OnlineVPO: Align Video Diffusion Model with Online Video-Centric Preference Optimization

In recent years, the field of text-to-video (T2V) generation has made significant strides. Despite this progress, there is still a gap between theoretical advancements and practical application, amplified by issues like degraded image quality and flickering artifacts. Recent advancements in enhancing the video diffusion model (VDM) through feedback learning have shown promising results. However, these methods still exhibit notable limitations, such as misaligned feedback and inferior scalability. To tackle these issues, we introduce OnlineVPO, a more efficient preference learning approach tailored specifically for video diffusion models. Our method features two novel designs, firstly, instead of directly using image-based reward feedback, we leverage the video quality assessment (VQA) model trained on synthetic data as the reward model to provide distribution and modality-aligned feedback on the video diffusion model. Additionally, we introduce an online DPO algorithm to address the off-policy optimization and scalability issue in existing video preference learning frameworks. By employing the video reward model to offer concise video feedback on the fly, OnlineVPO offers effective and efficient preference guidance. Extensive experiments on the open-source video-diffusion model demonstrate OnlineVPO as a simple yet effective and more importantly scalable preference learning algorithm for video diffusion models, offering valuable insights for future advancements in this domain.

Beyond Outcomes: Transparent Assessment of LLM Reasoning in Games

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications that demand complex reasoning. To track progress, robust benchmarks are required to evaluate their capabilities beyond superficial pattern recognition. However, current LLM reasoning benchmarks often face challenges such as insufficient interpretability, performance saturation or data contamination. To address these challenges, we introduce GAMEBoT, a gaming arena designed for rigorous and transparent assessment of LLM reasoning capabilities. GAMEBoT decomposes complex reasoning in games into predefined modular subproblems. This decomposition allows us to design a suite of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts that leverage domain knowledge to guide LLMs in addressing these subproblems before action selection. Furthermore, we develop a suite of rule-based algorithms to generate ground truth for these subproblems, enabling rigorous validation of the LLMs' intermediate reasoning steps. This approach facilitates evaluation of both the quality of final actions and the accuracy of the underlying reasoning process. GAMEBoT also naturally alleviates the risk of data contamination through dynamic games and head-to-head LLM competitions. We benchmark 17 prominent LLMs across eight games, encompassing various strategic abilities and game characteristics. Our results suggest that GAMEBoT presents a significant challenge, even when LLMs are provided with detailed CoT prompts. Project page: \url{https://visual-ai.github.io/gamebot}

Mr. DETR: Instructive Multi-Route Training for Detection Transformers

Existing methods enhance the training of detection transformers by incorporating an auxiliary one-to-many assignment. In this work, we treat the model as a multi-task framework, simultaneously performing one-to-one and one-to-many predictions. We investigate the roles of each component in the transformer decoder across these two training targets, including self-attention, cross-attention, and feed-forward network. Our empirical results demonstrate that any independent component in the decoder can effectively learn both targets simultaneously, even when other components are shared. This finding leads us to propose a multi-route training mechanism, featuring a primary route for one-to-one prediction and two auxiliary training routes for one-to-many prediction. We enhance the training mechanism with a novel instructive self-attention that dynamically and flexibly guides object queries for one-to-many prediction. The auxiliary routes are removed during inference, ensuring no impact on model architecture or inference cost. We conduct extensive experiments on various baselines, achieving consistent improvements as shown in Figure 1.

Forest-of-Thought: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Enhancing LLM Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities across various language tasks, but solving complex reasoning problems remains a challenge. While existing methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tree-of-Thought (ToT) enhance reasoning by decomposing problems or structuring prompts, they typically perform a single pass of reasoning and may fail to revisit flawed paths, compromising accuracy. To address this, we propose a novel reasoning framework called Forest-of-Thought (FoT), which integrates multiple reasoning trees to leverage collective decision-making for solving complex logical problems. FoT utilizes sparse activation strategies to select the most relevant reasoning paths, improving both efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic self-correction strategy that enables real-time error correction and learning from past mistakes, as well as consensus-guided decision making strategies to optimize correctness and computational resources. Experimental results demonstrate that the FoT framework, combined with these strategies, significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, enabling them to solve complex tasks with greater precision and efficiency.

UADet: A Remarkably Simple Yet Effective Uncertainty-Aware Open-Set Object Detection Framework

We tackle the challenging problem of Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD), which aims to detect both known and unknown objects in unlabelled images. The main difficulty arises from the absence of supervision for these unknown classes, making it challenging to distinguish them from the background. Existing OSOD detectors either fail to properly exploit or inadequately leverage the abundant unlabeled unknown objects in training data, restricting their performance. To address these limitations, we propose UADet, an Uncertainty-Aware Open-Set Object Detector that considers appearance and geometric uncertainty. By integrating these uncertainty measures, UADet effectively reduces the number of unannotated instances incorrectly utilized or omitted by previous methods. Extensive experiments on OSOD benchmarks demonstrate that UADet substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in detecting both known and unknown objects, achieving a 1.8x improvement in unknown recall while maintaining high performance on known classes. When extended to Open World Object Detection (OWOD), our method shows significant advantages over the current SOTA method, with average improvements of 13.8% and 6.9% in unknown recall on M-OWODB and S-OWODB benchmarks, respectively. Extensive results validate the effectiveness of our uncertainty-aware approach across different open-set scenarios.

WTDUN: Wavelet Tree-Structured Sampling and Deep Unfolding Network for Image Compressed Sensing

Deep unfolding networks have gained increasing attention in the field of compressed sensing (CS) owing to their theoretical interpretability and superior reconstruction performance. However, most existing deep unfolding methods often face the following issues: 1) they learn directly from single-channel images, leading to a simple feature representation that does not fully capture complex features; and 2) they treat various image components uniformly, ignoring the characteristics of different components. To address these issues, we propose a novel wavelet-domain deep unfolding framework named WTDUN, which operates directly on the multi-scale wavelet subbands. Our method utilizes the intrinsic sparsity and multi-scale structure of wavelet coefficients to achieve a tree-structured sampling and reconstruction, effectively capturing and highlighting the most important features within images. Specifically, the design of tree-structured reconstruction aims to capture the inter-dependencies among the multi-scale subbands, enabling the identification of both fine and coarse features, which can lead to a marked improvement in reconstruction quality. Furthermore, a wavelet domain adaptive sampling method is proposed to greatly improve the sampling capability, which is realized by assigning measurements to each wavelet subband based on its importance. Unlike pure deep learning methods that treat all components uniformly, our method introduces a targeted focus on important subbands, considering their energy and sparsity. This targeted strategy lets us capture key information more efficiently while discarding less important information, resulting in a more effective and detailed reconstruction. Extensive experimental results on various datasets validate the superior performance of our proposed method.

Star-Agents: Automatic Data Optimization with LLM Agents for Instruction Tuning

The efficacy of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks usually hinges on instruction tuning, which relies critically on the quality of training data. Unfortunately, collecting high-quality and diverse data is both expensive and time-consuming. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel Star-Agents framework, which automates the enhancement of data quality across datasets through multi-agent collaboration and assessment. The framework adopts a three-pronged strategy. It initially generates diverse instruction data with multiple LLM agents through a bespoke sampling method. Subsequently, the generated data undergo a rigorous evaluation using a dual-model method that assesses both difficulty and quality. Finaly, the above process evolves in a dynamic refinement phase, where more effective LLMs are prioritized, enhancing the overall data quality. Our empirical studies, including instruction tuning experiments with models such as Pythia and LLaMA, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Optimized datasets have achieved substantial improvements, with an average increase of 12% and notable gains in specific metrics, such as a 40% improvement in Fermi, as evidenced by benchmarks like MT-bench, Vicuna bench, and WizardLM testset.

MemoryFormer: Minimize Transformer Computation by Removing Fully-Connected Layers

In order to reduce the computational complexity of large language models, great efforts have been made to to improve the efficiency of transformer models such as linear attention and flash-attention. However, the model size and corresponding computational complexity are constantly scaled up in pursuit of higher performance. In this work, we present MemoryFormer, a novel transformer architecture which significantly reduces the computational complexity (FLOPs) from a new perspective. We eliminate nearly all the computations of the transformer model except for the necessary computation required by the multi-head attention operation. This is made possible by utilizing an alternative method for feature transformation to replace the linear projection of fully-connected layers. Specifically, we first construct a group of in-memory lookup tables that store a large amount of discrete vectors to replace the weight matrix used in linear projection. We then use a hash algorithm to retrieve a correlated subset of vectors dynamically based on the input embedding. The retrieved vectors combined together will form the output embedding, which provides an estimation of the result of matrix multiplication operation in a fully-connected layer. Compared to conducting matrix multiplication, retrieving data blocks from memory is a much cheaper operation which requires little computations. We train MemoryFormer from scratch and conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

GhostRNN: Reducing State Redundancy in RNN with Cheap Operations

Recurrent neural network (RNNs) that are capable of modeling long-distance dependencies are widely used in various speech tasks, eg., keyword spotting (KWS) and speech enhancement (SE). Due to the limitation of power and memory in low-resource devices, efficient RNN models are urgently required for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient RNN architecture, GhostRNN, which reduces hidden state redundancy with cheap operations. In particular, we observe that partial dimensions of hidden states are similar to the others in trained RNN models, suggesting that redundancy exists in specific RNNs. To reduce the redundancy and hence computational cost, we propose to first generate a few intrinsic states, and then apply cheap operations to produce ghost states based on the intrinsic states. Experiments on KWS and SE tasks demonstrate that the proposed GhostRNN significantly reduces the memory usage (~40%) and computation cost while keeping performance similar.

Needle Threading: Can LLMs Follow Threads through Near-Million-Scale Haystacks?

As the context limits of Large Language Models (LLMs) increase, the range of possible applications and downstream functions broadens. In many real-world tasks, decisions depend on details scattered across collections of often disparate documents containing mostly irrelevant information. Long-context LLMs appear well-suited to this form of complex information retrieval and reasoning, which has traditionally proven costly and time-consuming. However, although the development of longer context models has seen rapid gains in recent years, our understanding of how effectively LLMs use their context has not kept pace. To address this, we conduct a set of retrieval experiments designed to evaluate the capabilities of 17 leading LLMs, such as their ability to follow threads of information through the context window. Strikingly, we find that many models are remarkably threadsafe: capable of simultaneously following multiple threads without significant loss in performance. Still, for many models, we find the effective context limit is significantly shorter than the supported context length, with accuracy decreasing as the context window grows. Our study also highlights the important point that token counts from different tokenizers should not be directly compared -- they often correspond to substantially different numbers of written characters. We release our code and long-context experimental data.