We introduce MDSGen, a novel framework for vision-guided open-domain sound generation optimized for model parameter size, memory consumption, and inference speed. This framework incorporates two key innovations: (1) a redundant video feature removal module that filters out unnecessary visual information, and (2) a temporal-aware masking strategy that leverages temporal context for enhanced audio generation accuracy. In contrast to existing resource-heavy Unet-based models, MDSGen employs denoising masked diffusion transformers, facilitating efficient generation without reliance on pre-trained diffusion models. Evaluated on the benchmark VGGSound dataset, our smallest model (5M parameters) achieves 97.9% alignment accuracy, using 172x fewer parameters, 371% less memory, and offering 36x faster inference than the current 860M-parameter state-of-the-art model (93.9% accuracy). The larger model (131M parameters) reaches nearly 99% accuracy while requiring 6.5x fewer parameters. These results highlight the scalability and effectiveness of our approach.
We introduce INQUIRE, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark designed to challenge multimodal vision-language models on expert-level queries. INQUIRE includes iNaturalist 2024 (iNat24), a new dataset of five million natural world images, along with 250 expert-level retrieval queries. These queries are paired with all relevant images comprehensively labeled within iNat24, comprising 33,000 total matches. Queries span categories such as species identification, context, behavior, and appearance, emphasizing tasks that require nuanced image understanding and domain expertise. Our benchmark evaluates two core retrieval tasks: (1) INQUIRE-Fullrank, a full dataset ranking task, and (2) INQUIRE-Rerank, a reranking task for refining top-100 retrievals. Detailed evaluation of a range of recent multimodal models demonstrates that INQUIRE poses a significant challenge, with the best models failing to achieve an mAP@50 above 50%. In addition, we show that reranking with more powerful multimodal models can enhance retrieval performance, yet there remains a significant margin for improvement. By focusing on scientifically-motivated ecological challenges, INQUIRE aims to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and the needs of real-world scientific inquiry, encouraging the development of retrieval systems that can assist with accelerating ecological and biodiversity research. Our dataset and code are available at //inquire-benchmark.github.io
We introduce a new benchmark designed to advance the development of general-purpose, large-scale vision-language models for remote sensing images. Although several vision-language datasets in remote sensing have been proposed to pursue this goal, existing datasets are typically tailored to single tasks, lack detailed object information, or suffer from inadequate quality control. Exploring these improvement opportunities, we present a Versatile vision-language Benchmark for Remote Sensing image understanding, termed VRSBench. This benchmark comprises 29,614 images, with 29,614 human-verified detailed captions, 52,472 object references, and 123,221 question-answer pairs. It facilitates the training and evaluation of vision-language models across a broad spectrum of remote sensing image understanding tasks. We further evaluated state-of-the-art models on this benchmark for three vision-language tasks: image captioning, visual grounding, and visual question answering. Our work aims to significantly contribute to the development of advanced vision-language models in the field of remote sensing. The data and code can be accessed at //github.com/lx709/VRSBench.
We introduce Edify Image, a family of diffusion models capable of generating photorealistic image content with pixel-perfect accuracy. Edify Image utilizes cascaded pixel-space diffusion models trained using a novel Laplacian diffusion process, in which image signals at different frequency bands are attenuated at varying rates. Edify Image supports a wide range of applications, including text-to-image synthesis, 4K upsampling, ControlNets, 360 HDR panorama generation, and finetuning for image customization.
In this study, we introduce AV-PedAware, a self-supervised audio-visual fusion system designed to improve dynamic pedestrian awareness for robotics applications. Pedestrian awareness is a critical requirement in many robotics applications. However, traditional approaches that rely on cameras and LIDARs to cover multiple views can be expensive and susceptible to issues such as changes in illumination, occlusion, and weather conditions. Our proposed solution replicates human perception for 3D pedestrian detection using low-cost audio and visual fusion. This study represents the first attempt to employ audio-visual fusion to monitor footstep sounds for the purpose of predicting the movements of pedestrians in the vicinity. The system is trained through self-supervised learning based on LIDAR-generated labels, making it a cost-effective alternative to LIDAR-based pedestrian awareness. AV-PedAware achieves comparable results to LIDAR-based systems at a fraction of the cost. By utilizing an attention mechanism, it can handle dynamic lighting and occlusions, overcoming the limitations of traditional LIDAR and camera-based systems. To evaluate our approach's effectiveness, we collected a new multimodal pedestrian detection dataset and conducted experiments that demonstrate the system's ability to provide reliable 3D detection results using only audio and visual data, even in extreme visual conditions. We will make our collected dataset and source code available online for the community to encourage further development in the field of robotics perception systems.
Large language models (LLMs) for code have become indispensable in various domains, including code generation, reasoning tasks and agent systems. While open-access code LLMs are increasingly approaching the performance levels of proprietary models, high-quality code LLMs suitable for rigorous scientific investigation, particularly those with reproducible data processing pipelines and transparent training protocols, remain limited. The scarcity is due to various challenges, including resource constraints, ethical considerations, and the competitive advantages of keeping models advanced. To address the gap, we introduce OpenCoder, a top-tier code LLM that not only achieves performance comparable to leading models but also serves as an "open cookbook" for the research community. Unlike most prior efforts, we release not only model weights and inference code, but also the reproducible training data, complete data processing pipeline, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols for open scientific research. Through this comprehensive release, we identify the key ingredients for building a top-tier code LLM: (1) code optimized heuristic rules for data cleaning and methods for data deduplication, (2) recall of text corpus related to code and (3) high-quality synthetic data in both annealing and supervised fine-tuning stages. By offering this level of openness, we aim to broaden access to all aspects of a top-tier code LLM, with OpenCoder serving as both a powerful model and an open foundation to accelerate research, and enable reproducible advancements in code AI.
We present Attend-Fusion, a novel and efficient approach for audio-visual fusion in video classification tasks. Our method addresses the challenge of exploiting both audio and visual modalities while maintaining a compact model architecture. Through extensive experiments on the YouTube-8M dataset, we demonstrate that our Attend-Fusion achieves competitive performance with significantly reduced model complexity compared to larger baseline models.
The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a profound vision foundation model pretrained on a large-scale dataset, breaks the boundaries of general segmentation and sparks various downstream applications. This paper introduces Hi-SAM, a unified model leveraging SAM for hierarchical text segmentation. Hi-SAM excels in segmentation across four hierarchies, including pixel-level text, word, text-line, and paragraph, while realizing layout analysis as well. Specifically, we first turn SAM into a high-quality pixel-level text segmentation (TS) model through a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach. We use this TS model to iteratively generate the pixel-level text labels in a semi-automatical manner, unifying labels across the four text hierarchies in the HierText dataset. Subsequently, with these complete labels, we launch the end-to-end trainable Hi-SAM based on the TS architecture with a customized hierarchical mask decoder. During inference, Hi-SAM offers both automatic mask generation (AMG) mode and promptable segmentation (PS) mode. In the AMG mode, Hi-SAM segments pixel-level text foreground masks initially, then samples foreground points for hierarchical text mask generation and achieves layout analysis in passing. As for the PS mode, Hi-SAM provides word, text-line, and paragraph masks with a single point click. Experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance of our TS model: 84.86% fgIOU on Total-Text and 88.96% fgIOU on TextSeg for pixel-level text segmentation. Moreover, compared to the previous specialist for joint hierarchical detection and layout analysis on HierText, Hi-SAM achieves significant improvements: 4.73% PQ and 5.39% F1 on the text-line level, 5.49% PQ and 7.39% F1 on the paragraph level layout analysis, requiring $20\times$ fewer training epochs. The code is available at //github.com/ymy-k/Hi-SAM.
Recently, breakthroughs in video modeling have allowed for controllable camera trajectories in generated videos. However, these methods cannot be directly applied to user-provided videos that are not generated by a video model. In this paper, we present ReCapture, a method for generating new videos with novel camera trajectories from a single user-provided video. Our method allows us to re-generate the reference video, with all its existing scene motion, from vastly different angles and with cinematic camera motion. Notably, using our method we can also plausibly hallucinate parts of the scene that were not observable in the reference video. Our method works by (1) generating a noisy anchor video with a new camera trajectory using multiview diffusion models or depth-based point cloud rendering and then (2) regenerating the anchor video into a clean and temporally consistent reangled video using our proposed masked video fine-tuning technique.
We present SuffixDecoding, a novel model-free approach to accelerating large language model (LLM) inference through speculative decoding. Unlike existing methods that rely on draft models or specialized decoding heads, SuffixDecoding leverages suffix trees built from previously generated outputs to efficiently predict candidate token sequences. Our approach enables flexible tree-structured speculation without the overhead of maintaining and orchestrating additional models. SuffixDecoding builds and dynamically updates suffix trees to capture patterns in the generated text, using them to construct speculation trees through a principled scoring mechanism based on empirical token frequencies. SuffixDecoding requires only CPU memory which is plentiful and underutilized on typical LLM serving nodes. We demonstrate that SuffixDecoding achieves competitive speedups compared to model-based approaches across diverse workloads including open-domain chat, code generation, and text-to-SQL tasks. For open-ended chat and code generation tasks, SuffixDecoding achieves up to $1.4\times$ higher output throughput than SpecInfer and up to $1.1\times$ lower time-per-token (TPOT) latency. For a proprietary multi-LLM text-to-SQL application, SuffixDecoding achieves up to $2.9\times$ higher output throughput and $3\times$ lower latency than speculative decoding. Our evaluation shows that SuffixDecoding maintains high acceptance rates even with small reference corpora of 256 examples, while continuing to improve performance as more historical outputs are incorporated.
This paper introduces DanceFusion, a novel framework for reconstructing and generating dance movements synchronized to music, utilizing a Spatio-Temporal Skeleton Diffusion Transformer. The framework adeptly handles incomplete and noisy skeletal data common in short-form dance videos on social media platforms like TikTok. DanceFusion incorporates a hierarchical Transformer-based Variational Autoencoder (VAE) integrated with a diffusion model, significantly enhancing motion realism and accuracy. Our approach introduces sophisticated masking techniques and a unique iterative diffusion process that refines the motion sequences, ensuring high fidelity in both motion generation and synchronization with accompanying audio cues. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that DanceFusion surpasses existing methods, providing state-of-the-art performance in generating dynamic, realistic, and stylistically diverse dance motions. Potential applications of this framework extend to content creation, virtual reality, and interactive entertainment, promising substantial advancements in automated dance generation. Visit our project page at //th-mlab.github.io/DanceFusion/.