Large Language Model
Compositional 3D-aware Video Generation with LLM Director
Significant progress has been made in text-to-video generation through the use of powerful generative models and large-scale internet data. However, substantial challenges remain in precisely controlling individual elements within the generated video, such as the movement and appearance of specific characters and the manipulation of viewpoints. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that generates each element in 3D representation separately and then composites them with priors from Large Language Models (LLMs) and 2D diffusion models. Specifically, given an input textual query, our scheme consists of four stages: 1) we leverage the LLMs as the director to first decompose the complex query into several sub-queries, where each sub-query describes each element of the generated video; 2) to generate each element, pre-trained models are invoked by the LLMs to obtain the corresponding 3D representation; 3) to composite the generated 3D representations, we prompt multi-modal LLMs to produce coarse guidance on the scale, location, and trajectory of different objects; 4) to make the results adhere to natural distribution, we further leverage 2D diffusion priors and use score distillation sampling to refine the composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-fidelity videos from text with flexible control over each element.
Enhancing Large Vision Language Models with Self-Training on Image Comprehension
Large vision language models (LVLMs) integrate large language models (LLMs) with pre-trained vision encoders, thereby activating the perception capability of the model to understand image inputs for different queries and conduct subsequent reasoning. Improving this capability requires high-quality vision-language data, which is costly and labor-intensive to acquire. Self-training approaches have been effective in single-modal settings to alleviate the need for labeled data by leveraging model's own generation. However, effective self-training remains a challenge regarding the unique visual perception and reasoning capability of LVLMs.
Lumina-Next : Making Lumina-T2X Stronger and Faster with Next-DiT
Lumina-T2X is a nascent family of Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers (Flag-DiT) that establishes a unified framework for transforming noise into various modalities, such as images and videos, conditioned on text instructions. Despite its promising capabilities, Lumina-T2X still encounters challenges including training instability, slow inference, and extrapolation artifacts. In this paper, we present Lumina-Next, an improved version of Lumina-T2X, showcasing stronger generation performance with increased training and inference efficiency. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of the Flag-DiT architecture and identify several suboptimal components, which we address by introducing the Next-DiT architecture with 3D RoPE and sandwich normalizations. To enable better resolution extrapolation, we thoroughly compare different context extrapolation methods applied to text-to-image generation with 3D RoPE, and propose Frequency-and Time-Aware Scaled RoPE tailored for diffusion transformers. Additionally, we introduce a sigmoid time discretization schedule for diffusion sampling, which achieves high-quality generation in 5-10 steps combined with higher-order ODE solvers. Thanks to these improvements, Lumina-Next not only improves the basic text-to-image generation but also demonstrates superior resolution extrapolation capabilities as well as multilingual generation using decoder-based LLMs as the text encoder, all in a zero-shot manner. To further validate Lumina-Next as a versatile generative framework, we instantiate it on diverse tasks including visual recognition, multi-views, audio, music, and point cloud generation, showcasing strong performance across these domains.
CuMo: Scaling Multimodal LLM with Co-Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts
Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have focused primarily on scaling by increasing text-image pair data and enhancing LLMs to improve performance on multimodal tasks. However, these scaling approaches are computationally expensive and overlook the significance of efficiently improving model capabilities from the vision side. Inspired by the successful applications of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) in LLMs, which improves model scalability during training while keeping inference costs similar to those of smaller models, we propose CuMo, which incorporates Co-upcycled Top-K sparsely-gated Mixture-of-experts blocks into both the vision encoder and the MLP connector, thereby enhancing the multimodal LLMs with neglectable additional activated parameters during inference.CuMo first pre-trains the MLP blocks and then initializes each expert in the MoE block from the pre-trained MLP block during the visual instruction tuning stage, with auxiliary losses to ensure a balanced loading of experts.CuMo outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs across various VQA and visual-instruction-following benchmarks within each model size group, all while training exclusively on open-sourced datasets.
GREATS: Online Selection of High-Quality Data for LLM Training in Every Iteration
Online batch selection methods offer an adaptive alternative to static training data selection by dynamically selecting data batches during training. However, existing methods either rely on impractical reference models or simple heuristics that may not capture true data informativeness. To address these limitations, we propose \emph{GREedy Approximation Taylor Selection} (GREATS), a principled and efficient online batch selection method that applies greedy algorithm to optimize the data batch quality approximated by Taylor expansion. We develop a series of techniques to scale GREATS to large-scale model training. Extensive experiments with large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that GREATS significantly improves training convergence speed and generalization performance.
Paralinguistics-Aware Speech-Empowered Large Language Models for Natural Conversation
Recent work shows promising results in expanding the capabilities of large language models (LLM) to directly understand and synthesize speech. However, an LLM-based strategy for modeling spoken dialogs remains elusive, calling for further investigation. This paper introduces an extensive speech-text LLM framework, the Unified Spoken Dialog Model (USDM), designed to generate coherent spoken responses with naturally occurring prosodic features relevant to the given input speech without relying on explicit automatic speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We have verified the inclusion of prosody in speech tokens that predominantly contain semantic information and have used this foundation to construct a prosody-infused speech-text model. Additionally, we propose a generalized speech-text pretraining scheme that enhances the capture of cross-modal semantics. To construct USDM, we fine-tune our speech-text model on spoken dialog data using a multi-step spoken dialog template that stimulates the chain-of-reasoning capabilities exhibited by the underlying LLM. Automatic and human evaluations on the DailyTalk dataset demonstrate that our approach effectively generates natural-sounding spoken responses, surpassing previous and cascaded baselines. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/usdm.
AutoMix: Automatically Mixing Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are now available from cloud API providers in various sizes and configurations. While this diversity offers a broad spectrum of choices, effectively leveraging the options to optimize computational cost and performance remains challenging. In this work, we present AutoMix, an approach that strategically routes queries to larger LMs, based on the approximate correctness of outputs from a smaller LM. Central to AutoMix are two key technical contributions. First, it has a few-shot self-verification mechanism, which estimates the reliability of its own outputs without requiring extensive training. Second, given that self-verification can be noisy, it employs a POMDP based router that can effectively select an appropriately sized model, based on answer confidence. Experiments across five language models and five challenging datasets show that Automix consistently surpasses strong baselines, reducing computational cost by over 50\% for comparable performance.
Implicit Multimodal Alignment: On the Generalization of Frozen LLMs to Multimodal Inputs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multimodal tasks, without any multimodal finetuning. They are the de facto building block for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), yet, we still lack a proper understanding of their success. In this work, we expose frozen LLMs to image, video, audio and text inputs and analyse their internal representation with the attempt to understand their generalization beyond textual inputs. Our work provides the following findings. Perceptual tokens (1) are easily distinguishable from textual ones inside LLMs, with significantly different representations (e.g.
Self-Guiding Exploration for Combinatorial Problems
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in addressing reasoning tasks across diverse domains, including arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning. They utilize prompting techniques such as Exploration-of-Thought, Decomposition, and Refinement to effectively navigate and solve intricate tasks. Despite these advancements, the application of LLMs to Combinatorial Problems (CPs), known for their NP-hardness and critical roles in logistics and resource management remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel prompting strategy: Self-Guiding Exploration (SGE), designed to enhance the performance of solving CPs. SGE operates autonomously, generating multiple thought trajectories for each CP task. It then breaks these trajectories down into actionable subtasks, executes them sequentially, and refines the results to ensure optimal outcomes. We present our research as the first to apply LLMs to a broad range of CPs and demonstrate that SGE outperforms existing prompting strategies by over 27.84% in CP optimization performance. Additionally, SGE achieves a 2.46% higher accuracy over the best existing results in other reasoning tasks (arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic).
Probing the Decision Boundaries of In-context Learning in Large Language Models
In-context learning is an emergent paradigm in large language models (LLMs) that enables them to generalize to new tasks and domains by simply prompting these models with a few exemplars without explicit parameter updates. Many attempts have been made to understand in-context learning in LLMs as a function of model scale, pretraining data, and other factors. In this work, we propose a new mechanism to probe and understand in-context learning from the lens of decision boundaries for in-context binary classification. Decision boundaries are straightforward to visualize and provide important information about the qualitative behavior of the inductive biases of standard classifiers. To our surprise, we find that the decision boundaries learned by current LLMs in simple binary classification tasks are often irregularly non-smooth, regardless of task linearity. This paper investigates the factors influencing these decision boundaries and explores methods to enhance their generalizability. We assess various approaches, including training-free and fine-tuning methods for LLMs, the impact of model architecture, and the effectiveness of active prompting techniques for smoothing decision boundaries in a data-efficient manner. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of in-context learning dynamics and offer practical improvements for enhancing robustness and generalizability of in-context learning.