How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites

In this report, we introduce InternVL 1.5, an open-source multimodal large language model (MLLM) to bridge the capability gap between open-source and proprietary commercial models in multimodal understanding. We introduce three simple improvements: (1) Strong Vision Encoder: we explored a continuous learning strategy for the large-scale vision foundation model -- InternViT-6B, boosting its visual understanding capabilities, and making it can be transferred and reused in different LLMs. (2) Dynamic High-Resolution: we divide images into tiles ranging from 1 to 40 of 448$\times$448 pixels according to the aspect ratio and resolution of the input images, which supports up to 4K resolution input. (3) High-Quality Bilingual Dataset: we carefully collected a high-quality bilingual dataset that covers common scenes, document images, and annotated them with English and Chinese question-answer pairs, significantly enhancing performance in OCR- and Chinese-related tasks. We evaluate InternVL 1.5 through a series of benchmarks and comparative studies. Compared to both open-source and proprietary models, InternVL 1.5 shows competitive performance, achieving state-of-the-art results in 8 of 18 benchmarks. Code has been released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVL.

Efficient Deformable ConvNets: Rethinking Dynamic and Sparse Operator for Vision Applications

We introduce Deformable Convolution v4 (DCNv4), a highly efficient and effective operator designed for a broad spectrum of vision applications. DCNv4 addresses the limitations of its predecessor, DCNv3, with two key enhancements: 1. removing softmax normalization in spatial aggregation to enhance its dynamic property and expressive power and 2. optimizing memory access to minimize redundant operations for speedup. These improvements result in a significantly faster convergence compared to DCNv3 and a substantial increase in processing speed, with DCNv4 achieving more than three times the forward speed. DCNv4 demonstrates exceptional performance across various tasks, including image classification, instance and semantic segmentation, and notably, image generation. When integrated into generative models like U-Net in the latent diffusion model, DCNv4 outperforms its baseline, underscoring its possibility to enhance generative models. In practical applications, replacing DCNv3 with DCNv4 in the InternImage model to create FlashInternImage results in up to 80% speed increase and further performance improvement without further modifications. The advancements in speed and efficiency of DCNv4, combined with its robust performance across diverse vision tasks, show its potential as a foundational building block for future vision models.

An Efficient FPGA-based Accelerator for Deep Forest

Deep Forest is a prominent machine learning algorithm known for its high accuracy in forecasting. Compared with deep neural networks, Deep Forest has almost no multiplication operations and has better performance on small datasets. However, due to the deep structure and large forest quantity, it suffers from large amounts of calculation and memory consumption. In this paper, an efficient hardware accelerator is proposed for deep forest models, which is also the first work to implement Deep Forest on FPGA. Firstly, a delicate node computing unit (NCU) is designed to improve inference speed. Secondly, based on NCU, an efficient architecture and an adaptive dataflow are proposed, in order to alleviate the problem of node computing imbalance in the classification process. Moreover, an optimized storage scheme in this design also improves hardware utilization and power efficiency. The proposed design is implemented on an FPGA board, Intel Stratix V, and it is evaluated by two typical datasets, ADULT and Face Mask Detection. The experimental results show that the proposed design can achieve around 40x speedup compared to that on a 40 cores high performance x86 CPU.