Diff-Prompt: Diffusion-Driven Prompt Generator with Mask Supervision

Prompt learning has demonstrated promising results in fine-tuning pre-trained multimodal models. However, the performance improvement is limited when applied to more complex and fine-grained tasks. The reason is that most existing methods directly optimize the parameters involved in the prompt generation process through loss backpropagation, which constrains the richness and specificity of the prompt representations. In this paper, we propose Diffusion-Driven Prompt Generator (Diff-Prompt), aiming to use the diffusion model to generate rich and fine-grained prompt information for complex downstream tasks. Specifically, our approach consists of three stages. In the first stage, we train a Mask-VAE to compress the masks into latent space. In the second stage, we leverage an improved Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to train a prompt generator in the latent space, using the masks for supervision. In the third stage, we align the denoising process of the prompt generator with the pre-trained model in the semantic space, and use the generated prompts to fine-tune the model. We conduct experiments on a complex pixel-level downstream task, referring expression comprehension, and compare our method with various parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches. Diff-Prompt achieves a maximum improvement of 8.87 in R@1 and 14.05 in R@5 compared to the foundation model and also outperforms other state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the potential of using generative models for prompt generation. Code is available at https://github.com/Kelvin-ywc/diff-prompt.

Seedream 3.0 Technical Report

We present Seedream 3.0, a high-performance Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model. We develop several technical improvements to address existing challenges in Seedream 2.0, including alignment with complicated prompts, fine-grained typography generation, suboptimal visual aesthetics and fidelity, and limited image resolutions. Specifically, the advancements of Seedream 3.0 stem from improvements across the entire pipeline, from data construction to model deployment. At the data stratum, we double the dataset using a defect-aware training paradigm and a dual-axis collaborative data-sampling framework. Furthermore, we adopt several effective techniques such as mixed-resolution training, cross-modality RoPE, representation alignment loss, and resolution-aware timestep sampling in the pre-training phase. During the post-training stage, we utilize diversified aesthetic captions in SFT, and a VLM-based reward model with scaling, thereby achieving outputs that well align with human preferences. Furthermore, Seedream 3.0 pioneers a novel acceleration paradigm. By employing consistent noise expectation and importance-aware timestep sampling, we achieve a 4 to 8 times speedup while maintaining image quality. Seedream 3.0 demonstrates significant improvements over Seedream 2.0: it enhances overall capabilities, in particular for text-rendering in complicated Chinese characters which is important to professional typography generation. In addition, it provides native high-resolution output (up to 2K), allowing it to generate images with high visual quality.

Interpretable Style Takagi-Sugeno-Kang Fuzzy Clustering

Clustering is an efficient and essential technique for exploring latent knowledge of data. However, limited attention has been given to the interpretability of the clusters detected by most clustering algorithms. In addition, due to the homogeneity of data, different groups of data have their own homogeneous styles. In this paper, the above two aspects are considered, and an interpretable style Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy clustering (IS-TSK-FC) algorithm is proposed. The clustering behavior of IS-TSK-FC is fully guided by the TSK fuzzy inference on fuzzy rules. In particular, samples are grouped into clusters represented by the corresponding consequent vectors of all fuzzy rules learned in an unsupervised manner. This can explain how the clusters are generated in detail, thus making the underlying decision-making process of the IS-TSK-FC interpretable. Moreover, a series of style matrices are introduced to facilitate the consequents of fuzzy rules in IS-TSK-FC by capturing the styles of clusters as well as the nuances between different styles. Consequently, all the fuzzy rules in IS-TSK-FC have powerful data representation capability. After determining the antecedents of all the fuzzy rules, the optimization problem of IS-TSK-FC can be iteratively solved in an alternation manner. The effectiveness of IS-TSK-FC as an interpretable clustering tool is validated through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with unknown implicit/explicit styles. Specially, the superior clustering performance of IS-TSK-FC is demonstrated on case studies where different groups of data present explicit styles. The source code of IS-TSK-FC can be downloaded from https://github.com/gusuhang10/IS-TSK-FC.

TimeZero: Temporal Video Grounding with Reasoning-Guided LVLM

We introduce TimeZero, a reasoning-guided LVLM designed for the temporal video grounding (TVG) task. This task requires precisely localizing relevant video segments within long videos based on a given language query. TimeZero tackles this challenge by extending the inference process, enabling the model to reason about video-language relationships solely through reinforcement learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of TimeZero, we conduct experiments on two benchmarks, where TimeZero achieves state-of-the-art performance on Charades-STA. Code is available at https://github.com/www-Ye/TimeZero.

Seedream 2.0: A Native Chinese-English Bilingual Image Generation Foundation Model

Rapid advancement of diffusion models has catalyzed remarkable progress in the field of image generation. However, prevalent models such as Flux, SD3.5 and Midjourney, still grapple with issues like model bias, limited text rendering capabilities, and insufficient understanding of Chinese cultural nuances. To address these limitations, we present Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model that excels across diverse dimensions, which adeptly manages text prompt in both Chinese and English, supporting bilingual image generation and text rendering. We develop a powerful data system that facilitates knowledge integration, and a caption system that balances the accuracy and richness for image description. Particularly, Seedream is integrated with a self-developed bilingual large language model as a text encoder, allowing it to learn native knowledge directly from massive data. This enable it to generate high-fidelity images with accurate cultural nuances and aesthetic expressions described in either Chinese or English. Beside, Glyph-Aligned ByT5 is applied for flexible character-level text rendering, while a Scaled ROPE generalizes well to untrained resolutions. Multi-phase post-training optimizations, including SFT and RLHF iterations, further improve the overall capability. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Seedream 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple aspects, including prompt-following, aesthetics, text rendering, and structural correctness. Furthermore, Seedream 2.0 has been optimized through multiple RLHF iterations to closely align its output with human preferences, as revealed by its outstanding ELO score. In addition, it can be readily adapted to an instruction-based image editing model, such as SeedEdit, with strong editing capability that balances instruction-following and image consistency.

Lead Instrument Detection from Multitrack Music

Prior approaches to lead instrument detection primarily analyze mixture audio, limited to coarse classifications and lacking generalization ability. This paper presents a novel approach to lead instrument detection in multitrack music audio by crafting expertly annotated datasets and designing a novel framework that integrates a self-supervised learning model with a track-wise, frame-level attention-based classifier. This attention mechanism dynamically extracts and aggregates track-specific features based on their auditory importance, enabling precise detection across varied instrument types and combinations. Enhanced by track classification and permutation augmentation, our model substantially outperforms existing SVM and CRNN models, showing robustness on unseen instruments and out-of-domain testing. We believe our exploration provides valuable insights for future research on audio content analysis in multitrack music settings.

Winning Big with Small Models: Knowledge Distillation vs. Self-Training for Reducing Hallucination in QA Agents

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in customer support is constrained by hallucination-generating false information-and the high cost of proprietary models. To address these challenges, we propose a retrieval-augmented question-answering (QA) pipeline and explore how to balance human input and automation. Using a dataset of questions about a Samsung Smart TV user manual, we demonstrate that synthetic data generated by LLMs outperforms crowdsourced data in reducing hallucination in finetuned models. We also compare self-training (fine-tuning models on their own outputs) and knowledge distillation (fine-tuning on stronger models' outputs, e.g., GPT-4o), and find that self-training achieves comparable hallucination reduction. We conjecture that this surprising finding can be attributed to increased exposure bias issues in the knowledge distillation case and support this conjecture with post hoc analysis. We also improve robustness to unanswerable questions and retrieval failures with contextualized "I don't know" responses. These findings show that scalable, cost-efficient QA systems can be built using synthetic data and self-training with open-source models, reducing reliance on proprietary tools or costly human annotations.

EAGER-LLM: Enhancing Large Language Models as Recommenders through Exogenous Behavior-Semantic Integration

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly leveraged as foundational backbones in the development of advanced recommender systems, offering enhanced capabilities through their extensive knowledge and reasoning. Existing llm-based recommender systems (RSs) often face challenges due to the significant differences between the linguistic semantics of pre-trained LLMs and the collaborative semantics essential for RSs. These systems use pre-trained linguistic semantics but learn collaborative semantics from scratch via the llm-Backbone. However, LLMs are not designed for recommendations, leading to inefficient collaborative learning, weak result correlations, and poor integration of traditional RS features. To address these challenges, we propose EAGER-LLM, a decoder-only llm-based generative recommendation framework that integrates endogenous and exogenous behavioral and semantic information in a non-intrusive manner. Specifically, we propose 1)dual-source knowledge-rich item indices that integrates indexing sequences for exogenous signals, enabling efficient link-wide processing; 2)non-invasive multiscale alignment reconstruction tasks guide the model toward a deeper understanding of both collaborative and semantic signals; 3)an annealing adapter designed to finely balance the model's recommendation performance with its comprehension capabilities. We demonstrate EAGER-LLM's effectiveness through rigorous testing on three public benchmarks.

Smoothed Embeddings for Robust Language Models

Improving the safety and reliability of large language models (LLMs) is a crucial aspect of realizing trustworthy AI systems. Although alignment methods aim to suppress harmful content generation, LLMs are often still vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that employ adversarial inputs that subvert alignment and induce harmful outputs. We propose the Randomized Embedding Smoothing and Token Aggregation (RESTA) defense, which adds random noise to the embedding vectors and performs aggregation during the generation of each output token, with the aim of better preserving semantic information. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior robustness versus utility tradeoffs compared to the baseline defenses.

Low-rank Prompt Interaction for Continual Vision-Language Retrieval

Research on continual learning in multi-modal tasks has been receiving increasing attention. However, most existing work overlooks the explicit cross-modal and cross-task interactions. In this paper, we innovatively propose the Low-rank Prompt Interaction (LPI) to address this general problem of multi-modal understanding, which considers both cross-modal and cross-task interactions. Specifically, as for the former, we employ multi-modal correlation modules for corresponding Transformer layers. Considering that the training parameters scale to the number of layers and tasks, we propose low-rank interaction-augmented decomposition to avoid memory explosion while enhancing the cross-modal association through sharing and separating common-specific low-rank factors. In addition, due to the multi-modal semantic differences carried by the low-rank initialization, we adopt hierarchical low-rank contrastive learning to ensure training robustness. As for the latter, we initially employ a visual analysis and identify that different tasks have clear distinctions in proximity. Therefore, we introduce explicit task contrastive constraints in the prompt learning process based on task semantic distances. Experiments on two retrieval tasks show performance improvements with the introduction of a minimal number of parameters, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/Kelvin-ywc/LPI.