Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size

In this work, we introduce Gemma 2, a new addition to the Gemma family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models, ranging in scale from 2 billion to 27 billion parameters. In this new version, we apply several known technical modifications to the Transformer architecture, such as interleaving local-global attentions (Beltagy et al., 2020a) and group-query attention (Ainslie et al., 2023). We also train the 2B and 9B models with knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) instead of next token prediction. The resulting models deliver the best performance for their size, and even offer competitive alternatives to models that are 2-3 times bigger. We release all our models to the community.

Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology

This work introduces Gemma, a family of lightweight, state-of-the art open models built from the research and technology used to create Gemini models. Gemma models demonstrate strong performance across academic benchmarks for language understanding, reasoning, and safety. We release two sizes of models (2 billion and 7 billion parameters), and provide both pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints. Gemma outperforms similarly sized open models on 11 out of 18 text-based tasks, and we present comprehensive evaluations of safety and responsibility aspects of the models, alongside a detailed description of model development. We believe the responsible release of LLMs is critical for improving the safety of frontier models, and for enabling the next wave of LLM innovations.

Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning

Building models that can be rapidly adapted to numerous tasks using only a handful of annotated examples is an open challenge for multimodal machine learning research. We introduce Flamingo, a family of Visual Language Models (VLM) with this ability. Flamingo models include key architectural innovations to: (i) bridge powerful pretrained vision-only and language-only models, (ii) handle sequences of arbitrarily interleaved visual and textual data, and (iii) seamlessly ingest images or videos as inputs. Thanks to their flexibility, Flamingo models can be trained on large-scale multimodal web corpora containing arbitrarily interleaved text and images, which is key to endow them with in-context few-shot learning capabilities. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed Flamingo models, exploring and measuring their ability to rapidly adapt to a variety of image and video understanding benchmarks. These include open-ended tasks such as visual question-answering, where the model is prompted with a question which it has to answer, captioning tasks, which evaluate the ability to describe a scene or an event, and close-ended tasks such as multiple choice visual question-answering. For tasks lying anywhere on this spectrum, we demonstrate that a single Flamingo model can achieve a new state of the art for few-shot learning, simply by prompting the model with task-specific examples. On many of these benchmarks, Flamingo actually surpasses the performance of models that are fine-tuned on thousands of times more task-specific data.

RFID-Based Indoor Spatial Query Evaluation with Bayesian Filtering Techniques

People spend a significant amount of time in indoor spaces (e.g., office buildings, subway systems, etc.) in their daily lives. Therefore, it is important to develop efficient indoor spatial query algorithms for supporting various location-based applications. However, indoor spaces differ from outdoor spaces because users have to follow the indoor floor plan for their movements. In addition, positioning in indoor environments is mainly based on sensing devices (e.g., RFID readers) rather than GPS devices. Consequently, we cannot apply existing spatial query evaluation techniques devised for outdoor environments for this new challenge. Because Bayesian filtering techniques can be employed to estimate the state of a system that changes over time using a sequence of noisy measurements made on the system, in this research, we propose the Bayesian filtering-based location inference methods as the basis for evaluating indoor spatial queries with noisy RFID raw data. Furthermore, two novel models, indoor walking graph model and anchor point indexing model, are created for tracking object locations in indoor environments. Based on the inference method and tracking models, we develop innovative indoor range and k nearest neighbor (kNN) query algorithms. We validate our solution through use of both synthetic data and real-world data. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can evaluate indoor spatial queries effectively and efficiently. We open-source the code, data, and floor plan at https://github.com/DataScienceLab18/IndoorToolKit.

Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

Strike a Pose: Neural Networks Are Easily Fooled by Strange Poses of Familiar Objects

Despite excellent performance on stationary test sets, deep neural networks (DNNs) can fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OoD) inputs, including natural, non-adversarial ones, which are common in real-world settings. In this paper, we present a framework for discovering DNN failures that harnesses 3D renderers and 3D models. That is, we estimate the parameters of a 3D renderer that cause a target DNN to misbehave in response to the rendered image. Using our framework and a self-assembled dataset of 3D objects, we investigate the vulnerability of DNNs to OoD poses of well-known objects in ImageNet. For objects that are readily recognized by DNNs in their canonical poses, DNNs incorrectly classify 97% of their pose space. In addition, DNNs are highly sensitive to slight pose perturbations. Importantly, adversarial poses transfer across models and datasets. We find that 99.9% and 99.4% of the poses misclassified by Inception-v3 also transfer to the AlexNet and ResNet-50 image classifiers trained on the same ImageNet dataset, respectively, and 75.5% transfer to the YOLOv3 object detector trained on MS COCO.

Adversarial Texts with Gradient Methods

Adversarial samples for images have been extensively studied in the literature. Among many of the attacking methods, gradient-based methods are both effective and easy to compute. In this work, we propose a framework to adapt the gradient attacking methods on images to text domain. The main difficulties for generating adversarial texts with gradient methods are i) the input space is discrete, which makes it difficult to accumulate small noise directly in the inputs, and ii) the measurement of the quality of the adversarial texts is difficult. We tackle the first problem by searching for adversarials in the embedding space and then reconstruct the adversarial texts via nearest neighbor search. For the latter problem, we employ the Word Mover's Distance (WMD) to quantify the quality of adversarial texts. Through extensive experiments on three datasets, IMDB movie reviews, Reuters-2 and Reuters-5 newswires, we show that our framework can leverage gradient attacking methods to generate very high-quality adversarial texts that are only a few words different from the original texts. There are many cases where we can change one word to alter the label of the whole piece of text. We successfully incorporate FGM and DeepFool into our framework. In addition, we empirically show that WMD is closely related to the quality of adversarial texts.