ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generation

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable and robust abilities in both image and video generation. To achieve greater control over generated results, researchers introduce additional architectures, such as ControlNet, Adapters and ReferenceNet, to integrate conditioning controls. However, current controllable generation methods often require substantial additional computational resources, especially for video generation, and face challenges in training or exhibit weak control. In this paper, we propose ControlNeXt: a powerful and efficient method for controllable image and video generation. We first design a more straightforward and efficient architecture, replacing heavy additional branches with minimal additional cost compared to the base model. Such a concise structure also allows our method to seamlessly integrate with other LoRA weights, enabling style alteration without the need for additional training. As for training, we reduce up to 90% of learnable parameters compared to the alternatives. Furthermore, we propose another method called Cross Normalization (CN) as a replacement for Zero-Convolution' to achieve fast and stable training convergence. We have conducted various experiments with different base models across images and videos, demonstrating the robustness of our method.

LogoSticker: Inserting Logos into Diffusion Models for Customized Generation

Recent advances in text-to-image model customization have underscored the importance of integrating new concepts with a few examples. Yet, these progresses are largely confined to widely recognized subjects, which can be learned with relative ease through models' adequate shared prior knowledge. In contrast, logos, characterized by unique patterns and textual elements, are hard to establish shared knowledge within diffusion models, thus presenting a unique challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of logo insertion. Our goal is to insert logo identities into diffusion models and enable their seamless synthesis in varied contexts. We present a novel two-phase pipeline LogoSticker to tackle this task. First, we propose the actor-critic relation pre-training algorithm, which addresses the nontrivial gaps in models' understanding of the potential spatial positioning of logos and interactions with other objects. Second, we propose a decoupled identity learning algorithm, which enables precise localization and identity extraction of logos. LogoSticker can generate logos accurately and harmoniously in diverse contexts. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of LogoSticker over customization methods and large models such as DALLE~3. \href{https://mingkangz.github.io/logosticker}{Project page}.

Mind the Interference: Retaining Pre-trained Knowledge in Parameter Efficient Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models

This study addresses the Domain-Class Incremental Learning problem, a realistic but challenging continual learning scenario where both the domain distribution and target classes vary across tasks. To handle these diverse tasks, pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are introduced for their strong generalizability. However, this incurs a new problem: the knowledge encoded in the pre-trained VLMs may be disturbed when adapting to new tasks, compromising their inherent zero-shot ability. Existing methods tackle it by tuning VLMs with knowledge distillation on extra datasets, which demands heavy computation overhead. To address this problem efficiently, we propose the Distribution-aware Interference-free Knowledge Integration (DIKI) framework, retaining pre-trained knowledge of VLMs from a perspective of avoiding information interference. Specifically, we design a fully residual mechanism to infuse newly learned knowledge into a frozen backbone, while introducing minimal adverse impacts on pre-trained knowledge. Besides, this residual property enables our distribution-aware integration calibration scheme, explicitly controlling the information implantation process for test data from unseen distributions. Experiments demonstrate that our DIKI surpasses the current state-of-the-art approach using only 0.86% of the trained parameters and requiring substantially less training time. Code is available at: https://github.com/lloongx/DIKI .

Step-DPO: Step-wise Preference Optimization for Long-chain Reasoning of LLMs

Mathematical reasoning presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to the extensive and precise chain of reasoning required for accuracy. Ensuring the correctness of each reasoning step is critical. To address this, we aim to enhance the robustness and factuality of LLMs by learning from human feedback. However, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown limited benefits for long-chain mathematical reasoning, as models employing DPO struggle to identify detailed errors in incorrect answers. This limitation stems from a lack of fine-grained process supervision. We propose a simple, effective, and data-efficient method called Step-DPO, which treats individual reasoning steps as units for preference optimization rather than evaluating answers holistically. Additionally, we have developed a data construction pipeline for Step-DPO, enabling the creation of a high-quality dataset containing 10K step-wise preference pairs. We also observe that in DPO, self-generated data is more effective than data generated by humans or GPT-4, due to the latter's out-of-distribution nature. Our findings demonstrate that as few as 10K preference data pairs and fewer than 500 Step-DPO training steps can yield a nearly 3% gain in accuracy on MATH for models with over 70B parameters. Notably, Step-DPO, when applied to Qwen2-72B-Instruct, achieves scores of 70.8% and 94.0% on the test sets of MATH and GSM8K, respectively, surpassing a series of closed-source models, including GPT-4-1106, Claude-3-Opus, and Gemini-1.5-Pro. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Step-DPO.

MR-BEN: A Comprehensive Meta-Reasoning Benchmark for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capability in problem-solving and decision-making, largely based on the step-by-step chain-of-thought reasoning processes. However, it has been increasingly challenging to evaluate the reasoning capability of LLMs. Concretely, existing outcome-based benchmarks begin to saturate and become less sufficient to monitor the progress. To this end, we present a process-based benchmark MR-BEN that demands a meta reasoning skill, where LMs are asked to locate and analyse potential errors in automatically generated reasoning steps. MR-BEN is a comprehensive benchmark comprising 5,975 questions collected from human experts, covering various subjects such as physics, chemistry, logic, coding, and more. Through our designed metrics for assessing meta-reasoning on this benchmark, we identify interesting limitations and weaknesses of current LLMs (open-source and closed-source models). For example, open-source models are seemingly comparable to GPT-4 on outcome-based benchmarks, but they lag far behind on our benchmark, revealing the underlying reasoning capability gap between them. Our dataset and codes are available on https://randolph-zeng.github.io/Mr-Ben.github.io/.

QuickLLaMA: Query-aware Inference Acceleration for Large Language Models

The capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend and reason over long contexts is pivotal for advancements in diverse fields. Yet, they still stuggle with capturing long-distance dependencies within sequences to deeply understand semantics. To address this issue, we introduce Query-aware Inference for LLMs (Q-LLM), a system designed to process extensive sequences akin to human cognition. By focusing on memory data relevant to a given query, Q-LLM can accurately capture pertinent information within a fixed window size and provide precise answers to queries. It doesn't require extra training and can be seamlessly integrated with any LLMs. Q-LLM using LLaMA3 (QuickLLaMA) can read Harry Potter within 30s and accurately answer the questions. Q-LLM improved by 7.17% compared to the current state-of-the-art on LLaMA3, and by 3.26% on Mistral on the $\infty$-bench. In the Needle-in-a-Haystack task, On widely recognized benchmarks, Q-LLM improved upon the current SOTA by 7.0% on Mistral and achieves 100% on LLaMA3. Our code can be found in https://github.com/dvlab-research/Q-LLM.

RoboCoder: Robotic Learning from Basic Skills to General Tasks with Large Language Models

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has improved the prospects for robotic tasks. However, existing benchmarks are still limited to single tasks with limited generalization capabilities. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark and an autonomous learning framework, RoboCoder aimed at enhancing the generalization capabilities of robots in complex environments. Unlike traditional methods that focus on single-task learning, our research emphasizes the development of a general-purpose robotic coding algorithm that enables robots to leverage basic skills to tackle increasingly complex tasks. The newly proposed benchmark consists of 80 manually designed tasks across 7 distinct entities, testing the models' ability to learn from minimal initial mastery. Initial testing revealed that even advanced models like GPT-4 could only achieve a 47% pass rate in three-shot scenarios with humanoid entities. To address these limitations, the RoboCoder framework integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a dynamic learning system that uses real-time environmental feedback to continuously update and refine action codes. This adaptive method showed a remarkable improvement, achieving a 36% relative improvement. Our codes will be released.

Empowering Visual Creativity: A Vision-Language Assistant to Image Editing Recommendations

Advances in text-based image generation and editing have revolutionized content creation, enabling users to create impressive content from imaginative text prompts. However, existing methods are not designed to work well with the oversimplified prompts that are often encountered in typical scenarios when users start their editing with only vague or abstract purposes in mind. Those scenarios demand elaborate ideation efforts from the users to bridge the gap between such vague starting points and the detailed creative ideas needed to depict the desired results. In this paper, we introduce the task of Image Editing Recommendation (IER). This task aims to automatically generate diverse creative editing instructions from an input image and a simple prompt representing the users' under-specified editing purpose. To this end, we introduce Creativity-Vision Language Assistant~(Creativity-VLA), a multimodal framework designed specifically for edit-instruction generation. We train Creativity-VLA on our edit-instruction dataset specifically curated for IER. We further enhance our model with a novel 'token-for-localization' mechanism, enabling it to support both global and local editing operations. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of \ours{} in suggesting instructions that not only contain engaging creative elements but also maintain high relevance to both the input image and the user's initial hint.

Scalable Language Model with Generalized Continual Learning

Continual learning has gained increasing importance as it facilitates the acquisition and refinement of scalable knowledge and skills in language models. However, existing methods typically encounter strict limitations and challenges in real-world scenarios, such as reliance on experience replay, optimization constraints, and inference task-ID. In this study, we introduce the Scalable Language Model (SLM) to overcome these limitations within a more challenging and generalized setting, representing a significant advancement toward practical applications for continual learning. Specifically, we propose the Joint Adaptive Re-Parameterization (JARe), integrated with Dynamic Task-related Knowledge Retrieval (DTKR), to enable adaptive adjustment of language models based on specific downstream tasks. This approach leverages the task distribution within the vector space, aiming to achieve a smooth and effortless continual learning process. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on diverse backbones and benchmarks, achieving effective continual learning in both full-set and few-shot scenarios with minimal forgetting. Moreover, while prior research primarily focused on a single task type such as classification, our study goes beyond, with the large language model, i.e., LLaMA-2, to explore the effects across diverse domains and task types, such that a single language model can be decently scaled to broader applications.

Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation

This paper introduces Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation (ULDA), a novel task setting that enables a single model to adapt to diverse target domains without explicit domain-ID knowledge. We identify the constraints in the existing language-driven zero-shot domain adaptation task, particularly the requirement for domain IDs and domain-specific models, which may restrict flexibility and scalability. To overcome these issues, we propose a new framework for ULDA, consisting of Hierarchical Context Alignment (HCA), Domain Consistent Representation Learning (DCRL), and Text-Driven Rectifier (TDR). These components work synergistically to align simulated features with target text across multiple visual levels, retain semantic correlations between different regional representations, and rectify biases between simulated and real target visual features, respectively. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that this framework achieves competitive performance in both settings, surpassing even the model that requires domain-ID, showcasing its superiority and generalization ability. The proposed method is not only effective but also maintains practicality and efficiency, as it does not introduce additional computational costs during inference. Our project page is https://senqiaoyang.com/project/ULDA .