R. Xu

Tiancheng Zhao, Qianqian Zhang, Kyusong Lee et al. · cmu

We introduce OmChat, a model designed to excel in handling long contexts and video understanding tasks. OmChat's new architecture standardizes how different visual inputs are processed, making it more efficient and adaptable. It uses a dynamic vision encoding process to effectively handle images of various resolutions, capturing fine details across a range of image qualities. OmChat utilizes an active progressive multimodal pretraining strategy, which gradually increases the model's capacity for long contexts and enhances its overall abilities. By selecting high-quality data during training, OmChat learns from the most relevant and informative data points. With support for a context length of up to 512K, OmChat demonstrates promising performance in tasks involving multiple images and videos, outperforming most open-source models in these benchmarks. Additionally, OmChat proposes a prompting strategy for unifying complex multimodal inputs including single image text, multi-image text and videos, and achieving competitive performance on single-image benchmarks. To further evaluate the model's capabilities, we proposed a benchmark dataset named Temporal Visual Needle in a Haystack. This dataset assesses OmChat's ability to comprehend temporal visual details within long videos. Our analysis highlights several key factors contributing to OmChat's success: support for any-aspect high image resolution, the active progressive pretraining strategy, and high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets. This report provides a detailed overview of OmChat's capabilities and the strategies that enhance its performance in visual understanding.

Haozhan Shen, Kangjia Zhao, Tiancheng Zhao et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding. Recently, with the integration of test-time scaling techniques, these models have also shown strong potential in visual reasoning. However, most existing reasoning approaches remain text-level in nature: MLLMs are prompted to explore various combinations of textual tokens via their underlying language model, while the visual input remains fixed throughout the reasoning process. This paradigm limits the model's ability to fully exploit rich visual information, particularly when dealing with images containing numerous fine-grained elements. In such cases, vision-level reasoning becomes crucial - where models dynamically zoom into specific regions of the image to gather detailed visual cues necessary for accurate decision-making. In this paper, we propose Zoom Eye, a training-free, model-agnostic tree search algorithm tailored for vision-level reasoning. Zoom Eye treats an image as a hierarchical tree structure, where each child node represents a zoomed-in sub-region of its parent, and the root corresponds to the full image. The algorithm enables MLLMs to simulate human-like zooming behavior by navigating from root to leaf nodes in search of task-relevant visual evidence. We experiment on a series of high-resolution benchmarks and the results demonstrate that Zoom Eye consistently improves the performance of multiple MLLMs by a large margin (e.g., InternVL2.5-8B increases by 15.71% and 17.69% on HR-Bench) and also enables small 3-8B MLLMs to outperform strong large models such as GPT-4o. Code: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye

Yutao Sun, Mingshuai Chen, Tiancheng Zhao et al. · cmu

Self-improving large language models (LLMs) -- i.e., to improve the performance of an LLM by fine-tuning it with synthetic data generated by itself -- is a promising way to advance the capabilities of LLMs while avoiding extensive supervision. Existing approaches to self-improvement often rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. This paper presents Crescent -- a simple yet effective framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. Crescent first elicits the LLM to generate raw questions via a bait prompt, then diversifies these questions leveraging a rejection sampling-based self-deduplication, and finally feeds the questions to the LLM and collects the corresponding answers by means of majority voting. We show that Crescent sheds light on the potential of true self-improvement with zero external supervision signals for math reasoning; in particular, Crescent-generated question-answer pairs suffice to (i) improve the reasoning capabilities of an LLM while preserving its general performance (especially in the 0-shot setting); and (ii) distil LLM knowledge to weaker models more effectively than existing methods based on seed-dataset augmentation.

Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying et al. · cmu

Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. However, developing robust agents presents significant challenges: substantial engineering overhead, lack of standardized components, and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. We introduce Agent Graph-based Orchestration for Reasoning and Assessment (AGORA), a flexible and extensible framework that addresses these challenges through three key contributions: (1) a modular architecture with a graph-based workflow engine, efficient memory management, and clean component abstraction; (2) a comprehensive suite of reusable agent algorithms implementing state-of-the-art reasoning approaches; and (3) a rigorous evaluation framework enabling systematic comparison across multiple dimensions. Through extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and multimodal tasks, we evaluate various agent algorithms across different LLMs, revealing important insights about their relative strengths and applicability. Our results demonstrate that while sophisticated reasoning approaches can enhance agent capabilities, simpler methods like Chain-of-Thought often exhibit robust performance with significantly lower computational overhead. AGORA not only simplifies language agent development but also establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research through standardized evaluation protocols.

Chen Yang, Ruping Xu, Ruizhe Li et al.

Process mining aims to discover, monitor and optimize the actual behaviors of real processes. While prior work has mainly focused on extracting procedural action flows from instructional texts, rule flows embedded in business documents remain underexplored. To this end, we introduce a novel annotated Chinese dataset, BPRF, which contains 50 business process documents with 326 explicitly labeled business rules across multiple domains. Each rule is represented as a <Condition, Action> pair, and we annotate logical dependencies between rules (sequential, conditional, or parallel). We also propose ExIde, a framework for automatic business rule extraction and dependency relationship identification using large language models (LLMs). We evaluate ExIde using 12 state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs on the BPRF dataset, benchmarking performance on both rule extraction and dependency classification tasks of current LLMs. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of ExIde in extracting structured business rules and analyzing their interdependencies for current SOTA LLMs, paving the way for more automated and interpretable business process automation.

Zilun Zhang, Yutao Sun, Tiancheng Zhao et al.

Humans can retain old knowledge while learning new information, but Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting when post-pretrained or supervised fine-tuned (SFT) on domain-specific data. Moreover, for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) which are composed of the LLM base and visual projector (e.g. LLaVA), a significant decline in performance on language benchmarks was observed compared to their single-modality counterparts. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel model-agnostic self-decompression method, Tree Generation (TG), that decompresses knowledge within LLMs into the training corpus. This paper focuses on TG-SFT, which can synthetically generate SFT data for the instruction tuning steps. By incorporating the dumped corpus during SFT for MLLMs, we significantly reduce the forgetting problem.