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Dec 10

Are They the Same? Exploring Visual Correspondence Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs

Recent advancements in multimodal models have shown a strong ability in visual perception, reasoning abilities, and vision-language understanding. However, studies on visual matching ability are missing, where finding the visual correspondence of objects is essential in vision research. Our research reveals that the matching capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings, even with current strong MLLMs models, GPT-4o. In particular, we construct a Multimodal Visual Matching (MMVM) benchmark to fairly benchmark over 30 different MLLMs. The MMVM benchmark is built from 15 open-source datasets and Internet videos with manual annotation. We categorize the data samples of MMVM benchmark into eight aspects based on the required cues and capabilities to more comprehensively evaluate and analyze current MLLMs. In addition, we have designed an automatic annotation pipeline to generate the MMVM SFT dataset, including 220K visual matching data with reasoning annotation. Finally, we present CoLVA, a novel contrastive MLLM with two novel technical designs: fine-grained vision expert with object-level contrastive learning and instruction augmentation strategy. CoLVA achieves 51.06\% overall accuracy (OA) on the MMVM benchmark, surpassing GPT-4o and baseline by 8.41\% and 23.58\% OA, respectively. The results show the effectiveness of our MMVM SFT dataset and our novel technical designs. Code, benchmark, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhouyiks/CoLVA.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 8

VideoGPT+: Integrating Image and Video Encoders for Enhanced Video Understanding

Building on the advances of language models, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have contributed significant improvements in video understanding. While the current video LMMs utilize advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), they rely on either image or video encoders to process visual inputs, each of which has its own limitations. Image encoders excel at capturing rich spatial details from frame sequences but lack explicit temporal context, which can be important in videos with intricate action sequences. On the other hand, video encoders provide temporal context but are often limited by computational constraints that lead to processing only sparse frames at lower resolutions, resulting in reduced contextual and spatial understanding. To this end, we introduce VideoGPT+, which combines the complementary benefits of the image encoder (for detailed spatial understanding) and the video encoder (for global temporal context modeling). The model processes videos by dividing them into smaller segments and applies an adaptive pooling strategy on features extracted by both image and video encoders. Our architecture showcases improved performance across multiple video benchmarks, including VCGBench, MVBench and Zero-shot question-answering. Further, we develop 112K video-instruction set using a novel semi-automatic annotation pipeline which further improves the model performance. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate video LMMs, we present VCGBench-Diverse, covering 18 broad video categories such as lifestyle, sports, science, gaming, and surveillance videos. This benchmark with 4,354 question-answer pairs evaluates the generalization of existing LMMs on dense video captioning, spatial and temporal understanding, and complex reasoning, ensuring comprehensive assessment across diverse video types and dynamics. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/VideoGPT-plus.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

MIMIC-IT: Multi-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning

High-quality instructions and responses are essential for the zero-shot performance of large language models on interactive natural language tasks. For interactive vision-language tasks involving intricate visual scenes, a large quantity of diverse and creative instruction-response pairs should be imperative to tune vision-language models (VLMs). Nevertheless, the current availability of vision-language instruction-response pairs in terms of quantity, diversity, and creativity remains limited, posing challenges to the generalization of interactive VLMs. Here we present MultI-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning (MIMIC-IT), a dataset comprising 2.8 million multimodal instruction-response pairs, with 2.2 million unique instructions derived from images and videos. Each pair is accompanied by multi-modal in-context information, forming conversational contexts aimed at empowering VLMs in perception, reasoning, and planning. The instruction-response collection process, dubbed as Syphus, is scaled using an automatic annotation pipeline that combines human expertise with GPT's capabilities. Using the MIMIC-IT dataset, we train a large VLM named Otter. Based on extensive evaluations conducted on vision-language benchmarks, it has been observed that Otter demonstrates remarkable proficiency in multi-modal perception, reasoning, and in-context learning. Human evaluation reveals it effectively aligns with the user's intentions. We release the MIMIC-IT dataset, instruction-response collection pipeline, benchmarks, and the Otter model.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 8, 2023

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in coarse-grained video understanding, however, they struggle with fine-grained temporal grounding. In this paper, we introduce Grounded-VideoLLM, a novel Video-LLM adept at perceiving and reasoning over specific video moments in a fine-grained manner. We identify that current Video-LLMs have limitations for fine-grained video understanding since they lack effective temporal modeling and timestamp representation. In light of this, we sharpen our model by incorporating (1) an additional temporal stream to encode the relationships between frames and (2) discrete temporal tokens enriched with specific time knowledge to represent timestamps. To optimize the training of Grounded-VideoLLM, we employ a multi-stage training scheme, beginning with simple video-captioning tasks and progressively introducing video temporal grounding tasks of increasing complexity. To further enhance Grounded-VideoLLM's temporal reasoning capability, we also curate a grounded VideoQA dataset by an automatic annotation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Grounded-VideoLLM not only excels in fine-grained grounding tasks such as temporal sentence grounding, dense video captioning, and grounded VideoQA, but also shows great potential as a versatile video assistant for general video understanding.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 4, 2024 2

STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation

Recent breakthroughs in singing voice synthesis (SVS) have heightened the demand for high-quality annotated datasets, yet manual annotation remains prohibitively labor-intensive and resource-intensive. Existing automatic singing annotation (ASA) methods, however, primarily tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. To address this fundamental challenge, we present STARS, which is, to our knowledge, the first unified framework that simultaneously addresses singing transcription, alignment, and refined style annotation. Our framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. The proposed architecture employs hierarchical acoustic feature processing across frame, word, phoneme, note, and sentence levels. The novel non-autoregressive local acoustic encoders enable structured hierarchical representation learning. Experimental validation confirms the framework's superior performance across multiple evaluation dimensions compared to existing annotation approaches. Furthermore, applications in SVS training demonstrate that models utilizing STARS-annotated data achieve significantly enhanced perceptual naturalness and precise style control. This work not only overcomes critical scalability challenges in the creation of singing datasets but also pioneers new methodologies for controllable singing voice synthesis. Audio samples are available at https://gwx314.github.io/stars-demo/.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 9

VERIFIED: A Video Corpus Moment Retrieval Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Understanding

Existing Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR) is limited to coarse-grained understanding, which hinders precise video moment localization when given fine-grained queries. In this paper, we propose a more challenging fine-grained VCMR benchmark requiring methods to localize the best-matched moment from the corpus with other partially matched candidates. To improve the dataset construction efficiency and guarantee high-quality data annotations, we propose VERIFIED, an automatic VidEo-text annotation pipeline to generate captions with RelIable FInE-grained statics and Dynamics. Specifically, we resort to large language models (LLM) and large multimodal models (LMM) with our proposed Statics and Dynamics Enhanced Captioning modules to generate diverse fine-grained captions for each video. To filter out the inaccurate annotations caused by the LLM hallucination, we propose a Fine-Granularity Aware Noise Evaluator where we fine-tune a video foundation model with disturbed hard-negatives augmented contrastive and matching losses. With VERIFIED, we construct a more challenging fine-grained VCMR benchmark containing Charades-FIG, DiDeMo-FIG, and ActivityNet-FIG which demonstrate a high level of annotation quality. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VCMR models on the proposed dataset, revealing that there is still significant scope for fine-grained video understanding in VCMR. Code and Datasets are in https://github.com/hlchen23/VERIFIED{https://github.com/hlchen23/VERIFIED}.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

Event-driven Real-time Retrieval in Web Search

Information retrieval in real-time search presents unique challenges distinct from those encountered in classical web search. These challenges are particularly pronounced due to the rapid change of user search intent, which is influenced by the occurrence and evolution of breaking news events, such as earthquakes, elections, and wars. Previous dense retrieval methods, which primarily focused on static semantic representation, lack the capacity to capture immediate search intent, leading to inferior performance in retrieving the most recent event-related documents in time-sensitive scenarios. To address this issue, this paper expands the query with event information that represents real-time search intent. The Event information is then integrated with the query through a cross-attention mechanism, resulting in a time-context query representation. We further enhance the model's capacity for event representation through multi-task training. Since publicly available datasets such as MS-MARCO do not contain any event information on the query side and have few time-sensitive queries, we design an automatic data collection and annotation pipeline to address this issue, which includes ModelZoo-based Coarse Annotation and LLM-driven Fine Annotation processes. In addition, we share the training tricks such as two-stage training and hard negative sampling. Finally, we conduct a set of offline experiments on a million-scale production dataset to evaluate our approach and deploy an A/B testing in a real online system to verify the performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 1, 2023

R-AVST: Empowering Video-LLMs with Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Complex Audio-Visual Scenarios

Recently, rapid advancements have been made in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially in video understanding tasks. However, current research focuses on simple video scenarios, failing to reflect the complex and diverse nature of real-world audio-visual events in videos. To bridge this gap, we firstly introduce R-AVST, a dataset for audio-visual reasoning featuring fine-grained spatio-temporal annotations. In constructing this, we design a pipeline consisting of LLM-based key object extraction, automatic spatial annotation and manual quality inspection, resulting in over 5K untrimmed videos with 27K objects across 100 types of audio-visual events. Building on this dataset, we define three core tasks for spatio-temporal reasoning in audio-visual scenes and generate more than 8K high-quality, evenly distributed question-answer pairs to effectively benchmark model performance. To further enhance reasoning, we propose AVST-Zero, a reinforcement learning-based model that avoids intermediate supervision, directly optimizing behavior via carefully designed multi-dimensional rewards. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our R-AVST in advancing audio-visual spatio-temporal reasoning, upon which AVST-Zero demonstrates competitive performance compared to existing models. To the best of our knowledge, R-AVST is the first dataset designed for real-world audio-visual spatio-temporal reasoning, and AVST-Zero offers a novel perspective for tackling future challenges in this domain.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 20

AutoGUI: Scaling GUI Grounding with Automatic Functionality Annotations from LLMs

User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 3

OmniEval: An Omnidirectional and Automatic RAG Evaluation Benchmark in Financial Domain

As a typical and practical application of Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques have gained extensive attention, particularly in vertical domains where LLMs may lack domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an omnidirectional and automatic RAG benchmark, OmniEval, in the financial domain. Our benchmark is characterized by its multi-dimensional evaluation framework, including (1) a matrix-based RAG scenario evaluation system that categorizes queries into five task classes and 16 financial topics, leading to a structured assessment of diverse query scenarios; (2) a multi-dimensional evaluation data generation approach, which combines GPT-4-based automatic generation and human annotation, achieving an 87.47\% acceptance ratio in human evaluations on generated instances; (3) a multi-stage evaluation system that evaluates both retrieval and generation performance, result in a comprehensive evaluation on the RAG pipeline; and (4) robust evaluation metrics derived from rule-based and LLM-based ones, enhancing the reliability of assessments through manual annotations and supervised fine-tuning of an LLM evaluator. Our experiments demonstrate the comprehensiveness of OmniEval, which includes extensive test datasets and highlights the performance variations of RAG systems across diverse topics and tasks, revealing significant opportunities for RAG models to improve their capabilities in vertical domains. We open source the code of our benchmark in https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval{https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/OmniEval}.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024 2

VidEgoThink: Assessing Egocentric Video Understanding Capabilities for Embodied AI

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened new avenues for applications in Embodied AI. Building on previous work, EgoThink, we introduce VidEgoThink, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating egocentric video understanding capabilities. To bridge the gap between MLLMs and low-level control in Embodied AI, we design four key interrelated tasks: video question-answering, hierarchy planning, visual grounding and reward modeling. To minimize manual annotation costs, we develop an automatic data generation pipeline based on the Ego4D dataset, leveraging the prior knowledge and multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o. Three human annotators then filter the generated data to ensure diversity and quality, resulting in the VidEgoThink benchmark. We conduct extensive experiments with three types of models: API-based MLLMs, open-source image-based MLLMs, and open-source video-based MLLMs. Experimental results indicate that all MLLMs, including GPT-4o, perform poorly across all tasks related to egocentric video understanding. These findings suggest that foundation models still require significant advancements to be effectively applied to first-person scenarios in Embodied AI. In conclusion, VidEgoThink reflects a research trend towards employing MLLMs for egocentric vision, akin to human capabilities, enabling active observation and interaction in the complex real-world environments.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024 3

Detailed Annotations of Chest X-Rays via CT Projection for Report Understanding

In clinical radiology reports, doctors capture important information about the patient's health status. They convey their observations from raw medical imaging data about the inner structures of a patient. As such, formulating reports requires medical experts to possess wide-ranging knowledge about anatomical regions with their normal, healthy appearance as well as the ability to recognize abnormalities. This explicit grasp on both the patient's anatomy and their appearance is missing in current medical image-processing systems as annotations are especially difficult to gather. This renders the models to be narrow experts e.g. for identifying specific diseases. In this work, we recover this missing link by adding human anatomy into the mix and enable the association of content in medical reports to their occurrence in associated imagery (medical phrase grounding). To exploit anatomical structures in this scenario, we present a sophisticated automatic pipeline to gather and integrate human bodily structures from computed tomography datasets, which we incorporate in our PAXRay: A Projected dataset for the segmentation of Anatomical structures in X-Ray data. Our evaluation shows that methods that take advantage of anatomical information benefit heavily in visually grounding radiologists' findings, as our anatomical segmentations allow for up to absolute 50% better grounding results on the OpenI dataset as compared to commonly used region proposals. The PAXRay dataset is available at https://constantinseibold.github.io/paxray/.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 7, 2022

Skywork-Reward-V2: Scaling Preference Data Curation via Human-AI Synergy

Despite the critical role of reward models (RMs) in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), current state-of-the-art open RMs perform poorly on most existing evaluation benchmarks, failing to capture the spectrum of nuanced and sophisticated human preferences. Even approaches that incorporate advanced training techniques have not yielded meaningful performance improvements. We hypothesize that this brittleness stems primarily from limitations in preference datasets, which are often narrowly scoped, synthetically labeled, or lack rigorous quality control. To address these challenges, we present a large-scale preference dataset comprising 40 million preference pairs, named SynPref-40M. To enable data curation at scale, we design a human-AI synergistic two-stage pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of human annotation quality and AI scalability. In this pipeline, humans provide verified annotations, while large language models perform automatic curation based on human guidance. Training on this preference mixture, we introduce Skywork-Reward-V2, a suite of eight reward models ranging from 0.6B to 8B parameters, trained on a carefully curated subset of 26 million preference pairs from SynPref-40M. We demonstrate that Skywork-Reward-V2 is versatile across a wide range of capabilities, including alignment with human preferences, objective correctness, safety, resistance to stylistic biases, and best-of-N scaling, achieving state-of-the-art performance across seven major reward model benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that the effectiveness of our approach stems not only from data scale but also from high-quality curation. The Skywork-Reward-V2 series represents substantial progress in open reward models, highlighting the untapped potential of existing preference datasets and demonstrating how human-AI curation synergy can unlock significantly higher data quality.

Unlocking Science: Novel Dataset and Benchmark for Cross-Modality Scientific Information Extraction

Extracting key information from scientific papers has the potential to help researchers work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Over the last few years, research on Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) witnessed the release of several new systems and benchmarks. However, existing paper-focused datasets mostly focus only on specific parts of a manuscript (e.g., abstracts) and are single-modality (i.e., text- or table-only), due to complex processing and expensive annotations. Moreover, core information can be present in either text or tables or across both. To close this gap in data availability and enable cross-modality IE, while alleviating labeling costs, we propose a semi-supervised pipeline for annotating entities in text, as well as entities and relations in tables, in an iterative procedure. Based on this pipeline, we release novel resources for the scientific community, including a high-quality benchmark, a large-scale corpus, and a semi-supervised annotation pipeline. We further report the performance of state-of-the-art IE models on the proposed benchmark dataset, as a baseline. Lastly, we explore the potential capability of large language models such as ChatGPT for the current task. Our new dataset, results, and analysis validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our semi-supervised pipeline, and we discuss its remaining limitations.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

SVBench: A Benchmark with Temporal Multi-Turn Dialogues for Streaming Video Understanding

Despite the significant advancements of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on established benchmarks, there remains a notable gap in suitable evaluation regarding their applicability in the emerging domain of long-context streaming video understanding. Current benchmarks for video understanding typically emphasize isolated single-instance text inputs and fail to evaluate the capacity to sustain temporal reasoning throughout the entire duration of video streams. To address these limitations, we introduce SVBench, a pioneering benchmark with temporal multi-turn question-answering chains specifically designed to thoroughly assess the capabilities of streaming video understanding of current LVLMs. We design a semi-automated annotation pipeline to obtain 49,979 Question-Answer (QA) pairs of 1,353 streaming videos, which includes generating QA chains that represent a series of consecutive multi-turn dialogues over video segments and constructing temporal linkages between successive QA chains. Our experimental results, obtained from 14 models in dialogue and streaming evaluations, reveal that while the closed-source GPT-4o outperforms others, most open-source LVLMs struggle with long-context streaming video understanding. We also construct a StreamingChat model, which significantly outperforms open-source LVLMs on our SVBench and achieves comparable performance on diverse vision-language benchmarks. We expect SVBench to advance the research of streaming video understanding by providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current LVLMs. Our benchmark and model can be accessed at https://yzy-bupt.github.io/SVBench.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 15

ALLVB: All-in-One Long Video Understanding Benchmark

From image to video understanding, the capabilities of Multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) are increasingly powerful. However, most existing video understanding benchmarks are relatively short, which makes them inadequate for effectively evaluating the long-sequence modeling capabilities of MLLMs. This highlights the urgent need for a comprehensive and integrated long video understanding benchmark to assess the ability of MLLMs thoroughly. To this end, we propose ALLVB (ALL-in-One Long Video Understanding Benchmark). ALLVB's main contributions include: 1) It integrates 9 major video understanding tasks. These tasks are converted into video QA formats, allowing a single benchmark to evaluate 9 different video understanding capabilities of MLLMs, highlighting the versatility, comprehensiveness, and challenging nature of ALLVB. 2) A fully automated annotation pipeline using GPT-4o is designed, requiring only human quality control, which facilitates the maintenance and expansion of the benchmark. 3) It contains 1,376 videos across 16 categories, averaging nearly 2 hours each, with a total of 252k QAs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest long video understanding benchmark in terms of the number of videos, average duration, and number of QAs. We have tested various mainstream MLLMs on ALLVB, and the results indicate that even the most advanced commercial models have significant room for improvement. This reflects the benchmark's challenging nature and demonstrates the substantial potential for development in long video understanding.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 10

ARC-Hunyuan-Video-7B: Structured Video Comprehension of Real-World Shorts

Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.

SurgiSAM2: Fine-tuning a foundational model for surgical video anatomy segmentation and detection

Background: We evaluate SAM 2 for surgical scene understanding by examining its semantic segmentation capabilities for organs/tissues both in zero-shot scenarios and after fine-tuning. Methods: We utilized five public datasets to evaluate and fine-tune SAM 2 for segmenting anatomical tissues in surgical videos/images. Fine-tuning was applied to the image encoder and mask decoder. We limited training subsets from 50 to 400 samples per class to better model real-world constraints with data acquisition. The impact of dataset size on fine-tuning performance was evaluated with weighted mean Dice coefficient (WMDC), and the results were also compared against previously reported state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Results: SurgiSAM 2, a fine-tuned SAM 2 model, demonstrated significant improvements in segmentation performance, achieving a 17.9% relative WMDC gain compared to the baseline SAM 2. Increasing prompt points from 1 to 10 and training data scale from 50/class to 400/class enhanced performance; the best WMDC of 0.92 on the validation subset was achieved with 10 prompt points and 400 samples per class. On the test subset, this model outperformed prior SOTA methods in 24/30 (80%) of the classes with a WMDC of 0.91 using 10-point prompts. Notably, SurgiSAM 2 generalized effectively to unseen organ classes, achieving SOTA on 7/9 (77.8%) of them. Conclusion: SAM 2 achieves remarkable zero-shot and fine-tuned performance for surgical scene segmentation, surpassing prior SOTA models across several organ classes of diverse datasets. This suggests immense potential for enabling automated/semi-automated annotation pipelines, thereby decreasing the burden of annotations facilitating several surgical applications.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 5

Inst-IT: Boosting Multimodal Instance Understanding via Explicit Visual Prompt Instruction Tuning

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant breakthroughs with the advancement of instruction tuning. However, while existing models can understand images and videos at a holistic level, they still struggle with instance-level understanding that requires a more nuanced comprehension and alignment. Instance-level understanding is crucial, as it focuses on the specific elements that we are most interested in. Excitingly, existing works find that the state-of-the-art LMMs exhibit strong instance understanding capabilities when provided with explicit visual cues. Motivated by this, we introduce an automated annotation pipeline assisted by GPT-4o to extract instance-level information from images and videos through explicit visual prompting for instance guidance. Building upon this pipeline, we proposed Inst-IT, a solution to enhance LMMs in Instance understanding via explicit visual prompt Instruction Tuning. Inst-IT consists of a benchmark to diagnose multimodal instance-level understanding, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a continuous instruction-tuning training paradigm to effectively enhance spatial-temporal instance understanding capabilities of existing LMMs. Experimental results show that, with the boost of Inst-IT, our models not only achieve outstanding performance on Inst-IT Bench but also demonstrate significant improvements across various generic image and video understanding benchmarks. This highlights that our dataset not only boosts instance-level understanding but also strengthens the overall capabilities of generic image and video comprehension.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 4, 2024 2

OIG-Bench: A Multi-Agent Annotated Benchmark for Multimodal One-Image Guides Understanding

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities. However, evaluating their capacity for human-like understanding in One-Image Guides remains insufficiently explored. One-Image Guides are a visual format combining text, imagery, and symbols to present reorganized and structured information for easier comprehension, which are specifically designed for human viewing and inherently embody the characteristics of human perception and understanding. Here, we present OIG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark focused on One-Image Guide understanding across diverse domains. To reduce the cost of manual annotation, we developed a semi-automated annotation pipeline in which multiple intelligent agents collaborate to generate preliminary image descriptions, assisting humans in constructing image-text pairs. With OIG-Bench, we have conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art MLLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models. The results show that Qwen2.5-VL-72B performs the best among the evaluated models, with an overall accuracy of 77%. Nevertheless, all models exhibit notable weaknesses in semantic understanding and logical reasoning, indicating that current MLLMs still struggle to accurately interpret complex visual-text relationships. In addition, we also demonstrate that the proposed multi-agent annotation system outperforms all MLLMs in image captioning, highlighting its potential as both a high-quality image description generator and a valuable tool for future dataset construction. Datasets are available at https://github.com/XiejcSYSU/OIG-Bench.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 29

Pix2Cap-COCO: Advancing Visual Comprehension via Pixel-Level Captioning

We present Pix2Cap-COCO, the first panoptic pixel-level caption dataset designed to advance fine-grained visual understanding. To achieve this, we carefully design an automated annotation pipeline that prompts GPT-4V to generate pixel-aligned, instance-specific captions for individual objects within images, enabling models to learn more granular relationships between objects and their contexts. This approach results in 167,254 detailed captions, with an average of 22.94 words per caption. Building on Pix2Cap-COCO, we introduce a novel task, panoptic segmentation-captioning, which challenges models to recognize instances in an image and provide detailed descriptions for each simultaneously. To benchmark this task, we design a robust baseline based on X-Decoder. The experimental results demonstrate that Pix2Cap-COCO is a particularly challenging dataset, as it requires models to excel in both fine-grained visual understanding and detailed language generation. Furthermore, we leverage Pix2Cap-COCO for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on large multimodal models (LMMs) to enhance their performance. For example, training with Pix2Cap-COCO significantly improves the performance of GPT4RoI, yielding gains in CIDEr +1.4%, ROUGE +0.4%, and SPICE +0.5% on Visual Genome dataset, and strengthens its region understanding ability on the ViP-BENCH, with an overall improvement of +5.1%, including notable increases in recognition accuracy +11.2% and language generation quality +22.2%.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23

Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in visual understanding tasks. However, their capacity to comprehend human-centric scenes has rarely been explored, primarily due to the absence of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks that take into account both the human-oriented granular level and higher-dimensional causal reasoning ability. Such high-quality evaluation benchmarks face tough obstacles, given the physical complexity of the human body and the difficulty of annotating granular structures. In this paper, we propose Human-MME, a curated benchmark designed to provide a more holistic evaluation of MLLMs in human-centric scene understanding. Compared with other existing benchmarks, our work provides three key features: 1. Diversity in human scene, spanning 4 primary visual domains with 15 secondary domains and 43 sub-fields to ensure broad scenario coverage. 2. Progressive and diverse evaluation dimensions, evaluating the human-based activities progressively from the human-oriented granular perception to the higher-dimensional reasoning, consisting of eight dimensions with 19,945 real-world image question pairs and an evaluation suite. 3. High-quality annotations with rich data paradigms, constructing the automated annotation pipeline and human-annotation platform, supporting rigorous manual labeling to facilitate precise and reliable model assessment. Our benchmark extends the single-target understanding to the multi-person and multi-image mutual understanding by constructing the choice, short-answer, grounding, ranking and judgment question components, and complex questions of their combination. The extensive experiments on 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs effectively expose the limitations and guide future MLLMs research toward better human-centric image understanding. All data and code are available at https://github.com/Yuan-Hou/Human-MME.

  • 15 authors
·
Sep 30

A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers

Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) are transforming how knowledge is represented, integrated, and applied in scientific research, yet their progress is shaped by the complex nature of scientific data. This survey presents a comprehensive, data-centric synthesis that reframes the development of Sci-LLMs as a co-evolution between models and their underlying data substrate. We formulate a unified taxonomy of scientific data and a hierarchical model of scientific knowledge, emphasizing the multimodal, cross-scale, and domain-specific challenges that differentiate scientific corpora from general natural language processing datasets. We systematically review recent Sci-LLMs, from general-purpose foundations to specialized models across diverse scientific disciplines, alongside an extensive analysis of over 270 pre-/post-training datasets, showing why Sci-LLMs pose distinct demands -- heterogeneous, multi-scale, uncertainty-laden corpora that require representations preserving domain invariance and enabling cross-modal reasoning. On evaluation, we examine over 190 benchmark datasets and trace a shift from static exams toward process- and discovery-oriented assessments with advanced evaluation protocols. These data-centric analyses highlight persistent issues in scientific data development and discuss emerging solutions involving semi-automated annotation pipelines and expert validation. Finally, we outline a paradigm shift toward closed-loop systems where autonomous agents based on Sci-LLMs actively experiment, validate, and contribute to a living, evolving knowledge base. Collectively, this work provides a roadmap for building trustworthy, continually evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems that function as a true partner in accelerating scientific discovery.

  • 103 authors
·
Aug 28 4

GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) extend Large Language Models to the vision domain. Initial efforts towards LMMs used holistic images and text prompts to generate ungrounded textual responses. Very recently, region-level LMMs have been used to generate visually grounded responses. However, they are limited to only referring a single object category at a time, require users to specify the regions in inputs, or cannot offer dense pixel-wise object grounding. In this work, we present Grounding LMM (GLaMM), the first model that can generate natural language responses seamlessly intertwined with corresponding object segmentation masks. GLaMM not only grounds objects appearing in the conversations but is flexible enough to accept both textual and optional visual prompts (region of interest) as input. This empowers users to interact with the model at various levels of granularity, both in textual and visual domains. Due to the lack of standard benchmarks for the novel setting of generating visually grounded detailed conversations, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation protocol with our curated grounded conversations. Our proposed Grounded Conversation Generation (GCG) task requires densely grounded concepts in natural scenes at a large-scale. To this end, we propose a densely annotated Grounding-anything Dataset (GranD) using our proposed automated annotation pipeline that encompasses 7.5M unique concepts grounded in a total of 810M regions available with segmentation masks. Besides GCG, GLaMM also performs effectively on several downstream tasks e.g., referring expression segmentation, image and region-level captioning and vision-language conversations. Project Page: https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/groundingLMM.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 6, 2023 3

BTL-UI: Blink-Think-Link Reasoning Model for GUI Agent

In the field of AI-driven human-GUI interaction automation, while rapid advances in multimodal large language models and reinforcement fine-tuning techniques have yielded remarkable progress, a fundamental challenge persists: their interaction logic significantly deviates from natural human-GUI communication patterns. To fill this gap, we propose "Blink-Think-Link" (BTL), a brain-inspired framework for human-GUI interaction that mimics the human cognitive process between users and graphical interfaces. The system decomposes interactions into three biologically plausible phases: (1) Blink - rapid detection and attention to relevant screen areas, analogous to saccadic eye movements; (2) Think - higher-level reasoning and decision-making, mirroring cognitive planning; and (3) Link - generation of executable commands for precise motor control, emulating human action selection mechanisms. Additionally, we introduce two key technical innovations for the BTL framework: (1) Blink Data Generation - an automated annotation pipeline specifically optimized for blink data, and (2) BTL Reward -- the first rule-based reward mechanism that enables reinforcement learning driven by both process and outcome. Building upon this framework, we develop a GUI agent model named BTL-UI, which demonstrates consistent state-of-the-art performance across both static GUI understanding and dynamic interaction tasks in comprehensive benchmarks. These results provide conclusive empirical validation of the framework's efficacy in developing advanced GUI Agents.

SignAvatars: A Large-scale 3D Sign Language Holistic Motion Dataset and Benchmark

We present SignAvatars, the first large-scale, multi-prompt 3D sign language (SL) motion dataset designed to bridge the communication gap for Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. While there has been an exponentially growing number of research regarding digital communication, the majority of existing communication technologies primarily cater to spoken or written languages, instead of SL, the essential communication method for Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. Existing SL datasets, dictionaries, and sign language production (SLP) methods are typically limited to 2D as annotating 3D models and avatars for SL is usually an entirely manual and labor-intensive process conducted by SL experts, often resulting in unnatural avatars. In response to these challenges, we compile and curate the SignAvatars dataset, which comprises 70,000 videos from 153 signers, totaling 8.34 million frames, covering both isolated signs and continuous, co-articulated signs, with multiple prompts including HamNoSys, spoken language, and words. To yield 3D holistic annotations, including meshes and biomechanically-valid poses of body, hands, and face, as well as 2D and 3D keypoints, we introduce an automated annotation pipeline operating on our large corpus of SL videos. SignAvatars facilitates various tasks such as 3D sign language recognition (SLR) and the novel 3D SL production (SLP) from diverse inputs like text scripts, individual words, and HamNoSys notation. Hence, to evaluate the potential of SignAvatars, we further propose a unified benchmark of 3D SL holistic motion production. We believe that this work is a significant step forward towards bringing the digital world to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities as well as people interacting with them.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2023

Instruction-guided Multi-Granularity Segmentation and Captioning with Large Multimodal Model

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved significant progress by extending large language models. Building on this progress, the latest developments in LMMs demonstrate the ability to generate dense pixel-wise segmentation through the integration of segmentation models.Despite the innovations, the textual responses and segmentation masks of existing works remain at the instance level, showing limited ability to perform fine-grained understanding and segmentation even provided with detailed textual cues.To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Multi-Granularity Large Multimodal Model (MGLMM), which is capable of seamlessly adjusting the granularity of Segmentation and Captioning (SegCap) following user instructions, from panoptic SegCap to fine-grained SegCap. We name such a new task Multi-Granularity Segmentation and Captioning (MGSC). Observing the lack of a benchmark for model training and evaluation over the MGSC task, we establish a benchmark with aligned masks and captions in multi-granularity using our customized automated annotation pipeline. This benchmark comprises 10K images and more than 30K image-question pairs. We will release our dataset along with the implementation of our automated dataset annotation pipeline for further research.Besides, we propose a novel unified SegCap data format to unify heterogeneous segmentation datasets; it effectively facilitates learning to associate object concepts with visual features during multi-task training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MGLMM excels at tackling more than eight downstream tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in MGSC, GCG, image captioning, referring segmentation, multiple and empty segmentation, and reasoning segmentation tasks. The great performance and versatility of MGLMM underscore its potential impact on advancing multimodal research.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 20, 2024 2

FETA: Towards Specializing Foundation Models for Expert Task Applications

Foundation Models (FMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities including zero-shot learning, high fidelity data synthesis, and out of domain generalization. However, as we show in this paper, FMs still have poor out-of-the-box performance on expert tasks (e.g. retrieval of car manuals technical illustrations from language queries), data for which is either unseen or belonging to a long-tail part of the data distribution of the huge datasets used for FM pre-training. This underlines the necessity to explicitly evaluate and finetune FMs on such expert tasks, arguably ones that appear the most in practical real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a first of its kind FETA benchmark built around the task of teaching FMs to understand technical documentation, via learning to match their graphical illustrations to corresponding language descriptions. Our FETA benchmark focuses on text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval in public car manuals and sales catalogue brochures. FETA is equipped with a procedure for completely automatic annotation extraction (code would be released upon acceptance), allowing easy extension of FETA to more documentation types and application domains in the future. Our automatic annotation leads to an automated performance metric shown to be consistent with metrics computed on human-curated annotations (also released). We provide multiple baselines and analysis of popular FMs on FETA leading to several interesting findings that we believe would be very valuable to the FM community, paving the way towards real-world application of FMs for practical expert tasks currently 'overlooked' by standard benchmarks focusing on common objects.

  • 13 authors
·
Sep 8, 2022

Automated Privacy Information Annotation in Large Language Model Interactions

Users interacting with large language models (LLMs) under their real identifiers often unknowingly risk disclosing private information. Automatically notifying users whether their queries leak privacy and which phrases leak what private information has therefore become a practical need. Existing privacy detection methods, however, were designed for different objectives and application scenarios, typically tagging personally identifiable information (PII) in anonymous content. In this work, to support the development and evaluation of privacy detection models for LLM interactions that are deployable on local user devices, we construct a large-scale multilingual dataset with 249K user queries and 154K annotated privacy phrases. In particular, we build an automated privacy annotation pipeline with cloud-based strong LLMs to automatically extract privacy phrases from dialogue datasets and annotate leaked information. We also design evaluation metrics at the levels of privacy leakage, extracted privacy phrase, and privacy information. We further establish baseline methods using light-weight LLMs with both tuning-free and tuning-based methods, and report a comprehensive evaluation of their performance. Evaluation results reveal a gap between current performance and the requirements of real-world LLM applications, motivating future research into more effective local privacy detection methods grounded in our dataset.

  • 7 authors
·
May 27

Feedback-Based Self-Learning in Large-Scale Conversational AI Agents

Today, most large-scale conversational AI agents (e.g. Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant) are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system. Typically, the accuracy of the ML models in these components are improved by manually transcribing and annotating data. As the scope of these systems increase to cover more scenarios and domains, manual annotation to improve the accuracy of these components becomes prohibitively costly and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages user-system interaction feedback signals to automate learning without any manual annotation. Users here tend to modify a previous query in hopes of fixing an error in the previous turn to get the right results. These reformulations, which are often preceded by defective experiences caused by errors in ASR, NLU, ER or the application. In some cases, users may not properly formulate their requests (e.g. providing partial title of a song), but gleaning across a wider pool of users and sessions reveals the underlying recurrent patterns. Our proposed self-learning system automatically detects the errors, generate reformulations and deploys fixes to the runtime system to correct different types of errors occurring in different components of the system. In particular, we propose leveraging an absorbing Markov Chain model as a collaborative filtering mechanism in a novel attempt to mine these patterns. We show that our approach is highly scalable, and able to learn reformulations that reduce Alexa-user errors by pooling anonymized data across millions of customers. The proposed self-learning system achieves a win/loss ratio of 11.8 and effectively reduces the defect rate by more than 30% on utterance level reformulations in our production A/B tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-learning large-scale conversational AI system in production.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 6, 2019

CursorCore: Assist Programming through Aligning Anything

Large language models have been successfully applied to programming assistance tasks, such as code completion, code insertion, and instructional code editing. However, these applications remain insufficiently automated and struggle to effectively integrate various types of information during the programming process, including coding history, current code, and user instructions. In this work, we propose a new conversational framework that comprehensively integrates these information sources, collect data to train our models and evaluate their performance. Firstly, to thoroughly evaluate how well models align with different types of information and the quality of their outputs, we introduce a new benchmark, APEval (Assist Programming Eval), to comprehensively assess the performance of models in programming assistance tasks. Then, for data collection, we develop a data generation pipeline, Programming-Instruct, which synthesizes training data from diverse sources, such as GitHub and online judge platforms. This pipeline can automatically generate various types of messages throughout the programming process. Finally, using this pipeline, we generate 219K samples, fine-tune multiple models, and develop the CursorCore series. We show that CursorCore outperforms other models of comparable size. This framework unifies applications such as inline chat and automated editing, contributes to the advancement of coding assistants. Code, models and data are freely available at https://github.com/TechxGenus/CursorCore.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024 2

API2Com: On the Improvement of Automatically Generated Code Comments Using API Documentations

Code comments can help in program comprehension and are considered as important artifacts to help developers in software maintenance. However, the comments are mostly missing or are outdated, specially in complex software projects. As a result, several automatic comment generation models are developed as a solution. The recent models explore the integration of external knowledge resources such as Unified Modeling Language class diagrams to improve the generated comments. In this paper, we propose API2Com, a model that leverages the Application Programming Interface Documentations (API Docs) as a knowledge resource for comment generation. The API Docs include the description of the methods in more details and therefore, can provide better context in the generated comments. The API Docs are used along with the code snippets and Abstract Syntax Trees in our model. We apply the model on a large Java dataset of over 130,000 methods and evaluate it using both Transformer and RNN-base architectures. Interestingly, when API Docs are used, the performance increase is negligible. We therefore run different experiments to reason about the results. For methods that only contain one API, adding API Docs improves the results by 4% BLEU score on average (BLEU score is an automatic evaluation metric used in machine translation). However, as the number of APIs that are used in a method increases, the performance of the model in generating comments decreases due to long documentations used in the input. Our results confirm that the API Docs can be useful in generating better comments, but, new techniques are required to identify the most informative ones in a method rather than using all documentations simultaneously.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19, 2021

ViewSpatial-Bench: Evaluating Multi-perspective Spatial Localization in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and reasoning about visual content, but significant challenges persist in tasks requiring cross-viewpoint understanding and spatial reasoning. We identify a critical limitation: current VLMs excel primarily at egocentric spatial reasoning (from the camera's perspective) but fail to generalize to allocentric viewpoints when required to adopt another entity's spatial frame of reference. We introduce ViewSpatial-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for multi-viewpoint spatial localization recognition evaluation across five distinct task types, supported by an automated 3D annotation pipeline that generates precise directional labels. Comprehensive evaluation of diverse VLMs on ViewSpatial-Bench reveals a significant performance disparity: models demonstrate reasonable performance on camera-perspective tasks but exhibit reduced accuracy when reasoning from a human viewpoint. By fine-tuning VLMs on our multi-perspective spatial dataset, we achieve an overall performance improvement of 46.24% across tasks, highlighting the efficacy of our approach. Our work establishes a crucial benchmark for spatial intelligence in embodied AI systems and provides empirical evidence that modeling 3D spatial relationships enhances VLMs' corresponding spatial comprehension capabilities.

  • 12 authors
·
May 27 2

Intent-based Prompt Calibration: Enhancing prompt optimization with synthetic boundary cases

Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to achieve optimized performance from LLMs. Recent studies have demonstrated the capabilities of LLMs to automatically conduct prompt engineering by employing a meta-prompt that incorporates the outcomes of the last trials and proposes an improved prompt. However, this requires a high-quality benchmark to compare different prompts, which is difficult and expensive to acquire in many real-world use cases. In this work, we introduce a new method for automatic prompt engineering, using a calibration process that iteratively refines the prompt to the user intent. During the optimization process, the system jointly generates synthetic data of boundary use cases and optimizes the prompt according to the generated dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to strong proprietary models on real-world tasks such as moderation and generation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a limited number of annotated samples. Furthermore, we validate the advantages of each one of the system's key components. Our system is built in a modular way, facilitating easy adaptation to other tasks. The code is available https://github.com/Eladlev/AutoPrompt{here}.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

ToolCoder: Teach Code Generation Models to use API search tools

Automatically generating source code from natural language descriptions has been a growing field of research in recent years. However, current large-scale code generation models often encounter difficulties when selecting appropriate APIs for specific contexts. These models may generate APIs that do not meet requirements or refer to non-existent APIs in third-party libraries, especially for lesser-known or private libraries. Inspired by the process of human developers using tools to search APIs, we propose ToolCoder, a novel approach that integrates API search tools with existing models to assist in code generation and API selection. To teach our model to use tools, we introduce an automated data annotation method using ChatGPT to add tool usage information into the source code data and fine-tune code generation models. During inference, we integrate API search tools into the generation process so that our model can automatically use the search tool to get suggestions when selecting an API. Our experimental results demonstrate that ToolCoder exhibits excellent performance and generalization across five public and private library code generation benchmarks, with at least 6.21\% improvement on average pass@1 metrics and 9.64\% improvement on average pass@10 metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that our relatively small ToolCoder model is comparable to one of the current best models, GPT-3.5, highlighting the potential of incorporating programming tools into the code generation process.

  • 6 authors
·
May 6, 2023

POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversion

High-quality labeled data is essential for training accurate document conversion models, particularly in domains with complex formats such as tables, formulas, and multi-column text. However, manual annotation is both costly and time-consuming, while automatic labeling using existing models often lacks accuracy in handling such challenging scenarios. Consequently, training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a fully automated, distillation-free framework comprising two stages for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. In the first stage, we introduce a method for generating large-scale, diverse synthetic data, which enables a model to extract key elements in a unified format with strong initial performance. In the second stage, we present a self-improvement approach that further adapts the model, initially trained on synthetic data, to real-world documents. Specifically, we first use the fine-tuned model to annotate real documents, then apply a suite of filtering strategies to verify annotation quality, and finally retrain the model on the verified dataset. By iteratively repeating this process, we progressively enhance both the model's conversion capabilities and the quality of the generated data. We train a public POINTS-1.5 model to obtain POINTS-Reader, which surpasses many existing public and proprietary models of comparable or larger size. Our model is available at https://github.com/Tencent/POINTS-Reader.

ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs

Despite the advancements of open-source large language models (LLMs) and their variants, e.g., LLaMA and Vicuna, they remain significantly limited in performing higher-level tasks, such as following human instructions to use external tools (APIs). This is because current instruction tuning largely focuses on basic language tasks instead of the tool-use domain. This is in contrast to state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, which have demonstrated excellent tool-use capabilities but are unfortunately closed source. To facilitate tool-use capabilities within open-source LLMs, we introduce ToolLLM, a general tool-use framework of data construction, model training and evaluation. We first present ToolBench, an instruction-tuning dataset for tool use, which is created automatically using ChatGPT. Specifically, we collect 16,464 real-world RESTful APIs spanning 49 categories from RapidAPI Hub, then prompt ChatGPT to generate diverse human instructions involving these APIs, covering both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Finally, we use ChatGPT to search for a valid solution path (chain of API calls) for each instruction. To make the searching process more efficient, we develop a novel depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT), enabling LLMs to evaluate multiple reasoning traces and expand the search space. We show that DFSDT significantly enhances the planning and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. For efficient tool-use assessment, we develop an automatic evaluator: ToolEval. We fine-tune LLaMA on ToolBench and obtain ToolLLaMA. Our ToolEval reveals that ToolLLaMA demonstrates a remarkable ability to execute complex instructions and generalize to unseen APIs, and exhibits comparable performance to ChatGPT. To make the pipeline more practical, we devise a neural API retriever to recommend appropriate APIs for each instruction, negating the need for manual API selection.

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 31, 2023 5

Model-Agnostic Syntactical Information for Pre-Trained Programming Language Models

Pre-trained Programming Language Models (PPLMs) achieved many recent states of the art results for many code-related software engineering tasks. Though some studies use data flow or propose tree-based models that utilize Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), most PPLMs do not fully utilize the rich syntactical information in source code. Still, the input is considered a sequence of tokens. There are two issues; the first is computational inefficiency due to the quadratic relationship between input length and attention complexity. Second, any syntactical information, when needed as an extra input to the current PPLMs, requires the model to be pre-trained from scratch, wasting all the computational resources already used for pre-training the current models. In this work, we propose Named Entity Recognition (NER) adapters, lightweight modules that can be inserted into Transformer blocks to learn type information extracted from the AST. These adapters can be used with current PPLMs such as CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, and CodeT5. We train the NER adapters using a novel Token Type Classification objective function (TTC). We insert our proposed work in CodeBERT, building CodeBERTER, and evaluate the performance on two tasks of code refinement and code summarization. CodeBERTER improves the accuracy of code refinement from 16.4 to 17.8 while using 20% of training parameter budget compared to the fully fine-tuning approach, and the BLEU score of code summarization from 14.75 to 15.90 while reducing 77% of training parameters compared to the fully fine-tuning approach.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 10, 2023

GPT Self-Supervision for a Better Data Annotator

The task of annotating data into concise summaries poses a significant challenge across various domains, frequently requiring the allocation of significant time and specialized knowledge by human experts. Despite existing efforts to use large language models for annotation tasks, significant problems such as limited applicability to unlabeled data, the absence of self-supervised methods, and the lack of focus on complex structured data still persist. In this work, we propose a GPT self-supervision annotation method, which embodies a generating-recovering paradigm that leverages the one-shot learning capabilities of the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). The proposed approach comprises a one-shot tuning phase followed by a generation phase. In the one-shot tuning phase, we sample a data from the support set as part of the prompt for GPT to generate a textual summary, which is then used to recover the original data. The alignment score between the recovered and original data serves as a self-supervision navigator to refine the process. In the generation stage, the optimally selected one-shot sample serves as a template in the prompt and is applied to generating summaries from challenging datasets. The annotation performance is evaluated by tuning several human feedback reward networks and by calculating alignment scores between original and recovered data at both sentence and structure levels. Our self-supervised annotation method consistently achieves competitive scores, convincingly demonstrating its robust strength in various data-to-summary annotation tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 7, 2023

AutoMMLab: Automatically Generating Deployable Models from Language Instructions for Computer Vision Tasks

Automated machine learning (AutoML) is a collection of techniques designed to automate the machine learning development process. While traditional AutoML approaches have been successfully applied in several critical steps of model development (e.g. hyperparameter optimization), there lacks a AutoML system that automates the entire end-to-end model production workflow. To fill this blank, we present AutoMMLab, a general-purpose LLM-empowered AutoML system that follows user's language instructions to automate the whole model production workflow for computer vision tasks. The proposed AutoMMLab system effectively employs LLMs as the bridge to connect AutoML and OpenMMLab community, empowering non-expert individuals to easily build task-specific models via a user-friendly language interface. Specifically, we propose RU-LLaMA to understand users' request and schedule the whole pipeline, and propose a novel LLM-based hyperparameter optimizer called HPO-LLaMA to effectively search for the optimal hyperparameters. Experiments show that our AutoMMLab system is versatile and covers a wide range of mainstream tasks, including classification, detection, segmentation and keypoint estimation. We further develop a new benchmark, called LAMP, for studying key components in the end-to-end prompt-based model training pipeline. Code, model, and data will be released.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23, 2024

AutoML-Agent: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Full-Pipeline AutoML

Automated machine learning (AutoML) accelerates AI development by automating tasks in the development pipeline, such as optimal model search and hyperparameter tuning. Existing AutoML systems often require technical expertise to set up complex tools, which is in general time-consuming and requires a large amount of human effort. Therefore, recent works have started exploiting large language models (LLM) to lessen such burden and increase the usability of AutoML frameworks via a natural language interface, allowing non-expert users to build their data-driven solutions. These methods, however, are usually designed only for a particular process in the AI development pipeline and do not efficiently use the inherent capacity of the LLMs. This paper proposes AutoML-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework tailored for full-pipeline AutoML, i.e., from data retrieval to model deployment. AutoML-Agent takes user's task descriptions, facilitates collaboration between specialized LLM agents, and delivers deployment-ready models. Unlike existing work, instead of devising a single plan, we introduce a retrieval-augmented planning strategy to enhance exploration to search for more optimal plans. We also decompose each plan into sub-tasks (e.g., data preprocessing and neural network design) each of which is solved by a specialized agent we build via prompting executing in parallel, making the search process more efficient. Moreover, we propose a multi-stage verification to verify executed results and guide the code generation LLM in implementing successful solutions. Extensive experiments on seven downstream tasks using fourteen datasets show that AutoML-Agent achieves a higher success rate in automating the full AutoML process, yielding systems with good performance throughout the diverse domains.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

Chain of Tools: Large Language Model is an Automatic Multi-tool Learner

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to extend their utility, empowering them to solve practical tasks. Existing work typically empowers LLMs as tool users with a manually designed workflow, where the LLM plans a series of tools in a step-by-step manner, and sequentially executes each tool to obtain intermediate results until deriving the final answer. However, they suffer from two challenges in realistic scenarios: (1) The handcrafted control flow is often ad-hoc and constraints the LLM to local planning; (2) The LLM is instructed to use only manually demonstrated tools or well-trained Python functions, which limits its generalization to new tools. In this work, we first propose Automatic Tool Chain (ATC), a framework that enables the LLM to act as a multi-tool user, which directly utilizes a chain of tools through programming. To scale up the scope of the tools, we next propose a black-box probing method. This further empowers the LLM as a tool learner that can actively discover and document tool usages, teaching themselves to properly master new tools. For a comprehensive evaluation, we build a challenging benchmark named ToolFlow, which diverges from previous benchmarks by its long-term planning scenarios and complex toolset. Experiments on both existing datasets and ToolFlow illustrate the superiority of our framework. Analysis on different settings also validates the effectiveness and the utility of our black-box probing algorithm.

  • 10 authors
·
May 26, 2024

CAISE: Conversational Agent for Image Search and Editing

Demand for image editing has been increasing as users' desire for expression is also increasing. However, for most users, image editing tools are not easy to use since the tools require certain expertise in photo effects and have complex interfaces. Hence, users might need someone to help edit their images, but having a personal dedicated human assistant for every user is impossible to scale. For that reason, an automated assistant system for image editing is desirable. Additionally, users want more image sources for diverse image editing works, and integrating an image search functionality into the editing tool is a potential remedy for this demand. Thus, we propose a dataset of an automated Conversational Agent for Image Search and Editing (CAISE). To our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides conversational image search and editing annotations, where the agent holds a grounded conversation with users and helps them to search and edit images according to their requests. To build such a system, we first collect image search and editing conversations between pairs of annotators. The assistant-annotators are equipped with a customized image search and editing tool to address the requests from the user-annotators. The functions that the assistant-annotators conduct with the tool are recorded as executable commands, allowing the trained system to be useful for real-world application execution. We also introduce a generator-extractor baseline model for this task, which can adaptively select the source of the next token (i.e., from the vocabulary or from textual/visual contexts) for the executable command. This serves as a strong starting point while still leaving a large human-machine performance gap for useful future work. Our code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/hyounghk/CAISE

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23, 2022

Thinking Like an Annotator: Generation of Dataset Labeling Instructions

Large-scale datasets are essential to modern day deep learning. Advocates argue that understanding these methods requires dataset transparency (e.g. "dataset curation, motivation, composition, collection process, etc..."). However, almost no one has suggested the release of the detailed definitions and visual category examples provided to annotators - information critical to understanding the structure of the annotations present in each dataset. These labels are at the heart of public datasets, yet few datasets include the instructions that were used to generate them. We introduce a new task, Labeling Instruction Generation, to address missing publicly available labeling instructions. In Labeling Instruction Generation, we take a reasonably annotated dataset and: 1) generate a set of examples that are visually representative of each category in the dataset; 2) provide a text label that corresponds to each of the examples. We introduce a framework that requires no model training to solve this task and includes a newly created rapid retrieval system that leverages a large, pre-trained vision and language model. This framework acts as a proxy to human annotators that can help to both generate a final labeling instruction set and evaluate its quality. Our framework generates multiple diverse visual and text representations of dataset categories. The optimized instruction set outperforms our strongest baseline across 5 folds by 7.06 mAP for NuImages and 12.9 mAP for COCO.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 24, 2023 1

Benchmarking and Building Long-Context Retrieval Models with LoCo and M2-BERT

Retrieval pipelines-an integral component of many machine learning systems-perform poorly in domains where documents are long (e.g., 10K tokens or more) and where identifying the relevant document requires synthesizing information across the entire text. Developing long-context retrieval encoders suitable for these domains raises three challenges: (1) how to evaluate long-context retrieval performance, (2) how to pretrain a base language model to represent both short contexts (corresponding to queries) and long contexts (corresponding to documents), and (3) how to fine-tune this model for retrieval under the batch size limitations imposed by GPU memory constraints. To address these challenges, we first introduce LoCoV1, a novel 12 task benchmark constructed to measure long-context retrieval where chunking is not possible or not effective. We next present the M2-BERT retrieval encoder, an 80M parameter state-space encoder model built from the Monarch Mixer architecture, capable of scaling to documents up to 32K tokens long. We describe a pretraining data mixture which allows this encoder to process both short and long context sequences, and a finetuning approach that adapts this base model to retrieval with only single-sample batches. Finally, we validate the M2-BERT retrieval encoder on LoCoV1, finding that it outperforms competitive Transformer-based models by at least 23.3 points, despite containing upwards of 90x fewer parameters.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 12, 2024

FinCPRG: A Bidirectional Generation Pipeline for Hierarchical Queries and Rich Relevance in Financial Chinese Passage Retrieval

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 4

Pipeline and Dataset Generation for Automated Fact-checking in Almost Any Language

This article presents a pipeline for automated fact-checking leveraging publicly available Language Models and data. The objective is to assess the accuracy of textual claims using evidence from a ground-truth evidence corpus. The pipeline consists of two main modules -- the evidence retrieval and the claim veracity evaluation. Our primary focus is on the ease of deployment in various languages that remain unexplored in the field of automated fact-checking. Unlike most similar pipelines, which work with evidence sentences, our pipeline processes data on a paragraph level, simplifying the overall architecture and data requirements. Given the high cost of annotating language-specific fact-checking training data, our solution builds on the Question Answering for Claim Generation (QACG) method, which we adapt and use to generate the data for all models of the pipeline. Our strategy enables the introduction of new languages through machine translation of only two fixed datasets of moderate size. Subsequently, any number of training samples can be generated based on an evidence corpus in the target language. We provide open access to all data and fine-tuned models for Czech, English, Polish, and Slovak pipelines, as well as to our codebase that may be used to reproduce the results.We comprehensively evaluate the pipelines for all four languages, including human annotations and per-sample difficulty assessment using Pointwise V-information. The presented experiments are based on full Wikipedia snapshots to promote reproducibility. To facilitate implementation and user interaction, we develop the FactSearch application featuring the proposed pipeline and the preliminary feedback on its performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 15, 2023

CODE-ACCORD: A Corpus of Building Regulatory Data for Rule Generation towards Automatic Compliance Checking

Automatic Compliance Checking (ACC) within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector necessitates automating the interpretation of building regulations to achieve its full potential. However, extracting information from textual rules to convert them to a machine-readable format has been a challenge due to the complexities associated with natural language and the limited resources that can support advanced machine-learning techniques. To address this challenge, we introduce CODE-ACCORD, a unique dataset compiled under the EU Horizon ACCORD project. CODE-ACCORD comprises 862 self-contained sentences extracted from the building regulations of England and Finland. Aligned with our core objective of facilitating information extraction from text for machine-readable rule generation, each sentence was annotated with entities and relations. Entities represent specific components such as "window" and "smoke detectors", while relations denote semantic associations between these entities, collectively capturing the conveyed ideas in natural language. We manually annotated all the sentences using a group of 12 annotators. Each sentence underwent annotations by multiple annotators and subsequently careful data curation to finalise annotations, ensuring their accuracy and reliability, thereby establishing the dataset as a solid ground truth. CODE-ACCORD offers a rich resource for diverse machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) related tasks in ACC, including text classification, entity recognition and relation extraction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first entity and relation-annotated dataset in compliance checking, which is also publicly available.

  • 14 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024

GUI-360: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Computer-Using Agents

We introduce GUI-360^circ, a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmark suite designed to advance computer-using agents (CUAs). CUAs present unique challenges and is constrained by three persistent gaps: a scarcity of real-world CUA tasks, the lack of automated collection-and-annotation pipelines for multi-modal trajectories, and the absence of a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction. GUI-360^circ addresses these gaps with an LLM-augmented, largely automated pipeline for query sourcing, environment-template construction, task instantiation, batched execution, and LLM-driven quality filtering. The released corpus contains over 1.2M executed action steps across thousands of trajectories in popular Windows office applications, and includes full-resolution screenshots, accessibility metadata when available, instantiated goals, intermediate reasoning traces, and both successful and failed action trajectories. The dataset supports three canonical tasks, GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction, and a hybrid GUI+API action space that reflects modern agent designs. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision--language models on GUI-360^circ reveals substantial out-of-the-box shortcomings in grounding and action prediction; supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield significant gains but do not close the gap to human-level reliability. We release GUI-360^circ and accompanying code to facilitate reproducible research and accelerate progress on robust desktop CUAs. The full dataset has been made public on https://huggingface.co/datasets/vyokky/GUI-360.

microsoft Microsoft
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Nov 6 2