MinMo: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Seamless Voice Interaction

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal speech-text models have laid the groundwork for seamless voice interactions, enabling real-time, natural, and human-like conversations. Previous models for voice interactions are categorized as native and aligned. Native models integrate speech and text processing in one framework but struggle with issues like differing sequence lengths and insufficient pre-training. Aligned models maintain text LLM capabilities but are often limited by small datasets and a narrow focus on speech tasks. In this work, we introduce MinMo, a Multimodal Large Language Model with approximately 8B parameters for seamless voice interaction. We address the main limitations of prior aligned multimodal models. We train MinMo through multiple stages of speech-to-text alignment, text-to-speech alignment, speech-to-speech alignment, and duplex interaction alignment, on 1.4 million hours of diverse speech data and a broad range of speech tasks. After the multi-stage training, MinMo achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks for voice comprehension and generation while maintaining the capabilities of text LLMs, and also facilitates full-duplex conversation, that is, simultaneous two-way communication between the user and the system. Moreover, we propose a novel and simple voice decoder that outperforms prior models in voice generation. The enhanced instruction-following capabilities of MinMo supports controlling speech generation based on user instructions, with various nuances including emotions, dialects, and speaking rates, and mimicking specific voices. For MinMo, the speech-to-text latency is approximately 100ms, full-duplex latency is approximately 600ms in theory and 800ms in practice. The MinMo project web page is https://funaudiollm.github.io/minmo, and the code and models will be released soon.

ZhoBLiMP: a Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese

Whether and how language models (LMs) acquire the syntax of natural languages has been widely evaluated under the minimal pair paradigm. However, a lack of wide-coverage benchmarks in languages other than English has constrained systematic investigations into the issue. Addressing it, we first introduce ZhoBLiMP, the most comprehensive benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs for Chinese to date, with 118 paradigms, covering 15 linguistic phenomena. We then train 20 LMs of different sizes (14M to 1.4B) on Chinese corpora of various volumes (100M to 3B tokens) and evaluate them along with 14 off-the-shelf LLMs on ZhoBLiMP. The overall results indicate that Chinese grammar can be mostly learned by models with around 500M parameters, trained on 1B tokens with one epoch, showing limited benefits for further scaling. Most (N=95) linguistic paradigms are of easy or medium difficulty for LMs, while there are still 13 paradigms that remain challenging even for models with up to 32B parameters. In regard to how LMs acquire Chinese grammar, we observe a U-shaped learning pattern in several phenomena, similar to those observed in child language acquisition.

Not All Languages are Equal: Insights into Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RALMs (Retrieval-Augmented Language Models) broaden their knowledge scope by incorporating external textual resources. However, the multilingual nature of global knowledge necessitates RALMs to handle diverse languages, a topic that has received limited research focus. In this work, we propose \textit{Futurepedia}, a carefully crafted benchmark containing parallel texts across eight representative languages. We evaluate six multilingual RALMs using our benchmark to explore the challenges of multilingual RALMs. Experimental results reveal linguistic inequalities: 1) high-resource languages stand out in Monolingual Knowledge Extraction; 2) Indo-European languages lead RALMs to provide answers directly from documents, alleviating the challenge of expressing answers across languages; 3) English benefits from RALMs' selection bias and speaks louder in multilingual knowledge selection. Based on these findings, we offer advice for improving multilingual Retrieval Augmented Generation. For monolingual knowledge extraction, careful attention must be paid to cascading errors from translating low-resource languages into high-resource ones. In cross-lingual knowledge transfer, encouraging RALMs to provide answers within documents in different languages can improve transfer performance. For multilingual knowledge selection, incorporating more non-English documents and repositioning English documents can help mitigate RALMs' selection bias. Through comprehensive experiments, we underscore the complexities inherent in multilingual RALMs and offer valuable insights for future research.

mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval

We present systematic efforts in building long-context multilingual text representation model (TRM) and reranker from scratch for text retrieval. We first introduce a text encoder (base size) enhanced with RoPE and unpadding, pre-trained in a native 8192-token context (longer than 512 of previous multilingual encoders). Then we construct a hybrid TRM and a cross-encoder reranker by contrastive learning. Evaluations show that our text encoder outperforms the same-sized previous state-of-the-art XLM-R. Meanwhile, our TRM and reranker match the performance of large-sized state-of-the-art BGE-M3 models and achieve better results on long-context retrieval benchmarks. Further analysis demonstrate that our proposed models exhibit higher efficiency during both training and inference. We believe their efficiency and effectiveness could benefit various researches and industrial applications.

Qwen2 Technical Report

This report introduces the Qwen2 series, the latest addition to our large language models and large multimodal models. We release a comprehensive suite of foundational and instruction-tuned language models, encompassing a parameter range from 0.5 to 72 billion, featuring dense models and a Mixture-of-Experts model. Qwen2 surpasses most prior open-weight models, including its predecessor Qwen1.5, and exhibits competitive performance relative to proprietary models across diverse benchmarks on language understanding, generation, multilingual proficiency, coding, mathematics, and reasoning. The flagship model, Qwen2-72B, showcases remarkable performance: 84.2 on MMLU, 37.9 on GPQA, 64.6 on HumanEval, 89.5 on GSM8K, and 82.4 on BBH as a base language model. The instruction-tuned variant, Qwen2-72B-Instruct, attains 9.1 on MT-Bench, 48.1 on Arena-Hard, and 35.7 on LiveCodeBench. Moreover, Qwen2 demonstrates robust multilingual capabilities, proficient in approximately 30 languages, spanning English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and more, underscoring its versatility and global reach. To foster community innovation and accessibility, we have made the Qwen2 model weights openly available on Hugging Face and ModelScope, and the supplementary materials including example code on GitHub. These platforms also include resources for quantization, fine-tuning, and deployment, facilitating a wide range of applications and research endeavors.

AI Hospital: Interactive Evaluation and Collaboration of LLMs as Intern Doctors for Clinical Diagnosis

The incorporation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare marks a significant advancement. However, the application has predominantly been limited to discriminative and question-answering tasks, which does not fully leverage their interactive potential. To address this limitation, our paper presents AI Hospital, a framework designed to build a real-time interactive diagnosis environment. To simulate the procedure, we collect high-quality medical records to create patient, examiner, and medical director agents. AI Hospital is then utilized for the interactive evaluation and collaboration of LLMs. Initially, we create a Multi-View Medical Evaluation (MVME) benchmark where various LLMs serve as intern doctors for interactive diagnosis. Subsequently, to improve diagnostic accuracy, we introduce a collaborative mechanism that involves iterative discussions and a dispute resolution process under the supervision of the medical director. In our experiments, we validate the reliability of AI Hospital. The results not only explore the feasibility of apply LLMs in clinical consultation but also confirm the effectiveness of the dispute resolution focused collaboration method.

Harvesting Event Schemas from Large Language Models

Event schema provides a conceptual, structural and formal language to represent events and model the world event knowledge. Unfortunately, it is challenging to automatically induce high-quality and high-coverage event schemas due to the open nature of real-world events, the diversity of event expressions, and the sparsity of event knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for event schema induction -- knowledge harvesting from large-scale pre-trained language models, which can effectively resolve the above challenges by discovering, conceptualizing and structuralizing event schemas from PLMs. And an Event Schema Harvester (ESHer) is designed to automatically induce high-quality event schemas via in-context generation-based conceptualization, confidence-aware schema structuralization and graph-based schema aggregation. Empirical results show that ESHer can induce high-quality and high-coverage event schemas on varying domains.

Procedural Text Understanding via Scene-Wise Evolution

Procedural text understanding requires machines to reason about entity states within the dynamical narratives. Current procedural text understanding approaches are commonly \textbf{entity-wise}, which separately track each entity and independently predict different states of each entity. Such an entity-wise paradigm does not consider the interaction between entities and their states. In this paper, we propose a new \textbf{scene-wise} paradigm for procedural text understanding, which jointly tracks states of all entities in a scene-by-scene manner. Based on this paradigm, we propose \textbf{S}cene \textbf{G}raph \textbf{R}easoner (\textbf{SGR}), which introduces a series of dynamically evolving scene graphs to jointly formulate the evolution of entities, states and their associations throughout the narrative. In this way, the deep interactions between all entities and states can be jointly captured and simultaneously derived from scene graphs. Experiments show that SGR not only achieves the new state-of-the-art performance but also significantly accelerates the speed of reasoning.

Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction

Event extraction is challenging due to the complex structure of event records and the semantic gap between text and event. Traditional methods usually extract event records by decomposing the complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks. In this paper, we propose Text2Event, a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can directly extract events from the text in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we design a sequence-to-structure network for unified event extraction, a constrained decoding algorithm for event knowledge injection during inference, and a curriculum learning algorithm for efficient model learning. Experimental results show that, by uniformly modeling all tasks in a single model and universally predicting different labels, our method can achieve competitive performance using only record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings.

From Discourse to Narrative: Knowledge Projection for Event Relation Extraction

Current event-centric knowledge graphs highly rely on explicit connectives to mine relations between events. Unfortunately, due to the sparsity of connectives, these methods severely undermine the coverage of EventKGs. The lack of high-quality labelled corpora further exacerbates that problem. In this paper, we propose a knowledge projection paradigm for event relation extraction: projecting discourse knowledge to narratives by exploiting the commonalities between them. Specifically, we propose Multi-tier Knowledge Projection Network (MKPNet), which can leverage multi-tier discourse knowledge effectively for event relation extraction. In this way, the labelled data requirement is significantly reduced, and implicit event relations can be effectively extracted. Intrinsic experimental results show that MKPNet achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, and extrinsic experimental results verify the value of the extracted event relations.