Nevasini Sasikumar

Hina Dixit, Punit Kumar, Irene Tenison et al.

Cross-organization language-model adaptation increasingly faces hard governance constraints: in many deployments, device-level model state-parameters, activations, optimizer state, and per-device updates-cannot be exported outside an administrative boundary. Existing distributed and federated stacks typically assume cross-site model exchange and then retrofit privacy mechanisms, which complicates compliance and makes auditing brittle. We present Echelon, a boundary-first training architecture that enforces device-level model-state non-export as a systems invariant. Devices train locally inside each boundary; the only cross-boundary payloads are securely aggregated boundary-level deltas plus O(1) coordination metadata, exposed through a concrete audit surface. Restricting exchange to aggregates changes the optimization problem: the system must remain stable under WAN delay, heterogeneous participation, churn, and non-IID data even though the global plane never sees per-device updates. Echelon combines buffered semi-asynchronous secure aggregation, staleness-aware weighting, participation windows, proximal local objectives, and a drift-aware outer synchronization controller. In 1B-parameter LoRA adaptation across M= 2 boundaries, a budget-matched contest over three seeds (24.88M tokens) reaches validation loss 3.887 +/-0.010 and is best or tied-best among tuned low-communication baselines under fixed-token, fixed-bytes, fixed-wall-clock, and fixed-sync-count budgets. In OpenWebText stress tests, Echelon sustains 2,139-2,176 tokens/s across evaluated WAN and non-IID treatments, Echelon-DA improves time-to-target under WAN latency relative to a privacy-parityDiLoCo+SA baseline, and quality degrades by at most 2.2% under 200ms emulated latency or severe non-IID partitioning.

Ashmal Vayani, Dinura Dissanayake, Hasindri Watawana et al. · mila

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) generally focus on only a few regions and languages. As LMMs continue to improve, it is increasingly important to ensure they understand cultural contexts, respect local sensitivities, and support low-resource languages, all while effectively integrating corresponding visual cues. In pursuit of culturally diverse global multimodal models, our proposed All Languages Matter Benchmark (ALM-bench) represents the largest and most comprehensive effort to date for evaluating LMMs across 100 languages. ALM-bench challenges existing models by testing their ability to understand and reason about culturally diverse images paired with text in various languages, including many low-resource languages traditionally underrepresented in LMM research. The benchmark offers a robust and nuanced evaluation framework featuring various question formats, including true/false, multiple choice, and open-ended questions, which are further divided into short and long-answer categories. ALM-bench design ensures a comprehensive assessment of a model's ability to handle varied levels of difficulty in visual and linguistic reasoning. To capture the rich tapestry of global cultures, ALM-bench carefully curates content from 13 distinct cultural aspects, ranging from traditions and rituals to famous personalities and celebrations. Through this, ALM-bench not only provides a rigorous testing ground for state-of-the-art open and closed-source LMMs but also highlights the importance of cultural and linguistic inclusivity, encouraging the development of models that can serve diverse global populations effectively. Our benchmark is publicly available.

Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Nevasini Sasikumar

Fashionable image generation aims to synthesize images of diverse fashion prevalent around the globe, helping fashion designers in real-time visualization by giving them a basic customized structure of how a specific design preference would look in real life and what further improvements can be made for enhanced customer satisfaction. Moreover, users can alone interact and generate fashionable images by just giving a few simple prompts. Recently, diffusion models have gained popularity as generative models owing to their flexibility and generation of realistic images from Gaussian noise. Latent diffusion models are a type of generative model that use diffusion processes to model the generation of complex data, such as images, audio, or text. They are called "latent" because they learn a hidden representation, or latent variable, of the data that captures its underlying structure. We propose a method exploiting the equivalence between diffusion models and energy-based models (EBMs) and suggesting ways to compose multiple probability distributions. We describe a pipeline on how our method can be used specifically for new fashionable outfit generation and virtual try-on using LLM-guided text-to-image generation. Our results indicate that using an LLM to refine the prompts to the latent diffusion model assists in generating globally creative and culturally diversified fashion styles and reducing bias.