Eagle and Finch: RWKV with Matrix-Valued States and Dynamic Recurrence

We present Eagle (RWKV-5) and Finch (RWKV-6), sequence models improving upon the RWKV (RWKV-4) architecture. Our architectural design advancements include multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic recurrence mechanism that improve expressivity while maintaining the inference efficiency characteristics of RNNs. We introduce a new multilingual corpus with 1.12 trillion tokens and a fast tokenizer based on greedy matching for enhanced multilinguality. We trained four Eagle models, ranging from 0.46 to 7.5 billion parameters, and two Finch models with 1.6 and 3.1 billion parameters and find that they achieve competitive performance across a wide variety of benchmarks. We release all our models on HuggingFace under the Apache 2.0 license. Models at: https://huggingface.co/RWKV Training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM Inference code at: https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV Time-parallel training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer

Tuning LayerNorm in Attention: Towards Efficient Multi-Modal LLM Finetuning

This paper introduces an efficient strategy to transform Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). By conceptualizing this transformation as a domain adaptation process, i.e., transitioning from text understanding to embracing multiple modalities, we intriguingly note that, within each attention block, tuning LayerNorm suffices to yield strong performance. Moreover, when benchmarked against other tuning approaches like full parameter finetuning or LoRA, its benefits on efficiency are substantial. For example, when compared to LoRA on a 13B model scale, performance can be enhanced by an average of over 20% across five multi-modal tasks, and meanwhile, results in a significant reduction of trainable parameters by 41.9% and a decrease in GPU memory usage by 17.6%. On top of this LayerNorm strategy, we showcase that selectively tuning only with conversational data can improve efficiency further. Beyond these empirical outcomes, we provide a comprehensive analysis to explore the role of LayerNorm in adapting LLMs to the multi-modal domain and improving the expressive power of the model.

How Many Unicorns Are in This Image? A Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Vision LLMs

This work focuses on the potential of Vision LLMs (VLLMs) in visual reasoning. Different from prior studies, we shift our focus from evaluating standard performance to introducing a comprehensive safety evaluation suite, covering both out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization and adversarial robustness. For the OOD evaluation, we present two novel VQA datasets, each with one variant, designed to test model performance under challenging conditions. In exploring adversarial robustness, we propose a straightforward attack strategy for misleading VLLMs to produce visual-unrelated responses. Moreover, we assess the efficacy of two jailbreaking strategies, targeting either the vision or language component of VLLMs. Our evaluation of 21 diverse models, ranging from open-source VLLMs to GPT-4V, yields interesting observations: 1) Current VLLMs struggle with OOD texts but not images, unless the visual information is limited; and 2) These VLLMs can be easily misled by deceiving vision encoders only, and their vision-language training often compromise safety protocols. We release this safety evaluation suite at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/vllm-safety-benchmark.

Sight Beyond Text: Multi-Modal Training Enhances LLMs in Truthfulness and Ethics

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are trained based on large language models (LLM), with an enhanced capability to comprehend multi-modal inputs and generate textual responses. While they excel in multi-modal tasks, the pure NLP abilities of MLLMs are often underestimated and left untested. In this study, we get out of the box and unveil an intriguing characteristic of MLLMs -- our preliminary results suggest that visual instruction tuning, a prevailing strategy for transitioning LLMs into MLLMs, unexpectedly and interestingly helps models attain both improved truthfulness and ethical alignment in the pure NLP context. For example, a visual-instruction-tuned LLaMA2 7B model surpasses the performance of the LLaMA2-chat 7B model, fine-tuned with over one million human annotations, on TruthfulQA-mc and Ethics benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that the improved alignment can be attributed to the superior instruction quality inherent to visual-text data. In releasing our code at github.com/UCSC-VLAA/Sight-Beyond-Text, we aspire to foster further exploration into the intrinsic value of visual-text synergies and, in a broader scope, multi-modal interactions in alignment research.

ZeroGen: Zero-shot Multimodal Controllable Text Generation with Multiple Oracles

Automatically generating textual content with desired attributes is an ambitious task that people have pursued long. Existing works have made a series of progress in incorporating unimodal controls into language models (LMs), whereas how to generate controllable sentences with multimodal signals and high efficiency remains an open question. To tackle the puzzle, we propose a new paradigm of zero-shot controllable text generation with multimodal signals (\textsc{ZeroGen}). Specifically, \textsc{ZeroGen} leverages controls of text and image successively from token-level to sentence-level and maps them into a unified probability space at decoding, which customizes the LM outputs by weighted addition without extra training. To achieve better inter-modal trade-offs, we further introduce an effective dynamic weighting mechanism to regulate all control weights. Moreover, we conduct substantial experiments to probe the relationship of being in-depth or in-width between signals from distinct modalities. Encouraging empirical results on three downstream tasks show that \textsc{ZeroGen} not only outperforms its counterparts on captioning tasks by a large margin but also shows great potential in multimodal news generation with a higher degree of control. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ImKeTT/ZeroGen.

ReSee: Responding through Seeing Fine-grained Visual Knowledge in Open-domain Dialogue

Incorporating visual knowledge into text-only dialogue systems has become a potential direction to imitate the way humans think, imagine, and communicate. However, existing multimodal dialogue systems are either confined by the scale and quality of available datasets or the coarse concept of visual knowledge. To address these issues, we provide a new paradigm of constructing multimodal dialogues as well as two datasets extended from text-only dialogues under such paradigm (ReSee-WoW, ReSee-DD). We propose to explicitly split the visual knowledge into finer granularity (``turn-level'' and ``entity-level''). To further boost the accuracy and diversity of augmented visual information, we retrieve them from the Internet or a large image dataset. To demonstrate the superiority and universality of the provided visual knowledge, we propose a simple but effective framework ReSee to add visual representation into vanilla dialogue models by modality concatenations. We also conduct extensive experiments and ablations w.r.t. different model configurations and visual knowledge settings. Empirical, encouraging results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing visual knowledge at both entity and turn level but also verify the proposed model ReSee outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on automatic and human evaluations. By leveraging text and vision knowledge, ReSee can produce informative responses with real-world visual concepts.

An Overview on Controllable Text Generation via Variational Auto-Encoders

Recent advances in neural-based generative modeling have reignited the hopes of having computer systems capable of conversing with humans and able to understand natural language. The employment of deep neural architectures has been largely explored in a multitude of context and tasks to fulfill various user needs. On one hand, producing textual content that meets specific requirements is of priority for a model to seamlessly conduct conversations with different groups of people. On the other hand, latent variable models (LVM) such as variational auto-encoders (VAEs) as one of the most popular genres of generative models are designed to characterize the distributional pattern of textual data. Thus they are inherently capable of learning the integral textual features that are worth exploring for controllable pursuits. \noindent This overview gives an introduction to existing generation schemes, problems associated with text variational auto-encoders, and a review of several applications about the controllable generation that are instantiations of these general formulations,\footnote{A detailed paper list is available at \url{https://github.com/ImKeTT/CTG-latentAEs}} as well as related datasets, metrics and discussions for future researches. Hopefully, this overview will provide an overview of living questions, popular methodologies and raw thoughts for controllable language generation under the scope of variational auto-encoder.

PCAE: A Framework of Plug-in Conditional Auto-Encoder for Controllable Text Generation

Controllable text generation has taken a gigantic step forward these days. Yet existing methods are either constrained in a one-off pattern or not efficient enough for receiving multiple conditions at every generation stage. We propose a model-agnostic framework Plug-in Conditional Auto-Encoder for Controllable Text Generation (PCAE) towards flexible and semi-supervised text generation. Our framework is "plug-and-play" with partial parameters to be fine-tuned in the pre-trained model (less than a half). Crucial to the success of PCAE is the proposed broadcasting label fusion network for navigating the global latent code to a specified local and confined space. Visualization of the local latent prior well confirms the primary devotion in hidden space of the proposed model. Moreover, extensive experiments across five related generation tasks (from 2 conditions up to 10 conditions) on both RNN- based and pre-trained BART [26] based auto-encoders reveal the high capability of PCAE, which enables generation that is highly manipulable, syntactically diverse and time-saving with minimum labeled samples. We will release our code at https://github.com/ImKeTT/pcae.

AdaVAE: Exploring Adaptive GPT-2s in Variational Auto-Encoders for Language Modeling

Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has become the de-facto learning paradigm in achieving both representation learning and generation for natural language. However, existing VAE-based language models either employ elementary RNNs, which is not powerful to handle complex situations, or fine-tunes two pre-trained language models (PLMs) for any downstream task, which is a huge drain on resources. In this paper, we introduce the first VAE framework empowered with adaptive GPT-2s (AdaVAE). Different from existing systems, we unify both the encoder\&decoder of VAE model using GPT-2s with adaptive parameter-efficient components. Experiments from multiple dimensions validate that AdaVAE is competent to better organize language in generation task and representation modeling, even with less than $15\%$ activated parameters in training. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ImKeTT/adavae}.