EVA: An Embodied World Model for Future Video Anticipation

World models integrate raw data from various modalities, such as images and language to simulate comprehensive interactions in the world, thereby displaying crucial roles in fields like mixed reality and robotics. Yet, applying the world model for accurate video prediction is quite challenging due to the complex and dynamic intentions of the various scenes in practice. In this paper, inspired by the human rethinking process, we decompose the complex video prediction into four meta-tasks that enable the world model to handle this issue in a more fine-grained manner. Alongside these tasks, we introduce a new benchmark named Embodied Video Anticipation Benchmark (EVA-Bench) to provide a well-rounded evaluation. EVA-Bench focused on evaluating the video prediction ability of human and robot actions, presenting significant challenges for both the language model and the generation model. Targeting embodied video prediction, we propose the Embodied Video Anticipator (EVA), a unified framework aiming at video understanding and generation. EVA integrates a video generation model with a visual language model, effectively combining reasoning capabilities with high-quality generation. Moreover, to enhance the generalization of our framework, we tailor-designed a multi-stage pretraining paradigm that adaptatively ensembles LoRA to produce high-fidelity results. Extensive experiments on EVA-Bench highlight the potential of EVA to significantly improve performance in embodied scenes, paving the way for large-scale pre-trained models in real-world prediction tasks.

Both Ears Wide Open: Towards Language-Driven Spatial Audio Generation

Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in mono-channel audio generation. However, when it comes to stereo audio generation, the soundscapes often have a complex scene of multiple objects and directions. Controlling stereo audio with spatial contexts remains challenging due to high data costs and unstable generative models. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to address these issues. We first construct a large-scale, simulation-based, and GPT-assisted dataset, BEWO-1M, with abundant soundscapes and descriptions even including moving and multiple sources. Beyond text modality, we have also acquired a set of images and rationally paired stereo audios through retrieval to advance multimodal generation. Existing audio generation models tend to generate rather random and indistinct spatial audio. To provide accurate guidance for latent diffusion models, we introduce the SpatialSonic model utilizing spatial-aware encoders and azimuth state matrices to reveal reasonable spatial guidance. By leveraging spatial guidance, our unified model not only achieves the objective of generating immersive and controllable spatial audio from text and image but also enables interactive audio generation during inference. Finally, under fair settings, we conduct subjective and objective evaluations on simulated and real-world data to compare our approach with prevailing methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to generate spatial audio that adheres to physical rules.

You Know What I'm Saying -- Jailbreak Attack via Implicit Reference

While recent advancements in large language model (LLM) alignment have enabled the effective identification of malicious objectives involving scene nesting and keyword rewriting, our study reveals that these methods remain inadequate at detecting malicious objectives expressed through context within nested harmless objectives. This study identifies a previously overlooked vulnerability, which we term Attack via Implicit Reference (AIR). AIR decomposes a malicious objective into permissible objectives and links them through implicit references within the context. This method employs multiple related harmless objectives to generate malicious content without triggering refusal responses, thereby effectively bypassing existing detection techniques.Our experiments demonstrate AIR's effectiveness across state-of-the-art LLMs, achieving an attack success rate (ASR) exceeding 90% on most models, including GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Qwen-2-72B. Notably, we observe an inverse scaling phenomenon, where larger models are more vulnerable to this attack method. These findings underscore the urgent need for defense mechanisms capable of understanding and preventing contextual attacks. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-model attack strategy that leverages less secure models to generate malicious contexts, thereby further increasing the ASR when targeting other models.Our code and jailbreak artifacts can be found at https://github.com/Lucas-TY/llm_Implicit_reference.

PSHuman: Photorealistic Single-view Human Reconstruction using Cross-Scale Diffusion

Detailed and photorealistic 3D human modeling is essential for various applications and has seen tremendous progress. However, full-body reconstruction from a monocular RGB image remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem and sophisticated clothing topology with self-occlusions. In this paper, we propose PSHuman, a novel framework that explicitly reconstructs human meshes utilizing priors from the multiview diffusion model. It is found that directly applying multiview diffusion on single-view human images leads to severe geometric distortions, especially on generated faces. To address it, we propose a cross-scale diffusion that models the joint probability distribution of global full-body shape and local facial characteristics, enabling detailed and identity-preserved novel-view generation without any geometric distortion. Moreover, to enhance cross-view body shape consistency of varied human poses, we condition the generative model on parametric models like SMPL-X, which provide body priors and prevent unnatural views inconsistent with human anatomy. Leveraging the generated multi-view normal and color images, we present SMPLX-initialized explicit human carving to recover realistic textured human meshes efficiently. Extensive experimental results and quantitative evaluations on CAPE and THuman2.1 datasets demonstrate PSHumans superiority in geometry details, texture fidelity, and generalization capability.

HiPrompt: Tuning-free Higher-Resolution Generation with Hierarchical MLLM Prompts

The potential for higher-resolution image generation using pretrained diffusion models is immense, yet these models often struggle with issues of object repetition and structural artifacts especially when scaling to 4K resolution and higher. We figure out that the problem is caused by that, a single prompt for the generation of multiple scales provides insufficient efficacy. In response, we propose HiPrompt, a new tuning-free solution that tackles the above problems by introducing hierarchical prompts. The hierarchical prompts offer both global and local guidance. Specifically, the global guidance comes from the user input that describes the overall content, while the local guidance utilizes patch-wise descriptions from MLLMs to elaborately guide the regional structure and texture generation. Furthermore, during the inverse denoising process, the generated noise is decomposed into low- and high-frequency spatial components. These components are conditioned on multiple prompt levels, including detailed patch-wise descriptions and broader image-level prompts, facilitating prompt-guided denoising under hierarchical semantic guidance. It further allows the generation to focus more on local spatial regions and ensures the generated images maintain coherent local and global semantics, structures, and textures with high definition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiPrompt outperforms state-of-the-art works in higher-resolution image generation, significantly reducing object repetition and enhancing structural quality.

Deep learning surrogate models of JULES-INFERNO for wildfire prediction on a global scale

Global wildfire models play a crucial role in anticipating and responding to changing wildfire regimes. JULES-INFERNO is a global vegetation and fire model simulating wildfire emissions and area burnt on a global scale. However, because of the high data dimensionality and system complexity, JULES-INFERNO's computational costs make it challenging to apply to fire risk forecasting with unseen initial conditions. Typically, running JULES-INFERNO for 30 years of prediction will take several hours on High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. To tackle this bottleneck, two data-driven models are built in this work based on Deep Learning techniques to surrogate the JULES-INFERNO model and speed up global wildfire forecasting. More precisely, these machine learning models take global temperature, vegetation density, soil moisture and previous forecasts as inputs to predict the subsequent global area burnt on an iterative basis. Average Error per Pixel (AEP) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) are used as metrics to evaluate the performance of the proposed surrogate models. A fine tuning strategy is also proposed in this work to improve the algorithm performance for unseen scenarios. Numerical results show a strong performance of the proposed models, in terms of both computational efficiency (less than 20 seconds for 30 years of prediction on a laptop CPU) and prediction accuracy (with AEP under 0.3\% and SSIM over 98\% compared to the outputs of JULES-INFERNO).

Codec Does Matter: Exploring the Semantic Shortcoming of Codec for Audio Language Model

Recent advancements in audio generation have been significantly propelled by the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The existing research on audio LLM has primarily focused on enhancing the architecture and scale of audio language models, as well as leveraging larger datasets, and generally, acoustic codecs, such as EnCodec, are used for audio tokenization. However, these codecs were originally designed for audio compression, which may lead to suboptimal performance in the context of audio LLM. Our research aims to address the shortcomings of current audio LLM codecs, particularly their challenges in maintaining semantic integrity in generated audio. For instance, existing methods like VALL-E, which condition acoustic token generation on text transcriptions, often suffer from content inaccuracies and elevated word error rates (WER) due to semantic misinterpretations of acoustic tokens, resulting in word skipping and errors. To overcome these issues, we propose a straightforward yet effective approach called X-Codec. X-Codec incorporates semantic features from a pre-trained semantic encoder before the Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) stage and introduces a semantic reconstruction loss after RVQ. By enhancing the semantic ability of the codec, X-Codec significantly reduces WER in speech synthesis tasks and extends these benefits to non-speech applications, including music and sound generation. Our experiments in text-to-speech, music continuation, and text-to-sound tasks demonstrate that integrating semantic information substantially improves the overall performance of language models in audio generation. Our code and demo are available (Demo: https://x-codec-audio.github.io Code: https://github.com/zhenye234/xcodec)

AgentMonitor: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Predictive and Secure Multi-Agent Systems

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the rise of LLM-based agents. Recent research shows that multi-agent systems (MAS), where each agent plays a specific role, can outperform individual LLMs. However, configuring an MAS for a task remains challenging, with performance only observable post-execution. Inspired by scaling laws in LLM development, we investigate whether MAS performance can be predicted beforehand. We introduce AgentMonitor, a framework that integrates at the agent level to capture inputs and outputs, transforming them into statistics for training a regression model to predict task performance. Additionally, it can further apply real-time corrections to address security risks posed by malicious agents, mitigating negative impacts and enhancing MAS security. Experiments demonstrate that an XGBoost model achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.89 in-domain and 0.58 in more challenging scenarios. Furthermore, using AgentMonitor reduces harmful content by 6.2% and increases helpful content by 1.8% on average, enhancing safety and reliability. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/chanchimin/AgentMonitor}.

Importance Weighting Can Help Large Language Models Self-Improve

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capability in numerous tasks and applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs using high-quality datasets under external supervision remains prohibitively expensive. In response, LLM self-improvement approaches have been vibrantly developed recently. The typical paradigm of LLM self-improvement involves training LLM on self-generated data, part of which may be detrimental and should be filtered out due to the unstable data quality. While current works primarily employs filtering strategies based on answer correctness, in this paper, we demonstrate that filtering out correct but with high distribution shift extent (DSE) samples could also benefit the results of self-improvement. Given that the actual sample distribution is usually inaccessible, we propose a new metric called DS weight to approximate DSE, inspired by the Importance Weighting methods. Consequently, we integrate DS weight with self-consistency to comprehensively filter the self-generated samples and fine-tune the language model. Experiments show that with only a tiny valid set (up to 5\% size of the training set) to compute DS weight, our approach can notably promote the reasoning ability of current LLM self-improvement methods. The resulting performance is on par with methods that rely on external supervision from pre-trained reward models.

NoRA: Nested Low-Rank Adaptation for Efficient Fine-Tuning Large Models

In this paper, we introduce Nested Low-Rank Adaptation (NoRA), a novel approach to parameter-efficient fine-tuning that extends the capabilities of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) techniques. Vanilla LoRA overlooks pre-trained weight inheritance and still requires fine-tuning numerous parameters. To addresses these issues, our NoRA adopts a dual-layer nested structure with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), effectively leveraging original matrix knowledge while reducing tunable parameters. Specifically, NoRA freezes the outer LoRA weights and utilizes an inner LoRA design, providing enhanced control over model optimization. This approach allows the model to more precisely adapt to specific tasks while maintaining a compact parameter space. By freezing outer LoRA weights and using an inner LoRA design, NoRA enables precise task adaptation with a compact parameter space. Evaluations on tasks including commonsense reasoning with large language models, fine-tuning vision-language models, and subject-driven generation demonstrate NoRA's superiority over LoRA and its variants. Notably, NoRA reduces fine-tuning parameters|training-time|memory-usage by 4\%|22.5\%|20.7\% compared to LoRA on LLaMA-3 8B, while achieving 2.2\% higher performance. Code will be released upon acceptance.