Han Wang

Jinghui Lu, Haiyang Yu, Yanjie Wang et al.

Recently, many studies have demonstrated that exclusively incorporating OCR-derived text and spatial layouts with large language models (LLMs) can be highly effective for document understanding tasks. However, existing methods that integrate spatial layouts with text have limitations, such as producing overly long text sequences or failing to fully leverage the autoregressive traits of LLMs. In this work, we introduce Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM)} for document understanding. LayTextLLM projects each bounding box to a single embedding and interleaves it with text, efficiently avoiding long sequence issues while leveraging autoregressive traits of LLMs. LayTextLLM not only streamlines the interaction of layout and textual data but also shows enhanced performance in KIE and VQA. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations reveal significant improvements of LayTextLLM, with a 15.2% increase on KIE tasks and 10.7% on VQA tasks compared to previous SOTA OCR-based LLMs. All resources are available at https://github.com/LayTextLLM/LayTextLLM.

Han Wang, Yuxiang Nie, Yongjie Ye et al.

The application of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for analyzing images and videos is an exciting and rapidly evolving field. In recent years, we've seen significant growth in high-quality image-text datasets for fine-tuning image understanding, but there is still a lack of comparable datasets for videos. Additionally, many VideoLLMs are extensions of single-image VLMs, which may not efficiently handle the complexities of longer videos. In this study, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset created from proprietary models, using carefully designed prompts to tackle a wide range of questions. We also explore a dynamic visual token compression architecture that strikes a balance between computational efficiency and performance. Our proposed \model{} achieves state-of-the-art results across various video tasks and shows impressive generalization, setting new baselines in multi-image understanding. Notably, \model{} delivers an absolute improvement of 2.7\% over LLaVA-OneVision on VideoMME and 10.7\% on MuirBench. Codes are available at https://github.com/Hon-Wong/ByteVideoLLM

Han Wang, Yongjie Ye, Bingru Li et al.

We introduce Vision as LoRA (VoRA), a novel paradigm for transforming an LLM into an MLLM. Unlike prevalent MLLM architectures that rely on external vision modules for vision encoding, VoRA internalizes visual capabilities by integrating vision-specific LoRA layers directly into the LLM. This design allows the added parameters to be seamlessly merged into the LLM during inference, eliminating structural complexity and minimizing computational overhead. Moreover, inheriting the LLM's ability of handling flexible context, VoRA can process inputs at arbitrary resolutions. To further strengthen VoRA's visual capabilities, we introduce a block-wise distillation method that transfers visual priors from a pre-trained ViT into the LoRA layers, effectively accelerating training by injecting visual knowledge. Additionally, we apply bi-directional attention masks to better capture the context information of an image. We successfully demonstrate that with additional pre-training data, VoRA can perform comparably with conventional encode-based MLLMs. All training data, codes, and model weights will be released at https://github.com/Hon-Wong/VoRA.

Ling Niu, Xiaoji Zheng, Han Wang et al.

In recent years, vision-based end-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a new paradigm. However, popular end-to-end approaches typically rely on visual feature extraction networks trained under label supervision. This limited supervision framework restricts the generality and applicability of driving models. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm termed $E^{3}AD$, which advocates for comparative learning between visual feature extraction networks and the general EEG large model, in order to learn latent human driving cognition for enhancing end-to-end planning. In this work, we collected a cognitive dataset for the mentioned contrastive learning process. Subsequently, we investigated the methods and potential mechanisms for enhancing end-to-end planning with human driving cognition, using popular driving models as baselines on publicly available autonomous driving datasets. Both open-loop and closed-loop tests are conducted for a comprehensive evaluation of planning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the $E^{3}AD$ paradigm significantly enhances the end-to-end planning performance of baseline models. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of driving cognition and the effectiveness of comparative learning process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate human driving cognition for improving end-to-end autonomous driving planning. It represents an initial attempt to incorporate embodied cognitive data into end-to-end autonomous driving, providing valuable insights for future brain-inspired autonomous driving systems. Our code will be made available at Github

Jinghui Lu, Haiyang Yu, Siliang Xu et al.

Recent advancements in reasoning have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks. However, excessive reliance on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can impair model performance and brings unnecessarily lengthened outputs, reducing efficiency. Our work reveals that prolonged reasoning does not universally improve accuracy and even degrade performance on simpler tasks. To address this, we propose Certainty-based Adaptive Reasoning (CAR), a novel framework that dynamically switches between short answers and long-form reasoning based on the model perplexity. CAR first generates a short answer and evaluates its perplexity, triggering reasoning only when the model exhibits low confidence (i.e., high perplexity). Experiments across diverse multimodal VQA/KIE benchmarks and text reasoning datasets show that CAR outperforms both short-answer and long-form reasoning approaches, striking an optimal balance between accuracy and efficiency.

Yuhang Peng, Yizhou Pan, Xinning He et al.

As embodied intelligence emerges as a core frontier in artificial intelligence research, simulation platforms must evolve beyond low-level physical interactions to capture complex, human-centered social behaviors. We introduce FreeAskWorld, an interactive simulation framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) for high-level behavior planning and semantically grounded interaction, informed by theories of intention and social cognition. Our framework supports scalable, realistic human-agent simulations and includes a modular data generation pipeline tailored for diverse embodied tasks.To validate the framework, we extend the classic Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task into a interaction enriched Direction Inquiry setting, wherein agents can actively seek and interpret navigational guidance. We present and publicly release FreeAskWorld, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising reconstructed environments, six diverse task types, 16 core object categories, 63,429 annotated sample frames, and more than 17 hours of interaction data to support training and evaluation of embodied AI systems. We benchmark VLN models, and human participants under both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Experimental results demonstrate that models fine-tuned on FreeAskWorld outperform their original counterparts, achieving enhanced semantic understanding and interaction competency. These findings underscore the efficacy of socially grounded simulation frameworks in advancing embodied AI systems toward sophisticated high-level planning and more naturalistic human-agent interaction. Importantly, our work underscores that interaction itself serves as an additional information modality.

Haiyang Yu, Yuchuan Wu, Fan Shi et al.

Chinese ancient documents, invaluable carriers of millennia of Chinese history and culture, hold rich knowledge across diverse fields but face challenges in digitization and understanding, i.e., traditional methods only scan images, while current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with their visual and linguistic complexity. Existing document benchmarks focus on English printed texts or simplified Chinese, leaving a gap for evaluating VLMs on ancient Chinese documents. To address this, we present AncientDoc, the first benchmark for Chinese ancient documents, designed to assess VLMs from OCR to knowledge reasoning. AncientDoc includes five tasks (page-level OCR, vernacular translation, reasoning-based QA, knowledge-based QA, linguistic variant QA) and covers 14 document types, over 100 books, and about 3,000 pages. Based on AncientDoc, we evaluate mainstream VLMs using multiple metrics, supplemented by a human-aligned large language model for scoring.