Vibe-Eval: A hard evaluation suite for measuring progress of multimodal language models

We introduce Vibe-Eval: a new open benchmark and framework for evaluating multimodal chat models. Vibe-Eval consists of 269 visual understanding prompts, including 100 of hard difficulty, complete with gold-standard responses authored by experts. Vibe-Eval is open-ended and challenging with dual objectives: (i) vibe checking multimodal chat models for day-to-day tasks and (ii) rigorously testing and probing the capabilities of present frontier models. Notably, our hard set contains >50% questions that all frontier models answer incorrectly. We explore the nuances of designing, evaluating, and ranking models on ultra challenging prompts. We also discuss trade-offs between human and automatic evaluation, and show that automatic model evaluation using Reka Core roughly correlates to human judgment. We offer free API access for the purpose of lightweight evaluation and plan to conduct formal human evaluations for public models that perform well on the Vibe-Eval's automatic scores. We release the evaluation code and data, see https://github.com/reka-ai/reka-vibe-eval

Reka Core, Flash, and Edge: A Series of Powerful Multimodal Language Models

We introduce Reka Core, Flash, and Edge, a series of powerful multimodal language models trained from scratch by Reka. Reka models are able to process and reason with text, images, video, and audio inputs. This technical report discusses details of training some of these models and provides comprehensive evaluation results. We show that Reka Edge and Reka Flash are not only state-of-the-art but also outperform many much larger models, delivering outsized values for their respective compute class. Meanwhile, our most capable and largest model, Reka Core, approaches the best frontier models on both automatic evaluations and blind human evaluations. On image question answering benchmarks (e.g. MMMU, VQAv2), Core performs competitively to GPT4-V. Meanwhile, on multimodal chat, Core ranks as the second most preferred model under a blind third-party human evaluation setup, outperforming other models such as Claude 3 Opus. On text benchmarks, Core not only performs competitively to other frontier models on a set of well-established benchmarks (e.g. MMLU, GSM8K) but also outperforms GPT4-0613 on human evaluation. On video question answering (Perception-Test), Core outperforms Gemini Ultra. Models are shipped in production at http://chat.reka.ai . A showcase of non cherry picked qualitative examples can also be found at http://showcase.reka.ai .

PaLI-3 Vision Language Models: Smaller, Faster, Stronger

This paper presents PaLI-3, a smaller, faster, and stronger vision language model (VLM) that compares favorably to similar models that are 10x larger. As part of arriving at this strong performance, we compare Vision Transformer (ViT) models pretrained using classification objectives to contrastively (SigLIP) pretrained ones. We find that, while slightly underperforming on standard image classification benchmarks, SigLIP-based PaLI shows superior performance across various multimodal benchmarks, especially on localization and visually-situated text understanding. We scale the SigLIP image encoder up to 2 billion parameters, and achieves a new state-of-the-art on multilingual cross-modal retrieval. We hope that PaLI-3, at only 5B parameters, rekindles research on fundamental pieces of complex VLMs, and could fuel a new generation of scaled-up models.

Patch n' Pack: NaViT, a Vision Transformer for any Aspect Ratio and Resolution

The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged. However, models such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) offer flexible sequence-based modeling, and hence varying input sequence lengths. We take advantage of this with NaViT (Native Resolution ViT) which uses sequence packing during training to process inputs of arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. Alongside flexible model usage, we demonstrate improved training efficiency for large-scale supervised and contrastive image-text pretraining. NaViT can be efficiently transferred to standard tasks such as image and video classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation and leads to improved results on robustness and fairness benchmarks. At inference time, the input resolution flexibility can be used to smoothly navigate the test-time cost-performance trade-off. We believe that NaViT marks a departure from the standard, CNN-designed, input and modelling pipeline used by most computer vision models, and represents a promising direction for ViTs.

PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model

We present the training recipe and results of scaling up PaLI-X, a multilingual vision and language model, both in terms of size of the components and the breadth of its training task mixture. Our model achieves new levels of performance on a wide-range of varied and complex tasks, including multiple image-based captioning and question-answering tasks, image-based document understanding and few-shot (in-context) learning, as well as object detection, video question answering, and video captioning. PaLI-X advances the state-of-the-art on most vision-and-language benchmarks considered (25+ of them). Finally, we observe emerging capabilities, such as complex counting and multilingual object detection, tasks that are not explicitly in the training mix.

Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters

The scaling of Transformers has driven breakthrough capabilities for language models. At present, the largest large language models (LLMs) contain upwards of 100B parameters. Vision Transformers (ViT) have introduced the same architecture to image and video modelling, but these have not yet been successfully scaled to nearly the same degree; the largest dense ViT contains 4B parameters (Chen et al., 2022). We present a recipe for highly efficient and stable training of a 22B-parameter ViT (ViT-22B) and perform a wide variety of experiments on the resulting model. When evaluated on downstream tasks (often with a lightweight linear model on frozen features), ViT-22B demonstrates increasing performance with scale. We further observe other interesting benefits of scale, including an improved tradeoff between fairness and performance, state-of-the-art alignment to human visual perception in terms of shape/texture bias, and improved robustness. ViT-22B demonstrates the potential for "LLM-like" scaling in vision, and provides key steps towards getting there.

PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model

Effective scaling and a flexible task interface enable large language models to excel at many tasks. PaLI (Pathways Language and Image model) extends this approach to the joint modeling of language and vision. PaLI generates text based on visual and textual inputs, and with this interface performs many vision, language, and multimodal tasks, in many languages. To train PaLI, we make use of large pretrained encoder-decoder language models and Vision Transformers (ViTs). This allows us to capitalize on their existing capabilities and leverage the substantial cost of training them. We find that joint scaling of the vision and language components is important. Since existing Transformers for language are much larger than their vision counterparts, we train the largest ViT to date (ViT-e) to quantify the benefits from even larger-capacity vision models. To train PaLI, we create a large multilingual mix of pretraining tasks, based on a new image-text training set containing 10B images and texts in over 100 languages. PaLI achieves state-of-the-art in multiple vision and language tasks (such as captioning, visual question-answering, scene-text understanding), while retaining a simple, modular, and scalable design.