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Dec 12

WildFake: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for AI-Generated Images Detection

The extraordinary ability of generative models enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot distinguish Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images from real-life photographs. The development of generation techniques opened up new opportunities but concurrently introduced potential risks to privacy, authenticity, and security. Therefore, the task of detecting AI-generated imagery is of paramount importance to prevent illegal activities. To assess the generalizability and robustness of AI-generated image detection, we present a large-scale dataset, referred to as WildFake, comprising state-of-the-art generators, diverse object categories, and real-world applications. WildFake dataset has the following advantages: 1) Rich Content with Wild collection: WildFake collects fake images from the open-source community, enriching its diversity with a broad range of image classes and image styles. 2) Hierarchical structure: WildFake contains fake images synthesized by different types of generators from GANs, diffusion models, to other generative models. These key strengths enhance the generalization and robustness of detectors trained on WildFake, thereby demonstrating WildFake's considerable relevance and effectiveness for AI-generated detectors in real-world scenarios. Moreover, our extensive evaluation experiments are tailored to yield profound insights into the capabilities of different levels of generative models, a distinctive advantage afforded by WildFake's unique hierarchical structure.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 19, 2024

PixArt-$α$: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis

The most advanced text-to-image (T2I) models require significant training costs (e.g., millions of GPU hours), seriously hindering the fundamental innovation for the AIGC community while increasing CO2 emissions. This paper introduces PIXART-alpha, a Transformer-based T2I diffusion model whose image generation quality is competitive with state-of-the-art image generators (e.g., Imagen, SDXL, and even Midjourney), reaching near-commercial application standards. Additionally, it supports high-resolution image synthesis up to 1024px resolution with low training cost, as shown in Figure 1 and 2. To achieve this goal, three core designs are proposed: (1) Training strategy decomposition: We devise three distinct training steps that separately optimize pixel dependency, text-image alignment, and image aesthetic quality; (2) Efficient T2I Transformer: We incorporate cross-attention modules into Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to inject text conditions and streamline the computation-intensive class-condition branch; (3) High-informative data: We emphasize the significance of concept density in text-image pairs and leverage a large Vision-Language model to auto-label dense pseudo-captions to assist text-image alignment learning. As a result, PIXART-alpha's training speed markedly surpasses existing large-scale T2I models, e.g., PIXART-alpha only takes 10.8% of Stable Diffusion v1.5's training time (675 vs. 6,250 A100 GPU days), saving nearly \300,000 (26,000 vs. \320,000) and reducing 90% CO2 emissions. Moreover, compared with a larger SOTA model, RAPHAEL, our training cost is merely 1%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIXART-\alpha excels in image quality, artistry, and semantic control. We hope PIXART-\alpha$ will provide new insights to the AIGC community and startups to accelerate building their own high-quality yet low-cost generative models from scratch.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 30, 2023 11

Taming Data and Transformers for Audio Generation

Generating ambient sounds and effects is a challenging problem due to data scarcity and often insufficient caption quality, making it difficult to employ large-scale generative models for the task. In this work, we tackle the problem by introducing two new models. First, we propose AutoCap, a high-quality and efficient automatic audio captioning model. We show that by leveraging metadata available with the audio modality, we can substantially improve the quality of captions. AutoCap reaches CIDEr score of 83.2, marking a 3.2% improvement from the best available captioning model at four times faster inference speed. We then use AutoCap to caption clips from existing datasets, obtaining 761,000 audio clips with high-quality captions, forming the largest available audio-text dataset. Second, we propose GenAu, a scalable transformer-based audio generation architecture that we scale up to 1.25B parameters and train with our new dataset. When compared to state-of-the-art audio generators, GenAu obtains significant improvements of 15.7% in FAD score, 22.7% in IS, and 13.5% in CLAP score, indicating significantly improved quality of generated audio compared to previous works. This shows that the quality of data is often as important as its quantity. Besides, since AutoCap is fully automatic, new audio samples can be added to the training dataset, unlocking the training of even larger generative models for audio synthesis.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

MUG-V 10B: High-efficiency Training Pipeline for Large Video Generation Models

In recent years, large-scale generative models for visual content (e.g., images, videos, and 3D objects/scenes) have made remarkable progress. However, training large-scale video generation models remains particularly challenging and resource-intensive due to cross-modal text-video alignment, the long sequences involved, and the complex spatiotemporal dependencies. To address these challenges, we present a training framework that optimizes four pillars: (i) data processing, (ii) model architecture, (iii) training strategy, and (iv) infrastructure for large-scale video generation models. These optimizations delivered significant efficiency gains and performance improvements across all stages of data preprocessing, video compression, parameter scaling, curriculum-based pretraining, and alignment-focused post-training. Our resulting model, MUG-V 10B, matches recent state-of-the-art video generators overall and, on e-commerce-oriented video generation tasks, surpasses leading open-source baselines in human evaluations. More importantly, we open-source the complete stack, including model weights, Megatron-Core-based large-scale training code, and inference pipelines for video generation and enhancement. To our knowledge, this is the first public release of large-scale video generation training code that exploits Megatron-Core to achieve high training efficiency and near-linear multi-node scaling, details are available in https://github.com/Shopee-MUG/MUG-V{our webpage}.

GenCorres: Consistent Shape Matching via Coupled Implicit-Explicit Shape Generative Models

This paper introduces GenCorres, a novel unsupervised joint shape matching (JSM) approach. Our key idea is to learn a mesh generator to fit an unorganized deformable shape collection while constraining deformations between adjacent synthetic shapes to preserve geometric structures such as local rigidity and local conformality. GenCorres presents three appealing advantages over existing JSM techniques. First, GenCorres performs JSM among a synthetic shape collection whose size is much bigger than the input shapes and fully leverages the datadriven power of JSM. Second, GenCorres unifies consistent shape matching and pairwise matching (i.e., by enforcing deformation priors between adjacent synthetic shapes). Third, the generator provides a concise encoding of consistent shape correspondences. However, learning a mesh generator from an unorganized shape collection is challenging, requiring a good initialization. GenCorres addresses this issue by learning an implicit generator from the input shapes, which provides intermediate shapes between two arbitrary shapes. We introduce a novel approach for computing correspondences between adjacent implicit surfaces, which we use to regularize the implicit generator. Synthetic shapes of the implicit generator then guide initial fittings (i.e., via template-based deformation) for learning the mesh generator. Experimental results show that GenCorres considerably outperforms state-of-the-art JSM techniques. The synthetic shapes of GenCorres also achieve salient performance gains against state-of-the-art deformable shape generators.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 20, 2023

Captain Safari: A World Engine

World engines aim to synthesize long, 3D-consistent videos that support interactive exploration of a scene under user-controlled camera motion. However, existing systems struggle under aggressive 6-DoF trajectories and complex outdoor layouts: they lose long-range geometric coherence, deviate from the target path, or collapse into overly conservative motion. To this end, we introduce Captain Safari, a pose-conditioned world engine that generates videos by retrieving from a persistent world memory. Given a camera path, our method maintains a dynamic local memory and uses a retriever to fetch pose-aligned world tokens, which then condition video generation along the trajectory. This design enables the model to maintain stable 3D structure while accurately executing challenging camera maneuvers. To evaluate this setting, we curate OpenSafari, a new in-the-wild FPV dataset containing high-dynamic drone videos with verified camera trajectories, constructed through a multi-stage geometric and kinematic validation pipeline. Across video quality, 3D consistency, and trajectory following, Captain Safari substantially outperforms state-of-the-art camera-controlled generators. It reduces MEt3R from 0.3703 to 0.3690, improves AUC@30 from 0.181 to 0.200, and yields substantially lower FVD than all camera-controlled baselines. More importantly, in a 50-participant, 5-way human study where annotators select the best result among five anonymized models, 67.6% of preferences favor our method across all axes. Our results demonstrate that pose-conditioned world memory is a powerful mechanism for long-horizon, controllable video generation and provide OpenSafari as a challenging new benchmark for future world-engine research.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 27 2

One Pic is All it Takes: Poisoning Visual Document Retrieval Augmented Generation with a Single Image

Multi-modal retrieval augmented generation (M-RAG) is instrumental for inhibiting hallucinations in large multi-modal models (LMMs) through the use of a factual knowledge base (KB). However, M-RAG introduces new attack vectors for adversaries that aim to disrupt the system by injecting malicious entries into the KB. In this paper, we present the first poisoning attack against M-RAG targeting visual document retrieval applications where the KB contains images of document pages. We propose two attacks, each of which require injecting only a single adversarial image into the KB. Firstly, we propose a universal attack that, for any potential user query, influences the response to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) in the M-RAG system. Secondly, we present a targeted attack against one or a group of user queries, with the goal of spreading targeted misinformation. For both attacks, we use a multi-objective gradient-based adversarial approach to craft the injected image while optimizing for both retrieval and generation. We evaluate our attacks against several visual document retrieval datasets, a diverse set of state-of-the-art retrievers (embedding models) and generators (LMMs), demonstrating the attack effectiveness in both the universal and targeted settings. We additionally present results including commonly used defenses, various attack hyper-parameter settings, ablations, and attack transferability.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 2

Aesthetics is Cheap, Show me the Text: An Empirical Evaluation of State-of-the-Art Generative Models for OCR

Text image is a unique and crucial information medium that integrates visual aesthetics and linguistic semantics in modern e-society. Due to their subtlety and complexity, the generation of text images represents a challenging and evolving frontier in the image generation field. The recent surge of specialized image generators (e.g., Flux-series) and unified generative models (e.g., GPT-4o), which demonstrate exceptional fidelity, raises a natural question: can they master the intricacies of text image generation and editing? Motivated by this, we assess current state-of-the-art generative models' capabilities in terms of text image generation and editing. We incorporate various typical optical character recognition (OCR) tasks into our evaluation and broaden the concept of text-based generation tasks into OCR generative tasks. We select 33 representative tasks and categorize them into five categories: document, handwritten text, scene text, artistic text, and complex \& layout-rich text. For comprehensive evaluation, we examine six models across both closed-source and open-source domains, using tailored, high-quality image inputs and prompts. Through this evaluation, we draw crucial observations and identify the weaknesses of current generative models for OCR tasks. We argue that photorealistic text image generation and editing should be internalized as foundational skills into general-domain generative models, rather than being delegated to specialized solutions, and we hope this empirical analysis can provide valuable insights for the community to achieve this goal. This evaluation is online and will be continuously updated at our GitHub repository.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 20

Are You Robert or RoBERTa? Deceiving Online Authorship Attribution Models Using Neural Text Generators

Recently, there has been a rise in the development of powerful pre-trained natural language models, including GPT-2, Grover, and XLM. These models have shown state-of-the-art capabilities towards a variety of different NLP tasks, including question answering, content summarisation, and text generation. Alongside this, there have been many studies focused on online authorship attribution (AA). That is, the use of models to identify the authors of online texts. Given the power of natural language models in generating convincing texts, this paper examines the degree to which these language models can generate texts capable of deceiving online AA models. Experimenting with both blog and Twitter data, we utilise GPT-2 language models to generate texts using the existing posts of online users. We then examine whether these AI-based text generators are capable of mimicking authorial style to such a degree that they can deceive typical AA models. From this, we find that current AI-based text generators are able to successfully mimic authorship, showing capabilities towards this on both datasets. Our findings, in turn, highlight the current capacity of powerful natural language models to generate original online posts capable of mimicking authorial style sufficiently to deceive popular AA methods; a key finding given the proposed role of AA in real world applications such as spam-detection and forensic investigation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 18, 2022

Generate rather than Retrieve: Large Language Models are Strong Context Generators

Knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering (QA), require access to a large amount of world or domain knowledge. A common approach for knowledge-intensive tasks is to employ a retrieve-then-read pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant contextual documents from an external corpus such as Wikipedia and then predicts an answer conditioned on the retrieved documents. In this paper, we present a novel perspective for solving knowledge-intensive tasks by replacing document retrievers with large language model generators. We call our method generate-then-read (GenRead), which first prompts a large language model to generate contextutal documents based on a given question, and then reads the generated documents to produce the final answer. Furthermore, we propose a novel clustering-based prompting method that selects distinct prompts, resulting in the generated documents that cover different perspectives, leading to better recall over acceptable answers. We conduct extensive experiments on three different knowledge-intensive tasks, including open-domain QA, fact checking, and dialogue system. Notably, GenRead achieves 71.6 and 54.4 exact match scores on TriviaQA and WebQ, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art retrieve-then-read pipeline DPR-FiD by +4.0 and +3.9, without retrieving any documents from any external knowledge source. Lastly, we demonstrate the model performance can be further improved by combining retrieval and generation. Our code and generated documents can be found at https://github.com/wyu97/GenRead.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 20, 2022

Breaking Latent Prior Bias in Detectors for Generalizable AIGC Image Detection

Current AIGC detectors often achieve near-perfect accuracy on images produced by the same generator used for training but struggle to generalize to outputs from unseen generators. We trace this failure in part to latent prior bias: detectors learn shortcuts tied to patterns stemming from the initial noise vector rather than learning robust generative artifacts. To address this, we propose On-Manifold Adversarial Training (OMAT): by optimizing the initial latent noise of diffusion models under fixed conditioning, we generate on-manifold adversarial examples that remain on the generator's output manifold-unlike pixel-space attacks, which introduce off-manifold perturbations that the generator itself cannot reproduce and that can obscure the true discriminative artifacts. To test against state-of-the-art generative models, we introduce GenImage++, a test-only benchmark of outputs from advanced generators (Flux.1, SD3) with extended prompts and diverse styles. We apply our adversarial-training paradigm to ResNet50 and CLIP baselines and evaluate across existing AIGC forensic benchmarks and recent challenge datasets. Extensive experiments show that adversarially trained detectors significantly improve cross-generator performance without any network redesign. Our findings on latent-prior bias offer valuable insights for future dataset construction and detector evaluation, guiding the development of more robust and generalizable AIGC forensic methodologies.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 1

Machine Text Detectors are Membership Inference Attacks

Although membership inference attacks (MIAs) and machine-generated text detection target different goals, identifying training samples and synthetic texts, their methods often exploit similar signals based on a language model's probability distribution. Despite this shared methodological foundation, the two tasks have been independently studied, which may lead to conclusions that overlook stronger methods and valuable insights developed in the other task. In this work, we theoretically and empirically investigate the transferability, i.e., how well a method originally developed for one task performs on the other, between MIAs and machine text detection. For our theoretical contribution, we prove that the metric that achieves the asymptotically highest performance on both tasks is the same. We unify a large proportion of the existing literature in the context of this optimal metric and hypothesize that the accuracy with which a given method approximates this metric is directly correlated with its transferability. Our large-scale empirical experiments, including 7 state-of-the-art MIA methods and 5 state-of-the-art machine text detectors across 13 domains and 10 generators, demonstrate very strong rank correlation (rho > 0.6) in cross-task performance. We notably find that Binoculars, originally designed for machine text detection, achieves state-of-the-art performance on MIA benchmarks as well, demonstrating the practical impact of the transferability. Our findings highlight the need for greater cross-task awareness and collaboration between the two research communities. To facilitate cross-task developments and fair evaluations, we introduce MINT, a unified evaluation suite for MIAs and machine-generated text detection, with implementation of 15 recent methods from both tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 22 2

V$^{2}$-SAM: Marrying SAM2 with Multi-Prompt Experts for Cross-View Object Correspondence

Cross-view object correspondence, exemplified by the representative task of ego-exo object correspondence, aims to establish consistent associations of the same object across different viewpoints (e.g., ego-centric and exo-centric). This task poses significant challenges due to drastic viewpoint and appearance variations, making existing segmentation models, such as SAM2, non-trivial to apply directly. To address this, we present V^2-SAM, a unified cross-view object correspondence framework that adapts SAM2 from single-view segmentation to cross-view correspondence through two complementary prompt generators. Specifically, the Cross-View Anchor Prompt Generator (V^2-Anchor), built upon DINOv3 features, establishes geometry-aware correspondences and, for the first time, unlocks coordinate-based prompting for SAM2 in cross-view scenarios, while the Cross-View Visual Prompt Generator (V^2-Visual) enhances appearance-guided cues via a novel visual prompt matcher that aligns ego-exo representations from both feature and structural perspectives. To effectively exploit the strengths of both prompts, we further adopt a multi-expert design and introduce a Post-hoc Cyclic Consistency Selector (PCCS) that adaptively selects the most reliable expert based on cyclic consistency. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of V^2-SAM, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on Ego-Exo4D (ego-exo object correspondence), DAVIS-2017 (video object tracking), and HANDAL-X (robotic-ready cross-view correspondence).

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 25

Distilled Protein Backbone Generation

Diffusion- and flow-based generative models have recently demonstrated strong performance in protein backbone generation tasks, offering unprecedented capabilities for de novo protein design. However, while achieving notable performance in generation quality, these models are limited by their generating speed, often requiring hundreds of iterative steps in the reverse-diffusion process. This computational bottleneck limits their practical utility in large-scale protein discovery, where thousands to millions of candidate structures are needed. To address this challenge, we explore the techniques of score distillation, which has shown great success in reducing the number of sampling steps in the vision domain while maintaining high generation quality. However, a straightforward adaptation of these methods results in unacceptably low designability. Through extensive study, we have identified how to appropriately adapt Score identity Distillation (SiD), a state-of-the-art score distillation strategy, to train few-step protein backbone generators which significantly reduce sampling time, while maintaining comparable performance to their pretrained teacher model. In particular, multistep generation combined with inference time noise modulation is key to the success. We demonstrate that our distilled few-step generators achieve more than a 20-fold improvement in sampling speed, while achieving similar levels of designability, diversity, and novelty as the Proteina teacher model. This reduction in inference cost enables large-scale in silico protein design, thereby bringing diffusion-based models closer to real-world protein engineering applications. The PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/LY-Xie/SiD_Protein

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3

Empowering Vision-Language Models to Follow Interleaved Vision-Language Instructions

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently sparked significant interest, which demonstrates emergent capabilities to serve as a general-purpose model for various vision-language tasks. However, existing methods mainly focus on limited types of instructions with a single image as visual context, which hinders the widespread availability of MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce the I4 benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the instruction following ability on complicated interleaved vision-language instructions, which involve intricate image-text sequential context, covering a diverse range of scenarios (e.g., visually-rich webpages/textbooks, lecture slides, embodied dialogue). Systematic evaluation on our I4 benchmark reveals a common defect of existing methods: the Visual Prompt Generator (VPG) trained on image-captioning alignment objective tends to attend to common foreground information for captioning but struggles to extract specific information required by particular tasks. To address this issue, we propose a generic and lightweight controllable knowledge re-injection module, which utilizes the sophisticated reasoning ability of LLMs to control the VPG to conditionally extract instruction-specific visual information and re-inject it into the LLM. Further, we introduce an annotation-free cross-attention guided counterfactual image training strategy to methodically learn the proposed module by collaborating a cascade of foundation models. Enhanced by the proposed module and training strategy, we present Cheetor, a Transformer-based MLLM that can effectively handle a wide variety of interleaved vision-language instructions and achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all tasks of I4, without high-quality multimodal instruction tuning data. Cheetor also exhibits competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art instruction tuned models on MME benchmark.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 8, 2023

DATID-3D: Diversity-Preserved Domain Adaptation Using Text-to-Image Diffusion for 3D Generative Model

Recent 3D generative models have achieved remarkable performance in synthesizing high resolution photorealistic images with view consistency and detailed 3D shapes, but training them for diverse domains is challenging since it requires massive training images and their camera distribution information. Text-guided domain adaptation methods have shown impressive performance on converting the 2D generative model on one domain into the models on other domains with different styles by leveraging the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training), rather than collecting massive datasets for those domains. However, one drawback of them is that the sample diversity in the original generative model is not well-preserved in the domain-adapted generative models due to the deterministic nature of the CLIP text encoder. Text-guided domain adaptation will be even more challenging for 3D generative models not only because of catastrophic diversity loss, but also because of inferior text-image correspondence and poor image quality. Here we propose DATID-3D, a domain adaptation method tailored for 3D generative models using text-to-image diffusion models that can synthesize diverse images per text prompt without collecting additional images and camera information for the target domain. Unlike 3D extensions of prior text-guided domain adaptation methods, our novel pipeline was able to fine-tune the state-of-the-art 3D generator of the source domain to synthesize high resolution, multi-view consistent images in text-guided targeted domains without additional data, outperforming the existing text-guided domain adaptation methods in diversity and text-image correspondence. Furthermore, we propose and demonstrate diverse 3D image manipulations such as one-shot instance-selected adaptation and single-view manipulated 3D reconstruction to fully enjoy diversity in text.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 29, 2022

HumanRefiner: Benchmarking Abnormal Human Generation and Refining with Coarse-to-fine Pose-Reversible Guidance

Text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced in conditional image generation. However, these models usually struggle with accurately rendering images featuring humans, resulting in distorted limbs and other anomalies. This issue primarily stems from the insufficient recognition and evaluation of limb qualities in diffusion models. To address this issue, we introduce AbHuman, the first large-scale synthesized human benchmark focusing on anatomical anomalies. This benchmark consists of 56K synthesized human images, each annotated with detailed, bounding-box level labels identifying 147K human anomalies in 18 different categories. Based on this, the recognition of human anomalies can be established, which in turn enhances image generation through traditional techniques such as negative prompting and guidance. To further boost the improvement, we propose HumanRefiner, a novel plug-and-play approach for the coarse-to-fine refinement of human anomalies in text-to-image generation. Specifically, HumanRefiner utilizes a self-diagnostic procedure to detect and correct issues related to both coarse-grained abnormal human poses and fine-grained anomaly levels, facilitating pose-reversible diffusion generation. Experimental results on the AbHuman benchmark demonstrate that HumanRefiner significantly reduces generative discrepancies, achieving a 2.9x improvement in limb quality compared to the state-of-the-art open-source generator SDXL and a 1.4x improvement over DALL-E 3 in human evaluations. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Enderfga/HumanRefiner.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 9, 2024 1

From Generator to Embedder: Harnessing Innate Abilities of Multimodal LLMs via Building Zero-Shot Discriminative Embedding Model

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising solution for universal embedding tasks, yet adapting their generative nature for discriminative representation learning remains a significant challenge. The dominant paradigm of large-scale contrastive pre-training suffers from critical inefficiencies, including prohibitive computational costs and a failure to leverage the intrinsic, instruction-following capabilities of MLLMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose an efficient framework for universal multimodal embeddings, which bridges this gap by centering on two synergistic components. First, our hierarchical embedding prompt template employs a two-level instruction architecture that forces the model to produce discriminative representations. Building on this strong foundation, our second component, self-aware hard negative sampling, redefines the fine-tuning process by leveraging the model's own understanding to efficiently mine challenging negatives while actively filtering out potential false negatives. Our comprehensive experiments show that our hierarchical prompt achieves zero-shot performance competitive with contrastively trained baselines and enhances the fine-tuning process by lifting a simple in-batch negative baseline by 4.8 points on the MMEB benchmark. We further boost the performance via our self-aware hard negative sampling, achieving the state-of-the-art performance without the contrative pre-training. Our work presents an effective and efficient pathway to adapt MLLMs for universal embedding tasks, significantly reducing training time.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 1

PIGEON: Optimizing CUDA Code Generator for End-to-End Training and Inference of Relational Graph Neural Networks

Relational graph neural networks (RGNNs) are graph neural networks (GNNs) with dedicated structures for modeling the different types of nodes and/or edges in heterogeneous graphs. While RGNNs have been increasingly adopted in many real-world applications due to their versatility and accuracy, they pose performance and system design challenges due to their inherent computation patterns, gap between the programming interface and kernel APIs, and heavy programming efforts in optimizing kernels caused by their coupling with data layout and heterogeneity. To systematically address these challenges, we propose Pigeon, a novel two-level intermediate representation (IR) and its code generator framework, that (a) represents the key properties of the RGNN models to bridge the gap between the programming interface and kernel APIs, (b) decouples model semantics, data layout, and operators-specific optimization from each other to reduce programming efforts, (c) expresses and leverages optimization opportunities in inter-operator transforms, data layout, and operator-specific schedules. By building on one general matrix multiply (GEMM) template and a node/edge traversal template, Pigeon achieves up to 7.8x speed-up in inference and 5.6x speed-up in training compared with the state-of-the-art public systems in select models, i.e., RGCN, RGAT, HGT, when running heterogeneous graphs provided by Deep Graph Library (DGL) and Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Pigeon also triggers fewer out-of-memory (OOM) errors. In addition, we propose linear operator fusion and compact materialization to further accelerate the system by up to 2.2x.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 16, 2023

Re-Imagen: Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generator

Research on text-to-image generation has witnessed significant progress in generating diverse and photo-realistic images, driven by diffusion and auto-regressive models trained on large-scale image-text data. Though state-of-the-art models can generate high-quality images of common entities, they often have difficulty generating images of uncommon entities, such as `Chortai (dog)' or `Picarones (food)'. To tackle this issue, we present the Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generator (Re-Imagen), a generative model that uses retrieved information to produce high-fidelity and faithful images, even for rare or unseen entities. Given a text prompt, Re-Imagen accesses an external multi-modal knowledge base to retrieve relevant (image, text) pairs and uses them as references to generate the image. With this retrieval step, Re-Imagen is augmented with the knowledge of high-level semantics and low-level visual details of the mentioned entities, and thus improves its accuracy in generating the entities' visual appearances. We train Re-Imagen on a constructed dataset containing (image, text, retrieval) triples to teach the model to ground on both text prompt and retrieval. Furthermore, we develop a new sampling strategy to interleave the classifier-free guidance for text and retrieval conditions to balance the text and retrieval alignment. Re-Imagen achieves significant gain on FID score over COCO and WikiImage. To further evaluate the capabilities of the model, we introduce EntityDrawBench, a new benchmark that evaluates image generation for diverse entities, from frequent to rare, across multiple object categories including dogs, foods, landmarks, birds, and characters. Human evaluation on EntityDrawBench shows that Re-Imagen can significantly improve the fidelity of generated images, especially on less frequent entities.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 28, 2022

Symbolic Semantic Segmentation and Interpretation of COVID-19 Lung Infections in Chest CT volumes based on Emergent Languages

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has resulted in a pandemic crippling the a breadth of services critical to daily life. Segmentation of lung infections in computerized tomography (CT) slices could be be used to improve diagnosis and understanding of COVID-19 in patients. Deep learning systems lack interpretability because of their black box nature. Inspired by human communication of complex ideas through language, we propose a symbolic framework based on emergent languages for the segmentation of COVID-19 infections in CT scans of lungs. We model the cooperation between two artificial agents - a Sender and a Receiver. These agents synergistically cooperate using emergent symbolic language to solve the task of semantic segmentation. Our game theoretic approach is to model the cooperation between agents unlike Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The Sender retrieves information from one of the higher layers of the deep network and generates a symbolic sentence sampled from a categorical distribution of vocabularies. The Receiver ingests the stream of symbols and cogenerates the segmentation mask. A private emergent language is developed that forms the communication channel used to describe the task of segmentation of COVID infections. We augment existing state of the art semantic segmentation architectures with our symbolic generator to form symbolic segmentation models. Our symbolic segmentation framework achieves state of the art performance for segmentation of lung infections caused by COVID-19. Our results show direct interpretation of symbolic sentences to discriminate between normal and infected regions, infection morphology and image characteristics. We show state of the art results for segmentation of COVID-19 lung infections in CT.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 22, 2020

PosterLLaVa: Constructing a Unified Multi-modal Layout Generator with LLM

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024 2

Noise Consistency Training: A Native Approach for One-Step Generator in Learning Additional Controls

The pursuit of efficient and controllable high-quality content generation remains a central challenge in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC). While one-step generators, enabled by diffusion distillation techniques, offer excellent generation quality and computational efficiency, adapting them to new control conditions--such as structural constraints, semantic guidelines, or external inputs--poses a significant challenge. Conventional approaches often necessitate computationally expensive modifications to the base model and subsequent diffusion distillation. This paper introduces Noise Consistency Training (NCT), a novel and lightweight approach to directly integrate new control signals into pre-trained one-step generators without requiring access to original training images or retraining the base diffusion model. NCT operates by introducing an adapter module and employs a noise consistency loss in the noise space of the generator. This loss aligns the adapted model's generation behavior across noises that are conditionally dependent to varying degrees, implicitly guiding it to adhere to the new control. Theoretically, this training objective can be understood as minimizing the distributional distance between the adapted generator and the conditional distribution induced by the new conditions. NCT is modular, data-efficient, and easily deployable, relying only on the pre-trained one-step generator and a control signal model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCT achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation in a single forward pass, surpassing existing multi-step and distillation-based methods in both generation quality and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/NCT

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24 1

RL Tango: Reinforcing Generator and Verifier Together for Language Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a compelling approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), where an LLM generator serves as a policy guided by a verifier (reward model). However, current RL post-training methods for LLMs typically use verifiers that are fixed (rule-based or frozen pretrained) or trained discriminatively via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Such designs are susceptible to reward hacking and generalize poorly beyond their training distributions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Tango, a novel framework that uses RL to concurrently train both an LLM generator and a verifier in an interleaved manner. A central innovation of Tango is its generative, process-level LLM verifier, which is trained via RL and co-evolves with the generator. Importantly, the verifier is trained solely based on outcome-level verification correctness rewards without requiring explicit process-level annotations. This generative RL-trained verifier exhibits improved robustness and superior generalization compared to deterministic or SFT-trained verifiers, fostering effective mutual reinforcement with the generator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both components of Tango achieve state-of-the-art results among 7B/8B-scale models: the generator attains best-in-class performance across five competition-level math benchmarks and four challenging out-of-domain reasoning tasks, while the verifier leads on the ProcessBench dataset. Remarkably, both components exhibit particularly substantial improvements on the most difficult mathematical reasoning problems. Code is at: https://github.com/kaiwenzha/rl-tango.

  • 6 authors
·
May 20 2

SVDFormer: Complementing Point Cloud via Self-view Augmentation and Self-structure Dual-generator

In this paper, we propose a novel network, SVDFormer, to tackle two specific challenges in point cloud completion: understanding faithful global shapes from incomplete point clouds and generating high-accuracy local structures. Current methods either perceive shape patterns using only 3D coordinates or import extra images with well-calibrated intrinsic parameters to guide the geometry estimation of the missing parts. However, these approaches do not always fully leverage the cross-modal self-structures available for accurate and high-quality point cloud completion. To this end, we first design a Self-view Fusion Network that leverages multiple-view depth image information to observe incomplete self-shape and generate a compact global shape. To reveal highly detailed structures, we then introduce a refinement module, called Self-structure Dual-generator, in which we incorporate learned shape priors and geometric self-similarities for producing new points. By perceiving the incompleteness of each point, the dual-path design disentangles refinement strategies conditioned on the structural type of each point. SVDFormer absorbs the wisdom of self-structures, avoiding any additional paired information such as color images with precisely calibrated camera intrinsic parameters. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely-used benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/czvvd/SVDFormer.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 17, 2023

XiYan-SQL: A Multi-Generator Ensemble Framework for Text-to-SQL

To tackle the challenges of large language model performance in natural language to SQL tasks, we introduce XiYan-SQL, an innovative framework that employs a multi-generator ensemble strategy to improve candidate generation. We introduce M-Schema, a semi-structured schema representation method designed to enhance the understanding of database structures. To enhance the quality and diversity of generated candidate SQL queries, XiYan-SQL integrates the significant potential of in-context learning (ICL) with the precise control of supervised fine-tuning. On one hand, we propose a series of training strategies to fine-tune models to generate high-quality candidates with diverse preferences. On the other hand, we implement the ICL approach with an example selection method based on named entity recognition to prevent overemphasis on entities. The refiner optimizes each candidate by correcting logical or syntactical errors. To address the challenge of identifying the best candidate, we fine-tune a selection model to distinguish nuances of candidate SQL queries. The experimental results on multiple dialect datasets demonstrate the robustness of XiYan-SQL in addressing challenges across different scenarios. Overall, our proposed XiYan-SQL achieves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 89.65% on the Spider test set, 69.86% on SQL-Eval, 41.20% on NL2GQL, and a competitive score of 72.23% on the Bird development benchmark. The proposed framework not only enhances the quality and diversity of SQL queries but also outperforms previous methods.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 13, 2024

LoopTool: Closing the Data-Training Loop for Robust LLM Tool Calls

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to execute complex, multi-step tasks. However, tool learning is hampered by the static synthetic data pipelines where data generation and model training are executed as two separate, non-interactive processes. This approach fails to adaptively focus on a model's specific weaknesses and allows noisy labels to persist, degrading training efficiency. We introduce LoopTool, a fully automated, model-aware data evolution framework that closes this loop by tightly integrating data synthesis and model training. LoopTool iteratively refines both the data and the model through three synergistic modules: (1) Greedy Capability Probing (GCP) diagnoses the model's mastered and failed capabilities; (2) Judgement-Guided Label Verification (JGLV) uses an open-source judge model to find and correct annotation errors, progressively purifying the dataset; and (3) Error-Driven Data Expansion (EDDE) generates new, challenging samples based on identified failures. This closed-loop process operates within a cost-effective, open-source ecosystem, eliminating dependence on expensive closed-source APIs. Experiments show that our 8B model trained with LoopTool significantly surpasses its 32B data generator and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the BFCL-v3 and ACEBench benchmarks for its scale. Our work demonstrates that closed-loop, self-refining data pipelines can dramatically enhance the tool-use capabilities of LLMs.

GENERator: A Long-Context Generative Genomic Foundation Model

Advancements in DNA sequencing technologies have significantly improved our ability to decode genomic sequences. However, the prediction and interpretation of these sequences remain challenging due to the intricate nature of genetic material. Large language models (LLMs) have introduced new opportunities for biological sequence analysis. Recent developments in genomic language models have underscored the potential of LLMs in deciphering DNA sequences. Nonetheless, existing models often face limitations in robustness and application scope, primarily due to constraints in model structure and training data scale. To address these limitations, we present GENERator, a generative genomic foundation model featuring a context length of 98k base pairs (bp) and 1.2B parameters. Trained on an expansive dataset comprising 386B bp of eukaryotic DNA, the GENERator demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across both established and newly proposed benchmarks. The model adheres to the central dogma of molecular biology, accurately generating protein-coding sequences that translate into proteins structurally analogous to known families. It also shows significant promise in sequence optimization, particularly through the prompt-responsive generation of promoter sequences with specific activity profiles. These capabilities position the GENERator as a pivotal tool for genomic research and biotechnological advancement, enhancing our ability to interpret and predict complex biological systems and enabling precise genomic interventions.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 11

Can LLMs Be Trusted for Evaluating RAG Systems? A Survey of Methods and Datasets

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced significantly in recent years. The complexity of RAG systems, which involve multiple components-such as indexing, retrieval, and generation-along with numerous other parameters, poses substantial challenges for systematic evaluation and quality enhancement. Previous research highlights that evaluating RAG systems is essential for documenting advancements, comparing configurations, and identifying effective approaches for domain-specific applications. This study systematically reviews 63 academic articles to provide a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art RAG evaluation methodologies, focusing on four key areas: datasets, retrievers, indexing and databases, and the generator component. We observe the feasibility of an automated evaluation approach for each component of a RAG system, leveraging an LLM capable of both generating evaluation datasets and conducting evaluations. In addition, we found that further practical research is essential to provide companies with clear guidance on the do's and don'ts of implementing and evaluating RAG systems. By synthesizing evaluation approaches for key RAG components and emphasizing the creation and adaptation of domain-specific datasets for benchmarking, we contribute to the advancement of systematic evaluation methods and the improvement of evaluation rigor for RAG systems. Furthermore, by examining the interplay between automated approaches leveraging LLMs and human judgment, we contribute to the ongoing discourse on balancing automation and human input, clarifying their respective contributions, limitations, and challenges in achieving robust and reliable evaluations.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 28

Step1X-3D: Towards High-Fidelity and Controllable Generation of Textured 3D Assets

While generative artificial intelligence has advanced significantly across text, image, audio, and video domains, 3D generation remains comparatively underdeveloped due to fundamental challenges such as data scarcity, algorithmic limitations, and ecosystem fragmentation. To this end, we present Step1X-3D, an open framework addressing these challenges through: (1) a rigorous data curation pipeline processing >5M assets to create a 2M high-quality dataset with standardized geometric and textural properties; (2) a two-stage 3D-native architecture combining a hybrid VAE-DiT geometry generator with an diffusion-based texture synthesis module; and (3) the full open-source release of models, training code, and adaptation modules. For geometry generation, the hybrid VAE-DiT component produces TSDF representations by employing perceiver-based latent encoding with sharp edge sampling for detail preservation. The diffusion-based texture synthesis module then ensures cross-view consistency through geometric conditioning and latent-space synchronization. Benchmark results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance that exceeds existing open-source methods, while also achieving competitive quality with proprietary solutions. Notably, the framework uniquely bridges the 2D and 3D generation paradigms by supporting direct transfer of 2D control techniques~(e.g., LoRA) to 3D synthesis. By simultaneously advancing data quality, algorithmic fidelity, and reproducibility, Step1X-3D aims to establish new standards for open research in controllable 3D asset generation.

  • 18 authors
·
May 12 3

LargePiG: Your Large Language Model is Secretly a Pointer Generator

Recent research on query generation has focused on using Large Language Models (LLMs), which despite bringing state-of-the-art performance, also introduce issues with hallucinations in the generated queries. In this work, we introduce relevance hallucination and factuality hallucination as a new typology for hallucination problems brought by query generation based on LLMs. We propose an effective way to separate content from form in LLM-generated queries, which preserves the factual knowledge extracted and integrated from the inputs and compiles the syntactic structure, including function words, using the powerful linguistic capabilities of the LLM. Specifically, we introduce a model-agnostic and training-free method that turns the Large Language Model into a Pointer-Generator (LargePiG), where the pointer attention distribution leverages the LLM's inherent attention weights, and the copy probability is derived from the difference between the vocabulary distribution of the model's high layers and the last layer. To validate the effectiveness of LargePiG, we constructed two datasets for assessing the hallucination problems in query generation, covering both document and video scenarios. Empirical studies on various LLMs demonstrated the superiority of LargePiG on both datasets. Additional experiments also verified that LargePiG could reduce hallucination in large vision language models and improve the accuracy of document-based question-answering and factuality evaluation tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024

Language-Guided Image Tokenization for Generation

Image tokenization, the process of transforming raw image pixels into a compact low-dimensional latent representation, has proven crucial for scalable and efficient image generation. However, mainstream image tokenization methods generally have limited compression rates, making high-resolution image generation computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we propose to leverage language for efficient image tokenization, and we call our method Text-Conditioned Image Tokenization (TexTok). TexTok is a simple yet effective tokenization framework that leverages language to provide high-level semantics. By conditioning the tokenization process on descriptive text captions, TexTok allows the tokenization process to focus on encoding fine-grained visual details into latent tokens, leading to enhanced reconstruction quality and higher compression rates. Compared to the conventional tokenizer without text conditioning, TexTok achieves average reconstruction FID improvements of 29.2% and 48.1% on ImageNet-256 and -512 benchmarks respectively, across varying numbers of tokens. These tokenization improvements consistently translate to 16.3% and 34.3% average improvements in generation FID. By simply replacing the tokenizer in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) with TexTok, our system can achieve a 93.5x inference speedup while still outperforming the original DiT using only 32 tokens on ImageNet-512. TexTok with a vanilla DiT generator achieves state-of-the-art FID scores of 1.46 and 1.62 on ImageNet-256 and -512 respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate TexTok's superiority on the text-to-image generation task, effectively utilizing the off-the-shelf text captions in tokenization.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 7, 2024

Rewards Are Enough for Fast Photo-Realistic Text-to-image Generation

Aligning generated images to complicated text prompts and human preferences is a central challenge in Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC). With reward-enhanced diffusion distillation emerging as a promising approach that boosts controllability and fidelity of text-to-image models, we identify a fundamental paradigm shift: as conditions become more specific and reward signals stronger, the rewards themselves become the dominant force in generation. In contrast, the diffusion losses serve as an overly expensive form of regularization. To thoroughly validate our hypothesis, we introduce R0, a novel conditional generation approach via regularized reward maximization. Instead of relying on tricky diffusion distillation losses, R0 proposes a new perspective that treats image generations as an optimization problem in data space which aims to search for valid images that have high compositional rewards. By innovative designs of the generator parameterization and proper regularization techniques, we train state-of-the-art few-step text-to-image generative models with R0 at scales. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom of diffusion post-training and conditional generation by demonstrating that rewards play a dominant role in scenarios with complex conditions. We hope our findings can contribute to further research into human-centric and reward-centric generation paradigms across the broader field of AIGC. Code is available at https://github.com/Luo-Yihong/R0.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17 2

Continuous-Multiple Image Outpainting in One-Step via Positional Query and A Diffusion-based Approach

Image outpainting aims to generate the content of an input sub-image beyond its original boundaries. It is an important task in content generation yet remains an open problem for generative models. This paper pushes the technical frontier of image outpainting in two directions that have not been resolved in literature: 1) outpainting with arbitrary and continuous multiples (without restriction), and 2) outpainting in a single step (even for large expansion multiples). Moreover, we develop a method that does not depend on a pre-trained backbone network, which is in contrast commonly required by the previous SOTA outpainting methods. The arbitrary multiple outpainting is achieved by utilizing randomly cropped views from the same image during training to capture arbitrary relative positional information. Specifically, by feeding one view and positional embeddings as queries, we can reconstruct another view. At inference, we generate images with arbitrary expansion multiples by inputting an anchor image and its corresponding positional embeddings. The one-step outpainting ability here is particularly noteworthy in contrast to previous methods that need to be performed for N times to obtain a final multiple which is N times of its basic and fixed multiple. We evaluate the proposed approach (called PQDiff as we adopt a diffusion-based generator as our embodiment, under our proposed Positional Query scheme) on public benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, PQDiff achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on the Scenery (21.512), Building Facades (25.310), and WikiArts (36.212) datasets. Furthermore, under the 2.25x, 5x and 11.7x outpainting settings, PQDiff only takes 40.6\%, 20.3\% and 10.2\% of the time of the benchmark state-of-the-art (SOTA) method.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 28, 2024

Refining Text-to-Image Generation: Towards Accurate Training-Free Glyph-Enhanced Image Generation

Over the past few years, Text-to-Image (T2I) generation approaches based on diffusion models have gained significant attention. However, vanilla diffusion models often suffer from spelling inaccuracies in the text displayed within the generated images. The capability to generate visual text is crucial, offering both academic interest and a wide range of practical applications. To produce accurate visual text images, state-of-the-art techniques adopt a glyph-controlled image generation approach, consisting of a text layout generator followed by an image generator that is conditioned on the generated text layout. Nevertheless, our study reveals that these models still face three primary challenges, prompting us to develop a testbed to facilitate future research. We introduce a benchmark, LenCom-Eval, specifically designed for testing models' capability in generating images with Lengthy and Complex visual text. Subsequently, we introduce a training-free framework to enhance the two-stage generation approaches. We examine the effectiveness of our approach on both LenCom-Eval and MARIO-Eval benchmarks and demonstrate notable improvements across a range of evaluation metrics, including CLIPScore, OCR precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy, and edit distance scores. For instance, our proposed framework improves the backbone model, TextDiffuser, by more than 23\% and 13.5\% in terms of OCR word F1 on LenCom-Eval and MARIO-Eval, respectively. Our work makes a unique contribution to the field by focusing on generating images with long and rare text sequences, a niche previously unexplored by existing literature

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

SSS: Semi-Supervised SAM-2 with Efficient Prompting for Medical Imaging Segmentation

In the era of information explosion, efficiently leveraging large-scale unlabeled data while minimizing the reliance on high-quality pixel-level annotations remains a critical challenge in the field of medical imaging. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) enhances the utilization of unlabeled data by facilitating knowledge transfer, significantly improving the performance of fully supervised models and emerging as a highly promising research direction in medical image analysis. Inspired by the ability of Vision Foundation Models (e.g., SAM-2) to provide rich prior knowledge, we propose SSS (Semi-Supervised SAM-2), a novel approach that leverages SAM-2's robust feature extraction capabilities to uncover latent knowledge in unlabeled medical images, thus effectively enhancing feature support for fully supervised medical image segmentation. Specifically, building upon the single-stream "weak-to-strong" consistency regularization framework, this paper introduces a Discriminative Feature Enhancement (DFE) mechanism to further explore the feature discrepancies introduced by various data augmentation strategies across multiple views. By leveraging feature similarity and dissimilarity across multi-scale augmentation techniques, the method reconstructs and models the features, thereby effectively optimizing the salient regions. Furthermore, a prompt generator is developed that integrates Physical Constraints with a Sliding Window (PCSW) mechanism to generate input prompts for unlabeled data, fulfilling SAM-2's requirement for additional prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for semi-supervised medical image segmentation on two multi-label datasets, i.e., ACDC and BHSD. Notably, SSS achieves an average Dice score of 53.15 on BHSD, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art method by +3.65 Dice. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/SSS.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10

Dark Side Augmentation: Generating Diverse Night Examples for Metric Learning

Image retrieval methods based on CNN descriptors rely on metric learning from a large number of diverse examples of positive and negative image pairs. Domains, such as night-time images, with limited availability and variability of training data suffer from poor retrieval performance even with methods performing well on standard benchmarks. We propose to train a GAN-based synthetic-image generator, translating available day-time image examples into night images. Such a generator is used in metric learning as a form of augmentation, supplying training data to the scarce domain. Various types of generators are evaluated and analyzed. We contribute with a novel light-weight GAN architecture that enforces the consistency between the original and translated image through edge consistency. The proposed architecture also allows a simultaneous training of an edge detector that operates on both night and day images. To further increase the variability in the training examples and to maximize the generalization of the trained model, we propose a novel method of diverse anchor mining. The proposed method improves over the state-of-the-art results on a standard Tokyo 24/7 day-night retrieval benchmark while preserving the performance on Oxford and Paris datasets. This is achieved without the need of training image pairs of matching day and night images. The source code is available at https://github.com/mohwald/gandtr .

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 28, 2023

Visual Decoding and Reconstruction via EEG Embeddings with Guided Diffusion

How to decode human vision through neural signals has attracted a long-standing interest in neuroscience and machine learning. Modern contrastive learning and generative models improved the performance of fMRI-based visual decoding and reconstruction. However, the high cost and low temporal resolution of fMRI limit their applications in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), prompting a high need for EEG-based visual reconstruction. In this study, we present an EEG-based visual reconstruction framework. It consists of a plug-and-play EEG encoder called the Adaptive Thinking Mapper (ATM), which is aligned with image embeddings, and a two-stage EEG guidance image generator that first transforms EEG features into image priors and then reconstructs the visual stimuli with a pre-trained image generator. Our approach allows EEG embeddings to achieve superior performance in image classification and retrieval tasks. Our two-stage image generation strategy vividly reconstructs images seen by humans. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of signals from different time windows and brain regions on decoding and reconstruction. The versatility of our framework is demonstrated in the magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data modality. We report that EEG-based visual decoding achieves SOTA performance, highlighting the portability, low cost, and high temporal resolution of EEG, enabling a wide range of BCI applications. The code of ATM is available at https://github.com/dongyangli-del/EEG_Image_decode.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

Socratic-Zero : Bootstrapping Reasoning via Data-Free Agent Co-evolution

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks rely heavily on massive, high-quality datasets-typically human-annotated and thus difficult to scale. While data synthesis or distillation offers a promising alternative, existing methods struggle with inconsistent data quality and an inability to dynamically adapt to the evolving capabilities of the model, leading to suboptimal training signals. To address these limitations, we introduce Socratic-Zero, a fully autonomous framework that generates high-quality training data from minimal seed examples through the co-evolution of three agents: the Teacher, the Solver, and the Generator. The Solver continuously refines its reasoning by learning from preference feedback on both successful and failed trajectories; the Teacher adaptively crafts increasingly challenging questions based on the Solver's weaknesses; and the Generator distills the Teacher's question-design strategy to enable scalable, high-fidelity curriculum generation. This closed-loop system produces a self-improving curriculum-requiring no pre-existing tasks or labels. Remarkably, starting from only 100 seed questions, our Socratic-Solver-8B achieves an average gain of +20.2 percentage points over prior data synthesis methods across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks (AMC23, AIME24-25, Olympiad, MATH-500, Minerva, and GSM8K), with consistent gains on both Qwen3 and GLM4 series models. Even more surprisingly, synthetic data from Socratic-Generator-32B enables student LLMs to achieve superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) commercial LLMs on these benchmarks, including Qwen3-235B-A22B, DeepSeek-V3.1-671B, GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-Pro, Grok-4, and Claude-4.1-Opus.

alibaba-inc alibaba-inc
·
Sep 29 1

When Reasoning Beats Scale: A 1.5B Reasoning Model Outranks 13B LLMs as Discriminator

Large Language Models (LLM) with reasoning capabilities offer a promising path for improving candidate evaluation in planning frameworks, but their relative performance against traditional non-reasoning models remains largely underexplored. In this study, we benchmark a distilled 1.5B parameter reasoning model (DeepSeek-R1) against several state-of-the-art non-reasoning LLMs within a generator-discriminator LLM planning framework for the text-to-SQL task. For this, we introduce a novel method for extracting soft scores from the chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs from reasoning that enables fine-grained ranking of candidates. Our central hypothesis is that reasoning models are more effective discriminators than non-reasoning LLMs. Our results show that distilled DeepSeek-R1-1.5B achieves up to 87% higher F1 and 3.7% better discrimination accuracy than CodeLlama-7B, as well as 3.7% higher execution accuracy than CodeLlama-13B, despite having significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we find that there is a limit to the logical capabilities of reasoning models, and only providing more context or allowing more compute budget for reasoning is not enough to improve their discrimination performance. Finally, we demonstrate that, unlike non-reasoning LLMs, reasoning models find generation more challenging than discrimination and may underperform as generators compared to smaller non-reasoning LLMs. Our work highlights the potential of reasoning models as discriminators in agentic frameworks, far outweighing their capabilities as generators, offering insights into their optimal role within LLM planning infrastructures.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 30

Accelerating High-Fidelity Waveform Generation via Adversarial Flow Matching Optimization

This paper introduces PeriodWave-Turbo, a high-fidelity and high-efficient waveform generation model via adversarial flow matching optimization. Recently, conditional flow matching (CFM) generative models have been successfully adopted for waveform generation tasks, leveraging a single vector field estimation objective for training. Although these models can generate high-fidelity waveform signals, they require significantly more ODE steps compared to GAN-based models, which only need a single generation step. Additionally, the generated samples often lack high-frequency information due to noisy vector field estimation, which fails to ensure high-frequency reproduction. To address this limitation, we enhance pre-trained CFM-based generative models by incorporating a fixed-step generator modification. We utilized reconstruction losses and adversarial feedback to accelerate high-fidelity waveform generation. Through adversarial flow matching optimization, it only requires 1,000 steps of fine-tuning to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various objective metrics. Moreover, we significantly reduce inference speed from 16 steps to 2 or 4 steps. Additionally, by scaling up the backbone of PeriodWave from 29M to 70M parameters for improved generalization, PeriodWave-Turbo achieves unprecedented performance, with a perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) score of 4.454 on the LibriTTS dataset. Audio samples, source code and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/sh-lee-prml/PeriodWave.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 4

InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation with its exceptional quality and creativity. However, its multi-step sampling process is known to be slow, often requiring tens of inference steps to obtain satisfactory results. Previous attempts to improve its sampling speed and reduce computational costs through distillation have been unsuccessful in achieving a functional one-step model. In this paper, we explore a recent method called Rectified Flow, which, thus far, has only been applied to small datasets. The core of Rectified Flow lies in its reflow procedure, which straightens the trajectories of probability flows, refines the coupling between noises and images, and facilitates the distillation process with student models. We propose a novel text-conditioned pipeline to turn Stable Diffusion (SD) into an ultra-fast one-step model, in which we find reflow plays a critical role in improving the assignment between noise and images. Leveraging our new pipeline, we create, to the best of our knowledge, the first one-step diffusion-based text-to-image generator with SD-level image quality, achieving an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) of 23.3 on MS COCO 2017-5k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art technique, progressive distillation, by a significant margin (37.2 rightarrow 23.3 in FID). By utilizing an expanded network with 1.7B parameters, we further improve the FID to 22.4. We call our one-step models InstaFlow. On MS COCO 2014-30k, InstaFlow yields an FID of 13.1 in just 0.09 second, the best in leq 0.1 second regime, outperforming the recent StyleGAN-T (13.9 in 0.1 second). Notably, the training of InstaFlow only costs 199 A100 GPU days. Project page:~https://github.com/gnobitab/InstaFlow.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 12, 2023 1

Prismatic Synthesis: Gradient-based Data Diversification Boosts Generalization in LLM Reasoning

Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data. Yet existing diversity metrics often fall short of this goal, relying on surface-level heuristics that are decoupled from model behavior. This motivates us to ask: What kind of diversity in training data actually drives generalization in language models -- and how can we measure and amplify it? Through large-scale empirical analyses spanning over 300 training runs, carefully controlled for data scale and quality, we show that data diversity can be a strong predictor of generalization in LLM reasoning -- as measured by average model performance on unseen out-of-distribution benchmarks. We introduce G-Vendi, a metric that quantifies diversity via the entropy of model-induced gradients. Despite using a small off-the-shelf proxy model for gradients, G-Vendi consistently outperforms alternative measures, achieving strong correlation (Spearman's rho approx 0.9) with out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on both natural language inference (NLI) and math reasoning tasks. Building on this insight, we present Prismatic Synthesis, a framework for generating diverse synthetic data by targeting underrepresented regions in gradient space. Experimental results show that Prismatic Synthesis consistently improves model performance as we scale synthetic data -- not just on in-distribution test but across unseen, out-of-distribution benchmarks -- significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models that rely on 20 times larger data generator than ours. For example, PrismMath-7B, our model distilled from a 32B LLM, outperforms R1-Distill-Qwen-7B -- the same base model trained on proprietary data generated by 671B R1 -- on 6 out of 7 challenging benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
·
May 26

Doracamom: Joint 3D Detection and Occupancy Prediction with Multi-view 4D Radars and Cameras for Omnidirectional Perception

3D object detection and occupancy prediction are critical tasks in autonomous driving, attracting significant attention. Despite the potential of recent vision-based methods, they encounter challenges under adverse conditions. Thus, integrating cameras with next-generation 4D imaging radar to achieve unified multi-task perception is highly significant, though research in this domain remains limited. In this paper, we propose Doracamom, the first framework that fuses multi-view cameras and 4D radar for joint 3D object detection and semantic occupancy prediction, enabling comprehensive environmental perception. Specifically, we introduce a novel Coarse Voxel Queries Generator that integrates geometric priors from 4D radar with semantic features from images to initialize voxel queries, establishing a robust foundation for subsequent Transformer-based refinement. To leverage temporal information, we design a Dual-Branch Temporal Encoder that processes multi-modal temporal features in parallel across BEV and voxel spaces, enabling comprehensive spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-Modal BEV-Voxel Fusion module that adaptively fuses complementary features through attention mechanisms while employing auxiliary tasks to enhance feature quality. Extensive experiments on the OmniHD-Scenes, View-of-Delft (VoD), and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate that Doracamom achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tasks, establishing new benchmarks for multi-modal 3D perception. Code and models will be publicly available.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 25

PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation

While previous audio-driven talking head generation (THG) methods generate head poses from driving audio, the generated poses or lips cannot match the audio well or are not editable. In this study, we propose PoseTalk, a THG system that can freely generate lip-synchronized talking head videos with free head poses conditioned on text prompts and audio. The core insight of our method is using head pose to connect visual, linguistic, and audio signals. First, we propose to generate poses from both audio and text prompts, where the audio offers short-term variations and rhythm correspondence of the head movements and the text prompts describe the long-term semantics of head motions. To achieve this goal, we devise a Pose Latent Diffusion (PLD) model to generate motion latent from text prompts and audio cues in a pose latent space. Second, we observe a loss-imbalance problem: the loss for the lip region contributes less than 4\% of the total reconstruction loss caused by both pose and lip, making optimization lean towards head movements rather than lip shapes. To address this issue, we propose a refinement-based learning strategy to synthesize natural talking videos using two cascaded networks, i.e., CoarseNet, and RefineNet. The CoarseNet estimates coarse motions to produce animated images in novel poses and the RefineNet focuses on learning finer lip motions by progressively estimating lip motions from low-to-high resolutions, yielding improved lip-synchronization performance. Experiments demonstrate our pose prediction strategy achieves better pose diversity and realness compared to text-only or audio-only, and our video generator model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing talking videos with natural head motions. Project: https://junleen.github.io/projects/posetalk.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024

ConCuR: Conciseness Makes State-of-the-Art Kernel Generation

GPU kernel generation by LLMs has recently experienced rapid development, leveraging test-time scaling and reinforcement learning techniques. However, a key challenge for kernel generation is the scarcity of high-quality data, as most high-quality kernels are proprietary and not open-source. This challenge prevents us from leveraging supervised fine-tuning to align LLMs to the kernel generation task. To address this challenge, we develop a pipeline that generates and curates high-quality CUDA kernels with reasoning traces, motivated by a critical observation that concise yet informative reasoning traces result in robust generation of high-performance kernels. Using this pipeline, we construct our dataset ConCuR and introduce our model KernelCoder, which is the first model trained on a curated dataset consisting of PyTorch, reasoning, and CUDA kernel pairs, to our knowledge. In the KernelBench setup, our model achieves significant improvements over the existing top-performing model, QwQ-32B, and outperforms all open-source models fine-tuned for kernel generation, as well as frontier models such as DeepSeek-V3.1-Think and Claude-4-sonnet. Finally, we show that the average reasoning length can serve as a metric to assess the difficulty of kernel generation tasks. The observations, metrics, and our data collection and curation pipeline can help obtain better data in the kernel generation task in the future.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 8

On the Role of Attention Heads in Large Language Model Safety

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple language tasks, yet their safety guardrails can be circumvented, leading to harmful generations. In light of this, recent research on safety mechanisms has emerged, revealing that when safety representations or component are suppressed, the safety capability of LLMs are compromised. However, existing research tends to overlook the safety impact of multi-head attention mechanisms, despite their crucial role in various model functionalities. Hence, in this paper, we aim to explore the connection between standard attention mechanisms and safety capability to fill this gap in the safety-related mechanistic interpretability. We propose a novel metric which tailored for multi-head attention, the Safety Head ImPortant Score (Ships), to assess the individual heads' contributions to model safety. Based on this, we generalize Ships to the dataset level and further introduce the Safety Attention Head AttRibution Algorithm (Sahara) to attribute the critical safety attention heads inside the model. Our findings show that the special attention head has a significant impact on safety. Ablating a single safety head allows aligned model (e.g., Llama-2-7b-chat) to respond to 16 times more harmful queries, while only modifying 0.006% of the parameters, in contrast to the ~ 5% modification required in previous studies. More importantly, we demonstrate that attention heads primarily function as feature extractors for safety and models fine-tuned from the same base model exhibit overlapping safety heads through comprehensive experiments. Together, our attribution approach and findings provide a novel perspective for unpacking the black box of safety mechanisms within large models.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 17, 2024