SQ-LLaVA: Self-Questioning for Large Vision-Language Assistant

Recent advancements in the vision-language model have shown notable generalization in vision-language tasks after visual instruction tuning. However, bridging the gap between the pre-trained vision encoder and the large language models becomes the whole network's bottleneck. To improve cross-modality alignment, existing works usually consider more visual instruction data covering a broader range of vision tasks to fine-tune the model for question-answering, which are costly to obtain. However, the image contains rich contextual information that has been largely under-explored. This paper first attempts to harness this overlooked context within visual instruction data, training the model to self-supervised `learning' how to ask high-quality questions. In this way, we introduce a novel framework named SQ-LLaVA: Self-Questioning for Large Vision-Language Assistant. SQ-LLaVA exhibits proficiency in generating flexible and meaningful image-related questions while analyzing the visual clue and prior language knowledge, signifying an advanced level of generalized visual understanding. Moreover, fine-tuning SQ-LLaVA on higher-quality instruction data shows a consistent performance improvement compared with traditional visual-instruction tuning methods. This improvement highlights the efficacy of self-questioning techniques in achieving a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of visual content across various contexts.

Bayesian Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Reconstruction

We present Bayesian Diffusion Models (BDM), a prediction algorithm that performs effective Bayesian inference by tightly coupling the top-down (prior) information with the bottom-up (data-driven) procedure via joint diffusion processes. We show the effectiveness of BDM on the 3D shape reconstruction task. Compared to prototypical deep learning data-driven approaches trained on paired (supervised) data-labels (e.g. image-point clouds) datasets, our BDM brings in rich prior information from standalone labels (e.g. point clouds) to improve the bottom-up 3D reconstruction. As opposed to the standard Bayesian frameworks where explicit prior and likelihood are required for the inference, BDM performs seamless information fusion via coupled diffusion processes with learned gradient computation networks. The specialty of our BDM lies in its capability to engage the active and effective information exchange and fusion of the top-down and bottom-up processes where each itself is a diffusion process. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks for 3D shape reconstruction.

Pattern-wise Transparent Sequential Recommendation

A transparent decision-making process is essential for developing reliable and trustworthy recommender systems. For sequential recommendation, it means that the model can identify critical items asthe justifications for its recommendation results. However, achieving both model transparency and recommendation performance simultaneously is challenging, especially for models that take the entire sequence of items as input without screening. In this paper,we propose an interpretable framework (named PTSR) that enables a pattern-wise transparent decision-making process. It breaks the sequence of items into multi-level patterns that serve as atomic units for the entire recommendation process. The contribution of each pattern to the outcome is quantified in the probability space. With a carefully designed pattern weighting correction, the pattern contribution can be learned in the absence of ground-truth critical patterns. The final recommended items are those items that most critical patterns strongly endorse. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate remarkable recommendation performance, while case studies validate the model transparency. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PTSR-2237.

Dolfin: Diffusion Layout Transformers without Autoencoder

In this paper, we introduce a novel generative model, Diffusion Layout Transformers without Autoencoder (Dolfin), which significantly improves the modeling capability with reduced complexity compared to existing methods. Dolfin employs a Transformer-based diffusion process to model layout generation. In addition to an efficient bi-directional (non-causal joint) sequence representation, we further propose an autoregressive diffusion model (Dolfin-AR) that is especially adept at capturing rich semantic correlations for the neighboring objects, such as alignment, size, and overlap. When evaluated against standard generative layout benchmarks, Dolfin notably improves performance across various metrics (fid, alignment, overlap, MaxIoU and DocSim scores), enhancing transparency and interoperability in the process. Moreover, Dolfin's applications extend beyond layout generation, making it suitable for modeling geometric structures, such as line segments. Our experiments present both qualitative and quantitative results to demonstrate the advantages of Dolfin.

BLIVA: A Simple Multimodal LLM for Better Handling of Text-Rich Visual Questions

Vision Language Models (VLMs), which extend Large Language Models (LLM) by incorporating visual understanding capability, have demonstrated significant advancements in addressing open-ended visual question-answering (VQA) tasks. However, these models cannot accurately interpret images infused with text, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios. Standard procedures for extracting information from images often involve learning a fixed set of query embeddings. These embeddings are designed to encapsulate image contexts and are later used as soft prompt inputs in LLMs. Yet, this process is limited to the token count, potentially curtailing the recognition of scenes with text-rich context. To improve upon them, the present study introduces BLIVA: an augmented version of InstructBLIP with Visual Assistant. BLIVA incorporates the query embeddings from InstructBLIP and also directly projects encoded patch embeddings into the LLM, a technique inspired by LLaVA. This approach assists the model to capture intricate details potentially missed during the query decoding process. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our model, BLIVA, significantly enhances performance in processing text-rich VQA benchmarks (up to 17.76\% in OCR-VQA benchmark) and in undertaking typical VQA benchmarks (up to 7.9\% in Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark), comparing to our baseline InstructBLIP. BLIVA demonstrates significant capability in decoding real-world images, irrespective of text presence. To demonstrate the broad industry applications enabled by BLIVA, we evaluate the model using a new dataset comprising YouTube thumbnails paired with question-answer sets across 13 diverse categories. For researchers interested in further exploration, our code and models are freely accessible at https://github.com/mlpc-ucsd/BLIVA.git

Beyond Semantics: Learning a Behavior Augmented Relevance Model with Self-supervised Learning

Relevance modeling aims to locate desirable items for corresponding queries, which is crucial for search engines to ensure user experience. Although most conventional approaches address this problem by assessing the semantic similarity between the query and item, pure semantic matching is not everything.

BOLAA: Benchmarking and Orchestrating LLM-augmented Autonomous Agents

The massive successes of large language models (LLMs) encourage the emerging exploration of LLM-augmented Autonomous Agents (LAAs). An LAA is able to generate actions with its core LLM and interact with environments, which facilitates the ability to resolve complex tasks by conditioning on past interactions such as observations and actions. Since the investigation of LAA is still very recent, limited explorations are available. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive comparison of LAA in terms of both agent architectures and LLM backbones. Additionally, we propose a new strategy to orchestrate multiple LAAs such that each labor LAA focuses on one type of action, \textit{i.e.} BOLAA, where a controller manages the communication among multiple agents. We conduct simulations on both decision-making and multi-step reasoning environments, which comprehensively justify the capacity of LAAs. Our performance results provide quantitative suggestions for designing LAA architectures and the optimal choice of LLMs, as well as the compatibility of both. We release our implementation code of LAAs to the public at \url{https://github.com/salesforce/BOLAA}.