ZO2: Scalable Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning for Extremely Large Language Models with Limited GPU Memory

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during both the forward and backward phases as the model size expands. Alternatively, zeroth-order (ZO) techniques can compute gradients using just forward operations, eliminating the need to store activations. Furthermore, by leveraging CPU capabilities, it's feasible to enhance both the memory and processing power available to a single GPU. We propose a novel framework, ZO2 (Zeroth-Order Offloading), for efficient zeroth-order fine-tuning of LLMs with only limited GPU memory. Our framework dynamically shifts model parameters between the CPU and GPU as required, optimizing computation flow and maximizing GPU usage by minimizing downtime. This integration of parameter adjustments with ZO's double forward operations reduces unnecessary data movement, enhancing the fine-tuning efficacy. Additionally, our framework supports an innovative low-bit precision approach in AMP mode to streamline data exchanges between the CPU and GPU. Employing this approach allows us to fine-tune extraordinarily large models, such as the OPT-175B with more than 175 billion parameters, on a mere 18GB GPU--achievements beyond the reach of traditional methods. Moreover, our framework achieves these results with almost no additional time overhead and absolutely no accuracy loss compared to standard zeroth-order methods. ZO2's code has been open-sourced in https://github.com/liangyuwang/zo2.

Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in $200k

Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in the past year. The quality of AI video continues to improve, but at the cost of larger model size, increased data quantity, and greater demand for training compute. In this report, we present Open-Sora 2.0, a commercial-level video generation model trained for only $200k. With this model, we demonstrate that the cost of training a top-performing video generation model is highly controllable. We detail all techniques that contribute to this efficiency breakthrough, including data curation, model architecture, training strategy, and system optimization. According to human evaluation results and VBench scores, Open-Sora 2.0 is comparable to global leading video generation models including the open-source HunyuanVideo and the closed-source Runway Gen-3 Alpha. By making Open-Sora 2.0 fully open-source, we aim to democratize access to advanced video generation technology, fostering broader innovation and creativity in content creation. All resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora.

SemHiTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Codebook for Multimodal Understanding and Generation

We present SemHiTok, a unified image Tokenizer via Semantic-Guided Hierarchical codebook that provides consistent discrete feature representations for multimodal understanding and generation tasks. Recently, unified multimodal large models (MLLMs) for understanding and generation have sparked exploration within research community. Previous works attempt to train a unified image tokenizer by combining loss functions for semantic feature reconstruction and pixel reconstruction. However, due to the differing levels of features prioritized by multimodal understanding and generation tasks, joint training methods face significant challenges in achieving a good trade-off. SemHiTok addresses this challenge through Semantic-Guided Hierarchical codebook which builds texture sub-codebooks on pre-trained semantic codebook. This design decouples the training of semantic reconstruction and pixel reconstruction and equips the tokenizer with low-level texture feature extraction capability without degradation of high-level semantic feature extraction ability. Our experiments demonstrate that SemHiTok achieves state-of-the-art rFID score at 256X256resolution compared to other unified tokenizers, and exhibits competitive performance on multimodal understanding and generation tasks.

Can Atomic Step Decomposition Enhance the Self-structured Reasoning of Multimodal Large Models?

In this paper, we address the challenging task of multimodal mathematical reasoning by incorporating the ability of "slow thinking" into multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our core idea is that different levels of reasoning abilities can be combined dynamically to tackle questions with different complexity. To this end, we propose a paradigm of Self-structured Chain of Thought (SCoT), which is composed of minimal semantic atomic steps. Different from existing methods that rely on structured templates or free-form paradigms, our method can not only generate cognitive CoT structures for various complex tasks but also mitigates the phenomenon of overthinking. To introduce structured reasoning capabilities into visual understanding models, we further design a novel AtomThink framework with four key modules, including (i) a data engine to generate high-quality multimodal reasoning paths; (ii) a supervised fine-tuning process with serialized inference data; (iii) a policy-guided multi-turn inference method; and (iv) an atomic capability metric to evaluate the single step utilization rate. We conduct extensive experiments to show that the proposed AtomThink significantly improves the performance of baseline MLLMs, achieving more than 10\% average accuracy gains on MathVista and MathVerse. Compared to state-of-the-art structured CoT approaches, our method not only achieves higher accuracy but also improves data utilization by 5 times and boosts inference efficiency by 85.3\%. Our code is now public available in https://github.com/Quinn777/AtomThink.

Towards Heisenberg limit without critical slowing down via quantum reinforcement learning

Critical ground states of quantum many-body systems have emerged as vital resources for quantum-enhanced sensing. Traditional methods to prepare these states often rely on adiabatic evolution, which may diminish the quantum sensing advantage. In this work, we propose a quantum reinforcement learning (QRL)-enhanced critical sensing protocol for quantum many-body systems with exotic phase diagrams. Starting from product states and utilizing QRL-discovered gate sequences, we explore sensing accuracy in the presence of unknown external magnetic fields, covering both local and global regimes. Our results demonstrate that QRL-learned sequences reach the finite quantum speed limit and generalize effectively across systems of arbitrary size, ensuring accuracy regardless of preparation time. This method can robustly achieve Heisenberg and super-Heisenberg limits, even in noisy environments with practical Pauli measurements. Our study highlights the efficacy of QRL in enabling precise quantum state preparation, thereby advancing scalable, high-accuracy quantum critical sensing.

UniGS: Unified Language-Image-3D Pretraining with Gaussian Splatting

Recent advancements in multi-modal 3D pre-training methods have shown promising efficacy in learning joint representations of text, images, and point clouds. However, adopting point clouds as 3D representation fails to fully capture the intricacies of the 3D world and exhibits a noticeable gap between the discrete points and the dense 2D pixels of images. To tackle this issue, we propose UniGS, integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into multi-modal pre-training to enhance the 3D representation. We first rely on the 3DGS representation to model the 3D world as a collection of 3D Gaussians with color and opacity, incorporating all the information of the 3D scene while establishing a strong connection with 2D images. Then, to achieve Language-Image-3D pertaining, UniGS starts with a pre-trained vision-language model to establish a shared visual and textual space through extensive real-world image-text pairs. Subsequently, UniGS employs a 3D encoder to align the optimized 3DGS with the Language-Image representations to learn unified multi-modal representations. To facilitate the extraction of global explicit 3D features by the 3D encoder and achieve better cross-modal alignment, we additionally introduce a novel Gaussian-Aware Guidance module that guides the learning of fine-grained representations of the 3D domain. Through extensive experiments across the Objaverse, ABO, MVImgNet and SUN RGBD datasets with zero-shot classification, text-driven retrieval and open-world understanding tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of UniGS in learning a more general and stronger aligned multi-modal representation. Specifically, UniGS achieves leading results across different 3D tasks with remarkable improvements over previous SOTA, Uni3D, including on zero-shot classification (+9.36%), text-driven retrieval (+4.3%) and open-world understanding (+7.92%).

TransMamba: Fast Universal Architecture Adaption from Transformers to Mamba

Transformers have been favored in both uni-modal and multi-modal foundation models for their flexible scalability in attention modules. Consequently, a number of pre-trained Transformer models, e.g., LLaVA, CLIP, and DEIT, are publicly available. Recent research has introduced subquadratic architectures like Mamba, which enables global awareness with linear complexity. Nevertheless, training specialized subquadratic architectures from scratch for certain tasks is both resource-intensive and time-consuming. As a motivator, we explore cross-architecture training to transfer the ready knowledge in existing Transformer models to alternative architecture Mamba, termed TransMamba. Our approach employs a two-stage strategy to expedite training new Mamba models, ensuring effectiveness in across uni-modal and cross-modal tasks. Concerning architecture disparities, we project the intermediate features into an aligned latent space before transferring knowledge. On top of that, a Weight Subcloning and Adaptive Bidirectional distillation method (WSAB) is introduced for knowledge transfer without limitations on varying layer counts. For cross-modal learning, we propose a cross-Mamba module that integrates language awareness into Mamba's visual features, enhancing the cross-modal interaction capabilities of Mamba architecture. Despite using less than 75% of the training data typically required for training from scratch, TransMamba boasts substantially stronger performance across various network architectures and downstream tasks, including image classification, visual question answering, and text-video retrieval. The code will be publicly available.

VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation

Recent image-to-video generation methods have demonstrated success in enabling control over one or two visual elements, such as camera trajectory or object motion. However, these methods are unable to offer control over multiple visual elements due to limitations in data and network efficacy. In this paper, we introduce VidCRAFT3, a novel framework for precise image-to-video generation that enables control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction simultaneously. To better decouple control over each visual element, we propose the Spatial Triple-Attention Transformer, which integrates lighting direction, text, and image in a symmetric way. Since most real-world video datasets lack lighting annotations, we construct a high-quality synthetic video dataset, the VideoLightingDirection (VLD) dataset. This dataset includes lighting direction annotations and objects of diverse appearance, enabling VidCRAFT3 to effectively handle strong light transmission and reflection effects. Additionally, we propose a three-stage training strategy that eliminates the need for training data annotated with multiple visual elements (camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction) simultaneously. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of VidCRAFT3 in producing high-quality video content, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of control granularity and visual coherence. All code and data will be publicly available.

FreqPrior: Improving Video Diffusion Models with Frequency Filtering Gaussian Noise

Text-driven video generation has advanced significantly due to developments in diffusion models. Beyond the training and sampling phases, recent studies have investigated noise priors of diffusion models, as improved noise priors yield better generation results. One recent approach employs the Fourier transform to manipulate noise, marking the initial exploration of frequency operations in this context. However, it often generates videos that lack motion dynamics and imaging details. In this work, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the variance decay issue present in existing methods, contributing to the loss of details and motion dynamics. Recognizing the critical impact of noise distribution on generation quality, we introduce FreqPrior, a novel noise initialization strategy that refines noise in the frequency domain. Our method features a novel filtering technique designed to address different frequency signals while maintaining the noise prior distribution that closely approximates a standard Gaussian distribution. Additionally, we propose a partial sampling process by perturbing the latent at an intermediate timestep during finding the noise prior, significantly reducing inference time without compromising quality. Extensive experiments on VBench demonstrate that our method achieves the highest scores in both quality and semantic assessments, resulting in the best overall total score. These results highlight the superiority of our proposed noise prior.

A Study of In-Context-Learning-Based Text-to-SQL Errors

Large language models (LLMs) have been adopted to perform text-to-SQL tasks, utilizing their in-context learning (ICL) capability to translate natural language questions into structured query language (SQL). However, such a technique faces correctness problems and requires efficient repairing solutions. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of text-to-SQL errors. Our study covers four representative ICL-based techniques, five basic repairing methods, two benchmarks, and two LLM settings. We find that text-to-SQL errors are widespread and summarize 29 error types of 7 categories. We also find that existing repairing attempts have limited correctness improvement at the cost of high computational overhead with many mis-repairs. Based on the findings, we propose MapleRepair, a novel text-to-SQL error detection and repairing framework. The evaluation demonstrates that MapleRepair outperforms existing solutions by repairing 13.8% more queries with neglectable mis-repairs and 67.4% less overhead.