Daily Papers

It is widely accepted that information derived from analyzing speech (the acoustic signal) and language production (words and sentences) serves as a useful window into the health of an individual's cognitive ability. In fact, most neuropsychological testing batteries have a component related to speech and language where clinicians elicit speech from patients for subjective evaluation across a broad set of dimensions. With advances in speech signal processing and natural language processing, there has been recent interest in developing tools to detect more subtle changes in cognitive-linguistic function. This work relies on extracting a set of features from recorded and transcribed speech for objective assessments of speech and language, early diagnosis of neurological disease, and tracking of disease after diagnosis. With an emphasis on cognitive and thought disorders, in this paper we provide a review of existing speech and language features used in this domain, discuss their clinical application, and highlight their advantages and disadvantages. Broadly speaking, the review is split into two categories: language features based on natural language processing and speech features based on speech signal processing. Within each category, we consider features that aim to measure complementary dimensions of cognitive-linguistics, including language diversity, syntactic complexity, semantic coherence, and timing. We conclude the review with a proposal of new research directions to further advance the field.

Introduction: Electronic health records (EHR) are a critical medium through which patient stigmatization is perpetuated among healthcare teams. Methods: We identified linguistic features of doubt markers and stigmatizing labels in MIMIC-III EHR via expanded lexicon matching and supervised learning classifiers. Predictors of rates of linguistic features were assessed using Poisson regression models. Results: We found higher rates of stigmatizing labels per chart among patients who were Black or African American (RR: 1.16), patients with Medicare/Medicaid or government-run insurance (RR: 2.46), self-pay (RR: 2.12), and patients with a variety of stigmatizing disease and mental health conditions. Patterns among doubt markers were similar, though male patients had higher rates of doubt markers (RR: 1.25). We found increased stigmatizing labels used by nurses (RR: 1.40), and social workers (RR: 2.25), with similar patterns of doubt markers. Discussion: Stigmatizing language occurred at higher rates among historically stigmatized patients, perpetuated by multiple provider types.

Scene image editing is crucial for entertainment, photography, and advertising design. Existing methods solely focus on either 2D individual object or 3D global scene editing. This results in a lack of a unified approach to effectively control and manipulate scenes at the 3D level with different levels of granularity. In this work, we propose 3DitScene, a novel and unified scene editing framework leveraging language-guided disentangled Gaussian Splatting that enables seamless editing from 2D to 3D, allowing precise control over scene composition and individual objects. We first incorporate 3D Gaussians that are refined through generative priors and optimization techniques. Language features from CLIP then introduce semantics into 3D geometry for object disentanglement. With the disentangled Gaussians, 3DitScene allows for manipulation at both the global and individual levels, revolutionizing creative expression and empowering control over scenes and objects. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of 3DitScene in scene image editing. Code and online demo can be found at our project homepage: https://zqh0253.github.io/3DitScene/.

The Javanese language features a complex system of honorifics that vary according to the social status of the speaker, listener, and referent. Despite its cultural and linguistic significance, there has been limited progress in developing a comprehensive corpus to capture these variations for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present Unggah-Ungguh, a carefully curated dataset designed to encapsulate the nuances of Unggah-Ungguh Basa, the Javanese speech etiquette framework that dictates the choice of words and phrases based on social hierarchy and context. Using Unggah-Ungguh, we assess the ability of language models (LMs) to process various levels of Javanese honorifics through classification and machine translation tasks. To further evaluate cross-lingual LMs, we conduct machine translation experiments between Javanese (at specific honorific levels) and Indonesian. Additionally, we explore whether LMs can generate contextually appropriate Javanese honorifics in conversation tasks, where the honorific usage should align with the social role and contextual cues. Our findings indicate that current LMs struggle with most honorific levels, exhibitinga bias toward certain honorific tiers.

Open-vocabulary querying in 3D space is challenging but essential for scene understanding tasks such as object localization and segmentation. Language-embedded scene representations have made progress by incorporating language features into 3D spaces. However, their efficacy heavily depends on neural networks that are resource-intensive in training and rendering. Although recent 3D Gaussians offer efficient and high-quality novel view synthesis, directly embedding language features in them leads to prohibitive memory usage and decreased performance. In this work, we introduce Language Embedded 3D Gaussians, a novel scene representation for open-vocabulary query tasks. Instead of embedding high-dimensional raw semantic features on 3D Gaussians, we propose a dedicated quantization scheme that drastically alleviates the memory requirement, and a novel embedding procedure that achieves smoother yet high accuracy query, countering the multi-view feature inconsistencies and the high-frequency inductive bias in point-based representations. Our comprehensive experiments show that our representation achieves the best visual quality and language querying accuracy across current language-embedded representations, while maintaining real-time rendering frame rates on a single desktop GPU.

Following human instructions to explore and search for a specified target in an unfamiliar environment is a crucial skill for mobile service robots. Most of the previous works on object goal navigation have typically focused on a single input modality as the target, which may lead to limited consideration of language descriptions containing detailed attributes and spatial relationships. To address this limitation, we propose VLN-Game, a novel zero-shot framework for visual target navigation that can process object names and descriptive language targets effectively. To be more precise, our approach constructs a 3D object-centric spatial map by integrating pre-trained visual-language features with a 3D reconstruction of the physical environment. Then, the framework identifies the most promising areas to explore in search of potential target candidates. A game-theoretic vision language model is employed to determine which target best matches the given language description. Experiments conducted on the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both object goal navigation and language-based navigation tasks. Moreover, we show that VLN-Game can be easily deployed on real-world robots. The success of VLN-Game highlights the promising potential of using game-theoretic methods with compact vision-language models to advance decision-making capabilities in robotic systems. The supplementary video and code can be accessed via the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/vln-game.

Guardrails have emerged as an alternative to safety alignment for content moderation of large language models (LLMs). Existing model-based guardrails have not been designed for resource-constrained computational portable devices, such as mobile phones, more and more of which are running LLM-based applications locally. We introduce LoRA-Guard, a parameter-efficient guardrail adaptation method that relies on knowledge sharing between LLMs and guardrail models. LoRA-Guard extracts language features from the LLMs and adapts them for the content moderation task using low-rank adapters, while a dual-path design prevents any performance degradation on the generative task. We show that LoRA-Guard outperforms existing approaches with 100-1000x lower parameter overhead while maintaining accuracy, enabling on-device content moderation.

The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is black{generally} better in the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a potential limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets.

To enable AI agents to interact seamlessly with both humans and 3D environments, they must not only perceive the 3D world accurately but also align human language with 3D spatial representations. While prior work has made significant progress by integrating language features into geometrically detailed 3D scene representations using 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), these approaches rely on computationally intensive offline preprocessing of language features for each input image, limiting adaptability to new environments. In this work, we introduce Online Language Splatting, the first framework to achieve online, near real-time, open-vocabulary language mapping within a 3DGS-SLAM system without requiring pre-generated language features. The key challenge lies in efficiently fusing high-dimensional language features into 3D representations while balancing the computation speed, memory usage, rendering quality and open-vocabulary capability. To this end, we innovatively design: (1) a high-resolution CLIP embedding module capable of generating detailed language feature maps in 18ms per frame, (2) a two-stage online auto-encoder that compresses 768-dimensional CLIP features to 15 dimensions while preserving open-vocabulary capabilities, and (3) a color-language disentangled optimization approach to improve rendering quality. Experimental results show that our online method not only surpasses the state-of-the-art offline methods in accuracy but also achieves more than 40x efficiency boost, demonstrating the potential for dynamic and interactive AI applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated socioeconomic disparities across various racial and ethnic groups in the United States. While previous studies have utilized traditional survey methods like the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) to elucidate these disparities, this paper explores the role of social media platforms in both highlighting and addressing these challenges. Drawing from real-time data sourced from Twitter, we analyzed language patterns related to four major types of adverse experiences: loss of employment income (LI), food scarcity (FS), housing insecurity (HI), and unmet needs for mental health services (UM). We first formulate a sparsity optimization problem that extracts low-level language features from social media data sources. Second, we propose novel constraints on feature similarity exploiting prior knowledge about the similarity of the language patterns among the adverse experiences. The proposed problem is challenging to solve due to the non-convexity objective and non-smoothness penalties. We develop an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework to solve the proposed formulation. Extensive experiments and comparisons to other models on real-world social media and the detection of adverse experiences justify the efficacy of our model.

In this paper, we introduce LangSplatV2, which achieves high-dimensional feature splatting at 476.2 FPS and 3D open-vocabulary text querying at 384.6 FPS for high-resolution images, providing a 42 times speedup and a 47 times boost over LangSplat respectively, along with improved query accuracy. LangSplat employs Gaussian Splatting to embed 2D CLIP language features into 3D, significantly enhancing speed and learning a precise 3D language field with SAM semantics. Such advancements in 3D language fields are crucial for applications that require language interaction within complex scenes. However, LangSplat does not yet achieve real-time inference performance (8.2 FPS), even with advanced A100 GPUs, severely limiting its broader application. In this paper, we first conduct a detailed time analysis of LangSplat, identifying the heavyweight decoder as the primary speed bottleneck. Our solution, LangSplatV2 assumes that each Gaussian acts as a sparse code within a global dictionary, leading to the learning of a 3D sparse coefficient field that entirely eliminates the need for a heavyweight decoder. By leveraging this sparsity, we further propose an efficient sparse coefficient splatting method with CUDA optimization, rendering high-dimensional feature maps at high quality while incurring only the time cost of splatting an ultra-low-dimensional feature. Our experimental results demonstrate that LangSplatV2 not only achieves better or competitive query accuracy but is also significantly faster. Codes and demos are available at our project page: https://langsplat-v2.github.io.

Human lives in a 3D world and commonly uses natural language to interact with a 3D scene. Modeling a 3D language field to support open-ended language queries in 3D has gained increasing attention recently. This paper introduces LangSplat, which constructs a 3D language field that enables precise and efficient open-vocabulary querying within 3D spaces. Unlike existing methods that ground CLIP language embeddings in a NeRF model, LangSplat advances the field by utilizing a collection of 3D Gaussians, each encoding language features distilled from CLIP, to represent the language field. By employing a tile-based splatting technique for rendering language features, we circumvent the costly rendering process inherent in NeRF. Instead of directly learning CLIP embeddings, LangSplat first trains a scene-wise language autoencoder and then learns language features on the scene-specific latent space, thereby alleviating substantial memory demands imposed by explicit modeling. Existing methods struggle with imprecise and vague 3D language fields, which fail to discern clear boundaries between objects. We delve into this issue and propose to learn hierarchical semantics using SAM, thereby eliminating the need for extensively querying the language field across various scales and the regularization of DINO features. Extensive experiments on open-vocabulary 3D object localization and semantic segmentation demonstrate that LangSplat significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method LERF by a large margin. Notably, LangSplat is extremely efficient, achieving a {\speed} times speedup compared to LERF at the resolution of 1440 times 1080. We strongly recommend readers to check out our video results at https://langsplat.github.io

Scene representations using 3D Gaussian primitives have produced excellent results in modeling the appearance of static and dynamic 3D scenes. Many graphics applications, however, demand the ability to manipulate both the appearance and the physical properties of objects. We introduce Feature Splatting, an approach that unifies physics-based dynamic scene synthesis with rich semantics from vision language foundation models that are grounded by natural language. Our first contribution is a way to distill high-quality, object-centric vision-language features into 3D Gaussians, that enables semi-automatic scene decomposition using text queries. Our second contribution is a way to synthesize physics-based dynamics from an otherwise static scene using a particle-based simulator, in which material properties are assigned automatically via text queries. We ablate key techniques used in this pipeline, to illustrate the challenge and opportunities in using feature-carrying 3D Gaussians as a unified format for appearance, geometry, material properties and semantics grounded on natural language. Project website: https://feature-splatting.github.io/

In the dynamic field of eCommerce, the quality and comprehensiveness of product descriptions are pivotal for enhancing search visibility and customer engagement. Effective product descriptions can address the 'cold start' problem, align with market trends, and ultimately lead to increased click-through rates. Traditional methods for crafting these descriptions often involve significant human effort and may lack both consistency and scalability. This paper introduces a novel methodology for automating product description generation using the LLAMA 2.0 7B language model. We train the model on a dataset of authentic product descriptions from Walmart, one of the largest eCommerce platforms. The model is then fine-tuned for domain-specific language features and eCommerce nuances to enhance its utility in sales and user engagement. We employ multiple evaluation metrics, including NDCG, customer click-through rates, and human assessments, to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings reveal that the system is not only scalable but also significantly reduces the human workload involved in creating product descriptions. This study underscores the considerable potential of large language models like LLAMA 2.0 7B in automating and optimizing various facets of eCommerce platforms, offering significant business impact, including improved search functionality and increased sales.

Several studies have shown that speech and language features, automatically extracted from clinical interviews or spontaneous discourse, have diagnostic value for mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They typically make use of a large feature set to train a classifier for distinguishing between two groups of interest, i.e. a clinical and control group. However, a purely data-driven approach runs the risk of overfitting to a particular data set, especially when sample sizes are limited. Here, we first down-select the set of language features to a small subset that is related to a well-validated test of functional ability, the Social Skills Performance Assessment (SSPA). This helps establish the concurrent validity of the selected features. We use only these features to train a simple classifier to distinguish between groups of interest. Linear regression reveals that a subset of language features can effectively model the SSPA, with a correlation coefficient of 0.75. Furthermore, the same feature set can be used to build a strong binary classifier to distinguish between healthy controls and a clinical group (AUC = 0.96) and also between patients within the clinical group with schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder (AUC = 0.83).

The rise of large language models (LLMs) and instruction tuning has led to the current trend of instruction-tuned large language and vision models (LLVMs). This trend involves either meticulously curating numerous instruction tuning datasets tailored to specific objectives or enlarging LLVMs to manage vast amounts of vision language (VL) data. However, current LLVMs have disregarded the detailed and comprehensive real-world scene understanding available from specialized computer vision (CV) models in visual perception tasks such as segmentation, detection, scene graph generation (SGG), and optical character recognition (OCR). Instead, the existing LLVMs rely mainly on the large capacity and emergent capabilities of their LLM backbones. Therefore, we present a new LLVM, Mixture of All Intelligence (MoAI), which leverages auxiliary visual information obtained from the outputs of external segmentation, detection, SGG, and OCR models. MoAI operates through two newly introduced modules: MoAI-Compressor and MoAI-Mixer. After verbalizing the outputs of the external CV models, the MoAI-Compressor aligns and condenses them to efficiently use relevant auxiliary visual information for VL tasks. MoAI-Mixer then blends three types of intelligence (1) visual features, (2) auxiliary features from the external CV models, and (3) language features by utilizing the concept of Mixture of Experts. Through this integration, MoAI significantly outperforms both open-source and closed-source LLVMs in numerous zero-shot VL tasks, particularly those related to real-world scene understanding such as object existence, positions, relations, and OCR without enlarging the model size or curating extra visual instruction tuning datasets.

As multimodal language models advance, their application to 3D scene understanding is a fast-growing frontier, driving the development of 3D Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Current methods show strong dependence on object detectors, introducing processing bottlenecks and limitations in taxonomic flexibility. To address these limitations, we propose a scene-centric 3D VLM for 3D Gaussian splat scenes that employs language- and task-aware scene representations. Our approach directly embeds rich linguistic features into the 3D scene representation by associating language with each Gaussian primitive, achieving early modality alignment. To process the resulting dense representations, we introduce a dual sparsifier that distills them into compact, task-relevant tokens via task-guided and location-guided pathways, producing sparse, task-aware global and local scene tokens. Notably, we present the first Gaussian splatting-based VLM, leveraging photorealistic 3D representations derived from standard RGB images, demonstrating strong generalization: it improves performance of prior 3D VLM five folds, in out-of-the-domain settings.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to predict robotic actions based on visual observations and language instructions. Existing approaches require fine-tuning pre-trained visionlanguage models (VLMs) as visual and language features are independently fed into downstream policies, degrading the pre-trained semantic alignments. We propose OTTER, a novel VLA architecture that leverages these existing alignments through explicit, text-aware visual feature extraction. Instead of processing all visual features, OTTER selectively extracts and passes only task-relevant visual features that are semantically aligned with the language instruction to the policy transformer. This allows OTTER to keep the pre-trained vision-language encoders frozen. Thereby, OTTER preserves and utilizes the rich semantic understanding learned from large-scale pre-training, enabling strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. In simulation and real-world experiments, OTTER significantly outperforms existing VLA models, demonstrating strong zeroshot generalization to novel objects and environments. Video, code, checkpoints, and dataset: https://ottervla.github.io/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong decision-making capabilities in autonomous driving. However, existing VLAs often struggle with achieving efficient inference and generalizing to novel autonomous vehicle configurations and driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose Reasoning-VLA, a general and fast action-generation VLA framework. The proposed model employs a set of learnable action queries, initialized via Gaussian sampling from ground-truth trajectories within the training corpus. These learnable queries interact with reasoning-enhanced vision-language features to generate continuous action trajectories in parallel. To promote robust generalization, we consolidate eight publicly available autonomous driving datasets into a standardized, Chain-of-Thought reasoning-based, and easy-to-use data format for model training. Leveraging both supervised learning and reinforcement learning fine-tuning, extensive empirical evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Reasoning-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, superior generalization capability, and the excellent inference speed reported to date.

Grounding language to the visual observations of a navigating agent can be performed using off-the-shelf visual-language models pretrained on Internet-scale data (e.g., image captions). While this is useful for matching images to natural language descriptions of object goals, it remains disjoint from the process of mapping the environment, so that it lacks the spatial precision of classic geometric maps. To address this problem, we propose VLMaps, a spatial map representation that directly fuses pretrained visual-language features with a 3D reconstruction of the physical world. VLMaps can be autonomously built from video feed on robots using standard exploration approaches and enables natural language indexing of the map without additional labeled data. Specifically, when combined with large language models (LLMs), VLMaps can be used to (i) translate natural language commands into a sequence of open-vocabulary navigation goals (which, beyond prior work, can be spatial by construction, e.g., "in between the sofa and TV" or "three meters to the right of the chair") directly localized in the map, and (ii) can be shared among multiple robots with different embodiments to generate new obstacle maps on-the-fly (by using a list of obstacle categories). Extensive experiments carried out in simulated and real world environments show that VLMaps enable navigation according to more complex language instructions than existing methods. Videos are available at https://vlmaps.github.io.

We introduce the task of retrieving relevant video moments from a large corpus of untrimmed, unsegmented videos given a natural language query. Our task poses unique challenges as a system must efficiently identify both the relevant videos and localize the relevant moments in the videos. To address these challenges, we propose SpatioTemporal Alignment with Language (STAL), a model that represents a video moment as a set of regions within a series of short video clips and aligns a natural language query to the moment's regions. Our alignment cost compares variable-length language and video features using symmetric squared Chamfer distance, which allows for efficient indexing and retrieval of the video moments. Moreover, aligning language features to regions within a video moment allows for finer alignment compared to methods that extract only an aggregate feature from the entire video moment. We evaluate our approach on two recently proposed datasets for temporal localization of moments in video with natural language (DiDeMo and Charades-STA) extended to our video corpus moment retrieval setting. We show that our STAL re-ranking model outperforms the recently proposed Moment Context Network on all criteria across all datasets on our proposed task, obtaining relative gains of 37% - 118% for average recall and up to 30% for median rank. Moreover, our approach achieves more than 130x faster retrieval and 8x smaller index size with a 1M video corpus in an approximate setting.

Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a challenging task. Firstly, the metric should ensure that the generated hypothesis reflects the reference's semantics. Secondly, it should consider the grammatical quality of the generated sentence. Thirdly, it should be robust enough to handle various surface forms of the generated sentence. Thus, an effective evaluation metric has to be multifaceted. In this paper, we propose an automatic evaluation metric incorporating several core aspects of natural language understanding (language competence, syntactic and semantic variation). Our proposed metric, RoMe, is trained on language features such as semantic similarity combined with tree edit distance and grammatical acceptability, using a self-supervised neural network to assess the overall quality of the generated sentence. Moreover, we perform an extensive robustness analysis of the state-of-the-art methods and RoMe. Empirical results suggest that RoMe has a stronger correlation to human judgment over state-of-the-art metrics in evaluating system-generated sentences across several NLG tasks.

Recent progress in Sign Language Translation (SLT) has focussed primarily on improving the representational capacity of large language models to incorporate Sign Language features. This work explores an alternative direction: enhancing the geometric properties of skeletal representations themselves. We propose Geo-Sign, a method that leverages the properties of hyperbolic geometry to model the hierarchical structure inherent in sign language kinematics. By projecting skeletal features derived from Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) into the Poincar\'e ball model, we aim to create more discriminative embeddings, particularly for fine-grained motions like finger articulations. We introduce a hyperbolic projection layer, a weighted Fr\'echet mean aggregation scheme, and a geometric contrastive loss operating directly in hyperbolic space. These components are integrated into an end-to-end translation framework as a regularisation function, to enhance the representations within the language model. This work demonstrates the potential of hyperbolic geometry to improve skeletal representations for Sign Language Translation, improving on SOTA RGB methods while preserving privacy and improving computational efficiency. Code available here: https://github.com/ed-fish/geo-sign.

As large language models (LLMs) excel at code reasoning, a natural question arises: can an LLM execute programs (i.e., act as an interpreter) purely based on a programming language's formal semantics? If so, it will enable rapid prototyping of new programming languages and language features. We study this question using the imperative language IMP (a subset of C), formalized via small-step operational semantics (SOS) and rewriting-based operational semantics (K-semantics). We introduce three evaluation sets-Human-Written, LLM-Translated, and Fuzzer- Generated-whose difficulty is controlled by code-complexity metrics spanning the size, control-flow, and data-flow axes. Given a program and its semantics formalized with SOS/K-semantics, models are evaluated on three tasks ranging from coarse to fine: (1) final-state prediction, (2) semantic rule prediction, and (3) execution trace prediction. To distinguish pretraining memorization from semantic competence, we define two nonstandard semantics obtained through systematic mutations of the standard rules. Across strong code/reasoning LLMs, performance drops under nonstandard semantics despite high performance under the standard one. We further find that (i) there are patterns to different model failures, (ii) most reasoning models perform exceptionally well on coarse grained tasks involving reasoning about highly complex programs often containing nested loop depths beyond five, and surprisingly, (iii) providing formal semantics helps on simple programs but often hurts on more complex ones. Overall, the results show a promise that LLMs could serve as programming language interpreters, but points to the lack of their robust semantics understanding. We release the benchmark and the supporting code at https://github.com/EngineeringSoftware/PLSemanticsBench.

We introduce CogVLM, a powerful open-source visual language foundation model. Different from the popular shallow alignment method which maps image features into the input space of language model, CogVLM bridges the gap between the frozen pretrained language model and image encoder by a trainable visual expert module in the attention and FFN layers. As a result, CogVLM enables deep fusion of vision language features without sacrificing any performance on NLP tasks. CogVLM-17B achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 classic cross-modal benchmarks, including NoCaps, Flicker30k captioning, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, Visual7W, GQA, ScienceQA, VizWiz VQA and TDIUC, and ranks the 2nd on VQAv2, OKVQA, TextVQA, COCO captioning, etc., surpassing or matching PaLI-X 55B. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM.

We present MaskLID, a simple, yet effective, code-switching (CS) language identification (LID) method. MaskLID does not require any training and is designed to complement current high-performance sentence-level LIDs. Sentence-level LIDs are classifiers trained on monolingual texts to provide single labels, typically using a softmax layer to turn scores into probabilities. However, in cases where a sentence is composed in both L1 and L2 languages, the LID classifier often only returns the dominant label L1. To address this limitation, MaskLID employs a strategy to mask text features associated with L1, allowing the LID to classify the text as L2 in the next round. This method uses the LID itself to identify the features that require masking and does not rely on any external resource. In this work, we explore the use of MaskLID for two open-source LIDs (GlotLID and OpenLID), that are both based on the FastText architecture. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/MaskLID.

Compositional reasoning is a hallmark of human visual intelligence; yet despite the size of large vision-language models, they struggle to represent simple compositions by combining objects with their attributes. To measure this lack of compositional capability, we design Cola, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark to Compose Objects Localized with Attributes. Using Cola as a testbed, we explore modeling designs to adapt pre-trained vision-language models to reason compositionally about multiple attributes attached to multiple objects. We explore 6 finetuning strategies on 2 seminal vision-language models, using 3 finetuning datasets and 2 test benchmarks (Cola and CREPE). Surprisingly, our optimal finetuning strategy improves a 151M parameter CLIP, which disjointly encodes image and language during pretraining, to perform as well as a 241M parameter FLAVA, which uses a multi-modal transformer encoder during pretraining to attend over both vision and language modalities. This optimal finetuning strategy is a lightweight multi-modal adapter that jointly attends over both image and language features generated by the pretrained model. We show this works better than common strategies such as prompt/fine-tuning, or tuning a comparable number of unimodal layers.

Recently, methods have been proposed for 3D open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. Such methods are able to segment scenes into arbitrary classes based on text descriptions provided during runtime. In this paper, we propose to the best of our knowledge the first algorithm for open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation in 3D scenes. Our algorithm, Panoptic Vision-Language Feature Fields (PVLFF), learns a semantic feature field of the scene by distilling vision-language features from a pretrained 2D model, and jointly fits an instance feature field through contrastive learning using 2D instance segments on input frames. Despite not being trained on the target classes, our method achieves panoptic segmentation performance similar to the state-of-the-art closed-set 3D systems on the HyperSim, ScanNet and Replica dataset and additionally outperforms current 3D open-vocabulary systems in terms of semantic segmentation. We ablate the components of our method to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model architecture. Our code will be available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/pvlff.

Grounding natural language in images, such as localizing "the black dog on the left of the tree", is one of the core problems in artificial intelligence, as it needs to comprehend the fine-grained and compositional language space. However, existing solutions rely on the association between the holistic language features and visual features, while neglect the nature of compositional reasoning implied in the language. In this paper, we propose a natural language grounding model that can automatically compose a binary tree structure for parsing the language and then perform visual reasoning along the tree in a bottom-up fashion. We call our model RVG-TREE: Recursive Grounding Tree, which is inspired by the intuition that any language expression can be recursively decomposed into two constituent parts, and the grounding confidence score can be recursively accumulated by calculating their grounding scores returned by sub-trees. RVG-TREE can be trained end-to-end by using the Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax estimator that allows the gradients from the continuous score functions passing through the discrete tree construction. Experiments on several benchmarks show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance with more explainable reasoning.

The Transformer architecture is shown to provide a powerful machine transduction framework for online handwritten gestures corresponding to glyph strokes of natural language sentences. The attention mechanism is successfully used to create latent representations of an end-to-end encoder-decoder model, solving multi-level segmentation while also learning some language features and syntax rules. The additional use of a large decoding space with some learned Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE) is shown to provide robustness to ablated inputs and syntax rules. The encoder stack was directly fed with spatio-temporal data tokens potentially forming an infinitely large input vocabulary, an approach that finds applications beyond that of this work. Encoder transfer learning capabilities is also demonstrated on several languages resulting in faster optimisation and shared parameters. A new supervised dataset of online handwriting gestures suitable for generic handwriting recognition tasks was used to successfully train a small transformer model to an average normalised Levenshtein accuracy of 96% on English or German sentences and 94% in French.

We present the Brain Treebank, a large-scale dataset of electrophysiological neural responses, recorded from intracranial probes while 10 subjects watched one or more Hollywood movies. Subjects watched on average 2.6 Hollywood movies, for an average viewing time of 4.3 hours, and a total of 43 hours. The audio track for each movie was transcribed with manual corrections. Word onsets were manually annotated on spectrograms of the audio track for each movie. Each transcript was automatically parsed and manually corrected into the universal dependencies (UD) formalism, assigning a part of speech to every word and a dependency parse to every sentence. In total, subjects heard over 38,000 sentences (223,000 words), while they had on average 168 electrodes implanted. This is the largest dataset of intracranial recordings featuring grounded naturalistic language, one of the largest English UD treebanks in general, and one of only a few UD treebanks aligned to multimodal features. We hope that this dataset serves as a bridge between linguistic concepts, perception, and their neural representations. To that end, we present an analysis of which electrodes are sensitive to language features while also mapping out a rough time course of language processing across these electrodes. The Brain Treebank is available at https://BrainTreebank.dev/

When trained at a sufficient scale, self-supervised learning has exhibited a notable ability to solve a wide range of visual or language understanding tasks. In this paper, we investigate simple, yet effective approaches for adapting the pre-trained foundation models to the downstream task of interest, namely, open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) we introduce Fusioner, with a lightweight, transformer-based fusion module, that pairs the frozen visual representation with language concept through a handful of image segmentation data. As a consequence, the model gains the capability of zero-shot transfer to segment novel categories; (ii) without loss of generality, we experiment on a broad range of self-supervised models that have been pre-trained with different schemes, e.g. visual-only models (MoCo v3, DINO), language-only models (BERT), visual-language model (CLIP), and show that, the proposed fusion approach is effective to any pair of visual and language models, even those pre-trained on a corpus of uni-modal data; (iii) we conduct thorough ablation studies to analyze the critical components in our proposed Fusioner, while evaluating on standard benchmarks, e.g. PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i , it surpasses existing state-of-the-art models by a large margin, despite only being trained on frozen visual and language features; (iv) to measure the model's robustness on learning visual-language correspondence, we further evaluate on synthetic dataset, named Mosaic-4, where images are constructed by mosaicking the samples from FSS-1000. Fusioner demonstrates superior performance over previous models.

In this paper, we introduce EasyEdit2, a framework designed to enable plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. EasyEdit2 supports a wide range of test-time interventions, including safety, sentiment, personality, reasoning patterns, factuality, and language features. Unlike its predecessor, EasyEdit2 features a new architecture specifically designed for seamless model steering. It comprises key modules such as the steering vector generator and the steering vector applier, which enable automatic generation and application of steering vectors to influence the model's behavior without modifying its parameters. One of the main advantages of EasyEdit2 is its ease of use-users do not need extensive technical knowledge. With just a single example, they can effectively guide and adjust the model's responses, making precise control both accessible and efficient. Empirically, we report model steering performance across different LLMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of these techniques. We have released the source code on GitHub at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit along with a demonstration notebook. In addition, we provide a demo video at https://zjunlp.github.io/project/EasyEdit2/video for a quick introduction.

Pre-trained language models have proven their unique powers in capturing implicit language features. However, most pre-training approaches focus on the word-level training objective, while sentence-level objectives are rarely studied. In this paper, we propose Contrastive LEArning for sentence Representation (CLEAR), which employs multiple sentence-level augmentation strategies in order to learn a noise-invariant sentence representation. These augmentations include word and span deletion, reordering, and substitution. Furthermore, we investigate the key reasons that make contrastive learning effective through numerous experiments. We observe that different sentence augmentations during pre-training lead to different performance improvements on various downstream tasks. Our approach is shown to outperform multiple existing methods on both SentEval and GLUE benchmarks.

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) is an advanced vision-language task that involves identifying and segmenting objects within an image as described by free-form text descriptions. While previous studies focused on aligning visual and language features, exploring training techniques, such as data augmentation, remains underexplored. In this work, we explore effective data augmentation for RIS and propose a novel training framework called Masked Referring Image Segmentation (MaskRIS). We observe that the conventional image augmentations fall short of RIS, leading to performance degradation, while simple random masking significantly enhances the performance of RIS. MaskRIS uses both image and text masking, followed by Distortion-aware Contextual Learning (DCL) to fully exploit the benefits of the masking strategy. This approach can improve the model's robustness to occlusions, incomplete information, and various linguistic complexities, resulting in a significant performance improvement. Experiments demonstrate that MaskRIS can easily be applied to various RIS models, outperforming existing methods in both fully supervised and weakly supervised settings. Finally, MaskRIS achieves new state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/maskris.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled powerful multimodal reasoning, but state-of-the-art approaches typically rely on extremely large models with prohibitive computational and memory requirements. This makes their deployment challenging in resource-constrained environments such as warehouses, robotics, and industrial applications, where both efficiency and robust spatial understanding are critical. In this work, we present SmolRGPT, a compact vision-language architecture that explicitly incorporates region-level spatial reasoning by integrating both RGB and depth cues. SmolRGPT employs a three-stage curriculum that progressively align visual and language features, enables spatial relationship understanding, and adapts to task-specific datasets. We demonstrate that with only 600M parameters, SmolRGPT achieves competitive results on challenging warehouse spatial reasoning benchmarks, matching or exceeding the performance of much larger alternatives. These findings highlight the potential for efficient, deployable multimodal intelligence in real-world settings without sacrificing core spatial reasoning capabilities. The code of the experimentation will be available at: https://github.com/abtraore/SmolRGPT

Homophone normalization, where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character, is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature. While this may improve performance reported by automatic metrics, it also results in models that are not able to understand different forms of writing in a single language. Further, there might be impacts in transfer learning, where models trained on normalized data do not generalize well to other languages. In this paper, we experiment with monolingual training and cross-lingual transfer to understand the impacts of normalization on languages that use the Ge'ez script. We then propose a post-inference intervention in which normalization is applied to model predictions instead of training data. With our simple scheme of post-inference normalization, we show that we can achieve an increase in BLEU score of up to 1.03 while preserving language features in training. Our work contributes to the broader discussion on technology-facilitated language change and calls for more language-aware interventions.

Robot-moderated group discussions have the potential to facilitate engaging and productive interactions among human participants. Previous work on topic management in conversational agents has predominantly focused on human engagement and topic personalization, with the agent having an active role in the discussion. Also, studies have shown the usefulness of including robots in groups, yet further exploration is still needed for robots to learn when to change the topic while facilitating discussions. Accordingly, our work investigates the suitability of machine-learning models and audiovisual non-verbal features in predicting appropriate topic changes. We utilized interactions between a robot moderator and human participants, which we annotated and used for extracting acoustic and body language-related features. We provide a detailed analysis of the performance of machine learning approaches using sequential and non-sequential data with different sets of features. The results indicate promising performance in classifying inappropriate topic changes, outperforming rule-based approaches. Additionally, acoustic features exhibited comparable performance and robustness compared to the complete set of multimodal features. Our annotated data is publicly available at https://github.com/ghadj/topic-change-robot-discussions-data-2024.

We present a unified system to realize one-shot voice conversion (VC) on the pitch, rhythm, and speaker attributes. Existing works generally ignore the correlation between prosody and language content, leading to the degradation of naturalness in converted speech. Additionally, the lack of proper language features prevents these systems from accurately preserving language content after conversion. To address these issues, we devise a cascaded modular system leveraging self-supervised discrete speech units as language representation. These discrete units provide duration information essential for rhythm modeling. Our system first extracts utterance-level prosody and speaker representations from the raw waveform. Given the prosody representation, a prosody predictor estimates pitch, energy, and duration for each discrete unit in the utterance. A synthesizer further reconstructs speech based on the predicted prosody, speaker representation, and discrete units. Experiments show that our system outperforms previous approaches in naturalness, intelligibility, speaker transferability, and prosody transferability. Code and samples are publicly available.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving specific images by using a query that involves both a reference image and a relative caption. Most existing CIR models adopt the late-fusion strategy to combine visual and language features. Besides, several approaches have also been suggested to generate a pseudo-word token from the reference image, which is further integrated into the relative caption for CIR. However, these pseudo-word-based prompting methods have limitations when target image encompasses complex changes on reference image, e.g., object removal and attribute modification. In this work, we demonstrate that learning an appropriate sentence-level prompt for the relative caption (SPRC) is sufficient for achieving effective composed image retrieval. Instead of relying on pseudo-word-based prompts, we propose to leverage pretrained V-L models, e.g., BLIP-2, to generate sentence-level prompts. By concatenating the learned sentence-level prompt with the relative caption, one can readily use existing text-based image retrieval models to enhance CIR performance. Furthermore, we introduce both image-text contrastive loss and text prompt alignment loss to enforce the learning of suitable sentence-level prompts. Experiments show that our proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art CIR methods on the Fashion-IQ and CIRR datasets. The source code and pretrained model are publicly available at https://github.com/chunmeifeng/SPRC

Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) are widely used benchmark tasks for compositional evaluation of pre-trained language models. Despite growing interest in linguistic universals, most NLI/STS studies have focused almost exclusively on English. In particular, there are no available multilingual NLI/STS datasets in Japanese, which is typologically different from English and can shed light on the currently controversial behavior of language models in matters such as sensitivity to word order and case particles. Against this background, we introduce JSICK, a Japanese NLI/STS dataset that was manually translated from the English dataset SICK. We also present a stress-test dataset for compositional inference, created by transforming syntactic structures of sentences in JSICK to investigate whether language models are sensitive to word order and case particles. We conduct baseline experiments on different pre-trained language models and compare the performance of multilingual models when applied to Japanese and other languages. The results of the stress-test experiments suggest that the current pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order and case marking.

The goal of spatial-temporal action detection is to determine the time and place where each person's action occurs in a video and classify the corresponding action category. Most of the existing methods adopt fully-supervised learning, which requires a large amount of training data, making it very difficult to achieve zero-shot learning. In this paper, we propose to utilize a pre-trained visual-language model to extract the representative image and text features, and model the relationship between these features through different interaction modules to obtain the interaction feature. In addition, we use this feature to prompt each label to obtain more appropriate text features. Finally, we calculate the similarity between the interaction feature and the text feature for each label to determine the action category. Our experiments on J-HMDB and UCF101-24 datasets demonstrate that the proposed interaction module and prompting make the visual-language features better aligned, thus achieving excellent accuracy for zero-shot spatio-temporal action detection. The code will be available at https://github.com/webber2933/iCLIP.

Large language models have demonstrated the ability to generate both natural language and programming language text. Such models open up the possibility of multi-language code generation: could code generation models generalize knowledge from one language to another? Although contemporary code generation models can generate semantically correct Python code, little is known about their abilities with other languages. We propose MultiPL-E, a system for translating unit test-driven code generation benchmarks to new languages. We create the first massively multilingual code generation benchmark by using MultiPL-E to translate two popular Python code generation benchmarks to 18 additional programming languages. We use MultiPL-E to extend the HumanEval benchmark and MBPP benchmark to 18 languages that encompass a range of programming paradigms and popularity. Using these new parallel benchmarks, we evaluate the multi-language performance of three state-of-the-art code generation models: Codex, CodeGen, and InCoder. We find that Codex matches or even exceeds its performance on Python for several other languages. The range of programming languages represented in MultiPL-E allow us to explore the impact of language frequency and language features on model performance. Finally, the MultiPL-E approach of compiling code generation benchmarks to new programming languages is both scalable and extensible, making it straightforward to evaluate new models, benchmarks, and languages.

Current referring video object segmentation (R-VOS) techniques extract conditional kernels from encoded (low-resolution) vision-language features to segment the decoded high-resolution features. We discovered that this causes significant feature drift, which the segmentation kernels struggle to perceive during the forward computation. This negatively affects the ability of segmentation kernels. To address the drift problem, we propose a Spectrum-guided Multi-granularity (SgMg) approach, which performs direct segmentation on the encoded features and employs visual details to further optimize the masks. In addition, we propose Spectrum-guided Cross-modal Fusion (SCF) to perform intra-frame global interactions in the spectral domain for effective multimodal representation. Finally, we extend SgMg to perform multi-object R-VOS, a new paradigm that enables simultaneous segmentation of multiple referred objects in a video. This not only makes R-VOS faster, but also more practical. Extensive experiments show that SgMg achieves state-of-the-art performance on four video benchmark datasets, outperforming the nearest competitor by 2.8% points on Ref-YouTube-VOS. Our extended SgMg enables multi-object R-VOS, runs about 3 times faster while maintaining satisfactory performance. Code is available at https://github.com/bo-miao/SgMg.

In this work, we investigate a more realistic unsupervised multimodal machine translation (UMMT) setup, inference-time image-free UMMT, where the model is trained with source-text image pairs, and tested with only source-text inputs. First, we represent the input images and texts with the visual and language scene graphs (SG), where such fine-grained vision-language features ensure a holistic understanding of the semantics. To enable pure-text input during inference, we devise a visual scene hallucination mechanism that dynamically generates pseudo visual SG from the given textual SG. Several SG-pivoting based learning objectives are introduced for unsupervised translation training. On the benchmark Multi30K data, our SG-based method outperforms the best-performing baseline by significant BLEU scores on the task and setup, helping yield translations with better completeness, relevance and fluency without relying on paired images. Further in-depth analyses reveal how our model advances in the task setting.

Code intelligence plays a key role in transforming modern software engineering. Recently, deep learning-based models, especially Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable potential in tackling these tasks by leveraging massive open-source code data and programming language features. However, the development and deployment of such models often require expertise in both machine learning and software engineering, creating a barrier for the model adoption. In this paper, we present CodeTF, an open-source Transformer-based library for state-of-the-art Code LLMs and code intelligence. Following the principles of modular design and extensible framework, we design CodeTF with a unified interface to enable rapid access and development across different types of models, datasets and tasks. Our library supports a collection of pretrained Code LLM models and popular code benchmarks, including a standardized interface to train and serve code LLMs efficiently, and data features such as language-specific parsers and utility functions for extracting code attributes. In this paper, we describe the design principles, the architecture, key modules and components, and compare with other related library tools. Finally, we hope CodeTF is able to bridge the gap between machine learning/generative AI and software engineering, providing a comprehensive open-source solution for developers, researchers, and practitioners.

Environment understanding in egocentric videos is an important step for applications like robotics, augmented reality and assistive technologies. These videos are characterized by dynamic interactions and a strong dependence on the wearer engagement with the environment. Traditional approaches often focus on isolated clips or fail to integrate rich semantic and geometric information, limiting scene comprehension. We introduce Dynamic Image-Video Feature Fields (DIV FF), a framework that decomposes the egocentric scene into persistent, dynamic, and actor based components while integrating both image and video language features. Our model enables detailed segmentation, captures affordances, understands the surroundings and maintains consistent understanding over time. DIV-FF outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in dynamically evolving scenarios, demonstrating its potential to advance long term, spatio temporal scene understanding.

In-context learning is the paradigm that adapts large language models to downstream tasks by providing a few examples. Few-shot selection -- selecting appropriate examples for each test instance separately -- is important for in-context learning. In this paper, we propose Skill-KNN, a skill-based few-shot selection method for in-context learning. The key advantages of Skill-KNN include: (1) it addresses the problem that existing methods based on pre-trained embeddings can be easily biased by surface natural language features that are not important for the target task; (2) it does not require training or fine-tuning of any models, making it suitable for frequently expanding or changing example banks. The key insight is to optimize the inputs fed into the embedding model, rather than tuning the model itself. Technically, Skill-KNN generates the skill-based descriptions for each test case and candidate example by utilizing a pre-processing few-shot prompting, thus eliminating unimportant surface features. Experimental results across five cross-domain semantic parsing datasets and six backbone models show that Skill-KNN significantly outperforms existing methods.

Following the impressive development of LLMs, vision-language alignment in LLMs is actively being researched to enable multimodal reasoning and visual IO. This direction of research is particularly relevant to medical imaging because medical image analysis and generation consist of reasoning based on a combination of visual features and prior knowledge. Many recent works have focused on training adapter networks that serve as an information bridge between image processing networks and LLMs; but presumably, in order to achieve maximum reasoning potential of LLMs on visual information as well, visual and language features should be allowed to interact more freely. This is especially important in the medical domain because understanding and generating medical images such as chest X-rays (CXR) require not only accurate visual and language-based reasoning but also a more intimate mapping between the two modalities. Thus, taking inspiration from previous work on the transformer and VQ-GAN combination for bidirectional image and text generation, we build upon this approach and develop a method for instruction-tuning an LLM pre-trained only on text to gain vision-language capabilities for medical images. Specifically, we leverage a pretrained LLM's existing question-answering and instruction-following abilities to teach it to understand visual inputs by instructing it to answer questions about image inputs and, symmetrically, output both text and image responses appropriate to a given query by tuning the LLM with diverse tasks that encompass image-based text-generation and text-based image-generation. We show that our model, LLM-CXR, trained in this approach shows better image-text alignment in both CXR understanding and generation tasks while being smaller in size compared to previously developed models that perform a narrower range of tasks. The code is at https://github.com/hyn2028/llm-cxr.

Table structure recognition is an essential part for making machines understand tables. Its main task is to recognize the internal structure of a table. However, due to the complexity and diversity in their structure and style, it is very difficult to parse the tabular data into the structured format which machines can understand easily, especially for complex tables. In this paper, we introduce Split, Embed and Merge (SEM), an accurate table structure recognizer. Our model takes table images as input and can correctly recognize the structure of tables, whether they are simple or a complex tables. SEM is mainly composed of three parts, splitter, embedder and merger. In the first stage, we apply the splitter to predict the potential regions of the table row (column) separators, and obtain the fine grid structure of the table. In the second stage, by taking a full consideration of the textual information in the table, we fuse the output features for each table grid from both vision and language modalities. Moreover, we achieve a higher precision in our experiments through adding additional semantic features. Finally, we process the merging of these basic table grids in a self-regression manner. The correspondent merging results is learned through the attention mechanism. In our experiments, SEM achieves an average F1-Measure of 97.11% on the SciTSR dataset which outperforms other methods by a large margin. We also won the first place in the complex table and third place in all tables in ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing, Task-B. Extensive experiments on other publicly available datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art.

This paper presents BOUQuET, a multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark, and its broader collaborative extension initiative. This dataset is handcrafted in non-English languages first, each of these source languages being represented among the 23 languages commonly used by half of the world's population and therefore having the potential to serve as pivot languages that will enable more accurate translations. The dataset is specially designed to avoid contamination and be multicentric, so as to enforce representation of multilingual language features. In addition, the dataset goes beyond the sentence level, as it is organized in paragraphs of various lengths. Compared with related machine translation (MT) datasets, we show that BOUQuET has a broader representation of domains while simplifying the translation task for non-experts. Therefore, BOUQuET is specially suitable for the open initiative and call for translation participation that we are launching to extend it to a multi-way parallel corpus to any written language.

In this paper, we approach an overlooked yet critical task Graph2Image: generating images from multimodal attributed graphs (MMAGs). This task poses significant challenges due to the explosion in graph size, dependencies among graph entities, and the need for controllability in graph conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a graph context-conditioned diffusion model called InstructG2I. InstructG2I first exploits the graph structure and multimodal information to conduct informative neighbor sampling by combining personalized page rank and re-ranking based on vision-language features. Then, a Graph-QFormer encoder adaptively encodes the graph nodes into an auxiliary set of graph prompts to guide the denoising process of diffusion. Finally, we propose graph classifier-free guidance, enabling controllable generation by varying the strength of graph guidance and multiple connected edges to a node. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/InstructG2I.

We propose BERMo, an architectural modification to BERT, which makes predictions based on a hierarchy of surface, syntactic and semantic language features. We use linear combination scheme proposed in Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) to combine the scaled internal representations from different network depths. Our approach has two-fold benefits: (1) improved gradient flow for the downstream task as every layer has a direct connection to the gradients of the loss function and (2) increased representative power as the model no longer needs to copy the features learned in the shallower layer which are necessary for the downstream task. Further, our model has a negligible parameter overhead as there is a single scalar parameter associated with each layer in the network. Experiments on the probing task from SentEval dataset show that our model performs up to 4.65% better in accuracy than the baseline with an average improvement of 2.67% on the semantic tasks. When subject to compression techniques, we find that our model enables stable pruning for compressing small datasets like SST-2, where the BERT model commonly diverges. We observe that our approach converges 1.67times and 1.15times faster than the baseline on MNLI and QQP tasks from GLUE dataset. Moreover, our results show that our approach can obtain better parameter efficiency for penalty based pruning approaches on QQP task.

Recent work has proposed the linear representation hypothesis: that language models perform computation by manipulating one-dimensional representations of concepts ("features") in activation space. In contrast, we explore whether some language model representations may be inherently multi-dimensional. We begin by developing a rigorous definition of irreducible multi-dimensional features based on whether they can be decomposed into either independent or non-co-occurring lower-dimensional features. Motivated by these definitions, we design a scalable method that uses sparse autoencoders to automatically find multi-dimensional features in GPT-2 and Mistral 7B. These auto-discovered features include strikingly interpretable examples, e.g. circular features representing days of the week and months of the year. We identify tasks where these exact circles are used to solve computational problems involving modular arithmetic in days of the week and months of the year. Finally, we provide evidence that these circular features are indeed the fundamental unit of computation in these tasks with intervention experiments on Mistral 7B and Llama 3 8B, and we find further circular representations by breaking down the hidden states for these tasks into interpretable components.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) leverages heterogeneous modalities, such as language, vision, and audio, to enhance the understanding of human sentiment. While existing models often focus on extracting shared information across modalities or directly fusing heterogeneous modalities, such approaches can introduce redundancy and conflicts due to equal treatment of all modalities and the mutual transfer of information between modality pairs. To address these issues, we propose a Disentangled-Language-Focused (DLF) multimodal representation learning framework, which incorporates a feature disentanglement module to separate modality-shared and modality-specific information. To further reduce redundancy and enhance language-targeted features, four geometric measures are introduced to refine the disentanglement process. A Language-Focused Attractor (LFA) is further developed to strengthen language representation by leveraging complementary modality-specific information through a language-guided cross-attention mechanism. The framework also employs hierarchical predictions to improve overall accuracy. Extensive experiments on two popular MSA datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate the significant performance gains achieved by the proposed DLF framework. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the feature disentanglement module, language-focused attractor, and hierarchical predictions. Our code is available at https://github.com/pwang322/DLF.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have showcased significant advancements in code generation. However, most evaluation benchmarks are primarily oriented towards Python, making it difficult to evaluate other programming languages, such as Swift, with high quality. By examining widely established multilingual benchmarks like HumanEval-XL and MultiPL-E, we identified critical issues specific to their Swift components, making them insufficient or even irrelevant for assessing LLM coding capabilities on Swift. Unlike these existing approaches, which prioritize rapid scaling and generalization by automatically translating Python-centric benchmarks with LLMs, we adopt a quality-over-quantity methodology. We present SwiftEval, the first Swift-oriented benchmark consisting of 28 carefully hand-crafted problems, and evaluate 44 popular Code LLMs on it. Our results show significant LLM scores drop for problems requiring language-specific features, most noticeable in the models of smaller sizes.

Most existing multi-object tracking methods typically learn visual tracking features via maximizing dis-similarities of different instances and minimizing similarities of the same instance. While such a feature learning scheme achieves promising performance, learning discriminative features solely based on visual information is challenging especially in case of environmental interference such as occlusion, blur and domain variance. In this work, we argue that multi-modal language-driven features provide complementary information to classical visual features, thereby aiding in improving the robustness to such environmental interference. To this end, we propose a new multi-object tracking framework, named LG-MOT, that explicitly leverages language information at different levels of granularity (scene-and instance-level) and combines it with standard visual features to obtain discriminative representations. To develop LG-MOT, we annotate existing MOT datasets with scene-and instance-level language descriptions. We then encode both instance-and scene-level language information into high-dimensional embeddings, which are utilized to guide the visual features during training. At inference, our LG-MOT uses the standard visual features without relying on annotated language descriptions. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, MOT17, DanceTrack and SportsMOT, reveal the merits of the proposed contributions leading to state-of-the-art performance. On the DanceTrack test set, our LG-MOT achieves an absolute gain of 2.2\% in terms of target object association (IDF1 score), compared to the baseline using only visual features. Further, our LG-MOT exhibits strong cross-domain generalizability. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/WesLee88524/LG-MOT.

This research showcases the innovative integration of Large Language Models into machine learning workflows for traffic incident management, focusing on the classification of incident severity using accident reports. By leveraging features generated by modern language models alongside conventional data extracted from incident reports, our research demonstrates improvements in the accuracy of severity classification across several machine learning algorithms. Our contributions are threefold. First, we present an extensive comparison of various machine learning models paired with multiple large language models for feature extraction, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for accurate incident severity classification. Second, we contrast traditional feature engineering pipelines with those enhanced by language models, showcasing the superiority of language-based feature engineering in processing unstructured text. Third, our study illustrates how merging baseline features from accident reports with language-based features can improve the severity classification accuracy. This comprehensive approach not only advances the field of incident management but also highlights the cross-domain application potential of our methodology, particularly in contexts requiring the prediction of event outcomes from unstructured textual data or features translated into textual representation. Specifically, our novel methodology was applied to three distinct datasets originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Queensland, Australia. This cross-continental application underlines the robustness of our approach, suggesting its potential for widespread adoption in improving incident management processes globally.

Recent studies have shown that multilingual pretrained language models can be effectively improved with cross-lingual alignment information from Wikipedia entities. However, existing methods only exploit entity information in pretraining and do not explicitly use entities in downstream tasks. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of leveraging entity representations for downstream cross-lingual tasks. We train a multilingual language model with 24 languages with entity representations and show the model consistently outperforms word-based pretrained models in various cross-lingual transfer tasks. We also analyze the model and the key insight is that incorporating entity representations into the input allows us to extract more language-agnostic features. We also evaluate the model with a multilingual cloze prompt task with the mLAMA dataset. We show that entity-based prompt elicits correct factual knowledge more likely than using only word representations. Our source code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/luke.

Transformer-based language models, more specifically BERT-based architectures have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many downstream tasks. However, for a relatively low-resource language such as Thai, the choices of models are limited to training a BERT-based model based on a much smaller dataset or finetuning multi-lingual models, both of which yield suboptimal downstream performance. Moreover, large-scale multi-lingual pretraining does not take into account language-specific features for Thai. To overcome these limitations, we pretrain a language model based on RoBERTa-base architecture on a large, deduplicated, cleaned training set (78GB in total size), curated from diverse domains of social media posts, news articles and other publicly available datasets. We apply text processing rules that are specific to Thai most importantly preserving spaces, which are important chunk and sentence boundaries in Thai before subword tokenization. We also experiment with word-level, syllable-level and SentencePiece tokenization with a smaller dataset to explore the effects on tokenization on downstream performance. Our model wangchanberta-base-att-spm-uncased trained on the 78.5GB dataset outperforms strong baselines (NBSVM, CRF and ULMFit) and multi-lingual models (XLMR and mBERT) on both sequence classification and token classification tasks in human-annotated, mono-lingual contexts.

The number of tokens it takes to encode parallel text in different languages is known to vary. These disparities are called token premiums. Having high token premiums leads to less throughput during training and increases costs at inference. In this paper, we show that even after controlling for dataset size, vocabulary size, and data content, monolingual tokenizers exhibit a wide range of token premiums across languages. To understand the cross-linguistic differences that cause these token premiums, we train a suite of approximately 7,000 comparable monolingual tokenizers for 97 languages, manipulating tokenization algorithm, vocabulary size, and dataset size. We measure token premiums and test for a relationship between factors such as data similarity (between tokenizer training and evaluation), vocabulary size, and pre-tokenization. We also investigate the role of language-specific features such as writing system and word length. We find that similarity between training and test data does not impact token premiums, but vocabulary size and pre-tokenization do. While simply increasing vocabulary size does not lead to reduced token premium effects, we can determine an ``optimal'' vocabulary size for each language to achieve significantly reduced token premium effects. We also train superword tokenizers which allow merges over whitespaces, and we find that they both reduce token premium effects and improve compression overall. Thus, intervening on the vocabulary size or the pre-tokenizer significantly reduces crosslingual token premium effects.

In disentangling the heterogeneity observed in psychopathology, personality of the patients is considered crucial. While it has been demonstrated that personality traits are reflected in the language used by a patient, we hypothesize that this enables automatic inference of the personality type directly from speech utterances, potentially more accurately than through a traditional questionnaire-based approach explicitly designed for personality classification. To validate this hypothesis, we adopt natural language processing (NLP) and standard machine learning tools for classification. We test this on a dataset of recorded clinical diagnostic interviews (CDI) on a sample of 79 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) -- a condition for which differentiated treatment based on personality styles has been advocated -- and classified into anaclitic and introjective personality styles. We start by analyzing the interviews to see which linguistic features are associated with each style, in order to gain a better understanding of the styles. Then, we develop automatic classifiers based on (a) standardized questionnaire responses; (b) basic text features, i.e., TF-IDF scores of words and word sequences; (c) more advanced text features, using LIWC (linguistic inquiry and word count) and context-aware features using BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers); (d) audio features. We find that automated classification with language-derived features (i.e., based on LIWC) significantly outperforms questionnaire-based classification models. Furthermore, the best performance is achieved by combining LIWC with the questionnaire features. This suggests that more work should be put into developing linguistically based automated techniques for characterizing personality, however questionnaires still to some extent complement such methods.

Goal oriented dialogue systems were originally designed as a natural language interface to a fixed data-set of entities that users might inquire about, further described by domain, slots, and values. As we move towards adaptable dialogue systems where knowledge about domains, slots, and values may change, there is an increasing need to automatically extract these terms from raw dialogues or related non-dialogue data on a large scale. In this paper, we take an important step in this direction by exploring different features that can enable systems to discover realizations of domains, slots, and values in dialogues in a purely data-driven fashion. The features that we examine stem from word embeddings, language modelling features, as well as topological features of the word embedding space. To examine the utility of each feature set, we train a seed model based on the widely used MultiWOZ data-set. Then, we apply this model to a different corpus, the Schema-Guided Dialogue data-set. Our method outperforms the previously proposed approach that relies solely on word embeddings. We also demonstrate that each of the features is responsible for discovering different kinds of content. We believe our results warrant further research towards ontology induction, and continued harnessing of topological data analysis for dialogue and natural language processing research.

Reading text in real-world scenarios often requires understanding the context surrounding it, especially when dealing with poor-quality text. However, current scene text recognizers are unaware of the bigger picture as they operate on cropped text images. In this study, we harness the representative capabilities of modern vision-language models, such as CLIP, to provide scene-level information to the crop-based recognizer. We achieve this by fusing a rich representation of the entire image, obtained from the vision-language model, with the recognizer word-level features via a gated cross-attention mechanism. This component gradually shifts to the context-enhanced representation, allowing for stable fine-tuning of a pretrained recognizer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model-agnostic framework, CLIPTER (CLIP TExt Recognition), on leading text recognition architectures and achieve state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks. Furthermore, our analysis highlights improved robustness to out-of-vocabulary words and enhanced generalization in low-data regimes.

Most End-to-End SLU methods depend on the pretrained ASR or language model features for intent prediction. However, other essential information in speech, such as prosody, is often ignored. Recent research has shown improved results in classifying dialogue acts by incorporating prosodic information. The margins of improvement in these methods are minimal as the neural models ignore prosodic features. In this work, we propose prosody-attention, which uses the prosodic features differently to generate attention maps across time frames of the utterance. Then we propose prosody-distillation to explicitly learn the prosodic information in the acoustic encoder rather than concatenating the implicit prosodic features. Both the proposed methods improve the baseline results, and the prosody-distillation method gives an intent classification accuracy improvement of 8\% and 2\% on SLURP and STOP datasets over the prosody baseline.

Autonomous systems for software engineering are now capable of fixing bugs and developing features. These systems are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a), which assesses their ability to solve software issues from GitHub repositories. However, SWE-bench uses only Python repositories, with problem statements presented predominantly as text and lacking visual elements such as images. This limited coverage motivates our inquiry into how existing systems might perform on unrepresented software engineering domains (e.g., front-end, game development, DevOps), which use different programming languages and paradigms. Therefore, we propose SWE-bench Multimodal (SWE-bench M), to evaluate systems on their ability to fix bugs in visual, user-facing JavaScript software. SWE-bench M features 617 task instances collected from 17 JavaScript libraries used for web interface design, diagramming, data visualization, syntax highlighting, and interactive mapping. Each SWE-bench M task instance contains at least one image in its problem statement or unit tests. Our analysis finds that top-performing SWE-bench systems struggle with SWE-bench M, revealing limitations in visual problem-solving and cross-language generalization. Lastly, we show that SWE-agent's flexible language-agnostic features enable it to substantially outperform alternatives on SWE-bench M, resolving 12% of task instances compared to 6% for the next best system.

Multilingual transformer-based models demonstrate remarkable zero and few-shot transfer across languages by learning and reusing language-agnostic features. However, as a fixed-size model acquires more languages, its performance across all languages degrades, a phenomenon termed interference. Often attributed to limited model capacity, interference is commonly addressed by adding additional parameters despite evidence that transformer-based models are overparameterized. In this work, we show that it is possible to reduce interference by instead identifying and pruning language-specific parameters. First, we use Shapley Values, a credit allocation metric from coalitional game theory, to identify attention heads that introduce interference. Then, we show that removing identified attention heads from a fixed model improves performance for a target language on both sentence classification and structural prediction, seeing gains as large as 24.7\%. Finally, we provide insights on language-agnostic and language-specific attention heads using attention visualization.

While large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis through discrete tokenization paradigms, current architectures exhibit fundamental tensions between three critical dimensions: 1) irreversible loss of acoustic characteristics caused by quantization of speech prompts; 2) stringent dependence on precisely aligned prompt speech-text pairs that limit real-world deployment; and 3) catastrophic forgetting of the LLM's native text comprehension during optimization for speech token generation. To address these challenges, we propose an LLM-based text-to-speech Generation approach Optimized via a novel dual-branch ArchiTecture (GOAT-TTS). Our framework introduces two key innovations: (1) The modality-alignment branch combines a speech encoder and projector to capture continuous acoustic embeddings, enabling bidirectional correlation between paralinguistic features (language, timbre, emotion) and semantic text representations without transcript dependency; (2) The speech-generation branch employs modular fine-tuning on top-k layers of an LLM for speech token prediction while freezing the bottom-k layers to preserve foundational linguistic knowledge. Moreover, multi-token prediction is introduced to support real-time streaming TTS synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our GOAT-TTS achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art TTS models while validating the efficacy of synthesized dialect speech data.

Human processing of idioms relies on understanding the contextual sentences in which idioms occur, as well as language-intrinsic features such as frequency and speaker-intrinsic factors like familiarity. While LLMs have shown high performance on idiomaticity detection tasks, this success may be attributed to reasoning shortcuts in existing datasets. To this end, we construct a novel, controlled contrastive dataset designed to test whether LLMs can effectively use context to disambiguate idiomatic meaning. Additionally, we explore how collocational frequency and sentence probability influence model performance. Our findings reveal that LLMs often fail to resolve idiomaticity when it is required to attend to the surrounding context, and that models perform better on sentences that have higher likelihood. The collocational frequency of expressions also impacts performance. We make our code and dataset publicly available.

Pretrained contextual representation models (Peters et al., 2018; Devlin et al., 2018) have pushed forward the state-of-the-art on many NLP tasks. A new release of BERT (Devlin, 2018) includes a model simultaneously pretrained on 104 languages with impressive performance for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on a natural language inference task. This paper explores the broader cross-lingual potential of mBERT (multilingual) as a zero shot language transfer model on 5 NLP tasks covering a total of 39 languages from various language families: NLI, document classification, NER, POS tagging, and dependency parsing. We compare mBERT with the best-published methods for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer and find mBERT competitive on each task. Additionally, we investigate the most effective strategy for utilizing mBERT in this manner, determine to what extent mBERT generalizes away from language specific features, and measure factors that influence cross-lingual transfer.

One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is polysemanticity, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise, human-understandable explanations for what neural networks are doing internally. One hypothesised cause of polysemanticity is superposition, where neural networks represent more features than they have neurons by assigning features to an overcomplete set of directions in activation space, rather than to individual neurons. Here, we attempt to identify those directions, using sparse autoencoders to reconstruct the internal activations of a language model. These autoencoders learn sets of sparsely activating features that are more interpretable and monosemantic than directions identified by alternative approaches, where interpretability is measured by automated methods. Ablating these features enables precise model editing, for example, by removing capabilities such as pronoun prediction, while disrupting model behaviour less than prior techniques. This work indicates that it is possible to resolve superposition in language models using a scalable, unsupervised method. Our method may serve as a foundation for future mechanistic interpretability work, which we hope will enable greater model transparency and steerability.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities in mathematics and logical reasoning tasks. Prior research indicates that LLMs pre-trained with programming language data exhibit high mathematical and reasoning abilities; however, this causal relationship has not been rigorously tested. Our research aims to verify which programming languages and features during pre-training affect logical inference performance. Specifically, we pre-trained decoder-based language models from scratch using datasets from ten programming languages (e.g., Python, C, Java) and three natural language datasets (Wikipedia, Fineweb, C4) under identical conditions. Thereafter, we evaluated the trained models in a few-shot in-context learning setting on logical reasoning tasks: FLD and bAbi, which do not require commonsense or world knowledge. The results demonstrate that nearly all models trained with programming languages consistently outperform those trained with natural languages, indicating that programming languages contain factors that elicit logic inference performance. In addition, we found that models trained with programming languages exhibit a better ability to follow instructions compared to those trained with natural languages. Further analysis reveals that the depth of Abstract Syntax Trees representing parsed results of programs also affects logical reasoning performance. These findings will offer insights into the essential elements of pre-training for acquiring the foundational abilities of LLMs.

Post-hoc explanation methods have often been criticised for abstracting away the decision-making process of deep neural networks. In this work, we would like to provide natural language descriptions for what different layers of a vision backbone have learned. Our DeViL method decodes vision features into language, not only highlighting the attribution locations but also generating textual descriptions of visual features at different layers of the network. We train a transformer network to translate individual image features of any vision layer into a prompt that a separate off-the-shelf language model decodes into natural language. By employing dropout both per-layer and per-spatial-location, our model can generalize training on image-text pairs to generate localized explanations. As it uses a pre-trained language model, our approach is fast to train, can be applied to any vision backbone, and produces textual descriptions at different layers of the vision network. Moreover, DeViL can create open-vocabulary attribution maps corresponding to words or phrases even outside the training scope of the vision model. We demonstrate that DeViL generates textual descriptions relevant to the image content on CC3M surpassing previous lightweight captioning models and attribution maps uncovering the learned concepts of the vision backbone. Finally, we show DeViL also outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the neuron-wise descriptions of the MILANNOTATIONS dataset. Code available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/DeViL

We present Visual Lexicon, a novel visual language that encodes rich image information into the text space of vocabulary tokens while retaining intricate visual details that are often challenging to convey in natural language. Unlike traditional methods that prioritize either high-level semantics (e.g., CLIP) or pixel-level reconstruction (e.g., VAE), ViLex simultaneously captures rich semantic content and fine visual details, enabling high-quality image generation and comprehensive visual scene understanding. Through a self-supervised learning pipeline, ViLex generates tokens optimized for reconstructing input images using a frozen text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, preserving the detailed information necessary for high-fidelity semantic-level reconstruction. As an image embedding in the language space, ViLex tokens leverage the compositionality of natural languages, allowing them to be used independently as "text tokens" or combined with natural language tokens to prompt pretrained T2I models with both visual and textual inputs, mirroring how we interact with vision-language models (VLMs). Experiments demonstrate that ViLex achieves higher fidelity in image reconstruction compared to text embeddings--even with a single ViLex token. Moreover, ViLex successfully performs various DreamBooth tasks in a zero-shot, unsupervised manner without fine-tuning T2I models. Additionally, ViLex serves as a powerful vision encoder, consistently improving vision-language model performance across 15 benchmarks relative to a strong SigLIP baseline.

Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges on having a good connector that maps visual features generated by a vision encoder to a shared embedding space with the LLM while preserving semantic similarity. Existing connectors, such as multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), often produce out-of-distribution or noisy inputs, leading to misalignment between the modalities. In this work, we propose a novel vision-text alignment method, AlignVLM, that maps visual features to a weighted average of LLM text embeddings. Our approach leverages the linguistic priors encoded by the LLM to ensure that visual features are mapped to regions of the space that the LLM can effectively interpret. AlignVLM is particularly effective for document understanding tasks, where scanned document images must be accurately mapped to their textual content. Our extensive experiments show that AlignVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to prior alignment methods. We provide further analysis demonstrating improved vision-text feature alignment and robustness to noise.

This paper proposes a novel lip reading framework, especially for low-resource languages, which has not been well addressed in the previous literature. Since low-resource languages do not have enough video-text paired data to train the model to have sufficient power to model lip movements and language, it is regarded as challenging to develop lip reading models for low-resource languages. In order to mitigate the challenge, we try to learn general speech knowledge, the ability to model lip movements, from a high-resource language through the prediction of speech units. It is known that different languages partially share common phonemes, thus general speech knowledge learned from one language can be extended to other languages. Then, we try to learn language-specific knowledge, the ability to model language, by proposing Language-specific Memory-augmented Decoder (LMDecoder). LMDecoder saves language-specific audio features into memory banks and can be trained on audio-text paired data which is more easily accessible than video-text paired data. Therefore, with LMDecoder, we can transform the input speech units into language-specific audio features and translate them into texts by utilizing the learned rich language knowledge. Finally, by combining general speech knowledge and language-specific knowledge, we can efficiently develop lip reading models even for low-resource languages. Through extensive experiments using five languages, English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated.

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) uses lip-based video to improve performance in noise. Since videos are harder to obtain than audio, the video training data of AVSR models is usually limited to a few thousand hours. In contrast, speech models such as Whisper are trained with hundreds of thousands of hours of data, and thus learn a better speech-to-text decoder. The huge training data difference motivates us to adapt Whisper to handle video inputs. Inspired by Flamingo which injects visual features into language models, we propose Whisper-Flamingo which integrates visual features into the Whisper speech recognition and translation model with gated cross attention. Our audio-visual Whisper-Flamingo outperforms audio-only Whisper on English speech recognition and En-X translation for 6 languages in noisy conditions. Moreover, Whisper-Flamingo is a versatile model and conducts all of these tasks using one set of parameters, while prior methods are trained separately on each language.

The latest work on language representations carefully integrates contextualized features into language model training, which enables a series of success especially in various machine reading comprehension and natural language inference tasks. However, the existing language representation models including ELMo, GPT and BERT only exploit plain context-sensitive features such as character or word embeddings. They rarely consider incorporating structured semantic information which can provide rich semantics for language representation. To promote natural language understanding, we propose to incorporate explicit contextual semantics from pre-trained semantic role labeling, and introduce an improved language representation model, Semantics-aware BERT (SemBERT), which is capable of explicitly absorbing contextual semantics over a BERT backbone. SemBERT keeps the convenient usability of its BERT precursor in a light fine-tuning way without substantial task-specific modifications. Compared with BERT, semantics-aware BERT is as simple in concept but more powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art or substantially improves results on ten reading comprehension and language inference tasks.

Exploring open-world situations in an end-to-end manner is a promising yet challenging task due to the need for strong generalization capabilities. In particular, end-to-end autonomous driving in unstructured outdoor environments often encounters conditions that were unfamiliar during training. In this work, we present Vision-Language Action Retrieval (VLA-R), an open-world end-to-end autonomous driving (OW-E2EAD) framework that integrates open-world perception with a novel vision-action retrieval paradigm. We leverage a frozen vision-language model for open-world detection and segmentation to obtain multi-scale, prompt-guided, and interpretable perception features without domain-specific tuning. A Q-Former bottleneck aggregates fine-grained visual representations with language-aligned visual features, bridging perception and action domains. To learn transferable driving behaviors, we introduce a vision-action contrastive learning scheme that aligns vision-language and action embeddings for effective open-world reasoning and action retrieval. Our experiments on a real-world robotic platform demonstrate strong generalization and exploratory performance in unstructured, unseen environments, even with limited data. Demo videos are provided in the supplementary material.

Language plays a vital role in the realm of human motion. Existing methods have largely depended on CLIP text embeddings for motion generation, yet they fall short in effectively aligning language and motion due to CLIP's pretraining on static image-text pairs. This work introduces LaMP, a novel Language-Motion Pretraining model, which transitions from a language-vision to a more suitable language-motion latent space. It addresses key limitations by generating motion-informative text embeddings, significantly enhancing the relevance and semantics of generated motion sequences. With LaMP, we advance three key tasks: text-to-motion generation, motion-text retrieval, and motion captioning through aligned language-motion representation learning. For generation, we utilize LaMP to provide the text condition instead of CLIP, and an autoregressive masked prediction is designed to achieve mask modeling without rank collapse in transformers. For retrieval, motion features from LaMP's motion transformer interact with query tokens to retrieve text features from the text transformer, and vice versa. For captioning, we finetune a large language model with the language-informative motion features to develop a strong motion captioning model. In addition, we introduce the LaMP-BertScore metric to assess the alignment of generated motions with textual descriptions. Extensive experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods across all three tasks. The code of our method will be made public.

We introduce Stanza, an open-source Python natural language processing toolkit supporting 66 human languages. Compared to existing widely used toolkits, Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. We have trained Stanza on a total of 112 datasets, including the Universal Dependencies treebanks and other multilingual corpora, and show that the same neural architecture generalizes well and achieves competitive performance on all languages tested. Additionally, Stanza includes a native Python interface to the widely used Java Stanford CoreNLP software, which further extends its functionality to cover other tasks such as coreference resolution and relation extraction. Source code, documentation, and pretrained models for 66 languages are available at https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanza.

We propose DocFormerv2, a multi-modal transformer for Visual Document Understanding (VDU). The VDU domain entails understanding documents (beyond mere OCR predictions) e.g., extracting information from a form, VQA for documents and other tasks. VDU is challenging as it needs a model to make sense of multiple modalities (visual, language and spatial) to make a prediction. Our approach, termed DocFormerv2 is an encoder-decoder transformer which takes as input - vision, language and spatial features. DocFormerv2 is pre-trained with unsupervised tasks employed asymmetrically i.e., two novel document tasks on encoder and one on the auto-regressive decoder. The unsupervised tasks have been carefully designed to ensure that the pre-training encourages local-feature alignment between multiple modalities. DocFormerv2 when evaluated on nine datasets shows state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines e.g. TabFact (4.3%), InfoVQA (1.4%), FUNSD (1%). Furthermore, to show generalization capabilities, on three VQA tasks involving scene-text, Doc- Formerv2 outperforms previous comparably-sized models and even does better than much larger models (such as GIT2, PaLi and Flamingo) on some tasks. Extensive ablations show that due to its pre-training, DocFormerv2 understands multiple modalities better than prior-art in VDU.

The emergence and growing popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significant potential to enhance various aspects of daily life, from improving communication to facilitating learning and problem-solving. Mobile phones, as essential daily companions, represent the most effective and accessible deployment platform for MLLMs, enabling seamless integration into everyday tasks. However, deploying MLLMs on mobile phones presents challenges due to limitations in memory size and computational capability, making it difficult to achieve smooth and real-time processing without extensive optimization. In this paper, we present BlueLM-V-3B, an algorithm and system co-design approach specifically tailored for the efficient deployment of MLLMs on mobile platforms. To be specific, we redesign the dynamic resolution scheme adopted by mainstream MLLMs and implement system optimization for hardware-aware deployment to optimize model inference on mobile phones. BlueLM-V-3B boasts the following key highlights: (1) Small Size: BlueLM-V-3B features a language model with 2.7B parameters and a vision encoder with 400M parameters. (2) Fast Speed: BlueLM-V-3B achieves a generation speed of 24.4 token/s on the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor with 4-bit LLM weight quantization. (3) Strong Performance: BlueLM-V-3B has attained the highest average score of 66.1 on the OpenCompass benchmark among models with leq 4B parameters and surpassed a series of models with much larger parameter sizes (e.g., MiniCPM-V-2.6, InternVL2-8B).

The proliferation of deep learning in natural language processing (NLP) has led to the development and release of innovative technologies capable of understanding and generating human language with remarkable proficiency. Atinuke, a Transformer-based neural network, optimises performance across various language tasks by utilising a unique configuration. The architecture interweaves layers for processing sequential data with attention mechanisms to draw meaningful affinities between inputs and outputs. Due to the configuration of its topology and hyperparameter tuning, it can emulate human-like language by extracting features and learning complex mappings. Atinuke is modular, extensible, and integrates seamlessly with existing machine learning pipelines. Advanced matrix operations like softmax, embeddings, and multi-head attention enable nuanced handling of textual, acoustic, and visual signals. By unifying modern deep learning techniques with software design principles and mathematical theory, the system achieves state-of-the-art results on natural language tasks whilst remaining interpretable and robust.

Sequential recommendation aims to model dynamic user behavior from historical interactions. Existing methods rely on either explicit item IDs or general textual features for sequence modeling to understand user preferences. While promising, these approaches still struggle to model cold-start items or transfer knowledge to new datasets. In this paper, we propose to model user preferences and item features as language representations that can be generalized to new items and datasets. To this end, we present a novel framework, named Recformer, which effectively learns language representations for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we propose to formulate an item as a "sentence" (word sequence) by flattening item key-value attributes described by text so that an item sequence for a user becomes a sequence of sentences. For recommendation, Recformer is trained to understand the "sentence" sequence and retrieve the next "sentence". To encode item sequences, we design a bi-directional Transformer similar to the model Longformer but with different embedding layers for sequential recommendation. For effective representation learning, we propose novel pretraining and finetuning methods which combine language understanding and recommendation tasks. Therefore, Recformer can effectively recommend the next item based on language representations. Extensive experiments conducted on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Recformer for sequential recommendation, especially in low-resource and cold-start settings.

Recent advances on large language models (LLMs) enable researchers and developers to build autonomous language agents that can automatically solve various tasks and interact with environments, humans, and other agents using natural language interfaces. We consider language agents as a promising direction towards artificial general intelligence and release Agents, an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to a wider non-specialist audience. Agents is carefully engineered to support important features including planning, memory, tool usage, multi-agent communication, and fine-grained symbolic control. Agents is user-friendly as it enables non-specialists to build, customize, test, tune, and deploy state-of-the-art autonomous language agents without much coding. The library is also research-friendly as its modularized design makes it easily extensible for researchers. Agents is available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/agents.

Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation (CISS) requires continuous learning of newly introduced classes while retaining knowledge of past classes. By abstracting mainstream methods into two stages (visual feature extraction and prototype-feature matching), we identify a more fundamental challenge termed catastrophic semantic entanglement. This phenomenon involves Prototype-Feature Entanglement caused by semantic misalignment during the incremental process, and Background-Increment Entanglement due to dynamic data evolution. Existing techniques, which rely on visual feature learning without sufficient cues to distinguish targets, introduce significant noise and errors. To address these issues, we introduce a Language-inspired Bootstrapped Disentanglement framework (LBD). We leverage the prior class semantics of pre-trained visual-language models (e.g., CLIP) to guide the model in autonomously disentangling features through Language-guided Prototypical Disentanglement and Manifold Mutual Background Disentanglement. The former guides the disentangling of new prototypes by treating hand-crafted text features as topological templates, while the latter employs multiple learnable prototypes and mask-pooling-based supervision for background-incremental class disentanglement. By incorporating soft prompt tuning and encoder adaptation modifications, we further bridge the capability gap of CLIP between dense and sparse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both Pascal VOC and ADE20k, particularly in multi-step scenarios.

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) grow increasingly capable, fixed benchmarks are gradually losing their effectiveness in evaluating high-level scientific understanding. In this paper, we introduce the Multimodal Academic Cover benchmark (MAC), a live benchmark that could continuously evolve with scientific advancement and model progress. MAC leverages over 25,000 image-text pairs sourced from issues of top-tier scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell, challenging MLLMs to reason across abstract visual and textual scientific content. Experiments on our most recent yearly snapshot, MAC-2025, reveal that while MLLMs demonstrate strong perceptual abilities, their cross-modal scientific reasoning remains limited. To bridge this gap, we propose DAD, a lightweight inference-time approach that enhances MLLMs by extending MLLM visual features with language space reasoning, achieving performance improvements of up to 11%. Finally, we highlight the live nature of MAC through experiments on updating journal covers and models for curation, illustrating its potential to remain aligned with the frontier of human knowledge. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/mhjiang0408/MAC_Bench.

Video creation has become increasingly popular, yet the expertise and effort required for editing often pose barriers to beginners. In this paper, we explore the integration of large language models (LLMs) into the video editing workflow to reduce these barriers. Our design vision is embodied in LAVE, a novel system that provides LLM-powered agent assistance and language-augmented editing features. LAVE automatically generates language descriptions for the user's footage, serving as the foundation for enabling the LLM to process videos and assist in editing tasks. When the user provides editing objectives, the agent plans and executes relevant actions to fulfill them. Moreover, LAVE allows users to edit videos through either the agent or direct UI manipulation, providing flexibility and enabling manual refinement of agent actions. Our user study, which included eight participants ranging from novices to proficient editors, demonstrated LAVE's effectiveness. The results also shed light on user perceptions of the proposed LLM-assisted editing paradigm and its impact on users' creativity and sense of co-creation. Based on these findings, we propose design implications to inform the future development of agent-assisted content editing.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) are processing increasingly longer and richer inputs. Albeit the progress, few public benchmark is available to measure such development. To mitigate this gap, we introduce LongVideoBench, a question-answering benchmark that features video-language interleaved inputs up to an hour long. Our benchmark includes 3,763 varying-length web-collected videos with their subtitles across diverse themes, designed to comprehensively evaluate LMMs on long-term multimodal understanding. To achieve this, we interpret the primary challenge as to accurately retrieve and reason over detailed multimodal information from long inputs. As such, we formulate a novel video question-answering task termed referring reasoning. Specifically, as part of the question, it contains a referring query that references related video contexts, called referred context. The model is then required to reason over relevant video details from the referred context. Following the paradigm of referring reasoning, we curate 6,678 human-annotated multiple-choice questions in 17 fine-grained categories, establishing one of the most comprehensive benchmarks for long-form video understanding. Evaluations suggest that the LongVideoBench presents significant challenges even for the most advanced proprietary models (e.g. GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, GPT-4-Turbo), while their open-source counterparts show an even larger performance gap. In addition, our results indicate that model performance on the benchmark improves only when they are capable of processing more frames, positioning LongVideoBench as a valuable benchmark for evaluating future-generation long-context LMMs.

OpenThaiGPT 1.5 is an advanced Thai language chat model based on Qwen v2.5, finetuned on over 2,000,000 Thai instruction pairs. This report provides an engineering perspective on the model's development, capabilities, and performance. We discuss the model's architecture, training process, and key features, including multi-turn conversation support, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) compatibility, and tool-calling functionality. Benchmark results demonstrate OpenThaiGPT 1.5's state-of-the-art performance on various Thai language tasks, outperforming other open-source Thai language models. We also address practical considerations such as GPU memory requirements and deployment strategies.

We present LLM-KT, a flexible framework designed to enhance collaborative filtering (CF) models by seamlessly integrating LLM (Large Language Model)-generated features. Unlike existing methods that rely on passing LLM-generated features as direct inputs, our framework injects these features into an intermediate layer of any CF model, allowing the model to reconstruct and leverage the embeddings internally. This model-agnostic approach works with a wide range of CF models without requiring architectural changes, making it adaptable to various recommendation scenarios. Our framework is built for easy integration and modification, providing researchers and developers with a powerful tool for extending CF model capabilities through efficient knowledge transfer. We demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on the MovieLens and Amazon datasets, where it consistently improves baseline CF models. Experimental studies showed that LLM-KT is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in context-aware settings but can be applied to a broader range of CF models than current approaches.

Detecting objects based on language information is a popular task that includes Open-Vocabulary object Detection (OVD) and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). In this paper, we advance them to a more practical setting called Described Object Detection (DOD) by expanding category names to flexible language expressions for OVD and overcoming the limitation of REC only grounding the pre-existing object. We establish the research foundation for DOD by constructing a Description Detection Dataset (D^3). This dataset features flexible language expressions, whether short category names or long descriptions, and annotating all described objects on all images without omission. By evaluating previous SOTA methods on D^3, we find some troublemakers that fail current REC, OVD, and bi-functional methods. REC methods struggle with confidence scores, rejecting negative instances, and multi-target scenarios, while OVD methods face constraints with long and complex descriptions. Recent bi-functional methods also do not work well on DOD due to their separated training procedures and inference strategies for REC and OVD tasks. Building upon the aforementioned findings, we propose a baseline that largely improves REC methods by reconstructing the training data and introducing a binary classification sub-task, outperforming existing methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/shikras/d-cube and related works are tracked in https://github.com/Charles-Xie/awesome-described-object-detection.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

Open-vocabulary 3D visual grounding aims to localize target objects based on free-form language queries, which is crucial for embodied AI applications such as autonomous navigation, robotics, and augmented reality. Learning 3D language fields through neural representations enables accurate understanding of 3D scenes from limited viewpoints and facilitates the localization of target objects in complex environments. However, existing language field methods struggle to accurately localize instances using spatial relations in language queries, such as ``the book on the chair.'' This limitation mainly arises from inadequate reasoning about spatial relations in both language queries and 3D scenes. In this work, we propose SpatialReasoner, a novel neural representation-based framework with large language model (LLM)-driven spatial reasoning that constructs a visual properties-enhanced hierarchical feature field for open-vocabulary 3D visual grounding. To enable spatial reasoning in language queries, SpatialReasoner fine-tunes an LLM to capture spatial relations and explicitly infer instructions for the target, anchor, and spatial relation. To enable spatial reasoning in 3D scenes, SpatialReasoner incorporates visual properties (opacity and color) to construct a hierarchical feature field. This field represents language and instance features using distilled CLIP features and masks extracted via the Segment Anything Model (SAM). The field is then queried using the inferred instructions in a hierarchical manner to localize the target 3D instance based on the spatial relation in the language query. Extensive experiments show that our framework can be seamlessly integrated into different neural representations, outperforming baseline models in 3D visual grounding while empowering their spatial reasoning capability.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) often struggle to recognize novel concepts, as they rely on pre-trained knowledge and have limited ability to capture subtle visual details. Domain-specific knowledge gaps in training also make them prone to confusing visually similar, commonly misrepresented, or low-resource concepts. To help LMMs better align nuanced visual features with language, improving their ability to recognize and reason about novel or rare concepts, we propose a Contrastive visual Data Augmentation (CoDA) strategy. CoDA extracts key contrastive textual and visual features of target concepts against the known concepts they are misrecognized as, and then uses multimodal generative models to produce targeted synthetic data. Automatic filtering of extracted features and augmented images is implemented to guarantee their quality, as verified by human annotators. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of CoDA on low-resource concept and diverse scene recognition datasets including INaturalist and SUN. We additionally collect NovelSpecies, a benchmark dataset consisting of newly discovered animal species that are guaranteed to be unseen by LMMs. LLaVA-1.6 1-shot updating results on these three datasets show CoDA significantly improves SOTA visual data augmentation strategies by 12.3% (NovelSpecies), 5.1% (SUN), and 6.0% (iNat) absolute gains in accuracy.

Unlike Object Detection, Visual Grounding task necessitates the detection of an object described by complex free-form language. To simultaneously model such complex semantic and visual representations, recent state-of-the-art studies adopt transformer-based models to fuse features from both modalities, further introducing various modules that modulate visual features to align with the language expressions and eliminate the irrelevant redundant information. However, their loss function, still adopting common Object Detection losses, solely governs the bounding box regression output, failing to fully optimize for the above objectives. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we first analyze the attention mechanisms of transformer-based models. Building upon this, we further propose a novel framework named Attention-Driven Constraint Balancing (AttBalance) to optimize the behavior of visual features within language-relevant regions. Extensive experimental results show that our method brings impressive improvements. Specifically, we achieve constant improvements over five different models evaluated on four different benchmarks. Moreover, we attain a new state-of-the-art performance by integrating our method into QRNet.

In the era of foundation models, CLIP has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning text and visual modalities into a common embedding space. However, the alignment objective used to train CLIP often results in subpar visual features for fine-grained tasks. In contrast, SSL-pretrained models like DINO excel at extracting rich visual features due to their specialized training paradigm. Yet, these SSL models require an additional supervised linear probing step, which relies on fully labeled data which is often expensive and difficult to obtain at scale. In this paper, we propose a label-free prompt-tuning method that leverages the rich visual features of self-supervised learning models (DINO) and the broad textual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to largely enhance CLIP-based image classification performance using unlabeled images. Our approach unfolds in three key steps: (1) We generate robust textual feature embeddings that more accurately represent object classes by leveraging class-specific descriptions from LLMs, enabling more effective zero-shot classification compared to CLIP's default name-specific prompts. (2) These textual embeddings are then used to produce pseudo-labels to train an alignment module that integrates the complementary strengths of LLM description-based textual embeddings and DINO's visual features. (3) Finally, we prompt-tune CLIP's vision encoder through DINO-assisted supervision using the trained alignment module. This three-step process allows us to harness the best of visual and textual foundation models, resulting in a powerful and efficient approach that surpasses state-of-the-art label-free classification methods. Notably, our framework, NoLA (No Labels Attached), achieves an average absolute gain of 3.6% over the state-of-the-art LaFter across 11 diverse image classification datasets.

Latest efforts on cross-lingual relation extraction (XRE) aggressively leverage the language-consistent structural features from the universal dependency (UD) resource, while they may largely suffer from biased transfer (e.g., either target-biased or source-biased) due to the inevitable linguistic disparity between languages. In this work, we investigate an unbiased UD-based XRE transfer by constructing a type of code-mixed UD forest. We first translate the sentence of the source language to the parallel target-side language, for both of which we parse the UD tree respectively. Then, we merge the source-/target-side UD structures as a unified code-mixed UD forest. With such forest features, the gaps of UD-based XRE between the training and predicting phases can be effectively closed. We conduct experiments on the ACE XRE benchmark datasets, where the results demonstrate that the proposed code-mixed UD forests help unbiased UD-based XRE transfer, with which we achieve significant XRE performance gains.

Multimodal foundation models aim to create a unified representation space that abstracts away from surface features like language syntax or modality differences. To investigate this, we study the internal representations of three recent models, analyzing the model activations from semantically equivalent sentences across languages in the text and speech modalities. Our findings reveal that: 1) Cross-modal representations converge over model layers, except in the initial layers specialized at text and speech processing. 2) Length adaptation is crucial for reducing the cross-modal gap between text and speech, although current approaches' effectiveness is primarily limited to high-resource languages. 3) Speech exhibits larger cross-lingual differences than text. 4) For models not explicitly trained for modality-agnostic representations, the modality gap is more prominent than the language gap.

Recent progress in self-training, self-supervised pretraining and unsupervised learning enabled well performing speech recognition systems without any labeled data. However, in many cases there is labeled data available for related languages which is not utilized by these methods. This paper extends previous work on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning by fine-tuning a multilingually pretrained wav2vec 2.0 model to transcribe unseen languages. This is done by mapping phonemes of the training languages to the target language using articulatory features. Experiments show that this simple method significantly outperforms prior work which introduced task-specific architectures and used only part of a monolingually pretrained model.

3D visual grounding is an emerging research area dedicated to making connections between the 3D physical world and natural language, which is crucial for achieving embodied intelligence. In this paper, we propose DASANet, a Dual Attribute-Spatial relation Alignment Network that separately models and aligns object attributes and spatial relation features between language and 3D vision modalities. We decompose both the language and 3D point cloud input into two separate parts and design a dual-branch attention module to separately model the decomposed inputs while preserving global context in attribute-spatial feature fusion by cross attentions. Our DASANet achieves the highest grounding accuracy 65.1% on the Nr3D dataset, 1.3% higher than the best competitor. Besides, the visualization of the two branches proves that our method is efficient and highly interpretable.

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

Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA---a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs. The languages of TyDi QA are diverse with regard to their typology---the set of linguistic features each language expresses---such that we expect models performing well on this set to generalize across a large number of the world's languages. We present a quantitative analysis of the data quality and example-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora. To provide a realistic information-seeking task and avoid priming effects, questions are written by people who want to know the answer, but don't know the answer yet, and the data is collected directly in each language without the use of translation.

Pre-trained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) provide strong visual representations for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we continually pre-train prevailing VFMs in a multimodal manner such that they can effortlessly process visual inputs of varying sizes and produce visual representations that are more aligned with language representations, regardless of their original pre-training process. To this end, we introduce CoMP, a carefully designed multimodal pre-training pipeline. CoMP uses a Continual Rotary Position Embedding to support native resolution continual pre-training, and an Alignment Loss between visual and textual features through language prototypes to align multimodal representations. By three-stage training, our VFMs achieve remarkable improvements not only in multimodal understanding but also in other downstream tasks such as classification and segmentation. Remarkably, CoMP-SigLIP achieves scores of 66.7 on ChartQA and 75.9 on DocVQA with a 0.5B LLM, while maintaining an 87.4% accuracy on ImageNet-1K and a 49.5 mIoU on ADE20K under frozen chunk evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased profound capabilities in language understanding and generation, facilitating a wide array of applications. However, there is a notable paucity of detailed, open-sourced methodologies on efficiently scaling LLMs beyond 50 billion parameters with minimum trial-and-error cost and computational resources. In this report, we introduce Tele-FLM (aka FLM-2), a 52B open-sourced multilingual large language model that features a stable, efficient pre-training paradigm and enhanced factual judgment capabilities. Tele-FLM demonstrates superior multilingual language modeling abilities, measured by BPB on textual corpus. Besides, in both English and Chinese foundation model evaluation, it is comparable to strong open-sourced models that involve larger pre-training FLOPs, such as Llama2-70B and DeepSeek-67B. In addition to the model weights, we share the core designs, engineering practices, and training details, which we expect to benefit both the academic and industrial communities.

Visual grounding aims to predict the locations of target objects specified by textual descriptions. For this task with linguistic and visual modalities, there is a latest research line that focuses on only selecting the linguistic-relevant visual regions for object localization to reduce the computational overhead. Albeit achieving impressive performance, it is iteratively performed on different image scales, and at every iteration, linguistic features and visual features need to be stored in a cache, incurring extra overhead. To facilitate the implementation, in this paper, we propose a feature selection-based simple yet effective baseline for visual grounding, called FSVG. Specifically, we directly encapsulate the linguistic and visual modalities into an overall network architecture without complicated iterative procedures, and utilize the language in parallel as guidance to facilitate the interaction between linguistic modal and visual modal for extracting effective visual features. Furthermore, to reduce the computational cost, during the visual feature learning, we introduce a similarity-based feature selection mechanism to only exploit language-related visual features for faster prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets comprehensively substantiate that the proposed FSVG achieves a better balance between accuracy and efficiency beyond the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jcwang0602/FSVG.

We launch EVA-02, a next-generation Transformer-based visual representation pre-trained to reconstruct strong and robust language-aligned vision features via masked image modeling. With an updated plain Transformer architecture as well as extensive pre-training from an open & accessible giant CLIP vision encoder, EVA-02 demonstrates superior performance compared to prior state-of-the-art approaches across various representative vision tasks, while utilizing significantly fewer parameters and compute budgets. Notably, using exclusively publicly accessible training data, EVA-02 with only 304M parameters achieves a phenomenal 90.0 fine-tuning top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K val set. Additionally, our EVA-02-CLIP can reach up to 80.4 zero-shot top-1 on ImageNet-1K, outperforming the previous largest & best open-sourced CLIP with only ~1/6 parameters and ~1/6 image-text training data. We offer four EVA-02 variants in various model sizes, ranging from 6M to 304M parameters, all with impressive performance. To facilitate open access and open research, we release the complete suite of EVA-02 to the community at https://github.com/baaivision/EVA/tree/master/EVA-02.

Recent literature shows that large-scale language modeling provides excellent reusable sentence representations with both recurrent and self-attentive architectures. However, there has been less clarity on the commonalities and differences in the representational properties induced by the two architectures. It also has been shown that visual information serves as one of the means for grounding sentence representations. In this paper, we present a meta-study assessing the representational quality of models where the training signal is obtained from different modalities, in particular, language modeling, image features prediction, and both textual and multimodal machine translation. We evaluate textual and visual features of sentence representations obtained using predominant approaches on image retrieval and semantic textual similarity. Our experiments reveal that on moderate-sized datasets, a sentence counterpart in a target language or visual modality provides much stronger training signal for sentence representation than language modeling. Importantly, we observe that while the Transformer models achieve superior machine translation quality, representations from the recurrent neural network based models perform significantly better over tasks focused on semantic relevance.

We introduce a novel framework that utilizes the internal weight activations of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct a metric space of languages. Unlike traditional approaches based on hand-crafted linguistic features, our method automatically derives high-dimensional vector representations by computing weight importance scores via an adapted pruning algorithm. Our approach captures intrinsic language characteristics that reflect linguistic phenomena. We validate our approach across diverse datasets and multilingual LLMs, covering 106 languages. The results align well with established linguistic families while also revealing unexpected inter-language connections that may indicate historical contact or language evolution. The source code, computed language latent vectors, and visualization tool are made publicly available at https://github.com/mshamrai/deep-language-geometry.

Prior research has investigated the impact of various linguistic features on cross-lingual transfer performance. In this study, we investigate the manner in which this effect can be mapped onto the representation space. While past studies have focused on the impact on cross-lingual alignment in multilingual language models during fine-tuning, this study examines the absolute evolution of the respective language representation spaces produced by MLLMs. We place a specific emphasis on the role of linguistic characteristics and investigate their inter-correlation with the impact on representation spaces and cross-lingual transfer performance. Additionally, this paper provides preliminary evidence of how these findings can be leveraged to enhance transfer to linguistically distant languages.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. However, tabular data inherently exhibits sparse feature-level dependencies, where many feature interactions are structurally insignificant. This creates a fundamental mismatch as LLMs' self-attention mechanism inevitably distributes focus across all pairs, diluting attention on critical relationships, particularly in datasets with complex dependencies or semantically ambiguous features. To address this limitation, we propose GraDe (Graph-Guided Dependency Learning), a novel method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs' attention mechanism. GraDe employs a lightweight dynamic graph learning module guided by externally extracted functional dependencies, prioritizing key feature interactions while suppressing irrelevant ones. Our experiments across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that GraDe outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. Our method is minimally intrusive yet effective, offering a practical solution for structure-aware tabular data modeling with LLMs.

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design process is critical in effectively using any modern pre-trained generative language model. In this work, we focus on LLM sensitivity to a quintessential class of meaning-preserving design choices: prompt formatting. We find that several widely used open-source LLMs are extremely sensitive to subtle changes in prompt formatting in few-shot settings, with performance differences of up to 76 accuracy points when evaluated using LLaMA-2-13B. Sensitivity remains even when increasing model size, the number of few-shot examples, or performing instruction tuning. Our analysis suggests that work evaluating LLMs with prompting-based methods would benefit from reporting a range of performance across plausible prompt formats, instead of the currently-standard practice of reporting performance on a single format. We also show that format performance only weakly correlates between models, which puts into question the methodological validity of comparing models with an arbitrarily chosen, fixed prompt format. To facilitate systematic analysis we propose FormatSpread, an algorithm that rapidly evaluates a sampled set of plausible prompt formats for a given task, and reports the interval of expected performance without accessing model weights. Furthermore, we present a suite of analyses that characterize the nature of this sensitivity, including exploring the influence of particular atomic perturbations and the internal representation of particular formats.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) commonly follow a paradigm that projects visual features and then concatenates them with text tokens to form a unified sequence input for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this paradigm leads to a significant increase in the length of the input sequence, resulting in substantial computational overhead. Existing methods attempt to fuse visual information into the intermediate layers of LLMs, which alleviate the sequence length issue but often neglect the hierarchical semantic representations within the model and the fine-grained visual information available in the shallower visual encoding layers. To address this limitation, we propose DEHVF, an efficient vision-language fine-tuning method based on dynamic embedding and fusion of hierarchical visual features. Its core lies in leveraging the inherent hierarchical representation characteristics of visual encoders and language models. Through a lightweight hierarchical visual fuser, it dynamically selects and fuses hierarchical features corresponding to semantic granularity based on the internal representations of each layer in LLMs. The fused layer-related visual features are then projected and aligned before being directly embedded into the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of the corresponding layer in LLMs. This approach not only avoids sequence expansion but also dynamically fuses multi-layer visual information. By fine-tuning only a small number of parameters, DEHVF achieves precise alignment and complementarity of cross-modal information at the same semantic granularity. We conducted experiments across various VL benchmarks, including visual question answering on ScienceQA and image captioning on COCO Captions. The results demonstrate that DEHVF achieves higher accuracy than existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) baselines while maintaining efficient training and inference.

This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate estimates of concreteness, valence and arousal for multi-word expressions. Unlike previous artificial intelligence (AI) methods, LLMs can capture the nuanced meanings of multi-word expressions. We systematically evaluated ChatGPT-4o's ability to predict concreteness, valence and arousal. In Study 1, ChatGPT-4o showed strong correlations with human concreteness ratings (r = .8) for multi-word expressions. In Study 2, these findings were repeated for valence and arousal ratings of individual words, matching or outperforming previous AI models. Study 3 extended the prevalence and arousal analysis to multi-word expressions and showed promising results despite the lack of large-scale human benchmarks. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs for generating valuable psycholinguistic data related to multiword expressions. To help researchers with stimulus selection, we provide datasets with AI norms of concreteness, valence and arousal for 126,397 English single words and 63,680 multi-word expressions

Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques are limited in scope, labeling only a small subset of neurons and behaviors in any network. Is a richer characterization of neuron-level computation possible? We introduce a procedure (called MILAN, for mutual-information-guided linguistic annotation of neurons) that automatically labels neurons with open-ended, compositional, natural language descriptions. Given a neuron, MILAN generates a description by searching for a natural language string that maximizes pointwise mutual information with the image regions in which the neuron is active. MILAN produces fine-grained descriptions that capture categorical, relational, and logical structure in learned features. These descriptions obtain high agreement with human-generated feature descriptions across a diverse set of model architectures and tasks, and can aid in understanding and controlling learned models. We highlight three applications of natural language neuron descriptions. First, we use MILAN for analysis, characterizing the distribution and importance of neurons selective for attribute, category, and relational information in vision models. Second, we use MILAN for auditing, surfacing neurons sensitive to human faces in datasets designed to obscure them. Finally, we use MILAN for editing, improving robustness in an image classifier by deleting neurons sensitive to text features spuriously correlated with class labels.

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which may be more easily interpretable. However, these SAEs can have millions of distinct latent features, making it infeasible for humans to manually interpret each one. In this work, we build an open-source automated pipeline to generate and evaluate natural language explanations for SAE features using LLMs. We test our framework on SAEs of varying sizes, activation functions, and losses, trained on two different open-weight LLMs. We introduce five new techniques to score the quality of explanations that are cheaper to run than the previous state of the art. One of these techniques, intervention scoring, evaluates the interpretability of the effects of intervening on a feature, which we find explains features that are not recalled by existing methods. We propose guidelines for generating better explanations that remain valid for a broader set of activating contexts, and discuss pitfalls with existing scoring techniques. We use our explanations to measure the semantic similarity of independently trained SAEs, and find that SAEs trained on nearby layers of the residual stream are highly similar. Our large-scale analysis confirms that SAE latents are indeed much more interpretable than neurons, even when neurons are sparsified using top-k postprocessing. Our code is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/sae-auto-interp, and our explanations are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EleutherAI/auto_interp_explanations.

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive mathematical reasoning capabilities, yet how they compute basic arithmetic, such as addition, remains unclear. This paper shows that pre-trained LLMs add numbers using Fourier features -- dimensions in the hidden state that represent numbers via a set of features sparse in the frequency domain. Within the model, MLP and attention layers use Fourier features in complementary ways: MLP layers primarily approximate the magnitude of the answer using low-frequency features, while attention layers primarily perform modular addition (e.g., computing whether the answer is even or odd) using high-frequency features. Pre-training is crucial for this mechanism: models trained from scratch to add numbers only exploit low-frequency features, leading to lower accuracy. Introducing pre-trained token embeddings to a randomly initialized model rescues its performance. Overall, our analysis demonstrates that appropriate pre-trained representations (e.g., Fourier features) can unlock the ability of Transformers to learn precise mechanisms for algorithmic tasks.

The proliferation of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) underscores the pressing need for evaluation methods. Existing works primarily rely on external evaluators, focusing on training and prompting strategies. However, a crucial aspect - model-aware glass-box features - is overlooked. In this study, we explore the utility of glass-box features under the scenario of self-evaluation, namely applying an LLM to evaluate its own output. We investigate various glass-box feature groups and discovered that the softmax distribution serves as a reliable indicator for quality evaluation. Furthermore, we propose two strategies to enhance the evaluation by incorporating features derived from references. Experimental results on public benchmarks validate the feasibility of self-evaluation of LLMs using glass-box features.