MC-LLaVA: Multi-Concept Personalized Vision-Language Model

Current vision-language models (VLMs) show exceptional abilities across diverse tasks including visual question answering. To enhance user experience in practical applications, recent studies investigate VLM personalization to understand user-provided concepts. However, existing studies mainly focus on single-concept personalization, neglecting the existence and interplay of multiple concepts, which limits the real-world applicability of personalized VLMs. In this paper, we propose the first multi-concept personalization method named MC-LLaVA along with a high-quality multi-concept personalization dataset. Specifically, MC-LLaVA uses a joint training strategy incorporating multiple concepts in a single training step, allowing VLMs to perform accurately in multi-concept personalization. To reduce the cost of joint training, MC-LLaVA leverages visual token information for concept token initialization, yielding improved concept representation and accelerating joint training. To advance multi-concept personalization research, we further contribute a high-quality dataset. We carefully collect images from various movies that contain multiple characters and manually generate the multi-concept question-answer samples. Our dataset features diverse movie types and question-answer types. We conduct comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate that MC-LLaVA can achieve impressive multi-concept personalized responses, paving the way for VLMs to become better user-specific assistants. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/arctanxarc/MC-LLaVA.

Can Modifying Data Address Graph Domain Adaptation?

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in numerous graph analytical tasks. Yet, their effectiveness is often compromised in real-world scenarios due to distribution shifts, limiting their capacity for knowledge transfer across changing environments or domains. Recently, Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) has been introduced to resolve this issue. UGDA aims to facilitate knowledge transfer from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph. Current UGDA efforts primarily focus on model-centric methods, such as employing domain invariant learning strategies and designing model architectures. However, our critical examination reveals the limitations inherent to these model-centric methods, while a data-centric method allowed to modify the source graph provably demonstrates considerable potential. This insight motivates us to explore UGDA from a data-centric perspective. By revisiting the theoretical generalization bound for UGDA, we identify two data-centric principles for UGDA: alignment principle and rescaling principle. Guided by these principles, we propose GraphAlign, a novel UGDA method that generates a small yet transferable graph. By exclusively training a GNN on this new graph with classic Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM), GraphAlign attains exceptional performance on the target graph. Extensive experiments under various transfer scenarios demonstrate the GraphAlign outperforms the best baselines by an average of 2.16%, training on the generated graph as small as 0.25~1% of the original training graph.

LLM as Dataset Analyst: Subpopulation Structure Discovery with Large Language Model

The distribution of subpopulations is an important property hidden within a dataset. Uncovering and analyzing the subpopulation distribution within datasets provides a comprehensive understanding of the datasets, standing as a powerful tool beneficial to various downstream tasks, including Dataset Subpopulation Organization, Subpopulation Shift, and Slice Discovery. Despite its importance, there has been no work that systematically explores the subpopulation distribution of datasets to our knowledge. To address the limitation and solve all the mentioned tasks in a unified way, we introduce a novel concept of subpopulation structures to represent, analyze, and utilize subpopulation distributions within datasets. To characterize the structures in an interpretable manner, we propose the Subpopulation Structure Discovery with Large Language Models (SSD-LLM) framework, which employs world knowledge and instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to linguistically analyze informative image captions and summarize the structures. Furthermore, we propose complete workflows to address downstream tasks, named Task-specific Tuning, showcasing the application of the discovered structure to a spectrum of subpopulation-related tasks, including dataset subpopulation organization, subpopulation shift, and slice discovery. Furthermore, we propose complete workflows to address downstream tasks, named Task-specific Tuning, showcasing the application of the discovered structure to a spectrum of subpopulation-related tasks, including dataset subpopulation organization, subpopulation shift, and slice discovery.

Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want

The interaction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) is a crucial factor that reflects the effectiveness of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs primarily focus on image-level comprehension and limit interaction to textual instructions, thereby constraining their flexibility in usage and depth of response. In this paper, we introduce the Draw-and-Understand project: a new model, a multi-domain dataset, and a challenging benchmark for visual prompting. Specifically, we propose SPHINX-V, a new end-to-end trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that connects a vision encoder, a visual prompt encoder and an LLM for various visual prompts (points, bounding boxes, and free-form shape) and language understanding. To advance visual prompting research for MLLMs, we introduce MDVP-Data and MDVP-Bench. MDVP-Data features a multi-domain dataset containing 1.6M unique image-visual prompt-text instruction-following samples, including natural images, document images, OCR images, mobile screenshots, web screenshots, and multi-panel images. Furthermore, we present MDVP-Bench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess a model's capability in understanding visual prompting instructions. Our experiments demonstrate SPHINX-V's impressive multimodal interaction capabilities through visual prompting, revealing significant improvements in detailed pixel-level description and question-answering abilities.

Split & Merge: Unlocking the Potential of Visual Adapters via Sparse Training

With the rapid growth in the scale of pre-trained foundation models, parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques have gained significant attention, among which Adapter Tuning is the most widely used. Despite achieving efficiency, Adapter Tuning still underperforms full fine-tuning, and the performance improves at the cost of an increase in parameters. Recent efforts address this issue by pruning the original adapters, but it also introduces training instability and suboptimal performance on certain datasets. Motivated by this, we propose Mixture of Sparse Adapters, or MoSA, as a novel Adapter Tuning method to fully unleash the potential of each parameter in the adapter. We first split the standard adapter into multiple non-overlapping modules, then stochastically activate modules for sparse training, and finally merge them to form a complete adapter after tuning. In this way, MoSA can achieve significantly better performance than standard adapters without any additional computational or storage overhead. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical sparse strategy to better leverage limited training data. Extensive experiments on a series of 27 visual tasks demonstrate that MoSA consistently outperforms other Adapter Tuning methods as well as other baselines by a significant margin. Furthermore, in two challenging scenarios with low-resource and multi-task settings, MoSA achieves satisfactory results, further demonstrating the effectiveness of our design. Our code will be released.

MoEC: Mixture of Experts Implicit Neural Compression

Emerging Implicit Neural Representation (INR) is a promising data compression technique, which represents the data using the parameters of a Deep Neural Network (DNN). Existing methods manually partition a complex scene into local regions and overfit the INRs into those regions. However, manually designing the partition scheme for a complex scene is very challenging and fails to jointly learn the partition and INRs. To solve the problem, we propose MoEC, a novel implicit neural compression method based on the theory of mixture of experts. Specifically, we use a gating network to automatically assign a specific INR to a 3D point in the scene. The gating network is trained jointly with the INRs of different local regions. Compared with block-wise and tree-structured partitions, our learnable partition can adaptively find the optimal partition in an end-to-end manner. We conduct detailed experiments on massive and diverse biomedical data to demonstrate the advantages of MoEC against existing approaches. In most of experiment settings, we have achieved state-of-the-art results. Especially in cases of extreme compression ratios, such as 6000x, we are able to uphold the PSNR of 48.16.