Abstract:Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified efforts to fuse heterogeneous open-source models into a unified system that inherits their complementary strengths. Existing logit-based fusion methods maintain inference efficiency but treat vocabulary dimensions independently, overlooking semantic dependencies encoded by cross-dimension interactions. These dependencies reflect how token types interact under a model's internal reasoning and are essential for aligning models with diverse generation behaviors. To explicitly model these dependencies, we propose \textbf{InfiGFusion}, the first structure-aware fusion framework with a novel \textit{Graph-on-Logits Distillation} (GLD) loss. Specifically, we retain the top-$k$ logits per output and aggregate their outer products across sequence positions to form a global co-activation graph, where nodes represent vocabulary channels and edges quantify their joint activations. To ensure scalability and efficiency, we design a sorting-based closed-form approximation that reduces the original $O(n^4)$ cost of Gromov-Wasserstein distance to $O(n \log n)$, with provable approximation guarantees. Experiments across multiple fusion settings show that GLD consistently improves fusion quality and stability. InfiGFusion outperforms SOTA models and fusion baselines across 11 benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, and mathematics. It shows particular strength in complex reasoning tasks, with +35.6 improvement on Multistep Arithmetic and +37.06 on Causal Judgement over SFT, demonstrating superior multi-step and relational inference.
Abstract:Model fusion combines multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) with different strengths into a more powerful, integrated model through lightweight training methods. Existing works on model fusion focus primarily on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), leaving preference alignment (PA) --a critical phase for enhancing LLM performance--largely unexplored. The current few fusion methods on PA phase, like WRPO, simplify the process by utilizing only response outputs from source models while discarding their probability information. To address this limitation, we propose InfiFPO, a preference optimization method for implicit model fusion. InfiFPO replaces the reference model in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with a fused source model that synthesizes multi-source probabilities at the sequence level, circumventing complex vocabulary alignment challenges in previous works and meanwhile maintaining the probability information. By introducing probability clipping and max-margin fusion strategies, InfiFPO enables the pivot model to align with human preferences while effectively distilling knowledge from source models. Comprehensive experiments on 11 widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that InfiFPO consistently outperforms existing model fusion and preference optimization methods. When using Phi-4 as the pivot model, InfiFPO improve its average performance from 79.95 to 83.33 on 11 benchmarks, significantly improving its capabilities in mathematics, coding, and reasoning tasks.
Abstract:Human preference plays a crucial role in the refinement of large language models (LLMs). However, collecting human preference feedback is costly and most existing datasets neglect the correlation between personalization and preferences. To address this issue, we introduce Fair-PP, a synthetic dataset of personalized preferences targeting social equity, derived from real-world social survey data, which includes 28 social groups, 98 equity topics, and 5 personal preference dimensions. Leveraging GPT-4o-mini, we engage in role-playing based on seven representative persona portrayals guided by existing social survey data, yielding a total of 238,623 preference records. Through Fair-PP, we also contribute (i) An automated framework for generating preference data, along with a more fine-grained dataset of personalized preferences; (ii) analysis of the positioning of the existing mainstream LLMs across five major global regions within the personalized preference space; and (iii) a sample reweighting method for personalized preference alignment, enabling alignment with a target persona while maximizing the divergence from other personas. Empirical experiments show our method outperforms the baselines.
Abstract:Visible and infrared image fusion is one of the most crucial tasks in the field of image fusion, aiming to generate fused images with clear structural information and high-quality texture features for high-level vision tasks. However, when faced with severe illumination degradation in visible images, the fusion results of existing image fusion methods often exhibit blurry and dim visual effects, posing major challenges for autonomous driving. To this end, a Darkness-Free network is proposed to handle Visible and infrared image disentanglement and fusion all at Once (DFVO), which employs a cascaded multi-task approach to replace the traditional two-stage cascaded training (enhancement and fusion), addressing the issue of information entropy loss caused by hierarchical data transmission. Specifically, we construct a latent-common feature extractor (LCFE) to obtain latent features for the cascaded tasks strategy. Firstly, a details-extraction module (DEM) is devised to acquire high-frequency semantic information. Secondly, we design a hyper cross-attention module (HCAM) to extract low-frequency information and preserve texture features from source images. Finally, a relevant loss function is designed to guide the holistic network learning, thereby achieving better image fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Particularly, DFVO can generate clearer, more informative, and more evenly illuminated fusion results in the dark environments, achieving best performance on the LLVIP dataset with 63.258 dB PSNR and 0.724 CC, providing more effective information for high-level vision tasks. Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/DaVin-Qi530/DFVO.
Abstract:Low-overlap aerial imagery poses significant challenges to traditional photogrammetric methods, which rely heavily on high image overlap to produce accurate and complete mapping products. In this study, we propose a novel workflow based on monocular depth estimation to address the limitations of conventional techniques. Our method leverages tie points obtained from aerial triangulation to establish a relationship between monocular depth and metric depth, thus transforming the original depth map into a metric depth map, enabling the generation of dense depth information and the comprehensive reconstruction of the scene. For the experiments, a high-overlap drone dataset containing 296 images is processed using Metashape to generate depth maps and DSMs as ground truth. Subsequently, we create a low-overlap dataset by selecting 20 images for experimental evaluation. Results demonstrate that while the recovered depth maps and resulting DSMs achieve meter-level accuracy, they provide significantly better completeness compared to traditional methods, particularly in regions covered by single images. This study showcases the potential of monocular depth estimation in low-overlap aerial photogrammetry.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, they still face challenges such as high computational demands and privacy concerns. This paper focuses on developing efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) and Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) that retain competitive reasoning abilities. We introduce a novel training pipeline that enhances reasoning capabilities and facilitates deployment on edge devices, achieving state-of-the-art performance while minimizing development costs. \InfR~ aims to advance AI systems by improving reasoning, reducing adoption barriers, and addressing privacy concerns through smaller model sizes. Resources are available at https://github. com/Reallm-Labs/InfiR.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various reasoning tasks, yet building a single model that consistently excels across all domains remains challenging. This paper addresses this problem by exploring strategies to integrate multiple domain-specialized models into an efficient pivot model.We propose two fusion strategies to combine the strengths of multiple LLMs: (1) a pairwise, multi-step fusion approach that sequentially distills each source model into the pivot model, followed by a weight merging step to integrate the distilled models into the final model. This method achieves strong performance but requires substantial training effort; and (2) a unified fusion approach that aggregates all source models' outputs simultaneously.To improve the fusion process, we introduce a novel Rate-Skewness Adaptive Fusion (RSAF) technique, which dynamically adjusts top-K ratios during parameter merging for enhanced flexibility and stability.Furthermore, we propose an uncertainty-based weighting method for the unified approach, which dynamically balances the contributions of source models and outperforms other logits/distribution ensemble methods.We achieved accuracy improvements of 9.27%, 8.80%, and 8.89% on the GSM8K, MATH, and HumanEval tasks, respectively.
Abstract:Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the vulnerability of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to maliciously injected or perturbed input images, which can mislead their responses. Existing defense methods show that such vision attacks are sensitive to image modifications especially cropping, using majority voting across responses of modified images as corrected responses. However, these modifications often result in partial images and distort the semantics, which reduces response quality on clean images after voting. Instead of directly using responses from partial images for voting, we investigate using them to supervise the LVLM's responses to the original images. We propose a black-box, training-free method called DPS (Defense through Partial-Perception Supervision). In this approach, the model is prompted using the responses generated by a model that perceives only a partial image. With DPS, the model can adjust its response based on partial image understanding when under attack, while confidently maintaining its original response for clean input. Our findings show that the weak model can supervise the strong model: when faced with an attacked input, the strong model becomes less confident and adjusts its response based on the weak model's partial understanding, effectively defending against the attack. With clean input, it confidently maintains its original response. Empirical experiments show our method outperforms the baseline, cutting the average attack success rate by 76.3% across six datasets on three popular models.
Abstract:Fault diagnosis technology supports the healthy operation of mechanical equipment. However, the variations conditions during the operation of mechanical equipment lead to significant disparities in data distribution, posing challenges to fault diagnosis. Furthermore, when deploying applications, traditional methods often encounter issues such as latency and data security. Therefore, conducting fault diagnosis and deploying application methods under cross-operating conditions holds significant value. This paper proposes a domain adaptation-based lightweight fault diagnosis framework for edge computing scenarios. Incorporating the local maximum mean discrepancy into knowledge transfer aligns the feature distributions of different domains in a high-dimensional feature space, to discover a common feature space across domains. The acquired fault diagnosis expertise from the cloud-model is transferred to the lightweight edge-model using adaptation knowledge transfer methods. While ensuring real-time diagnostic capabilities, accurate fault diagnosis is achieved across working conditions. We conducted validation experiments on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX kit. In terms of diagnostic performance, the proposed method significantly improved diagnostic accuracy, with average increases of 34.44% and 17.33% compared to the comparison method, respectively. Regarding lightweight effectiveness, proposed method achieved an average inference speed increase of 80.47%. Additionally, compared to the cloud-model, the parameter count of the edge-model decreased by 96.37%, while the Flops decreased by 83.08%.
Abstract:Recent advancements in building domain-specific large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, especially in tasks requiring reasoning abilities like logical inference over complex relationships and multi-step problem solving. However, creating a powerful all-in-one LLM remains challenging due to the need for proprietary data and vast computational resources. As a resource-friendly alternative, we explore the potential of merging multiple expert models into a single LLM. Existing studies on model merging mainly focus on generalist LLMs instead of domain experts, or the LLMs under the same architecture and size. In this work, we propose an unconstrained model merging framework that accommodates both homogeneous and heterogeneous model architectures with a focus on reasoning tasks. A fine-grained layer-wise weight merging strategy is designed for homogeneous models merging, while heterogeneous model merging is built upon the probabilistic distribution knowledge derived from instruction-response fine-tuning data. Across 7 benchmarks and 9 reasoning-optimized LLMs, we reveal key findings that combinatorial reasoning emerges from merging which surpasses simple additive effects. We propose that unconstrained model merging could serve as a foundation for decentralized LLMs, marking a notable progression from the existing centralized LLM framework. This evolution could enhance wider participation and stimulate additional advancement in the field of artificial intelligence, effectively addressing the constraints posed by centralized models.