Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models

We propose Hymba, a family of small language models featuring a hybrid-head parallel architecture that integrates transformer attention mechanisms with state space models (SSMs) for enhanced efficiency. Attention heads provide high-resolution recall, while SSM heads enable efficient context summarization. Additionally, we introduce learnable meta tokens that are prepended to prompts, storing critical information and alleviating the "forced-to-attend" burden associated with attention mechanisms. This model is further optimized by incorporating cross-layer key-value (KV) sharing and partial sliding window attention, resulting in a compact cache size. During development, we conducted a controlled study comparing various architectures under identical settings and observed significant advantages of our proposed architecture. Notably, Hymba achieves state-of-the-art results for small LMs: Our Hymba-1.5B-Base model surpasses all sub-2B public models in performance and even outperforms Llama-3.2-3B with 1.32% higher average accuracy, an 11.67x cache size reduction, and 3.49x throughput.

An Empirical Study of Mamba-based Language Models

Selective state-space models (SSMs) like Mamba overcome some of the shortcomings of Transformers, such as quadratic computational complexity with sequence length and large inference-time memory requirements from the key-value cache. Moreover, recent studies have shown that SSMs can match or exceed the language modeling capabilities of Transformers, making them an attractive alternative. In a controlled setting (e.g., same data), however, studies so far have only presented small scale experiments comparing SSMs to Transformers. To understand the strengths and weaknesses of these architectures at larger scales, we present a direct comparison between 8B-parameter Mamba, Mamba-2, and Transformer models trained on the same datasets of up to 3.5T tokens. We also compare these models to a hybrid architecture consisting of 43% Mamba-2, 7% attention, and 50% MLP layers (Mamba-2-Hybrid). Using a diverse set of tasks, we answer the question of whether Mamba models can match Transformers at larger training budgets. Our results show that while pure SSMs match or exceed Transformers on many tasks, they lag behind Transformers on tasks which require strong copying or in-context learning abilities (e.g., 5-shot MMLU, Phonebook) or long-context reasoning. In contrast, we find that the 8B Mamba-2-Hybrid exceeds the 8B Transformer on all 12 standard tasks we evaluated (+2.65 points on average) and is predicted to be up to 8x faster when generating tokens at inference time. To validate long-context capabilities, we provide additional experiments evaluating variants of the Mamba-2-Hybrid and Transformer extended to support 16K, 32K, and 128K sequences. On an additional 23 long-context tasks, the hybrid model continues to closely match or exceed the Transformer on average. To enable further study, we release the checkpoints as well as the code used to train our models as part of NVIDIA's Megatron-LM project.

RegionGPT: Towards Region Understanding Vision Language Model

Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension.

MTVG : Multi-text Video Generation with Text-to-Video Models

Recently, video generation has attracted massive attention and yielded noticeable outcomes. Concerning the characteristics of video, multi-text conditioning incorporating sequential events is necessary for next-step video generation. In this work, we propose a novel multi-text video generation~(MTVG) by directly utilizing a pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-video~(T2V) generation model without additional fine-tuning. To generate consecutive video segments, visual consistency generated by distinct prompts is necessary with diverse variations, such as motion and content-related transitions. Our proposed MTVG includes Dynamic Noise and Last Frame Aware Inversion which reinitialize the noise latent to preserve visual coherence between videos of different prompts and prevent repetitive motion or contents. Furthermore, we present Structure Guiding Sampling to maintain the global appearance across the frames in a single video clip, where we leverage iterative latent updates across the preceding frame. Additionally, our Prompt Generator allows for arbitrary format of text conditions consisting of diverse events. As a result, our extensive experiments, including diverse transitions of descriptions, demonstrate that our proposed methods show superior generated outputs in terms of semantically coherent and temporally seamless video.Video examples are available in our project page: https://kuai-lab.github.io/mtvg-page.

Convolutional State Space Models for Long-Range Spatiotemporal Modeling

Effectively modeling long spatiotemporal sequences is challenging due to the need to model complex spatial correlations and long-range temporal dependencies simultaneously. ConvLSTMs attempt to address this by updating tensor-valued states with recurrent neural networks, but their sequential computation makes them slow to train. In contrast, Transformers can process an entire spatiotemporal sequence, compressed into tokens, in parallel. However, the cost of attention scales quadratically in length, limiting their scalability to longer sequences. Here, we address the challenges of prior methods and introduce convolutional state space models (ConvSSM) that combine the tensor modeling ideas of ConvLSTM with the long sequence modeling approaches of state space methods such as S4 and S5. First, we demonstrate how parallel scans can be applied to convolutional recurrences to achieve subquadratic parallelization and fast autoregressive generation. We then establish an equivalence between the dynamics of ConvSSMs and SSMs, which motivates parameterization and initialization strategies for modeling long-range dependencies. The result is ConvS5, an efficient ConvSSM variant for long-range spatiotemporal modeling. ConvS5 significantly outperforms Transformers and ConvLSTM on a long horizon Moving-MNIST experiment while training 3X faster than ConvLSTM and generating samples 400X faster than Transformers. In addition, ConvS5 matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods on challenging DMLab, Minecraft and Habitat prediction benchmarks and enables new directions for modeling long spatiotemporal sequences.

The Power of Sound : Audio Reactive Video Generation with Stable Diffusion

In recent years, video generation has become a prominent generative tool and has drawn significant attention. However, there is little consideration in audio-to-video generation, though audio contains unique qualities like temporal semantics and magnitude. Hence, we propose The Power of Sound (TPoS) model to incorporate audio input that includes both changeable temporal semantics and magnitude. To generate video frames, TPoS utilizes a latent stable diffusion model with textual semantic information, which is then guided by the sequential audio embedding from our pretrained Audio Encoder. As a result, this method produces audio reactive video contents. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TPoS across various tasks and compare its results with current state-of-the-art techniques in the field of audio-to-video generation. More examples are available at https://ku-vai.github.io/TPoS/

Heterogeneous Continual Learning

We propose a novel framework and a solution to tackle the continual learning (CL) problem with changing network architectures. Most CL methods focus on adapting a single architecture to a new task/class by modifying its weights. However, with rapid progress in architecture design, the problem of adapting existing solutions to novel architectures becomes relevant. To address this limitation, we propose Heterogeneous Continual Learning (HCL), where a wide range of evolving network architectures emerge continually together with novel data/tasks. As a solution, we build on top of the distillation family of techniques and modify it to a new setting where a weaker model takes the role of a teacher; meanwhile, a new stronger architecture acts as a student. Furthermore, we consider a setup of limited access to previous data and propose Quick Deep Inversion (QDI) to recover prior task visual features to support knowledge transfer. QDI significantly reduces computational costs compared to previous solutions and improves overall performance. In summary, we propose a new setup for CL with a modified knowledge distillation paradigm and design a quick data inversion method to enhance distillation. Our evaluation of various benchmarks shows a significant improvement on accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art methods over various networks architectures.

Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

We present ODISE: Open-vocabulary DIffusion-based panoptic SEgmentation, which unifies pre-trained text-image diffusion and discriminative models to perform open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation. Text-to-image diffusion models have shown the remarkable capability of generating high-quality images with diverse open-vocabulary language descriptions. This demonstrates that their internal representation space is highly correlated with open concepts in the real world. Text-image discriminative models like CLIP, on the other hand, are good at classifying images into open-vocabulary labels. We propose to leverage the frozen representation of both these models to perform panoptic segmentation of any category in the wild. Our approach outperforms the previous state of the art by significant margins on both open-vocabulary panoptic and semantic segmentation tasks. In particular, with COCO training only, our method achieves 23.4 PQ and 30.0 mIoU on the ADE20K dataset, with 8.3 PQ and 7.9 mIoU absolute improvement over the previous state-of-the-art. Project page is available at https://jerryxu.net/ODISE .

LISA: Localized Image Stylization with Audio via Implicit Neural Representation

We present a novel framework, Localized Image Stylization with Audio (LISA) which performs audio-driven localized image stylization. Sound often provides information about the specific context of the scene and is closely related to a certain part of the scene or object. However, existing image stylization works have focused on stylizing the entire image using an image or text input. Stylizing a particular part of the image based on audio input is natural but challenging. In this work, we propose a framework that a user provides an audio input to localize the sound source in the input image and another for locally stylizing the target object or scene. LISA first produces a delicate localization map with an audio-visual localization network by leveraging CLIP embedding space. We then utilize implicit neural representation (INR) along with the predicted localization map to stylize the target object or scene based on sound information. The proposed INR can manipulate the localized pixel values to be semantically consistent with the provided audio input. Through a series of experiments, we show that the proposed framework outperforms the other audio-guided stylization methods. Moreover, LISA constructs concise localization maps and naturally manipulates the target object or scene in accordance with the given audio input.

Robust Sound-Guided Image Manipulation

Recent successes suggest that an image can be manipulated by a text prompt, e.g., a landscape scene on a sunny day is manipulated into the same scene on a rainy day driven by a text input "raining". These approaches often utilize a StyleCLIP-based image generator, which leverages multi-modal (text and image) embedding space. However, we observe that such text inputs are often bottlenecked in providing and synthesizing rich semantic cues, e.g., differentiating heavy rain from rain with thunderstorms. To address this issue, we advocate leveraging an additional modality, sound, which has notable advantages in image manipulation as it can convey more diverse semantic cues (vivid emotions or dynamic expressions of the natural world) than texts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that first extends the image-text joint embedding space with sound and applies a direct latent optimization method to manipulate a given image based on audio input, e.g., the sound of rain. Our extensive experiments show that our sound-guided image manipulation approach produces semantically and visually more plausible manipulation results than the state-of-the-art text and sound-guided image manipulation methods, which are further confirmed by our human evaluations. Our downstream task evaluations also show that our learned image-text-sound joint embedding space effectively encodes sound inputs.