Xin Tao

Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by integrating visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. Current MLLMs typically rely on simple adapter architectures and pretraining approaches to bridge vision encoders with large language models (LLM), guided by image-level supervision. We identify this paradigm often leads to suboptimal alignment between modalities, significantly constraining the LLM's ability to properly interpret and reason with visual features particularly for smaller language models. This limitation degrades overall performance-particularly for smaller language models where capacity constraints are more pronounced and adaptation capabilities are limited. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose Supervised Embedding Alignment (SEA), a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. SEA introduces minimal computational overhead while preserving language capabilities and substantially improving cross-modal understanding. Our comprehensive analyses reveal critical insights into the adapter's role in multimodal integration, and extensive experiments demonstrate that SEA consistently improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most (average performance gain of 7.61% for Gemma-2B). This work establishes a foundation for developing more effective alignment strategies for future multimodal systems.

Zhaokun Zhou, Qiulin Wang, Bin Lin et al.

As an alternative to expensive expert evaluation, Image Aesthetic Assessment (IAA) stands out as a crucial task in computer vision. However, traditional IAA methods are typically constrained to a single data source or task, restricting the universality and broader application. In this work, to better align with human aesthetics, we propose a Unified Multi-modal Image Aesthetic Assessment (UNIAA) framework, including a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) named UNIAA-LLaVA and a comprehensive benchmark named UNIAA-Bench. We choose MLLMs with both visual perception and language ability for IAA and establish a low-cost paradigm for transforming the existing datasets into unified and high-quality visual instruction tuning data, from which the UNIAA-LLaVA is trained. To further evaluate the IAA capability of MLLMs, we construct the UNIAA-Bench, which consists of three aesthetic levels: Perception, Description, and Assessment. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and rationality of UNIAA. UNIAA-LLaVA achieves competitive performance on all levels of UNIAA-Bench, compared with existing MLLMs. Specifically, our model performs better than GPT-4V in aesthetic perception and even approaches the junior-level human. We find MLLMs have great potential in IAA, yet there remains plenty of room for further improvement. The UNIAA-LLaVA and UNIAA-Bench will be released.

Luozhou Wang, Ziyang Mai, Guibao Shen et al.

In this work, we present a novel approach for motion customization in video generation, addressing the widespread gap in the exploration of motion representation within video generative models. Recognizing the unique challenges posed by the spatiotemporal nature of video, our method introduces Motion Embeddings, a set of explicit, temporally coherent embeddings derived from a given video. These embeddings are designed to integrate seamlessly with the temporal transformer modules of video diffusion models, modulating self-attention computations across frames without compromising spatial integrity. Our approach provides a compact and efficient solution to motion representation, utilizing two types of embeddings: a Motion Query-Key Embedding to modulate the temporal attention map and a Motion Value Embedding to modulate the attention values. Additionally, we introduce an inference strategy that excludes spatial dimensions from the Motion Query-Key Embedding and applies a differential operation to the Motion Value Embedding, both designed to debias appearance and ensure the embeddings focus solely on motion. Our contributions include the introduction of a tailored motion embedding for customization tasks and a demonstration of the practical advantages and effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments.