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Jan 5

Ovis2.5 Technical Report

We present Ovis2.5, a successor to Ovis2 designed for native-resolution visual perception and strong multimodal reasoning. Ovis2.5 integrates a native-resolution vision transformer that processes images at their native, variable resolutions, avoiding the degradation from fixed-resolution tiling and preserving both fine detail and global layout -- crucial for visually dense content like complex charts. To strengthen reasoning, we train the model to move beyond linear chain-of-thought and perform reflection -- including self-checking and revision. This advanced capability is exposed as an optional "thinking mode" at inference time, allowing users to trade latency for enhanced accuracy on difficult inputs. The model is trained via a comprehensive five-phase curriculum that progressively builds its skills. The process begins with foundational visual and multimodal pretraining, advances through large-scale instruction tuning, and culminates in alignment and reasoning enhancement using DPO and GRPO. To scale these upgrades efficiently, we employ multimodal data packing and hybrid parallelism, yielding a significant end-to-end speedup. We release two open-source models: Ovis2.5-9B and Ovis2.5-2B. The latter continues the "small model, big performance" philosophy of Ovis2, making it ideal for resource-constrained, on-device scenarios. On the OpenCompass multimodal leaderboard, Ovis2.5-9B averages 78.3, marking a substantial improvement over its predecessor, Ovis2-8B, and achieving state-of-the-art results among open-source MLLMs in the sub-40B parameter range; Ovis2.5-2B scores 73.9, establishing SOTA for its size. Beyond aggregate scores, Ovis2.5 achieves leading results on STEM benchmarks, exhibits strong capabilities on grounding and video tasks, and achieves open-source SOTA at its scale for complex chart analysis.

  • 42 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025 4

UDKAG: Augmenting Large Vision-Language Models with Up-to-Date Knowledge

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are ignorant of the up-to-date knowledge, such as LLaVA series, because they cannot be updated frequently due to the large amount of resources required, and therefore fail in many cases. For example, if a LVLM was released on January 2024, and it wouldn't know the detailed plot of the new movie Dune 2, which wasn't released until February 2024. To solve the problem, a promising solution is to provide LVLMs with up-to-date knowledge via internet search during inference, i.e., internet-augmented generation (IAG), which is already integrated in some closed-source commercial LVLMs such as GPT-4V. However, the specific mechanics underpinning them remain a mystery. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework, for augmenting existing LVLMs in handling visual question answering (VQA) about up-to-date knowledge, dubbed UDKAG. A hierarchical filtering model is trained to effectively and efficiently find the most helpful content from the websites returned by a search engine to prompt LVLMs with up-to-date knowledge. To train the model and evaluate our framework's performance, we propose a pipeline to automatically generate news-related VQA samples to construct a dataset, dubbed UDK-VQA. A multi-model voting mechanism is introduced to label the usefulness of website/content for VQA samples to construct the training set. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, outperforming GPT-4V by about 25% in accuracy.

  • 9 authors
·
May 23, 2024

nvBench 2.0: Resolving Ambiguity in Text-to-Visualization through Stepwise Reasoning

Text-to-Visualization (Text2VIS) enables users to create visualizations from natural language queries, making data insights more accessible. However, Text2VIS faces challenges in interpreting ambiguous queries, as users often express their visualization needs in imprecise language. To address this challenge, we introduce nBench 2.0, a new benchmark designed to evaluate Text2VIS systems in scenarios involving ambiguous queries. nvBench 2.0 includes 7,878 natural language queries and 24,076 corresponding visualizations, derived from 780 tables across 153 domains. It is built using a controlled ambiguity-injection pipeline that generates ambiguous queries through a reverse-generation workflow. By starting with unambiguous seed visualizations and selectively injecting ambiguities, the pipeline yields multiple valid interpretations for each query, with each ambiguous query traceable to its corresponding visualization through step-wise reasoning paths. We evaluate various Large Language Models (LLMs) on their ability to perform ambiguous Text2VIS tasks using nBench 2.0. We also propose Step-Text2Vis, an LLM-based model trained on nvBench 2.0, which enhances performance in ambiguous scenarios through step-wise preference optimization. Our results show that Step-Text2Vis outperforms all baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art for ambiguous Text2VIS tasks. Our source code and data are available at https://nvbench2.github.io/

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

Prompt4Vis: Prompting Large Language Models with Example Mining and Schema Filtering for Tabular Data Visualization

Data visualization (DV) systems are increasingly recognized for their profound capability to uncover insights from vast datasets, gaining attention across both industry and academia. Crafting data queries is an essential process within certain declarative visualization languages (DVLs, e.g., Vega-Lite, EChart.). The evolution of natural language processing (NLP) technologies has streamlined the use of natural language interfaces to visualize tabular data, offering a more accessible and intuitive user experience. However, current methods for converting natural language questions into data visualization queries, such as Seq2Vis, ncNet, and RGVisNet, despite utilizing complex neural network architectures, still fall short of expectations and have great room for improvement. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have established new benchmarks in a variety of NLP tasks, fundamentally altering the landscape of the field. Inspired by these advancements, we introduce a novel framework, Prompt4Vis, leveraging LLMs and in-context learning to enhance the performance of generating data visualization from natural language. Prompt4Vis comprises two key components: (1) a multi-objective example mining module, designed to find out the truly effective examples that strengthen the LLM's in-context learning capabilities for text-to-vis; (2) a schema filtering module, which is proposed to simplify the schema of the database. Extensive experiments through 5-fold cross-validation on the NVBench dataset demonstrate the superiority of Prompt4Vis, which notably surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) RGVisNet by approximately 35.9% and 71.3% on dev and test sets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, Prompt4Vis is the first work that introduces in-context learning into the text-to-vis for generating data visualization queries.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024

LaVi: Efficient Large Vision-Language Models via Internal Feature Modulation

Despite the impressive advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), existing approaches suffer from a fundamental bottleneck: inefficient visual-language integration. Current methods either disrupt the model's inherent structure or introduce severe long-context computational burden, severely limiting scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we rethink multimodal integration and present LaVi, a novel LVLM that enables seamless and efficient vision-language fusion through internal feature modulation within the Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike dominant LVLMs that rely on visual token concatenation, LaVi bypasses long-context expansion by introducing a lightweight and adaptive transformation, which incorporates visual context by injecting token-wise vision-conditioned deltas into the affine parameters of layer normalization. This mechanism directly modulates linguistic hidden states based on visual input, ensuring precise vision-language alignment while preserving the LLM's linguistic priors and drastically reducing computational costs. Extensive evaluations across 15 image and video benchmarks demonstrate that LaVi not only achieves state-of-the-art multimodal performance but also dramatically enhances efficiency. Compared to LLaVA-OV-7B, LaVi reduces FLOPs by 94.0%, improves inference speed by 3.1 times, and cuts memory usage in half - establishing LaVi as a scalable and practical solution for real-time multimodal reasoning. The code and models will be released soon.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 19, 2025

LV-Eval: A Balanced Long-Context Benchmark with 5 Length Levels Up to 256K

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are now claiming remarkable supported context lengths of 256k or even more. In contrast, the average context lengths of mainstream benchmarks are insufficient (5k-21k), and they suffer from potential knowledge leakage and inaccurate metrics, resulting in biased evaluation. This paper introduces LV-Eval, a challenging long-context benchmark with five length levels (16k, 32k, 64k, 128k, and 256k) reaching up to 256k words. LV-Eval features two main tasks, single-hop QA and multi-hop QA, comprising 11 bilingual datasets. The design of LV-Eval has incorporated three key techniques, namely confusing facts insertion, keyword and phrase replacement, and keyword-recall-based metric design. The advantages of LV-Eval include controllable evaluation across different context lengths, challenging test instances with confusing facts, mitigated knowledge leakage, and more objective evaluations. We evaluate 10 LLMs on LV-Eval and conduct ablation studies on the techniques used in LV-Eval construction. The results reveal that: (i) Commercial LLMs generally outperform open-source LLMs when evaluated within length levels shorter than their claimed context length. However, their overall performance is surpassed by open-source LLMs with longer context lengths. (ii) Extremely long-context LLMs, such as Yi-6B-200k, exhibit a relatively gentle degradation of performance, but their absolute performances may not necessarily be higher than those of LLMs with shorter context lengths. (iii) LLMs' performances can significantly degrade in the presence of confusing information, especially in the pressure test of "needle in a haystack". (iv) Issues related to knowledge leakage and inaccurate metrics introduce bias in evaluation, and these concerns are alleviated in LV-Eval. All datasets and evaluation codes are released at: https://github.com/infinigence/LVEval.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

Cheap and Quick: Efficient Vision-Language Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models

Recently, growing interest has been aroused in extending the multimodal capability of large language models (LLMs), e.g., vision-language (VL) learning, which is regarded as the next milestone of artificial general intelligence. However, existing solutions are prohibitively expensive, which not only need to optimize excessive parameters, but also require another large-scale pre-training before VL instruction tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel and affordable solution for the effective VL adaption of LLMs, called Mixture-of-Modality Adaptation (MMA). Instead of using large neural networks to connect the image encoder and LLM, MMA adopts lightweight modules, i.e., adapters, to bridge the gap between LLMs and VL tasks, which also enables the joint optimization of the image and language models. Meanwhile, MMA is also equipped with a routing algorithm to help LLMs achieve an automatic shift between single- and multi-modal instructions without compromising their ability of natural language understanding. To validate MMA, we apply it to a recent LLM called LLaMA and term this formed large vision-language instructed model as LaVIN. To validate MMA and LaVIN, we conduct extensive experiments under two setups, namely multimodal science question answering and multimodal dialogue. The experimental results not only demonstrate the competitive performance and the superior training efficiency of LaVIN than existing multimodal LLMs, but also confirm its great potential as a general-purpose chatbot. More importantly, the actual expenditure of LaVIN is extremely cheap, e.g., only 1.4 training hours with 3.8M trainable parameters, greatly confirming the effectiveness of MMA. Our project is released at https://luogen1996.github.io/lavin.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2023 1

Ovis: Structural Embedding Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Model

Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically integrate a pre-trained LLM with another pre-trained vision transformer through a connector, such as an MLP, endowing the LLM with visual capabilities. However, the misalignment between two embedding strategies in MLLMs -- the structural textual embeddings based on an embedding look-up table and the continuous embeddings generated directly by the vision encoder -- makes challenges for a more seamless fusion of visual and textual information. We propose Ovis, a novel MLLM architecture designed to structurally align visual and textual embeddings. Ovis integrates an additional learnable visual embedding table into the visual encoder's process. To capture rich visual semantics, each image patch indexes the visual embedding table multiple times, resulting in a final visual embedding that is a probabilistic combination of the indexed embeddings. This structural approach mirrors the method used for generating textual embeddings. Empirical evaluations on various multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Ovis outperforms open-source MLLMs of similar parameter scales and even surpasses the proprietary model Qwen-VL-Plus overall. These results highlight the potential of Ovis' structured visual representation for advancing MLLM architectural design and promoting more effective multimodal learning. Both the source code and the training dataset of Ovis will be made publicly available.

  • 7 authors
·
May 31, 2024

TinyGPT-V: Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model via Small Backbones

In the era of advanced multimodel learning, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4V have made remarkable strides towards bridging language and visual elements. However, the closed-source nature and considerable computational demand present notable challenges for universal usage and modifications. This is where open-source MLLMs like LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 come in, presenting groundbreaking achievements across tasks. Despite these accomplishments, computational efficiency remains an unresolved issue, as these models, like LLaVA-v1.5-13B, require substantial resources. Addressing these issues, we introduce TinyGPT-V, a new-wave model marrying impressive performance with commonplace computational capacity. It stands out by requiring merely a 24G GPU for training and an 8G GPU or CPU for inference. Built upon Phi-2, TinyGPT-V couples an effective language backbone with pre-trained vision modules from BLIP-2 or CLIP. TinyGPT-V's 2.8B parameters can undergo a unique quantisation process, suitable for local deployment and inference tasks on 8G various devices. Our work fosters further developments for designing cost-effective, efficient, and high-performing MLLMs, expanding their applicability in a broad array of real-world scenarios. Furthermore this paper proposed a new paradigm of Multimodal Large Language Model via small backbones. Our code and training weights are placed at: https://github.com/DLYuanGod/TinyGPT-V and https://huggingface.co/Tyrannosaurus/TinyGPT-V respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 28, 2023 7

COCO is "ALL'' You Need for Visual Instruction Fine-tuning

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

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

Efficient Model Development through Fine-tuning Transfer

Modern LLMs struggle with efficient updates, as each new pretrained model version requires repeating expensive alignment processes. This challenge also applies to domain- or language-specific models, where fine-tuning on specialized data must be redone for every new base model release. In this paper, we explore the transfer of fine-tuning updates between model versions. Specifically, we derive the diff vector from one source model version, which represents the weight changes from fine-tuning, and apply it to the base model of a different target version. Through empirical evaluations on various open-weight model versions, we show that transferring diff vectors can significantly improve the target base model, often achieving performance comparable to its fine-tuned counterpart. For example, reusing the fine-tuning updates from Llama 3.0 8B leads to an absolute accuracy improvement of 10.7% on GPQA over the base Llama 3.1 8B without additional training, surpassing Llama 3.1 8B Instruct. In a multilingual model development setting, we show that this approach can significantly increase performance on target-language tasks without retraining, achieving an absolute improvement of 4.7% and 15.5% on Global MMLU for Malagasy and Turkish, respectively, compared to Llama 3.1 8B Instruct. Our controlled experiments reveal that fine-tuning transfer is most effective when the source and target models are linearly connected in the parameter space. Additionally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning transfer offers a stronger and more computationally efficient starting point for further fine-tuning. Finally, we propose an iterative recycling-then-finetuning approach for continuous model development, which improves both efficiency and effectiveness. Our findings suggest that fine-tuning transfer is a viable strategy to reduce training costs while maintaining model performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025 2

KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache

Efficiently serving large language models (LLMs) requires batching many requests together to reduce the cost per request. Yet, the key-value (KV) cache, which stores attention keys and values to avoid re-computations, significantly increases memory demands and becomes the new bottleneck in speed and memory usage. This memory demand increases with larger batch sizes and longer context lengths. Additionally, the inference speed is limited by the size of KV cache, as the GPU's SRAM must load the entire KV cache from the main GPU memory for each token generated, causing the computational core to be idle during this process. A straightforward and effective solution to reduce KV cache size is quantization, which decreases the total bytes taken by KV cache. However, there is a lack of in-depth studies that explore the element distribution of KV cache to understand the hardness and limitation of KV cache quantization. To fill the gap, we conducted a comprehensive study on the element distribution in KV cache of popular LLMs. Our findings indicate that the key cache should be quantized per-channel, i.e., group elements along the channel dimension and quantize them together. In contrast, the value cache should be quantized per-token. From this analysis, we developed a tuning-free 2bit KV cache quantization algorithm, named KIVI. With the hardware-friendly implementation, KIVI can enable Llama (Llama-2), Falcon, and Mistral models to maintain almost the same quality while using 2.6times less peak memory usage (including the model weight). This reduction in memory usage enables up to 4times larger batch size, bringing 2.35times sim 3.47times throughput on real LLM inference workload. The source code is available at https://github.com/jy-yuan/KIVI.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024 1

Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Radiology Report Error-checking

This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from two real-world radiology datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray), with 1,000 subsampled reports each. A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing various type of mistakes. The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. LLaVA (Large Language and Visual Assistant) variant models, including our instruction-tuned model, were used for the evaluation. Additionally, a domain expert evaluation was conducted on a small test set. At the SIMPLE level, the LLaVA v1.5 model outperformed other publicly available models. Instruction tuning significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray data, respectively. The model also surpassed the domain experts accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multi-modal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans. Nevertheless, future work is needed to improve the model ability to identify the types of inconsistency.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 20, 2023

MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in textual reasoning, they struggle with mathematical domains like geometry that intrinsically rely on visual aids. Existing approaches to Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) are often limited by rigid external tools or fail to generate the high-fidelity, strategically-timed diagrams necessary for complex problem-solving. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathCanvas, a comprehensive framework designed to endow unified Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with intrinsic VCoT capabilities for mathematics. Our approach consists of two phases. First, a Visual Manipulation stage pre-trains the model on a novel 15.2M-pair corpus, comprising 10M caption-to-diagram pairs (MathCanvas-Imagen) and 5.2M step-by-step editing trajectories (MathCanvas-Edit), to master diagram generation and editing. Second, a Strategic Visual-Aided Reasoning stage fine-tunes the model on MathCanvas-Instruct, a new 219K-example dataset of interleaved visual-textual reasoning paths, teaching it when and how to leverage visual aids. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce MathCanvas-Bench, a challenging benchmark with 3K problems that require models to produce interleaved visual-textual solutions. Our model, BAGEL-Canvas, trained under this framework, achieves an 86% relative improvement over strong LMM baselines on MathCanvas-Bench, demonstrating excellent generalization to other public math benchmarks. Our work provides a complete toolkit-framework, datasets, and benchmark-to unlock complex, human-like visual-aided reasoning in LMMs. Project Page: https://mathcanvas.github.io/

  • 14 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025 2

Phantom of Latent for Large Language and Vision Models

The success of visual instruction tuning has accelerated the development of large language and vision models (LLVMs). Following the scaling laws of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), LLVMs either have further increased their sizes, reaching 26B, 34B, and even 80B parameters. While this increase in model size has yielded significant performance gains, it demands substantially more hardware resources for both training and inference. Consequently, there naturally exists a strong need for efficient LLVMs that achieve the performance of larger models while being smaller in size. To achieve this need, we present a new efficient LLVM family with model sizes of 0.5B, 1.8B, 3.8B, and 7B parameters, Phantom, which significantly enhances learning capabilities within limited structures. By temporarily increasing the latent hidden dimension during multi-head self-attention (MHSA), we make LLVMs prepare to look and understand much more vision-language knowledge on the latent, without substantially increasing physical model sizes. To maximize its advantage, we introduce Phantom Optimization (PO) using both autoregressive supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO)-like concept, which effectively follows correct answers while eliminating incorrect and ambiguous ones. Phantom outperforms numerous larger open- and closed-source LLVMs, positioning itself as a leading solution in the landscape of efficient LLVMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024 2

MAVIS: Mathematical Visual Instruction Tuning

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently emerged as a significant focus in academia and industry. Despite their proficiency in general multi-modal scenarios, the mathematical problem-solving capabilities in visual contexts remain insufficiently explored. We identify three key areas within MLLMs that need to be improved: visual encoding of math diagrams, diagram-language alignment, and mathematical reasoning skills. This draws forth an urgent demand for large-scale, high-quality data and training pipelines in visual mathematics. In this paper, we propose MAVIS, the first MAthematical VISual instruction tuning paradigm for MLLMs, involving a series of mathematical visual datasets and specialized MLLMs. Targeting the three issues, MAVIS contains three progressive training stages from scratch. First, we curate MAVIS-Caption, consisting of 558K diagram-caption pairs, to fine-tune a math-specific vision encoder (CLIP-Math) through contrastive learning, tailored for improved diagram visual encoding. Second, we utilize MAVIS-Caption to align the CLIP-Math with a large language model (LLM) by a projection layer, enhancing vision-language alignment in mathematical domains. Third, we introduce MAVIS-Instruct, including 900K meticulously collected and annotated visual math problems, which is adopted to finally instruct-tune the MLLM for robust mathematical reasoning skills. In MAVIS-Instruct, we incorporate complete chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for each problem, and minimize textual redundancy, thereby concentrating the model towards the visual elements. Data and Models are released at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/MAVIS

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024 3

Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation

We aim at advancing open-vocabulary object detection, which detects objects described by arbitrary text inputs. The fundamental challenge is the availability of training data. It is costly to further scale up the number of classes contained in existing object detection datasets. To overcome this challenge, we propose ViLD, a training method via Vision and Language knowledge Distillation. Our method distills the knowledge from a pretrained open-vocabulary image classification model (teacher) into a two-stage detector (student). Specifically, we use the teacher model to encode category texts and image regions of object proposals. Then we train a student detector, whose region embeddings of detected boxes are aligned with the text and image embeddings inferred by the teacher. We benchmark on LVIS by holding out all rare categories as novel categories that are not seen during training. ViLD obtains 16.1 mask AP_r with a ResNet-50 backbone, even outperforming the supervised counterpart by 3.8. When trained with a stronger teacher model ALIGN, ViLD achieves 26.3 AP_r. The model can directly transfer to other datasets without finetuning, achieving 72.2 AP_{50} on PASCAL VOC, 36.6 AP on COCO and 11.8 AP on Objects365. On COCO, ViLD outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.8 on novel AP and 11.4 on overall AP. Code and demo are open-sourced at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/detection/projects/vild.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 28, 2021

From Head to Tail: Towards Balanced Representation in Large Vision-Language Models through Adaptive Data Calibration

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in combining visual comprehension with language generation. Despite this success, the training data of LVLMs still suffers from Long-Tail (LT) problems, where the data distribution is highly imbalanced. Previous works have mainly focused on traditional VLM architectures, i.e., CLIP or ViT, and specific tasks such as recognition and classification. Nevertheless, the exploration of LVLM (e.g. LLaVA) and more general tasks (e.g. Visual Question Answering and Visual Reasoning) remains under-explored. In this paper, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the LT issues in LVLMs and identify two core causes: the overrepresentation of head concepts and the underrepresentation of tail concepts. Based on the above observation, we propose an Adaptive Data Refinement Framework (ADR), which consists of two stages: Data Rebalancing (DR) and Data Synthesis (DS). In the DR stage, we adaptively rebalance the redundant data based on entity distributions, while in the DS stage, we leverage Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) and scarce images to supplement underrepresented portions. Through comprehensive evaluations across eleven benchmarks, our proposed ADR effectively mitigates the long-tail problem in the training data, improving the average performance of LLaVA 1.5 relatively by 4.36%, without increasing the training data volume.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025 2

Text2Vis: A Challenging and Diverse Benchmark for Generating Multimodal Visualizations from Text

Automated data visualization plays a crucial role in simplifying data interpretation, enhancing decision-making, and improving efficiency. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating visualizations from natural language, the absence of comprehensive benchmarks limits the rigorous evaluation of their capabilities. We introduce Text2Vis, a benchmark designed to assess text-to-visualization models, covering 20+ chart types and diverse data science queries, including trend analysis, correlation, outlier detection, and predictive analytics. It comprises 1,985 samples, each with a data table, natural language query, short answer, visualization code, and annotated charts. The queries involve complex reasoning, conversational turns, and dynamic data retrieval. We benchmark 11 open-source and closed-source models, revealing significant performance gaps, highlighting key challenges, and offering insights for future advancements. To close this gap, we propose the first cross-modal actor-critic agentic framework that jointly refines the textual answer and visualization code, increasing GPT-4o`s pass rate from 26% to 42% over the direct approach and improving chart quality. We also introduce an automated LLM-based evaluation framework that enables scalable assessment across thousands of samples without human annotation, measuring answer correctness, code execution success, visualization readability, and chart accuracy. We release Text2Vis at https://github.com/vis-nlp/Text2Vis.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 26, 2025

LLaVA-UHD v3: Progressive Visual Compression for Efficient Native-Resolution Encoding in MLLMs

Visual encoding followed by token condensing has become the standard architectural paradigm in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). Many recent MLLMs increasingly favor global native- resolution visual encoding over slice-based methods. To investigate this trend, we systematically compare their behavior on vision-language understanding and attention patterns, revealing that global encoding enhances overall capability but at the expense of greater computational overhead. To address this issue, we present LLaVA-UHD v3, an MLLM centered upon our proposed Progressive Visual Compression (PVC) method, which can be seamlessly integrated into standard Vision Transformer (ViT) to enable efficient native-resolution encoding. The PVC approach consists of two key modules: (i) refined patch embedding, which supports flexible patch-size scaling for fine-grained visual model- ing, (ii) windowed token compression, hierarchically deployed across ViT layers to progressively aggregate local token representations. Jointly modulated by these two modules, a widely pretrained ViT can be reconfigured into an efficient architecture while largely preserving generality. Evaluated across extensive benchmarks, the transformed ViT, termed ViT-UHD, demonstrates competitive performance with MoonViT while reducing TTFT (time-to-first-token) by 2.4x, when developed within an identical MLLM architecture. Building upon ViT-UHD, LLaVA-UHD v3 also achieves competitive performance to Qwen2-VL, while further reducing TTFT by 1.9x. We will release all code and checkpoints to support future research on efficient MLLMs.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 26, 2025

ConvLLaVA: Hierarchical Backbones as Visual Encoder for Large Multimodal Models

High-resolution Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encounter the challenges of excessive visual tokens and quadratic visual complexity. Current high-resolution LMMs address the quadratic complexity while still generating excessive visual tokens. However, the redundancy in visual tokens is the key problem as it leads to more substantial compute. To mitigate this issue, we propose ConvLLaVA, which employs ConvNeXt, a hierarchical backbone, as the visual encoder of LMM to replace Vision Transformer (ViT). ConvLLaVA compresses high-resolution images into information-rich visual features, effectively preventing the generation of excessive visual tokens. To enhance the capabilities of ConvLLaVA, we propose two critical optimizations. Since the low-resolution pretrained ConvNeXt underperforms when directly applied on high resolution, we update it to bridge the gap. Moreover, since ConvNeXt's original compression ratio is inadequate for much higher resolution inputs, we train a successive stage to further compress the visual tokens, thereby reducing redundancy. These optimizations enable ConvLLaVA to support inputs of 1536x1536 resolution generating only 576 visual tokens, capable of handling images of arbitrary aspect ratios. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art models on mainstream benchmarks. The ConvLLaVA model series are publicly available at https://github.com/alibaba/conv-llava.

  • 9 authors
·
May 24, 2024 7

FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Models

Scaling the input image resolution is essential for enhancing the performance of Vision Language Models (VLMs), particularly in text-rich image understanding tasks. However, popular visual encoders such as ViTs become inefficient at high resolutions due to the large number of tokens and high encoding latency caused by stacked self-attention layers. At different operational resolutions, the vision encoder of a VLM can be optimized along two axes: reducing encoding latency and minimizing the number of visual tokens passed to the LLM, thereby lowering overall latency. Based on a comprehensive efficiency analysis of the interplay between image resolution, vision latency, token count, and LLM size, we introduce FastVLM, a model that achieves an optimized trade-off between latency, model size and accuracy. FastVLM incorporates FastViTHD, a novel hybrid vision encoder designed to output fewer tokens and significantly reduce encoding time for high-resolution images. Unlike previous methods, FastVLM achieves the optimal balance between visual token count and image resolution solely by scaling the input image, eliminating the need for additional token pruning and simplifying the model design. In the LLaVA-1.5 setup, FastVLM achieves 3.2times improvement in time-to-first-token (TTFT) while maintaining similar performance on VLM benchmarks compared to prior works. Compared to LLaVa-OneVision at the highest resolution (1152times1152), FastVLM achieves comparable performance on key benchmarks like SeedBench and MMMU, using the same 0.5B LLM, but with 85times faster TTFT and a vision encoder that is 3.4times smaller.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024 6

Flacuna: Unleashing the Problem Solving Power of Vicuna using FLAN Fine-Tuning

Recently, the release of INSTRUCTEVAL has provided valuable insights into the performance of large language models (LLMs) that utilize encoder-decoder or decoder-only architecture. Interestingly, despite being introduced four years ago, T5-based LLMs, such as FLAN-T5, continue to outperform the latest decoder-based LLMs, such as LLAMA and VICUNA, on tasks that require general problem-solving skills. This performance discrepancy can be attributed to three key factors: (1) Pre-training data, (2) Backbone architecture, and (3) Instruction dataset. In this technical report, our main focus is on investigating the impact of the third factor by leveraging VICUNA, a large language model based on LLAMA, which has undergone fine-tuning on ChatGPT conversations. To achieve this objective, we fine-tuned VICUNA using a customized instruction dataset collection called FLANMINI. This collection includes a subset of the large-scale instruction dataset known as FLAN, as well as various code-related datasets and conversational datasets derived from ChatGPT/GPT-4. This dataset comprises a large number of tasks that demand problem-solving skills. Our experimental findings strongly indicate that the enhanced problem-solving abilities of our model, FLACUNA, are obtained through fine-tuning VICUNA on the FLAN dataset, leading to significant improvements across numerous benchmark datasets in INSTRUCTEVAL. FLACUNA is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/declare-lab/flacuna-13b-v1.0.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 5, 2023 1

DynamicVis: An Efficient and General Visual Foundation Model for Remote Sensing Image Understanding

The advancement of remote sensing technology has improved the spatial resolution of satellite imagery, facilitating more detailed visual representations for diverse interpretations. However, existing methods exhibit limited generalization capabilities across varied applications. While some contemporary foundation models demonstrate potential, they are hindered by insufficient cross-task adaptability and primarily process low-resolution imagery of restricted sizes, thus failing to fully exploit high-resolution data or leverage comprehensive large-scene semantics. Crucially, remote sensing imagery differs fundamentally from natural images, as key foreground targets (eg., maritime objects, artificial structures) often occupy minimal spatial proportions (~1%) and exhibit sparse distributions. Efficiently modeling cross-task generalizable knowledge from lengthy 2D tokens (~100,000) poses a significant challenge yet remains critical for remote sensing image understanding. Motivated by the selective attention mechanisms inherent to the human visual system, we propose DynamicVis, a dynamic visual perception foundation model for remote sensing imagery. The framework integrates a novel dynamic region perception backbone based on the selective state space model, which strategically balances localized detail extraction with global contextual integration, enabling computationally efficient encoding of large-scale data while maintaining architectural scalability. To enhance cross-task knowledge transferring, we introduce a multi-instance learning paradigm utilizing meta-embedding representations, trained on million-scale region-level annotations. Evaluations across nine downstream tasks demonstrate the model's versatility. DynamicVis achieves multi-level feature modeling with exceptional efficiency, processing (2048x2048) pixels with 97 ms latency (6% of ViT's) and 833 MB GPU memory (3% of ViT's).

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025 2

Closing the gap between open-source and commercial large language models for medical evidence summarization

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise in summarizing medical evidence. Most recent studies focus on the application of proprietary LLMs. Using proprietary LLMs introduces multiple risk factors, including a lack of transparency and vendor dependency. While open-source LLMs allow better transparency and customization, their performance falls short compared to proprietary ones. In this study, we investigated to what extent fine-tuning open-source LLMs can further improve their performance in summarizing medical evidence. Utilizing a benchmark dataset, MedReview, consisting of 8,161 pairs of systematic reviews and summaries, we fine-tuned three broadly-used, open-sourced LLMs, namely PRIMERA, LongT5, and Llama-2. Overall, the fine-tuned LLMs obtained an increase of 9.89 in ROUGE-L (95% confidence interval: 8.94-10.81), 13.21 in METEOR score (95% confidence interval: 12.05-14.37), and 15.82 in CHRF score (95% confidence interval: 13.89-16.44). The performance of fine-tuned LongT5 is close to GPT-3.5 with zero-shot settings. Furthermore, smaller fine-tuned models sometimes even demonstrated superior performance compared to larger zero-shot models. The above trends of improvement were also manifested in both human and GPT4-simulated evaluations. Our results can be applied to guide model selection for tasks demanding particular domain knowledge, such as medical evidence summarization.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

RES-Q: Evaluating Code-Editing Large Language Model Systems at the Repository Scale

The instruction-following ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has cultivated a class of LLM-based systems capable of approaching complex tasks such as making edits to large code repositories. Due to the high sensitivity and unpredictability of LLM behavior in response to changes in prompting, robust evaluation tools are needed to drive future iteration of these systems. We propose RES-Q, a natural language instruction-based benchmark for evaluating Repository Editing Systems, which consists of 100 repository editing tasks derived from real GitHub commits. Given an edit instruction and a code repository, RES-Q evaluates an LLM system's ability to gather information and construct an edit that satisfies the criteria set by the instruction. We argue that evaluating LLMs in this way addresses issues with traditional benchmarks and provides a more holistic assessment of a model's abilities. We evaluate various state-of-the-art LLMs as language agents in a repository-editing system built on Qurrent OS, our language agent development software. Despite their 1% pass@1 performance difference on HumanEval, we find Claude Sonnet 3.5 outperforms GPT-4o by 12% pass@1 on RES-Q, indicating RES-Q's capacity to differentiate model capability as traditional benchmarks approach saturation. We further investigate token efficiency, performance relationships with existing benchmarks, and interesting disparities between closed and open-source LLMs. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Qurrent-AI/RES-Q.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

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

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

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

VARGPT: Unified Understanding and Generation in a Visual Autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model

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/

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025

Detection-Oriented Image-Text Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Detection

We present a new open-vocabulary detection approach based on detection-oriented image-text pretraining to bridge the gap between image-level pretraining and open-vocabulary object detection. At the pretraining phase, we replace the commonly used classification architecture with the detector architecture, which better serves the region-level recognition needs of detection by enabling the detector heads to learn from noisy image-text pairs. Using only standard contrastive loss and no pseudo-labeling, our approach is a simple yet effective extension of the contrastive learning method to learn emergent object-semantic cues. In addition, we propose a shifted-window learning approach upon window attention to make the backbone representation more robust, translation-invariant, and less biased by the window pattern. On the popular LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark, our approach sets a new state of the art of 40.4 mask AP_r using the common ViT-L backbone, significantly outperforming the best existing approach by +6.5 mask AP_r at system level. On the COCO benchmark, we achieve very competitive 40.8 novel AP without pseudo labeling or weak supervision. In addition, we evaluate our approach on the transfer detection setup, where ours outperforms the baseline significantly. Visualization reveals emerging object locality from the pretraining recipes compared to the baseline. Code and models will be publicly released.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

LAVID: An Agentic LVLM Framework for Diffusion-Generated Video Detection

The impressive achievements of generative models in creating high-quality videos have raised concerns about digital integrity and privacy vulnerabilities. Recent works of AI-generated content detection have been widely studied in the image field (e.g., deepfake), yet the video field has been unexplored. Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) has become an emerging tool for AI-generated content detection for its strong reasoning and multimodal capabilities. It breaks the limitations of traditional deep learning based methods faced with like lack of transparency and inability to recognize new artifacts. Motivated by this, we propose LAVID, a novel LVLMs-based ai-generated video detection with explicit knowledge enhancement. Our insight list as follows: (1) The leading LVLMs can call external tools to extract useful information to facilitate its own video detection task; (2) Structuring the prompt can affect LVLM's reasoning ability to interpret information in video content. Our proposed pipeline automatically selects a set of explicit knowledge tools for detection, and then adaptively adjusts the structure prompt by self-rewriting. Different from prior SOTA that trains additional detectors, our method is fully training-free and only requires inference of the LVLM for detection. To facilitate our research, we also create a new benchmark \vidfor with high-quality videos generated from multiple sources of video generation tools. Evaluation results show that LAVID improves F1 scores by 6.2 to 30.2% over the top baselines on our datasets across four SOTA LVLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 20, 2025

FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem Proving

Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER3. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,125 lemmas, and 200,646 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3- 8B solves 17.39% (69 -> 81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75 -> 84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024

Human Re-ID Meets LVLMs: What can we expect?

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been regarded as a breakthrough advance in an astoundingly variety of tasks, from content generation to virtual assistants and multimodal search or retrieval. However, for many of these applications, the performance of these methods has been widely criticized, particularly when compared with state-of-the-art methods and technologies in each specific domain. In this work, we compare the performance of the leading large vision-language models in the human re-identification task, using as baseline the performance attained by state-of-the-art AI models specifically designed for this problem. We compare the results due to ChatGPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Qwen-VL-Max to a baseline ReID PersonViT model, using the well-known Market1501 dataset. Our evaluation pipeline includes the dataset curation, prompt engineering, and metric selection to assess the models' performance. Results are analyzed from many different perspectives: similarity scores, classification accuracy, and classification metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, and area under curve (AUC). Our results confirm the strengths of LVLMs, but also their severe limitations that often lead to catastrophic answers and should be the scope of further research. As a concluding remark, we speculate about some further research that should fuse traditional and LVLMs to combine the strengths from both families of techniques and achieve solid improvements in performance.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 30, 2025

Towards Open Foundation Language Model and Corpus for Macedonian: A Low-Resource Language

The increase in technological adoption worldwide comes with demands for novel tools to be used by the general population. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great opportunity in this respect, but their capabilities remain limited for low-resource languages, restricting applications in countries where such languages are spoken. We create several resources to facilitate the adoption of LLMs and to support research advancements for Macedonian. We collect the largest Macedonian corpus to date, consisting of 40GB of textual data and totaling 3.5B words. To support conversational applications, we collect a 106k-instance instruction dataset, carefully built to be culturally grounded. For evaluation, we construct a Macedonian evaluation suite covering seven benchmarks. Finally, we train domestic-yak, a state-of-the-art 8B-parameter model, on our curated datasets and evaluate it against eight baseline models using the newly constructed benchmark suite. Our model outperforms all existing models in the 8B parameter range across all benchmarks, and achieves performance comparable to models up to 10x larger. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis with native speakers reveals that our model is preferred over larger counterparts, receiving higher ratings for grammatical correctness and cultural appropriateness. All datasets, code, and model weights are openly released, setting a foundation for advancing LLMs in similarly underrepresented languages. These resources are publicly available at github.com/LVSTCK for source code, and at huggingface.co/LVSTCK for pretrained model weights and data.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

Empowering Large Language Models in Wireless Communication: A Novel Dataset and Fine-Tuning Framework

In this work, we develop a specialized dataset aimed at enhancing the evaluation and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) specifically for wireless communication applications. The dataset includes a diverse set of multi-hop questions, including true/false and multiple-choice types, spanning varying difficulty levels from easy to hard. By utilizing advanced language models for entity extraction and question generation, rigorous data curation processes are employed to maintain high quality and relevance. Additionally, we introduce a Pointwise V-Information (PVI) based fine-tuning method, providing a detailed theoretical analysis and justification for its use in quantifying the information content of training data with 2.24\% and 1.31\% performance boost for different models compared to baselines, respectively. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the fine-tuned models with the proposed methodologies on practical tasks, we also consider different tasks, including summarizing optimization problems from technical papers and solving the mathematical problems related to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which are generated by using the proposed multi-agent framework. Simulation results show significant performance gain in summarization tasks with 20.9\% in the ROUGE-L metrics. We also study the scaling laws of fine-tuning LLMs and the challenges LLMs face in the field of wireless communications, offering insights into their adaptation to wireless communication tasks. This dataset and fine-tuning methodology aim to enhance the training and evaluation of LLMs, contributing to advancements in LLMs for wireless communication research and applications.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 16, 2025

Multi-modal preference alignment remedies regression of visual instruction tuning on language model

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

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 16, 2024

Breaking Focus: Contextual Distraction Curse in Large Language Models

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized generative systems, achieving excellent performance across diverse domains. Although these models perform well in controlled environments, their real-world applications frequently encounter inputs containing both essential and irrelevant details. Our investigation has revealed a critical vulnerability in LLMs, which we term Contextual Distraction Vulnerability (CDV). This phenomenon arises when models fail to maintain consistent performance on questions modified with semantically coherent but irrelevant context. To systematically investigate this vulnerability, we propose an efficient tree-based search methodology to automatically generate CDV examples. Our approach successfully generates CDV examples across four datasets, causing an average performance degradation of approximately 45% in state-of-the-art LLMs. To address this critical issue, we explore various mitigation strategies and find that post-targeted training approaches can effectively enhance model robustness against contextual distractions. Our findings highlight the fundamental nature of CDV as an ability-level challenge rather than a knowledge-level issue since models demonstrate the necessary knowledge by answering correctly in the absence of distractions. This calls the community's attention to address CDV during model development to ensure reliability. The code is available at https://github.com/wyf23187/LLM_CDV.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

RevisEval: Improving LLM-as-a-Judge via Response-Adapted References

With significant efforts in recent studies, LLM-as-a-Judge has become a cost-effective alternative to human evaluation for assessing the text generation quality in a wide range of tasks. However, there still remains a reliability gap between LLM-as-a-Judge and human evaluation. One important reason is the lack of guided oracles in the evaluation process. Motivated by the role of reference pervasively used in classic text evaluation, we introduce RevisEval, a novel text generation evaluation paradigm via the response-adapted references. RevisEval is driven by the key observation that an ideal reference should maintain the necessary relevance to the response to be evaluated. Specifically, RevisEval leverages the text revision capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to adaptively revise the response, then treat the revised text as the reference (response-adapted reference) for the subsequent evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RevisEval outperforms traditional reference-free and reference-based evaluation paradigms that use LLM-as-a-Judge across NLG tasks and open-ended instruction-following tasks. More importantly, our response-adapted references can further boost the classical text metrics, e.g., BLEU and BERTScore, compared to traditional references and even rival the LLM-as-a-Judge. A detailed analysis is also conducted to confirm RevisEval's effectiveness in bias reduction, the impact of inference cost, and reference relevance.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 3

LLaVA-KD: A Framework of Distilling Multimodal Large Language Models

The success of Large Language Models (LLM) has led researchers to explore Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) for unified visual and linguistic understanding. However, the increasing model size and computational complexity of MLLM limit their use in resource-constrained environments. Small-scale MLLM (s-MLLM) aims to retain the capabilities of the large-scale model (l-MLLM) while reducing computational demands, but resulting in a significant decline in performance. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel LLaVA-KD framework to transfer knowledge from l-MLLM to s-MLLM. Specifically, we introduce Multimodal Distillation (MDist) to minimize the divergence between the visual-textual output distributions of l-MLLM and s-MLLM, and Relation Distillation (RDist) to transfer l-MLLM's ability to model correlations between visual features. Additionally, we propose a three-stage training scheme to fully exploit the potential of s-MLLM: 1) Distilled Pre-Training to align visual-textual representations, 2) Supervised Fine-Tuning to equip the model with multimodal understanding, and 3) Distilled Fine-Tuning to further transfer l-MLLM capabilities. Our approach significantly improves performance without altering the small model's architecture. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each proposed component. Code will be available at https://github.com/caiyuxuan1120/LLaVA-KD.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

Evaluating the Symbol Binding Ability of Large Language Models for Multiple-Choice Questions in Vietnamese General Education

In this paper, we evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform multiple choice symbol binding (MCSB) for multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot settings. We focus on Vietnamese, with fewer challenging MCQA datasets than in English. The two existing datasets, ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0, focus on literature. Recent research in Vietnamese natural language processing (NLP) has focused on the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Examination (VNHSGE) from 2019 to 2023 to evaluate ChatGPT. However, these studies have mainly focused on how ChatGPT solves the VNHSGE step by step. We aim to create a novel and high-quality dataset by providing structured guidelines for typing LaTeX formulas for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. This dataset can be used to evaluate the MCSB ability of LLMs and smaller language models (LMs) because it is typed in a strict LaTeX style. We focus on predicting the character (A, B, C, or D) that is the most likely answer to a question, given the context of the question. Our evaluation of six well-known LLMs, namely BLOOMZ-7.1B-MT, LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-2-70B, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.0, on the ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0 benchmarks and our proposed dataset shows promising results on the MCSB ability of LLMs for Vietnamese. The dataset is available for research purposes only.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

LLaVA-MORE: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Visual Backbones for Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has highlighted the critical roles of both the visual backbone and the underlying language model. While prior work has primarily focused on scaling these components to billions of parameters, the trade-offs between model size, architecture, and performance remain underexplored. Additionally, inconsistencies in training data and evaluation protocols have hindered direct comparisons, making it difficult to derive optimal design choices. In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-MORE, a new family of MLLMs that integrates recent language models with diverse visual backbones. To ensure fair comparisons, we employ a unified training protocol applied consistently across all architectures. Our analysis systematically explores both small- and medium-scale LLMs -- including Phi-4, LLaMA-3.1, and Gemma-2 -- to evaluate multimodal reasoning, generation, and instruction following, while examining the relationship between model size and performance. Beyond evaluating the LLM impact on final results, we conduct a comprehensive study of various visual encoders, ranging from CLIP-based architectures to alternatives such as DINOv2, SigLIP, and SigLIP2. Additional experiments investigate the effects of increased image resolution and variations in pre-training datasets. Overall, our results provide insights into the design of more effective MLLMs, offering a reproducible evaluation framework that facilitates direct comparisons and can guide future model development. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/LLaVA-MORE.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

LLaVA-MoD: Making LLaVA Tiny via MoE Knowledge Distillation

We introduce LLaVA-MoD, a novel framework designed to enable the efficient training of small-scale Multimodal Language Models (s-MLLM) by distilling knowledge from large-scale MLLM (l-MLLM). Our approach tackles two fundamental challenges in MLLM distillation. First, we optimize the network structure of s-MLLM by integrating a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture into the language model, striking a balance between computational efficiency and model expressiveness. Second, we propose a progressive knowledge transfer strategy to ensure comprehensive knowledge migration. This strategy begins with mimic distillation, where we minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between output distributions to enable the student model to emulate the teacher network's understanding. Following this, we introduce preference distillation via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), where the key lies in treating l-MLLM as the reference model. During this phase, the s-MLLM's ability to discriminate between superior and inferior examples is significantly enhanced beyond l-MLLM, leading to a better student that surpasses its teacher, particularly in hallucination benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-MoD outperforms existing models across various multimodal benchmarks while maintaining a minimal number of activated parameters and low computational costs. Remarkably, LLaVA-MoD, with only 2B activated parameters, surpasses Qwen-VL-Chat-7B by an average of 8.8% across benchmarks, using merely 0.3% of the training data and 23% trainable parameters. These results underscore LLaVA-MoD's ability to effectively distill comprehensive knowledge from its teacher model, paving the way for the development of more efficient MLLMs. The code will be available on: https://github.com/shufangxun/LLaVA-MoD.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024 2

VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks

Recently, fine-tuning language models pre-trained on large text corpora have provided huge improvements on vision-and-language (V&L) tasks as well as on pure language tasks. However, fine-tuning the entire parameter set of pre-trained models becomes impractical since the model size is growing rapidly. Hence, in this paper, we introduce adapter-based parameter-efficient transfer learning techniques to V&L models such as VL-BART and VLT5. We evaluate our methods in a unified multi-task setup on both image-text and video-text benchmarks. For the image-text tasks, we use four diverse V&L datasets: VQAv2, GQA, NLVR2 , and MSCOCO image captioning. For video-text tasks, we use TVQA, How2QA, TVC, and YC2C. With careful training and thorough experiments, we benchmark three popular adapter-based methods (Adapter, Hyperformer, Compacter) against the standard full fine-tuning and the recently proposed prompt-tuning approach. We also enhance the efficiency and performance of adapters by sharing their weights to attain knowledge across tasks. Our results demonstrate that training the adapter with the weight-sharing technique (4.18% of total parameters for image-text tasks and 3.39% for video-text tasks) can match the performance of fine-tuning the entire model. Lastly, we present a comprehensive analysis including the combination of adapter and task-specific prompts and the impact of V&L pre-training on adapters. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ylsung/VL_adapter.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 13, 2021

Rewriting Pre-Training Data Boosts LLM Performance in Math and Code

The performance of large language models (LLMs) in program synthesis and mathematical reasoning is fundamentally limited by the quality of their pre-training corpora. We introduce two openly licensed datasets, released under the Llama 3.3 Community License, that significantly enhance LLM performance by systematically rewriting public data. SwallowCode (approximately 16.1 billion tokens) refines Python snippets from The-Stack-v2 through a novel four-stage pipeline: syntax validation, pylint-based style filtering, and a two-stage LLM rewriting process that enforces style conformity and transforms snippets into self-contained, algorithmically efficient examples. Unlike prior methods that rely on exclusionary filtering or limited transformations, our transform-and-retain approach upgrades low-quality code, maximizing data utility. SwallowMath (approximately 2.3 billion tokens) enhances Finemath-4+ by removing boilerplate, restoring context, and reformatting solutions into concise, step-by-step explanations. Within a fixed 50 billion token training budget, continual pre-training of Llama-3.1-8B with SwallowCode boosts pass@1 by +17.0 on HumanEval and +17.7 on HumanEval+ compared to Stack-Edu, surpassing the baseline model's code generation capabilities. Similarly, substituting SwallowMath yields +12.4 accuracy on GSM8K and +7.6 on MATH. Ablation studies confirm that each pipeline stage contributes incrementally, with rewriting delivering the largest gains. All datasets, prompts, and checkpoints are publicly available, enabling reproducible research and advancing LLM pre-training for specialized domains.

  • 16 authors
·
May 5, 2025 4

V-Rex: Real-Time Streaming Video LLM Acceleration via Dynamic KV Cache Retrieval

Streaming video large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for real-time multimodal tasks such as video captioning, question answering, conversational agents, and augmented reality. However, these models face fundamental memory and computational challenges because their key-value (KV) caches grow substantially with continuous streaming video input. This process requires an iterative prefill stage, which is a unique feature of streaming video LLMs. Due to its iterative prefill stage, it suffers from significant limitations, including extensive computation, substantial data transfer, and degradation in accuracy. Crucially, this issue is exacerbated for edge deployment, which is the primary target for these models. In this work, we propose V-Rex, the first software-hardware co-designed accelerator that comprehensively addresses both algorithmic and hardware bottlenecks in streaming video LLM inference. At its core, V-Rex introduces ReSV, a training-free dynamic KV cache retrieval algorithm. ReSV exploits temporal and spatial similarity-based token clustering to reduce excessive KV cache memory across video frames. To fully realize these algorithmic benefits, V-Rex offers a compact, low-latency hardware accelerator with a dynamic KV cache retrieval engine (DRE), featuring bit-level and early-exit based computing units. V-Rex achieves unprecedented real-time of 3.9-8.3 FPS and energy-efficient streaming video LLM inference on edge deployment with negligible accuracy loss. While DRE only accounts for 2.2% power and 2.0% area, the system delivers 1.9-19.7x speedup and 3.1-18.5x energy efficiency improvements over AGX Orin GPU. This work is the first to comprehensively tackle KV cache retrieval across algorithms and hardware, enabling real-time streaming video LLM inference on resource-constrained edge devices.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 13, 2025