Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

6DMA-Aided Hybrid Beamforming with Joint Antenna Position and Orientation Optimization

This paper studies a sub-connected six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA)-aided multi-user communication system. In this system, each sub-array is connected to a dedicated radio frequency chain and collectively moves and rotates as a unit within specific local regions. The movement and rotation capabilities of 6DMAs enhance design flexibility, facilitating the capture of spatial variations for improved communication performance. To fully characterize the effect of antenna position and orientation on wireless channels between the base station (BS) and users, we develop a field-response-based 6DMA channel model to account for the antenna radiation pattern and polarization. We then maximize the sum rate of multiple users, by jointly optimizing the digital and unit-modulus analog beamformers given the transmit power budget as well as the positions and orientations of sub-arrays within given movable and rotatable ranges at the BS. Due to the highly coupled variables, the formulated optimization problem is non-convex and thus challenging to solve. We develop a fractional programming-aided alternating optimization framework that integrates the Lagrange multiplier method, manifold optimization, and gradient descent to solve the problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed 6DMA-aided sub-connected structure achieves a substantial sum-rate improvement over various benchmark schemes with less flexibility in antenna movement and can even outperform fully-digital beamforming systems that employ antenna position or orientation adjustments only. The results also highlight the necessity of considering antenna polarization for optimally adjusting antenna orientation.

PyOD 2: A Python Library for Outlier Detection with LLM-powered Model Selection

Outlier detection (OD), also known as anomaly detection, is a critical machine learning (ML) task with applications in fraud detection, network intrusion detection, clickstream analysis, recommendation systems, and social network moderation. Among open-source libraries for outlier detection, the Python Outlier Detection (PyOD) library is the most widely adopted, with over 8,500 GitHub stars, 25 million downloads, and diverse industry usage. However, PyOD currently faces three limitations: (1) insufficient coverage of modern deep learning algorithms, (2) fragmented implementations across PyTorch and TensorFlow, and (3) no automated model selection, making it hard for non-experts. To address these issues, we present PyOD Version 2 (PyOD 2), which integrates 12 state-of-the-art deep learning models into a unified PyTorch framework and introduces a large language model (LLM)-based pipeline for automated OD model selection. These improvements simplify OD workflows, provide access to 45 algorithms, and deliver robust performance on various datasets. In this paper, we demonstrate how PyOD 2 streamlines the deployment and automation of OD models and sets a new standard in both research and industry. PyOD 2 is accessible at [https://github.com/yzhao062/pyod](https://github.com/yzhao062/pyod). This study aligns with the Web Mining and Content Analysis track, addressing topics such as the robustness of Web mining methods and the quality of algorithmically-generated Web data.

Scaling Laws for Black box Adversarial Attacks

A longstanding problem of deep learning models is their vulnerability to adversarial examples, which are often generated by applying imperceptible perturbations to natural examples. Adversarial examples exhibit cross-model transferability, enabling to attack black-box models with limited information about their architectures and parameters. Model ensembling is an effective strategy to improve the transferability by attacking multiple surrogate models simultaneously. However, as prior studies usually adopt few models in the ensemble, there remains an open question of whether scaling the number of models can further improve black-box attacks. Inspired by the findings in large foundation models, we investigate the scaling laws of black-box adversarial attacks in this work. By analyzing the relationship between the number of surrogate models and transferability of adversarial examples, we conclude with clear scaling laws, emphasizing the potential of using more surrogate models to enhance adversarial transferability. Extensive experiments verify the claims on standard image classifiers, multimodal large language models, and even proprietary models like GPT-4o, demonstrating consistent scaling effects and impressive attack success rates with more surrogate models. Further studies by visualization indicate that scaled attacks bring better interpretability in semantics, indicating that the common features of models are captured.

Looking Beyond Text: Reducing Language bias in Large Vision-Language Models via Multimodal Dual-Attention and Soft-Image Guidance

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive results in various vision-language tasks. However, despite showing promising performance, LVLMs suffer from hallucinations caused by language bias, leading to diminished focus on images and ineffective visual comprehension. We identify two primary reasons for this bias: 1. Different scales of training data between the pretraining stage of LLM and multimodal alignment stage. 2. The learned inference bias due to short-term dependency of text data. Therefore, we propose LACING, a systemic framework designed to address the language bias of LVLMs with muLtimodal duAl-attention meChanIsm (MDA) aNd soft-image Guidance (IFG). Specifically, MDA introduces a parallel dual-attention mechanism that enhances the integration of visual inputs across the model. IFG introduces a learnable soft visual prompt during training and inference to replace visual inputs, designed to compel LVLMs to prioritize text inputs. Then, IFG further proposes a novel decoding strategy using the soft visual prompt to mitigate the model's over-reliance on adjacent text inputs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively debiases LVLMs from their language bias, enhancing visual comprehension and reducing hallucinations without requiring additional training resources or data. The code and model are available at [lacing-lvlm.github.io](https://lacing-lvlm.github.io).

MKGL: Mastery of a Three-Word Language

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced performance across a spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, their application to knowledge graphs (KGs), which describe facts in the form of triplets and allow minimal hallucinations, remains an underexplored frontier. In this paper, we investigate the integration of LLMs with KGs by introducing a specialized KG Language (KGL), where a sentence precisely consists of an entity noun, a relation verb, and ends with another entity noun. Despite KGL's unfamiliar vocabulary to the LLM, we facilitate its learning through a tailored dictionary and illustrative sentences, and enhance context understanding via real-time KG context retrieval and KGL token embedding augmentation. Our results reveal that LLMs can achieve fluency in KGL, drastically reducing errors compared to conventional KG embedding methods on KG completion. Furthermore, our enhanced LLM shows exceptional competence in generating accurate three-word sentences from an initial entity and interpreting new unseen terms out of KGs.

MetaOOD: Automatic Selection of OOD Detection Models

How can we automatically select an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection model for various underlying tasks? This is crucial for maintaining the reliability of open-world applications by identifying data distribution shifts, particularly in critical domains such as online transactions, autonomous driving, and real-time patient diagnosis. Despite the availability of numerous OOD detection methods, the challenge of selecting an optimal model for diverse tasks remains largely underexplored, especially in scenarios lacking ground truth labels. In this work, we introduce MetaOOD, the first zero-shot, unsupervised framework that utilizes meta-learning to automatically select an OOD detection model. As a meta-learning approach, MetaOOD leverages historical performance data of existing methods across various benchmark OOD datasets, enabling the effective selection of a suitable model for new datasets without the need for labeled data at the test time. To quantify task similarities more accurately, we introduce language model-based embeddings that capture the distinctive OOD characteristics of both datasets and detection models. Through extensive experimentation with 24 unique test dataset pairs to choose from among 11 OOD detection models, we demonstrate that MetaOOD significantly outperforms existing methods and only brings marginal time overhead. Our results, validated by Wilcoxon statistical tests, show that MetaOOD surpasses a diverse group of 11 baselines, including established OOD detectors and advanced unsupervised selection methods.

A Spark of Vision-Language Intelligence: 2-Dimensional Autoregressive Transformer for Efficient Finegrained Image Generation

This work tackles the information loss bottleneck of vector-quantization (VQ) autoregressive image generation by introducing a novel model architecture called the 2-Dimensional Autoregression (DnD) Transformer. The DnD-Transformer predicts more codes for an image by introducing a new autoregression direction, \textit{model depth}, along with the sequence length direction. Compared to traditional 1D autoregression and previous work utilizing similar 2D image decomposition such as RQ-Transformer, the DnD-Transformer is an end-to-end model that can generate higher quality images with the same backbone model size and sequence length, opening a new optimization perspective for autoregressive image generation. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that the DnD-Transformer's potential extends beyond generating natural images. It can even generate images with rich text and graphical elements in a self-supervised manner, demonstrating an understanding of these combined modalities. This has not been previously demonstrated for popular vision generative models such as diffusion models, showing a spark of vision-language intelligence when trained solely on images. Code, datasets and models are open at https://github.com/chenllliang/DnD-Transformer.

Robust Training of Neural Networks at Arbitrary Precision and Sparsity

The discontinuous operations inherent in quantization and sparsification introduce obstacles to backpropagation. This is particularly challenging when training deep neural networks in ultra-low precision and sparse regimes. We propose a novel, robust, and universal solution: a denoising affine transform that stabilizes training under these challenging conditions. By formulating quantization and sparsification as perturbations during training, we derive a perturbation-resilient approach based on ridge regression. Our solution employs a piecewise constant backbone model to ensure a performance lower bound and features an inherent noise reduction mechanism to mitigate perturbation-induced corruption. This formulation allows existing models to be trained at arbitrarily low precision and sparsity levels with off-the-shelf recipes. Furthermore, our method provides a novel perspective on training temporal binary neural networks, contributing to ongoing efforts to narrow the gap between artificial and biological neural networks.

Unleashing the Potential of SAM2 for Biomedical Images and Videos: A Survey

The unprecedented developments in segmentation foundational models have become a dominant force in the field of computer vision, introducing a multitude of previously unexplored capabilities in a wide range of natural images and videos. Specifically, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) signifies a noteworthy expansion of the prompt-driven paradigm into the domain of image segmentation. The recent introduction of SAM2 effectively extends the original SAM to a streaming fashion and demonstrates strong performance in video segmentation. However, due to the substantial distinctions between natural and medical images, the effectiveness of these models on biomedical images and videos is still under exploration. This paper presents an overview of recent efforts in applying and adapting SAM2 to biomedical images and videos. The findings indicate that while SAM2 shows promise in reducing annotation burdens and enabling zero-shot segmentation, its performance varies across different datasets and tasks. Addressing the domain gap between natural and medical images through adaptation and fine-tuning is essential to fully unleash SAM2's potential in clinical applications. To support ongoing research endeavors, we maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date SAM & SAM2-related papers and projects at https://github.com/YichiZhang98/SAM4MIS.