Zhihao Fan

Peng Wang, Shuai Bai, Sinan Tan et al.

We present the Qwen2-VL Series, an advanced upgrade of the previous Qwen-VL models that redefines the conventional predetermined-resolution approach in visual processing. Qwen2-VL introduces the Naive Dynamic Resolution mechanism, which enables the model to dynamically process images of varying resolutions into different numbers of visual tokens. This approach allows the model to generate more efficient and accurate visual representations, closely aligning with human perceptual processes. The model also integrates Multimodal Rotary Position Embedding (M-RoPE), facilitating the effective fusion of positional information across text, images, and videos. We employ a unified paradigm for processing both images and videos, enhancing the model's visual perception capabilities. To explore the potential of large multimodal models, Qwen2-VL investigates the scaling laws for large vision-language models (LVLMs). By scaling both the model size-with versions at 2B, 8B, and 72B parameters-and the amount of training data, the Qwen2-VL Series achieves highly competitive performance. Notably, the Qwen2-VL-72B model achieves results comparable to leading models such as GPT-4o and Claude3.5-Sonnet across various multimodal benchmarks, outperforming other generalist models. Code is available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen2-VL .

Zhenghao Lin, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen et al.

In this paper, we introduce a novel dIffusion language modEl pre-training framework for text generation, which we call GENIE. GENIE is a large-scale pretrained diffusion language model that consists of an encoder and a diffusion-based decoder, which can generate text by gradually transforming a random noise sequence into a coherent text sequence. To pre-train GENIE on a large-scale language corpus, we design a new continuous paragraph denoise objective, which encourages the diffusion-decoder to reconstruct a clean text paragraph from a corrupted version, while preserving the semantic and syntactic coherence. We evaluate GENIE on four downstream text generation benchmarks, namely XSum, CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and CommonGen. Our experimental results show that GENIE achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art autoregressive models on these benchmarks, and generates more diverse text samples. The code and models of GENIE are available at https://github.com/microsoft/ProphetNet/tree/master/GENIE.

An Yang, Baosong Yang, Binyuan Hui et al.

This report introduces the Qwen2 series, the latest addition to our large language models and large multimodal models. We release a comprehensive suite of foundational and instruction-tuned language models, encompassing a parameter range from 0.5 to 72 billion, featuring dense models and a Mixture-of-Experts model. Qwen2 surpasses most prior open-weight models, including its predecessor Qwen1.5, and exhibits competitive performance relative to proprietary models across diverse benchmarks on language understanding, generation, multilingual proficiency, coding, mathematics, and reasoning. The flagship model, Qwen2-72B, showcases remarkable performance: 84.2 on MMLU, 37.9 on GPQA, 64.6 on HumanEval, 89.5 on GSM8K, and 82.4 on BBH as a base language model. The instruction-tuned variant, Qwen2-72B-Instruct, attains 9.1 on MT-Bench, 48.1 on Arena-Hard, and 35.7 on LiveCodeBench. Moreover, Qwen2 demonstrates robust multilingual capabilities, proficient in approximately 30 languages, spanning English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and more, underscoring its versatility and global reach. To foster community innovation and accessibility, we have made the Qwen2 model weights openly available on Hugging Face and ModelScope, and the supplementary materials including example code on GitHub. These platforms also include resources for quantization, fine-tuning, and deployment, facilitating a wide range of applications and research endeavors.

Zejun Li, Ye Wang, Mengfei Du et al.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in the development of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Benefiting from the strong language backbones and efficient cross-modal alignment strategies, LVLMs exhibit surprising capabilities to perceive visual signals and perform visually grounded reasoning. However, the capabilities of LVLMs have not been comprehensively and quantitatively evaluate. Most existing multi-modal benchmarks require task-oriented input-output formats, posing great challenges to automatically assess the free-form text output of LVLMs. To effectively leverage the annotations available in existing benchmarks and reduce the manual effort required for constructing new benchmarks, we propose to re-formulate existing benchmarks into unified LVLM-compatible formats. Through systematic data collection and reformulation, we present the ReForm-Eval benchmark, offering substantial data for evaluating various capabilities of LVLMs. Based on ReForm-Eval, we conduct extensive experiments, thoroughly analyze the strengths and weaknesses of existing LVLMs, and identify the underlying factors. Our benchmark and evaluation framework will be open-sourced as a cornerstone for advancing the development of LVLMs.

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Shuai Liu et al.

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

Siyuan Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan et al.

Multi-hop reasoning requires aggregating multiple documents to answer a complex question. Existing methods usually decompose the multi-hop question into simpler single-hop questions to solve the problem for illustrating the explainable reasoning process. However, they ignore grounding on the supporting facts of each reasoning step, which tends to generate inaccurate decompositions. In this paper, we propose an interpretable stepwise reasoning framework to incorporate both single-hop supporting sentence identification and single-hop question generation at each intermediate step, and utilize the inference of the current hop for the next until reasoning out the final result. We employ a unified reader model for both intermediate hop reasoning and final hop inference and adopt joint optimization for more accurate and robust multi-hop reasoning. We conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The results show that our method can effectively boost performance and also yields a better interpretable reasoning process without decomposition supervision.

Zhihao Fan, Zhongyu Wei, Jingjing Chen et al.

Multi-modal pre-training and knowledge discovery are two important research topics in multi-modal machine learning. Nevertheless, none of existing works make attempts to link knowledge discovery with knowledge guided multi-modal pre-training. In this paper, we propose to unify them into a continuous learning framework for mutual improvement. Taking the open-domain uni-modal datasets of images and texts as input, we maintain a knowledge graph as the foundation to support these two tasks. For knowledge discovery, a pre-trained model is used to identify cross-modal links on the graph. For model pre-training, the knowledge graph is used as the external knowledge to guide the model updating. These two steps are iteratively performed in our framework for continuous learning. The experimental results on MS-COCO and Flickr30K with respect to both knowledge discovery and the pre-trained model validate the effectiveness of our framework.

Siyuan Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Jiarong Xu et al.

Recent pre-trained language models (PLMs) equipped with foundation reasoning skills have shown remarkable performance on downstream complex tasks. However, the significant structure reasoning skill has been rarely studied, which involves modeling implicit structure information within the text and performing explicit logical reasoning over them to deduce the conclusion. This paper proposes a unified learning framework that combines explicit structure reasoning and language pre-training to endow PLMs with the structure reasoning skill. It first identifies several elementary structures within contexts to construct structured queries and performs step-by-step reasoning along the queries to identify the answer entity. The fusion of textual semantics and structure reasoning is achieved by using contextual representations learned by PLMs to initialize the representation space of structures, and performing stepwise reasoning on this semantic representation space. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant improvements in complex reasoning tasks involving diverse structures, and shows transferability to downstream tasks with limited training data and effectiveness for complex reasoning of KGs modality.

Siyuan Wang, Zhuohan Long, Zhihao Fan et al.

This paper presents a benchmark self-evolving framework to dynamically evaluate rapidly advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming for a more accurate assessment of their capabilities and limitations. We utilize a multi-agent system to manipulate the context or question of original instances, reframing new evolving instances with high confidence that dynamically extend existing benchmarks. Towards a more scalable, robust and fine-grained evaluation, we implement six reframing operations to construct evolving instances testing LLMs against diverse queries, data noise and probing their problem-solving sub-abilities. With this framework, we extend benchmark datasets of four tasks. Experimental results show a general performance decline in most LLMs against their original results. This decline under our scalable and robust evaluations, alongside our fine-grained evaluation, more accurately reflect models' capabilities. Besides, our framework widens performance discrepancies both between different models and within the same model across various tasks, facilitating more informed model selection for specific tasks (Code and data are available at https://github.com/NanshineLoong/Self-Evolving-Benchmark).

Zhihao Fan, Jialong Tang, Wei Chen et al.

Artificial intelligence has significantly advanced healthcare, particularly through large language models (LLMs) that excel in medical question answering benchmarks. However, their real-world clinical application remains limited due to the complexities of doctor-patient interactions. To address this, we introduce \textbf{AI Hospital}, a multi-agent framework simulating dynamic medical interactions between \emph{Doctor} as player and NPCs including \emph{Patient}, \emph{Examiner}, \emph{Chief Physician}. This setup allows for realistic assessments of LLMs in clinical scenarios. We develop the Multi-View Medical Evaluation (MVME) benchmark, utilizing high-quality Chinese medical records and NPCs to evaluate LLMs' performance in symptom collection, examination recommendations, and diagnoses. Additionally, a dispute resolution collaborative mechanism is proposed to enhance diagnostic accuracy through iterative discussions. Despite improvements, current LLMs exhibit significant performance gaps in multi-turn interactions compared to one-step approaches. Our findings highlight the need for further research to bridge these gaps and improve LLMs' clinical diagnostic capabilities. Our data, code, and experimental results are all open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/LibertFan/AI_Hospital}.

Zhenbiao Cao, Yuanlei Zheng, Zhihao Fan et al.

Text-to-SQL generation aims to translate natural language questions into SQL statements. In Text-to-SQL based on large language models, schema linking is a widely adopted strategy to streamline the input for LLMs by selecting only relevant schema elements, therefore reducing noise and computational overhead. However, schema linking faces risks that require caution, including the potential omission of necessary elements and disruption of database structural integrity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called RSL-SQL that combines bidirectional schema linking, contextual information augmentation, binary selection strategy, and multi-turn self-correction. We improve the recall of pattern linking using forward and backward pruning methods, achieving a strict recall of 94% while reducing the number of input columns by 83%. Furthermore, it hedges the risk by voting between a full mode and a simplified mode enhanced with contextual information. Experiments on the BIRD and Spider benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves SOTA execution accuracy among open-source solutions, with 67.2% on BIRD and 87.9% on Spider using GPT-4o. Furthermore, our approach outperforms a series of GPT-4 based Text-to-SQL systems when adopting DeepSeek (much cheaper) with same intact prompts. Extensive analysis and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in our framework. The codes are available at https://github.com/Laqcce-cao/RSL-SQL.

Tong Wu, Zhihao Fan, Xiao Liu et al.

Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the realm of image generation due to their exceptional performance. Their success has been recently expanded to text generation via generating all tokens within a sequence concurrently. However, natural language exhibits a far more pronounced sequential dependency in comparison to images, and the majority of existing language models are trained with a left-to-right auto-regressive approach. To account for the inherent sequential characteristic of natural language, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion). AR-Diffusion ensures that the generation of tokens on the right depends on the generated ones on the left, a mechanism achieved through employing a dynamic number of denoising steps that vary based on token position. This results in tokens on the left undergoing fewer denoising steps than those on the right, thereby enabling them to generate earlier and subsequently influence the generation of tokens on the right. In a series of experiments on various text generation tasks, including text summarization, machine translation, and common sense generation, AR-Diffusion clearly demonstrated its superiority over existing diffusion language models and that it can be $100\times\sim600\times$ faster when achieving comparable results. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/ProphetNet/tree/master/AR-diffusion.

Zejun Li, Zhihao Fan, Huaixiao Tou et al.

Previous vision-language pre-training models mainly construct multi-modal inputs with tokens and objects (pixels) followed by performing cross-modality interaction between them. We argue that the input of only tokens and object features limits high-level semantic alignment like phrase-to-region grounding. Meanwhile, multi-level alignments are inherently consistent and able to facilitate the representation learning synergistically. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to learn Multi-level semantic alignment for Vision-language Pre-TRaining (MVPTR). In MVPTR, we follow the nested structure of both modalities to introduce concepts as high-level semantics. To ease the learning from multi-modal multi-level inputs, our framework is split into two stages, the first stage focuses on intra-modality multi-level representation learning, the second enforces interactions across modalities via both coarse-grained and fine-grained semantic alignment tasks. In addition to the commonly used image-text matching and masked language model tasks, we introduce a masked concept recovering task in the first stage to enhance the concept representation learning, and two more tasks in the second stage to explicitly encourage multi-level alignments across modalities. Our code is available at https://github.com/Junction4Nako/mvp_pytorch.

Zhihao Fan, Zhongyu Wei, Zejun Li et al.

Matching model is essential for Image-Text Retrieval framework. Existing research usually train the model with a triplet loss and explore various strategy to retrieve hard negative sentences in the dataset. We argue that current retrieval-based negative sample construction approach is limited in the scale of the dataset thus fail to identify negative sample of high difficulty for every image. We propose our TAiloring neGative Sentences with Discrimination and Correction (TAGS-DC) to generate synthetic sentences automatically as negative samples. TAGS-DC is composed of masking and refilling to generate synthetic negative sentences with higher difficulty. To keep the difficulty during training, we mutually improve the retrieval and generation through parameter sharing. To further utilize fine-grained semantic of mismatch in the negative sentence, we propose two auxiliary tasks, namely word discrimination and word correction to improve the training. In experiments, we verify the effectiveness of our model on MS-COCO and Flickr30K compared with current state-of-the-art models and demonstrates its robustness and faithfulness in the further analysis. Our code is available in https://github.com/LibertFan/TAGS.

Yaqi Wu, Zhihao Fan, Xiaofeng Chu et al.

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/.

Mengfei Du, Binhao Wu, Jiwen Zhang et al.

Vision-and-Language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate in unseen environment by following natural language instruction. For task completion, the agent needs to align and integrate various navigation modalities, including instruction, observation and navigation history. Existing works primarily concentrate on cross-modal attention at the fusion stage to achieve this objective. Nevertheless, modality features generated by disparate uni-encoders reside in their own spaces, leading to a decline in the quality of cross-modal fusion and decision. To address this problem, we propose a Dual-levEL AligNment (DELAN) framework by cross-modal contrastive learning. This framework is designed to align various navigation-related modalities before fusion, thereby enhancing cross-modal interaction and action decision-making. Specifically, we divide the pre-fusion alignment into dual levels: instruction-history level and landmark-observation level according to their semantic correlations. We also reconstruct a dual-level instruction for adaptation to the dual-level alignment. As the training signals for pre-fusion alignment are extremely limited, self-supervised contrastive learning strategies are employed to enforce the matching between different modalities. Our approach seamlessly integrates with the majority of existing models, resulting in improved navigation performance on various VLN benchmarks, including R2R, R4R, RxR and CVDN.

Siyuan Wang, Dianyi Wang, Chengxing Zhou et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically learn visual capacity through visual instruction tuning, involving updates to both a projector and their LLM backbones. Inspired by the concept of a visual region in the human brain, we investigate the existence of an analogous \textit{visual region} within LLMs that functions as a cognitive core, and explore the potential of efficient training of LVLMs via selective layers tuning. Using Bunny-Llama-3-8B-V for detailed analysis and other three LVLMs for validation across diverse visual and textual tasks, we find that selectively updating 25\% of LLMs layers, when sparsely and uniformly distributed, can preserve nearly 99\% of visual performance and maintain or improve textual task results, while effectively reducing training time. Based on this targeted training approach, we further propose a novel visual region-based pruning paradigm, removing non-critical layers outside the visual region, which can achieve minimal performance loss. This study offers an effective and efficient strategy for LVLM training and inference by activating a layer-wise visual region within LLMs, which proves consistently effective across different models.

Siyuan Wang, Zhuohan Long, Zhihao Fan et al.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has exposed vulnerabilities to various adversarial attacks. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of jailbreaking research targeting both LLMs and MLLMs, highlighting recent advancements in evaluation benchmarks, attack techniques and defense strategies. Compared to the more advanced state of unimodal jailbreaking, multimodal domain remains underexplored. We summarize the limitations and potential research directions of multimodal jailbreaking, aiming to inspire future research and further enhance the robustness and security of MLLMs.

Siyuan Wang, Zhongyu Wei, Meng Han et al.

Logical reasoning over incomplete knowledge graphs to answer complex logical queries is a challenging task. With the emergence of new entities and relations in constantly evolving KGs, inductive logical reasoning over KGs has become a crucial problem. However, previous PLMs-based methods struggle to model the logical structures of complex queries, which limits their ability to generalize within the same structure. In this paper, we propose a structure-modeled textual encoding framework for inductive logical reasoning over KGs. It encodes linearized query structures and entities using pre-trained language models to find answers. For structure modeling of complex queries, we design stepwise instructions that implicitly prompt PLMs on the execution order of geometric operations in each query. We further separately model different geometric operations (i.e., projection, intersection, and union) on the representation space using a pre-trained encoder with additional attention and maxout layers to enhance structured modeling. We conduct experiments on two inductive logical reasoning datasets and three transductive datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on logical reasoning over KGs in both inductive and transductive settings.

Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Can Xu et al.

We study the problem of coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The problem is equally important with fine-grained response selection, but is less explored in existing literature. In this paper, we propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. In our CFC model, dense representations of query, candidate response and corresponding context is learned based on the multi-tower architecture, and more expressive knowledge learned from the one-tower architecture (fine-grained) is distilled into the multi-tower architecture (coarse-grained) to enhance the performance of the retriever. To evaluate the performance of our proposed model, we construct two new datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus. Extensive experimental results on the two datasets show that the proposed methods achieve a significant improvement over all evaluation metrics compared with traditional baseline methods.

Zhihao Fan, Zhongyu Wei, Zejun Li et al.

Existing research for image text retrieval mainly relies on sentence-level supervision to distinguish matched and mismatched sentences for a query image. However, semantic mismatch between an image and sentences usually happens in finer grain, i.e., phrase level. In this paper, we explore to introduce additional phrase-level supervision for the better identification of mismatched units in the text. In practice, multi-grained semantic labels are automatically constructed for a query image in both sentence-level and phrase-level. We construct text scene graphs for the matched sentences and extract entities and triples as the phrase-level labels. In order to integrate both supervision of sentence-level and phrase-level, we propose Semantic Structure Aware Multimodal Transformer (SSAMT) for multi-modal representation learning. Inside the SSAMT, we utilize different kinds of attention mechanisms to enforce interactions of multi-grain semantic units in both sides of vision and language. For the training, we propose multi-scale matching losses from both global and local perspectives, and penalize mismatched phrases. Experimental results on MS-COCO and Flickr30K show the effectiveness of our approach compared to some state-of-the-art models.

Zhihao Fan, Zhongyu Wei, Siyuan Wang et al.

Existing research for image captioning usually represents an image using a scene graph with low-level facts (objects and relations) and fails to capture the high-level semantics. In this paper, we propose a Theme Concepts extended Image Captioning (TCIC) framework that incorporates theme concepts to represent high-level cross-modality semantics. In practice, we model theme concepts as memory vectors and propose Transformer with Theme Nodes (TTN) to incorporate those vectors for image captioning. Considering that theme concepts can be learned from both images and captions, we propose two settings for their representations learning based on TTN. On the vision side, TTN is configured to take both scene graph based features and theme concepts as input for visual representation learning. On the language side, TTN is configured to take both captions and theme concepts as input for text representation re-construction. Both settings aim to generate target captions with the same transformer-based decoder. During the training, we further align representations of theme concepts learned from images and corresponding captions to enforce the cross-modality learning. Experimental results on MS COCO show the effectiveness of our approach compared to some state-of-the-art models.

Siyuan Wang, Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang et al.

Logical reasoning of text requires understanding critical logical information in the text and performing inference over them. Large-scale pre-trained models for logical reasoning mainly focus on word-level semantics of text while struggling to capture symbolic logic. In this paper, we propose to understand logical symbols and expressions in the text to arrive at the answer. Based on such logical information, we not only put forward a context extension framework but also propose a data augmentation algorithm. The former extends the context to cover implicit logical expressions following logical equivalence laws. The latter augments literally similar but logically different instances to better capture logical information, especially logical negative and conditional relationships. We conduct experiments on ReClor dataset. The results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and both logic-driven context extension framework and data augmentation algorithm can help improve the accuracy. And our multi-model ensemble system is the first to surpass human performance on both EASY set and HARD set of ReClor.

Zhihao Fan, Yeyun Gong, Dayiheng Liu et al.

Transformer is an attention-based neural network, which consists of two sublayers, namely, Self-Attention Network (SAN) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). Existing research explores to enhance the two sublayers separately to improve the capability of Transformer for text representation. In this paper, we present a novel understanding of SAN and FFN as Mask Attention Networks (MANs) and show that they are two special cases of MANs with static mask matrices. However, their static mask matrices limit the capability for localness modeling in text representation learning. We therefore introduce a new layer named dynamic mask attention network (DMAN) with a learnable mask matrix which is able to model localness adaptively. To incorporate advantages of DMAN, SAN, and FFN, we propose a sequential layered structure to combine the three types of layers. Extensive experiments on various tasks, including neural machine translation and text summarization demonstrate that our model outperforms the original Transformer.

Zejun Li, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan et al.

In this paper, we focus on the problem of unsupervised image-sentence matching. Existing research explores to utilize document-level structural information to sample positive and negative instances for model training. Although the approach achieves positive results, it introduces a sampling bias and fails to distinguish instances with high semantic similarity. To alleviate the bias, we propose a new sampling strategy to select additional intra-document image-sentence pairs as positive or negative samples. Furthermore, to recognize the complex pattern in intra-document samples, we propose a Transformer based model to capture fine-grained features and implicitly construct a graph for each document, where concepts in a document are introduced to bridge the representation learning of images and sentences in the context of a document. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach to alleviate the bias and learn well-aligned multimodal representations.

Zhihao Fan, Yeyun Gong, Zhongyu Wei et al.

Commonsense generation aims at generating plausible everyday scenario description based on a set of provided concepts. Digging the relationship of concepts from scratch is non-trivial, therefore, we retrieve prototypes from external knowledge to assist the understanding of the scenario for better description generation. We integrate two additional modules, namely position indicator and scaling module, into the pretrained encoder-decoder model for prototype modeling to enhance the knowledge injection procedure. We conduct experiment on CommonGen benchmark, and experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance on all the metrics.