Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in comprehending and handling text-based tasks. Many efforts are being made to transfer these attributes to video modality, which are termed Video-LLMs. However, existing Video-LLMs can only capture the coarse-grained semantics and are unable to effectively handle tasks related to comprehension or localization of specific video segments. In light of these challenges, we propose Momentor, a Video-LLM capable of accomplishing fine-grained temporal understanding tasks. To support the training of Momentor, we design an automatic data generation engine to construct Moment-10M, a large-scale video instruction dataset with segment-level instruction data. We train Momentor on Moment-10M, enabling it to perform segment-level reasoning and localization. Zero-shot evaluations on several tasks demonstrate that Momentor excels in fine-grained temporally grounded comprehension and localization.
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with generating reliable outputs due to outdated knowledge and hallucinations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models address this by enhancing LLMs with external knowledge, but often fail to personalize the retrieval process. This paper introduces PersonaRAG, a novel framework incorporating user-centric agents to adapt retrieval and generation based on real-time user data and interactions. Evaluated across various question answering datasets, PersonaRAG demonstrates superiority over baseline models, providing tailored answers to user needs. The results suggest promising directions for user-adapted information retrieval systems.
Utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robotic manipulation represents a novel paradigm, aiming to enhance the model's ability to generalize to new objects and instructions. However, due to variations in camera specifications and mounting positions, existing methods exhibit significant performance disparities across different robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose RoboUniView in this paper, an innovative approach that decouples visual feature extraction from action learning. We first learn a unified view representation from multi-perspective views by pre-training on readily accessible data, and then derive actions from this unified view representation to control robotic manipulation. This unified view representation more accurately mirrors the physical world and is not constrained by the robotic platform's camera parameters. Thanks to this methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the demanding CALVIN benchmark, enhancing the success rate in the $D \to D$ setting from 93.0% to 96.2%, and in the $ABC \to D$ setting from 92.2% to 94.2%. Moreover, our model exhibits outstanding adaptability and flexibility: it maintains high performance under unseen camera parameters, can utilize multiple datasets with varying camera parameters, and is capable of joint cross-task learning across datasets. Code is provided for re-implementation. //github.com/liufanfanlff/RoboUniview
Object-oriented embodied navigation aims to locate specific objects, defined by category or depicted in images. Existing methods often struggle to generalize to open vocabulary goals without extensive training data. While recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising solution by extending object recognition beyond predefined categories, efficient goal-oriented exploration becomes more challenging in an open vocabulary setting. We introduce OVExp, a learning-based framework that integrates VLMs for Open-Vocabulary Exploration. OVExp constructs scene representations by encoding observations with VLMs and projecting them onto top-down maps for goal-conditioned exploration. Goals are encoded in the same VLM feature space, and a lightweight transformer-based decoder predicts target locations while maintaining versatile representation abilities. To address the impracticality of fusing dense pixel embeddings with full 3D scene reconstruction for training, we propose constructing maps using low-cost semantic categories and transforming them into CLIP's embedding space via the text encoder. The simple but effective design of OVExp significantly reduces computational costs and demonstrates strong generalization abilities to various navigation settings. Experiments on established benchmarks show OVExp outperforms previous zero-shot methods, can generalize to diverse scenes, and handle different goal modalities.
High-resolution inputs enable Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to discern finer visual details, enhancing their comprehension capabilities. To reduce the training and computation costs caused by high-resolution input, one promising direction is to use sliding windows to slice the input into uniform patches, each matching the input size of the well-trained vision encoder. Although efficient, this slicing strategy leads to the fragmentation of original input, i.e., the continuity of contextual information and spatial geometry is lost across patches, adversely affecting performance in cross-patch context perception and position-specific tasks. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce HiRes-LLaVA, a novel framework designed to efficiently process any size of high-resolution input without altering the original contextual and geometric information. HiRes-LLaVA comprises two innovative components: (i) a SliceRestore adapter that reconstructs sliced patches into their original form, efficiently extracting both global and local features via down-up-sampling and convolution layers, and (ii) a Self-Mining Sampler to compresses the vision tokens based on themselves, preserving the original context and positional information while reducing training overhead. To assess the ability of handling context fragmentation, we construct a new benchmark, EntityGrid-QA, consisting of edge-related and position-related tasks. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of HiRes-LLaVA on both existing public benchmarks and on EntityGrid-QA, particularly on document-oriented tasks, establishing new standards for handling high-resolution inputs.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in complex tasks like machine translation, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding. One of the primary reasons for the adaptability of LLMs in such diverse tasks is their in-context learning (ICL) capability, which allows them to perform well on new tasks by simply using a few task samples in the prompt. Despite their effectiveness in enhancing the performance of LLMs on diverse language and tabular tasks, these methods have not been thoroughly explored for their potential to generate post hoc explanations. In this work, we carry out one of the first explorations to analyze the effectiveness of LLMs in explaining other complex predictive models using ICL. To this end, we propose a novel framework, In-Context Explainers, comprising of three novel approaches that exploit the ICL capabilities of LLMs to explain the predictions made by other predictive models. We conduct extensive analysis with these approaches on real-world tabular and text datasets and demonstrate that LLMs are capable of explaining other predictive models similar to state-of-the-art post hoc explainers, opening up promising avenues for future research into LLM-based post hoc explanations of complex predictive models.
Transformers excel in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their prowess in capturing long-term dependencies but suffer from exponential resource consumption with increasing sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose MCSD model, an efficient language model with linear scaling and fast inference speed. MCSD model leverages diverse feature fusion, primarily through the multi-channel slope and decay (MCSD) block, to robustly represent features. This block comprises slope and decay sections that extract features across diverse temporal receptive fields, facilitating capture of both local and global information. In addition, MCSD block conducts element-wise fusion of diverse features to further enhance the delicate feature extraction capability. For inference, we formulate the inference process into a recurrent representation, slashing space complexity to $O(1)$ and time complexity to $O(N)$ respectively. Our experiments show that MCSD attains higher throughput and lower GPU memory consumption compared to Transformers, while maintaining comparable performance to larger-scale language learning models on benchmark tests. These attributes position MCSD as a promising base for edge deployment and embodied intelligence.
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in image generation, with studies suggesting that they can generalize by composing latent factors learned from the training data. In this work, we go further and study DDPMs trained on strictly separate subsets of the data distribution with large gaps on the support of the latent factors. We show that such a model can effectively generate images in the unexplored, intermediate regions of the distribution. For instance, when trained on clearly smiling and non-smiling faces, we demonstrate a sampling procedure which can generate slightly smiling faces without reference images (zero-shot interpolation). We replicate these findings for other attributes as well as other datasets. Our code is available at //github.com/jdeschena/ddpm-zero-shot-interpolation.
This paper introduces Standard Basis LoRA (SBoRA), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach for Large Language Models that builds upon the pioneering works of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Orthogonal Adaptation. SBoRA further reduces the computational and memory requirements of LoRA while enhancing learning performance. By leveraging orthogonal standard basis vectors to initialize one of the low-rank matrices, either A or B, SBoRA enables regional weight updates and memory-efficient fine-tuning. This approach gives rise to two variants, SBoRA-FA and SBoRA-FB, where only one of the matrices is updated, resulting in a sparse update matrix with a majority of zero rows or columns. Consequently, the majority of the fine-tuned model's weights remain unchanged from the pre-trained weights. This characteristic of SBoRA, wherein regional weight updates occur, is reminiscent of the modular organization of the human brain, which efficiently adapts to new tasks. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of SBoRA-FA over LoRA in various fine-tuning tasks, including commonsense reasoning and arithmetic reasoning. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of QSBoRA on quantized LLaMA models of varying scales, highlighting its potential for efficient adaptation to new tasks. Code is available at //github.com/cityuhkai/SBoRA
In domain-specific applications, GPT-4, augmented with precise prompts or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), shows notable potential but faces the critical tri-lemma of performance, cost, and data privacy. High performance requires sophisticated processing techniques, yet managing multiple agents within a complex workflow often proves costly and challenging. To address this, we introduce the PEER (Plan, Execute, Express, Review) multi-agent framework. This systematizes domain-specific tasks by integrating precise question decomposition, advanced information retrieval, comprehensive summarization, and rigorous self-assessment. Given the concerns of cost and data privacy, enterprises are shifting from proprietary models like GPT-4 to custom models, striking a balance between cost, security, and performance. We developed industrial practices leveraging online data and user feedback for efficient model tuning. This study provides best practice guidelines for applying multi-agent systems in domain-specific problem-solving and implementing effective agent tuning strategies. Our empirical studies, particularly in the financial question-answering domain, demonstrate that our approach achieves 95.0% of GPT-4's performance, while effectively managing costs and ensuring data privacy.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving various tasks, yet they often struggle with comprehensively addressing complex and vague problems. Existing approaches, including multi-agent LLM systems, offer solutions to certain challenges but still require manual setup and lack scalability. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach leveraging decomposition to enable LLMs to tackle vague problems effectively. Our approach involves an orchestrating LLM that interacts with users to understand the problem and then decomposes it into tangible sub-problems. Instead of expecting the LLM to solve the entire problem in one go, we train it to ask follow-up questions to gain a deeper understanding of the user's requirements. Once the problem is adequately understood, the orchestrating LLM divides it into smaller, manageable sub-problems. Each sub-problem is then assigned to specialized LLM agents or non-LLM functions for resolution. These agents work in parallel to solve their respective sub-problems, with the orchestrating LLM overseeing the process and compiling the solutions into a comprehensive answer for the user. By adopting this decomposition approach, we alleviate the constraints imposed by token limitations on LLM outputs and empower them to provide nuanced solutions to complex and ambiguous problems. Through our approach, we aim to enable LLMs to think and operate more like humans, breaking down complex problems into manageable parts and collaboratively solving them. This not only enhances the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs but also offers a scalable and efficient method for addressing a wide range of real-world challenges.