Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction for General Video-Language Representation Learning

Multimodal representation learning, with contrastive learning, plays an important role in the artificial intelligence domain. As an important subfield, video-language representation learning focuses on learning representations using global semantic interactions between pre-defined video-text pairs. However, to enhance and refine such coarse-grained global interactions, more detailed interactions are necessary for fine-grained multimodal learning. In this study, we introduce a new approach that models video-text as game players using multivariate cooperative game theory to handle uncertainty during fine-grained semantic interactions with diverse granularity, flexible combination, and vague intensity. Specifically, we design the Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction to simulate the fine-grained correspondence between video clips and textual words from hierarchical perspectives. Furthermore, to mitigate the bias in calculations within Banzhaf Interaction, we propose reconstructing the representation through a fusion of single-modal and cross-modal components. This reconstructed representation ensures fine granularity comparable to that of the single-modal representation, while also preserving the adaptive encoding characteristics of cross-modal representation. Additionally, we extend our original structure into a flexible encoder-decoder framework, enabling the model to adapt to various downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on commonly used text-video retrieval, video-question answering, and video captioning benchmarks, with superior performance, validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method.

Multi-Agent Sampling: Scaling Inference Compute for Data Synthesis with Tree Search-Based Agentic Collaboration

Scaling laws for inference compute in multi-agent systems remain under-explored compared to single-agent scenarios. This work aims to bridge this gap by investigating the problem of data synthesis through multi-agent sampling, where synthetic responses are generated by sampling from multiple distinct language models. Effective model coordination is crucial for successful multi-agent collaboration. Unlike previous approaches that rely on fixed workflows, we treat model coordination as a multi-step decision-making process, optimizing generation structures dynamically for each input question. We introduce Tree Search-based Orchestrated Agents~(TOA), where the workflow evolves iteratively during the sequential sampling process. To achieve this, we leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), integrating a reward model to provide real-time feedback and accelerate exploration. Our experiments on alignment, machine translation, and mathematical reasoning demonstrate that multi-agent sampling significantly outperforms single-agent sampling as inference compute scales. TOA is the most compute-efficient approach, achieving SOTA performance on WMT and a 71.8\% LC win rate on AlpacaEval. Moreover, fine-tuning with our synthesized alignment data surpasses strong preference learning methods on challenging benchmarks such as Arena-Hard and AlpacaEval.

DiffusionTrend: A Minimalist Approach to Virtual Fashion Try-On

We introduce DiffusionTrend for virtual fashion try-on, which forgoes the need for retraining diffusion models. Using advanced diffusion models, DiffusionTrend harnesses latent information rich in prior information to capture the nuances of garment details. Throughout the diffusion denoising process, these details are seamlessly integrated into the model image generation, expertly directed by a precise garment mask crafted by a lightweight and compact CNN. Although our DiffusionTrend model initially demonstrates suboptimal metric performance, our exploratory approach offers some important advantages: (1) It circumvents resource-intensive retraining of diffusion models on large datasets. (2) It eliminates the necessity for various complex and user-unfriendly model inputs. (3) It delivers a visually compelling try-on experience, underscoring the potential of training-free diffusion model. This initial foray into the application of untrained diffusion models in virtual try-on technology potentially paves the way for further exploration and refinement in this industrially and academically valuable field.

Combating Multimodal LLM Hallucination via Bottom-up Holistic Reasoning

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown unprecedented capabilities in advancing various vision-language tasks. However, MLLMs face significant challenges with hallucinations, and misleading outputs that do not align with the input data. While existing efforts are paid to combat MLLM hallucinations, several pivotal challenges are still unsolved. First, while current approaches aggressively focus on addressing errors at the perception level, another important type at the cognition level requiring factual commonsense can be overlooked. In addition, existing methods might fall short in finding a more effective way to represent visual input, which is yet a key bottleneck that triggers visual hallucinations. Moreover, MLLMs can frequently be misled by faulty textual inputs and cause hallucinations, while unfortunately, this type of issue has long been overlooked by existing studies. Inspired by human intuition in handling hallucinations, this paper introduces a novel bottom-up reasoning framework. Our framework systematically addresses potential issues in both visual and textual inputs by verifying and integrating perception-level information with cognition-level commonsense knowledge, ensuring more reliable outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements in multiple hallucination benchmarks after integrating MLLMs with the proposed framework. In-depth analyses reveal the great potential of our methods in addressing perception- and cognition-level hallucinations.

HumanEdit: A High-Quality Human-Rewarded Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing

We present HumanEdit, a high-quality, human-rewarded dataset specifically designed for instruction-guided image editing, enabling precise and diverse image manipulations through open-form language instructions. Previous large-scale editing datasets often incorporate minimal human feedback, leading to challenges in aligning datasets with human preferences. HumanEdit bridges this gap by employing human annotators to construct data pairs and administrators to provide feedback. With meticulously curation, HumanEdit comprises 5,751 images and requires more than 2,500 hours of human effort across four stages, ensuring both accuracy and reliability for a wide range of image editing tasks. The dataset includes six distinct types of editing instructions: Action, Add, Counting, Relation, Remove, and Replace, encompassing a broad spectrum of real-world scenarios. All images in the dataset are accompanied by masks, and for a subset of the data, we ensure that the instructions are sufficiently detailed to support mask-free editing. Furthermore, HumanEdit offers comprehensive diversity and high-resolution $1024 \times 1024$ content sourced from various domains, setting a new versatile benchmark for instructional image editing datasets. With the aim of advancing future research and establishing evaluation benchmarks in the field of image editing, we release HumanEdit at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/BryanW/HumanEdit}.

MEMO: Memory-Guided Diffusion for Expressive Talking Video Generation

Recent advances in video diffusion models have unlocked new potential for realistic audio-driven talking video generation. However, achieving seamless audio-lip synchronization, maintaining long-term identity consistency, and producing natural, audio-aligned expressions in generated talking videos remain significant challenges. To address these challenges, we propose Memory-guided EMOtion-aware diffusion (MEMO), an end-to-end audio-driven portrait animation approach to generate identity-consistent and expressive talking videos. Our approach is built around two key modules: (1) a memory-guided temporal module, which enhances long-term identity consistency and motion smoothness by developing memory states to store information from a longer past context to guide temporal modeling via linear attention; and (2) an emotion-aware audio module, which replaces traditional cross attention with multi-modal attention to enhance audio-video interaction, while detecting emotions from audio to refine facial expressions via emotion adaptive layer norm. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that MEMO generates more realistic talking videos across diverse image and audio types, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in overall quality, audio-lip synchronization, identity consistency, and expression-emotion alignment.

UniVST: A Unified Framework for Training-free Localized Video Style Transfer

This paper presents UniVST, a unified framework for localized video style transfer. It operates without the need for training, offering a distinct advantage over existing methods that transfer style across entire videos. The endeavors of this paper comprise: (1) A point-matching mask propagation strategy that leverages feature maps from the DDIM inversion. This streamlines the model's architecture by obviating the need for tracking models. (2) An AdaIN-guided style transfer mechanism that operates at both the latent and attention levels. This balances content fidelity and style richness, mitigating the loss of localized details commonly associated with direct video stylization. (3) A sliding window smoothing strategy that harnesses optical flow within the pixel representation and refines predicted noise to update the latent space. This significantly enhances temporal consistency and diminishes artifacts in video outputs. Our proposed UniVST has been validated to be superior to existing methods in quantitative and qualitative metrics. It adeptly addresses the challenges of preserving the primary object's style while ensuring temporal consistency and detail preservation.

Two are better than one: Context window extension with multi-grained self-injection

The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a huge barrier to their broader application across various domains. While continual pre-training on long-context data is a straightforward and effective solution, it incurs substantial costs in terms of data acquisition and computational resources. To alleviate this issue, we propose SharedLLM, a novel approach grounded in the design philosophy of multi-grained context compression and query-aware information retrieval. SharedLLM is composed of two short-context LLMs such as LLaMA-2, termed upper model and lower model. The lower model functions as a compressor while the upper model acts as a decoder. The upper model receives compressed, multi-grained context information from the lower model and performs context-aware modeling on the running text. Information transfer between the compressor and decoder occurs only at the lowest layers to refrain from long forward paths in the lower model and redundant cross-attention modules in the upper model. Based on this architecture, we introduce a specialized tree-style data structure to efficiently encode, store and retrieve multi-grained contextual information for text chunks. This structure, combined with a search algorithm, enables rapid encoding and retrieval of relevant information from various levels of the tree based on the input query. This entire process, wherein the sender and receiver are derived from the same LLM layer, is referred to as self-injection.

Skywork-Reward: Bag of Tricks for Reward Modeling in LLMs

In this report, we introduce a collection of methods to enhance reward modeling for LLMs, focusing specifically on data-centric techniques. We propose effective data selection and filtering strategies for curating high-quality open-source preference datasets, culminating in the Skywork-Reward data collection, which contains only 80K preference pairs -- significantly smaller than existing datasets. Using this curated dataset, we developed the Skywork-Reward model series -- Skywork-Reward-Gemma-27B and Skywork-Reward-Llama-3.1-8B -- with the former currently holding the top position on the RewardBench leaderboard. Notably, our techniques and datasets have directly enhanced the performance of many top-ranked models on RewardBench, highlighting the practical impact of our contributions in real-world preference learning applications.

MEGA: Memory-Efficient 4D Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Scenes

4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) has recently emerged as a promising technique for capturing complex dynamic 3D scenes with high fidelity. It utilizes a 4D Gaussian representation and a GPU-friendly rasterizer, enabling rapid rendering speeds. Despite its advantages, 4DGS faces significant challenges, notably the requirement of millions of 4D Gaussians, each with extensive associated attributes, leading to substantial memory and storage cost. This paper introduces a memory-efficient framework for 4DGS. We streamline the color attribute by decomposing it into a per-Gaussian direct color component with only 3 parameters and a shared lightweight alternating current color predictor. This approach eliminates the need for spherical harmonics coefficients, which typically involve up to 144 parameters in classic 4DGS, thereby creating a memory-efficient 4D Gaussian representation. Furthermore, we introduce an entropy-constrained Gaussian deformation technique that uses a deformation field to expand the action range of each Gaussian and integrates an opacity-based entropy loss to limit the number of Gaussians, thus forcing our model to use as few Gaussians as possible to fit a dynamic scene well. With simple half-precision storage and zip compression, our framework achieves a storage reduction by approximately 190$\times$ and 125$\times$ on the Technicolor and Neural 3D Video datasets, respectively, compared to the original 4DGS. Meanwhile, it maintains comparable rendering speeds and scene representation quality, setting a new standard in the field.