grounding-DINO, an open-source, comprehensive, and user-friendly baseline, which is built with the MMDetection toolbox. It adopts abundant vision datasets for pre-training and various detection and grounding datasets for fine-tuning. We give a comprehensive analysis of each reported result and detailed settings for reproduction. The extensive experiments on the benchmarks mentioned demonstrate that our MM-Grounding-DINO-Tiny outperforms the Grounding-DINO-Tiny baseline. We release all our models to the research community. Codes and trained models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/tree/main/configs/mm_grounding_dino.

The automatic co-speech gesture generation draws much attention in computer animation. Previous works designed network structures on individual datasets, which resulted in a lack of data volume and generalizability across different motion capture standards. In addition, it is a challenging task due to the weak correlation between speech and gestures. To address these problems, we present UnifiedGesture, a novel diffusion model-based speech-driven gesture synthesis approach, trained on multiple gesture datasets with different skeletons. Specifically, we first present a retargeting network to learn latent homeomorphic graphs for different motion capture standards, unifying the representations of various gestures while extending the dataset. We then capture the correlation between speech and gestures based on a diffusion model architecture using cross-local attention and self-attention to generate better speech-matched and realistic gestures. To further align speech and gesture and increase diversity, we incorporate reinforcement learning on the discrete gesture units with a learned reward function. Extensive experiments show that UnifiedGesture outperforms recent approaches on speech-driven gesture generation in terms of CCA, FGD, and human-likeness. All code, pre-trained models, databases, and demos are available to the public at https://github.com/YoungSeng/UnifiedGesture.

Despite recent progress, learning new tasks through language instructions remains an extremely challenging problem. On the ALFRED benchmark for task learning, the published state-of-the-art system only achieves a task success rate of less than 10% in an unseen environment, compared to the human performance of over 90%. To address this issue, this paper takes a closer look at task learning. In a departure from a widely applied end-to-end architecture, we decomposed task learning into three sub-problems: sub-goal planning, scene navigation, and object manipulation; and developed a model HiTUT (stands for Hierarchical Tasks via Unified Transformers) that addresses each sub-problem in a unified manner to learn a hierarchical task structure. On the ALFRED benchmark, HiTUT has achieved the best performance with a remarkably higher generalization ability. In the unseen environment, HiTUT achieves over 160% performance gain in success rate compared to the previous state of the art. The explicit representation of task structures also enables an in-depth understanding of the nature of the problem and the ability of the agent, which provides insight for future benchmark development and evaluation.

Generalist models have achieved remarkable success in both language and vision-language tasks, showcasing the potential of unified modeling. However, effectively integrating fine-grained perception tasks like detection and segmentation into these models remains a significant challenge. This is primarily because these tasks often rely heavily on task-specific designs and architectures that can complicate the modeling process. To address this challenge, we present \ours, a framework that Unifies Fine-grained visual perception tasks through an Open-ended language interface. By transforming all perception targets into the language space, \ours unifies object-level detection, pixel-level segmentation, and image-level vision-language tasks into a single model. Additionally, we introduce a novel embedding retrieval approach that relies solely on the language interface to support segmentation tasks. Our framework bridges the gap between fine-grained perception and vision-language tasks, significantly simplifying architectural design and training strategies while achieving comparable or superior performance to methods with intricate task-specific designs. After multi-task training on five standard visual perception datasets, \ours outperforms the previous state-of-the-art generalist models by 12.3 mAP on COCO instance segmentation and 3.3 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. Furthermore, our method seamlessly integrates with existing MLLMs, effectively combining fine-grained perception capabilities with their advanced language abilities, thereby enabling more challenging tasks such as reasoning segmentation. Code and models will be publicly available.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has gathered notable interest since it can liberate training from dependency on depth annotations. In monocular video training case, recent methods only conduct view synthesis between existing camera views, leading to insufficient guidance. To tackle this, we try to synthesize more virtual camera views by flow-based video frame interpolation (VFI), termed as temporal augmentation. For multi-frame inference, to sidestep the problem of dynamic objects encountered by explicit geometry-based methods like ManyDepth, we return to the feature fusion paradigm and design a VFI-assisted multi-frame fusion module to align and aggregate multi-frame features, using motion and occlusion information obtained by the flow-based VFI model. Finally, we construct a unified self-supervised learning framework, named Mono-ViFI, to bilaterally connect single- and multi-frame depth. In this framework, spatial data augmentation through image affine transformation is incorporated for data diversity, along with a triplet depth consistency loss for regularization. The single- and multi-frame models can share weights, making our framework compact and memory-efficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can bring significant improvements to current advanced architectures. Source code is available at https://github.com/LiuJF1226/Mono-ViFI.

The recognition capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of images, texts, and 3D point clouds by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/salesforce/ULIP.

We present FoundationPose, a unified foundation model for 6D object pose estimation and tracking, supporting both model-based and model-free setups. Our approach can be instantly applied at test-time to a novel object without fine-tuning, as long as its CAD model is given, or a small number of reference images are captured. We bridge the gap between these two setups with a neural implicit representation that allows for effective novel view synthesis, keeping the downstream pose estimation modules invariant under the same unified framework. Strong generalizability is achieved via large-scale synthetic training, aided by a large language model (LLM), a novel transformer-based architecture, and contrastive learning formulation. Extensive evaluation on multiple public datasets involving challenging scenarios and objects indicate our unified approach outperforms existing methods specialized for each task by a large margin. In addition, it even achieves comparable results to instance-level methods despite the reduced assumptions. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/FoundationPose/

Masked image modeling, an emerging self-supervised pre-training method, has shown impressive success across numerous downstream vision tasks with Vision transformers. Its underlying idea is simple: a portion of the input image is masked out and then reconstructed via a pre-text task. However, the working principle behind MIM is not well explained, and previous studies insist that MIM primarily works for the Transformer family but is incompatible with CNNs. In this work, we observe that MIM essentially teaches the model to learn better middle-order interactions among patches for more generalized feature extraction. We then propose an Architecture-Agnostic Masked Image Modeling framework (A^2MIM), which is compatible with both Transformers and CNNs in a unified way. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that A^2MIM learns better representations without explicit design and endows the backbone model with the stronger capability to transfer to various downstream tasks.

Recent AIGC systems possess the capability to generate digital multimedia content based on human language instructions, such as text, image and video. However, when it comes to speech, existing methods related to human instruction-to-speech generation exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they require the division of inputs into content prompt (transcript) and description prompt (style and speaker), instead of directly supporting human instruction. This division is less natural in form and does not align with other AIGC models. Secondly, the practice of utilizing an independent description prompt to model speech style, without considering the transcript content, restricts the ability to control speech at a fine-grained level. To address these limitations, we propose VoxInstruct, a novel unified multilingual codec language modeling framework that extends traditional text-to-speech tasks into a general human instruction-to-speech task. Our approach enhances the expressiveness of human instruction-guided speech generation and aligns the speech generation paradigm with other modalities. To enable the model to automatically extract the content of synthesized speech from raw text instructions, we introduce speech semantic tokens as an intermediate representation for instruction-to-content guidance. We also incorporate multiple Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) strategies into our codec language model, which strengthens the generated speech following human instructions. Furthermore, our model architecture and training strategies allow for the simultaneous support of combining speech prompt and descriptive human instruction for expressive speech synthesis, which is a first-of-its-kind attempt. Codes, models and demos are at: https://github.com/thuhcsi/VoxInstruct.

In the domain of symbolic music research, the progress of developing scalable systems has been notably hindered by the scarcity of available training data and the demand for models tailored to specific tasks. To address these issues, we propose MelodyT5, a novel unified framework that leverages an encoder-decoder architecture tailored for symbolic music processing in ABC notation. This framework challenges the conventional task-specific approach, considering various symbolic music tasks as score-to-score transformations. Consequently, it integrates seven melody-centric tasks, from generation to harmonization and segmentation, within a single model. Pre-trained on MelodyHub, a newly curated collection featuring over 261K unique melodies encoded in ABC notation and encompassing more than one million task instances, MelodyT5 demonstrates superior performance in symbolic music processing via multi-task transfer learning. Our findings highlight the efficacy of multi-task transfer learning in symbolic music processing, particularly for data-scarce tasks, challenging the prevailing task-specific paradigms and offering a comprehensive dataset and framework for future explorations in this domain.

Recent advancements in hate speech detection (HSD) in Vietnamese have made significant progress, primarily attributed to the emergence of transformer-based pre-trained language models, particularly those built on the BERT architecture. However, the necessity for specialized fine-tuned models has resulted in the complexity and fragmentation of developing a multitasking HSD system. Moreover, most current methodologies focus on fine-tuning general pre-trained models, primarily trained on formal textual datasets like Wikipedia, which may not accurately capture human behavior on online platforms. In this research, we introduce ViHateT5, a T5-based model pre-trained on our proposed large-scale domain-specific dataset named VOZ-HSD. By harnessing the power of a text-to-text architecture, ViHateT5 can tackle multiple tasks using a unified model and achieve state-of-the-art performance across all standard HSD benchmarks in Vietnamese. Our experiments also underscore the significance of label distribution in pre-training data on model efficacy. We provide our experimental materials for research purposes, including the VOZ-HSD dataset, pre-trained checkpoint, the unified HSD-multitask ViHateT5 model, and related source code on GitHub publicly.

3D plane recovery from a single image can usually be divided into several subtasks of plane detection, segmentation, parameter estimation and possibly depth estimation. Previous works tend to solve this task by either extending the RCNN-based segmentation network or the dense pixel embedding-based clustering framework. However, none of them tried to integrate above related subtasks into a unified framework but treat them separately and sequentially, which we suspect is potentially a main source of performance limitation for existing approaches. Motivated by this finding and the success of query-based learning in enriching reasoning among semantic entities, in this paper, we propose PlaneRecTR, a Transformer-based architecture, which for the first time unifies all subtasks related to single-view plane recovery with a single compact model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed unified learning achieves mutual benefits across subtasks, obtaining a new state-of-the-art performance on public ScanNet and NYUv2-Plane datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/SJingjia/PlaneRecTR.

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e. text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e. image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a unified-modal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections can be utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space over a corpus of image-text pairs. As the non-paired single-modal data is very rich, our model can utilize much larger scale of data to learn more generalizable representations. Moreover, the textual knowledge and visual knowledge can enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO significantly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/

Sequence parallelism (SP), which divides the sequence dimension of input tensors across multiple computational devices, is becoming key to unlocking the long-context capabilities of generative AI models. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art SP approaches, i.e. DeepSpeed-Ulysses and Ring-Attention, and proposes a unified SP approach, which is more robust to transformer model architectures and network hardware topology. This paper compares the communication and memory cost of SP and existing parallelism, including data/tensor/zero/expert/pipeline parallelism, and discusses the best practices for designing hybrid 4D parallelism involving SP. We achieved 86% MFU on two 8xA800 nodes using SP for sequence length 208K for the LLAMA3-8B model. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/feifeibear/long-context-attention.

The natural world is full of complex systems characterized by intricate relations between their components: from social interactions between individuals in a social network to electrostatic interactions between atoms in a protein. Topological Deep Learning (TDL) provides a comprehensive framework to process and extract knowledge from data associated with these systems, such as predicting the social community to which an individual belongs or predicting whether a protein can be a reasonable target for drug development. TDL has demonstrated theoretical and practical advantages that hold the promise of breaking ground in the applied sciences and beyond. However, the rapid growth of the TDL literature has also led to a lack of unification in notation and language across Topological Neural Network (TNN) architectures. This presents a real obstacle for building upon existing works and for deploying TNNs to new real-world problems. To address this issue, we provide an accessible introduction to TDL, and compare the recently published TNNs using a unified mathematical and graphical notation. Through an intuitive and critical review of the emerging field of TDL, we extract valuable insights into current challenges and exciting opportunities for future development.

This paper introduces a novel framework for unified incremental few-shot object detection (iFSOD) and instance segmentation (iFSIS) using the Transformer architecture. Our goal is to create an optimal solution for situations where only a few examples of novel object classes are available, with no access to training data for base or old classes, while maintaining high performance across both base and novel classes. To achieve this, We extend Mask-DINO into a two-stage incremental learning framework. Stage 1 focuses on optimizing the model using the base dataset, while Stage 2 involves fine-tuning the model on novel classes. Besides, we incorporate a classifier selection strategy that assigns appropriate classifiers to the encoder and decoder according to their distinct functions. Empirical evidence indicates that this approach effectively mitigates the over-fitting on novel classes learning. Furthermore, we implement knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting of base classes. Comprehensive evaluations on the COCO and LVIS datasets for both iFSIS and iFSOD tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Neural networks efficiently encode learned information within their parameters. Consequently, many tasks can be unified by treating neural networks themselves as input data. When doing so, recent studies demonstrated the importance of accounting for the symmetries and geometry of parameter spaces. However, those works developed architectures tailored to specific networks such as MLPs and CNNs without normalization layers, and generalizing such architectures to other types of networks can be challenging. In this work, we overcome these challenges by building new metanetworks - neural networks that take weights from other neural networks as input. Put simply, we carefully build graphs representing the input neural networks and process the graphs using graph neural networks. Our approach, Graph Metanetworks (GMNs), generalizes to neural architectures where competing methods struggle, such as multi-head attention layers, normalization layers, convolutional layers, ResNet blocks, and group-equivariant linear layers. We prove that GMNs are expressive and equivariant to parameter permutation symmetries that leave the input neural network functions unchanged. We validate the effectiveness of our method on several metanetwork tasks over diverse neural network architectures.

Diffusion models are emerging expressive generative models, in which a large number of time steps (inference steps) are required for a single image generation. To accelerate such tedious process, reducing steps uniformly is considered as an undisputed principle of diffusion models. We consider that such a uniform assumption is not the optimal solution in practice; i.e., we can find different optimal time steps for different models. Therefore, we propose to search the optimal time steps sequence and compressed model architecture in a unified framework to achieve effective image generation for diffusion models without any further training. Specifically, we first design a unified search space that consists of all possible time steps and various architectures. Then, a two stage evolutionary algorithm is introduced to find the optimal solution in the designed search space. To further accelerate the search process, we employ FID score between generated and real samples to estimate the performance of the sampled examples. As a result, the proposed method is (i).training-free, obtaining the optimal time steps and model architecture without any training process; (ii). orthogonal to most advanced diffusion samplers and can be integrated to gain better sample quality. (iii). generalized, where the searched time steps and architectures can be directly applied on different diffusion models with the same guidance scale. Experimental results show that our method achieves excellent performance by using only a few time steps, e.g. 17.86 FID score on ImageNet 64 times 64 with only four steps, compared to 138.66 with DDIM. The code is available at https://github.com/lilijiangg/AutoDiffusion.

Estimating 3D human poses only from a 2D human pose sequence is thoroughly explored in recent years. Yet, prior to this, no such work has attempted to unify 2D and 3D pose representations in the shared feature space. In this paper, we propose MPM, a unified 2D-3D human pose representation framework via masked pose modeling. We treat 2D and 3D poses as two different modalities like vision and language and build a single-stream transformer-based architecture. We apply three pretext tasks, which are masked 2D pose modeling, masked 3D pose modeling, and masked 2D pose lifting to pre-train our network and use full-supervision to perform further fine-tuning. A high masking ratio of 72.5% in total with a spatio-temporal mask sampling strategy leading to better relation modeling both in spatial and temporal domains. MPM can handle multiple tasks including 3D human pose estimation, 3D pose estimation from occluded 2D pose, and 3D pose completion in a single framework. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on several widely used human pose datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/vvirgooo2/MPM

Large and sparse feed-forward layers (S-FFN) such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have proven effective in scaling up Transformers model size for pretraining large language models. By only activating part of the FFN parameters conditioning on input, S-FFN improves generalization performance while keeping training and inference costs (in FLOPs) fixed. In this work, we analyzed two major design choices of S-FFN: the memory block (a.k.a. expert) size and the memory block selection method under a general conceptual framework of sparse neural memory. Using this unified framework, we compare several S-FFN architectures for language modeling and provide insights into their relative efficacy and efficiency. We found a simpler selection method -- \texttt{Avg-K} that selects blocks through their mean aggregated hidden states, achieving lower perplexity in language model pretraining compared to existing MoE architectures including Switch Transformer (Fedus et al., 2021) and HashLayer (Roller et al., 2021).

A large-scale labeled dataset is a key factor for the success of supervised deep learning in computer vision. However, a limited number of annotated data is very common, especially in ophthalmic image analysis, since manual annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods bring huge opportunities for better utilizing unlabeled data, as they do not need massive annotations. With an attempt to use as many as possible unlabeled ophthalmic images, it is necessary to break the dimension barrier, simultaneously making use of both 2D and 3D images. In this paper, we propose a universal self-supervised Transformer framework, named Uni4Eye, to discover the inherent image property and capture domain-specific feature embedding in ophthalmic images. Uni4Eye can serve as a global feature extractor, which builds its basis on a Masked Image Modeling task with a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. We employ a Unified Patch Embedding module to replace the origin patch embedding module in ViT for jointly processing both 2D and 3D input images. Besides, we design a dual-branch multitask decoder module to simultaneously perform two reconstruction tasks on the input image and its gradient map, delivering discriminative representations for better convergence. We evaluate the performance of our pre-trained Uni4Eye encoder by fine-tuning it on six downstream ophthalmic image classification tasks. The superiority of Uni4Eye is successfully established through comparisons to other state-of-the-art SSL pre-training methods.

We introduce Lumos, a novel framework for training language agents that employs a unified data format and a modular architecture based on open-source large language models (LLMs). Lumos consists of three distinct modules: planning, grounding, and execution. The planning module breaks down a task into a series of high-level, tool-agnostic subgoals, which are then made specific by the grounding module through a set of low-level actions. These actions are subsequently executed by the execution module, utilizing a range of off-the-shelf tools and APIs. In order to train these modules effectively, high-quality annotations of subgoals and actions were collected and are made available for fine-tuning open-source LLMs for various tasks such as complex question answering, web tasks, and math problems. Leveraging this unified data and modular design, Lumos not only achieves comparable or superior performance to current, state-of-the-art agents, but also exhibits several key advantages: (1) Lumos surpasses GPT-4/3.5-based agents in complex question answering and web tasks, while equalling the performance of significantly larger LLM agents on math tasks; (2) Lumos outperforms open-source agents created through conventional training methods and those using chain-of-thoughts training; and (3) Lumos is capable of effectively generalizing to unseen interactive tasks, outperforming larger LLM-based agents and even exceeding performance of specialized agents.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has demonstrated amazing success in searching for efficient deep neural networks (DNNs) from a given supernet. In parallel, the lottery ticket hypothesis has shown that DNNs contain small subnetworks that can be trained from scratch to achieve a comparable or higher accuracy than original DNNs. As such, it is currently a common practice to develop efficient DNNs via a pipeline of first search and then prune. Nevertheless, doing so often requires a search-train-prune-retrain process and thus prohibitive computational cost. In this paper, we discover for the first time that both efficient DNNs and their lottery subnetworks (i.e., lottery tickets) can be directly identified from a supernet, which we term as SuperTickets, via a two-in-one training scheme with jointly architecture searching and parameter pruning. Moreover, we develop a progressive and unified SuperTickets identification strategy that allows the connectivity of subnetworks to change during supernet training, achieving better accuracy and efficiency trade-offs than conventional sparse training. Finally, we evaluate whether such identified SuperTickets drawn from one task can transfer well to other tasks, validating their potential of handling multiple tasks simultaneously. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on three tasks and four benchmark datasets validate that our proposed SuperTickets achieve boosted accuracy and efficiency trade-offs than both typical NAS and pruning pipelines, regardless of having retraining or not. Codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/SuperTickets.

Recently, text-to-image generation models have achieved remarkable advancements, particularly with diffusion models facilitating high-quality image synthesis from textual descriptions. However, these models often struggle with achieving precise control over pixel-level layouts, object appearances, and global styles when using text prompts alone. To mitigate this issue, previous works introduce conditional images as auxiliary inputs for image generation, enhancing control but typically necessitating specialized models tailored to different types of reference inputs. In this paper, we explore a new approach to unify controllable generation within a single framework. Specifically, we propose the unified image-instruction adapter (UNIC-Adapter) built on the Multi-Modal-Diffusion Transformer architecture, to enable flexible and controllable generation across diverse conditions without the need for multiple specialized models. Our UNIC-Adapter effectively extracts multi-modal instruction information by incorporating both conditional images and task instructions, injecting this information into the image generation process through a cross-attention mechanism enhanced by Rotary Position Embedding. Experimental results across a variety of tasks, including pixel-level spatial control, subject-driven image generation, and style-image-based image synthesis, demonstrate the effectiveness of our UNIC-Adapter in unified controllable image generation.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have attracted significant attention in research. However, they suffer from a slow convergence rate. In this paper, we aim to accelerate DiT training without any architectural modification. We identify the following issues in the training process: firstly, certain training strategies do not consistently perform well across different data. Secondly, the effectiveness of supervision at specific timesteps is limited. In response, we propose the following contributions: (1) We introduce a new perspective for interpreting the failure of the strategies. Specifically, we slightly extend the definition of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and suggest observing the Probability Density Function (PDF) of SNR to understand the essence of the data robustness of the strategy. (2) We conduct numerous experiments and report over one hundred experimental results to empirically summarize a unified accelerating strategy from the perspective of PDF. (3) We develop a new supervision method that further accelerates the training process of DiT. Based on them, we propose FasterDiT, an exceedingly simple and practicable design strategy. With few lines of code modifications, it achieves 2.30 FID on ImageNet 256 resolution at 1000k iterations, which is comparable to DiT (2.27 FID) but 7 times faster in training.

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

RNN-T models are widely used in ASR, which rely on the RNN-T loss to achieve length alignment between input audio and target sequence. However, the implementation complexity and the alignment-based optimization target of RNN-T loss lead to computational redundancy and a reduced role for predictor network, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel model named CIF-Transducer (CIF-T) which incorporates the Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF) mechanism with the RNN-T model to achieve efficient alignment. In this way, the RNN-T loss is abandoned, thus bringing a computational reduction and allowing the predictor network a more significant role. We also introduce Funnel-CIF, Context Blocks, Unified Gating and Bilinear Pooling joint network, and auxiliary training strategy to further improve performance. Experiments on the 178-hour AISHELL-1 and 10000-hour WenetSpeech datasets show that CIF-T achieves state-of-the-art results with lower computational overhead compared to RNN-T models.

Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new ``Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus'', we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks, but leveraging them for dense passage embedding remains challenging. This is due to their causal attention mechanism and the misalignment between their pre-training objectives and the text ranking tasks. Despite some recent efforts to address these issues, existing frameworks for LLM-based text embeddings have been limited by their support for only a limited range of LLM architectures and fine-tuning strategies, limiting their practical application and versatility. In this work, we introduce the Unified framework for Large Language Model Embedding (ULLME), a flexible, plug-and-play implementation that enables bidirectional attention across various LLMs and supports a range of fine-tuning strategies. We also propose Generation-augmented Representation Learning (GRL), a novel fine-tuning method to boost LLMs for text embedding tasks. GRL enforces consistency between representation-based and generation-based relevance scores, leveraging LLMs' powerful generative abilities for learning passage embeddings. To showcase our framework's flexibility and effectiveness, we release three pre-trained models from ULLME with different backbone architectures, ranging from 1.5B to 8B parameters, all of which demonstrate strong performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark. Our framework is publicly available at: https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/ullme. A demo video for ULLME can also be found at https://rb.gy/ws1ile.

Symbolic music generation aims to create musical notes, which can help users compose music, such as generating target instrumental tracks from scratch, or based on user-provided source tracks. Considering the diverse and flexible combination between source and target tracks, a unified model capable of generating any arbitrary tracks is of crucial necessity. Previous works fail to address this need due to inherent constraints in music representations and model architectures. To address this need, we propose a unified representation and diffusion framework named GETMusic (`GET' stands for GEnerate music Tracks), which includes a novel music representation named GETScore, and a diffusion model named GETDiff. GETScore represents notes as tokens and organizes them in a 2D structure, with tracks stacked vertically and progressing horizontally over time. During training, tracks are randomly selected as either the target or source. In the forward process, target tracks are corrupted by masking their tokens, while source tracks remain as ground truth. In the denoising process, GETDiff learns to predict the masked target tokens, conditioning on the source tracks. With separate tracks in GETScore and the non-autoregressive behavior of the model, GETMusic can explicitly control the generation of any target tracks from scratch or conditioning on source tracks. We conduct experiments on music generation involving six instrumental tracks, resulting in a total of 665 combinations. GETMusic provides high-quality results across diverse combinations and surpasses prior works proposed for some specific combinations.

We introduce a unified framework for iterative reasoning that leverages non-Euclidean geometry via Bregman divergences, higher-order operator averaging, and adaptive feedback mechanisms. Our analysis establishes that, under mild smoothness and contractivity assumptions, a generalized update scheme not only unifies classical methods such as mirror descent and dynamic programming but also captures modern chain-of-thought reasoning processes in large language models. In particular, we prove that our accelerated iterative update achieves an O(1/t^2) convergence rate in the absence of persistent perturbations, and we further demonstrate that feedback (iterative) architectures are necessary to approximate certain fixed-point functions efficiently. These theoretical insights bridge classical acceleration techniques with contemporary applications in neural computation and optimization.

Video synthesis techniques are undergoing rapid progress, with controllability being a significant aspect of practical usability for end-users. Although text condition is an effective way to guide video synthesis, capturing the correct joint distribution between text descriptions and video motion remains a substantial challenge. In this paper, we present a disentangled and unified framework, namely I2VControl, that unifies multiple motion control tasks in image-to-video synthesis. Our approach partitions the video into individual motion units and represents each unit with disentangled control signals, which allows for various control types to be flexibly combined within our single system. Furthermore, our methodology seamlessly integrates as a plug-in for pre-trained models and remains agnostic to specific model architectures. We conduct extensive experiments, achieving excellent performance on various control tasks, and our method further facilitates user-driven creative combinations, enhancing innovation and creativity. The project page is: https://wanquanf.github.io/I2VControl .

Recent work shows that path gradient estimators for normalizing flows have lower variance compared to standard estimators for variational inference, resulting in improved training. However, they are often prohibitively more expensive from a computational point of view and cannot be applied to maximum likelihood training in a scalable manner, which severely hinders their widespread adoption. In this work, we overcome these crucial limitations. Specifically, we propose a fast path gradient estimator which improves computational efficiency significantly and works for all normalizing flow architectures of practical relevance. We then show that this estimator can also be applied to maximum likelihood training for which it has a regularizing effect as it can take the form of a given target energy function into account. We empirically establish its superior performance and reduced variance for several natural sciences applications.

Human-centric perceptions (e.g., pose estimation, human parsing, pedestrian detection, person re-identification, etc.) play a key role in industrial applications of visual models. While specific human-centric tasks have their own relevant semantic aspect to focus on, they also share the same underlying semantic structure of the human body. However, few works have attempted to exploit such homogeneity and design a general-propose model for human-centric tasks. In this work, we revisit a broad range of human-centric tasks and unify them in a minimalist manner. We propose UniHCP, a Unified Model for Human-Centric Perceptions, which unifies a wide range of human-centric tasks in a simplified end-to-end manner with the plain vision transformer architecture. With large-scale joint training on 33 human-centric datasets, UniHCP can outperform strong baselines on several in-domain and downstream tasks by direct evaluation. When adapted to a specific task, UniHCP achieves new SOTAs on a wide range of human-centric tasks, e.g., 69.8 mIoU on CIHP for human parsing, 86.18 mA on PA-100K for attribute prediction, 90.3 mAP on Market1501 for ReID, and 85.8 JI on CrowdHuman for pedestrian detection, performing better than specialized models tailored for each task.

For a long time, different recommendation tasks typically require designing task-specific architectures and training objectives. As a result, it is hard to transfer the learned knowledge and representations from one task to another, thus restricting the generalization ability of existing recommendation approaches, e.g., a sequential recommendation model can hardly be applied or transferred to a review generation method. To deal with such issues, considering that language can describe almost anything and language grounding is a powerful medium to represent various problems or tasks, we present a flexible and unified text-to-text paradigm called "Pretrain, Personalized Prompt, and Predict Paradigm" (P5) for recommendation, which unifies various recommendation tasks in a shared framework. In P5, all data such as user-item interactions, user descriptions, item metadata, and user reviews are converted to a common format -- natural language sequences. The rich information from natural language assists P5 to capture deeper semantics for personalization and recommendation. Specifically, P5 learns different tasks with the same language modeling objective during pretraining. Thus, it serves as the foundation model for various downstream recommendation tasks, allows easy integration with other modalities, and enables instruction-based recommendation based on prompts. P5 advances recommender systems from shallow model to deep model to big model, and will revolutionize the technical form of recommender systems towards universal recommendation engine. With adaptive personalized prompt for different users, P5 is able to make predictions in a zero-shot or few-shot manner and largely reduces the necessity for extensive fine-tuning. On several recommendation benchmarks, we conduct experiments to show the effectiveness of P5. We release the source code at https://github.com/jeykigung/P5.

The development of large language models (LLMs) has expanded to multi-modal systems capable of processing text, images, and speech within a unified framework. Training these models demands significantly larger datasets and computational resources compared to text-only LLMs. To address the scaling challenges, we introduce Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT), a sparse multi-modal transformer architecture that significantly reduces pretraining computational costs. MoT decouples non-embedding parameters of the model by modality -- including feed-forward networks, attention matrices, and layer normalization -- enabling modality-specific processing with global self-attention over the full input sequence. We evaluate MoT across multiple settings and model scales. In the Chameleon 7B setting (autoregressive text-and-image generation), MoT matches the dense baseline's performance using only 55.8\% of the FLOPs. When extended to include speech, MoT reaches speech performance comparable to the dense baseline with only 37.2\% of the FLOPs. In the Transfusion setting, where text and image are trained with different objectives, a 7B MoT model matches the image modality performance of the dense baseline with one third of the FLOPs, and a 760M MoT model outperforms a 1.4B dense baseline across key image generation metrics. System profiling further highlights MoT's practical benefits, achieving dense baseline image quality in 47.2\% of the wall-clock time and text quality in 75.6\% of the wall-clock time (measured on AWS p4de.24xlarge instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs).

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Medical image analysis continues to hold interesting challenges given the subtle characteristics of certain diseases and the significant overlap in appearance between diseases. In this work, we explore the concept of self-attention for tackling such subtleties in and between diseases. To this end, we introduce MEDUSA, a multi-scale encoder-decoder self-attention mechanism tailored for medical image analysis. While self-attention deep convolutional neural network architectures in existing literature center around the notion of multiple isolated lightweight attention mechanisms with limited individual capacities being incorporated at different points in the network architecture, MEDUSA takes a significant departure from this notion by possessing a single, unified self-attention mechanism with significantly higher capacity with multiple attention heads feeding into different scales in the network architecture. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first "single body, multi-scale heads" realization of self-attention and enables explicit global context amongst selective attention at different levels of representational abstractions while still enabling differing local attention context at individual levels of abstractions. With MEDUSA, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging medical image analysis benchmarks including COVIDx, RSNA RICORD, and RSNA Pneumonia Challenge when compared to previous work. Our MEDUSA model is publicly available.

Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in general image tasks, a gap persists in the medical field for a multimodal large model adept at handling the nuanced diversity of medical images. Addressing this, we propose MedXChat, a unified multimodal large model designed for seamless interactions between medical assistants and users. MedXChat encompasses three key functionalities: CXR(Chest X-ray)-to-Report generation, CXR-based visual question-answering (VQA), and Text-to-CXR synthesis. Our contributions are as follows. Firstly, our model showcases exceptional cross-task adaptability, displaying adeptness across all three defined tasks and outperforming the benchmark models on the MIMIC dataset in medical multimodal applications. Secondly, we introduce an innovative Text-to-CXR synthesis approach that utilizes instruction-following capabilities within the Stable Diffusion (SD) architecture. This technique integrates smoothly with the existing model framework, requiring no extra parameters, thereby maintaining the SD's generative strength while also bestowing upon it the capacity to render fine-grained medical images with high fidelity. Comprehensive experiments validate MedXChat's synergistic enhancement across all tasks. Our instruction data and model will be open-sourced.

In-context learning (ICL) involves reasoning from given contextual examples. As more modalities comes, this procedure is becoming more challenging as the interleaved input modalities convolutes the understanding process. This is exemplified by the observation that multimodal models often struggle to effectively extrapolate from contextual examples to perform ICL. To address these challenges, we introduce MultiModal In-conteXt Tuning (M^2IXT), a lightweight module to enhance the ICL capabilities of multimodal unified models. The proposed M^2IXT module perceives an expandable context window to incorporate various labeled examples of multiple modalities (e.g., text, image, and coordinates). It can be prepended to various multimodal unified models (e.g., OFA, Unival, LLaVA) of different architectures and trained via a mixed-tasks strategy to enable rapid few-shot adaption on multiple tasks and datasets. When tuned on as little as 50K multimodal data, M^2IXT can boost the few-shot ICL performance significantly (e.g., 18\% relative increase for OFA), and obtained state-of-the-art results across an array of tasks including visual question answering, image captioning, visual grounding, and visual entailment, while being considerably small in terms of model parameters (e.g., sim20times smaller than Flamingo or MMICL), highlighting the flexibility and effectiveness of M^2IXT as a multimodal in-context learner.

Audio-driven 3D facial animation aims to map input audio to realistic facial motion. Despite significant progress, limitations arise from inconsistent 3D annotations, restricting previous models to training on specific annotations and thereby constraining the training scale. In this work, we present UniTalker, a unified model featuring a multi-head architecture designed to effectively leverage datasets with varied annotations. To enhance training stability and ensure consistency among multi-head outputs, we employ three training strategies, namely, PCA, model warm-up, and pivot identity embedding. To expand the training scale and diversity, we assemble A2F-Bench, comprising five publicly available datasets and three newly curated datasets. These datasets contain a wide range of audio domains, covering multilingual speech voices and songs, thereby scaling the training data from commonly employed datasets, typically less than 1 hour, to 18.5 hours. With a single trained UniTalker model, we achieve substantial lip vertex error reductions of 9.2% for BIWI dataset and 13.7% for Vocaset. Additionally, the pre-trained UniTalker exhibits promise as the foundation model for audio-driven facial animation tasks. Fine-tuning the pre-trained UniTalker on seen datasets further enhances performance on each dataset, with an average error reduction of 6.3% on A2F-Bench. Moreover, fine-tuning UniTalker on an unseen dataset with only half the data surpasses prior state-of-the-art models trained on the full dataset. The code and dataset are available at the project page https://github.com/X-niper/UniTalker.

Computer vision researchers are embracing two promising paradigms: Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Multi-task Learning (MTL), which both show great performance but are computation-intensive, given the quadratic complexity of self-attention in ViT and the need to activate an entire large MTL model for one task. M^3ViT is the latest multi-task ViT model that introduces mixture-of-experts (MoE), where only a small portion of subnetworks ("experts") are sparsely and dynamically activated based on the current task. M^3ViT achieves better accuracy and over 80% computation reduction but leaves challenges for efficient deployment on FPGA. Our work, dubbed Edge-MoE, solves the challenges to introduce the first end-to-end FPGA accelerator for multi-task ViT with a collection of architectural innovations, including (1) a novel reordering mechanism for self-attention, which requires only constant bandwidth regardless of the target parallelism; (2) a fast single-pass softmax approximation; (3) an accurate and low-cost GELU approximation; (4) a unified and flexible computing unit that is shared by almost all computational layers to maximally reduce resource usage; and (5) uniquely for M^3ViT, a novel patch reordering method to eliminate memory access overhead. Edge-MoE achieves 2.24x and 4.90x better energy efficiency comparing with GPU and CPU, respectively. A real-time video demonstration is available online, along with our open-source code written using High-Level Synthesis.

This paper introduces a novel approach to efficiently feeding knowledge to language models (LLMs) during prediction by integrating retrieval and generation processes within a unified framework. While the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model addresses gaps in LLMs' training data and knowledge limits, it is hindered by token limit restrictions and dependency on the retrieval system's accuracy. Our proposed architecture incorporates in-context vectors (ICV) to overcome these challenges. ICV recasts in-context learning by using latent embeddings of LLMs to create a vector that captures essential task information. This vector is then used to shift the latent states of the LLM, enhancing the generation process without adding demonstration examples to the prompt. ICV directly integrates information into the model, enabling it to process this information more effectively. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that ICV outperforms standard in-context learning and fine-tuning across question-answering, information retrieval, and other tasks. This approach mitigates the limitations of current RAG models and offers a more robust solution for handling extensive and diverse datasets. Despite leveraging a fraction of the parameters, our ICV-enhanced model achieves competitive performance against models like LLaMA-3, Gemma, and Phi-3, significantly reducing computational costs and memory requirements. ICV reduces prompt length, is easy to control, surpasses token limitations, and is computationally efficient compared to fine-tuning.

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end

Deep neural networks exploiting millions of parameters are nowadays the norm in deep learning applications. This is a potential issue because of the great amount of computational resources needed for training, and of the possible loss of generalization performance of overparametrized networks. We propose in this paper a method for learning sparse neural topologies via a regularization technique which identifies non relevant weights and selectively shrinks their norm, while performing a classic update for relevant ones. This technique, which is an improvement of classical weight decay, is based on the definition of a regularization term which can be added to any loss functional regardless of its form, resulting in a unified general framework exploitable in many different contexts. The actual elimination of parameters identified as irrelevant is handled by an iterative pruning algorithm. We tested the proposed technique on different image classification and Natural language generation tasks, obtaining results on par or better then competitors in terms of sparsity and metrics, while achieving strong models compression.

Xmodel-2 is a 1.2-billion-parameter large language model designed specifically for reasoning tasks. Its architecture enables different model scales to share a unified set of hyperparameters, allowing for extensive experimentation on smaller models and seamless transfer of optimal configurations to larger models. To maximize training efficiency and stability, Xmodel-2 employs the WSD learning rate scheduler from MiniCPM. Pretrained on 1.5 trillion tokens from diverse sources, Xmodel-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex reasoning and agent-based tasks, while maintaining low training costs. These results highlight the potential of efficient model design and training strategies in advancing reasoning capabilities. Model checkpoints and code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2

We present ArTST, a pre-trained Arabic text and speech transformer for supporting open-source speech technologies for the Arabic language. The model architecture follows the unified-modal framework, SpeechT5, that was recently released for English, and is focused on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), with plans to extend the model for dialectal and code-switched Arabic in future editions. We pre-trained the model from scratch on MSA speech and text data, and fine-tuned it for the following tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech synthesis (TTS), and spoken dialect identification. In our experiments comparing ArTST with SpeechT5, as well as with previously reported results in these tasks, ArTST performs on a par with or exceeding the current state-of-the-art in all three tasks. Moreover, we find that our pre-training is conducive for generalization, which is particularly evident in the low-resource TTS task. The pre-trained model as well as the fine-tuned ASR and TTS models are released for research use.

We present Kosmos-2.5, a multimodal literate model for machine reading of text-intensive images. Pre-trained on large-scale text-intensive images, Kosmos-2.5 excels in two distinct yet cooperative transcription tasks: (1) generating spatially-aware text blocks, where each block of text is assigned its spatial coordinates within the image, and (2) producing structured text output that captures styles and structures into the markdown format. This unified multimodal literate capability is achieved through a shared Transformer architecture, task-specific prompts, and flexible text representations. We evaluate Kosmos-2.5 on end-to-end document-level text recognition and image-to-markdown text generation. Furthermore, the model can be readily adapted for any text-intensive image understanding task with different prompts through supervised fine-tuning, making it a general-purpose tool for real-world applications involving text-rich images. This work also paves the way for the future scaling of multimodal large language models.

We present a unified formulation and model for three motion and 3D perception tasks: optical flow, rectified stereo matching and unrectified stereo depth estimation from posed images. Unlike previous specialized architectures for each specific task, we formulate all three tasks as a unified dense correspondence matching problem, which can be solved with a single model by directly comparing feature similarities. Such a formulation calls for discriminative feature representations, which we achieve using a Transformer, in particular the cross-attention mechanism. We demonstrate that cross-attention enables integration of knowledge from another image via cross-view interactions, which greatly improves the quality of the extracted features. Our unified model naturally enables cross-task transfer since the model architecture and parameters are shared across tasks. We outperform RAFT with our unified model on the challenging Sintel dataset, and our final model that uses a few additional task-specific refinement steps outperforms or compares favorably to recent state-of-the-art methods on 10 popular flow, stereo and depth datasets, while being simpler and more efficient in terms of model design and inference speed.

We introduce OneDiffusion, a versatile, large-scale diffusion model that seamlessly supports bidirectional image synthesis and understanding across diverse tasks. It enables conditional generation from inputs such as text, depth, pose, layout, and semantic maps, while also handling tasks like image deblurring, upscaling, and reverse processes such as depth estimation and segmentation. Additionally, OneDiffusion allows for multi-view generation, camera pose estimation, and instant personalization using sequential image inputs. Our model takes a straightforward yet effective approach by treating all tasks as frame sequences with varying noise scales during training, allowing any frame to act as a conditioning image at inference time. Our unified training framework removes the need for specialized architectures, supports scalable multi-task training, and adapts smoothly to any resolution, enhancing both generalization and scalability. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance across tasks in both generation and prediction such as text-to-image, multiview generation, ID preservation, depth estimation and camera pose estimation despite relatively small training dataset. Our code and checkpoint are freely available at https://github.com/lehduong/OneDiffusion

Unified vision-language frameworks have greatly advanced in recent years, most of which adopt an encoder-decoder architecture to unify image-text tasks as sequence-to-sequence generation. However, existing video-language (VidL) models still require task-specific designs in model architecture and training objectives for each task. In this work, we explore a unified VidL framework LAVENDER, where Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is used as the common interface for all pre-training and downstream tasks. Such unification leads to a simplified model architecture, where only a lightweight MLM head, instead of a decoder with much more parameters, is needed on top of the multimodal encoder. Surprisingly, experimental results show that this unified framework achieves competitive performance on 14 VidL benchmarks, covering video question answering, text-to-video retrieval and video captioning. Extensive analyses further demonstrate the advantage of LAVENDER over existing VidL methods in: (i) supporting all downstream tasks with just a single set of parameter values when multi-task finetuned; (ii) few-shot generalization on various downstream tasks; and (iii) enabling zero-shot evaluation on video question answering tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LAVENDER.

The recent advances in natural language processing have predominantly favored well-resourced English-centric models, resulting in a significant gap with low-resource languages. In this work, we introduce the language model TURNA, which is developed for the low-resource language Turkish and is capable of both natural language understanding and generation tasks. TURNA is pretrained with an encoder-decoder architecture based on the unified framework UL2 with a diverse corpus that we specifically curated for this purpose. We evaluated TURNA with three generation tasks and five understanding tasks for Turkish. The results show that TURNA outperforms several multilingual models in both understanding and generation tasks, and competes with monolingual Turkish models in understanding tasks. TURNA is made available at https://huggingface.co/boun-tabi-LMG/TURNA .

We describe MGARD, a software providing MultiGrid Adaptive Reduction for floating-point scientific data on structured and unstructured grids. With exceptional data compression capability and precise error control, MGARD addresses a wide range of requirements, including storage reduction, high-performance I/O, and in-situ data analysis. It features a unified application programming interface (API) that seamlessly operates across diverse computing architectures. MGARD has been optimized with highly-tuned GPU kernels and efficient memory and device management mechanisms, ensuring scalable and rapid operations.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) deliver impressive generative performance but face prohibitive computational demands due to both the quadratic complexity of token-based self-attention and the need for extensive sampling steps. While recent research has focused on accelerating sampling, the structural inefficiencies of DiT remain underexplored. We propose FlexDiT, a framework that dynamically adapts token density across both spatial and temporal dimensions to achieve computational efficiency without compromising generation quality. Spatially, FlexDiT employs a three-segment architecture that allocates token density based on feature requirements at each layer: Poolingformer in the bottom layers for efficient global feature extraction, Sparse-Dense Token Modules (SDTM) in the middle layers to balance global context with local detail, and dense tokens in the top layers to refine high-frequency details. Temporally, FlexDiT dynamically modulates token density across denoising stages, progressively increasing token count as finer details emerge in later timesteps. This synergy between FlexDiT's spatially adaptive architecture and its temporal pruning strategy enables a unified framework that balances efficiency and fidelity throughout the generation process. Our experiments demonstrate FlexDiT's effectiveness, achieving a 55% reduction in FLOPs and a 175% improvement in inference speed on DiT-XL with only a 0.09 increase in FID score on 512times512 ImageNet images, a 56% reduction in FLOPs across video generation datasets including FaceForensics, SkyTimelapse, UCF101, and Taichi-HD, and a 69% improvement in inference speed on PixArt-alpha on text-to-image generation task with a 0.24 FID score decrease. FlexDiT provides a scalable solution for high-quality diffusion-based generation compatible with further sampling optimization techniques.

We present LiRank, a large-scale ranking framework at LinkedIn that brings to production state-of-the-art modeling architectures and optimization methods. We unveil several modeling improvements, including Residual DCN, which adds attention and residual connections to the famous DCNv2 architecture. We share insights into combining and tuning SOTA architectures to create a unified model, including Dense Gating, Transformers and Residual DCN. We also propose novel techniques for calibration and describe how we productionalized deep learning based explore/exploit methods. To enable effective, production-grade serving of large ranking models, we detail how to train and compress models using quantization and vocabulary compression. We provide details about the deployment setup for large-scale use cases of Feed ranking, Jobs Recommendations, and Ads click-through rate (CTR) prediction. We summarize our learnings from various A/B tests by elucidating the most effective technical approaches. These ideas have contributed to relative metrics improvements across the board at LinkedIn: +0.5% member sessions in the Feed, +1.76% qualified job applications for Jobs search and recommendations, and +4.3% for Ads CTR. We hope this work can provide practical insights and solutions for practitioners interested in leveraging large-scale deep ranking systems.

NLP benchmarks have largely focused on short texts, such as sentences and paragraphs, even though long texts comprise a considerable amount of natural language in the wild. We introduce SCROLLS, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts. We examine existing long-text datasets, and handpick ones where the text is naturally long, while prioritizing tasks that involve synthesizing information across the input. SCROLLS contains summarization, question answering, and natural language inference tasks, covering multiple domains, including literature, science, business, and entertainment. Initial baselines, including Longformer Encoder-Decoder, indicate that there is ample room for improvement on SCROLLS. We make all datasets available in a unified text-to-text format and host a live leaderboard to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods.

Given that visual foundation models (VFMs) are trained on extensive datasets but often limited to 2D images, a natural question arises: how well do they understand the 3D world? With the differences in architecture and training protocols (i.e., objectives, proxy tasks), a unified framework to fairly and comprehensively probe their 3D awareness is urgently needed. Existing works on 3D probing suggest single-view 2.5D estimation (e.g., depth and normal) or two-view sparse 2D correspondence (e.g., matching and tracking). Unfortunately, these tasks ignore texture awareness, and require 3D data as ground-truth, which limits the scale and diversity of their evaluation set. To address these issues, we introduce Feat2GS, which readout 3D Gaussians attributes from VFM features extracted from unposed images. This allows us to probe 3D awareness for geometry and texture via novel view synthesis, without requiring 3D data. Additionally, the disentanglement of 3DGS parameters - geometry (x, alpha, Sigma) and texture (c) - enables separate analysis of texture and geometry awareness. Under Feat2GS, we conduct extensive experiments to probe the 3D awareness of several VFMs, and investigate the ingredients that lead to a 3D aware VFM. Building on these findings, we develop several variants that achieve state-of-the-art across diverse datasets. This makes Feat2GS useful for probing VFMs, and as a simple-yet-effective baseline for novel-view synthesis. Code and data will be made available at https://fanegg.github.io/Feat2GS/.

Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties: (1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algorithms whose components are separately trained and tuned. (2) It naturally handles sequences in arbitrary lengths, involving no character segmentation or horizontal scale normalization. (3) It is not confined to any predefined lexicon and achieves remarkable performances in both lexicon-free and lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks. (4) It generates an effective yet much smaller model, which is more practical for real-world application scenarios. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, Street View Text and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the prior arts. Moreover, the proposed algorithm performs well in the task of image-based music score recognition, which evidently verifies the generality of it.

Recent progress in natural language processing has been driven by advances in both model architecture and model pretraining. Transformer architectures have facilitated building higher-capacity models and pretraining has made it possible to effectively utilize this capacity for a wide variety of tasks. Transformers is an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to the wider machine learning community. The library consists of carefully engineered state-of-the art Transformer architectures under a unified API. Backing this library is a curated collection of pretrained models made by and available for the community. Transformers is designed to be extensible by researchers, simple for practitioners, and fast and robust in industrial deployments. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.

Recently, large-scale diffusion models, e.g., Stable diffusion and DallE2, have shown remarkable results on image synthesis. On the other hand, large-scale cross-modal pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP, ALIGN, and FILIP) are competent for various downstream tasks by learning to align vision and language embeddings. In this paper, we explore the possibility of jointly modeling generation and discrimination. Specifically, we propose DiffDis to unify the cross-modal generative and discriminative pretraining into one single framework under the diffusion process. DiffDis first formulates the image-text discriminative problem as a generative diffusion process of the text embedding from the text encoder conditioned on the image. Then, we propose a novel dual-stream network architecture, which fuses the noisy text embedding with the knowledge of latent images from different scales for image-text discriminative learning. Moreover, the generative and discriminative tasks can efficiently share the image-branch network structure in the multi-modality model. Benefiting from diffusion-based unified training, DiffDis achieves both better generation ability and cross-modal semantic alignment in one architecture. Experimental results show that DiffDis outperforms single-task models on both the image generation and the image-text discriminative tasks, e.g., 1.65% improvement on average accuracy of zero-shot classification over 12 datasets and 2.42 improvement on FID of zero-shot image synthesis.

Transfer learning has recently become the dominant paradigm of machine learning. Pre-trained models fine-tuned for downstream tasks achieve better performance with fewer labelled examples. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how to develop models that specialise towards multiple tasks without incurring negative interference and that generalise systematically to non-identically distributed tasks. Modular deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges. In this framework, units of computation are often implemented as autonomous parameter-efficient modules. Information is conditionally routed to a subset of modules and subsequently aggregated. These properties enable positive transfer and systematic generalisation by separating computation from routing and updating modules locally. We offer a survey of modular architectures, providing a unified view over several threads of research that evolved independently in the scientific literature. Moreover, we explore various additional purposes of modularity, including scaling language models, causal inference, programme induction, and planning in reinforcement learning. Finally, we report various concrete applications where modularity has been successfully deployed such as cross-lingual and cross-modal knowledge transfer. Related talks and projects to this survey, are available at https://www.modulardeeplearning.com/.

This work targets automated designing and scaling of Vision Transformers (ViTs). The motivation comes from two pain spots: 1) the lack of efficient and principled methods for designing and scaling ViTs; 2) the tremendous computational cost of training ViT that is much heavier than its convolution counterpart. To tackle these issues, we propose As-ViT, an auto-scaling framework for ViTs without training, which automatically discovers and scales up ViTs in an efficient and principled manner. Specifically, we first design a "seed" ViT topology by leveraging a training-free search process. This extremely fast search is fulfilled by a comprehensive study of ViT's network complexity, yielding a strong Kendall-tau correlation with ground-truth accuracies. Second, starting from the "seed" topology, we automate the scaling rule for ViTs by growing widths/depths to different ViT layers. This results in a series of architectures with different numbers of parameters in a single run. Finally, based on the observation that ViTs can tolerate coarse tokenization in early training stages, we propose a progressive tokenization strategy to train ViTs faster and cheaper. As a unified framework, As-ViT achieves strong performance on classification (83.5% top1 on ImageNet-1k) and detection (52.7% mAP on COCO) without any manual crafting nor scaling of ViT architectures: the end-to-end model design and scaling process cost only 12 hours on one V100 GPU. Our code is available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/AsViT.

In the fashion domain, there exists a variety of vision-and-language (V+L) tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, text-guided image retrieval, multi-modal classification, and image captioning. They differ drastically in each individual input/output format and dataset size. It has been common to design a task-specific model and fine-tune it independently from a pre-trained V+L model (e.g., CLIP). This results in parameter inefficiency and inability to exploit inter-task relatedness. To address such issues, we propose a novel FAshion-focused Multi-task Efficient learning method for Vision-and-Language tasks (FAME-ViL) in this work. Compared with existing approaches, FAME-ViL applies a single model for multiple heterogeneous fashion tasks, therefore being much more parameter-efficient. It is enabled by two novel components: (1) a task-versatile architecture with cross-attention adapters and task-specific adapters integrated into a unified V+L model, and (2) a stable and effective multi-task training strategy that supports learning from heterogeneous data and prevents negative transfer. Extensive experiments on four fashion tasks show that our FAME-ViL can save 61.5% of parameters over alternatives, while significantly outperforming the conventional independently trained single-task models. Code is available at https://github.com/BrandonHanx/FAME-ViL.

There has been a debate about the superiority between vision Transformers and ConvNets, serving as the backbone of computer vision models. Although they are usually considered as two completely different architectures, in this paper, we interpret vision Transformers as ConvNets with dynamic convolutions, which enables us to characterize existing Transformers and dynamic ConvNets in a unified framework and compare their design choices side by side. In addition, our interpretation can also guide the network design as researchers now can consider vision Transformers from the design space of ConvNets and vice versa. We demonstrate such potential through two specific studies. First, we inspect the role of softmax in vision Transformers as the activation function and find it can be replaced by commonly used ConvNets modules, such as ReLU and Layer Normalization, which results in a faster convergence rate and better performance. Second, following the design of depth-wise convolution, we create a corresponding depth-wise vision Transformer that is more efficient with comparable performance. The potential of the proposed unified interpretation is not limited to the given examples and we hope it can inspire the community and give rise to more advanced network architectures.

Transformers have attracted increasing interests in computer vision, but they still fall behind state-of-the-art convolutional networks. In this work, we show that while Transformers tend to have larger model capacity, their generalization can be worse than convolutional networks due to the lack of the right inductive bias. To effectively combine the strengths from both architectures, we present CoAtNets(pronounced "coat" nets), a family of hybrid models built from two key insights: (1) depthwise Convolution and self-Attention can be naturally unified via simple relative attention; (2) vertically stacking convolution layers and attention layers in a principled way is surprisingly effective in improving generalization, capacity and efficiency. Experiments show that our CoAtNets achieve state-of-the-art performance under different resource constraints across various datasets: Without extra data, CoAtNet achieves 86.0% ImageNet top-1 accuracy; When pre-trained with 13M images from ImageNet-21K, our CoAtNet achieves 88.56% top-1 accuracy, matching ViT-huge pre-trained with 300M images from JFT-300M while using 23x less data; Notably, when we further scale up CoAtNet with JFT-3B, it achieves 90.88% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, establishing a new state-of-the-art result.

The goal of this paper is to serve as a guide for selecting a detection architecture that achieves the right speed/memory/accuracy balance for a given application and platform. To this end, we investigate various ways to trade accuracy for speed and memory usage in modern convolutional object detection systems. A number of successful systems have been proposed in recent years, but apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult due to different base feature extractors (e.g., VGG, Residual Networks), different default image resolutions, as well as different hardware and software platforms. We present a unified implementation of the Faster R-CNN [Ren et al., 2015], R-FCN [Dai et al., 2016] and SSD [Liu et al., 2015] systems, which we view as "meta-architectures" and trace out the speed/accuracy trade-off curve created by using alternative feature extractors and varying other critical parameters such as image size within each of these meta-architectures. On one extreme end of this spectrum where speed and memory are critical, we present a detector that achieves real time speeds and can be deployed on a mobile device. On the opposite end in which accuracy is critical, we present a detector that achieves state-of-the-art performance measured on the COCO detection task.

Diffusion-based audio and music generation models commonly generate music by constructing an image representation of audio (e.g., a mel-spectrogram) and then converting it to audio using a phase reconstruction model or vocoder. Typical vocoders, however, produce monophonic audio at lower resolutions (e.g., 16-24 kHz), which limits their effectiveness. We propose MusicHiFi -- an efficient high-fidelity stereophonic vocoder. Our method employs a cascade of three generative adversarial networks (GANs) that convert low-resolution mel-spectrograms to audio, upsamples to high-resolution audio via bandwidth expansion, and upmixes to stereophonic audio. Compared to previous work, we propose 1) a unified GAN-based generator and discriminator architecture and training procedure for each stage of our cascade, 2) a new fast, near downsampling-compatible bandwidth extension module, and 3) a new fast downmix-compatible mono-to-stereo upmixer that ensures the preservation of monophonic content in the output. We evaluate our approach using both objective and subjective listening tests and find our approach yields comparable or better audio quality, better spatialization control, and significantly faster inference speed compared to past work. Sound examples are at https://MusicHiFi.github.io/web/.

Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on vast source code have achieved prominent progress in code intelligence. However, existing code LLMs have two main limitations in terms of architecture and pretraining tasks. First, they often adopt a specific architecture (encoder-only or decoder-only) or rely on a unified encoder-decoder network for different downstream tasks. The former paradigm is limited by inflexibility in applications while in the latter, the model is treated as a single system for all tasks, leading to suboptimal performance on a subset of tasks. Secondly, they often employ a limited set of pretraining objectives which might not be relevant to some downstream tasks and hence result in substantial performance degrade. To address these limitations, we propose ``CodeT5+'', a family of encoder-decoder LLMs for code in which component modules can be flexibly combined to suit a wide range of downstream code tasks. Such flexibility is enabled by our proposed mixture of pretraining objectives to mitigate the pretrain-finetune discrepancy. These objectives cover span denoising, contrastive learning, text-code matching, and causal LM pretraining tasks, on both unimodal and bimodal multilingual code corpora. Furthermore, we propose to initialize CodeT5+ with frozen off-the-shelf LLMs without training from scratch to efficiently scale up our models, and explore instruction-tuning to align with natural language instructions. We extensively evaluate CodeT5+ on over 20 code-related benchmarks in different settings, including zero-shot, finetuning, and instruction-tuning. We observe state-of-the-art (SoTA) model performance on various code-related tasks, such as code generation and completion, math programming, and text-to-code retrieval tasks. Particularly, our instruction-tuned CodeT5+ 16B achieves new SoTA results on HumanEval code generation task against other open code LLMs.

We introduce a novel neural volumetric pose feature, termed PoseMap, designed to enhance camera localization by encapsulating the information between images and the associated camera poses. Our framework leverages an Absolute Pose Regression (APR) architecture, together with an augmented NeRF module. This integration not only facilitates the generation of novel views to enrich the training dataset but also enables the learning of effective pose features. Additionally, we extend our architecture for self-supervised online alignment, allowing our method to be used and fine-tuned for unlabelled images within a unified framework. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 14.28% and 20.51% performance gain on average in indoor and outdoor benchmark scenes, outperforming existing APR methods with state-of-the-art accuracy.

Objective To solve major clinical natural language processing (NLP) tasks using a unified text-to-text learning architecture based on a generative large language model (LLM) via prompt tuning. Methods We formulated 7 key clinical NLP tasks as text-to-text learning and solved them using one unified generative clinical LLM, GatorTronGPT, developed using GPT-3 architecture and trained with up to 20 billion parameters. We adopted soft prompts (i.e., trainable vectors) with frozen LLM, where the LLM parameters were not updated (i.e., frozen) and only the vectors of soft prompts were updated, known as prompt tuning. We added additional soft prompts as a prefix to the input layer, which were optimized during the prompt tuning. We evaluated the proposed method using 7 clinical NLP tasks and compared them with previous task-specific solutions based on Transformer models. Results and Conclusion The proposed approach achieved state-of-the-art performance for 5 out of 7 major clinical NLP tasks using one unified generative LLM. Our approach outperformed previous task-specific transformer models by ~3% for concept extraction and 7% for relation extraction applied to social determinants of health, 3.4% for clinical concept normalization, 3.4~10% for clinical abbreviation disambiguation, and 5.5~9% for natural language inference. Our approach also outperformed a previously developed prompt-based machine reading comprehension (MRC) model, GatorTron-MRC, for clinical concept and relation extraction. The proposed approach can deliver the ``one model for all`` promise from training to deployment using a unified generative LLM.

We present XMem, a video object segmentation architecture for long videos with unified feature memory stores inspired by the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model. Prior work on video object segmentation typically only uses one type of feature memory. For videos longer than a minute, a single feature memory model tightly links memory consumption and accuracy. In contrast, following the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, we develop an architecture that incorporates multiple independent yet deeply-connected feature memory stores: a rapidly updated sensory memory, a high-resolution working memory, and a compact thus sustained long-term memory. Crucially, we develop a memory potentiation algorithm that routinely consolidates actively used working memory elements into the long-term memory, which avoids memory explosion and minimizes performance decay for long-term prediction. Combined with a new memory reading mechanism, XMem greatly exceeds state-of-the-art performance on long-video datasets while being on par with state-of-the-art methods (that do not work on long videos) on short-video datasets. Code is available at https://hkchengrex.github.io/XMem

Artificial neural nets can represent and classify many types of data but are often tailored to particular applications -- e.g., for "fair" or "hierarchical" classification. Once an architecture has been selected, it is often difficult for humans to adjust models for a new task; for example, a hierarchical classifier cannot be easily transformed into a fair classifier that shields a protected field. Our contribution in this work is a new neural network architecture, the concept subspace network (CSN), which generalizes existing specialized classifiers to produce a unified model capable of learning a spectrum of multi-concept relationships. We demonstrate that CSNs reproduce state-of-the-art results in fair classification when enforcing concept independence, may be transformed into hierarchical classifiers, or even reconcile fairness and hierarchy within a single classifier. The CSN is inspired by existing prototype-based classifiers that promote interpretability.

GPT-4o, an all-encompassing model, represents a milestone in the development of large multi-modal language models. It can understand visual, auditory, and textual modalities, directly output audio, and support flexible duplex interaction. Models from the open-source community often achieve some functionalities of GPT-4o, such as visual understanding and voice chat. Nevertheless, training a unified model that incorporates all modalities is challenging due to the complexities of multi-modal data, intricate model architectures, and training processes. In this paper, we introduce Mini-Omni2, a visual-audio assistant capable of providing real-time, end-to-end voice responses to visoin and audio queries. By integrating pretrained visual and auditory encoders, Mini-Omni2 maintains performance in individual modalities. We propose a three-stage training process to align modalities, allowing the language model to handle multi-modal inputs and outputs after training on a limited dataset. For interaction, we introduce a command-based interruption mechanism, enabling more flexible interaction with users. To the best of our knowledge, Mini-Omni2 is one of the closest reproductions of GPT-4o, which have similar form of functionality, and we hope it can offer valuable insights for subsequent research.

Recently, semidefinite programming (SDP) techniques have shown great promise in providing accurate Lipschitz bounds for neural networks. Specifically, the LipSDP approach (Fazlyab et al., 2019) has received much attention and provides the least conservative Lipschitz upper bounds that can be computed with polynomial time guarantees. However, one main restriction of LipSDP is that its formulation requires the activation functions to be slope-restricted on [0,1], preventing its further use for more general activation functions such as GroupSort, MaxMin, and Householder. One can rewrite MaxMin activations for example as residual ReLU networks. However, a direct application of LipSDP to the resultant residual ReLU networks is conservative and even fails in recovering the well-known fact that the MaxMin activation is 1-Lipschitz. Our paper bridges this gap and extends LipSDP beyond slope-restricted activation functions. To this end, we provide novel quadratic constraints for GroupSort, MaxMin, and Householder activations via leveraging their underlying properties such as sum preservation. Our proposed analysis is general and provides a unified approach for estimating ell_2 and ell_infty Lipschitz bounds for a rich class of neural network architectures, including non-residual and residual neural networks and implicit models, with GroupSort, MaxMin, and Householder activations. Finally, we illustrate the utility of our approach with a variety of experiments and show that our proposed SDPs generate less conservative Lipschitz bounds in comparison to existing approaches.

We introduce ParlAI (pronounced "par-lay"), an open-source software platform for dialog research implemented in Python, available at http://parl.ai. Its goal is to provide a unified framework for sharing, training and testing of dialog models, integration of Amazon Mechanical Turk for data collection, human evaluation, and online/reinforcement learning; and a repository of machine learning models for comparing with others' models, and improving upon existing architectures. Over 20 tasks are supported in the first release, including popular datasets such as SQuAD, bAbI tasks, MCTest, WikiQA, QACNN, QADailyMail, CBT, bAbI Dialog, Ubuntu, OpenSubtitles and VQA. Several models are integrated, including neural models such as memory networks, seq2seq and attentive LSTMs.

Human beings are social animals. How to equip 3D autonomous characters with similar social intelligence that can perceive, understand and interact with humans remains an open yet foundamental problem. In this paper, we introduce SOLAMI, the first end-to-end Social vision-Language-Action (VLA) Modeling framework for Immersive interaction with 3D autonomous characters. Specifically, SOLAMI builds 3D autonomous characters from three aspects: (1) Social VLA Architecture: We propose a unified social VLA framework to generate multimodal response (speech and motion) based on the user's multimodal input to drive the character for social interaction. (2) Interactive Multimodal Data: We present SynMSI, a synthetic multimodal social interaction dataset generated by an automatic pipeline using only existing motion datasets to address the issue of data scarcity. (3) Immersive VR Interface: We develop a VR interface that enables users to immersively interact with these characters driven by various architectures. Extensive quantitative experiments and user studies demonstrate that our framework leads to more precise and natural character responses (in both speech and motion) that align with user expectations with lower latency.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are capable of learning robust representation with different regularization methods and activations as convolutional layers are spatially correlated. Based on this property, a large variety of regional dropout strategies have been proposed, such as Cutout, DropBlock, CutMix, etc. These methods aim to promote the network to generalize better by partially occluding the discriminative parts of objects. However, all of them perform this operation randomly, without capturing the most important region(s) within an object. In this paper, we propose Attentive CutMix, a naturally enhanced augmentation strategy based on CutMix. In each training iteration, we choose the most descriptive regions based on the intermediate attention maps from a feature extractor, which enables searching for the most discriminative parts in an image. Our proposed method is simple yet effective, easy to implement and can boost the baseline significantly. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet datasets with various CNN architectures (in a unified setting) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which consistently outperforms the baseline CutMix and other methods by a significant margin.

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.

While recent advancements in speech language models have achieved significant progress, they face remarkable challenges in modeling the long acoustic sequences of neural audio codecs. In this paper, we introduce Generative Pre-trained Speech Transformer (GPST), a hierarchical transformer designed for efficient speech language modeling. GPST quantizes audio waveforms into two distinct types of discrete speech representations and integrates them within a hierarchical transformer architecture, allowing for a unified one-stage generation process and enhancing Hi-Res audio generation capabilities. By training on large corpora of speeches in an end-to-end unsupervised manner, GPST can generate syntactically consistent speech with diverse speaker identities. Given a brief 3-second prompt, GPST can produce natural and coherent personalized speech, demonstrating in-context learning abilities. Moreover, our approach can be easily extended to spoken cross-lingual speech generation by incorporating multi-lingual semantic tokens and universal acoustic tokens. Experimental results indicate that GPST significantly outperforms the existing speech language models in terms of word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. See https://youngsheen.github.io/GPST/demo for demo samples.

Category-specific models are provenly valuable methods in 3D single object tracking (SOT) regardless of Siamese or motion-centric paradigms. However, such over-specialized model designs incur redundant parameters, thus limiting the broader applicability of 3D SOT task. This paper first introduces unified models that can simultaneously track objects across all categories using a single network with shared model parameters. Specifically, we propose to explicitly encode distinct attributes associated to different object categories, enabling the model to adapt to cross-category data. We find that the attribute variances of point cloud objects primarily occur from the varying size and shape (e.g., large and square vehicles v.s. small and slender humans). Based on this observation, we design a novel point set representation learning network inheriting transformer architecture, termed AdaFormer, which adaptively encodes the dynamically varying shape and size information from cross-category data in a unified manner. We further incorporate the size and shape prior derived from the known template targets into the model's inputs and learning objective, facilitating the learning of unified representation. Equipped with such designs, we construct two category-unified models SiamCUT and MoCUT.Extensive experiments demonstrate that SiamCUT and MoCUT exhibit strong generalization and training stability. Furthermore, our category-unified models outperform the category-specific counterparts by a significant margin (e.g., on KITTI dataset, 12% and 3% performance gains on the Siamese and motion paradigms). Our code will be available.

Vectorized high-definition map online construction has garnered considerable attention in the field of autonomous driving research. Most existing approaches model changeable map elements using a fixed number of points, or predict local maps in a two-stage autoregressive manner, which may miss essential details and lead to error accumulation. Towards precise map element learning, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PivotNet, which adopts unified pivot-based map representations and is formulated as a direct set prediction paradigm. Concretely, we first propose a novel point-to-line mask module to encode both the subordinate and geometrical point-line priors in the network. Then, a well-designed pivot dynamic matching module is proposed to model the topology in dynamic point sequences by introducing the concept of sequence matching. Furthermore, to supervise the position and topology of the vectorized point predictions, we propose a dynamic vectorized sequence loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show that PivotNet is remarkably superior to other SOTAs by 5.9 mAP at least. The code will be available soon.

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

In this paper, we introduce OminiControl, a highly versatile and parameter-efficient framework that integrates image conditions into pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models. At its core, OminiControl leverages a parameter reuse mechanism, enabling the DiT to encode image conditions using itself as a powerful backbone and process them with its flexible multi-modal attention processors. Unlike existing methods, which rely heavily on additional encoder modules with complex architectures, OminiControl (1) effectively and efficiently incorporates injected image conditions with only ~0.1% additional parameters, and (2) addresses a wide range of image conditioning tasks in a unified manner, including subject-driven generation and spatially-aligned conditions such as edges, depth, and more. Remarkably, these capabilities are achieved by training on images generated by the DiT itself, which is particularly beneficial for subject-driven generation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that OminiControl outperforms existing UNet-based and DiT-adapted models in both subject-driven and spatially-aligned conditional generation. Additionally, we release our training dataset, Subjects200K, a diverse collection of over 200,000 identity-consistent images, along with an efficient data synthesis pipeline to advance research in subject-consistent generation.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt models from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains. When adapting to adverse scenes, existing UDA methods fail to perform well due to the lack of instructions, leading their models to overlook discrepancies within all adverse scenes. To tackle this, we propose CoDA which instructs models to distinguish, focus, and learn from these discrepancies at scene and image levels. Specifically, CoDA consists of a Chain-of-Domain (CoD) strategy and a Severity-Aware Visual Prompt Tuning (SAVPT) mechanism. CoD focuses on scene-level instructions to divide all adverse scenes into easy and hard scenes, guiding models to adapt from source to easy domains with easy scene images, and then to hard domains with hard scene images, thereby laying a solid foundation for whole adaptations. Building upon this foundation, we employ SAVPT to dive into more detailed image-level instructions to boost performance. SAVPT features a novel metric Severity that divides all adverse scene images into low-severity and high-severity images. Then Severity directs visual prompts and adapters, instructing models to concentrate on unified severity features instead of scene-specific features, without adding complexity to the model architecture. CoDA achieves SOTA performances on widely-used benchmarks under all adverse scenes. Notably, CoDA outperforms the existing ones by 4.6%, and 10.3% mIoU on the Foggy Driving, and Foggy Zurich benchmarks, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/Cuzyoung/CoDA

Semantic future prediction is important for autonomous systems navigating dynamic environments. This paper introduces FUTURIST, a method for multimodal future semantic prediction that uses a unified and efficient visual sequence transformer architecture. Our approach incorporates a multimodal masked visual modeling objective and a novel masking mechanism designed for multimodal training. This allows the model to effectively integrate visible information from various modalities, improving prediction accuracy. Additionally, we propose a VAE-free hierarchical tokenization process, which reduces computational complexity, streamlines the training pipeline, and enables end-to-end training with high-resolution, multimodal inputs. We validate FUTURIST on the Cityscapes dataset, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in future semantic segmentation for both short- and mid-term forecasting. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/Sta8is/FUTURIST .

Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Image Captioning (CAP), which are among the most popular vision-language tasks, have analogous scene-text versions that require reasoning from the text in the image. Despite their obvious resemblance, the two are treated independently and, as we show, yield task-specific methods that can either see or read, but not both. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and propose UniTNT, a Unified Text-Non-Text approach, which grants existing multimodal architectures scene-text understanding capabilities. Specifically, we treat scene-text information as an additional modality, fusing it with any pretrained encoder-decoder-based architecture via designated modules. Thorough experiments reveal that UniTNT leads to the first single model that successfully handles both task types. Moreover, we show that scene-text understanding capabilities can boost vision-language models' performance on general VQA and CAP by up to 2.69% and 0.6 CIDEr, respectively.

Multimodal models are becoming increasingly effective, in part due to unified components, such as the Transformer architecture. However, multimodal models still often consist of many task- and modality-specific pieces and training procedures. For example, CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) trains independent text and image towers via a contrastive loss. We explore an additional unification: the use of a pure pixel-based model to perform image, text, and multimodal tasks. Our model is trained with contrastive loss alone, so we call it CLIP-Pixels Only (CLIPPO). CLIPPO uses a single encoder that processes both regular images and text rendered as images. CLIPPO performs image-based tasks such as retrieval and zero-shot image classification almost as well as CLIP, with half the number of parameters and no text-specific tower or embedding. When trained jointly via image-text contrastive learning and next-sentence contrastive learning, CLIPPO can perform well on natural language understanding tasks, without any word-level loss (language modelling or masked language modelling), outperforming pixel-based prior work. Surprisingly, CLIPPO can obtain good accuracy in visual question answering, simply by rendering the question and image together. Finally, we exploit the fact that CLIPPO does not require a tokenizer to show that it can achieve strong performance on multilingual multimodal retrieval without

In this paper, we are interested in self-supervised learning the motion cues in videos using dynamic motion filters for a better motion representation to finally boost human action recognition in particular. Thus far, the vision community has focused on spatio-temporal approaches using standard filters, rather we here propose dynamic filters that adaptively learn the video-specific internal motion representation by predicting the short-term future frames. We name this new motion representation, as dynamic motion representation (DMR) and is embedded inside of 3D convolutional network as a new layer, which captures the visual appearance and motion dynamics throughout entire video clip via end-to-end network learning. Simultaneously, we utilize these motion representation to enrich video classification. We have designed the frame prediction task as an auxiliary task to empower the classification problem. With these overall objectives, to this end, we introduce a novel unified spatio-temporal 3D-CNN architecture (DynamoNet) that jointly optimizes the video classification and learning motion representation by predicting future frames as a multi-task learning problem. We conduct experiments on challenging human action datasets: Kinetics 400, UCF101, HMDB51. The experiments using the proposed DynamoNet show promising results on all the datasets.

Bitemporal supervised learning paradigm always dominates remote sensing change detection using numerous labeled bitemporal image pairs, especially for high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery. However, it is very expensive and labor-intensive to label change regions in large-scale bitemporal HSR remote sensing image pairs. In this paper, we propose single-temporal supervised learning (STAR) for universal remote sensing change detection from a new perspective of exploiting changes between unpaired images as supervisory signals. STAR enables us to train a high-accuracy change detector only using unpaired labeled images and can generalize to real-world bitemporal image pairs. To demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of STAR, we design a simple yet unified change detector, termed ChangeStar2, capable of addressing binary change detection, object change detection, and semantic change detection in one architecture. ChangeStar2 achieves state-of-the-art performances on eight public remote sensing change detection datasets, covering above two supervised settings, multiple change types, multiple scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Z-Zheng/pytorch-change-models.

Local feature matching aims at finding correspondences between a pair of images. Although current detector-free methods leverage Transformer architecture to obtain an impressive performance, few works consider maintaining local consistency. Meanwhile, most methods struggle with large scale variations. To deal with the above issues, we propose Adaptive Spot-Guided Transformer (ASTR) for local feature matching, which jointly models the local consistency and scale variations in a unified coarse-to-fine architecture. The proposed ASTR enjoys several merits. First, we design a spot-guided aggregation module to avoid interfering with irrelevant areas during feature aggregation. Second, we design an adaptive scaling module to adjust the size of grids according to the calculated depth information at fine stage. Extensive experimental results on five standard benchmarks demonstrate that our ASTR performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released on https://astr2023.github.io.

Person re-identification (re-ID), which aims to re-identify people across different camera views, has been significantly advanced by deep learning in recent years, particularly with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we present Torchreid, a software library built on PyTorch that allows fast development and end-to-end training and evaluation of deep re-ID models. As a general-purpose framework for person re-ID research, Torchreid provides (1) unified data loaders that support 15 commonly used re-ID benchmark datasets covering both image and video domains, (2) streamlined pipelines for quick development and benchmarking of deep re-ID models, and (3) implementations of the latest re-ID CNN architectures along with their pre-trained models to facilitate reproducibility as well as future research. With a high-level modularity in its design, Torchreid offers a great flexibility to allow easy extension to new datasets, CNN models and loss functions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made the ambitious quest for generalist agents significantly far from being a fantasy. A key hurdle for building such general models is the diversity and heterogeneity of tasks and modalities. A promising solution is unification, allowing the support of a myriad of tasks and modalities within one unified framework. While few large models (e.g., Flamingo (Alayrac et al., 2022), trained on massive datasets, can support more than two modalities, current small to mid-scale unified models are still limited to 2 modalities, usually image-text or video-text. The question that we ask is: is it possible to build efficiently a unified model that can support all modalities? To answer this, we propose UnIVAL, a step further towards this ambitious goal. Without relying on fancy datasets sizes or models with billions of parameters, the ~ 0.25B parameter UnIVAL model goes beyond two modalities and unifies text, images, video, and audio into a single model. Our model is efficiently pretrained on many tasks, based on task balancing and multimodal curriculum learning. UnIVAL shows competitive performance to existing state-of-the-art approaches, across image and video-text tasks. The feature representations learned from image and video-text modalities, allows the model to achieve competitive performance when finetuned on audio-text tasks, despite not being pretrained on audio. Thanks to the unified model, we propose a novel study on multimodal model merging via weight interpolation of models trained on different multimodal tasks, showing their benefits in particular for out-of-distribution generalization. Finally, we motivate unification by showing the synergy between tasks. The model weights and code are released here: https://github.com/mshukor/UnIVAL.

Large-scale vision-language pre-trained models have shown promising transferability to various downstream tasks. As the size of these foundation models and the number of downstream tasks grow, the standard full fine-tuning paradigm becomes unsustainable due to heavy computational and storage costs. This paper proposes UniAdapter, which unifies unimodal and multimodal adapters for parameter-efficient cross-modal adaptation on pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, adapters are distributed to different modalities and their interactions, with the total number of tunable parameters reduced by partial weight sharing. The unified and knowledge-sharing design enables powerful cross-modal representations that can benefit various downstream tasks, requiring only 1.0%-2.0% tunable parameters of the pre-trained model. Extensive experiments on 6 cross-modal downstream benchmarks (including video-text retrieval, image-text retrieval, VideoQA, and VQA) show that in most cases, UniAdapter not only outperforms the state-of-the-arts, but even beats the full fine-tuning strategy. Particularly, on the MSRVTT retrieval task, UniAdapter achieves 49.7% recall@1 with 2.2% model parameters, outperforming the latest competitors by 2.0%. The code and models are available at https://github.com/RERV/UniAdapter.

In the current landscape of artificial intelligence, foundation models serve as the bedrock for advancements in both language and vision domains. OpenAI GPT-4 has emerged as the pinnacle in large language models (LLMs), while the computer vision (CV) domain boasts a plethora of state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as Meta's SAM and DINO, and YOLOS. However, the financial and computational burdens of training new models from scratch remain a significant barrier to progress. In response to this challenge, we introduce UnifiedVisionGPT, a novel framework designed to consolidate and automate the integration of SOTA vision models, thereby facilitating the development of vision-oriented AI. UnifiedVisionGPT distinguishes itself through four key features: (1) provides a versatile multimodal framework adaptable to a wide range of applications, building upon the strengths of multimodal foundation models; (2) seamlessly integrates various SOTA vision models to create a comprehensive multimodal platform, capitalizing on the best components of each model; (3) prioritizes vision-oriented AI, ensuring a more rapid progression in the CV domain compared to the current trajectory of LLMs; and (4) introduces automation in the selection of SOTA vision models, generating optimal results based on diverse multimodal inputs such as text prompts and images. This paper outlines the architecture and capabilities of UnifiedVisionGPT, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize the field of computer vision through enhanced efficiency, versatility, generalization, and performance. Our implementation, along with the unified multimodal framework and comprehensive dataset, is made publicly available at https://github.com/LHBuilder/SA-Segment-Anything.

With the comprehensive research conducted on various face analysis tasks, there is a growing interest among researchers to develop a unified approach to face perception. Existing methods mainly discuss unified representation and training, which lack task extensibility and application efficiency. To tackle this issue, we focus on the unified model structure, exploring a face generalist model. As an intuitive design, Naive Faceptor enables tasks with the same output shape and granularity to share the structural design of the standardized output head, achieving improved task extensibility. Furthermore, Faceptor is proposed to adopt a well-designed single-encoder dual-decoder architecture, allowing task-specific queries to represent new-coming semantics. This design enhances the unification of model structure while improving application efficiency in terms of storage overhead. Additionally, we introduce Layer-Attention into Faceptor, enabling the model to adaptively select features from optimal layers to perform the desired tasks. Through joint training on 13 face perception datasets, Faceptor achieves exceptional performance in facial landmark localization, face parsing, age estimation, expression recognition, binary attribute classification, and face recognition, achieving or surpassing specialized methods in most tasks. Our training framework can also be applied to auxiliary supervised learning, significantly improving performance in data-sparse tasks such as age estimation and expression recognition. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lxq1000/Faceptor.

We present Unified-IO 2, the first autoregressive multimodal model that is capable of understanding and generating image, text, audio, and action. To unify different modalities, we tokenize inputs and outputs -- images, text, audio, action, bounding boxes, etc., into a shared semantic space and then process them with a single encoder-decoder transformer model. Since training with such diverse modalities is challenging, we propose various architectural improvements to stabilize model training. We train our model from scratch on a large multimodal pre-training corpus from diverse sources with a multimodal mixture of denoisers objective. To learn an expansive set of skills, such as following multimodal instructions, we construct and finetune on an ensemble of 120 datasets with prompts and augmentations. With a single unified model, Unified-IO 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GRIT benchmark and strong results in more than 35 benchmarks, including image generation and understanding, natural language understanding, video and audio understanding, and robotic manipulation. We release all our models to the research community.

Machine learning is a prevalent approach to tame the complexity of design space exploration for domain-specific architectures. Using ML for design space exploration poses challenges. First, it's not straightforward to identify the suitable algorithm from an increasing pool of ML methods. Second, assessing the trade-offs between performance and sample efficiency across these methods is inconclusive. Finally, lack of a holistic framework for fair, reproducible, and objective comparison across these methods hinders progress of adopting ML-aided architecture design space exploration and impedes creating repeatable artifacts. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce ArchGym, an open-source gym and easy-to-extend framework that connects diverse search algorithms to architecture simulators. To demonstrate utility, we evaluate ArchGym across multiple vanilla and domain-specific search algorithms in designing custom memory controller, deep neural network accelerators, and custom SoC for AR/VR workloads, encompassing over 21K experiments. Results suggest that with unlimited samples, ML algorithms are equally favorable to meet user-defined target specification if hyperparameters are tuned; no solution is necessarily better than another (e.g., reinforcement learning vs. Bayesian methods). We coin the term hyperparameter lottery to describe the chance for a search algorithm to find an optimal design provided meticulously selected hyperparameters. The ease of data collection and aggregation in ArchGym facilitates research in ML-aided architecture design space exploration. As a case study, we show this advantage by developing a proxy cost model with an RMSE of 0.61% that offers a 2,000-fold reduction in simulation time. Code and data for ArchGym is available at https://bit.ly/ArchGym.

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

Modern autonomous driving system is characterized as modular tasks in sequential order, i.e., perception, prediction, and planning. In order to perform a wide diversity of tasks and achieve advanced-level intelligence, contemporary approaches either deploy standalone models for individual tasks, or design a multi-task paradigm with separate heads. However, they might suffer from accumulative errors or deficient task coordination. Instead, we argue that a favorable framework should be devised and optimized in pursuit of the ultimate goal, i.e., planning of the self-driving car. Oriented at this, we revisit the key components within perception and prediction, and prioritize the tasks such that all these tasks contribute to planning. We introduce Unified Autonomous Driving (UniAD), a comprehensive framework up-to-date that incorporates full-stack driving tasks in one network. It is exquisitely devised to leverage advantages of each module, and provide complementary feature abstractions for agent interaction from a global perspective. Tasks are communicated with unified query interfaces to facilitate each other toward planning. We instantiate UniAD on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. With extensive ablations, the effectiveness of using such a philosophy is proven by substantially outperforming previous state-of-the-arts in all aspects. Code and models are public.

On the way to Exascale, programmers face the increasing challenge of having to support multiple hardware architectures from the same code base. At the same time, portability of code and performance are increasingly difficult to achieve as hardware architectures are becoming more and more diverse. Today's heterogeneous systems often include two or more completely distinct and incompatible hardware execution models, such as GPGPU's, SIMD vector units, and general purpose cores which conventionally have to be programmed using separate tool chains representing non-overlapping programming models. The recent revival of interest in the industry and the wider community for the C++ language has spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications in the arena of concurrency and parallelism. This recently includes an increasing amount of discussion around the need for a uniform, higher-level abstraction and programming model for parallelism in the C++ standard targeting heterogeneous and distributed computing. Such an abstraction should perfectly blend with existing, already standardized language and library features, but should also be generic enough to support future hardware developments. In this paper, we present the results from developing such a higher-level programming abstraction for parallelism in C++ which aims at enabling code and performance portability over a wide range of architectures and for various types of parallelism. We present and compare performance data obtained from running the well-known STREAM benchmark ported to our higher level C++ abstraction with the corresponding results from running it natively. We show that our abstractions enable performance at least as good as the comparable base-line benchmarks while providing a uniform programming API on all compared target architectures.

Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

Collaborative perception aims to mitigate the limitations of single-agent perception, such as occlusions, by facilitating data exchange among multiple agents. However, most current works consider a homogeneous scenario where all agents use identity sensors and perception models. In reality, heterogeneous agent types may continually emerge and inevitably face a domain gap when collaborating with existing agents. In this paper, we introduce a new open heterogeneous problem: how to accommodate continually emerging new heterogeneous agent types into collaborative perception, while ensuring high perception performance and low integration cost? To address this problem, we propose HEterogeneous ALliance (HEAL), a novel extensible collaborative perception framework. HEAL first establishes a unified feature space with initial agents via a novel multi-scale foreground-aware Pyramid Fusion network. When heterogeneous new agents emerge with previously unseen modalities or models, we align them to the established unified space with an innovative backward alignment. This step only involves individual training on the new agent type, thus presenting extremely low training costs and high extensibility. To enrich agents' data heterogeneity, we bring OPV2V-H, a new large-scale dataset with more diverse sensor types. Extensive experiments on OPV2V-H and DAIR-V2X datasets show that HEAL surpasses SOTA methods in performance while reducing the training parameters by 91.5% when integrating 3 new agent types. We further implement a comprehensive codebase at: https://github.com/yifanlu0227/HEAL

The democratization of machine learning systems has made the process of fine-tuning accessible to practitioners, leading to a wide range of open-source models fine-tuned on specialized tasks and datasets. Recent work has proposed to merge such models to combine their functionalities. However, prior approaches are usually restricted to models that are fine-tuned from the same base model. Furthermore, the final merged model is typically required to be of the same size as the original models. In this work, we propose a new two-step algorithm to merge models -- termed PLeaS -- which relaxes these constraints. First, leveraging the Permutation symmetries inherent in the two models, PLeaS partially matches nodes in each layer by maximizing alignment. Next, PLeaS computes the weights of the merged model as a layer-wise Least Squares solution to minimize the approximation error between the features of the merged model and the permuted features of the original models. PLeaS allows a practitioner to merge two models sharing the same architecture into a single performant model of a desired size, even when the two original models are fine-tuned from different base models. We also demonstrate how our method can be extended to address a challenging scenario where no data is available from the fine-tuning domains. We demonstrate our method to merge ResNet and ViT models trained with shared and different label spaces, and show improvement over the state-of-the-art merging methods of up to 15 percentage points for the same target compute while merging models trained on DomainNet and fine-grained classification tasks. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/SewoongLab/PLeaS-Merging .

With the advent of specialized hardware such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), large scale image localization, classification and retrieval have seen increased prevalence. Designing scalable software architecture that co-evolves with such specialized hardware is a challenge in the commercial setting. In this paper, we describe one such architecture (Cortexica) that leverages scalability of GPUs and sandboxing offered by docker containers. This allows for the flexibility of mixing different computer architectures as well as computational algorithms with the security of a trusted environment. We illustrate the utility of this framework in a commercial setting i.e., searching for multiple products in an image by combining image localisation and retrieval.

Multimodal learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. Despite years of development in this field, it still remains challenging to design a unified network for processing various modalities (e.g. natural language, 2D images, 3D point clouds, audio, video, time series, tabular data) due to the inherent gaps among them. In this work, we propose a framework, named Meta-Transformer, that leverages a frozen encoder to perform multimodal perception without any paired multimodal training data. In Meta-Transformer, the raw input data from various modalities are mapped into a shared token space, allowing a subsequent encoder with frozen parameters to extract high-level semantic features of the input data. Composed of three main components: a unified data tokenizer, a modality-shared encoder, and task-specific heads for downstream tasks, Meta-Transformer is the first framework to perform unified learning across 12 modalities with unpaired data. Experiments on different benchmarks reveal that Meta-Transformer can handle a wide range of tasks including fundamental perception (text, image, point cloud, audio, video), practical application (X-Ray, infrared, hyperspectral, and IMU), and data mining (graph, tabular, and time-series). Meta-Transformer indicates a promising future for developing unified multimodal intelligence with transformers. Code will be available at https://github.com/invictus717/MetaTransformer

This work uniquely identifies and characterizes four prevalent multimodal model architectural patterns in the contemporary multimodal landscape. Systematically categorizing models by architecture type facilitates monitoring of developments in the multimodal domain. Distinct from recent survey papers that present general information on multimodal architectures, this research conducts a comprehensive exploration of architectural details and identifies four specific architectural types. The types are distinguished by their respective methodologies for integrating multimodal inputs into the deep neural network model. The first two types (Type A and B) deeply fuses multimodal inputs within the internal layers of the model, whereas the following two types (Type C and D) facilitate early fusion at the input stage. Type-A employs standard cross-attention, whereas Type-B utilizes custom-designed layers for modality fusion within the internal layers. On the other hand, Type-C utilizes modality-specific encoders, while Type-D leverages tokenizers to process the modalities at the model's input stage. The identified architecture types aid the monitoring of any-to-any multimodal model development. Notably, Type-C and Type-D are currently favored in the construction of any-to-any multimodal models. Type-C, distinguished by its non-tokenizing multimodal model architecture, is emerging as a viable alternative to Type-D, which utilizes input-tokenizing techniques. To assist in model selection, this work highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each architecture type based on data and compute requirements, architecture complexity, scalability, simplification of adding modalities, training objectives, and any-to-any multimodal generation capability.

Training on diverse, internet-scale data is a key factor in the success of recent large foundation models. Yet, using the same recipe for building embodied agents has faced noticeable difficulties. Despite the availability of many crowd-sourced embodied datasets, their action spaces often exhibit significant heterogeneity due to distinct physical embodiment and control interfaces for different robots, causing substantial challenges in developing embodied foundation models using cross-domain data. In this paper, we introduce UniAct, a new embodied foundation modeling framework operating in a tokenized Universal Action Space. Our learned universal actions capture the generic atomic behaviors across diverse robots by exploiting their shared structural features, and enable enhanced cross-domain data utilization and cross-embodiment generalizations by eliminating the notorious heterogeneity. The universal actions can be efficiently translated back to heterogeneous actionable commands by simply adding embodiment-specific details, from which fast adaptation to new robots becomes simple and straightforward. Our 0.5B instantiation of UniAct outperforms 14X larger SOTA embodied foundation models in extensive evaluations on various real-world and simulation robots, showcasing exceptional cross-embodiment control and adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of adopting universal actions. Project page: https://github.com/2toinf/UniAct

Recent advances in large language models have led to specialized models excelling in specific domains, creating a need for efficient model merging techniques. While traditional merging approaches combine parameters into a single static model, they often compromise task-specific performance. However, task-specific routing methods maintain accuracy but introduce substantial storage overhead. We present 1bit-Merging, a novel framework that integrates task-specific routing with 1-bit quantized task vectors to balance performance and storage efficiency. Our approach leverages the observation that different task-specific models store knowledge in distinct layers-chat models primarily in attention layers and math/code models in MLP layers-enabling targeted compression strategies. Through extensive experiments with LLaMA2 and Mistral model families across chat, mathematical reasoning, and code generation tasks, we demonstrate that 1bit-Merging achieves comparable or superior performance to existing methods while significantly reducing storage requirements. Our framework offers a practical solution for combining specialized models while maintaining their individual strengths and addressing the storage challenges of current approaches.

Generalizable manipulation skills, which can be composed to tackle long-horizon and complex daily chores, are one of the cornerstones of Embodied AI. However, existing benchmarks, mostly composed of a suite of simulatable environments, are insufficient to push cutting-edge research works because they lack object-level topological and geometric variations, are not based on fully dynamic simulation, or are short of native support for multiple types of manipulation tasks. To this end, we present ManiSkill2, the next generation of the SAPIEN ManiSkill benchmark, to address critical pain points often encountered by researchers when using benchmarks for generalizable manipulation skills. ManiSkill2 includes 20 manipulation task families with 2000+ object models and 4M+ demonstration frames, which cover stationary/mobile-base, single/dual-arm, and rigid/soft-body manipulation tasks with 2D/3D-input data simulated by fully dynamic engines. It defines a unified interface and evaluation protocol to support a wide range of algorithms (e.g., classic sense-plan-act, RL, IL), visual observations (point cloud, RGBD), and controllers (e.g., action type and parameterization). Moreover, it empowers fast visual input learning algorithms so that a CNN-based policy can collect samples at about 2000 FPS with 1 GPU and 16 processes on a regular workstation. It implements a render server infrastructure to allow sharing rendering resources across all environments, thereby significantly reducing memory usage. We open-source all codes of our benchmark (simulator, environments, and baselines) and host an online challenge open to interdisciplinary researchers.

Monolithic large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have paved the way for modern generative AI applications. Training, serving, and maintaining monolithic LLMs at scale, however, remains prohibitively expensive and challenging. The disproportionate increase in compute-to-memory ratio of modern AI accelerators have created a memory wall, necessitating new methods to deploy AI. Composition of Experts (CoE) is an alternative modular approach that lowers the cost and complexity of training and serving. However, this approach presents two key challenges when using conventional hardware: (1) without fused operations, smaller models have lower operational intensity, which makes high utilization more challenging to achieve; and (2) hosting a large number of models can be either prohibitively expensive or slow when dynamically switching between them. In this paper, we describe how combining CoE, streaming dataflow, and a three-tier memory system scales the AI memory wall. We describe Samba-CoE, a CoE system with 150 experts and a trillion total parameters. We deploy Samba-CoE on the SambaNova SN40L Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) - a commercial dataflow accelerator architecture that has been co-designed for enterprise inference and training applications. The chip introduces a new three-tier memory system with on-chip distributed SRAM, on-package HBM, and off-package DDR DRAM. A dedicated inter-RDU network enables scaling up and out over multiple sockets. We demonstrate speedups ranging from 2x to 13x on various benchmarks running on eight RDU sockets compared with an unfused baseline. We show that for CoE inference deployments, the 8-socket RDU Node reduces machine footprint by up to 19x, speeds up model switching time by 15x to 31x, and achieves an overall speedup of 3.7x over a DGX H100 and 6.6x over a DGX A100.

The rapid advancement of AI technology has led to widespread applications of agent systems across various domains. However, the need for detailed architecture design poses significant challenges in designing and operating these systems. This paper introduces a taxonomy focused on the architectures of foundation-model-based agents, addressing critical aspects such as functional capabilities and non-functional qualities. We also discuss the operations involved in both design-time and run-time phases, providing a comprehensive view of architectural design and operational characteristics. By unifying and detailing these classifications, our taxonomy aims to improve the design of foundation-model-based agents. Additionally, the paper establishes a decision model that guides critical design and runtime decisions, offering a structured approach to enhance the development of foundation-model-based agents. Our contributions include providing a structured architecture design option and guiding the development process of foundation-model-based agents, thereby addressing current fragmentation in the field.

Visual recognition requires rich representations that span levels from low to high, scales from small to large, and resolutions from fine to coarse. Even with the depth of features in a convolutional network, a layer in isolation is not enough: compounding and aggregating these representations improves inference of what and where. Architectural efforts are exploring many dimensions for network backbones, designing deeper or wider architectures, but how to best aggregate layers and blocks across a network deserves further attention. Although skip connections have been incorporated to combine layers, these connections have been "shallow" themselves, and only fuse by simple, one-step operations. We augment standard architectures with deeper aggregation to better fuse information across layers. Our deep layer aggregation structures iteratively and hierarchically merge the feature hierarchy to make networks with better accuracy and fewer parameters. Experiments across architectures and tasks show that deep layer aggregation improves recognition and resolution compared to existing branching and merging schemes. The code is at https://github.com/ucbdrive/dla.

This paper proposes a simple, yet effective framework, called GiT, simultaneously applicable for various vision tasks only with a vanilla ViT. Motivated by the universality of the Multi-layer Transformer architecture (e.g, GPT) widely used in large language models (LLMs), we seek to broaden its scope to serve as a powerful vision foundation model (VFM). However, unlike language modeling, visual tasks typically require specific modules, such as bounding box heads for detection and pixel decoders for segmentation, greatly hindering the application of powerful multi-layer transformers in the vision domain. To solve this, we design a universal language interface that empowers the successful auto-regressive decoding to adeptly unify various visual tasks, from image-level understanding (e.g., captioning), over sparse perception (e.g., detection), to dense prediction (e.g., segmentation). Based on the above designs, the entire model is composed solely of a ViT, without any specific additions, offering a remarkable architectural simplification. GiT is a multi-task visual model, jointly trained across five representative benchmarks without task-specific fine-tuning. Interestingly, our GiT builds a new benchmark in generalist performance, and fosters mutual enhancement across tasks, leading to significant improvements compared to isolated training. This reflects a similar impact observed in LLMs. Further enriching training with 27 datasets, GiT achieves strong zero-shot results over various tasks. Due to its simple design, this paradigm holds promise for narrowing the architectural gap between vision and language. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/GiT.

We revisit the one-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) paradigm and analyze its advantages over existing NAS approaches. Existing one-shot method, however, is hard to train and not yet effective on large scale datasets like ImageNet. This work propose a Single Path One-Shot model to address the challenge in the training. Our central idea is to construct a simplified supernet, where all architectures are single paths so that weight co-adaption problem is alleviated. Training is performed by uniform path sampling. All architectures (and their weights) are trained fully and equally. Comprehensive experiments verify that our approach is flexible and effective. It is easy to train and fast to search. It effortlessly supports complex search spaces (e.g., building blocks, channel, mixed-precision quantization) and different search constraints (e.g., FLOPs, latency). It is thus convenient to use for various needs. It achieves start-of-the-art performance on the large dataset ImageNet.

Existing checkpointing approaches seem ill-suited for distributed training even though hardware limitations make model parallelism, i.e., sharding model state across multiple accelerators, a requirement for model scaling. Consolidating distributed model state into a single checkpoint unacceptably slows down training, and is impractical at extreme scales. Distributed checkpoints, in contrast, are tightly coupled to the model parallelism and hardware configurations of the training run, and thus unusable on different configurations. To address this problem, we propose Universal Checkpointing, a technique that enables efficient checkpoint creation while providing the flexibility of resuming on arbitrary parallelism strategy and hardware configurations. Universal Checkpointing unlocks unprecedented capabilities for large-scale training such as improved resilience to hardware failures through continued training on remaining healthy hardware, and reduced training time through opportunistic exploitation of elastic capacity. The key insight of Universal Checkpointing is the selection of the optimal representation in each phase of the checkpointing life cycle: distributed representation for saving, and consolidated representation for loading. This is achieved using two key mechanisms. First, the universal checkpoint format, which consists of a consolidated representation of each model parameter and metadata for mapping parameter fragments into training ranks of arbitrary model-parallelism configuration. Second, the universal checkpoint language, a simple but powerful specification language for converting distributed checkpoints into the universal checkpoint format. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of Universal Checkpointing on state-of-the-art model architectures and a wide range of parallelism techniques.

This paper envisions a revolutionary AIOS-Agent ecosystem, where Large Language Model (LLM) serves as the (Artificial) Intelligent Operating System (IOS, or AIOS)--an operating system "with soul". Upon this foundation, a diverse range of LLM-based AI Agent Applications (Agents, or AAPs) are developed, enriching the AIOS-Agent ecosystem and signaling a paradigm shift from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. We envision that LLM's impact will not be limited to the AI application level, instead, it will in turn revolutionize the design and implementation of computer system, architecture, software, and programming language, featured by several main concepts: LLM as OS (system-level), Agents as Applications (application-level), Natural Language as Programming Interface (user-level), and Tools as Devices/Libraries (hardware/middleware-level). We begin by introducing the architecture of traditional OS. Then we formalize a conceptual framework for AIOS through "LLM as OS (LLMOS)", drawing analogies between AIOS and traditional OS: LLM is likened to OS kernel, context window to memory, external storage to file system, hardware tools to peripheral devices, software tools to programming libraries, and user prompts to user commands. Subsequently, we introduce the new AIOS-Agent Ecosystem, where users can easily program Agent Applications (AAPs) using natural language, democratizing the development of software, which is different from the traditional OS-APP ecosystem. Following this, we explore the diverse scope of Agent Applications. We delve into both single-agent and multi-agent systems, as well as human-agent interaction. Lastly, drawing on the insights from traditional OS-APP ecosystem, we propose a roadmap for the evolution of the AIOS-Agent ecosystem. This roadmap is designed to guide the future research and development, suggesting systematic progresses of AIOS and its Agent applications.

This paper proposes the paradigm of large convolutional kernels in designing modern Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets). We establish that employing a few large kernels, instead of stacking multiple smaller ones, can be a superior design strategy. Our work introduces a set of architecture design guidelines for large-kernel ConvNets that optimize their efficiency and performance. We propose the UniRepLKNet architecture, which offers systematical architecture design principles specifically crafted for large-kernel ConvNets, emphasizing their unique ability to capture extensive spatial information without deep layer stacking. This results in a model that not only surpasses its predecessors with an ImageNet accuracy of 88.0%, an ADE20K mIoU of 55.6%, and a COCO box AP of 56.4% but also demonstrates impressive scalability and performance on various modalities such as time-series forecasting, audio, point cloud, and video recognition. These results indicate the universal modeling abilities of large-kernel ConvNets with faster inference speed compared with vision transformers. Our findings reveal that large-kernel ConvNets possess larger effective receptive fields and a higher shape bias, moving away from the texture bias typical of smaller-kernel CNNs. All codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/UniRepLKNet promoting further research and development in the community.

Unified multi-model representation spaces are the foundation of multimodal understanding and generation. However, the billions of model parameters and catastrophic forgetting problems make it challenging to further enhance pre-trained unified spaces. In this work, we propose FreeBind, an idea that treats multimodal representation spaces as basic units, and freely augments pre-trained unified space by integrating knowledge from extra expert spaces via "space bonds". Specifically, we introduce two kinds of basic space bonds: 1) Space Displacement Bond and 2) Space Combination Bond. Based on these basic bonds, we design Complex Sequential & Parallel Bonds to effectively integrate multiple spaces simultaneously. Benefiting from the modularization concept, we further propose a coarse-to-fine customized inference strategy to flexibly adjust the enhanced unified space for different purposes. Experimentally, we bind ImageBind with extra image-text and audio-text expert spaces, resulting in three main variants: ImageBind++, InternVL_IB, and InternVL_IB++. These resulting spaces outperform ImageBind on 5 audio-image-text downstream tasks across 9 datasets. Moreover, via customized inference, it even surpasses the advanced audio-text and image-text expert spaces.

Existing pre-trained models are generally geared towards a particular class of problems. To date, there seems to be still no consensus on what the right architecture and pre-training setup should be. This paper presents a unified framework for pre-training models that are universally effective across datasets and setups. We begin by disentangling architectural archetypes with pre-training objectives -- two concepts that are commonly conflated. Next, we present a generalized & unified perspective for self-supervision in NLP and show how different pre-training objectives can be cast as one another and how interpolating between different objectives can be effective. We then propose Mixture-of-Denoisers (MoD), a pre-training objective that combines diverse pre-training paradigms together. We furthermore introduce a notion of mode switching, wherein downstream fine-tuning is associated with specific pre-training schemes. We conduct extensive ablative experiments to compare multiple pre-training objectives and find that our method pushes the Pareto-frontier by outperforming T5 & GPT-like models across multiple diverse setups. By scaling our model up to 20B parameters, we achieve SOTA performance on 50 well-established supervised finetuning based NLP tasks. Our model also achieve strong results at in-context learning, outperforming 175B GPT-3 on zero-shot SuperGLUE and tripling the performance of T5-XXL on one-shot summarization. On 0-shot MMLU, UL2 20B outperforms T0 and T5 models. UL2 20B also works well with chain-of-thought prompting and reasoning, making it an appealing choice for research into reasoning at a small to medium scale of 20B parameters. Finally, we apply FLAN instruction tuning to the UL2 20B model, achieving MMLU and Big-Bench scores competitive to FLAN-PaLM 62B. We release Flax-based T5X checkpoints for the UL2 20B & Flan-UL2 20B.

Human motion generation and editing are key components of computer graphics and vision. However, current approaches in this field tend to offer isolated solutions tailored to specific tasks, which can be inefficient and impractical for real-world applications. While some efforts have aimed to unify motion-related tasks, these methods simply use different modalities as conditions to guide motion generation. Consequently, they lack editing capabilities, fine-grained control, and fail to facilitate knowledge sharing across tasks. To address these limitations and provide a versatile, unified framework capable of handling both human motion generation and editing, we introduce a novel paradigm: Motion-Condition-Motion, which enables the unified formulation of diverse tasks with three concepts: source motion, condition, and target motion. Based on this paradigm, we propose a unified framework, MotionLab, which incorporates rectified flows to learn the mapping from source motion to target motion, guided by the specified conditions. In MotionLab, we introduce the 1) MotionFlow Transformer to enhance conditional generation and editing without task-specific modules; 2) Aligned Rotational Position Encoding} to guarantee the time synchronization between source motion and target motion; 3) Task Specified Instruction Modulation; and 4) Motion Curriculum Learning for effective multi-task learning and knowledge sharing across tasks. Notably, our MotionLab demonstrates promising generalization capabilities and inference efficiency across multiple benchmarks for human motion. Our code and additional video results are available at: https://diouo.github.io/motionlab.github.io/.

Collaborative software development is an integral part of the modern software development life cycle, essential to the success of large-scale software projects. When multiple developers make concurrent changes around the same lines of code, a merge conflict may occur. Such conflicts stall pull requests and continuous integration pipelines for hours to several days, seriously hurting developer productivity. To address this problem, we introduce MergeBERT, a novel neural program merge framework based on token-level three-way differencing and a transformer encoder model. By exploiting the restricted nature of merge conflict resolutions, we reformulate the task of generating the resolution sequence as a classification task over a set of primitive merge patterns extracted from real-world merge commit data. Our model achieves 63-68% accuracy for merge resolution synthesis, yielding nearly a 3x performance improvement over existing semi-structured, and 2x improvement over neural program merge tools. Finally, we demonstrate that MergeBERT is sufficiently flexible to work with source code files in Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C# programming languages. To measure the practical use of MergeBERT, we conduct a user study to evaluate MergeBERT suggestions with 25 developers from large OSS projects on 122 real-world conflicts they encountered. Results suggest that in practice, MergeBERT resolutions would be accepted at a higher rate than estimated by automatic metrics for precision and accuracy. Additionally, we use participant feedback to identify future avenues for improvement of MergeBERT.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In this work, we explore the effects of Continued Pretraining (CPT), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and various preference-based optimization approaches, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO), on fine-tuned LLM performance. Our analysis shows how these strategies influence model outcomes and reveals that the merging of multiple fine-tuned models can lead to the emergence of capabilities that surpass the individual contributions of the parent models. We find that model merging leads to new functionalities that neither parent model could achieve alone, leading to improved performance in domain-specific assessments. Experiments with different model architectures are presented, including Llama 3.1 8B and Mistral 7B models, where similar behaviors are observed. Exploring whether the results hold also for much smaller models, we use a tiny LLM with 1.7 billion parameters and show that very small LLMs do not necessarily feature emergent capabilities under model merging, suggesting that model scaling may be a key component. In open-ended yet consistent chat conversations between a human and AI models, our assessment reveals detailed insights into how different model variants perform and show that the smallest model achieves a high intelligence score across key criteria including reasoning depth, creativity, clarity, and quantitative precision. Other experiments include the development of image generation prompts based on disparate biological material design concepts, to create new microstructures, architectural concepts, and urban design based on biological materials-inspired construction principles.

Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) is a vital component of fields like embodied AI and virtual reality. Despite advancements in motion quality and physical plausibility, two pivotal factors, versatile interaction control and the development of a user-friendly interface, require further exploration before the practical application of HSI. This paper presents a unified HSI framework, UniHSI, which supports unified control of diverse interactions through language commands. This framework is built upon the definition of interaction as Chain of Contacts (CoC): steps of human joint-object part pairs, which is inspired by the strong correlation between interaction types and human-object contact regions. Based on the definition, UniHSI constitutes a Large Language Model (LLM) Planner to translate language prompts into task plans in the form of CoC, and a Unified Controller that turns CoC into uniform task execution. To facilitate training and evaluation, we collect a new dataset named ScenePlan that encompasses thousands of task plans generated by LLMs based on diverse scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in versatile task execution and generalizability to real scanned scenes. The project page is at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/UniHSI .

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for the development of highly capable autonomous agents. However, existing multi-agent frameworks often struggle with integrating diverse capable third-party agents due to reliance on agents defined within their own ecosystems. They also face challenges in simulating distributed environments, as most frameworks are limited to single-device setups. Furthermore, these frameworks often rely on hard-coded communication pipelines, limiting their adaptability to dynamic task requirements. Inspired by the concept of the Internet, we propose the Internet of Agents (IoA), a novel framework that addresses these limitations by providing a flexible and scalable platform for LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. IoA introduces an agent integration protocol, an instant-messaging-like architecture design, and dynamic mechanisms for agent teaming and conversation flow control. Through extensive experiments on general assistant tasks, embodied AI tasks, and retrieval-augmented generation benchmarks, we demonstrate that IoA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing its ability to facilitate effective collaboration among heterogeneous agents. IoA represents a step towards linking diverse agents in an Internet-like environment, where agents can seamlessly collaborate to achieve greater intelligence and capabilities. Our codebase has been released at https://github.com/OpenBMB/IoA.

A common method to solve complex problems in software engineering, is to divide the problem into multiple sub-problems. Inspired by this, we propose a Modular Architecture for Software-engineering AI (MASAI) agents, where different LLM-powered sub-agents are instantiated with well-defined objectives and strategies tuned to achieve those objectives. Our modular architecture offers several advantages: (1) employing and tuning different problem-solving strategies across sub-agents, (2) enabling sub-agents to gather information from different sources scattered throughout a repository, and (3) avoiding unnecessarily long trajectories which inflate costs and add extraneous context. MASAI enabled us to achieve the highest performance (28.33% resolution rate) on the popular and highly challenging SWE-bench Lite dataset consisting of 300 GitHub issues from 11 Python repositories. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MASAI relative to other agentic methods and analyze the effects of our design decisions and their contribution to the success of MASAI.

The "pretrain-then-finetune" paradigm is commonly adopted in the deployment of large language models. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, is often employed to adapt a base model to a multitude of tasks, resulting in a substantial collection of LoRA adapters derived from one base model. We observe that this paradigm presents significant opportunities for batched inference during serving. To capitalize on these opportunities, we present S-LoRA, a system designed for the scalable serving of many LoRA adapters. S-LoRA stores all adapters in the main memory and fetches the adapters used by the currently running queries to the GPU memory. To efficiently use the GPU memory and reduce fragmentation, S-LoRA proposes Unified Paging. Unified Paging uses a unified memory pool to manage dynamic adapter weights with different ranks and KV cache tensors with varying sequence lengths. Additionally, S-LoRA employs a novel tensor parallelism strategy and highly optimized custom CUDA kernels for heterogeneous batching of LoRA computation. Collectively, these features enable S-LoRA to serve thousands of LoRA adapters on a single GPU or across multiple GPUs with a small overhead. Compared to state-of-the-art libraries such as HuggingFace PEFT and vLLM (with naive support of LoRA serving), S-LoRA can improve the throughput by up to 4 times and increase the number of served adapters by several orders of magnitude. As a result, S-LoRA enables scalable serving of many task-specific fine-tuned models and offers the potential for large-scale customized fine-tuning services.

To address intricate real-world tasks, there has been a rising interest in tool utilization in applications of large language models (LLMs). To develop LLM-based agents, it usually requires LLMs to understand many tool functions from different tool documentation. But these documentations could be diverse, redundant or incomplete, which immensely affects the capability of LLMs in using tools. To solve this, we introduce EASYTOOL, a framework transforming diverse and lengthy tool documentation into a unified and concise tool instruction for easier tool usage. EasyTool purifies essential information from extensive tool documentation of different sources, and elaborates a unified interface (i.e., tool instruction) to offer standardized tool descriptions and functionalities for LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on multiple different tasks demonstrate that EasyTool can significantly reduce token consumption and improve the performance of tool utilization in real-world scenarios. Our code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/JARVIS/ in the future.

Evolutionary model merging enables the creation of high-performing multi-task models but remains computationally prohibitive for consumer hardware. We introduce MERGE^3, an efficient framework that makes evolutionary merging feasible on a single GPU by reducing fitness computation costs 50times while preserving performance. MERGE^3 achieves this by Extracting a reduced dataset for evaluation, Estimating model abilities using Item Response Theory (IRT), and Evolving optimal merges via IRT-based performance estimators. Our method enables state-of-the-art multilingual and cross-lingual merging, transferring knowledge across languages with significantly lower computational overhead. We provide theoretical guarantees and an open-source library, democratizing high-quality model merging.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has demonstrated its power on various AI accelerating platforms such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). However, it remains an open problem, how to integrate NAS with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), despite them being the most powerful AI accelerating platforms. The major bottleneck comes from the large design freedom associated with ASIC designs. Moreover, with the consideration that multiple DNNs will run in parallel for different workloads with diverse layer operations and sizes, integrating heterogeneous ASIC sub-accelerators for distinct DNNs in one design can significantly boost performance, and at the same time further complicate the design space. To address these challenges, in this paper we build ASIC template set based on existing successful designs, described by their unique dataflows, so that the design space is significantly reduced. Based on the templates, we further propose a framework, namely NASAIC, which can simultaneously identify multiple DNN architectures and the associated heterogeneous ASIC accelerator design, such that the design specifications (specs) can be satisfied, while the accuracy can be maximized. Experimental results show that compared with successive NAS and ASIC design optimizations which lead to design spec violations, NASAIC can guarantee the results to meet the design specs with 17.77%, 2.49x, and 2.32x reductions on latency, energy, and area and with 0.76% accuracy loss. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first work on neural architecture and ASIC accelerator design co-exploration.

We present a unified transformer, i.e., Show-o, that unifies multimodal understanding and generation. Unlike fully autoregressive models, Show-o unifies autoregressive and (discrete) diffusion modeling to adaptively handle inputs and outputs of various and mixed modalities. The unified model flexibly supports a wide range of vision-language tasks including visual question-answering, text-to-image generation, text-guided inpainting/extrapolation, and mixed-modality generation. Across various benchmarks, it demonstrates comparable or superior performance to existing individual models with an equivalent or larger number of parameters tailored for understanding or generation. This significantly highlights its potential as a next-generation foundation model. Code and models are released at https://github.com/showlab/Show-o.

Human pose plays a crucial role in the digital age. While recent works have achieved impressive progress in understanding and generating human poses, they often support only a single modality of control signals and operate in isolation, limiting their application in real-world scenarios. This paper presents UniPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend, generate, and edit human poses across various modalities, including images, text, and 3D SMPL poses. Specifically, we apply a pose tokenizer to convert 3D poses into discrete pose tokens, enabling seamless integration into the LLM within a unified vocabulary. To further enhance the fine-grained pose perception capabilities, we facilitate UniPose with a mixture of visual encoders, among them a pose-specific visual encoder. Benefiting from a unified learning strategy, UniPose effectively transfers knowledge across different pose-relevant tasks, adapts to unseen tasks, and exhibits extended capabilities. This work serves as the first attempt at building a general-purpose framework for pose comprehension, generation, and editing. Extensive experiments highlight UniPose's competitive and even superior performance across various pose-relevant tasks.

The rapid expansion of the open-source language model landscape presents an opportunity to merge the competencies of these model checkpoints by combining their parameters. Advances in transfer learning, the process of fine-tuning pretrained models for specific tasks, has resulted in the development of vast amounts of task-specific models, typically specialized in individual tasks and unable to utilize each other's strengths. Model merging facilitates the creation of multitask models without the need for additional training, offering a promising avenue for enhancing model performance and versatility. By preserving the intrinsic capabilities of the original models, model merging addresses complex challenges in AI - including the difficulties of catastrophic forgetting and multitask learning. To support this expanding area of research, we introduce MergeKit, a comprehensive, open-source library designed to facilitate the application of model merging strategies. MergeKit offers an extensible framework to efficiently merge models on any hardware, providing utility to researchers and practitioners. To date, thousands of models have been merged by the open-source community, leading to the creation of some of the worlds most powerful open-source model checkpoints, as assessed by the Open LLM Leaderboard. The library is accessible at https://github.com/arcee-ai/MergeKit.

Humans recognize the visual world at multiple levels: we effortlessly categorize scenes and detect objects inside, while also identifying the textures and surfaces of the objects along with their different compositional parts. In this paper, we study a new task called Unified Perceptual Parsing, which requires the machine vision systems to recognize as many visual concepts as possible from a given image. A multi-task framework called UPerNet and a training strategy are developed to learn from heterogeneous image annotations. We benchmark our framework on Unified Perceptual Parsing and show that it is able to effectively segment a wide range of concepts from images. The trained networks are further applied to discover visual knowledge in natural scenes. Models are available at https://github.com/CSAILVision/unifiedparsing.

Universal source separation (USS) is a fundamental research task for computational auditory scene analysis, which aims to separate mono recordings into individual source tracks. There are three potential challenges awaiting the solution to the audio source separation task. First, previous audio source separation systems mainly focus on separating one or a limited number of specific sources. There is a lack of research on building a unified system that can separate arbitrary sources via a single model. Second, most previous systems require clean source data to train a separator, while clean source data are scarce. Third, there is a lack of USS system that can automatically detect and separate active sound classes in a hierarchical level. To use large-scale weakly labeled/unlabeled audio data for audio source separation, we propose a universal audio source separation framework containing: 1) an audio tagging model trained on weakly labeled data as a query net; and 2) a conditional source separation model that takes query net outputs as conditions to separate arbitrary sound sources. We investigate various query nets, source separation models, and training strategies and propose a hierarchical USS strategy to automatically detect and separate sound classes from the AudioSet ontology. By solely leveraging the weakly labelled AudioSet, our USS system is successful in separating a wide variety of sound classes, including sound event separation, music source separation, and speech enhancement. The USS system achieves an average signal-to-distortion ratio improvement (SDRi) of 5.57 dB over 527 sound classes of AudioSet; 10.57 dB on the DCASE 2018 Task 2 dataset; 8.12 dB on the MUSDB18 dataset; an SDRi of 7.28 dB on the Slakh2100 dataset; and an SSNR of 9.00 dB on the voicebank-demand dataset. We release the source code at https://github.com/bytedance/uss

A unified video and action model holds significant promise for robotics, where videos provide rich scene information for action prediction, and actions provide dynamics information for video prediction. However, effectively combining video generation and action prediction remains challenging, and current video generation-based methods struggle to match the performance of direct policy learning in action accuracy and inference speed. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unified Video Action model (UVA), which jointly optimizes video and action predictions to achieve both high accuracy and efficient action inference. The key lies in learning a joint video-action latent representation and decoupling video-action decoding. The joint latent representation bridges the visual and action domains, effectively modeling the relationship between video and action sequences. Meanwhile, the decoupled decoding, powered by two lightweight diffusion heads, enables high-speed action inference by bypassing video generation during inference. Such a unified framework further enables versatile functionality through masked input training. By selectively masking actions or videos, a single model can tackle diverse tasks beyond policy learning, such as forward and inverse dynamics modeling and video generation. Via an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that UVA can serve as a general-purpose solution for a wide range of robotics tasks, such as policy learning, forward/inverse dynamics and video observation prediction, without compromising performance compared to methods tailored for specific applications. Results are best viewed on https://unified-video-action-model.github.io/.

Architectural design is a highly complex practice that involves a wide diversity of disciplines, technologies, proprietary design software, expertise, and an almost infinite number of constraints, across a vast array of design tasks. Enabling intuitive, accessible, and scalable design processes is an important step towards performance-driven and sustainable design for all. To that end, we introduce Architext, a novel semantic generation assistive tool. Architext enables design generation with only natural language prompts, given to large-scale Language Models, as input. We conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of Architext's downstream task performance, focusing on semantic accuracy and diversity for a number of pre-trained language models ranging from 120 million to 6 billion parameters. Architext models are able to learn the specific design task, generating valid residential layouts at a near 100% rate. Accuracy shows great improvement when scaling the models, with the largest model (GPT-J) yielding impressive accuracy ranging between 25% to over 80% for different prompt categories. We open source the finetuned Architext models and our synthetic dataset, hoping to inspire experimentation in this exciting area of design research.

Contemporary intelligent systems incorporate software components, including machine learning components. As they grow in complexity and data volume such machine learning systems face unique quality challenges like scalability and performance. To overcome them, engineers may often use specific architectural patterns, however their impact on ML systems is difficult to quantify. The effect of software architecture on traditional systems is well studied, however more work is needed in the area of machine learning systems. This study proposes a framework for quantitative assessment of architectural patterns in ML systems, focusing on scalability and performance metrics for cost-effective CPU-based inference. We integrate these metrics into a systematic evaluation process for selection of architectural patterns and demonstrate its application through a case study. The approach shown in the paper should enable software architects to objectively analyze and select optimal patterns, addressing key challenges in ML system design.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance generalization performance, which facilitates a recent endeavor to collect various instructions and integrate existing instruction tuning datasets into larger collections. However, different users have their unique ways of expressing instructions, and there often exist variations across different datasets in the instruction styles and formats, i.e., format inconsistency. In this work, we study how format inconsistency may impact the performance of instruction tuning. We propose a framework called "Unified Instruction Tuning" (UIT), which calls OpenAI APIs for automatic format transfer among different instruction tuning datasets. We show that UIT successfully improves the generalization performance on unseen instructions, which highlights the importance of format consistency for instruction tuning. To make the UIT framework more practical, we further propose a novel perplexity-based denoising method to reduce the noise of automatic format transfer. We also train a smaller offline model that achieves comparable format transfer capability than OpenAI APIs to reduce costs in practice.

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

The transition from x86 to ARM architecture is becoming increasingly common across various domains, primarily driven by ARM's energy efficiency and improved performance across traditional sectors. However, this ISA shift poses significant challenges, mainly due to the extensive legacy ecosystem of x86 software and lack of portability across proprietary ecosystems and software stacks. This paper introduces CRT, a lightweight LLM-based transpiler that automatically converts x86 assembly to ARM assembly. Our approach bridges the fundamental architectural gap between x86's CISC-based and ARM's RISC-based computing paradigms while preserving program semantics and optimizing performance. We evaluate CRT on diverse real-world applications, achieving 79.25% translation accuracy from x86 to ARMv5 on our comprehensive test suite, and an 88.68% accuracy from x86 to RISC-V. In practical deployments on Apple M2 hardware (ARMv8), our transpiled code achieves 1.73times speedup compared to Apple's Rosetta 2 virtualization engine, while delivering 2.41times memory efficiency and 1.47times better energy consumption. Through testing and analysis, we show that CRT successfully navigates the CISC/RISC divide and generates correctly executable RISC code despite machine ``language'' barriers. We release our code, models, training datasets, and benchmarks at: https://ahmedheakl.github.io/asm2asm/.

On-device automatic speech recognition systems face several challenges compared to server-based systems. They have to meet stricter constraints in terms of speed, disk size and memory while maintaining the same accuracy. Often they have to serve several applications with different distributions at once, such as communicating with a virtual assistant and speech-to-text. The simplest solution to serve multiple applications is to build application-specific (language) models, but this leads to an increase in memory. Therefore, we explore different data- and architecture-driven language modeling approaches to build a single application-agnostic model. We propose two novel feed-forward architectures that find an optimal trade off between different on-device constraints. In comparison to the application-specific solution, one of our novel approaches reduces the disk size by half, while maintaining speed and accuracy of the original model.

Efforts to overcome catastrophic forgetting have primarily centered around developing more effective Continual Learning (CL) methods. In contrast, less attention was devoted to analyzing the role of network architecture design (e.g., network depth, width, and components) in contributing to CL. This paper seeks to bridge this gap between network architecture design and CL, and to present a holistic study on the impact of network architectures on CL. This work considers architecture design at the network scaling level, i.e., width and depth, and also at the network components, i.e., skip connections, global pooling layers, and down-sampling. In both cases, we first derive insights through systematically exploring how architectural designs affect CL. Then, grounded in these insights, we craft a specialized search space for CL and further propose a simple yet effective ArchCraft method to steer a CL-friendly architecture, namely, this method recrafts AlexNet/ResNet into AlexAC/ResAC. Experimental validation across various CL settings and scenarios demonstrates that improved architectures are parameter-efficient, achieving state-of-the-art performance of CL while being 86%, 61%, and 97% more compact in terms of parameters than the naive CL architecture in Task IL and Class IL. Code is available at https://github.com/byyx666/ArchCraft.

A comprehensive semantic understanding of a scene is important for many applications - but in what space should diverse semantic information (e.g., objects, scene categories, material types, texture, etc.) be grounded and what should be its structure? Aspiring to have one unified structure that hosts diverse types of semantics, we follow the Scene Graph paradigm in 3D, generating a 3D Scene Graph. Given a 3D mesh and registered panoramic images, we construct a graph that spans the entire building and includes semantics on objects (e.g., class, material, and other attributes), rooms (e.g., scene category, volume, etc.) and cameras (e.g., location, etc.), as well as the relationships among these entities. However, this process is prohibitively labor heavy if done manually. To alleviate this we devise a semi-automatic framework that employs existing detection methods and enhances them using two main constraints: I. framing of query images sampled on panoramas to maximize the performance of 2D detectors, and II. multi-view consistency enforcement across 2D detections that originate in different camera locations.

DARTS is a popular algorithm for neural architecture search (NAS). Despite its great advantage in search efficiency, DARTS often suffers weak stability, which reflects in the large variation among individual trials as well as the sensitivity to the hyper-parameters of the search process. This paper owes such instability to an optimization gap between the super-network and its sub-networks, namely, improving the validation accuracy of the super-network does not necessarily lead to a higher expectation on the performance of the sampled sub-networks. Then, we point out that the gap is due to the inaccurate estimation of the architectural gradients, based on which we propose an amended estimation method. Mathematically, our method guarantees a bounded error from the true gradients while the original estimation does not. Our approach bridges the gap from two aspects, namely, amending the estimation on the architectural gradients, and unifying the hyper-parameter settings in the search and re-training stages. Experiments on CIFAR10 and ImageNet demonstrate that our approach largely improves search stability and, more importantly, enables DARTS-based approaches to explore much larger search spaces that have not been investigated before.

We propose GroundUp, the first sketch-based ideation tool for 3D city massing of urban areas. We focus on early-stage urban design, where sketching is a common tool and the design starts from balancing building volumes (masses) and open spaces. With Human-Centered AI in mind, we aim to help architects quickly revise their ideas by easily switching between 2D sketches and 3D models, allowing for smoother iteration and sharing of ideas. Inspired by feedback from architects and existing workflows, our system takes as a first input a user sketch of multiple buildings in a top-down view. The user then draws a perspective sketch of the envisioned site. Our method is designed to exploit the complementarity of information in the two sketches and allows users to quickly preview and adjust the inferred 3D shapes. Our model has two main components. First, we propose a novel sketch-to-depth prediction network for perspective sketches that exploits top-down sketch shapes. Second, we use depth cues derived from the perspective sketch as a condition to our diffusion model, which ultimately completes the geometry in a top-down view. Thus, our final 3D geometry is represented as a heightfield, allowing users to construct the city `from the ground up'.

Albeit being a prevalent architecture searching approach, differentiable architecture search (DARTS) is largely hindered by its substantial memory cost since the entire supernet resides in the memory. This is where the single-path DARTS comes in, which only chooses a single-path submodel at each step. While being memory-friendly, it also comes with low computational costs. Nonetheless, we discover a critical issue of single-path DARTS that has not been primarily noticed. Namely, it also suffers from severe performance collapse since too many parameter-free operations like skip connections are derived, just like DARTS does. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called RObustifying Memory-Efficient NAS (ROME) to give a cure. First, we disentangle the topology search from the operation search to make searching and evaluation consistent. We then adopt Gumbel-Top2 reparameterization and gradient accumulation to robustify the unwieldy bi-level optimization. We verify ROME extensively across 15 benchmarks to demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in stand-alone code tasks like HumanEval and MBPP, but struggle with handling entire code repositories. This challenge has prompted research on enhancing LLM-codebase interaction at a repository scale. Current solutions rely on similarity-based retrieval or manual tools and APIs, each with notable drawbacks. Similarity-based retrieval often has low recall in complex tasks, while manual tools and APIs are typically task-specific and require expert knowledge, reducing their generalizability across diverse code tasks and real-world applications. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce \framework, a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. By leveraging the structural properties of graph databases and the flexibility of the graph query language, \framework enables the LLM agent to construct and execute queries, allowing for precise, code structure-aware context retrieval and code navigation. We assess \framework using three benchmarks: CrossCodeEval, SWE-bench, and EvoCodeBench. Additionally, we develop five real-world coding applications. With a unified graph database schema, \framework demonstrates competitive performance and potential in both academic and real-world environments, showcasing its versatility and efficacy in software engineering. Our application demo: https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent/tree/master/apps/codexgraph_agent.

In this paper, we investigate the intersection of large generative AI models and cloud-native computing architectures. Recent large models such as ChatGPT, while revolutionary in their capabilities, face challenges like escalating costs and demand for high-end GPUs. Drawing analogies between large-model-as-a-service (LMaaS) and cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS), we describe an AI-native computing paradigm that harnesses the power of both cloud-native technologies (e.g., multi-tenancy and serverless computing) and advanced machine learning runtime (e.g., batched LoRA inference). These joint efforts aim to optimize costs-of-goods-sold (COGS) and improve resource accessibility. The journey of merging these two domains is just at the beginning and we hope to stimulate future research and development in this area.

Currently, the success of large language models (LLMs) illustrates that a unified multitasking approach can significantly enhance model usability, streamline deployment, and foster synergistic benefits across different tasks. However, in computer vision, while text-to-image (T2I) models have significantly improved generation quality through scaling up, their framework design did not initially consider how to unify with downstream tasks, such as various types of editing. To address this, we introduce DreamOmni, a unified model for image generation and editing. We begin by analyzing existing frameworks and the requirements of downstream tasks, proposing a unified framework that integrates both T2I models and various editing tasks. Furthermore, another key challenge is the efficient creation of high-quality editing data, particularly for instruction-based and drag-based editing. To this end, we develop a synthetic data pipeline using sticker-like elements to synthesize accurate, high-quality datasets efficiently, which enables editing data scaling up for unified model training. For training, DreamOmni jointly trains T2I generation and downstream tasks. T2I training enhances the model's understanding of specific concepts and improves generation quality, while editing training helps the model grasp the nuances of the editing task. This collaboration significantly boosts editing performance. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of DreamOmni. The code and model will be released.

Despite significant progress in diffusion-based image generation, subject-driven generation and instruction-based editing remain challenging. Existing methods typically treat them separately, struggling with limited high-quality data and poor generalization. However, both tasks require capturing complex visual variations while maintaining consistency between inputs and outputs. Therefore, we propose MIGE, a unified framework that standardizes task representations using multimodal instructions. It treats subject-driven generation as creation on a blank canvas and instruction-based editing as modification of an existing image, establishing a shared input-output formulation. MIGE introduces a novel multimodal encoder that maps free-form multimodal instructions into a unified vision-language space, integrating visual and semantic features through a feature fusion mechanism.This unification enables joint training of both tasks, providing two key advantages: (1) Cross-Task Enhancement: By leveraging shared visual and semantic representations, joint training improves instruction adherence and visual consistency in both subject-driven generation and instruction-based editing. (2) Generalization: Learning in a unified format facilitates cross-task knowledge transfer, enabling MIGE to generalize to novel compositional tasks, including instruction-based subject-driven editing. Experiments show that MIGE excels in both subject-driven generation and instruction-based editing while setting a state-of-the-art in the new task of instruction-based subject-driven editing. Code and model have been publicly available at https://github.com/Eureka-Maggie/MIGE.

The integration and deployment of large language model (LLM)-based intelligent agents have been fraught with challenges that compromise their efficiency and efficacy. Among these issues are sub-optimal scheduling and resource allocation of agent requests over the LLM, the difficulties in maintaining context during interactions between agent and LLM, and the complexities inherent in integrating heterogeneous agents with different capabilities and specializations. The rapid increase of agent quantity and complexity further exacerbates these issues, often leading to bottlenecks and sub-optimal utilization of resources. Inspired by these challenges, this paper presents AIOS, an LLM agent operating system, which embeds large language model into operating systems (OS). Specifically, AIOS is designed to optimize resource allocation, facilitate context switch across agents, enable concurrent execution of agents, provide tool service for agents, and maintain access control for agents. We present the architecture of such an operating system, outline the core challenges it aims to resolve, and provide the basic design and implementation of the AIOS. Our experiments on concurrent execution of multiple agents demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of our AIOS modules. Through this, we aim to not only improve the performance and efficiency of LLM agents but also to pioneer for better development and deployment of the AIOS ecosystem in the future. The project is open-source at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

In this paper, we propose an architecture to harness the collective knowledge of multiple trained LLMs to create a new state-of-the-art. At the core of this framework is a LLM-based orchestrator that is adept at picking the right underlying LLM experts for optimal task execution. Inspired by self-play in reinforcement learning, we created a loop of query generation, orchestration, and evaluation to generate training data for the orchestrator. Our evaluation focused on the MMLU benchmark, employing models with 7B, 13B, and 34B parameters available on Hugging Face. The results demonstrate new state-of-the-art open-source models: Our Leeroo orchestrator achieves performance on par with the Mixtral model while incurring only two-thirds of its cost. Moreover, increasing the allowed cost surpasses Mixtral's accuracy by over 5% at the same cost level, reaching an accuracy of 75.9%. Further enhancements were observed when integrating GPT4 into the underlying model pool. The Leeroo orchestrator nearly matches GPT4's performance at half the cost and even exceeds GPT4's results with a 25% cost reduction. These findings illustrate the potential of our architecture in creating state-of-the-art and cost-effective LLMs by optimizing the synergy between multiple LLMs to achieve superior performance outcomes.

Multi-agent collaborative perception (MCP) has recently attracted much attention. It includes three key processes: communication for sharing, collaboration for integration, and reconstruction for different downstream tasks. Existing methods pursue designing the collaboration process alone, ignoring their intrinsic interactions and resulting in suboptimal performance. In contrast, we aim to propose a Unified Collaborative perception framework named UMC, optimizing the communication, collaboration, and reconstruction processes with the Multi-resolution technique. The communication introduces a novel trainable multi-resolution and selective-region (MRSR) mechanism, achieving higher quality and lower bandwidth. Then, a graph-based collaboration is proposed, conducting on each resolution to adapt the MRSR. Finally, the reconstruction integrates the multi-resolution collaborative features for downstream tasks. Since the general metric can not reflect the performance enhancement brought by MCP systematically, we introduce a brand-new evaluation metric that evaluates the MCP from different perspectives. To verify our algorithm, we conducted experiments on the V2X-Sim and OPV2V datasets. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments prove that the proposed UMC greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art collaborative perception approaches.

In the past few years, more and more AI applications have been applied to edge devices. However, models trained by data scientists with machine learning frameworks, such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, can not be seamlessly executed on edge. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end code generator parsing a pre-trained model to C source libraries for the backend using MicroTVM, a machine learning compiler framework extension addressing inference on bare metal devices. An analysis shows that specific compute-intensive operators can be easily offloaded to the dedicated accelerator with a Universal Modular Accelerator (UMA) interface, while others are processed in the CPU cores. By using the automatically generated ahead-of-time C runtime, we conduct a hand gesture recognition experiment on an ARM Cortex M4F core.

The next generation of AI applications will continuously interact with the environment and learn from these interactions. These applications impose new and demanding systems requirements, both in terms of performance and flexibility. In this paper, we consider these requirements and present Ray---a distributed system to address them. Ray implements a unified interface that can express both task-parallel and actor-based computations, supported by a single dynamic execution engine. To meet the performance requirements, Ray employs a distributed scheduler and a distributed and fault-tolerant store to manage the system's control state. In our experiments, we demonstrate scaling beyond 1.8 million tasks per second and better performance than existing specialized systems for several challenging reinforcement learning applications.

We address the challenging problem of efficient inference across many devices and resource constraints, especially on edge devices. Conventional approaches either manually design or use neural architecture search (NAS) to find a specialized neural network and train it from scratch for each case, which is computationally prohibitive (causing CO_2 emission as much as 5 cars' lifetime) thus unscalable. In this work, we propose to train a once-for-all (OFA) network that supports diverse architectural settings by decoupling training and search, to reduce the cost. We can quickly get a specialized sub-network by selecting from the OFA network without additional training. To efficiently train OFA networks, we also propose a novel progressive shrinking algorithm, a generalized pruning method that reduces the model size across many more dimensions than pruning (depth, width, kernel size, and resolution). It can obtain a surprisingly large number of sub-networks (> 10^{19}) that can fit different hardware platforms and latency constraints while maintaining the same level of accuracy as training independently. On diverse edge devices, OFA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) NAS methods (up to 4.0% ImageNet top1 accuracy improvement over MobileNetV3, or same accuracy but 1.5x faster than MobileNetV3, 2.6x faster than EfficientNet w.r.t measured latency) while reducing many orders of magnitude GPU hours and CO_2 emission. In particular, OFA achieves a new SOTA 80.0% ImageNet top-1 accuracy under the mobile setting (<600M MACs). OFA is the winning solution for the 3rd Low Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC), DSP classification track and the 4th LPCVC, both classification track and detection track. Code and 50 pre-trained models (for many devices & many latency constraints) are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/once-for-all.