We propose Step-by-Step Coding (SBSC): a multi-turn math reasoning framework that enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate sequence of programs for solving Olympiad level math problems. At each step/turn, by leveraging the code execution outputs and programs of previous steps, the model generates the next sub-task and the corresponding program to solve it. This way, SBSC, sequentially navigates to reach the final answer. SBSC allows more granular, flexible and precise approach to problem-solving compared to existing methods. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of SBSC in tackling competition and Olympiad-level math problems. For Claude-3.5-Sonnet, we observe SBSC (greedy decoding) surpasses existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) program generation based reasoning strategies by absolute 10.7% on AMC12, 8% on AIME and 12.6% on MathOdyssey. Given SBSC is multi-turn in nature, we also benchmark SBSC's greedy decoding against self-consistency decoding results of existing SOTA math reasoning strategies and observe performance gain by absolute 6.2% on AMC, 6.7% on AIME and 7.4% on MathOdyssey.

Typically, Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction (FCRE) models must balance retaining prior knowledge while adapting to new tasks with extremely limited data. However, real-world scenarios may also involve unseen or undetermined relations that existing methods still struggle to handle. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that leverages the Open Information Extraction concept of Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC). Our method not only exposes models to all possible pairs of relations, including determined and undetermined labels not available in the training set, but also enriches model knowledge with diverse relation descriptions, thereby enhancing knowledge retention and adaptability in this challenging scenario. In the perspective of KGC, this is the first work explored in the setting of Continual Learning, allowing efficient expansion of the graph as the data evolves. Experimental results demonstrate our superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art FCRE baselines, as well as the efficiency in handling dynamic graph construction in this setting.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged to address the knowledge-intensive visual question answering (VQA) task. Current methods mainly employ separate retrieval and generation modules to acquire external knowledge and generate answers, respectively. We propose ReAuSE, an alternative to the previous RAG model for the knowledge-based VQA task, which seamlessly integrates knowledge retriever into the generative multi-modal large language model, serving as a built-in search engine. Specifically, our model functions both as a generative retriever and an accurate answer generator. It not only helps retrieve documents from the knowledge base by producing identifiers for each document, but it also answers visual questions based on the retrieved documents. Furthermore, we propose a reinforced retrieval calibration module from relevance feedback to improve retrieval performance and align with the preferences for accurate answer generation. Extensive experiments on two representative OKVQA and A-OKVQA datasets demonstrate significant improvements ranging from 2.9\% to 9.6\% across all evaluation metrics when compared to strong baselines.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a popular approach for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) by addressing their limitations in verifying facts and answering knowledge-intensive questions. As the research in LLM extends their capability to handle input modality other than text, e.g. image, several multimodal RAG benchmarks are proposed. Nonetheless, they mainly use textual knowledge bases as the primary source of evidences for augmentation. There still lack benchmarks designed to evaluate images as augmentation in RAG systems and how they leverage visual knowledge. We propose Visual-RAG, a novel Question Answering benchmark that emphasizes visual knowledge intensive questions. Unlike prior works relying on text-based evidence, Visual-RAG necessitates text-to-image retrieval and integration of relevant clue images to extract visual knowledge as evidence. With Visual-RAG, we evaluate 5 open-sourced and 3 proprietary Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), revealing that images can serve as good evidence in RAG; however, even the SoTA models struggle with effectively extracting and utilizing visual knowledge

Generative AI models, renowned for their ability to synthesize high-quality content, have sparked growing concerns over the improper generation of copyright-protected material. While recent studies have proposed various approaches to address copyright issues, the capability of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to detect copyright infringements remains largely unexplored. In this work, we focus on evaluating the copyright detection abilities of state-of-the-art LVLMs using a various set of image samples. Recognizing the absence of a comprehensive dataset that includes both IP-infringement samples and ambiguous non-infringement negative samples, we construct a benchmark dataset comprising positive samples that violate the copyright protection of well-known IP figures, as well as negative samples that resemble these figures but do not raise copyright concerns. This dataset is created using advanced prompt engineering techniques. We then evaluate leading LVLMs using our benchmark dataset. Our experimental results reveal that LVLMs are prone to overfitting, leading to the misclassification of some negative samples as IP-infringement cases. In the final section, we analyze these failure cases and propose potential solutions to mitigate the overfitting problem.

The critique capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for reasoning abilities, which can provide necessary suggestions (e.g., detailed analysis and constructive feedback). Therefore, how to evaluate the critique capacity of LLMs has drawn great attention and several critique benchmarks have been proposed. However, existing critique benchmarks usually have the following limitations: (1). Focusing on diverse reasoning tasks in general domains and insufficient evaluation on code tasks (e.g., only covering code generation task), where the difficulty of queries is relatively easy (e.g., the code queries of CriticBench are from Humaneval and MBPP). (2). Lacking comprehensive evaluation from different dimensions. To address these limitations, we introduce a holistic code critique benchmark for LLMs called CodeCriticBench. Specifically, our CodeCriticBench includes two mainstream code tasks (i.e., code generation and code QA) with different difficulties. Besides, the evaluation protocols include basic critique evaluation and advanced critique evaluation for different characteristics, where fine-grained evaluation checklists are well-designed for advanced settings. Finally, we conduct extensive experimental results of existing LLMs, which show the effectiveness of CodeCriticBench.

The proliferation of multimodal content on social media presents significant challenges in understanding and moderating complex, context-dependent issues such as misinformation, hate speech, and propaganda. While efforts have been made to develop resources and propose new methods for automatic detection, limited attention has been given to label detection and the generation of explanation-based rationales for predicted labels. To address this challenge, we introduce MemeIntel, an explanation-enhanced dataset for propaganda memes in Arabic and hateful memes in English, making it the first large-scale resource for these tasks. To solve these tasks, we propose a multi-stage optimization approach and train Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Our results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves performance over the base model for both \textbf{label detection} and explanation generation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art with an absolute improvement of ~3% on ArMeme and ~7% on Hateful Memes. For reproducibility and future research, we aim to make the MemeIntel dataset and experimental resources publicly available.

Recently, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides across diverse multimodal tasks and benchmarks. This paper reveals a largely under-explored problem from existing video-involved LVLMs - language bias, where models tend to prioritize language over video and thus result in incorrect responses. To address this research gap, we first collect a Video Language Bias Evaluation Benchmark, which is specifically designed to assess the language bias in video-involved LVLMs through two key tasks: ambiguous video contrast and interrogative question probing. Accordingly, we design accompanied evaluation metrics that aim to penalize LVLMs being biased by language. In addition, we also propose Multi-branch Contrastive Decoding (MCD), introducing two expert branches to simultaneously counteract language bias potentially generated by the amateur text-only branch. Our experiments demonstrate that i) existing video-involved LVLMs, including both proprietary and open-sourced, are largely limited by the language bias problem; ii) our MCD can effectively mitigate this issue and maintain general-purpose capabilities in various video-involved LVLMs without any additional retraining or alteration to model architectures.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable image understanding and dialogue capabilities, allowing them to handle a variety of visual question answering tasks. However, their widespread availability raises concerns about unauthorized usage and copyright infringement, where users or individuals can develop their own LVLMs by fine-tuning published models. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Parameter Learning Attack (PLA) for tracking the copyright of LVLMs without modifying the original model. Specifically, we construct adversarial images through targeted attacks against the original model, enabling it to generate specific outputs. To ensure these attacks remain effective on potential fine-tuned models to trigger copyright tracking, we allow the original model to learn the trigger images by updating parameters in the opposite direction during the adversarial attack process. Notably, the proposed method can be applied after the release of the original model, thus not affecting the model's performance and behavior. To simulate real-world applications, we fine-tune the original model using various strategies across diverse datasets, creating a range of models for copyright verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can more effectively identify the original copyright of fine-tuned models compared to baseline methods. Therefore, this work provides a powerful tool for tracking copyrights and detecting unlicensed usage of LVLMs.

Recent advancements in audio tokenization have significantly enhanced the integration of audio capabilities into large language models (LLMs). However, audio understanding and generation are often treated as distinct tasks, hindering the development of truly unified audio-language models. While instruction tuning has demonstrated remarkable success in improving generalization and zero-shot learning across text and vision, its application to audio remains largely unexplored. A major obstacle is the lack of comprehensive datasets that unify audio understanding and generation. To address this, we introduce Audio-FLAN, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset covering 80 diverse tasks across speech, music, and sound domains, with over 100 million instances. Audio-FLAN lays the foundation for unified audio-language models that can seamlessly handle both understanding (e.g., transcription, comprehension) and generation (e.g., speech, music, sound) tasks across a wide range of audio domains in a zero-shot manner. The Audio-FLAN dataset is available on HuggingFace and GitHub and will be continuously updated.