Martin Q. Ma

Alex Wilf, Martin Q. Ma, Paul Pu Liang et al. · cmu

Creating artificial social intelligence - algorithms that can understand the nuances of multi-person interactions - is an exciting and emerging challenge in processing facial expressions and gestures from multimodal videos. Recent multimodal methods have set the state of the art on many tasks, but have difficulty modeling the complex face-to-face conversational dynamics across speaking turns in social interaction, particularly in a self-supervised setup. In this paper, we propose Face-to-Face Contrastive Learning (F2F-CL), a graph neural network designed to model social interactions using factorization nodes to contextualize the multimodal face-to-face interaction along the boundaries of the speaking turn. With the F2F-CL model, we propose to perform contrastive learning between the factorization nodes of different speaking turns within the same video. We experimentally evaluated the challenging Social-IQ dataset and show state-of-the-art results.

Lingjing Kong, Martin Q. Ma, Guangyi Chen et al.

Masked autoencoder (MAE), a simple and effective self-supervised learning framework based on the reconstruction of masked image regions, has recently achieved prominent success in a variety of vision tasks. Despite the emergence of intriguing empirical observations on MAE, a theoretically principled understanding is still lacking. In this work, we formally characterize and justify existing empirical insights and provide theoretical guarantees of MAE. We formulate the underlying data-generating process as a hierarchical latent variable model and show that under reasonable assumptions, MAE provably identifies a set of latent variables in the hierarchical model, explaining why MAE can extract high-level information from pixels. Further, we show how key hyperparameters in MAE (the masking ratio and the patch size) determine which true latent variables to be recovered, therefore influencing the level of semantic information in the representation. Specifically, extremely large or small masking ratios inevitably lead to low-level representations. Our theory offers coherent explanations of existing empirical observations and provides insights for potential empirical improvements and fundamental limitations of the masking-reconstruction paradigm. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our theoretical insights.

Shuchang Pan, Siddharth Banerjee, Dhruv Hebbar et al.

Human conversation is organized by an implicit chain of thoughts that manifests as timed speech acts. Capturing this causal pathway is key to building natural full-duplex interactive systems. We introduce a framework that enables reasoning over conversational behaviors by modeling this process as causal inference within a Graph-of-Thoughts (GoT). Our approach formalizes the intent-to-action pathway with a hierarchical labeling scheme, predicting high-level communicative intents and low-level speech acts to learn their causal and temporal dependencies. To train this system, we develop a hybrid corpus that pairs controllable, event-rich simulations with human-annotated rationales and real conversational speech. The GoT framework structures streaming predictions as an evolving graph, enabling a multimodal transformer to forecast the next speech act, generate concise justifications for its decisions, and dynamically refine its reasoning. Experiments on both synthetic and real duplex dialogues show that the framework delivers robust behavior detection, produces interpretable reasoning chains, and establishes a foundation for benchmarking conversational reasoning in full duplex spoken dialogue systems.

Ce Zhang, Zifu Wan, Zhehan Kan et al. · cmu

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance in multi-modal tasks, they are prone to generating hallucinatory text responses that do not align with the given visual input, which restricts their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, inspired by the observation that the text-to-image generation process is the inverse of image-conditioned response generation in LVLMs, we explore the potential of leveraging text-to-image generative models to assist in mitigating hallucinations in LVLMs. We discover that generative models can offer valuable self-feedback for mitigating hallucinations at both the response and token levels. Building on this insight, we introduce self-correcting Decoding with Generative Feedback (DeGF), a novel training-free algorithm that incorporates feedback from text-to-image generative models into the decoding process to effectively mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs. Specifically, DeGF generates an image from the initial response produced by LVLMs, which acts as an auxiliary visual reference and provides self-feedback to verify and correct the initial response through complementary or contrastive decoding. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating diverse types of hallucinations, consistently surpassing state-of-the-art methods across six benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/DeGF.

Long Phan, Alice Gatti, Ziwen Han et al. · amazon-science, apple-ml

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,500 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.

Zifu Wan, Ce Zhang, Silong Yong et al.

Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have introduced a new paradigm for understanding and reasoning about image input through textual responses. Although they have achieved remarkable performance across a range of multi-modal tasks, they face the persistent challenge of hallucination, which introduces practical weaknesses and raises concerns about their reliable deployment in real-world applications. Existing work has explored contrastive decoding approaches to mitigate this issue, where the output of the original LVLM is compared and contrasted with that of a perturbed version. However, these methods require two or more queries that slow down LVLM response generation, making them less suitable for real-time applications. To overcome this limitation, we propose ONLY, a training-free decoding approach that requires only a single query and a one-layer intervention during decoding, enabling efficient real-time deployment. Specifically, we enhance textual outputs by selectively amplifying crucial textual information using a text-to-visual entropy ratio for each token. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed ONLY consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks while requiring minimal implementation effort and computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/zifuwan/ONLY.

Martin Q. Ma, Yue Zhao, Xiaorong Zhang et al.

Given an unsupervised outlier detection task, how should one select a detection algorithm as well as its hyperparameters (jointly called a model)? Unsupervised model selection is notoriously difficult, in the absence of hold-out validation data with ground-truth labels. Therefore, the problem is vastly understudied. In this work, we study the feasibility of employing internal model evaluation strategies for selecting a model for outlier detection. These so-called internal strategies solely rely on the input data (without labels) and the output (outlier scores) of the candidate models. We setup (and open-source) a large testbed with 39 detection tasks and 297 candidate models comprised of 8 detectors and various hyperparameter configurations. We evaluate 7 different strategies on their ability to discriminate between models w.r.t. detection performance, without using any labels. Our study reveals room for progress -- we find that none would be practically useful, as they select models only comparable to a state-of-the-art detector (with random configuration).

Martin Q. Ma, Yuxiao Qu, Aditya Agrawal et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) typically rely on static initial frames for video reasoning, restricting their ability to incorporate essential dynamic information as the reasoning process evolves. Existing methods that augment Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with additional frame information often exhibit suboptimal CoT quality and lack the crucial ability to synthesize visual information for hypothetical or counterfactual scenarios. We introduce Act-to-See (Act2See), a novel framework that enables active visual perception by empowering VLMs to actively interleave video frames within text CoTs. Act2See is developed via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a high-quality dataset of reasoning traces generated by a frontier VLM. These traces integrate active calls to either retrieve existing frames or generate new ones, and are rigorously verified against human-annotated CoTs to ensure quality. This approach cultivates an emergent capability: at inference time, the model actively determines when to search for or synthesize the necessary visual evidence. Act2See establishes new state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks, including VideoEspresso and ViTIB, and outperforms comparable or larger models on Video-MME, EgoNormia, and VCR-Bench, demonstrating an advancement in enabling VLMs with active visual perception for video reasoning.

Martin Q. Ma, Willis Guo, Aditya Agrawal et al.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal tasks such as video question answering (QA). However, VLMs face the challenge of selecting frames effectively and efficiently, as standard uniform sampling is expensive and performance may plateau. Inspired by active perception theory, which posits that models gain information by acquiring data that differs from their expectations, we introduce Video Active Perception (VAP), a training-free method to enhance long-form video QA using VLMs. Our approach treats keyframe selection as data acquisition in active perception and leverages a lightweight text-conditioned video generation model to represent prior world knowledge. Empirically, VAP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot results on long-form or reasoning video QA datasets such as EgoSchema, NExT-QA, ActivityNet-QA, IntentQA, and CLEVRER, achieving an increase of up to 5.6 x frame efficiency by frames per question over standard GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and LLaVA-OV. Moreover, VAP shows stronger reasoning abilities than previous methods and effectively selects keyframes relevant to questions. These findings highlight the potential of leveraging active perception to improve the frame effectiveness and efficiency of long-form video QA.

Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Tianqin Li, Martin Q. Ma et al.

Conditional contrastive learning frameworks consider the conditional sampling procedure that constructs positive or negative data pairs conditioned on specific variables. Fair contrastive learning constructs negative pairs, for example, from the same gender (conditioning on sensitive information), which in turn reduces undesirable information from the learned representations; weakly supervised contrastive learning constructs positive pairs with similar annotative attributes (conditioning on auxiliary information), which in turn are incorporated into the representations. Although conditional contrastive learning enables many applications, the conditional sampling procedure can be challenging if we cannot obtain sufficient data pairs for some values of the conditioning variable. This paper presents Conditional Contrastive Learning with Kernel (CCL-K) that converts existing conditional contrastive objectives into alternative forms that mitigate the insufficient data problem. Instead of sampling data according to the value of the conditioning variable, CCL-K uses the Kernel Conditional Embedding Operator that samples data from all available data and assigns weights to each sampled data given the kernel similarity between the values of the conditioning variable. We conduct experiments using weakly supervised, fair, and hard negatives contrastive learning, showing CCL-K outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Martin Q. Ma, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Paul Pu Liang et al.

Contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) learns an embedding space that maps similar data pairs closer and dissimilar data pairs farther apart. Despite its success, one issue has been overlooked: the fairness aspect of representations learned using contrastive SSL. Without mitigation, contrastive SSL techniques can incorporate sensitive information such as gender or race and cause potentially unfair predictions on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a Conditional Contrastive Learning (CCL) approach to improve the fairness of contrastive SSL methods. Our approach samples positive and negative pairs from distributions conditioning on the sensitive attribute, or empirically speaking, sampling positive and negative pairs from the same gender or the same race. We show that our approach provably maximizes the conditional mutual information between the learned representations of the positive pairs, and reduces the effect of the sensitive attribute by taking it as the conditional variable. On seven fairness and vision datasets, we empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art downstream performances compared to unsupervised baselines and significantly improves the fairness of contrastive SSL models on multiple fairness metrics.

Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Martin Q. Ma, Muqiao Yang et al.

This paper introduces Relative Predictive Coding (RPC), a new contrastive representation learning objective that maintains a good balance among training stability, minibatch size sensitivity, and downstream task performance. The key to the success of RPC is two-fold. First, RPC introduces the relative parameters to regularize the objective for boundedness and low variance. Second, RPC contains no logarithm and exponential score functions, which are the main cause of training instability in prior contrastive objectives. We empirically verify the effectiveness of RPC on benchmark vision and speech self-supervised learning tasks. Lastly, we relate RPC with mutual information (MI) estimation, showing RPC can be used to estimate MI with low variance.

Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Martin Q. Ma, Muqiao Yang et al.

The human language can be expressed through multiple sources of information known as modalities, including tones of voice, facial gestures, and spoken language. Recent multimodal learning with strong performances on human-centric tasks such as sentiment analysis and emotion recognition are often black-box, with very limited interpretability. In this paper we propose Multimodal Routing, which dynamically adjusts weights between input modalities and output representations differently for each input sample. Multimodal routing can identify relative importance of both individual modalities and cross-modality features. Moreover, the weight assignment by routing allows us to interpret modality-prediction relationships not only globally (i.e. general trends over the whole dataset), but also locally for each single input sample, meanwhile keeping competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Muqiao Yang, Martin Q. Ma, Dongyu Li et al.

While deep learning has received a surge of interest in a variety of fields in recent years, major deep learning models barely use complex numbers. However, speech, signal and audio data are naturally complex-valued after Fourier Transform, and studies have shown a potentially richer representation of complex nets. In this paper, we propose a Complex Transformer, which incorporates the transformer model as a backbone for sequence modeling; we also develop attention and encoder-decoder network operating for complex input. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MusicNet dataset and an In-phase Quadrature (IQ) signal dataset.