STOP: Integrated Spatial-Temporal Dynamic Prompting for Video Understanding

Pre-trained on tremendous image-text pairs, vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated promising zero-shot generalization across numerous image-based tasks. However, extending these capabilities to video tasks remains challenging due to limited labeled video data and high training costs. Recent video prompting methods attempt to adapt CLIP for video tasks by introducing learnable prompts, but they typically rely on a single static prompt for all video sequences, overlooking the diverse temporal dynamics and spatial variations that exist across frames. This limitation significantly hinders the model's ability to capture essential temporal information for effective video understanding. To address this, we propose an integrated Spatial-TempOral dynamic Prompting (STOP) model which consists of two complementary modules, the intra-frame spatial prompting and inter-frame temporal prompting. Our intra-frame spatial prompts are designed to adaptively highlight discriminative regions within each frame by leveraging intra-frame attention and temporal variation, allowing the model to focus on areas with substantial temporal dynamics and capture fine-grained spatial details. Additionally, to highlight the varying importance of frames for video understanding, we further introduce inter-frame temporal prompts, dynamically inserting prompts between frames with high temporal variance as measured by frame similarity. This enables the model to prioritize key frames and enhances its capacity to understand temporal dependencies across sequences. Extensive experiments on various video benchmarks demonstrate that STOP consistently achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2025-STOP.

SCAP: Transductive Test-Time Adaptation via Supportive Clique-based Attribute Prompting

Vision-language models (VLMs) encounter considerable challenges when adapting to domain shifts stemming from changes in data distribution. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance VLM performance under such conditions. In practice, test data often arrives in batches, leading to increasing interest in the transductive TTA setting. However, existing TTA methods primarily focus on individual test samples, overlooking crucial cross-sample correlations within a batch. While recent ViT-based TTA methods have introduced batch-level adaptation, they remain suboptimal for VLMs due to inadequate integration of the text modality. To address these limitations, we propose a novel transductive TTA framework, Supportive Clique-based Attribute Prompting (SCAP), which effectively combines visual and textual information to enhance adaptation by generating fine-grained attribute prompts across test batches. SCAP first forms supportive cliques of test samples in an unsupervised manner based on visual similarity and learns an attribute prompt for each clique, capturing shared attributes critical for adaptation. For each test sample, SCAP aggregates attribute prompts from its associated cliques, providing enriched contextual information. To ensure adaptability over time, we incorporate a retention module that dynamically updates attribute prompts and their associated attributes as new data arrives. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SCAP outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, significantly advancing VLM generalization under domain shifts. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2025-SCAP.

Sailor2: Sailing in South-East Asia with Inclusive Multilingual LLMs

Sailor2 is a family of cutting-edge multilingual language models for South-East Asian (SEA) languages, available in 1B, 8B, and 20B sizes to suit diverse applications. Building on Qwen2.5, Sailor2 undergoes continuous pre-training on 500B tokens (400B SEA-specific and 100B replay tokens) to support 13 SEA languages while retaining proficiency in Chinese and English. Sailor2-20B model achieves a 50-50 win rate against GPT-4o across SEA languages. We also deliver a comprehensive cookbook on how to develop the multilingual model in an efficient manner, including five key aspects: data curation, pre-training, post-training, model customization and evaluation. We hope that Sailor2 model (Apache 2.0 license) will drive language development in the SEA region, and Sailor2 cookbook will inspire researchers to build more inclusive LLMs for other under-served languages.

Selective Visual Prompting in Vision Mamba

Pre-trained Vision Mamba (Vim) models have demonstrated exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks in a computationally efficient manner, attributed to their unique design of selective state space models. To further extend their applicability to diverse downstream vision tasks, Vim models can be adapted using the efficient fine-tuning technique known as visual prompting. However, existing visual prompting methods are predominantly tailored for Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models that leverage global attention, neglecting the distinctive sequential token-wise compression and propagation characteristics of Vim. Specifically, existing prompt tokens prefixed to the sequence are insufficient to effectively activate the input and forget gates across the entire sequence, hindering the extraction and propagation of discriminative information. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel Selective Visual Prompting (SVP) method specifically for the efficient fine-tuning of Vim. To prevent the loss of discriminative information during state space propagation, SVP employs lightweight selective prompters for token-wise prompt generation, ensuring adaptive activation of the update and forget gates within Mamba blocks to promote discriminative information propagation. Moreover, considering that Vim propagates both shared cross-layer information and specific inner-layer information, we further refine SVP with a dual-path structure: Cross-Prompting and Inner-Prompting. Cross-Prompting utilizes shared parameters across layers, while Inner-Prompting employs distinct parameters, promoting the propagation of both shared and specific information, respectively. Extensive experimental results on various large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed SVP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/AAAI2025-SVP.

MagicQuill: An Intelligent Interactive Image Editing System

Image editing involves a variety of complex tasks and requires efficient and precise manipulation techniques. In this paper, we present MagicQuill, an integrated image editing system that enables swift actualization of creative ideas. Our system features a streamlined yet functionally robust interface, allowing for the articulation of editing operations (e.g., inserting elements, erasing objects, altering color) with minimal input. These interactions are monitored by a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to anticipate editing intentions in real time, bypassing the need for explicit prompt entry. Finally, we apply a powerful diffusion prior, enhanced by a carefully learned two-branch plug-in module, to process editing requests with precise control. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicQuill in achieving high-quality image edits. Please visit https://magic-quill.github.io to try out our system.

Sample-Efficient Alignment for LLMs

We study methods for efficiently aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences given budgeted online feedback. We first formulate the LLM alignment problem in the frame of contextual dueling bandits. This formulation, subsuming recent paradigms such as online RLHF and online DPO, inherently quests for sample-efficient algorithms that incorporate online active exploration. Leveraging insights from bandit theory, we introduce a unified algorithm based on Thompson sampling and highlight its applications in two distinct LLM alignment scenarios. The practical agent that efficiently implements this algorithm, named SEA (Sample-Efficient Alignment), is empirically validated through extensive experiments across three model scales (1B, 2.8B, 6.9B) and three preference learning algorithms (DPO, IPO, SLiC). The results demonstrate that SEA achieves highly sample-efficient alignment with oracle's preferences, outperforming recent active exploration methods for LLMs. Additionally, we release the implementation of SEA together with an efficient codebase designed for online alignment of LLMs, aiming to accelerate future research in this field.

Bootstrapping Language Models with DPO Implicit Rewards

Human alignment in large language models (LLMs) is an active area of research. A recent groundbreaking work, direct preference optimization (DPO), has greatly simplified the process from past work in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) by bypassing the reward learning stage in RLHF. DPO, after training, provides an implicit reward model. In this work, we make a novel observation that this implicit reward model can by itself be used in a bootstrapping fashion to further align the LLM. Our approach is to use the rewards from a current LLM model to construct a preference dataset, which is then used in subsequent DPO rounds. We incorporate refinements that debias the length of the responses and improve the quality of the preference dataset to further improve our approach. Our approach, named self-alignment with DPO ImpliCit rEwards (DICE), shows great improvements in alignment and achieves superior performance than Gemini Pro on AlpacaEval 2, reaching 27.55% length-controlled win rate against GPT-4 Turbo, but with only 8B parameters and no external feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/dice.

Dynamic Typography: Bringing Text to Life via Video Diffusion Prior

Text animation serves as an expressive medium, transforming static communication into dynamic experiences by infusing words with motion to evoke emotions, emphasize meanings, and construct compelling narratives. Crafting animations that are semantically aware poses significant challenges, demanding expertise in graphic design and animation. We present an automated text animation scheme, termed "Dynamic Typography", which combines two challenging tasks. It deforms letters to convey semantic meaning and infuses them with vibrant movements based on user prompts. Our technique harnesses vector graphics representations and an end-to-end optimization-based framework. This framework employs neural displacement fields to convert letters into base shapes and applies per-frame motion, encouraging coherence with the intended textual concept. Shape preservation techniques and perceptual loss regularization are employed to maintain legibility and structural integrity throughout the animation process. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across various text-to-video models and highlight the superiority of our end-to-end methodology over baseline methods, which might comprise separate tasks. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating coherent text animations that faithfully interpret user prompts while maintaining readability. Our code is available at: https://animate-your-word.github.io/demo/.

Open RL Benchmark: Comprehensive Tracked Experiments for Reinforcement Learning

In many Reinforcement Learning (RL) papers, learning curves are useful indicators to measure the effectiveness of RL algorithms. However, the complete raw data of the learning curves are rarely available. As a result, it is usually necessary to reproduce the experiments from scratch, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. We present Open RL Benchmark, a set of fully tracked RL experiments, including not only the usual data such as episodic return, but also all algorithm-specific and system metrics. Open RL Benchmark is community-driven: anyone can download, use, and contribute to the data. At the time of writing, more than 25,000 runs have been tracked, for a cumulative duration of more than 8 years. Open RL Benchmark covers a wide range of RL libraries and reference implementations. Special care is taken to ensure that each experiment is precisely reproducible by providing not only the full parameters, but also the versions of the dependencies used to generate it. In addition, Open RL Benchmark comes with a command-line interface (CLI) for easy fetching and generating figures to present the results. In this document, we include two case studies to demonstrate the usefulness of Open RL Benchmark in practice. To the best of our knowledge, Open RL Benchmark is the first RL benchmark of its kind, and the authors hope that it will improve and facilitate the work of researchers in the field.

Locality Sensitive Sparse Encoding for Learning World Models Online

Acquiring an accurate world model online for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is challenging due to data nonstationarity, which typically causes catastrophic forgetting for neural networks (NNs). From the online learning perspective, a Follow-The-Leader (FTL) world model is desirable, which optimally fits all previous experiences at each round. Unfortunately, NN-based models need re-training on all accumulated data at every interaction step to achieve FTL, which is computationally expensive for lifelong agents. In this paper, we revisit models that can achieve FTL with incremental updates. Specifically, our world model is a linear regression model supported by nonlinear random features. The linear part ensures efficient FTL update while the nonlinear random feature empowers the fitting of complex environments. To best trade off model capacity and computation efficiency, we introduce a locality sensitive sparse encoding, which allows us to conduct efficient sparse updates even with very high dimensional nonlinear features. We validate the representation power of our encoding and verify that it allows efficient online learning under data covariate shift. We also show, in the Dyna MBRL setting, that our world models learned online using a single pass of trajectory data either surpass or match the performance of deep world models trained with replay and other continual learning methods.