Haoli Yin

Christina Baek, Ricardo Pio Monti, David Schwab et al.

Real-world model deployments demand strong performance on narrow domains where data is often scarce. Typically, practitioners finetune models to specialize them, but this risks overfitting to the domain and forgetting general knowledge. We study a simple strategy, specialized pretraining (SPT), where a small domain dataset, typically reserved for finetuning, is repeated starting from pretraining as a fraction of the total tokens. Across three specialized domains (ChemPile, MusicPile, and ProofPile), SPT improves domain performance and preserves general capabilities after finetuning compared to standard pretraining. In our experiments, SPT reduces the pretraining tokens needed to reach a given domain performance by up to 1.75x. These gains grow when the target domain is underrepresented in the pretraining corpus: on domains far from web text, a 1B SPT model outperforms a 3B standard pretrained model. Beyond these empirical gains, we derive overfitting scaling laws to guide practitioners in selecting the optimal domain-data repetition for a given pretraining compute budget. Our observations reveal the finetuner's fallacy: while finetuning may appear to be the cheapest path to domain adaptation, introducing specialized domain data during pretraining stretches its utility. SPT yields better specialized domain performance (via reduced overfitting across repeated exposures) and better general domain performance (via reduced forgetting during finetuning), ultimately achieving stronger results with fewer parameters and less total compute when amortized over inference. To get the most out of domain data, incorporate it as early in training as possible.

Siddharth Joshi, Haoli Yin, Rishabh Adiga et al.

Data curation has shifted the quality-compute frontier for language-model and contrastive image-text pretraining, but its role for vision-language models (VLMs) is far less established. We ask how far data curation alone can take VLM performance, holding architecture, training recipe, and compute fixed and varying only the training data. Our pipeline, applied to the MAmmoTH-VL single-image subset, lifts performance by +11.7pp on average across 20 public VLM benchmarks (spanning grounding, VQA, OCR/documents, captioning, spatial/3D, counting, charts, math, brand-ID, and multi-image reasoning) and by +11.3pp on average across all nine capability axes of DatBench, our high-fidelity VLM eval suite. At 2B, our curated model surpasses InternVL3.5-2B by 9.9pp at ~17x less training compute and closes the gap to Qwen3-VL-2B to within 1.8pp at ~87x less compute, from pretraining alone. Beyond accuracy, curation delivers four further properties: (1) Reliability: per-capability std across training seeds drops by ~67% and the lift survives a 4k-to-16k context-length sweep; (2) OOD generalization: the 9-eval OOD average rises by +7.2pp, and multi-image BLINK rises by +3.09pp despite single-image-only training, with Visual Correspondence gaining +11.8pp; (3) Behavioral gains beyond benchmarks: across ~1,100 open-ended queries the curated 2B is more honest and more specific than the matched-compute baseline, and more concise and less refusal-prone than a frontier 2B reference; (4) Pareto-dominance on inference cost: at every scale (1B, 2B, 4B) the curated model raises accuracy while lowering response FLOPs vs. the matched-compute baseline, and the curated 4B matches near-frontier accuracy at 3.3x lower response FLOPs than Qwen3-VL-4B. Data curation is a high-leverage tool for building better VLMs, reaching near-frontier accuracy at up to ~150x less training compute.

Haoli Yin, Jiayao Li, Eva Schiller et al.

Object Re-Identification (ReID) is pivotal in computer vision, witnessing an escalating demand for adept multimodal representation learning. Current models, although promising, reveal scalability limitations with increasing modalities as they rely heavily on late fusion, which postpones the integration of specific modality insights. Addressing this, we introduce the \textbf{Gradual Fusion Transformer (GraFT)} for multimodal ReID. At its core, GraFT employs learnable fusion tokens that guide self-attention across encoders, adeptly capturing both modality-specific and object-specific features. Further bolstering its efficacy, we introduce a novel training paradigm combined with an augmented triplet loss, optimizing the ReID feature embedding space. We demonstrate these enhancements through extensive ablation studies and show that GraFT consistently surpasses established multimodal ReID benchmarks. Additionally, aiming for deployment versatility, we've integrated neural network pruning into GraFT, offering a balance between model size and performance.

DatologyAI, Siddharth Joshi, Haoli Yin et al.

Empirical evaluation serves as the primary compass guiding research progress in foundation models. Despite a large body of work focused on training frontier vision-language models (VLMs), approaches to their evaluation remain nascent. To guide their maturation, we propose three desiderata that evaluations should satisfy: (1) faithfulness to the modality and application, (2) discriminability between models of varying quality, and (3) efficiency in compute. Through this lens, we identify critical failure modes that violate faithfulness and discriminability, misrepresenting model capabilities: (i) multiple-choice formats reward guessing, poorly reflect downstream use cases, and saturate early as models improve; (ii) blindly solvable questions, which can be answered without images, constitute up to 70% of some evaluations; and (iii) mislabeled or ambiguous samples compromise up to 42% of examples in certain datasets. Regarding efficiency, the computational burden of evaluating frontier models has become prohibitive: by some accounts, nearly 20% of development compute is devoted to evaluation alone. Rather than discarding existing benchmarks, we curate them via transformation and filtering to maximize fidelity and discriminability. We find that converting multiple-choice questions to generative tasks reveals sharp capability drops of up to 35%. In addition, filtering blindly solvable and mislabeled samples improves discriminative power while simultaneously reducing computational cost. We release DatBench-Full, a cleaned evaluation suite of 33 datasets spanning nine VLM capabilities, and DatBench, a discriminative subset that achieves 13x average speedup (up to 50x) while closely matching the discriminative power of the original datasets. Our work outlines a path toward evaluation practices that are both rigorous and sustainable as VLMs continue to scale.

Jennifer Crawford, Haoli Yin, Luke McDermott et al.

Multimodal Re-Identification (ReID) is a popular retrieval task that aims to re-identify objects across diverse data streams, prompting many researchers to integrate multiple modalities into a unified representation. While such fusion promises a holistic view, our investigations shed light on potential pitfalls. We uncover that prevailing late-fusion techniques often produce suboptimal latent representations when compared to methods that train modalities in isolation. We argue that this effect is largely due to the inadvertent relaxation of the training objectives on individual modalities when using fusion, what others have termed modality laziness. We present a nuanced point-of-view that this relaxation can lead to certain modalities failing to fully harness available task-relevant information, and yet, offers a protective veil to noisy modalities, preventing them from overfitting to task-irrelevant data. Our findings also show that unimodal concatenation (UniCat) and other late-fusion ensembling of unimodal backbones, when paired with best-known training techniques, exceed the current state-of-the-art performance across several multimodal ReID benchmarks. By unveiling the double-edged sword of "modality laziness", we motivate future research in balancing local modality strengths with global representations.

Haoli Yin, Nithin Buduma

Multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) has a growing role in detecting prostate cancer lesions. Thus, it is pertinent that medical professionals who interpret these scans reduce the risk of human error by using computer-aided detection systems. The variety of algorithms used in system implementation, however, has yielded mixed results. Here we investigate the best machine learning classifier for each prostate zone. We also discover salient features to clarify the models' classification rationale. Of the data provided, we gathered and augmented T2 weighted images and apparent diffusion coefficient map images to extract first through third order statistical features as input to machine learning classifiers. For our deep learning classifier, we used a convolutional neural net (CNN) architecture for automatic feature extraction and classification. The interpretability of the CNN results was improved by saliency mapping to understand the classification mechanisms within. Ultimately, we concluded that effective detection of peripheral and anterior fibromuscular stroma (AS) lesions depended more on statistical distribution features, whereas those in the transition zone (TZ) depended more on textural features. Ensemble algorithms worked best for PZ and TZ zones, while CNNs were best in the AS zone. These classifiers can be used to validate a radiologist's predictions and reduce inter-reader variability in patients suspected to have prostate cancer. The salient features reported in this study can also be investigated further to better understand hidden features and biomarkers of prostate lesions with mpMRIs.

DatologyAI, Matthew L. Leavitt, Siddharth Joshi et al.

Inference efficiency is typically pursued by shrinking the model: distillation, pruning, quantization, and sparse routing each lower per-token cost while treating token count as fixed. But output length has been inflating, and it is precisely the component the standard toolkit leaves untouched. Here, we argue that brevity is the missing inference-efficiency lever, and that pretraining data curation is a practical way to pull it: a model trained on concise, correct data learns to answer in fewer tokens; i.e. it has a lower Cost-of-Pass. We apply our VLM curation pipeline to the MAmmoTH-VL single-image subset, and compare models trained on our curated data, the standard MAmmoTH-VL data, and external open-weight frontier VLMs. On a controlled 20-evaluation set and 14 VLMs at 1B-4B activated parameters, we hold output length fixed with a per-model regression, separating brevity from quality, and price models in FLOPs per correct answer. Curation buys a 35x Cost-of-Pass advantage over the most verbose 4B comparator (Qwen3.5-4B) within $\sim$1 pp of accuracy (0.41 vs 14.58 TFLOPs per correct answer; 0.691 vs 0.704 mean accuracy). Curation also buys a +17.55-percentage-point matched-length accuracy gain over the uncurated baseline that grows with model scale (from +16.7 pp at 1B to +21.2 pp at 4B). This brevity improvement concedes no quality: generic verbosity buys no accuracy at any capability or scale, and the window where reasoning-structured verbosity still earns its tokens shrinks from 4 of 8 capability groups at 2B to 1 of 8 at 4B. Per example, the concise model even reaches correct answers the verbose reasoning model misses, marking reasoning as a distinct curation target rather than something brevity gives up. Inference efficiency in this regime is a tokens-per-correct problem, and brevity is the lever that targets it directly.