Hanqin Wang

Tommi Kerola, Yuya Masuda, Takashi Masuko et al.

We introduce PLaMo 2.1-VL, a lightweight Vision Language Model (VLM) for autonomous devices, available in 8B and 2B variants and designed for local and edge deployment with Japanese-language operation. Focusing on Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Visual Grounding as its core capabilities, we develop and evaluate the models for two real-world application scenarios: factory task analysis via tool recognition, and infrastructure anomaly detection. We also develop a large-scale synthetic data generation pipeline and comprehensive Japanese training and evaluation resources. PLaMo 2.1-VL outperforms comparable open models on Japanese and English benchmarks, achieving 61.5 ROUGE-L on JA-VG-VQA-500 and 85.2% accuracy on Japanese Ref-L4. For the two application scenarios, it achieves 53.9% zero-shot accuracy on factory task analysis, and fine-tuning on power plant data improves anomaly detection bbox + label F1-score from 39.7 to 64.9.

Xuangeng Chu, Nabarun Goswami, Ziteng Cui et al.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic lip movements and facial expressions for 3D head models from arbitrary audio clips. Although existing diffusion-based methods are capable of producing natural motions, their slow generation speed limits their application potential. In this paper, we introduce a novel autoregressive model that achieves real-time generation of highly synchronized lip movements and realistic head poses and eye blinks by learning a mapping from speech to a multi-scale motion codebook. Furthermore, our model can adapt to unseen speaking styles, enabling the creation of 3D talking avatars with unique personal styles beyond the identities seen during training. Extensive evaluations and user studies demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in lip synchronization accuracy and perceived quality.

Preferred Networks, Kaizaburo Chubachi, Yasuhiro Fujita et al.

In this report, we introduce PLaMo 2, a series of Japanese-focused large language models featuring a hybrid Samba-based architecture that transitions to full attention via continual pre-training to support 32K token contexts. Training leverages extensive synthetic corpora to overcome data scarcity, while computational efficiency is achieved through weight reuse and structured pruning. This efficient pruning methodology produces an 8B model that achieves performance comparable to our previous 100B model. Post-training further refines the models using a pipeline of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO), enhanced by synthetic Japanese instruction data and model merging techniques. Optimized for inference using vLLM and quantization with minimal accuracy loss, the PLaMo 2 models achieve state-of-the-art results on Japanese benchmarks, outperforming similarly-sized open models in instruction-following, language fluency, and Japanese-specific knowledge.

Kohei Uehara, Nabarun Goswami, Hanqin Wang et al.

The increasing demand for intelligent systems capable of interpreting and reasoning about visual content requires the development of large Vision-and-Language Models (VLMs) that are not only accurate but also have explicit reasoning capabilities. This paper presents a novel approach to develop a VLM with the ability to conduct explicit reasoning based on visual content and textual instructions. We introduce a system that can ask a question to acquire necessary knowledge, thereby enhancing the robustness and explicability of the reasoning process. To this end, we developed a novel dataset generated by a Large Language Model (LLM), designed to promote chain-of-thought reasoning combined with a question-asking mechanism. The dataset covers a range of tasks, from common ones like caption generation to specialized VQA tasks that require expert knowledge. Furthermore, using the dataset we created, we fine-tuned an existing VLM. This training enabled the models to generate questions and perform iterative reasoning during inference. The results demonstrated a stride toward a more robust, accurate, and interpretable VLM, capable of reasoning explicitly and seeking information proactively when confronted with ambiguous visual input.