MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) relies on the powerful LLM to perform multimodal tasks, showing amazing emergent abilities in recent studies, such as writing poems based on an image. However, it is difficult for these case studies to fully reflect the performance of MLLM, lacking a comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, we fill in this blank, presenting the first MLLM Evaluation benchmark MME. It measures both perception and cognition abilities on a total of 14 subtasks. In order to avoid data leakage that may arise from direct use of public datasets for evaluation, the annotations of instruction-answer pairs are all manually designed. The concise instruction design allows us to fairly compare MLLMs, instead of struggling in prompt engineering. Besides, with such an instruction, we can also easily carry out quantitative statistics. A total of 12 advanced MLLMs are comprehensively evaluated on our MME, which not only suggests that existing MLLMs still have a large room for improvement, but also reveals the potential directions for the subsequent model optimization.

MEMD-ABSA: A Multi-Element Multi-Domain Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a long-standing research interest in the field of opinion mining, and in recent years, researchers have gradually shifted their focus from simple ABSA subtasks to end-to-end multi-element ABSA tasks. However, the datasets currently used in the research are limited to individual elements of specific tasks, usually focusing on in-domain settings, ignoring implicit aspects and opinions, and with a small data scale. To address these issues, we propose a large-scale Multi-Element Multi-Domain dataset (MEMD) that covers the four elements across five domains, including nearly 20,000 review sentences and 30,000 quadruples annotated with explicit and implicit aspects and opinions for ABSA research. Meanwhile, we evaluate generative and non-generative baselines on multiple ABSA subtasks under the open domain setting, and the results show that open domain ABSA as well as mining implicit aspects and opinions remain ongoing challenges to be addressed. The datasets are publicly released at \url{https://github.com/NUSTM/MEMD-ABSA}.

A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) recently has been a new rising research hotspot, which uses powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as a brain to perform multimodal tasks. The surprising emergent capabilities of MLLM, such as writing stories based on images and OCR-free math reasoning, are rare in traditional methods, suggesting a potential path to artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we aim to trace and summarize the recent progress of MLLM. First of all, we present the formulation of MLLM and delineate its related concepts. Then, we discuss the key techniques and applications, including Multimodal Instruction Tuning (M-IT), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL), Multimodal Chain of Thought (M-CoT), and LLM-Aided Visual Reasoning (LAVR). Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. In light of the fact that the era of MLLM has only just begun, we will keep updating this survey and hope it can inspire more research. An associated GitHub link collecting the latest papers is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.

Learning from Visual Observation via Offline Pretrained State-to-Go Transformer

Learning from visual observation (LfVO), aiming at recovering policies from only visual observation data, is promising yet a challenging problem. Existing LfVO approaches either only adopt inefficient online learning schemes or require additional task-specific information like goal states, making them not suited for open-ended tasks. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework for learning from visual observation. In the first stage, we introduce and pretrain State-to-Go (STG) Transformer offline to predict and differentiate latent transitions of demonstrations. Subsequently, in the second stage, the STG Transformer provides intrinsic rewards for downstream reinforcement learning tasks where an agent learns merely from intrinsic rewards. Empirical results on Atari and Minecraft show that our proposed method outperforms baselines and in some tasks even achieves performance comparable to the policy learned from environmental rewards. These results shed light on the potential of utilizing video-only data to solve difficult visual reinforcement learning tasks rather than relying on complete offline datasets containing states, actions, and rewards. The project's website and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/stgtransformer.

Multi-modal Queried Object Detection in the Wild

We introduce MQ-Det, an efficient architecture and pre-training strategy design to utilize both textual description with open-set generalization and visual exemplars with rich description granularity as category queries, namely, Multi-modal Queried object Detection, for real-world detection with both open-vocabulary categories and various granularity. MQ-Det incorporates vision queries into existing well-established language-queried-only detectors. A plug-and-play gated class-scalable perceiver module upon the frozen detector is proposed to augment category text with class-wise visual information. To address the learning inertia problem brought by the frozen detector, a vision conditioned masked language prediction strategy is proposed. MQ-Det's simple yet effective architecture and training strategy design is compatible with most language-queried object detectors, thus yielding versatile applications. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-modal queries largely boost open-world detection. For instance, MQ-Det significantly improves the state-of-the-art open-set detector GLIP by +7.8% zero-shot AP on the LVIS benchmark and averagely +6.3% AP on 13 few-shot downstream tasks, with merely 3% pre-training time required by GLIP. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/MQ-Det.

READ: Recurrent Adaptation of Large Transformers

Fine-tuning large-scale Transformers has led to the explosion of many AI applications across Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision tasks. However, fine-tuning all pre-trained model parameters becomes impractical as the model size and number of tasks increase. Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods aim to address these challenges. While effective in reducing the number of trainable parameters, PETL methods still require significant energy and computational resources to fine-tune. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{RE}current \textbf{AD}aption (READ) -- a lightweight and memory-efficient fine-tuning method -- to overcome the limitations of the current PETL approaches. Specifically, READ inserts a small RNN network alongside the backbone model so that the model does not have to back-propagate through the large backbone network. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation of the GLUE benchmark, we demonstrate READ can achieve a $56\%$ reduction in the training memory consumption and an $84\%$ reduction in the GPU energy usage while retraining high model quality compared to full-tuning. Additionally, the model size of READ does not grow with the backbone model size, making it a highly scalable solution for fine-tuning large Transformers.

Integrating Multiple Sources Knowledge for Class Asymmetry Domain Adaptation Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images

In the existing unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for remote sensing images (RSIs) semantic segmentation, class symmetry is an widely followed ideal assumption, where the source and target RSIs have exactly the same class space. In practice, however, it is often very difficult to find a source RSI with exactly the same classes as the target RSI. More commonly, there are multiple source RSIs available. To this end, a novel class asymmetry RSIs domain adaptation method with multiple sources is proposed in this paper, which consists of four key components. Firstly, a multi-branch segmentation network is built to learn an expert for each source RSI. Secondly, a novel collaborative learning method with the cross-domain mixing strategy is proposed, to supplement the class information for each source while achieving the domain adaptation of each source-target pair. Thirdly, a pseudo-label generation strategy is proposed to effectively combine strengths of different experts, which can be flexibly applied to two cases where the source class union is equal to or includes the target class set. Fourthly, a multiview-enhanced knowledge integration module is developed for the high-level knowledge routing and transfer from multiple domains to target predictions.

Compressing neural network by tensor network with exponentially fewer variational parameters

Neural network (NN) designed for challenging machine learning tasks is in general a highly nonlinear mapping that contains massive variational parameters. High complexity of NN, if unbounded or unconstrained, might unpredictably cause severe issues including over-fitting, loss of generalization power, and unbearable cost of hardware. In this work, we propose a general compression scheme that significantly reduces the variational parameters of NN by encoding them to multi-layer tensor networks (TN's) that contain exponentially-fewer free parameters. Superior compression performance of our scheme is demonstrated on several widely-recognized NN's (FC-2, LeNet-5, and VGG-16) and datasets (MNIST and CIFAR-10), surpassing the state-of-the-art method based on shallow tensor networks. For instance, about 10 million parameters in the three convolutional layers of VGG-16 are compressed in TN's with just $632$ parameters, while the testing accuracy on CIFAR-10 is surprisingly improved from $81.14\%$ by the original NN to $84.36\%$ after compression. Our work suggests TN as an exceptionally efficient mathematical structure for representing the variational parameters of NN's, which superiorly exploits the compressibility than the simple multi-way arrays.

Reactive Perturbation Defocusing for Textual Adversarial Defense

Recent studies have shown that large pre-trained language models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing methods attempt to reconstruct the adversarial examples. However, these methods usually have limited performance in defense against adversarial examples, while also negatively impacting the performance on natural examples. To overcome this problem, we propose a method called Reactive Perturbation Defocusing (RPD). RPD uses an adversarial detector to identify adversarial examples and reduce false defenses on natural examples. Instead of reconstructing the adversaries, RPD injects safe perturbations into adversarial examples to distract the objective models from the malicious perturbations. Our experiments on three datasets, two objective models, and various adversarial attacks show that our proposed framework successfully repairs up to approximately 97% of correctly identified adversarial examples with only about a 2% performance decrease on natural examples. We also provide a demo of adversarial detection and repair based on our work.

DiffFacto: Controllable Part-Based 3D Point Cloud Generation with Cross Diffusion

While the community of 3D point cloud generation has witnessed a big growth in recent years, there still lacks an effective way to enable intuitive user control in the generation process, hence limiting the general utility of such methods. Since an intuitive way of decomposing a shape is through its parts, we propose to tackle the task of controllable part-based point cloud generation. We introduce DiffFacto, a novel probabilistic generative model that learns the distribution of shapes with part-level control. We propose a factorization that models independent part style and part configuration distributions and presents a novel cross-diffusion network that enables us to generate coherent and plausible shapes under our proposed factorization. Experiments show that our method is able to generate novel shapes with multiple axes of control. It achieves state-of-the-art part-level generation quality and generates plausible and coherent shapes while enabling various downstream editing applications such as shape interpolation, mixing, and transformation editing. Project website: https://difffacto.github.io/