TLDR: Token-Level Detective Reward Model for Large Vision Language Models

Although reward models have been successful in improving multimodal large language models, the reward models themselves remain brutal and contain minimal information. Notably, existing reward models only mimic human annotations by assigning only one binary feedback to any text, no matter how long the text is. In the realm of multimodal language models, where models are required to process both images and texts, a naive reward model may learn implicit biases toward texts and become less grounded in images. In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{T}$oken-$\textbf{L}$evel $\textbf{D}$etective $\textbf{R}$eward Model ($\textbf{TLDR}$) to provide fine-grained annotations to each text token. We first introduce a perturbation-based method to generate synthetic hard negatives and their token-level labels to train TLDR models. Then we show the rich usefulness of TLDR models both in assisting off-the-shelf models to self-correct their generations, and in serving as a hallucination evaluation tool. Finally, we show that TLDR models can significantly speed up human annotation by 3 times to acquire a broader range of high-quality vision language data.

Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-context Models

Numerous recent works target to extend effective context length for language models and various methods, tasks and benchmarks exist to measure model's effective memorization length. However, through thorough investigations, we find limitations for currently existing evaluations on model's memorization capability. We provide an extensive survey for limitations in this work and propose a new method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. We show that forgetting curve has the advantage of being robust to the tested corpus and the experimental settings, of not relying on prompts and can be applied to any model size. We apply our forgetting curve to a large variety of models involving both transformer and RNN/SSM based architectures. Our measurement provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of transformer extension techniques while raises questions for the effective length of RNN/SSM based models. We also examine the difference between our measurement and existing benchmarks as well as popular metrics for various models. Our code and results can be found at https://github.com/1azybug/ForgettingCurve.

LRHP: Learning Representations for Human Preferences via Preference Pairs

To improve human-preference alignment training, current research has developed numerous preference datasets consisting of preference pairs labeled as "preferred" or "dispreferred". These preference pairs are typically used to encode human preferences into a single numerical value through reward modeling, which acts as a reward signal during reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, representing these human preferences as a numerical value complicates the analysis of these preferences and restricts their broader applications other than RLHF. In contrast, in this work, we introduce a preference representation learning task that aims to construct a richer and more structured representation of human preferences. We further develop a more generalizable framework, Learning Representations for Human Preferences via preference pairs (namely LRHP), which extends beyond traditional reward modeling to tackle this task. We verify the utility of preference representations in two downstream tasks: preference data selection and preference margin prediction. Building upon the human preferences in representations, we achieve strong performance in both tasks, significantly outperforming baselines.

A Modular-based Strategy for Mitigating Gradient Conflicts in Simultaneous Speech Translation

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) involves generating target language text while continuously processing streaming speech input, presenting significant real-time challenges. Multi-task learning is often employed to enhance SimulST performance but introduces optimization conflicts between primary and auxiliary tasks, potentially compromising overall efficiency. The existing model-level conflict resolution methods are not well-suited for this task which exacerbates inefficiencies and leads to high GPU memory consumption. To address these challenges, we propose a Modular Gradient Conflict Mitigation (MGCM) strategy that detects conflicts at a finer-grained modular level and resolves them utilizing gradient projection. Experimental results demonstrate that MGCM significantly improves SimulST performance, particularly under medium and high latency conditions, achieving a 0.68 BLEU score gain in offline tasks. Additionally, MGCM reduces GPU memory consumption by over 95\% compared to other conflict mitigation methods, establishing it as a robust solution for SimulST tasks.

More Effective LLM Compressed Tokens with Uniformly Spread Position Identifiers and Compression Loss

Compressing Transformer inputs into compressd tokens allows running LLMs with improved speed and cost efficiency. Based on the compression method ICAE, we carefully examine the position identifier choices for compressed tokens and also propose a new compression loss. We demonstrate empirically that our proposed methods achieve significantly higher compression ratios (15x compared to 4x for ICAE), while being able to attain comparable reconstruction performance.

SpMis: An Investigation of Synthetic Spoken Misinformation Detection

In recent years, speech generation technology has advanced rapidly, fueled by generative models and large-scale training techniques. While these developments have enabled the production of high-quality synthetic speech, they have also raised concerns about the misuse of this technology, particularly for generating synthetic misinformation. Current research primarily focuses on distinguishing machine-generated speech from human-produced speech, but the more urgent challenge is detecting misinformation within spoken content. This task requires a thorough analysis of factors such as speaker identity, topic, and synthesis. To address this need, we conduct an initial investigation into synthetic spoken misinformation detection by introducing an open-source dataset, SpMis. SpMis includes speech synthesized from over 1,000 speakers across five common topics, utilizing state-of-the-art text-to-speech systems. Although our results show promising detection capabilities, they also reveal substantial challenges for practical implementation, underscoring the importance of ongoing research in this critical area.

NDP: Next Distribution Prediction as a More Broad Target

Large language models (LLMs) trained on next-token prediction (NTP) paradigm have demonstrated powerful capabilities. However, the existing NTP paradigm contains several limitations, particularly related to planned task complications and error propagation during inference. In our work, we extend the critique of NTP, highlighting its limitation also due to training with a narrow objective: the prediction of a sub-optimal one-hot distribution. To support this critique, we conducted a pre-experiment treating the output distribution from powerful LLMs as efficient world data compression. By evaluating the similarity between the $n$-gram distribution and the one-hot distribution with LLMs, we observed that the $n$-gram distributions align more closely with the output distribution of LLMs. Based on this insight, we introduce Next Distribution Prediction (NDP), which uses $n$-gram distributions to replace the one-hot targets, enhancing learning without extra online training time. We conducted experiments across translation, general task, language transfer, and medical domain adaptation. Compared to NTP, NDP can achieve up to +2.97 COMET improvement in translation tasks, +0.61 average improvement in general tasks, and incredible +10.75 average improvement in the medical domain. This demonstrates the concrete benefits of addressing the target narrowing problem, pointing to a new direction for future work on improving NTP.

RoVRM: A Robust Visual Reward Model Optimized via Auxiliary Textual Preference Data

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) often fail to align with human preferences, leading to issues like generating misleading content without proper visual context (also known as hallucination). A promising solution to this problem is using human-preference alignment techniques, such as best-of-n sampling and reinforcement learning. However, these techniques face the difficulty arising from the scarcity of visual preference data, which is required to train a visual reward model (VRM). In this work, we continue the line of research. We present a Robust Visual Reward Model (RoVRM) which improves human-preference alignment for LVLMs. RoVRM leverages auxiliary textual preference data through a three-phase progressive training and optimal transport-based preference data selection to effectively mitigate the scarcity of visual preference data. We experiment with RoVRM on the commonly used vision-language tasks based on the LLaVA-1.5-7B and -13B models. Experimental results demonstrate that RoVRM consistently outperforms traditional VRMs. Furthermore, our three-phase progressive training and preference data selection approaches can yield consistent performance gains over ranking-based alignment techniques, such as direct preference optimization.

Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) evolve, the increase in model depth and parameter number leads to substantial redundancy. To enhance the efficiency of the attention mechanism, previous works primarily compress the KV cache or group attention heads, while largely overlooking redundancy between layers. Our comprehensive analyses across various LLMs show that highly similar attention patterns persist within most layers. It's intuitive to save the computation by sharing attention weights across layers. However, further analysis reveals two challenges: (1) Directly sharing the weight matrix without carefully rearranging the attention heads proves to be ineffective; (2) Shallow layers are vulnerable to small deviations in attention weights. Driven by these insights, we introduce LiSA, a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs. LiSA employs tiny feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. Evaluations encompassing 13 typical benchmarks demonstrate that LiSA maintains high response quality in terms of accuracy and perplexity while reducing redundant attention calculations within 53-84% of the total layers. Our implementations of LiSA achieve a 6X compression of Q and K, with maximum throughput improvements of 19.5% for LLaMA3-8B and 32.3% for LLaMA2-7B.

The Llama 3 Herd of Models

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems are powered by foundation models. This paper presents a new set of foundation models, called Llama 3. It is a herd of language models that natively support multilinguality, coding, reasoning, and tool usage. Our largest model is a dense Transformer with 405B parameters and a context window of up to 128K tokens. This paper presents an extensive empirical evaluation of Llama 3. We find that Llama 3 delivers comparable quality to leading language models such as GPT-4 on a plethora of tasks. We publicly release Llama 3, including pre-trained and post-trained versions of the 405B parameter language model and our Llama Guard 3 model for input and output safety. The paper also presents the results of experiments in which we integrate image, video, and speech capabilities into Llama 3 via a compositional approach. We observe this approach performs competitively with the state-of-the-art on image, video, and speech recognition tasks. The resulting models are not yet being broadly released as they are still under development.