InstructSeq: Unifying Vision Tasks with Instruction-conditioned Multi-modal Sequence Generation

Empowering models to dynamically accomplish tasks specified through natural language instructions represents a promising path toward more capable and general artificial intelligence. In this work, we introduce InstructSeq, an instruction-conditioned multi-modal modeling framework that unifies diverse vision tasks through flexible natural language control and handling of both visual and textual data. InstructSeq employs a multimodal transformer architecture encompassing visual, language, and sequential modeling. We utilize a visual encoder to extract image features and a text encoder to encode instructions. An autoregressive transformer fuses the representations and generates sequential task outputs. By training with LLM-generated natural language instructions, InstructSeq acquires a strong comprehension of free-form instructions for specifying visual tasks. This provides an intuitive interface for directing capabilities using flexible natural instructions. Without any task-specific tuning, InstructSeq achieves compelling performance on semantic segmentation, referring expression segmentation/comprehension, and image captioning. The flexible control and multi-task unification empower the model with more human-like versatility and generalizability for computer vision. The code will be released soon at https://github.com/rongyaofang/InstructSeq.

ViLaM: A Vision-Language Model with Enhanced Visual Grounding and Generalization Capability

Vision-language models have revolutionized human-computer interaction and shown significant progress in multi-modal tasks. However, applying these models to complex visual tasks like medical image analysis remains challenging. In this study, we propose ViLaM, a unified Vision-Language transformer model that integrates instruction tuning predicated on a large language model. This approach enables us to optimally utilize the knowledge and reasoning capacities of large pre-trained language models for an array of tasks encompassing both language and vision. We employ frozen pre-trained encoders to encode and align both image and text features, enabling ViLaM to handle a variety of visual tasks following textual instructions. Besides, we've designed cycle training for referring expressions to address the need for high-quality, paired referring expression datasets for training large models in terms of both quantity and quality. We evaluated ViLaM's exceptional performance on public general datasets and further confirmed its generalizability on medical datasets. Importantly, we've observed the model's impressive zero-shot learning ability, indicating the potential future application of ViLaM in the medical field.

SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models

We present SPHINX, a versatile multi-modal large language model (MLLM) with a joint mixing of model weights, tuning tasks, and visual embeddings. First, for stronger vision-language alignment, we unfreeze the large language model (LLM) during pre-training, and introduce a weight mix strategy between LLMs trained by real-world and synthetic data. By directly integrating the weights from two domains, the mixed LLM can efficiently incorporate diverse semantics with favorable robustness. Then, to enable multi-purpose capabilities, we mix a variety of tasks for joint visual instruction tuning, and design task-specific instructions to avoid inter-task conflict. In addition to the basic visual question answering, we include more challenging tasks such as region-level understanding, caption grounding, document layout detection, and human pose estimation, contributing to mutual enhancement over different scenarios. Additionally, we propose to extract comprehensive visual embeddings from various network architectures, pre-training paradigms, and information granularity, providing language models with more robust image representations. Based on our proposed joint mixing, SPHINX exhibits superior multi-modal understanding capabilities on a wide range of applications. On top of this, we further propose an efficient strategy aiming to better capture fine-grained appearances of high-resolution images. With a mixing of different scales and high-resolution sub-images, SPHINX attains exceptional visual parsing and reasoning performance on existing evaluation benchmarks. We hope our work may cast a light on the exploration of joint mixing in future MLLM research. Code is released at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/LLaMA2-Accessory.

Learning A Multi-Task Transformer Via Unified And Customized Instruction Tuning For Chest Radiograph Interpretation

The emergence of multi-modal deep learning models has made significant impacts on clinical applications in the last decade. However, the majority of models are limited to single-tasking, without considering disease diagnosis is indeed a multi-task procedure. Here, we demonstrate a unified transformer model specifically designed for multi-modal clinical tasks by incorporating customized instruction tuning. We first compose a multi-task training dataset comprising 13.4 million instruction and ground-truth pairs (with approximately one million radiographs) for the customized tuning, involving both image- and pixel-level tasks. Thus, we can unify the various vision-intensive tasks in a single training framework with homogeneous model inputs and outputs to increase clinical interpretability in one reading. Finally, we demonstrate the overall superior performance of our model compared to prior arts on various chest X-ray benchmarks across multi-tasks in both direct inference and finetuning settings. Three radiologists further evaluate the generated reports against the recorded ones, which also exhibit the enhanced explainability of our multi-task model.

Towards Large-scale Masked Face Recognition

During the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone is wearing masks, which poses a huge challenge for deep learning-based face recognition algorithms. In this paper, we will present our \textbf{championship} solutions in ICCV MFR WebFace260M and InsightFace unconstrained tracks. We will focus on four challenges in large-scale masked face recognition, i.e., super-large scale training, data noise handling, masked and non-masked face recognition accuracy balancing, and how to design inference-friendly model architecture. We hope that the discussion on these four aspects can guide future research towards more robust masked face recognition systems.

Decoupled DETR: Spatially Disentangling Localization and Classification for Improved End-to-End Object Detection

The introduction of DETR represents a new paradigm for object detection. However, its decoder conducts classification and box localization using shared queries and cross-attention layers, leading to suboptimal results. We observe that different regions of interest in the visual feature map are suitable for performing query classification and box localization tasks, even for the same object. Salient regions provide vital information for classification, while the boundaries around them are more favorable for box regression. Unfortunately, such spatial misalignment between these two tasks greatly hinders DETR's training. Therefore, in this work, we focus on decoupling localization and classification tasks in DETR. To achieve this, we introduce a new design scheme called spatially decoupled DETR (SD-DETR), which includes a task-aware query generation module and a disentangled feature learning process. We elaborately design the task-aware query initialization process and divide the cross-attention block in the decoder to allow the task-aware queries to match different visual regions. Meanwhile, we also observe that the prediction misalignment problem for high classification confidence and precise localization exists, so we propose an alignment loss to further guide the spatially decoupled DETR training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant improvement in MSCOCO datasets compared to previous work. For instance, we improve the performance of Conditional DETR by 4.5 AP. By spatially disentangling the two tasks, our method overcomes the misalignment problem and greatly improves the performance of DETR for object detection.

UE4-NeRF:Neural Radiance Field for Real-Time Rendering of Large-Scale Scene

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a novel implicit 3D reconstruction method that shows immense potential and has been gaining increasing attention. It enables the reconstruction of 3D scenes solely from a set of photographs. However, its real-time rendering capability, especially for interactive real-time rendering of large-scale scenes, still has significant limitations. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel neural rendering system called UE4-NeRF, specifically designed for real-time rendering of large-scale scenes. We partitioned each large scene into different sub-NeRFs. In order to represent the partitioned independent scene, we initialize polygonal meshes by constructing multiple regular octahedra within the scene and the vertices of the polygonal faces are continuously optimized during the training process. Drawing inspiration from Level of Detail (LOD) techniques, we trained meshes of varying levels of detail for different observation levels. Our approach combines with the rasterization pipeline in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), achieving real-time rendering of large-scale scenes at 4K resolution with a frame rate of up to 43 FPS. Rendering within UE4 also facilitates scene editing in subsequent stages. Furthermore, through experiments, we have demonstrated that our method achieves rendering quality comparable to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://jamchaos.github.io/UE4-NeRF/.

Debias the Training of Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have demonstrated compelling generation quality by optimizing the variational lower bound through a simple denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we provide theoretical evidence that the prevailing practice of using a constant loss weight strategy in diffusion models leads to biased estimation during the training phase. Simply optimizing the denoising network to predict Gaussian noise with constant weighting may hinder precise estimations of original images. To address the issue, we propose an elegant and effective weighting strategy grounded in the theoretically unbiased principle. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic exploration to dissect the inherent bias problem deriving from constant weighting loss from the perspectives of its existence, impact and reasons. These analyses are expected to advance our understanding and demystify the inner workings of diffusion models. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our proposed debiased estimation method significantly enhances sample quality without the reliance on complex techniques, and exhibits improved efficiency compared to the baseline method both in training and sampling processes.

LightZero: A Unified Benchmark for Monte Carlo Tree Search in General Sequential Decision Scenarios

Building agents based on tree-search planning capabilities with learned models has achieved remarkable success in classic decision-making problems, such as Go and Atari. However, it has been deemed challenging or even infeasible to extend Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based algorithms to diverse real-world applications, especially when these environments involve complex action spaces and significant simulation costs, or inherent stochasticity. In this work, we introduce LightZero, the first unified benchmark for deploying MCTS/MuZero in general sequential decision scenarios. Specificially, we summarize the most critical challenges in designing a general MCTS-style decision-making solver, then decompose the tightly-coupled algorithm and system design of tree-search RL methods into distinct sub-modules. By incorporating more appropriate exploration and optimization strategies, we can significantly enhance these sub-modules and construct powerful LightZero agents to tackle tasks across a wide range of domains, such as board games, Atari, MuJoCo, MiniGrid and GoBigger. Detailed benchmark results reveal the significant potential of such methods in building scalable and efficient decision intelligence. The code is available as part of OpenDILab at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.

MathCoder: Seamless Code Integration in LLMs for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning

The recently released GPT-4 Code Interpreter has demonstrated remarkable proficiency in solving challenging math problems, primarily attributed to its ability to seamlessly reason with natural language, generate code, execute code, and continue reasoning based on the execution output. In this paper, we present a method to fine-tune open-source language models, enabling them to use code for modeling and deriving math equations and, consequently, enhancing their mathematical reasoning abilities. We propose a method of generating novel and high-quality datasets with math problems and their code-based solutions, referred to as MathCodeInstruct. Each solution interleaves natural language, code, and execution results. We also introduce a customized supervised fine-tuning and inference approach. This approach yields the MathCoder models, a family of models capable of generating code-based solutions for solving challenging math problems. Impressively, the MathCoder models achieve state-of-the-art scores among open-source LLMs on the MATH (45.2%) and GSM8K (83.9%) datasets, substantially outperforming other open-source alternatives. Notably, the MathCoder model not only surpasses ChatGPT-3.5 and PaLM-2 on GSM8K and MATH but also outperforms GPT-4 on the competition-level MATH dataset. The dataset and models will be released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder.