VersaGen: Unleashing Versatile Visual Control for Text-to-Image Synthesis

Despite the rapid advancements in text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, enabling precise visual control remains a significant challenge. Existing works attempted to incorporate multi-facet controls (text and sketch), aiming to enhance the creative control over generated images. However, our pilot study reveals that the expressive power of humans far surpasses the capabilities of current methods. Users desire a more versatile approach that can accommodate their diverse creative intents, ranging from controlling individual subjects to manipulating the entire scene composition. We present VersaGen, a generative AI agent that enables versatile visual control in T2I synthesis. VersaGen admits four types of visual controls: i) single visual subject; ii) multiple visual subjects; iii) scene background; iv) any combination of the three above or merely no control at all. We train an adaptor upon a frozen T2I model to accommodate the visual information into the text-dominated diffusion process. We introduce three optimization strategies during the inference phase of VersaGen to improve generation results and enhance user experience. Comprehensive experiments on COCO and Sketchy validate the effectiveness and flexibility of VersaGen, as evidenced by both qualitative and quantitative results.

Imitate, Explore, and Self-Improve: A Reproduction Report on Slow-thinking Reasoning Systems

Recently, slow-thinking reasoning systems, such as o1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks. These systems typically engage in an extended thinking process before responding to a query, allowing them to generate more thorough, accurate, and well-reasoned solutions. These systems are primarily developed and maintained by industry, with their core techniques not publicly disclosed. In response, an increasing number of studies from the research community aim to explore the technical foundations underlying these powerful reasoning systems. Building on these prior efforts, this paper presents a reproduction report on implementing o1-like reasoning systems. We introduce an "imitate, explore, and self-improve" framework as our primary technical approach to train the reasoning model. In the initial phase, we use distilled long-form thought data to fine-tune the reasoning model, enabling it to invoke a slow-thinking mode. The model is then encouraged to explore challenging problems by generating multiple rollouts, which can result in increasingly more high-quality trajectories that lead to correct answers. Furthermore, the model undergoes self-improvement by iteratively refining its training dataset. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to industry-level reasoning systems on these benchmarks.

Technical Report: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Reward-guided Tree Search

Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference phase, large language models~(LLMs) can extensively explore the solution space by generating more thought tokens or diverse solutions, thereby producing more accurate responses. However, developing an o1-like reasoning approach is challenging, and researchers have been making various attempts to advance this open area of research. In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration into enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs through reward-guided tree search algorithms. This framework is implemented by integrating the policy model, reward model, and search algorithm. It is primarily constructed around a tree search algorithm, where the policy model navigates a dynamically expanding tree guided by a specially trained reward model. We thoroughly explore various design considerations necessary for implementing this framework and provide a detailed report of the technical aspects. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we focus on mathematical reasoning tasks and conduct extensive evaluations on four challenging datasets, significantly enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs.

Extracting and Transferring Abilities For Building Multi-lingual Ability-enhanced Large Language Models

Multi-lingual ability transfer has become increasingly important for the broad application of large language models (LLMs). Existing work highly relies on training with the multi-lingual ability-related data, which may be not available for low-resource languages. To solve it, we propose a Multi-lingual Ability Extraction and Transfer approach, named as MAET. Our key idea is to decompose and extract language-agnostic ability-related weights from LLMs, and transfer them across different languages by simple addition and subtraction operations without training. Specially, our MAET consists of the extraction and transfer stages. In the extraction stage, we firstly locate key neurons that are highly related to specific abilities, and then employ them to extract the transferable ability-specific weights. In the transfer stage, we further select the ability-related parameter tensors, and design the merging strategy based on the linguistic and ability specific weights, to build the multi-lingual ability-enhanced LLM. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on mathematical and scientific tasks in both high-resource lingual and low-resource lingual scenarios. Experiment results have shown that MAET can effectively and efficiently extract and transfer the advanced abilities, and outperform training-based baseline methods. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/MAET}.

Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models

Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. To make the CPT approach more traceable, this paper presents a technical report for continually pre-training Llama-3 (8B), which significantly enhances the Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of the backbone model. To enhance the new abilities while retaining the original abilities, we design specific data mixture and curriculum strategies by utilizing existing datasets and synthesizing high-quality datasets. Specifically, we synthesize multidisciplinary scientific question and answer (QA) pairs based on related web pages, and subsequently incorporate these synthetic data to improve the scientific reasoning ability of Llama-3. We refer to the model after CPT as Llama-3-SynE (Synthetic data Enhanced Llama-3). We also present the tuning experiments with a relatively small model -- TinyLlama, and employ the derived findings to train the backbone model. Extensive experiments on a number of evaluation benchmarks show that our approach can largely improve the performance of the backbone models, including both the general abilities (+8.81 on C-Eval and +6.31 on CMMLU) and the scientific reasoning abilities (+12.00 on MATH and +4.13 on SciEval), without hurting the original capacities. Our model, data, and codes are available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/Llama-3-SynE.

YuLan: An Open-source Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have become the foundation of many applications, leveraging their extensive capabilities in processing and understanding natural language. While many open-source LLMs have been released with technical reports, the lack of training details hinders further research and development. This paper presents the development of YuLan, a series of open-source LLMs with $12$ billion parameters. The base model of YuLan is pre-trained on approximately $1.7$T tokens derived from a diverse corpus, including massive English, Chinese, and multilingual texts. We design a three-stage pre-training method to enhance YuLan's overall capabilities. Subsequent phases of training incorporate instruction-tuning and human alignment, employing a substantial volume of high-quality synthesized data. To facilitate the learning of complex and long-tail knowledge, we devise a curriculum-learning framework throughout across these stages, which helps LLMs learn knowledge in an easy-to-hard manner. YuLan's training is finished on Jan, 2024 and has achieved performance on par with state-of-the-art LLMs across various English and Chinese benchmarks. This paper outlines a comprehensive technical roadmap for developing LLMs from scratch. Our model and codes are available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-Chat.

Low-Redundant Optimization for Large Language Model Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) are still struggling in aligning with human preference in complex tasks and scenarios. They are prone to overfit into the unexpected patterns or superficial styles in the training data. We conduct an empirical study that only selects the top-10\% most updated parameters in LLMs for alignment training, and see improvements in the convergence process and final performance. It indicates the existence of redundant neurons in LLMs for alignment training. To reduce its influence, we propose a low-redundant alignment method named \textbf{ALLO}, focusing on optimizing the most related neurons with the most useful supervised signals. Concretely, we first identify the neurons that are related to the human preference data by a gradient-based strategy, then identify the alignment-related key tokens by reward models for computing loss. Besides, we also decompose the alignment process into the forgetting and learning stages, where we first forget the tokens with unaligned knowledge and then learn aligned knowledge, by updating different ratios of neurons, respectively. Experimental results on 10 datasets have shown the effectiveness of ALLO. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ALLO}.

Dual-Pipeline with Low-Rank Adaptation for New Language Integration in Multilingual ASR

This paper addresses challenges in integrating new languages into a pre-trained multilingual automatic speech recognition (mASR) system, particularly in scenarios where training data for existing languages is limited or unavailable. The proposed method employs a dual-pipeline with low-rank adaptation (LoRA). It maintains two data flow pipelines-one for existing languages and another for new languages. The primary pipeline follows the standard flow through the pre-trained parameters of mASR, while the secondary pipeline additionally utilizes language-specific parameters represented by LoRA and a separate output decoder module. Importantly, the proposed approach minimizes the performance degradation of existing languages and enables a language-agnostic operation mode, facilitated by a decoder selection strategy. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by extending the pre-trained Whisper model to 19 new languages from the FLEURS dataset

JiuZhang3.0: Efficiently Improving Mathematical Reasoning by Training Small Data Synthesis Models

Mathematical reasoning is an important capability of large language models~(LLMs) for real-world applications. To enhance this capability, existing work either collects large-scale math-related texts for pre-training, or relies on stronger LLMs (\eg GPT-4) to synthesize massive math problems. Both types of work generally lead to large costs in training or synthesis. To reduce the cost, based on open-source available texts, we propose an efficient way that trains a small LLM for math problem synthesis, to efficiently generate sufficient high-quality pre-training data. To achieve it, we create a dataset using GPT-4 to distill its data synthesis capability into the small LLM. Concretely, we craft a set of prompts based on human education stages to guide GPT-4, to synthesize problems covering diverse math knowledge and difficulty levels. Besides, we adopt the gradient-based influence estimation method to select the most valuable math-related texts. The both are fed into GPT-4 for creating the knowledge distillation dataset to train the small LLM. We leverage it to synthesize 6 million math problems for pre-training our JiuZhang3.0 model, which only needs to invoke GPT-4 API 9.3k times and pre-train on 4.6B data. Experimental results have shown that JiuZhang3.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several mathematical reasoning datasets, under both natural language reasoning and tool manipulation settings. Our code and data will be publicly released in \url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/JiuZhang3.0}.

Improving Large Language Models via Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning with Minimum Editing Constraint

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models~(LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, \eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is unable to provide fine-grained supervision for complex reasoning tasks, and can not focus on the few key tokens that lead to the incorrectness. To address it, we propose a new RL method named \textbf{RLMEC} that incorporates a generative model as the reward model, which is trained by the erroneous solution rewriting task under the minimum editing constraint, and can produce token-level rewards for RL training. Based on the generative reward model, we design the token-level RL objective for training and an imitation-based regularization for stabilizing RL process. And the both objectives focus on the learning of the key tokens for the erroneous solution, reducing the effect of other unimportant tokens. The experiment results on mathematical tasks and question-answering tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/RLMEC}.