Joshua Adrian Cahyono

Kaichen Zhang, Bo Li, Peiyuan Zhang et al.

The advances of large foundation models necessitate wide-coverage, low-cost, and zero-contamination benchmarks. Despite continuous exploration of language model evaluations, comprehensive studies on the evaluation of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) remain limited. In this work, we introduce LMMS-EVAL, a unified and standardized multimodal benchmark framework with over 50 tasks and more than 10 models to promote transparent and reproducible evaluations. Although LMMS-EVAL offers comprehensive coverage, we find it still falls short in achieving low cost and zero contamination. To approach this evaluation trilemma, we further introduce LMMS-EVAL LITE, a pruned evaluation toolkit that emphasizes both coverage and efficiency. Additionally, we present Multimodal LIVEBENCH that utilizes continuously updating news and online forums to assess models' generalization abilities in the wild, featuring a low-cost and zero-contamination evaluation approach. In summary, our work highlights the importance of considering the evaluation trilemma and provides practical solutions to navigate the trade-offs in evaluating large multi-modal models, paving the way for more effective and reliable benchmarking of LMMs. We opensource our codebase and maintain leaderboard of LIVEBENCH at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/lmms-eval and https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmms-lab/LiveBench.

Joshua Adrian Cahyono, Saran Subramanian

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper investigates these failure modes through three experiments: (1) a multiple-choice evaluation to measure model stability against user pressure; (2) a free-response analysis using a novel safety typology and an LLM Judge; and (3) a mechanistic interpretability experiment to steer model behavior by manipulating a "high-stakes" activation vector. Our results show that while some models exhibit sycophancy, others like o4-mini remain robust. Top-performing models achieve high safety scores by frequently asking clarifying questions, a key feature of a safe, inquisitive approach, rather than issuing prescriptive advice. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a model's cautiousness can be directly controlled via activation steering, suggesting a new path for safety alignment. These findings underscore the need for nuanced, multi-faceted benchmarks to ensure LLMs can be trusted with life-changing decisions.

Joshua Adrian Cahyono, Jeremy Nathan Jusuf

This project aims to create an automated image captioning system that generates natural language descriptions for input images by integrating techniques from computer vision and natural language processing. We employ various different techniques, ranging from CNN-RNN to the more advanced transformer-based techniques. Training is carried out on image datasets paired with descriptive captions, and model performance will be evaluated using established metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and CIDEr. The project will also involve experimentation with advanced attention mechanisms, comparisons of different architectural choices, and hyperparameter optimization to refine captioning accuracy and overall system effectiveness.

Bo Li, Yuanhan Zhang, Liangyu Chen et al.

Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have unveiled great potential as visual assistants. However, most existing works focus on responding to individual instructions or using previous dialogues for contextual understanding. There is little discussion on employing both images and text as in-context examples to enhance the instruction following capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce the \textbf{Otter} model to leverage both textual and visual in-context examples for instruction tuning. Specifically, Otter builds upon Flamingo with Perceiver architecture, and has been instruction tuned for general purpose multi-modal assistant. Otter seamlessly processes multi-modal inputs, supporting modalities including text, multiple images, and dynamic video content. To support the training of Otter, we present the \textbf{MIMIC-IT} (\textbf{M}ult\textbf{I}-\textbf{M}odal \textbf{I}n-\textbf{C}ontext \textbf{I}nstruction \textbf{T}uning) dataset, which encompasses over 3 million multi-modal instruction-response pairs, including approximately 2.2 million unique instructions across a broad spectrum of images and videos. MIMIC-IT has been carefully curated to feature a diverse array of in-context examples for each entry. Comprehensive evaluations suggest that instruction tuning with these in-context examples substantially enhances model convergence and generalization capabilities. Notably, the extensive scenario coverage provided by the MIMIC-IT dataset empowers the Otter model to excel in tasks involving complex video and multi-image understanding.