HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video Dataset

We present a validation dataset of newly-collected kitchen-based egocentric videos, manually annotated with highly detailed and interconnected ground-truth labels covering: recipe steps, fine-grained actions, ingredients with nutritional values, moving objects, and audio annotations. Importantly, all annotations are grounded in 3D through digital twinning of the scene, fixtures, object locations, and primed with gaze. Footage is collected from unscripted recordings in diverse home environments, making HDEPIC the first dataset collected in-the-wild but with detailed annotations matching those in controlled lab environments. We show the potential of our highly-detailed annotations through a challenging VQA benchmark of 26K questions assessing the capability to recognise recipes, ingredients, nutrition, fine-grained actions, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze direction. The powerful long-context Gemini Pro only achieves 38.5% on this benchmark, showcasing its difficulty and highlighting shortcomings in current VLMs. We additionally assess action recognition, sound recognition, and long-term video-object segmentation on HD-EPIC. HD-EPIC is 41 hours of video in 9 kitchens with digital twins of 413 kitchen fixtures, capturing 69 recipes, 59K fine-grained actions, 51K audio events, 20K object movements and 37K object masks lifted to 3D. On average, we have 263 annotations per minute of our unscripted videos.

Calling a Spade a Heart: Gaslighting Multimodal Large Language Models via Negation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited remarkable advancements in integrating different modalities, excelling in complex understanding and generation tasks. Despite their success, MLLMs remain vulnerable to conversational adversarial inputs, particularly negation arguments. This paper systematically evaluates state-of-the-art MLLMs across diverse benchmarks, revealing significant performance drops when negation arguments are introduced to initially correct responses. We show critical vulnerabilities in the reasoning and alignment mechanisms of these models. Proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet demonstrate better resilience compared to open-source counterparts like Qwen2-VL and LLaVA. However, all evaluated MLLMs struggle to maintain logical consistency under negation arguments during conversation. This paper aims to offer valuable insights for improving the robustness of MLLMs against adversarial inputs, contributing to the development of more reliable and trustworthy multimodal AI systems.

Next Patch Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation

Autoregressive models, built based on the Next Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm, show great potential in developing a unified framework that integrates both language and vision tasks. In this work, we rethink the NTP for autoregressive image generation and propose a novel Next Patch Prediction (NPP) paradigm. Our key idea is to group and aggregate image tokens into patch tokens containing high information density. With patch tokens as a shorter input sequence, the autoregressive model is trained to predict the next patch, thereby significantly reducing the computational cost. We further propose a multi-scale coarse-to-fine patch grouping strategy that exploits the natural hierarchical property of image data. Experiments on a diverse range of models (100M-1.4B parameters) demonstrate that the next patch prediction paradigm could reduce the training cost to around 0.6 times while improving image generation quality by up to 1.0 FID score on the ImageNet benchmark. We highlight that our method retains the original autoregressive model architecture without introducing additional trainable parameters or specifically designing a custom image tokenizer, thus ensuring flexibility and seamless adaptation to various autoregressive models for visual generation.

DreamDance: Animating Human Images by Enriching 3D Geometry Cues from 2D Poses

In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.

Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model

We introduce Open-Sora Plan, an open-source project that aims to contribute a large generation model for generating desired high-resolution videos with long durations based on various user inputs. Our project comprises multiple components for the entire video generation process, including a Wavelet-Flow Variational Autoencoder, a Joint Image-Video Skiparse Denoiser, and various condition controllers. Moreover, many assistant strategies for efficient training and inference are designed, and a multi-dimensional data curation pipeline is proposed for obtaining desired high-quality data. Benefiting from efficient thoughts, our Open-Sora Plan achieves impressive video generation results in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We hope our careful design and practical experience can inspire the video generation research community. All our codes and model weights are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Open-Sora-Plan}.

Visual Cue Enhancement and Dual Low-Rank Adaptation for Efficient Visual Instruction Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning multimodal large language models (MLLMs) presents significant challenges, including a reliance on high-level visual features that limits fine-grained detail comprehension, and data conflicts that arise from task complexity. To address these issues, we propose an efficient fine-tuning framework with two novel approaches: Vision Cue Enhancement (VCE) and Dual Low-Rank Adaptation (Dual-LoRA). VCE enhances the vision projector by integrating multi-level visual cues, improving the model's ability to capture fine-grained visual features. Dual-LoRA introduces a dual low-rank structure for instruction tuning, decoupling learning into skill and task spaces to enable precise control and efficient adaptation across diverse tasks. Our method simplifies implementation, enhances visual comprehension, and improves adaptability. Experiments on both downstream tasks and general benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

$\ell_0$ factor analysis

Factor Analysis is about finding a low-rank plus sparse additive decomposition from a noisy estimate of the signal covariance matrix. In order to get such a decomposition, we formulate an optimization problem using the nuclear norm for the low-rank component, the $\ell_0$ norm for the sparse component, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence to control the residual in the sample covariance matrix. An alternating minimization algorithm is designed for the solution of the optimization problem. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified via simulations on synthetic and real datasets.

Retrieval Augmented Recipe Generation

Given the potential applications of generating recipes from food images, this area has garnered significant attention from researchers in recent years. Existing works for recipe generation primarily utilize a two-stage training method, first generating ingredients and then obtaining instructions from both the image and ingredients. Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs), which have achieved notable success across a variety of vision and language tasks, shed light to generating both ingredients and instructions directly from images. Nevertheless, LMMs still face the common issue of hallucinations during recipe generation, leading to suboptimal performance. To tackle this, we propose a retrieval augmented large multimodal model for recipe generation. We first introduce Stochastic Diversified Retrieval Augmentation (SDRA) to retrieve recipes semantically related to the image from an existing datastore as a supplement, integrating them into the prompt to add diverse and rich context to the input image. Additionally, Self-Consistency Ensemble Voting mechanism is proposed to determine the most confident prediction recipes as the final output. It calculates the consistency among generated recipe candidates, which use different retrieval recipes as context for generation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which demonstrates state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in recipe generation tasks on the Recipe1M dataset.

IterSelectTune: An Iterative Training Framework for Efficient Instruction-Tuning Data Selection

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, instruction tuning has become critical for improving their ability to generate accurate and contextually appropriate responses. Although numerous instruction-tuning datasets have been developed to enhance LLM performance, selecting high-quality instruction data from large source datasets typically demands significant human effort. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{IterSelectTune}$, an efficient, cost-effective iterative training policy for selecting high-quality instruction data with no human involvement and limited reliance on GPT-4. By fine-tuning on approximately 20\% of the source data, our method consistently outperforms models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multiple benchmarks and public test datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing LLM performance while reducing the computational resources required for instruction tuning.

Line Spectral Analysis Using the G-Filter: An Atomic Norm Minimization Approach

The area of spectral analysis has a traditional dichotomy between continuous spectra (spectral densities) which correspond to purely nondeterministic processes, and line spectra (Dirac impulses) which represent sinusoids. While the former case is important in the identification of discrete-time linear stochastic systems, the latter case is essential for the analysis and modeling of time series with notable applications in radar systems. In this paper, we develop a novel approach for line spectral estimation which combines ideas of Georgiou's filter banks (G-filters) and atomic norm minimization (ANM), a mainstream method for line spectral analysis in the last decade following the theory of compressed sensing. Such a combination is only possible because a Carath\'{e}odory--Fej\'{e}r-type decomposition is available for the covariance matrix of the filter output. The ANM problem can be characterized via semidefinite programming which can be solved efficiently. As a consequence, our optimization theory can be seen as a substantial generalization of the standard ANM for line spectral estimation. Moreover, our ANM approach with a G-filter has significant advantages over subspace methods because it can work with just one output vector and without \emph{a priori} knowledge about the number of sinusoids in the input. Simulation results show that our approach performs reasonably well under different signal-to-noise ratios when the G-filter is suitably designed.