Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved impressive general-purpose vision-language capabilities through visual instruction tuning. However, current MLLMs primarily focus on image-level or box-level understanding, falling short of achieving fine-grained vision-language alignment at the pixel level. Besides, the lack of mask-based instruction data limits their advancements. In this paper, we propose Osprey, a mask-text instruction tuning approach, to extend MLLMs by incorporating fine-grained mask regions into language instruction, aiming at achieving pixel-wise visual understanding. To achieve this goal, we first meticulously curate a mask-based region-text dataset with 724K samples, and then design a vision-language model by injecting pixel-level representation into LLM. Especially, Osprey adopts a convolutional CLIP backbone as the vision encoder and employs a mask-aware visual extractor to extract precise visual mask features from high resolution input. Experimental results demonstrate Osprey's superiority in various region understanding tasks, showcasing its new capability for pixel-level instruction tuning. In particular, Osprey can be integrated with Segment Anything Model (SAM) seamlessly to obtain multi-granularity semantics. The source code, dataset and demo can be found at //github.com/CircleRadon/Osprey.
Large language models (LLMs) strengthen instruction-following capability through instruction-finetuning (IFT) on supervised instruction/response data. However, widely used IFT datasets (e.g., Alpaca's 52k data) surprisingly contain many low-quality instances with incorrect or irrelevant responses, which are misleading and detrimental to IFT. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective data selection strategy that automatically identifies and filters out low-quality data using a strong LLM (e.g., ChatGPT). To this end, we introduce AlpaGasus, which is finetuned on only 9k high-quality data filtered from the 52k Alpaca data. AlpaGasus significantly outperforms the original Alpaca as evaluated by GPT-4 on multiple test sets and the controlled human evaluation. Its 13B variant matches $>90\%$ performance of its teacher LLM (i.e., Text-Davinci-003 generating the 52k data) on test tasks. It also provides 5.7x faster training, reducing the training time for a 7B variant from 80 minutes (for Alpaca) to 14 minutes. Moreover, the experiments prove the efficacy of our method across diverse datasets, base models, and LLM filters. Overall, AlpaGasus demonstrates a novel data-centric IFT paradigm that can be generally applied to instruction-tuning data, leading to faster training and better instruction-following models. Our project page is available at: //lichang-chen.github.io/AlpaGasus/
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a prominent area of interest within the research community, given their proficiency in handling and reasoning with non-textual data, including images and videos. This study seeks to extend the application of MLLMs to the realm of autonomous driving by introducing DriveGPT4, a novel interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving system based on LLMs. Capable of processing multi-frame video inputs and textual queries, DriveGPT4 facilitates the interpretation of vehicle actions, offers pertinent reasoning, and effectively addresses a diverse range of questions posed by users. Furthermore, DriveGPT4 predicts low-level vehicle control signals in an end-to-end fashion. These advanced capabilities are achieved through the utilization of a bespoke visual instruction tuning dataset, specifically tailored for autonomous driving applications, in conjunction with a mix-finetuning training strategy. DriveGPT4 represents the pioneering effort to leverage LLMs for the development of an interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving solution. Evaluations conducted on the BDD-X dataset showcase the superior qualitative and quantitative performance of DriveGPT4. Additionally, the fine-tuning of domain-specific data enables DriveGPT4 to yield close or even improved results in terms of autonomous driving grounding when contrasted with GPT4-V. The code and dataset will be publicly available.
The recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) represents a transformational capability at the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). However, LLMs are generalized models, trained on extensive text corpus, and often struggle to provide context-specific information, particularly in areas requiring specialized knowledge such as wildfire details within the broader context of climate change. For decision-makers and policymakers focused on wildfire resilience and adaptation, it is crucial to obtain responses that are not only precise but also domain-specific, rather than generic. To that end, we developed WildfireGPT, a prototype LLM agent designed to transform user queries into actionable insights on wildfire risks. We enrich WildfireGPT by providing additional context such as climate projections and scientific literature to ensure its information is current, relevant, and scientifically accurate. This enables WildfireGPT to be an effective tool for delivering detailed, user-specific insights on wildfire risks to support a diverse set of end users, including researchers, engineers, urban planners, emergency managers, and infrastructure operators.
Vision language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of tasks, from logical reasoning to visual understanding. This opens the door to richer interaction with the world, for example robotic control. However, VLMs produce only textual outputs, while robotic control and other spatial tasks require outputting continuous coordinates, actions, or trajectories. How can we enable VLMs to handle such settings without fine-tuning on task-specific data? In this paper, we propose a novel visual prompting approach for VLMs that we call Prompting with Iterative Visual Optimization (PIVOT), which casts tasks as iterative visual question answering. In each iteration, the image is annotated with a visual representation of proposals that the VLM can refer to (e.g., candidate robot actions, localizations, or trajectories). The VLM then selects the best ones for the task. These proposals are iteratively refined, allowing the VLM to eventually zero in on the best available answer. We investigate PIVOT on real-world robotic navigation, real-world manipulation from images, instruction following in simulation, and additional spatial inference tasks such as localization. We find, perhaps surprisingly, that our approach enables zero-shot control of robotic systems without any robot training data, navigation in a variety of environments, and other capabilities. Although current performance is far from perfect, our work highlights potentials and limitations of this new regime and shows a promising approach for Internet-Scale VLMs in robotic and spatial reasoning domains. Website: pivot-prompt.github.io and HuggingFace: //huggingface.co/spaces/pivot-prompt/pivot-prompt-demo.
Cloud-based large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have increasingly become integral to daily operations, serving as vital tools across various applications. While these models offer substantial benefits in terms of accessibility and functionality, they also introduce significant privacy concerns: the transmission and storage of user data in cloud infrastructures pose substantial risks of data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information; even if the transmission and storage of data is encrypted, the LLM service provider itself still knows the real contents of the data, preventing individuals or entities from confidently using such LLM services. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a simple yet effective mechanism EmojiCrypt to protect user privacy. It uses Emoji to encrypt the user inputs before sending them to LLM, effectively rendering them indecipherable to human or LLM's examination while retaining the original intent of the prompt, thus ensuring the model's performance remains unaffected. We conduct experiments on three tasks, personalized recommendation, sentiment analysis, and tabular data analysis. Experiment results reveal that EmojiCrypt can encrypt personal information within prompts in such a manner that not only prevents the discernment of sensitive data by humans or LLM itself, but also maintains or even improves the precision without further tuning, achieving comparable or even better task accuracy than directly prompting the LLM without prompt encryption. These results highlight the practicality of adopting encryption measures that safeguard user privacy without compromising the functional integrity and performance of LLMs. Code and dataset are available at //github.com/agiresearch/EmojiCrypt.
Trained on massive publicly available data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated tremendous success across various fields. While more data contributes to better performance, a disconcerting reality is that high-quality public data will be exhausted in a few years. In this paper, we offer a potential next step for contemporary LLMs: collaborative and privacy-preserving LLM training on the underutilized distributed private data via federated learning (FL), where multiple data owners collaboratively train a shared model without transmitting raw data. To achieve this, we build a concise, integrated, and research-friendly framework/codebase, named OpenFedLLM. It covers federated instruction tuning for enhancing instruction-following capability, federated value alignment for aligning with human values, and 7 representative FL algorithms. Besides, OpenFedLLM supports training on diverse domains, where we cover 8 training datasets; and provides comprehensive evaluations, where we cover 30+ evaluation metrics. Through extensive experiments, we observe that all FL algorithms outperform local training on training LLMs, demonstrating a clear performance improvement across a variety of settings. Notably, in a financial benchmark, Llama2-7B fine-tuned by applying any FL algorithm can outperform GPT-4 by a significant margin while the model obtained through individual training cannot, demonstrating strong motivation for clients to participate in FL. The code is available at //github.com/rui-ye/OpenFedLLM.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications. Therefore, understanding and explaining these models is crucial for elucidating their behaviors, limitations, and social impacts. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of explainability techniques and provide a structured overview of methods for explaining Transformer-based language models. We categorize techniques based on the training paradigms of LLMs: traditional fine-tuning-based paradigm and prompting-based paradigm. For each paradigm, we summarize the goals and dominant approaches for generating local explanations of individual predictions and global explanations of overall model knowledge. We also discuss metrics for evaluating generated explanations, and discuss how explanations can be leveraged to debug models and improve performance. Lastly, we examine key challenges and emerging opportunities for explanation techniques in the era of LLMs in comparison to conventional machine learning models.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Pre-trained language representation models, such as BERT, capture a general language representation from large-scale corpora, but lack domain-specific knowledge. When reading a domain text, experts make inferences with relevant knowledge. For machines to achieve this capability, we propose a knowledge-enabled language representation model (K-BERT) with knowledge graphs (KGs), in which triples are injected into the sentences as domain knowledge. However, too much knowledge incorporation may divert the sentence from its correct meaning, which is called knowledge noise (KN) issue. To overcome KN, K-BERT introduces soft-position and visible matrix to limit the impact of knowledge. K-BERT can easily inject domain knowledge into the models by equipped with a KG without pre-training by-self because it is capable of loading model parameters from the pre-trained BERT. Our investigation reveals promising results in twelve NLP tasks. Especially in domain-specific tasks (including finance, law, and medicine), K-BERT significantly outperforms BERT, which demonstrates that K-BERT is an excellent choice for solving the knowledge-driven problems that require experts.