Grounded Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Large Language Models

Despite great progress, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are prone to visual hallucination, greatly impeding their trustworthy applications. In this paper, we study this problem from the perspective of visual-spatial reasoning, and propose a new learning task for MLLMs, termed Grounded Chain-of-Thought (GCoT). Different from recent visual CoT studies, which focus more on visual knowledge reasoning, GCoT is keen to helping MLLMs to recognize and ground the relevant visual cues step by step, thereby predicting the correct answer with grounding coordinates as the intuitive basis. To facilitate this task, we also carefully design and construct a dataset called multimodal grounded chain-of-thought (MM-GCoT) consisting of 24,022 GCoT examples for 5,033 images. Besides, a comprehensive consistency evaluation system is also introduced, including the metrics of answer accuracy, grounding accuracy and answer-grounding consistency. We further design and conduct a bunch of experiments on 12 advanced MLLMs, and reveal some notable findings: i. most MLLMs performs poorly on the consistency evaluation, indicating obvious visual hallucination; ii. visual hallucination is not directly related to the parameter size and general multimodal performance, i.e., a larger and stronger MLLM is not less affected by this issue. Lastly, we also demonstrate that the proposed dataset can help existing MLLMs to well cultivate their GCoT capability and reduce the inconsistent answering significantly. Moreover, their GCoT can be also generalized to exiting multimodal tasks, such as open-world QA and REC.

LightMotion: A Light and Tuning-free Method for Simulating Camera Motion in Video Generation

Existing camera motion-controlled video generation methods face computational bottlenecks in fine-tuning and inference. This paper proposes LightMotion, a light and tuning-free method for simulating camera motion in video generation. Operating in the latent space, it eliminates additional fine-tuning, inpainting, and depth estimation, making it more streamlined than existing methods. The endeavors of this paper comprise: (i) The latent space permutation operation effectively simulates various camera motions like panning, zooming, and rotation. (ii) The latent space resampling strategy combines background-aware sampling and cross-frame alignment to accurately fill new perspectives while maintaining coherence across frames. (iii) Our in-depth analysis shows that the permutation and resampling cause an SNR shift in latent space, leading to poor-quality generation. To address this, we propose latent space correction, which reintroduces noise during denoising to mitigate SNR shift and enhance video generation quality. Exhaustive experiments show that our LightMotion outperforms existing methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

AnomalyPainter: Vision-Language-Diffusion Synergy for Zero-Shot Realistic and Diverse Industrial Anomaly Synthesis

While existing anomaly synthesis methods have made remarkable progress, achieving both realism and diversity in synthesis remains a major obstacle. To address this, we propose AnomalyPainter, a zero-shot framework that breaks the diversity-realism trade-off dilemma through synergizing Vision Language Large Model (VLLM), Latent Diffusion Model (LDM), and our newly introduced texture library Tex-9K. Tex-9K is a professional texture library containing 75 categories and 8,792 texture assets crafted for diverse anomaly synthesis. Leveraging VLLM's general knowledge, reasonable anomaly text descriptions are generated for each industrial object and matched with relevant diverse textures from Tex-9K. These textures then guide the LDM via ControlNet to paint on normal images. Furthermore, we introduce Texture-Aware Latent Init to stabilize the natural-image-trained ControlNet for industrial images. Extensive experiments show that AnomalyPainter outperforms existing methods in realism, diversity, and generalization, achieving superior downstream performance.

QuoTA: Query-oriented Token Assignment via CoT Query Decouple for Long Video Comprehension

Recent advances in long video understanding typically mitigate visual redundancy through visual token pruning based on attention distribution. However, while existing methods employ post-hoc low-response token pruning in decoder layers, they overlook the input-level semantic correlation between visual tokens and instructions (query). In this paper, we propose QuoTA, an ante-hoc training-free modular that extends existing large video-language models (LVLMs) for visual token assignment based on query-oriented frame-level importance assessment. The query-oriented token selection is crucial as it aligns visual processing with task-specific requirements, optimizing token budget utilization while preserving semantically relevant content. Specifically, (i) QuoTA strategically allocates frame-level importance scores based on query relevance, enabling one-time visual token assignment before cross-modal interactions in decoder layers, (ii) we decouple the query through Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning to facilitate more precise LVLM-based frame importance scoring, and (iii) QuoTA offers a plug-and-play functionality that extends to existing LVLMs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that implementing QuoTA with LLaVA-Video-7B yields an average performance improvement of 3.2% across six benchmarks (including Video-MME and MLVU) while operating within an identical visual token budget as the baseline. Codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/MAC-AutoML/QuoTA.

Towards Efficient Automatic Self-Pruning of Large Language Models

Despite exceptional capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still face deployment challenges due to their enormous size. Post-training structured pruning is a promising solution that prunes LLMs without the need for retraining, reducing computational overhead, and it is hardware-deployment friendly. However, the training-free nature of post-training structured pruning leads to significant performance degradation. We argue that the key to mitigating this issue lies in accurately determining the pruning rate for each layer. Meanwhile, we find that LLMs may have prior knowledge about their own redundancy. Based on this insight, we introduce $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$ an end-to-end automatic self-pruning framework for LLMs, which efficiently search layer-wise pruning rates. Specifically, $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$ leverages LLMs to autonomously execute the entire evolutionary search process to search for pruning rate configurations. In this process, LLMs are used to generate populations, select parent solutions from the current population, and perform crossover and mutation operations to produce offspring solutions. In this way, LLMs automatically generate and evaluate a large number of candidate solutions, effectively converging to find the pruning rate configurations with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$'s better performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, $\textbf{Self-Pruner}$ prunes LLaMA-2-70B to 49B level with only 0.80$\%$ drop in accuracy across seven commonsense reasoning tasks, achieving a 1.39$\times$ speedup on NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU. Further pruning to 35B level resulted in only a 3.80$\%$ decrease in accuracy while obtaining a 1.70$\times$ speedup.

Dynamic Low-Rank Sparse Adaptation for Large Language Models

Despite the efficacy of network sparsity in alleviating the deployment strain of Large Language Models (LLMs), it endures significant performance degradation. Applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the sparse LLMs offers an intuitive approach to counter this predicament, while it holds shortcomings include: 1) The inability to integrate LoRA weights into sparse LLMs post-training, and 2) Insufficient performance recovery at high sparsity ratios. In this paper, we introduce dynamic Low-rank Sparse Adaptation (LoSA), a novel method that seamlessly integrates low-rank adaptation into LLM sparsity within a unified framework, thereby enhancing the performance of sparse LLMs without increasing the inference latency. In particular, LoSA dynamically sparsifies the LoRA outcomes based on the corresponding sparse weights during fine-tuning, thus guaranteeing that the LoRA module can be integrated into the sparse LLMs post-training. Besides, LoSA leverages Representation Mutual Information (RMI) as an indicator to determine the importance of layers, thereby efficiently determining the layer-wise sparsity rates during fine-tuning. Predicated on this, LoSA adjusts the rank of the LoRA module based on the variability in layer-wise reconstruction errors, allocating an appropriate fine-tuning for each layer to reduce the output discrepancies between dense and sparse LLMs. Extensive experiments tell that LoSA can efficiently boost the efficacy of sparse LLMs within a few hours, without introducing any additional inferential burden. For example, LoSA reduced the perplexity of sparse LLaMA-2-7B by 68.73 and increased zero-shot accuracy by 16.32$\%$, achieving a 2.60$\times$ speedup on CPU and 2.23$\times$ speedup on GPU, requiring only 45 minutes of fine-tuning on a single NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/wzhuang-xmu/LoSA.

Determining Layer-wise Sparsity for Large Language Models Through a Theoretical Perspective

In this paper, we address the challenge of determining the layer-wise sparsity rates of large language models (LLMs) through a theoretical perspective. Specifically, we identify a critical issue of ''$\textbf{reconstruction error explosion}$'' in existing LLMs sparsification methods. This refers to the cumulative effect of reconstruction errors throughout the sparsification process, where errors from earlier layers propagate and amplify in subsequent layers. As a result, the overall reconstruction error increases significantly, leading to a substantial degradation in model performance. Through theoretical analysis, we derive a simple yet effective approach to layer-wise sparsity allocation that mitigates this issue. Our method uses a monotonically increasing arithmetic progression, reducing the process of determining sparsity rates for multiple layers to the determination of a single common difference hyperparameter. Remarkably, this allows for the optimal layer-wise sparsity rates to be identified with just a few trials. Both our theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that this sparsity allocation scheme is near optimal. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves the performance of sparse LLMs across various architectures, outperforming existing layer-wise sparsity methods. Furthermore, it enhances the performance of various compression techniques and is applicable to vision and multimodal models. Notably, our method achieves a reduction of 52.10 in perplexity for the 70$\%$ sparse LLaMA2-7B model obtained via Wanda, improves average zero-shot accuracy by 10.50$\%$, and delivers speedups of 2.63$\times$ and 2.23$\times$ on CPU and GPU, respectively.

DAMamba: Vision State Space Model with Dynamic Adaptive Scan

State space models (SSMs) have recently garnered significant attention in computer vision. However, due to the unique characteristics of image data, adapting SSMs from natural language processing to computer vision has not outperformed the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Existing vision SSMs primarily leverage manually designed scans to flatten image patches into sequences locally or globally. This approach disrupts the original semantic spatial adjacency of the image and lacks flexibility, making it difficult to capture complex image structures. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Adaptive Scan (DAS), a data-driven method that adaptively allocates scanning orders and regions. This enables more flexible modeling capabilities while maintaining linear computational complexity and global modeling capacity. Based on DAS, we further propose the vision backbone DAMamba, which significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art vision Mamba models in vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Notably, it surpasses some of the latest state-of-the-art CNNs and ViTs. Code will be available at https://github.com/ltzovo/DAMamba.

Training-free Anomaly Event Detection via LLM-guided Symbolic Pattern Discovery

Anomaly event detection plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. However, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised learning, which faces significant challenges: the requirement for extensive labeled training data and lack of interpretability in decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we present a training-free framework that integrates open-set object detection with symbolic regression, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) for efficient symbolic pattern discovery. The LLMs guide the symbolic reasoning process, establishing logical relationships between detected entities. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains, our framework demonstrates several key advantages: (1) achieving superior detection accuracy through direct reasoning without any training process; (2) providing highly interpretable logical expressions that are readily comprehensible to humans; and (3) requiring minimal annotation effort - approximately 1% of the data needed by traditional training-based methods.To facilitate comprehensive evaluation and future research, we introduce two datasets: a large-scale private dataset containing over 110,000 annotated images covering various anomaly scenarios including construction site safety violations, illegal fishing activities, and industrial hazards, along with a public benchmark dataset of 5,000 samples with detailed anomaly event annotations. Code is available at here.

AdaFlow: Efficient Long Video Editing via Adaptive Attention Slimming And Keyframe Selection

Despite great progress, text-driven long video editing is still notoriously challenging mainly due to excessive memory overhead. Although recent efforts have simplified this task into a two-step process of keyframe translation and interpolation generation, the token-wise keyframe translation still plagues the upper limit of video length. In this paper, we propose a novel and training-free approach towards efficient and effective long video editing, termed AdaFlow. We first reveal that not all tokens of video frames hold equal importance for keyframe translation, based on which we propose an Adaptive Attention Slimming scheme for AdaFlow to squeeze the $KV$ sequence, thus increasing the number of keyframes for translations by an order of magnitude. In addition, an Adaptive Keyframe Selection scheme is also equipped to select the representative frames for joint editing, further improving generation quality. With these innovative designs, AdaFlow achieves high-quality long video editing of minutes in one inference, i.e., more than 1$k$ frames on one A800 GPU, which is about ten times longer than the compared methods, e.g., TokenFlow. To validate AdaFlow, we also build a new benchmark for long video editing with high-quality annotations, termed LongV-EVAL. Our code is released at: https://github.com/jidantang55/AdaFlow.