CVMay 18Code
Incantation: Natural Language as the Action Interface for Multi-Entity Video World ModelsShangwen Zhu, Qianyu Peng, Zhao Pu et al.
Modern interactive video world models have achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet lack fine-grained multi-entity control and cross-entity, cross-world generalization. We trace this gap to the action interface: standard control protocols (e.g. animation IDs, device inputs, scene-level captions) bind action semantics to specific entities or engines at design time. We propose natural language as the interface to unlock expressiveness that no prior interface can achieve, and we present Incantation, the first interactive video world model with per-latent-frame (0.25 s) natural-language conditioning that supports simultaneous multi-entity control and concept-level cross-entity transfer beyond any fixed rendering pipeline. We pair a pretrained bidirectional video backbone with frame-local text cross-attention, and enable real-time long-horizon streaming through ODE-initialized Self-Forcing distillation with a RoPE-decoupled sliding KV-cache. We surpass the Action-Index baseline on cross-entity transfer (89% vs. 43%) and out-of-vocabulary prompts (90% vs. 0%), and our 2-step student sustains 19.7 FPS at 480p with stable FVD over 2-hour rollouts. We further apply the same architecture and training recipe to The King of Fighters, changing only the per-entity action vocabulary slots. We have released a preview subset of the Incantation dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhush/incantation-elden-ring-scenes, containing manually collected Elden Ring player-boss combat clips with structured action-oriented metadata. Larger-scale Elden Ring and KOF data will be released with the full project.
CLFeb 13
ReFilter: Improving Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Gated FilterYixin Chen, Ying Xiong, Shangyu Wu et al.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a dominant paradigm for grounding large language models (LLMs) with external evidence in knowledge-intensive question answering. A core design choice is how to fuse retrieved samples into the LLMs, where existing internal fusion approaches broadly fall into query-based fusion, parametric fusion, and latent-based fusion. Despite their effectiveness at modest retrieval scales, these methods often fail to scale gracefully as the number of retrieved candidates k increases: Larger k improves evidence coverage, yet realistic top-k retrieval inevitably contains irrelevant or redundant content and increases the inference cost. To address these limitations, we propose ReFilter, a novel latent-based fusion framework that performs token-level filtering and fusion. ReFilter consists of three key components: a context encoder for encoding context features, a gated filter for weighting each token, and a token fusion module for integrating the weighted token feature into the LLM's hidden states. Our experiments across four general-domain QA benchmarks show that ReFilter consistently achieves the best average performance under both in-domain adaptation and out-of-domain transfer. ReFilter further generalizes to five biomedical QA benchmarks in zero-shot transfer without domain fine-tuning, reaching 70.01% average accuracy with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct.
DCJun 30, 2025
Towards Building Private LLMs: Exploring Multi-Node Expert Parallelism on Apple Silicon for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language ModelMu-Chi Chen, Po-Hsuan Huang, Xiangrui Ke et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Artificial Intelligence (AI) with significant advancements such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, and Databricks' DBRX. This paper addresses the cost and scalability challenges encountered when constructing private LLM systems for personal or small group services, as aimed by Apple Intelligence. A Mac Studio cluster with Apple's M2 Ultra chips is established as a cost-efficient solution to host and accelerate the pretrained DBRX model with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Our performance analysis reveal that parallel execution of the model's experts across two to four machine nodes significantly reduces inference time. We find that computation time for the experts is comparable to the communication time for exchanging their outputs, emphasizing the importance of network latency over bandwidth. We also observe significant management overhead due to Apple software stack's memory management logic. Based on these findings, we develop optimization schemes to eliminate the memory management overhead. As a result, the Mac Studio cluster is 1.15 times more cost-efficient than the state-of-the-art AI supercomputer with NVIDIA H100 GPUs. In addition, we construct a performance model to estimate system performance under varying configurations, and the model provides valuable insights for designing private LLM systems.