Jacob Hansen

Junmo Kang, Hongyin Luo, Yada Zhu et al. · gatech

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-alignment in which a large language model is aligned to follow general instructions using instructional data generated from the model itself starting from a handful of human-written seeds. Instead of general alignment, in this work, we focus on self-alignment for expert domain specialization (e.g., biomedicine, finance). As a preliminary, we quantitively show the marginal effect that generic instruction-following training has on downstream expert domains' performance. To remedy this, we propose self-specialization - allowing for effective model specialization while achieving cross-task generalization by leveraging only a few labeled seeds. Self-specialization offers a data- and parameter-efficient way of "carving out" an expert model out of a generalist pre-trained LLM. Exploring a variety of popular open large models as a base for specialization, our experimental results in both biomedical and financial domains show that our self-specialized models outperform their base models by a large margin, and even larger models that are generally instruction-tuned or that have been adapted to the target domain by other means.

Granite Vision Team, Leonid Karlinsky, Assaf Arbelle et al.

We introduce Granite Vision, a lightweight large language model with vision capabilities, specifically designed to excel in enterprise use cases, particularly in visual document understanding. Our model is trained on a comprehensive instruction-following dataset, including document-related tasks, such as content extraction from tables, charts, diagrams, sketches, and infographics, as well as general image tasks. The architecture of Granite Vision is centered around visual modality alignment with a decoder-only, 2 billion parameter Granite large language model. Additionally, we introduce a dedicated safety classification approach in test-time that leverages a sparse set of attention vectors to identify potential harmful inputs. Despite its lightweight architecture, Granite Vision achieves strong results in standard benchmarks related to visual document understanding, as well as on the LiveXiv benchmark, which is designed to avoid test set contamination by using a constantly updated corpus of recently published Arxiv papers. We are releasing the model under the Apache-2 license, allowing for both research and commercial use, while offering complete visibility into the training data and other relevant details. See https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/ for model weights.

Jacob Hansen, Wei Lin, Junmo Kang et al.

Visual Instruction Tuning (VisIT) data, commonly available as human-assistant conversations with images interleaved in the human turns, are currently the most widespread vehicle for aligning strong LLMs to understand visual inputs, converting them to strong LMMs. While many VisIT datasets are available, most are constructed using ad-hoc techniques developed independently by different groups. They are often poorly documented, lack reproducible code, and rely on paid, closed-source model APIs such as GPT-4, Gemini, or Claude to convert image metadata (labels) into VisIT instructions. This leads to high costs and makes it challenging to scale, enhance quality, or generate VisIT data for new datasets. In this work, we address these challenges and propose an open and unified recipe and approach,~\textbf{\method}, for converting available metadata to VisIT instructions using open LLMs. Our multi-stage \method features an efficient framework for metadata grouping, quality control, data and prompt organization, and conversation sampling. We show that our approach can reproduce or enhance the data quality of available VisIT datasets when applied to the same image data and metadata sources, improving GPT-4 generated VisIT instructions by ~3\% on average and up to 12\% on individual benchmarks using open models, such as Gemma 2 27B and LLaMa 3.1 70B. Additionally, our approach enables effective performance scaling - both in quantity and quality - by enhancing the resulting LMM performance across a wide range of benchmarks. We also analyze the impact of various factors, including conversation format, base model selection, and resampling strategies. Our code, which supports the reproduction of equal or higher-quality VisIT datasets and facilities future metadata-to-VisIT data conversion for niche domains, is released at https://github.com/jacob-hansen/Instructify.

Junmo Kang, Leonid Karlinsky, Hongyin Luo et al.

We present Self-MoE, an approach that transforms a monolithic LLM into a compositional, modular system of self-specialized experts, named MiXSE (MiXture of Self-specialized Experts). Our approach leverages self-specialization, which constructs expert modules using self-generated synthetic data, each equipping a shared base LLM with distinct domain-specific capabilities, activated via self-optimized routing. This allows for dynamic and capability-specific handling of various target tasks, enhancing overall capabilities, without extensive human-labeled data and added parameters. Our empirical results reveal that specializing LLMs may exhibit potential trade-offs in performances on non-specialized tasks. On the other hand, our Self-MoE demonstrates substantial improvements (6.5%p on average) over the base LLM across diverse benchmarks such as knowledge, reasoning, math, and coding. It also consistently outperforms other methods, including instance merging and weight merging, while offering better flexibility and interpretability by design with semantic experts and routing. Our findings highlight the critical role of modularity, the applicability of Self-MoE to multiple base LLMs, and the potential of self-improvement in achieving efficient, scalable, and adaptable systems.