FOFO: A Benchmark to Evaluate LLMs' Format-Following Capability

This paper presents FoFo, a pioneering benchmark for evaluating large language models' (LLMs) ability to follow complex, domain-specific formats, a crucial yet underexamined capability for their application as AI agents. Despite LLMs' advancements, existing benchmarks fail to assess their format-following proficiency adequately. FoFo fills this gap with a diverse range of real-world formats and instructions, developed through an AI-Human collaborative method. Our evaluation across both open-source (e.g., Llama 2, WizardLM) and closed-source (e.g., GPT-4, PALM2, Gemini) LLMs highlights three key findings: open-source models significantly lag behind closed-source ones in format adherence; LLMs' format-following performance is independent of their content generation quality; and LLMs' format proficiency varies across different domains. These insights suggest the need for specialized tuning for format-following skills and highlight FoFo's role in guiding the selection of domain-specific AI agents. FoFo is released here at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/FoFo.

Lemur: Harmonizing Natural Language and Code for Language Agents

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemur

XGen-7B Technical Report

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous across various domains, transforming the way we interact with information and conduct research. However, most high-performing LLMs remain confined behind proprietary walls, hindering scientific progress. Most open-source LLMs, on the other hand, are limited in their ability to support longer sequence lengths, which is a key requirement for many tasks that require inference over an input context. To address this, we have trained XGen, a series of 7B parameter models on up to 8K sequence length for up to 1.5T tokens. We have also finetuned the XGen models on public-domain instructional data, creating their instruction-tuned counterparts (XGen-Inst). We open-source our models for both research advancements and commercial applications. Our evaluation on standard benchmarks shows that XGen models achieve comparable or better results when compared with state-of-the-art open-source LLMs. Our targeted evaluation on long sequence modeling tasks shows the benefits of our 8K-sequence models over 2K-sequence open-source LLMs.

Mask-free OVIS: Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation without Manual Mask Annotations

Existing instance segmentation models learn task-specific information using manual mask annotations from base (training) categories. These mask annotations require tremendous human effort, limiting the scalability to annotate novel (new) categories. To alleviate this problem, Open-Vocabulary (OV) methods leverage large-scale image-caption pairs and vision-language models to learn novel categories. In summary, an OV method learns task-specific information using strong supervision from base annotations and novel category information using weak supervision from image-captions pairs. This difference between strong and weak supervision leads to overfitting on base categories, resulting in poor generalization towards novel categories. In this work, we overcome this issue by learning both base and novel categories from pseudo-mask annotations generated by the vision-language model in a weakly supervised manner using our proposed Mask-free OVIS pipeline. Our method automatically generates pseudo-mask annotations by leveraging the localization ability of a pre-trained vision-language model for objects present in image-caption pairs. The generated pseudo-mask annotations are then used to supervise an instance segmentation model, freeing the entire pipeline from any labour-expensive instance-level annotations and overfitting. Our extensive experiments show that our method trained with just pseudo-masks significantly improves the mAP scores on the MS-COCO dataset and OpenImages dataset compared to the recent state-of-the-art methods trained with manual masks. Codes and models are provided in https://vibashan.github.io/ovis-web/.

GlueGen: Plug and Play Multi-modal Encoders for X-to-image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) models based on diffusion processes have achieved remarkable success in controllable image generation using user-provided captions. However, the tight coupling between the current text encoder and image decoder in T2I models makes it challenging to replace or upgrade. Such changes often require massive fine-tuning or even training from scratch with the prohibitive expense. To address this problem, we propose GlueGen, which applies a newly proposed GlueNet model to align features from single-modal or multi-modal encoders with the latent space of an existing T2I model. The approach introduces a new training objective that leverages parallel corpora to align the representation spaces of different encoders. Empirical results show that GlueNet can be trained efficiently and enables various capabilities beyond previous state-of-the-art models: 1) multilingual language models such as XLM-Roberta can be aligned with existing T2I models, allowing for the generation of high-quality images from captions beyond English; 2) GlueNet can align multi-modal encoders such as AudioCLIP with the Stable Diffusion model, enabling sound-to-image generation; 3) it can also upgrade the current text encoder of the latent diffusion model for challenging case generation. By the alignment of various feature representations, the GlueNet allows for flexible and efficient integration of new functionality into existing T2I models and sheds light on X-to-image (X2I) generation.

ULIP: Learning Unified Representation of Language, Image and Point Cloud for 3D Understanding

The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.

Model ensemble instead of prompt fusion: a sample-specific knowledge transfer method for few-shot prompt tuning

Prompt tuning approaches, which learn task-specific soft prompts for a downstream task conditioning on frozen pre-trained models, have attracted growing interest due to its parameter efficiency. With large language models and sufficient training data, prompt tuning performs comparably to full-model tuning. However, with limited training samples in few-shot settings, prompt tuning fails to match the performance of full-model fine-tuning. In this work, we focus on improving the few-shot performance of prompt tuning by transferring knowledge from soft prompts of source tasks. Recognizing the good generalization capabilities of ensemble methods in low-data regime, we first experiment and show that a simple ensemble of model predictions based on different source prompts, outperforms existing multi-prompt knowledge transfer approaches such as source prompt fusion in the few-shot setting. Motivated by this observation, we further investigate model ensembles and propose Sample-specific Ensemble of Source Models (SESoM). SESoM learns to adjust the contribution of each source model for each target sample separately when ensembling source model outputs. Through this way, SESoM inherits the superior generalization of model ensemble approaches and simultaneously captures the sample-specific competence of each source prompt. We conduct experiments across a diverse set of eight NLP tasks using models of different scales (T5-{base, large, XL}) and find that SESoM consistently outperforms the existing models of the same as well as larger parametric scale by a large margin.

Value Retrieval with Arbitrary Queries for Form-like Documents

We propose value retrieval with arbitrary queries for form-like documents to reduce human effort of processing forms. Unlike previous methods that only address a fixed set of field items, our method predicts target value for an arbitrary query based on the understanding of layout and semantics of a form. To further boost model performance, we propose a simple document language modeling (simpleDLM) strategy to improve document understanding on large-scale model pre-training. Experimental results show that our method outperforms our baselines significantly and the simpleDLM further improves our performance on value retrieval by around 17\% F1 score compared with the state-of-the-art pre-training method. Code will be made publicly available.

Towards Open Vocabulary Object Detection without Human-provided Bounding Boxes

Despite great progress in object detection, most existing methods are limited to a small set of object categories, due to the tremendous human effort needed for instance-level bounding-box annotation. To alleviate the problem, recent open vocabulary and zero-shot detection methods attempt to detect object categories not seen during training. However, these approaches still rely on manually provided bounding-box annotations on a set of base classes. We propose an open vocabulary detection framework that can be trained without manually provided bounding-box annotations. Our method achieves this by leveraging the localization ability of pre-trained vision-language models and generating pseudo bounding-box labels that can be used directly for training object detectors. Experimental results on COCO, PASCAL VOC, Objects365 and LVIS demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts (SOTA) that are trained using human annotated bounding-boxes by 3% AP on COCO novel categories even though our training source is not equipped with manual bounding-box labels. When utilizing the manual bounding-box labels as our baselines do, our method surpasses the SOTA largely by 8% AP.

Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-Trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting

Although pre-trained language models, such as BERT, achieve state-of-art performance in many language understanding tasks, they have been demonstrated to inherit strong gender bias from its training data. Existing studies addressing the gender bias issue of pre-trained models, usually recollect and build gender-neutral data on their own and conduct a second phase pre-training on the released pre-trained model with such data. However, given the limited size of the gender-neutral data and its potential distributional mismatch with the original pre-training data, catastrophic forgetting would occur during the second-phase pre-training. Forgetting on the original training data may damage the model's downstream performance to a large margin. In this work, we first empirically show that even if the gender-neutral data for second-phase pre-training comes from the original training data, catastrophic forgetting still occurs if the size of gender-neutral data is smaller than that of original training data. Then, we propose a new method, GEnder Equality Prompt (GEEP), to improve gender fairness of pre-trained models without forgetting. GEEP learns gender-related prompts to reduce gender bias, conditioned on frozen language models. Since all pre-trained parameters are frozen, forgetting on information from the original training data can be alleviated to the most extent. Then GEEP trains new embeddings of profession names as gender equality prompts conditioned on the frozen model. Empirical results show that GEEP not only achieves state-of-the-art performances on gender debiasing in various applications such as pronoun predicting and coreference resolution, but also achieves comparable results on general downstream tasks such as GLUE with original pre-trained models without much forgetting.