CMMU: A Benchmark for Chinese Multi-modal Multi-type Question Understanding and Reasoning

Multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress and demonstrated powerful knowledge comprehension and reasoning abilities. However, the mastery of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for evaluating the intelligence of MLLMs, continues to be a challenge. Current multi-modal benchmarks for domain-specific knowledge concentrate on multiple-choice questions and are predominantly available in English, which imposes limitations on the comprehensiveness of the evaluation. To this end, we introduce CMMU, a novel benchmark for multi-modal and multi-type question understanding and reasoning in Chinese. CMMU consists of 3,603 questions in 7 subjects, covering knowledge from primary to high school. The questions can be categorized into 3 types: multiple-choice, multiple-response, and fill-in-the-blank, bringing greater challenges to MLLMs. In addition, we propose a rigorous evaluation strategy called ShiftCheck for assessing multiple-choice questions. The strategy aims to reduce position bias, minimize the influence of randomness on correctness, and perform a quantitative analysis of position bias. We evaluate seven open-source MLLMs along with GPT4-V, Gemini-Pro, and Qwen-VL-Plus. The results demonstrate that CMMU poses a significant challenge to the recent MLLMs.

SegMamba: Long-range Sequential Modeling Mamba For 3D Medical Image Segmentation

The Transformer architecture has shown a remarkable ability in modeling global relationships. However, it poses a significant computational challenge when processing high-dimensional medical images. This hinders its development and widespread adoption in this task. Mamba, as a State Space Model (SSM), recently emerged as a notable manner for long-range dependencies in sequential modeling, excelling in natural language processing filed with its remarkable memory efficiency and computational speed. Inspired by its success, we introduce SegMamba, a novel 3D medical image \textbf{Seg}mentation \textbf{Mamba} model, designed to effectively capture long-range dependencies within whole volume features at every scale. Our SegMamba, in contrast to Transformer-based methods, excels in whole volume feature modeling from a state space model standpoint, maintaining superior processing speed, even with volume features at a resolution of {$64\times 64\times 64$}. Comprehensive experiments on the BraTS2023 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our SegMamba. The code for SegMamba is available at: https://github.com/ge-xing/SegMamba

TACO: Topics in Algorithmic COde generation dataset

We introduce TACO, an open-source, large-scale code generation dataset, with a focus on the optics of algorithms, designed to provide a more challenging training dataset and evaluation benchmark in the field of code generation models. TACO includes competition-level programming questions that are more challenging, to enhance or evaluate problem understanding and reasoning abilities in real-world programming scenarios. There are 25433 and 1000 coding problems in training and test set, as well as up to 1.55 million diverse solution answers. Moreover, each TACO problem includes several fine-grained labels such as task topics, algorithms, programming skills, and difficulty levels, providing a more precise reference for the training and evaluation of code generation models. The dataset and evaluation scripts are available on Hugging Face Hub (https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/TACO) and Github (https://github.com/FlagOpen/TACO).

CoIE: Chain-of-Instruct Editing for Multi-Attribute Face Manipulation

Current text-to-image editing models often encounter challenges with smoothly manipulating multiple attributes using a single instruction. Taking inspiration from the Chain-of-Thought prompting technique utilized in language models, we present an innovative concept known as Chain-of-Instruct Editing (CoIE), which enhances the capabilities of these models through step-by-step editing using a series of instructions. In particular, in the context of face manipulation, we leverage the contextual learning abilities of a pretrained Large Language Model (LLM), such as GPT-4, to generate a sequence of instructions from the original input, utilizing a purpose-designed 1-shot template. To further improve the precision of each editing step, we conduct fine-tuning on the editing models using our self-constructed instruction-guided face editing dataset, Instruct-CelebA. And additionally, we incorporate a super-resolution module to mitigate the adverse effects of editability and quality degradation. Experimental results across various challenging cases confirm the significant boost in multi-attribute facial image manipulation using chain-of-instruct editing. This is evident in enhanced editing success rates, measured by CLIPSim and Coverage metrics, improved by 17.86% and 85.45% respectively, and heightened controllability indicated by Preserve L1 and Quality metrics, improved by 11.58% and 4.93% respectively.

AltDiffusion: A Multilingual Text-to-Image Diffusion Model

Large Text-to-Image(T2I) diffusion models have shown a remarkable capability to produce photorealistic and diverse images based on text inputs. However, existing works only support limited language input, e.g., English, Chinese, and Japanese, leaving users beyond these languages underserved and blocking the global expansion of T2I models. Therefore, this paper presents AltDiffusion, a novel multilingual T2I diffusion model that supports eighteen different languages. Specifically, we first train a multilingual text encoder based on the knowledge distillation. Then we plug it into a pretrained English-only diffusion model and train the model with a two-stage schema to enhance the multilingual capability, including concept alignment and quality improvement stage on a large-scale multilingual dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark, which includes Multilingual-General-18(MG-18) and Multilingual-Cultural-18(MC-18) datasets, to evaluate the capabilities of T2I diffusion models for generating high-quality images and capturing culture-specific concepts in different languages. Experimental results on both MG-18 and MC-18 demonstrate that AltDiffusion outperforms current state-of-the-art T2I models, e.g., Stable Diffusion in multilingual understanding, especially with respect to culture-specific concepts, while still having comparable capability for generating high-quality images. All source code and checkpoints could be found in https://github.com/superhero-7/AltDiffuson.

UniTabE: Pretraining a Unified Tabular Encoder for Heterogeneous Tabular Data

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have witnessed the groundbreaking impact of pretrained models, yielding impressive outcomes across various tasks. This study seeks to extend the power of pretraining methodologies to tabular data, a domain traditionally overlooked, yet inherently challenging due to the plethora of table schemas intrinsic to different tasks. The primary research questions underpinning this work revolve around the adaptation to heterogeneous table structures, the establishment of a universal pretraining protocol for tabular data, the generalizability and transferability of learned knowledge across tasks, the adaptation to diverse downstream applications, and the incorporation of incremental columns over time. In response to these challenges, we introduce UniTabE, a pioneering method designed to process tables in a uniform manner, devoid of constraints imposed by specific table structures. UniTabE's core concept relies on representing each basic table element with a module, termed TabUnit. This is subsequently followed by a Transformer encoder to refine the representation. Moreover, our model is designed to facilitate pretraining and finetuning through the utilization of free-form prompts. In order to implement the pretraining phase, we curated an expansive tabular dataset comprising approximately 13 billion samples, meticulously gathered from the Kaggle platform. Rigorous experimental testing and analyses were performed under a myriad of scenarios to validate the effectiveness of our methodology. The experimental results demonstrate UniTabE's superior performance against several baseline models across a multitude of benchmark datasets. This, therefore, underscores UniTabE's potential to significantly enhance the semantic representation of tabular data, thereby marking a significant stride in the field of tabular data analysis.

AltCLIP: Altering the Language Encoder in CLIP for Extended Language Capabilities

In this work, we present a conceptually simple and effective method to train a strong bilingual/multilingual multimodal representation model. Starting from the pre-trained multimodal representation model CLIP released by OpenAI, we altered its text encoder with a pre-trained multilingual text encoder XLM-R, and aligned both languages and image representations by a two-stage training schema consisting of teacher learning and contrastive learning. We validate our method through evaluations of a wide range of tasks. We set new state-of-the-art performances on a bunch of tasks including ImageNet-CN, Flicker30k-CN, COCO-CN and XTD. Further, we obtain very close performances with CLIP on almost all tasks, suggesting that one can simply alter the text encoder in CLIP for extended capabilities such as multilingual understanding. Our models and code are available at https://github.com/FlagAI-Open/FlagAI.

PTab: Using the Pre-trained Language Model for Modeling Tabular Data

Tabular data is the foundation of the information age and has been extensively studied. Recent studies show that neural-based models are effective in learning contextual representation for tabular data. The learning of an effective contextual representation requires meaningful features and a large amount of data. However, current methods often fail to properly learn a contextual representation from the features without semantic information. In addition, it's intractable to enlarge the training set through mixed tabular datasets due to the difference between datasets. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework PTab, using the Pre-trained language model to model Tabular data. PTab learns a contextual representation of tabular data through a three-stage processing: Modality Transformation(MT), Masked-Language Fine-tuning(MF), and Classification Fine-tuning(CF). We initialize our model with a pre-trained Model (PTM) which contains semantic information learned from the large-scale language data. Consequently, contextual representation can be learned effectively during the fine-tuning stages. In addition, we can naturally mix the textualized tabular data to enlarge the training set to further improve representation learning. We evaluate PTab on eight popular tabular classification datasets. Experimental results show that our method has achieved a better average AUC score in supervised settings compared to the state-of-the-art baselines(e.g. XGBoost), and outperforms counterpart methods under semi-supervised settings. We present visualization results that show PTab has well instance-based interpretability.

A Diversity-Enhanced and Constraints-Relaxed Augmentation for Low-Resource Classification

Data augmentation (DA) aims to generate constrained and diversified data to improve classifiers in Low-Resource Classification (LRC). Previous studies mostly use a fine-tuned Language Model (LM) to strengthen the constraints but ignore the fact that the potential of diversity could improve the effectiveness of generated data. In LRC, strong constraints but weak diversity in DA result in the poor generalization ability of classifiers. To address this dilemma, we propose a {D}iversity-{E}nhanced and {C}onstraints-\{R}elaxed {A}ugmentation (DECRA). Our DECRA has two essential components on top of a transformer-based backbone model. 1) A k-beta augmentation, an essential component of DECRA, is proposed to enhance the diversity in generating constrained data. It expands the changing scope and improves the degree of complexity of the generated data. 2) A masked language model loss, instead of fine-tuning, is used as a regularization. It relaxes constraints so that the classifier can be trained with more scattered generated data. The combination of these two components generates data that can reach or approach category boundaries and hence help the classifier generalize better. We evaluate our DECRA on three public benchmark datasets under low-resource settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DECRA outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 3.8% in the overall score.