Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Models

Today's most advanced multimodal models remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed models into open ones. As a result, the community is still missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key innovation is a novel, highly detailed image caption dataset collected entirely from human annotators using speech-based descriptions. To enable a wide array of user interactions, we also introduce a diverse dataset mixture for fine-tuning that includes in-the-wild Q&A and innovative 2D pointing data. The success of our approach relies on careful choices for the model architecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of which will be released. The best-in-class 72B model within the Molmo family not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models but also compares favorably against proprietary systems like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini 1.5 on both academic benchmarks and human evaluation. We will be releasing all of our model weights, captioning and fine-tuning data, and source code in the near future. Select model weights, inference code, and demo are available at https://molmo.allenai.org.

Efficiency Pentathlon: A Standardized Arena for Efficiency Evaluation

Rising computational demands of modern natural language processing (NLP) systems have increased the barrier to entry for cutting-edge research while posing serious environmental concerns. Yet, progress on model efficiency has been impeded by practical challenges in model evaluation and comparison. For example, hardware is challenging to control due to disparate levels of accessibility across different institutions. Moreover, improvements in metrics such as FLOPs often fail to translate to progress in real-world applications. In response, we introduce Pentathlon, a benchmark for holistic and realistic evaluation of model efficiency. Pentathlon focuses on inference, which accounts for a majority of the compute in a model's lifecycle. It offers a strictly-controlled hardware platform, and is designed to mirror real-world applications scenarios. It incorporates a suite of metrics that target different aspects of efficiency, including latency, throughput, memory overhead, and energy consumption. Pentathlon also comes with a software library that can be seamlessly integrated into any codebase and enable evaluation. As a standardized and centralized evaluation platform, Pentathlon can drastically reduce the workload to make fair and reproducible efficiency comparisons. While initially focused on natural language processing (NLP) models, Pentathlon is designed to allow flexible extension to other fields. We envision Pentathlon will stimulate algorithmic innovations in building efficient models, and foster an increased awareness of the social and environmental implications in the development of future-generation NLP models.

Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text

Communicating with humans is challenging for AIs because it requires a shared understanding of the world, complex semantics (e.g., metaphors or analogies), and at times multi-modal gestures (e.g., pointing with a finger, or an arrow in a diagram). We investigate these challenges in the context of Iconary, a collaborative game of drawing and guessing based on Pictionary, that poses a novel challenge for the research community. In Iconary, a Guesser tries to identify a phrase that a Drawer is drawing by composing icons, and the Drawer iteratively revises the drawing to help the Guesser in response. This back-and-forth often uses canonical scenes, visual metaphor, or icon compositions to express challenging words, making it an ideal test for mixing language and visual/symbolic communication in AI. We propose models to play Iconary and train them on over 55,000 games between human players. Our models are skillful players and are able to employ world knowledge in language models to play with words unseen during training. Elite human players outperform our models, particularly at the drawing task, leaving an important gap for future research to address. We release our dataset, code, and evaluation setup as a challenge to the community at http://www.github.com/allenai/iconary.

PAWLS: PDF Annotation With Labels and Structure

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular way of distributing view-only documents with a rich visual markup. This presents a challenge to NLP practitioners who wish to use the information contained within PDF documents for training models or data analysis, because annotating these documents is difficult. In this paper, we present PDF Annotation with Labels and Structure (PAWLS), a new annotation tool designed specifically for the PDF document format. PAWLS is particularly suited for mixed-mode annotation and scenarios in which annotators require extended context to annotate accurately. PAWLS supports span-based textual annotation, N-ary relations and freeform, non-textual bounding boxes, all of which can be exported in convenient formats for training multi-modal machine learning models. A read-only PAWLS server is available at https://pawls.apps.allenai.org/ and the source code is available at https://github.com/allenai/pawls.

Augmenting Scientific Papers with Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols

Despite the central importance of research papers to scientific progress, they can be difficult to read. Comprehension is often stymied when the information needed to understand a passage resides somewhere else: in another section, or in another paper. In this work, we envision how interfaces can bring definitions of technical terms and symbols to readers when and where they need them most. We introduce ScholarPhi, an augmented reading interface with four novel features: (1) tooltips that surface position-sensitive definitions from elsewhere in a paper, (2) a filter over the paper that "declutters" it to reveal how the term or symbol is used across the paper, (3) automatic equation diagrams that expose multiple definitions in parallel, and (4) an automatically generated glossary of important terms and symbols. A usability study showed that the tool helps researchers of all experience levels read papers. Furthermore, researchers were eager to have ScholarPhi's definitions available to support their everyday reading.

Extracting evidence of supplement-drug interactions from literature

Dietary supplements are used by a large portion of the population, but information on their safety is hard to find. We demonstrate an automated method for extracting evidence of supplement-drug interactions (SDIs) and supplement-supplement interactions (SSIs) from scientific text. To address the lack of labeled data in this domain, we use labels of the closely related task of identifying drug-drug interactions (DDIs) for supervision, and assess the feasibility of transferring the model to identify supplement interactions. We fine-tune the contextualized word representations of BERT-large using labeled data from the PDDI corpus. We then process 22M abstracts from PubMed using this model, and extract evidence for 55946 unique interactions between 1923 supplements and 2727 drugs (precision: 0.77, recall: 0.96), demonstrating that learning the task of DDI classification transfers successfully to the related problem of identifying SDIs and SSIs. As far as we know, this is the first published work on detecting evidence of SDIs/SSIs from literature. We implement a freely-available public interface supp.ai to browse and search evidence sentences extracted by our model.

Construction of the Literature Graph in Semantic Scholar

We describe a deployed scalable system for organizing published scientific literature into a heterogeneous graph to facilitate algorithmic manipulation and discovery. The resulting literature graph consists of more than 280M nodes, representing papers, authors, entities and various interactions between them (e.g., authorships, citations, entity mentions). We reduce literature graph construction into familiar NLP tasks (e.g., entity extraction and linking), point out research challenges due to differences from standard formulations of these tasks, and report empirical results for each task. The methods described in this paper are used to enable semantic features in www.semanticscholar.org