Omni-RGPT: Unifying Image and Video Region-level Understanding via Token Marks

We present Omni-RGPT, a multimodal large language model designed to facilitate region-level comprehension for both images and videos. To achieve consistent region representation across spatio-temporal dimensions, we introduce Token Mark, a set of tokens highlighting the target regions within the visual feature space. These tokens are directly embedded into spatial regions using region prompts (e.g., boxes or masks) and simultaneously incorporated into the text prompt to specify the target, establishing a direct connection between visual and text tokens. To further support robust video understanding without requiring tracklets, we introduce an auxiliary task that guides Token Mark by leveraging the consistency of the tokens, enabling stable region interpretation across the video. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale region-level video instruction dataset (RegVID-300k). Omni-RGPT achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video-based commonsense reasoning benchmarks while showing strong performance in captioning and referring expression comprehension tasks.

Detecting the Undetectable: Assessing the Efficacy of Current Spoof Detection Methods Against Seamless Speech Edits

Neural speech editing advancements have raised concerns about their misuse in spoofing attacks. Traditional partially edited speech corpora primarily focus on cut-and-paste edits, which, while maintaining speaker consistency, often introduce detectable discontinuities. Recent methods, like A\textsuperscript{3}T and Voicebox, improve transitions by leveraging contextual information. To foster spoofing detection research, we introduce the Speech INfilling Edit (SINE) dataset, created with Voicebox. We detailed the process of re-implementing Voicebox training and dataset creation. Subjective evaluations confirm that speech edited using this novel technique is more challenging to detect than conventional cut-and-paste methods. Despite human difficulty, experimental results demonstrate that self-supervised-based detectors can achieve remarkable performance in detection, localization, and generalization across different edit methods. The dataset and related models will be made publicly available.

Toward Scene Graph and Layout Guided Complex 3D Scene Generation

Recent advancements in object-centric text-to-3D generation have shown impressive results. However, generating complex 3D scenes remains an open challenge due to the intricate relations between objects. Moreover, existing methods are largely based on score distillation sampling (SDS), which constrains the ability to manipulate multiobjects with specific interactions. Addressing these critical yet underexplored issues, we present a novel framework of Scene Graph and Layout Guided 3D Scene Generation (GraLa3D). Given a text prompt describing a complex 3D scene, GraLa3D utilizes LLM to model the scene using a scene graph representation with layout bounding box information. GraLa3D uniquely constructs the scene graph with single-object nodes and composite super-nodes. In addition to constraining 3D generation within the desirable layout, a major contribution lies in the modeling of interactions between objects in a super-node, while alleviating appearance leakage across objects within such nodes. Our experiments confirm that GraLa3D overcomes the above limitations and generates complex 3D scenes closely aligned with text prompts.

Sparse Voxels Rasterization: Real-time High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering

We propose an efficient radiance field rendering algorithm that incorporates a rasterization process on sparse voxels without neural networks or 3D Gaussians. There are two key contributions coupled with the proposed system. The first is to render sparse voxels in the correct depth order along pixel rays by using dynamic Morton ordering. This avoids the well-known popping artifact found in Gaussian splatting. Second, we adaptively fit sparse voxels to different levels of detail within scenes, faithfully reproducing scene details while achieving high rendering frame rates. Our method improves the previous neural-free voxel grid representation by over 4db PSNR and more than 10x rendering FPS speedup, achieving state-of-the-art comparable novel-view synthesis results. Additionally, our neural-free sparse voxels are seamlessly compatible with grid-based 3D processing algorithms. We achieve promising mesh reconstruction accuracy by integrating TSDF-Fusion and Marching Cubes into our sparse grid system.

VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions from Large to Small Vision Language Models

The recent surge in high-quality visual instruction tuning samples from closed-source vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V has accelerated the release of open-source VLMs across various model sizes. However, scaling VLMs to improve performance using larger models brings significant computational challenges, especially for deployment on resource-constrained devices like mobile platforms and robots. To address this, we propose VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions, a new VLM family in 2B and 7B model sizes, which prioritizes efficiency without compromising accuracy. VLsI leverages a unique, layer-wise distillation process, introducing intermediate "verbalizers" that map features from each layer to natural language space, allowing smaller VLMs to flexibly align with the reasoning processes of larger VLMs. This approach mitigates the training instability often encountered in output imitation and goes beyond typical final-layer tuning by aligning the small VLMs' layer-wise progression with that of the large ones. We validate VLsI across ten challenging vision-language benchmarks, achieving notable performance gains (11.0% for 2B and 17.4% for 7B) over GPT-4V without the need for model scaling, merging, or architectural changes.

Understanding and Improving Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detections with Vision Foundation Models

The rapid advancement of generative models has introduced serious risks, including deepfake techniques for facial synthesis and editing. Traditional approaches rely on training classifiers and enhancing generalizability through various feature extraction techniques. Meanwhile, training-free detection methods address issues like limited data and overfitting by directly leveraging statistical properties from vision foundation models to distinguish between real and fake images. The current leading training-free approach, RIGID, utilizes DINOv2 sensitivity to perturbations in image space for detecting fake images, with fake image embeddings exhibiting greater sensitivity than those of real images. This observation prompts us to investigate how detection performance varies across model backbones, perturbation types, and datasets. Our experiments reveal that detection performance is closely linked to model robustness, with self-supervised (SSL) models providing more reliable representations. While Gaussian noise effectively detects general objects, it performs worse on facial images, whereas Gaussian blur is more effective due to potential frequency artifacts. To further improve detection, we introduce Contrastive Blur, which enhances performance on facial images, and MINDER (MINimum distance DetEctoR), which addresses noise type bias, balancing performance across domains. Beyond performance gains, our work offers valuable insights for both the generative and detection communities, contributing to a deeper understanding of model robustness property utilized for deepfake detection.

PromptHSI: Universal Hyperspectral Image Restoration Framework for Composite Degradation

Recent developments in All-in-One (AiO) RGB image restoration and prompt learning have enabled the representation of distinct degradations through prompts, allowing degraded images to be effectively addressed by a single restoration model. However, this paradigm faces significant challenges when transferring to hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration tasks due to: 1) the domain gap between RGB and HSI features and difference on their structures, 2) information loss in visual prompts under severe composite degradations, and 3) difficulties in capturing HSI-specific degradation representations through text prompts. To address these challenges, we propose PromptHSI, the first universal AiO HSI restoration framework. By leveraging the frequency-aware feature modulation based on characteristics of HSI degradations, we decompose text prompts into intensity and bias controllers to effectively guide the restoration process while avoiding domain gaps. Our unified architecture excels at both fine-grained recovery and global information restoration tasks. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance under various degradation combinations, indicating great potential for practical remote sensing applications. The source code and dataset will be publicly released.

NeKo: Toward Post Recognition Generative Correction Large Language Models with Task-Oriented Experts

Construction of a general-purpose post-recognition error corrector poses a crucial question: how can we most effectively train a model on a large mixture of domain datasets? The answer would lie in learning dataset-specific features and digesting their knowledge in a single model. Previous methods achieve this by having separate correction language models, resulting in a significant increase in parameters. In this work, we present Mixture-of-Experts as a solution, highlighting that MoEs are much more than a scalability tool. We propose a Multi-Task Correction MoE, where we train the experts to become an ``expert'' of speech-to-text, language-to-text and vision-to-text datasets by learning to route each dataset's tokens to its mapped expert. Experiments on the Open ASR Leaderboard show that we explore a new state-of-the-art performance by achieving an average relative $5.0$% WER reduction and substantial improvements in BLEU scores for speech and translation tasks. On zero-shot evaluation, NeKo outperforms GPT-3.5 and Claude-Opus with $15.5$% to $27.6$% relative WER reduction in the Hyporadise benchmark. NeKo performs competitively on grammar and post-OCR correction as a multi-task model.

EoRA: Training-free Compensation for Compressed LLM with Eigenspace Low-Rank Approximation

In this work, we re-formulate the model compression problem into the customized compensation problem: Given a compressed model, we aim to introduce residual low-rank paths to compensate for compression errors under customized requirements from users (e.g., tasks, compression ratios), resulting in greater flexibility in adjusting overall capacity without being constrained by specific compression formats. However, naively applying SVD to derive residual paths causes suboptimal utilization of the low-rank representation capacity. Instead, we propose Training-free Eigenspace Low-Rank Approximation (EoRA), a method that directly minimizes compression-induced errors without requiring gradient-based training, achieving fast optimization in minutes using a small amount of calibration data. EoRA projects compression errors into the eigenspace of input activations, leveraging eigenvalues to effectively prioritize the reconstruction of high-importance error components. Moreover, EoRA can be seamlessly integrated with fine-tuning and quantization to further improve effectiveness and efficiency. EoRA consistently outperforms previous methods in compensating errors for compressed LLaMA2/3 models on various tasks, such as language generation, commonsense reasoning, and math reasoning tasks (e.g., 31.31%/12.88% and 9.69% improvements on ARC-Easy/ARC-Challenge and MathQA when compensating LLaMA3-8B that is quantized to 4-bit and pruned to 2:4 sparsity). EoRA offers a scalable, training-free solution to compensate for compression errors, making it a powerful tool to deploy LLMs in various capacity and efficiency requirements.

Developing Instruction-Following Speech Language Model Without Speech Instruction-Tuning Data

Recent end-to-end speech language models (SLMs) have expanded upon the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating pre-trained speech models. However, these SLMs often undergo extensive speech instruction-tuning to bridge the gap between speech and text modalities. This requires significant annotation efforts and risks catastrophic forgetting of the original language capabilities. In this work, we present a simple yet effective automatic process for creating speech-text pair data that carefully injects speech paralinguistic understanding abilities into SLMs while preserving the inherent language capabilities of the text-based LLM. Our model demonstrates general capabilities for speech-related tasks without the need for speech instruction-tuning data, achieving impressive performance on Dynamic-SUPERB and AIR-Bench-Chat benchmarks. Furthermore, our model exhibits the ability to follow complex instructions derived from LLMs, such as specific output formatting and chain-of-thought reasoning. Our approach not only enhances the versatility and effectiveness of SLMs but also reduces reliance on extensive annotated datasets, paving the way for more efficient and capable speech understanding systems.