Probing and Inducing Combinational Creativity in Vision-Language Models

The ability to combine existing concepts into novel ideas stands as a fundamental hallmark of human intelligence. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4V and DALLE-3 have sparked debate about whether their outputs reflect combinational creativity--defined by M. A. Boden (1998) as synthesizing novel ideas through combining existing concepts--or sophisticated pattern matching of training data. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we investigate the combinational creativity of VLMs from the lens of concept blending. We propose the Identification-Explanation-Implication (IEI) framework, which decomposes creative processes into three levels: identifying input spaces, extracting shared attributes, and deriving novel semantic implications. To validate this framework, we curate CreativeMashup, a high-quality dataset of 666 artist-generated visual mashups annotated according to the IEI framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that in comprehension tasks, best VLMs have surpassed average human performance while falling short of expert-level understanding; in generation tasks, incorporating our IEI framework into the generation pipeline significantly enhances the creative quality of VLMs outputs. Our findings establish both a theoretical foundation for evaluating artificial creativity and practical guidelines for improving creative generation in VLMs.

OmniMMI: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Interaction Benchmark in Streaming Video Contexts

The rapid advancement of multi-modal language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4o has propelled the development of Omni language models, designed to process and proactively respond to continuous streams of multi-modal data. Despite their potential, evaluating their real-world interactive capabilities in streaming video contexts remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce OmniMMI, a comprehensive multi-modal interaction benchmark tailored for OmniLLMs in streaming video contexts. OmniMMI encompasses over 1,121 videos and 2,290 questions, addressing two critical yet underexplored challenges in existing video benchmarks: streaming video understanding and proactive reasoning, across six distinct subtasks. Moreover, we propose a novel framework, Multi-modal Multiplexing Modeling (M4), designed to enable an inference-efficient streaming model that can see, listen while generating.

MMKE-Bench: A Multimodal Editing Benchmark for Diverse Visual Knowledge

Knowledge editing techniques have emerged as essential tools for updating the factual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models (LMMs), allowing them to correct outdated or inaccurate information without retraining from scratch. However, existing benchmarks for multimodal knowledge editing primarily focus on entity-level knowledge represented as simple triplets, which fail to capture the complexity of real-world multimodal information. To address this issue, we introduce MMKE-Bench, a comprehensive MultiModal Knowledge Editing Benchmark, designed to evaluate the ability of LMMs to edit diverse visual knowledge in real-world scenarios. MMKE-Bench addresses these limitations by incorporating three types of editing tasks: visual entity editing, visual semantic editing, and user-specific editing. Besides, MMKE-Bench uses free-form natural language to represent and edit knowledge, offering a more flexible and effective format. The benchmark consists of 2,940 pieces of knowledge and 8,363 images across 33 broad categories, with evaluation questions automatically generated and human-verified. We assess five state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods on three prominent LMMs, revealing that no method excels across all criteria, and that visual and user-specific edits are particularly challenging. MMKE-Bench sets a new standard for evaluating the robustness of multimodal knowledge editing techniques, driving progress in this rapidly evolving field.

Amulet: ReAlignment During Test Time for Personalized Preference Adaptation of LLMs

How to align large language models (LLMs) with user preferences from a static general dataset has been frequently studied. However, user preferences are usually personalized, changing, and diverse regarding culture, values, or time. This leads to the problem that the actual user preferences often do not coincide with those trained by the model developers in the practical use of LLMs. Since we cannot collect enough data and retrain for every demand, researching efficient real-time preference adaptation methods based on the backbone LLMs during test time is important. To this end, we introduce Amulet, a novel, training-free framework that formulates the decoding process of every token as a separate online learning problem with the guidance of simple user-provided prompts, thus enabling real-time optimization to satisfy users' personalized preferences. To reduce the computational cost brought by this optimization process for each token, we additionally provide a closed-form solution for each iteration step of the optimization process, thereby reducing the computational time cost to a negligible level. The detailed experimental results demonstrate that Amulet can achieve significant performance improvements in rich settings with combinations of different LLMs, datasets, and user preferences, while maintaining acceptable computational efficiency.

From Hours to Minutes: Lossless Acceleration of Ultra Long Sequence Generation up to 100K Tokens

Generating ultra-long sequences with large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly crucial but remains a highly time-intensive task, particularly for sequences up to 100K tokens. While traditional speculative decoding methods exist, simply extending their generation limits fails to accelerate the process and can be detrimental. Through an in-depth analysis, we identify three major challenges hindering efficient generation: frequent model reloading, dynamic key-value (KV) management and repetitive generation. To address these issues, we introduce TOKENSWIFT, a novel framework designed to substantially accelerate the generation process of ultra-long sequences while maintaining the target model's inherent quality. Experimental results demonstrate that TOKENSWIFT achieves over 3 times speedup across models of varying scales (1.5B, 7B, 8B, 14B) and architectures (MHA, GQA). This acceleration translates to hours of time savings for ultra-long sequence generation, establishing TOKENSWIFT as a scalable and effective solution at unprecedented lengths. Code can be found at https://github.com/bigai-nlco/TokenSwift.

LIFT: Improving Long Context Understanding of Large Language Models through Long Input Fine-Tuning

Long context understanding remains challenging for large language models due to their limited context windows. This paper presents Long Input Fine-Tuning (LIFT), a novel framework for long-context modeling that can improve the long-context performance of arbitrary (short-context) LLMs by dynamically adapting model parameters based on the long input. Importantly, LIFT, rather than endlessly extending the context window size to accommodate increasingly longer inputs in context, chooses to store and absorb the long input in parameter. By fine-tuning the long input into model parameters, LIFT allows short-context LLMs to answer questions even when the required information is not provided in the context during inference. Furthermore, to enhance LIFT performance while maintaining the original in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, we introduce Gated Memory, a specialized attention adapter that automatically balances long input memorization and ICL. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of LIFT on long context understanding, offering valuable directions for future research.

Causal Graph Guided Steering of LLM Values via Prompts and Sparse Autoencoders

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into critical applications, aligning their behavior with human values presents significant challenges. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often focus on a limited set of values and can be resource-intensive. Furthermore, the correlation between values has been largely overlooked and remains underutilized. Our framework addresses this limitation by mining a causal graph that elucidates the implicit relationships among various values within the LLMs. Leveraging the causal graph, we implement two lightweight mechanisms for value steering: prompt template steering and Sparse Autoencoder feature steering, and analyze the effects of altering one value dimension on others. Extensive experiments conducted on Gemma-2B-IT and Llama3-8B-IT demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our steering methods.

How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?

Model collapse in synthetic data indicates that iterative training on self-generated data leads to a gradual decline in performance. With the proliferation of AI models, synthetic data will fundamentally reshape the web data ecosystem. Future GPT-$\{n\}$ models will inevitably be trained on a blend of synthetic and human-produced data. In this paper, we focus on two questions: what is the impact of synthetic data on language model training, and how to synthesize data without model collapse? We first pre-train language models across different proportions of synthetic data, revealing a negative correlation between the proportion of synthetic data and model performance. We further conduct statistical analysis on synthetic data to uncover distributional shift phenomenon and over-concentration of n-gram features. Inspired by the above findings, we propose token editing on human-produced data to obtain semi-synthetic data. As a proof of concept, we theoretically demonstrate that token-level editing can prevent model collapse, as the test error is constrained by a finite upper bound. We conduct extensive experiments on pre-training from scratch, continual pre-training, and supervised fine-tuning. The results validate our theoretical proof that token-level editing improves data quality and enhances model performance.

LIFT: Improving Long Context Understanding Through Long Input Fine-Tuning

Long context understanding remains challenging for large language models due to their limited context windows. This paper introduces Long Input Fine-Tuning (LIFT) for long context modeling, a novel framework that enhances LLM performance on long-context tasks by adapting model parameters to the context at test time. LIFT enables efficient processing of lengthy inputs without the computational burden of offline long-context adaptation, and can improve the long-context capabilities of arbitrary short-context models. The framework is further enhanced by integrating in-context learning and pre-LIFT supervised fine-tuning. The combination of in-context learning and LIFT enables short-context models like Llama 3 to handle arbitrarily long contexts and consistently improves their performance on popular long-context benchmarks like LooGLE and LongBench. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of LIFT on long context understanding, offering valuable directions for future research.

Mars: Situated Inductive Reasoning in an Open-World Environment

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive corpora have shown remarkable success in knowledge-intensive tasks. Yet, most of them rely on pre-stored knowledge. Inducing new general knowledge from a specific environment and performing reasoning with the acquired knowledge -- \textit{situated inductive reasoning}, is crucial and challenging for machine intelligence. In this paper, we design Mars, an interactive environment devised for situated inductive reasoning. It introduces counter-commonsense game mechanisms by modifying terrain, survival setting and task dependency while adhering to certain principles. In Mars, agents need to actively interact with their surroundings, derive useful rules and perform decision-making tasks in specific contexts. We conduct experiments on various RL-based and LLM-based methods, finding that they all struggle on this challenging situated inductive reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we explore \textit{Induction from Reflection}, where we instruct agents to perform inductive reasoning from history trajectory. The superior performance underscores the importance of inductive reasoning in Mars. Through Mars, we aim to galvanize advancements in situated inductive reasoning and set the stage for developing the next generation of AI systems that can reason in an adaptive and context-sensitive way.