GPT-4o, an omni-modal model that enables vocal conversations with diverse emotions and tones, marks a milestone for omni-modal foundation models. However, empowering Large Language Models to perceive and generate images, texts, and speeches end-to-end with publicly available data remains challenging in the open-source community. Existing vision-language models rely on external tools for the speech processing, while speech-language models still suffer from limited or even without vision-understanding abilities. To address this gap, we propose EMOVA (EMotionally Omni-present Voice Assistant), to enable Large Language Models with end-to-end speech capabilities while maintaining the leading vision-language performance. With a semantic-acoustic disentangled speech tokenizer, we notice surprisingly that omni-modal alignment can further enhance vision-language and speech abilities compared with the corresponding bi-modal aligned counterparts. Moreover, a lightweight style module is proposed for flexible speech style controls (e.g., emotions and pitches). For the first time, EMOVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the vision-language and speech benchmarks, and meanwhile, supporting omni-modal spoken dialogue with vivid emotions.

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have expanded dramatically, aligning these models with human values presents a significant challenge. Traditional alignment strategies rely heavily on human intervention, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), or on the self-alignment capacities of LLMs, which usually require a strong LLM's emergent ability to improve its original bad answer. To address these challenges, we propose a novel self-alignment method that utilizes a Chain of Thought (CoT) approach, termed AlignCoT. This method encompasses stages of Question Analysis, Answer Guidance, and Safe Answer production. It is designed to enable LLMs to generate high-quality, safe responses throughout various stages of their development. Furthermore, we introduce the Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE) architecture, which applies mixture of experts to enhance each component of the AlignCoT process, markedly increasing alignment efficiency. The MoTE approach not only outperforms existing methods in aligning LLMs with human values but also highlights the benefits of using self-generated data, revealing the dual benefits of improved alignment and training efficiency.

Most existing vision-language pre-training (VLP) approaches adopt cross-modal masked language modeling (CMLM) to learn vision-language associations. However, we find that CMLM is insufficient for this purpose according to our observations: (1) Modality bias: a considerable amount of masked tokens in CMLM can be recovered with only the language information, ignoring the visual inputs. (2) Under-utilization of the unmasked tokens: CMLM primarily focuses on the masked token but it cannot simultaneously leverage other tokens to learn vision-language associations. To handle those limitations, we propose EPIC (lEveraging Per Image-Token Consistency for vision-language pre-training). In EPIC, for each image-sentence pair, we mask tokens that are salient to the image (i.e., Saliency-based Masking Strategy) and replace them with alternatives sampled from a language model (i.e., Inconsistent Token Generation Procedure), and then the model is required to determine for each token in the sentence whether it is consistent with the image (i.e., Image-Token Consistency Task). The proposed EPIC method is easily combined with pre-training methods. Extensive experiments show that the combination of the EPIC method and state-of-the-art pre-training approaches, including ViLT, ALBEF, METER, and X-VLM, leads to significant improvements on downstream tasks. The code is released at https://github.com/gyhdog99/epic.