GroundingSuite: Measuring Complex Multi-Granular Pixel Grounding

Pixel grounding, encompassing tasks such as Referring Expression Segmentation (RES), has garnered considerable attention due to its immense potential for bridging the gap between vision and language modalities. However, advancements in this domain are currently constrained by limitations inherent in existing datasets, including limited object categories, insufficient textual diversity, and a scarcity of high-quality annotations. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce GroundingSuite, which comprises: (1) an automated data annotation framework leveraging multiple Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents; (2) a large-scale training dataset encompassing 9.56 million diverse referring expressions and their corresponding segmentations; and (3) a meticulously curated evaluation benchmark consisting of 3,800 images. The GroundingSuite training dataset facilitates substantial performance improvements, enabling models trained on it to achieve state-of-the-art results. Specifically, a cIoU of 68.9 on gRefCOCO and a gIoU of 55.3 on RefCOCOm. Moreover, the GroundingSuite annotation framework demonstrates superior efficiency compared to the current leading data annotation method, i.e., $4.5 \times$ faster than the GLaMM.

SmartBench: Is Your LLM Truly a Good Chinese Smartphone Assistant?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to daily life, especially advancing as intelligent assistants through on-device deployment on smartphones. However, existing LLM evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on objective tasks like mathematics and coding in English, which do not necessarily reflect the practical use cases of on-device LLMs in real-world mobile scenarios, especially for Chinese users. To address these gaps, we introduce SmartBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of on-device LLMs in Chinese mobile contexts. We analyze functionalities provided by representative smartphone manufacturers and divide them into five categories: text summarization, text Q\&A, information extraction, content creation, and notification management, further detailed into 20 specific tasks. For each task, we construct high-quality datasets comprising 50 to 200 question-answer pairs that reflect everyday mobile interactions, and we develop automated evaluation criteria tailored for these tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of on-device LLMs and MLLMs using SmartBench and also assess their performance after quantized deployment on real smartphone NPUs. Our contributions provide a standardized framework for evaluating on-device LLMs in Chinese, promoting further development and optimization in this critical area. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/SmartBench.

GenieBlue: Integrating both Linguistic and Multimodal Capabilities for Large Language Models on Mobile Devices

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled their deployment on mobile devices. However, challenges persist in maintaining strong language capabilities and ensuring hardware compatibility, both of which are crucial for user experience and practical deployment efficiency. In our deployment process, we observe that existing MLLMs often face performance degradation on pure language tasks, and the current NPU platforms on smartphones do not support the MoE architecture, which is commonly used to preserve pure language capabilities during multimodal training. To address these issues, we systematically analyze methods to maintain pure language capabilities during the training of MLLMs, focusing on both training data and model architecture aspects. Based on these analyses, we propose GenieBlue, an efficient MLLM structural design that integrates both linguistic and multimodal capabilities for LLMs on mobile devices. GenieBlue freezes the original LLM parameters during MLLM training to maintain pure language capabilities. It acquires multimodal capabilities by duplicating specific transformer blocks for full fine-tuning and integrating lightweight LoRA modules. This approach preserves language capabilities while achieving comparable multimodal performance through extensive training. Deployed on smartphone NPUs, GenieBlue demonstrates efficiency and practicality for applications on mobile devices.

Autonomous Deep Agent

This technical brief introduces Deep Agent, an advanced autonomous AI system designed to manage complex multi-phase tasks through a novel hierarchical task management architecture. The system's foundation is built on our Hierarchical Task DAG (HTDAG) framework, which dynamically decomposes high-level objectives into manageable sub-tasks while rigorously maintaining dependencies and execution coherence. Deep Agent advances beyond traditional agent systems through three key innovations: First, it implements a recursive two-stage planner-executor architecture that enables continuous task refinement and adaptation as circumstances change. Second, it features an Autonomous API & Tool Creation (AATC) system that automatically generates reusable components from UI interactions, substantially reducing operational costs for similar tasks. Third, it incorporates Prompt Tweaking Engine and Autonomous Prompt Feedback Learning components that optimize Large Language Model prompts for specific scenarios, enhancing both inference accuracy and operational stability. These components are integrated to form a service infrastructure that manages user contexts, handles complex task dependencies, and orchestrates end-to-end agentic workflow execution. Through this sophisticated architecture, Deep Agent establishes a novel paradigm in self-governing AI systems, demonstrating robust capability to independently handle intricate, multi-step tasks while maintaining consistent efficiency and reliability through continuous self-optimization.

Data Quality Enhancement on the Basis of Diversity with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Uncovered, Difficult, and Noisy

In recent years, the use of large language models (LLMs) for text classification has attracted widespread attention. Despite this, the classification accuracy of LLMs has not yet universally surpassed that of smaller models. LLMs can enhance their performance in text classification through fine-tuning. However, existing data quality research based on LLMs is challenging to apply directly to solve text classification problems. To further improve the performance of LLMs in classification tasks, this paper proposes a data quality enhancement (DQE) method for text classification based on LLMs. This method starts by using a greedy algorithm to select data, dividing the dataset into sampled and unsampled subsets, and then performing fine-tuning of the LLMs using the sampled data. Subsequently, this model is used to predict the outcomes for the unsampled data, categorizing incorrectly predicted data into uncovered, difficult, and noisy data. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the performance of LLMs in text classification tasks and significantly improves training efficiency, saving nearly half of the training time. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in several open-source classification tasks.

BlueLM-V-3B: Algorithm and System Co-Design for Multimodal Large Language Models on Mobile Devices

The emergence and growing popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significant potential to enhance various aspects of daily life, from improving communication to facilitating learning and problem-solving. Mobile phones, as essential daily companions, represent the most effective and accessible deployment platform for MLLMs, enabling seamless integration into everyday tasks. However, deploying MLLMs on mobile phones presents challenges due to limitations in memory size and computational capability, making it difficult to achieve smooth and real-time processing without extensive optimization. In this paper, we present BlueLM-V-3B, an algorithm and system co-design approach specifically tailored for the efficient deployment of MLLMs on mobile platforms. To be specific, we redesign the dynamic resolution scheme adopted by mainstream MLLMs and implement system optimization for hardware-aware deployment to optimize model inference on mobile phones. BlueLM-V-3B boasts the following key highlights: (1) Small Size: BlueLM-V-3B features a language model with 2.7B parameters and a vision encoder with 400M parameters. (2) Fast Speed: BlueLM-V-3B achieves a generation speed of 24.4 token/s on the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor with 4-bit LLM weight quantization. (3) Strong Performance: BlueLM-V-3B has attained the highest average score of 66.1 on the OpenCompass benchmark among models with $\leq$ 4B parameters and surpassed a series of models with much larger parameter sizes (e.g., MiniCPM-V-2.6, InternVL2-8B).

A Learning Rate Path Switching Training Paradigm for Version Updates of Large Language Models

Due to the continuous emergence of new data, version updates have become an indispensable requirement for Large Language Models (LLMs). The training paradigms for version updates of LLMs include pre-training from scratch (PTFS) and continual pre-training (CPT). Preliminary experiments demonstrate that PTFS achieves better pre-training performance, while CPT has lower training cost. Moreover, their performance and training cost gaps widen progressively with version updates. To investigate the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, we analyze the effect of learning rate adjustments during the two stages of CPT: preparing an initialization checkpoint and continual pre-training based on this checkpoint. We find that a large learning rate in the first stage and a complete learning rate decay process in the second stage are crucial for version updates of LLMs. Hence, we propose a learning rate path switching training paradigm. Our paradigm comprises one main path, where we pre-train a LLM with the maximal learning rate, and multiple branching paths, each of which corresponds to an update of the LLM with newly-added training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our paradigm. Particularly, when training four versions of LLMs, our paradigm reduces the total training cost to 58% compared to PTFS, while maintaining comparable pre-training performance.

ControlAR: Controllable Image Generation with Autoregressive Models

Autoregressive (AR) models have reformulated image generation as next-token prediction, demonstrating remarkable potential and emerging as strong competitors to diffusion models. However, control-to-image generation, akin to ControlNet, remains largely unexplored within AR models. Although a natural approach, inspired by advancements in Large Language Models, is to tokenize control images into tokens and prefill them into the autoregressive model before decoding image tokens, it still falls short in generation quality compared to ControlNet and suffers from inefficiency. To this end, we introduce ControlAR, an efficient and effective framework for integrating spatial controls into autoregressive image generation models. Firstly, we explore control encoding for AR models and propose a lightweight control encoder to transform spatial inputs (e.g., canny edges or depth maps) into control tokens. Then ControlAR exploits the conditional decoding method to generate the next image token conditioned on the per-token fusion between control and image tokens, similar to positional encodings. Compared to prefilling tokens, using conditional decoding significantly strengthens the control capability of AR models but also maintains the model's efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed ControlAR surprisingly empowers AR models with arbitrary-resolution image generation via conditional decoding and specific controls. Extensive experiments can demonstrate the controllability of the proposed ControlAR for the autoregressive control-to-image generation across diverse inputs, including edges, depths, and segmentation masks. Furthermore, both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that ControlAR surpasses previous state-of-the-art controllable diffusion models, e.g., ControlNet++. Code, models, and demo will soon be available at https://github.com/hustvl/ControlAR.

Efficient Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models have showcased impressive zero-shot classification capabilities when equipped with suitable text prompts. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of test-time prompt tuning; however, these methods typically require per-image prompt adaptation during inference, which incurs high computational budgets and limits scalability and practical deployment. To overcome this issue, we introduce Self-TPT, a novel framework leveraging Self-supervised learning for efficient Test-time Prompt Tuning. The key aspect of Self-TPT is that it turns to efficient predefined class adaptation via self-supervised learning, thus avoiding computation-heavy per-image adaptation at inference. Self-TPT begins by co-training the self-supervised and the classification task using source data, then applies the self-supervised task exclusively for test-time new class adaptation. Specifically, we propose Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPT) as the key task for self-supervision. CPT is designed to minimize the intra-class distances while enhancing inter-class distinguishability via contrastive learning. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that CPT could closely mimic back-propagated gradients of the classification task, offering a plausible explanation for its effectiveness. Motivated by this finding, we further introduce a gradient matching loss to explicitly enhance the gradient similarity. We evaluated Self-TPT across three challenging zero-shot benchmarks. The results consistently demonstrate that Self-TPT not only significantly reduces inference costs but also achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing the efficiency-efficacy trade-off.

EVF-SAM: Early Vision-Language Fusion for Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has attracted widespread attention for its superior interactive segmentation capabilities with visual prompts while lacking further exploration of text prompts. In this paper, we empirically investigate what text prompt encoders (e.g., CLIP or LLM) are good for adapting SAM for referring expression segmentation and introduce the Early Vision-language Fusion-based SAM (EVF-SAM). EVF-SAM is a simple yet effective referring segmentation method which exploits multimodal prompts (i.e., image and text) and comprises a pre-trained vision-language model to generate referring prompts and a SAM model for segmentation. Surprisingly, we observe that: (1) multimodal prompts and (2) vision-language models with early fusion (e.g., BEIT-3) are beneficial for prompting SAM for accurate referring segmentation. Our experiments show that the proposed EVF-SAM based on BEIT-3 can obtain state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO/+/g for referring expression segmentation and demonstrate the superiority of prompting SAM with early vision-language fusion. In addition, the proposed EVF-SAM with 1.32B parameters achieves remarkably higher performance while reducing nearly 82% of parameters compared to previous SAM methods based on large multimodal models.