Do we Really Need Visual Instructions? Towards Visual Instruction-Free Fine-tuning for Large Vision-Language Models

Visual instruction tuning has become the predominant technology in eliciting the multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite the success, as visual instructions require images as the input, it would leave the gap in inheriting the task-solving capabilities from the backbone LLMs, and make it costly to collect a large-scale dataset. To address it, we propose ViFT, a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for LVLMs. In ViFT, we only require the text-only instructions and image caption data during training, to separately learn the task-solving and visual perception abilities. During inference, we extract and combine the representations of the text and image inputs, for fusing the two abilities to fulfill multimodal tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ViFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several visual reasoning and visual instruction following benchmarks, with rather less training data. Our code and data will be publicly released.

KIMAs: A Configurable Knowledge Integrated Multi-Agent System

Knowledge-intensive conversations supported by large language models (LLMs) have become one of the most popular and helpful applications that can assist people in different aspects. Many current knowledge-intensive applications are centered on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques. While many open-source RAG frameworks facilitate the development of RAG-based applications, they often fall short in handling practical scenarios complicated by heterogeneous data in topics and formats, conversational context management, and the requirement of low-latency response times. This technical report presents a configurable knowledge integrated multi-agent system, KIMAs, to address these challenges. KIMAs features a flexible and configurable system for integrating diverse knowledge sources with 1) context management and query rewrite mechanisms to improve retrieval accuracy and multi-turn conversational coherency, 2) efficient knowledge routing and retrieval, 3) simple but effective filter and reference generation mechanisms, and 4) optimized parallelizable multi-agent pipeline execution. Our work provides a scalable framework for advancing the deployment of LLMs in real-world settings. To show how KIMAs can help developers build knowledge-intensive applications with different scales and emphases, we demonstrate how we configure the system to three applications already running in practice with reliable performance.

Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technology for addressing hallucination issues in the responses generated by large language models (LLMs). Existing studies on RAG primarily focus on applying semantic-based approaches to retrieve isolated relevant chunks, which ignore their intrinsic relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation (KG$^2$RAG) framework that utilizes knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide fact-level relationships between chunks, improving the diversity and coherence of the retrieved results. Specifically, after performing a semantic-based retrieval to provide seed chunks, KG$^2$RAG employs a KG-guided chunk expansion process and a KG-based chunk organization process to deliver relevant and important knowledge in well-organized paragraphs. Extensive experiments conducted on the HotpotQA dataset and its variants demonstrate the advantages of KG$^2$RAG compared to existing RAG-based approaches, in terms of both response quality and retrieval quality.

Diversity as a Reward: Fine-Tuning LLMs on a Mixture of Domain-Undetermined Data

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using diverse datasets is crucial for enhancing their overall performance across various domains. In practical scenarios, existing methods based on modeling the mixture proportions of data composition often struggle with data whose domain labels are missing, imprecise or non-normalized, while methods based on data selection usually encounter difficulties in balancing multi-domain performance. To address these challenges, in this paper, we study the role of data diversity in enhancing the overall abilities of LLMs by empirically constructing contrastive data pools and theoretically deriving explanations for both inter- and intra-diversity. Building upon the insights gained, we propose a new method that gives the LLM a dual identity: an output model to cognitively probe and select data based on diversity reward, as well as an input model to be tuned with the selected data. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method notably boosts performance across domain-undetermined data and a series of foundational downstream tasks when applied to various advanced LLMs. We release our code and hope this study can shed light on the understanding of data diversity and advance feedback-driven data-model co-development for LLMs.

Talk to Right Specialists: Routing and Planning in Multi-agent System for Question Answering

Leveraging large language models (LLMs), an agent can utilize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to integrate external knowledge and increase the reliability of its responses. Current RAG-based agents integrate single, domain-specific knowledge sources, limiting their ability and leading to hallucinated or inaccurate responses when addressing cross-domain queries. Integrating multiple knowledge bases into a unified RAG-based agent raises significant challenges, including increased retrieval overhead and data sovereignty when sensitive data is involved. In this work, we propose RopMura, a novel multi-agent system that addresses these limitations by incorporating highly efficient routing and planning mechanisms. RopMura features two key components: a router that intelligently selects the most relevant agents based on knowledge boundaries and a planner that decomposes complex multi-hop queries into manageable steps, allowing for coordinating cross-domain responses. Experimental results demonstrate that RopMura effectively handles both single-hop and multi-hop queries, with the routing mechanism enabling precise answers for single-hop queries and the combined routing and planning mechanisms achieving accurate, multi-step resolutions for complex queries.

HumanVBench: Exploring Human-Centric Video Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs with Synthetic Benchmark Data

In the domain of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), achieving human-centric video understanding remains a formidable challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily emphasize object and action recognition, often neglecting the intricate nuances of human emotions, behaviors, and speech visual alignment within video content. We present HumanVBench, an innovative benchmark meticulously crafted to bridge these gaps in the evaluation of video MLLMs. HumanVBench comprises 17 carefully designed tasks that explore two primary dimensions: inner emotion and outer manifestations, spanning static and dynamic, basic and complex, as well as single-modal and cross-modal aspects. With two advanced automated pipelines for video annotation and distractor-included QA generation, HumanVBench utilizes diverse state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques to streamline benchmark data synthesis and quality assessment, minimizing human annotation dependency tailored to human-centric multimodal attributes. A comprehensive evaluation across 16 SOTA video MLLMs reveals notable limitations in current performance, especially in cross-modal and temporal alignment, underscoring the necessity for further refinement toward achieving more human-like understanding. HumanVBench is open-sourced to facilitate future advancements and real-world applications in video MLLMs.

ArtAug: Enhancing Text-to-Image Generation through Synthesis-Understanding Interaction

The emergence of diffusion models has significantly advanced image synthesis. The recent studies of model interaction and self-corrective reasoning approach in large language models offer new insights for enhancing text-to-image models. Inspired by these studies, we propose a novel method called ArtAug for enhancing text-to-image models in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, ArtAug is the first one that improves image synthesis models via model interactions with understanding models. In the interactions, we leverage human preferences implicitly learned by image understanding models to provide fine-grained suggestions for image synthesis models. The interactions can modify the image content to make it aesthetically pleasing, such as adjusting exposure, changing shooting angles, and adding atmospheric effects. The enhancements brought by the interaction are iteratively fused into the synthesis model itself through an additional enhancement module. This enables the synthesis model to directly produce aesthetically pleasing images without any extra computational cost. In the experiments, we train the ArtAug enhancement module on existing text-to-image models. Various evaluation metrics consistently demonstrate that ArtAug enhances the generative capabilities of text-to-image models without incurring additional computational costs. The source code and models will be released publicly.

A Simple and Provable Scaling Law for the Test-Time Compute of Large Language Models

We propose a general two-stage algorithm that enjoys a provable scaling law for the test-time compute of large language models (LLMs). Given an input problem, the proposed algorithm first generates $N$ candidate solutions, and then chooses the best one via a multiple-round knockout tournament where each pair of candidates are compared for $K$ times and only the winners move on to the next round. In a minimalistic implementation, both stages can be executed with a black-box LLM alone and nothing else (e.g., no external verifier or reward model), and a total of $N \times (K + 1)$ highly parallelizable LLM calls are needed for solving an input problem. Assuming that a generated candidate solution is correct with probability $p_{\text{gen}} > 0$ and a comparison between a pair of correct and incorrect solutions identifies the right winner with probability $p_{\text{comp}} > 0.5$ (i.e., better than a random guess), we prove theoretically that the failure probability of the proposed algorithm decays to zero exponentially with respect to $N$ and $K$: $$\mathbb{P}(\text{final output is incorrect}) \le (1 - p_{\text{gen}})^N + \lceil \log_2 N \rceil e^{-2 K (p_{\text{comp}} - 0.5)^2}.$$ Our empirical results with the challenging MMLU-Pro benchmark validate the technical assumptions, as well as the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and the gains from scaling up its test-time compute.

Dynamic and Textual Graph Generation Via Large-Scale LLM-based Agent Simulation

Graph generation is a fundamental task that has been extensively studied in social, technological, and scientific analysis. For modeling the dynamic graph evolution process, traditional rule-based methods struggle to capture community structures within graphs, while deep learning methods only focus on fitting training graphs. This limits existing graph generators to producing graphs that adhere to predefined rules or closely resemble training datasets, achieving poor performance in dynamic graph generation. Given that graphs are abstract representations arising from pairwise interactions in human activities, a realistic simulation of human-wise interaction could provide deeper insights into the graph evolution mechanism. With the increasing recognition of large language models (LLMs) in simulating human behavior, we introduce GraphAgent-Generator (GAG), a novel simulation-based framework for dynamic graph generation. Without training or fine-tuning process of LLM, our framework effectively replicates seven macro-level structural characteristics in established network science theories while surpassing existing baselines in graph expansion tasks by 31\% on specific evaluation metrics. Through node classification task, we validate GAG effectively preserves characteristics of real-world network for node-wise textual features in generated text-rich graph. Furthermore, by incorporating parallel acceleration, GAG supports generating graphs with up to nearly 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges through large-scale LLM-based agent simulation, with a minimum speed-up of 90.4\%. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GraphAgent-2206.

GenSim: A General Social Simulation Platform with Large Language Model based Agents

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent years have witnessed many promising studies on leveraging LLM-based agents to simulate human social behavior. While prior work has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, much of it has focused on specific scenarios involving a limited number of agents and has lacked the ability to adapt when errors occur during simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel LLM-agent-based simulation platform called \textit{GenSim}, which: (1) \textbf{Abstracts a set of general functions} to simplify the simulation of customized social scenarios; (2) \textbf{Supports one hundred thousand agents} to better simulate large-scale populations in real-world contexts; (3) \textbf{Incorporates error-correction mechanisms} to ensure more reliable and long-term simulations. To evaluate our platform, we assess both the efficiency of large-scale agent simulations and the effectiveness of the error-correction mechanisms. To our knowledge, GenSim represents an initial step toward a general, large-scale, and correctable social simulation platform based on LLM agents, promising to further advance the field of social science.