Daily Papers

While large reasoning models demonstrate strong performance on complex tasks, they lack the ability to adjust reasoning token usage based on task difficulty. This often leads to the "overthinking" problem -- excessive and unnecessary reasoning -- which, although potentially mitigated by human intervention to control the token budget, still fundamentally contradicts the goal of achieving fully autonomous AI. In this work, we propose Adaptive Reasoning Model (ARM), a reasoning model capable of adaptively selecting appropriate reasoning formats based on the task at hand. These formats include three efficient ones -- Direct Answer, Short CoT, and Code -- as well as a more elaborate format, Long CoT. To train ARM, we introduce Ada-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which addresses the format collapse issue in traditional GRPO. Ada-GRPO enables ARM to achieve high token efficiency, reducing tokens by an average of 30%, and up to 70%, while maintaining performance comparable to the model that relies solely on Long CoT. Furthermore, not only does it improve inference efficiency through reduced token generation, but it also brings a 2x speedup in training. In addition to the default Adaptive Mode, ARM supports two additional reasoning modes: 1) Instruction-Guided Mode, which allows users to explicitly specify the reasoning format via special tokens -- ideal when the appropriate format is known for a batch of tasks. 2) Consensus-Guided Mode, which aggregates the outputs of the three efficient formats and resorts to Long CoT in case of disagreement, prioritizing performance with higher token usage.

An image editing model should be able to perform diverse edits, ranging from object replacement, changing attributes or style, to performing actions or movement, which require many forms of reasoning. Current general instruction-guided editing models have significant shortcomings with action and reasoning-centric edits. Object, attribute or stylistic changes can be learned from visually static datasets. On the other hand, high-quality data for action and reasoning-centric edits is scarce and has to come from entirely different sources that cover e.g. physical dynamics, temporality and spatial reasoning. To this end, we meticulously curate the AURORA Dataset (Action-Reasoning-Object-Attribute), a collection of high-quality training data, human-annotated and curated from videos and simulation engines. We focus on a key aspect of quality training data: triplets (source image, prompt, target image) contain a single meaningful visual change described by the prompt, i.e., truly minimal changes between source and target images. To demonstrate the value of our dataset, we evaluate an AURORA-finetuned model on a new expert-curated benchmark (AURORA-Bench) covering 8 diverse editing tasks. Our model significantly outperforms previous editing models as judged by human raters. For automatic evaluations, we find important flaws in previous metrics and caution their use for semantically hard editing tasks. Instead, we propose a new automatic metric that focuses on discriminative understanding. We hope that our efforts : (1) curating a quality training dataset and an evaluation benchmark, (2) developing critical evaluations, and (3) releasing a state-of-the-art model, will fuel further progress on general image editing.

Although natural language instructions offer an intuitive way to guide automated image editing, deep-learning models often struggle to achieve high-quality results, largely due to challenges in creating large, high-quality training datasets. Previous work has typically relied on text-toimage (T2I) generative models to produce pairs of original and edited images that simulate the input/output of an instruction-guided image-editing model. However, these image pairs often fail to align with the specified edit instructions due to the limitations of T2I models, which negatively impacts models trained on such datasets. To address this, we present Instruct-CLIP, a self-supervised method that learns the semantic changes between original and edited images to refine and better align the instructions in existing datasets. Furthermore, we adapt Instruct-CLIP to handle noisy latent images and diffusion timesteps so that it can be used to train latent diffusion models (LDMs) [19] and efficiently enforce alignment between the edit instruction and the image changes in latent space at any step of the diffusion pipeline. We use Instruct-CLIP to correct the InstructPix2Pix dataset and get over 120K refined samples we then use to fine-tune their model, guided by our novel Instruct-CLIP-based loss function. The resulting model can produce edits that are more aligned with the given instructions. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SherryXTChen/Instruct-CLIP.git.

Text-guided image editing is widely needed in daily life, ranging from personal use to professional applications such as Photoshop. However, existing methods are either zero-shot or trained on an automatically synthesized dataset, which contains a high volume of noise. Thus, they still require lots of manual tuning to produce desirable outcomes in practice. To address this issue, we introduce MagicBrush (https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/MagicBrush/), the first large-scale, manually annotated dataset for instruction-guided real image editing that covers diverse scenarios: single-turn, multi-turn, mask-provided, and mask-free editing. MagicBrush comprises over 10K manually annotated triples (source image, instruction, target image), which supports trainining large-scale text-guided image editing models. We fine-tune InstructPix2Pix on MagicBrush and show that the new model can produce much better images according to human evaluation. We further conduct extensive experiments to evaluate current image editing baselines from multiple dimensions including quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations. The results reveal the challenging nature of our dataset and the gap between current baselines and real-world editing needs.

Audio editing is applicable for various purposes, such as adding background sound effects, replacing a musical instrument, and repairing damaged audio. Recently, some diffusion-based methods achieved zero-shot audio editing by using a diffusion and denoising process conditioned on the text description of the output audio. However, these methods still have some problems: 1) they have not been trained on editing tasks and cannot ensure good editing effects; 2) they can erroneously modify audio segments that do not require editing; 3) they need a complete description of the output audio, which is not always available or necessary in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose AUDIT, an instruction-guided audio editing model based on latent diffusion models. Specifically, AUDIT has three main design features: 1) we construct triplet training data (instruction, input audio, output audio) for different audio editing tasks and train a diffusion model using instruction and input (to be edited) audio as conditions and generating output (edited) audio; 2) it can automatically learn to only modify segments that need to be edited by comparing the difference between the input and output audio; 3) it only needs edit instructions instead of full target audio descriptions as text input. AUDIT achieves state-of-the-art results in both objective and subjective metrics for several audio editing tasks (e.g., adding, dropping, replacement, inpainting, super-resolution). Demo samples are available at https://audit-demo.github.io/.

This is the technique report for the winning solution of the CVPR2024 GenAI Media Generation Challenge Workshop's Instruction-guided Image Editing track. Instruction-guided image editing has been largely studied in recent years. The most advanced methods, such as SmartEdit and MGIE, usually combine large language models with diffusion models through joint training, where the former provides text understanding ability, and the latter provides image generation ability. However, in our experiments, we find that simply connecting large language models and image generation models through intermediary guidance such as masks instead of joint fine-tuning leads to a better editing performance and success rate. We use a 4-step process IIIE (Inpainting-based Instruction-guided Image Editing): editing category classification, main editing object identification, editing mask acquisition, and image inpainting. Results show that through proper combinations of language models and image inpainting models, our pipeline can reach a high success rate with satisfying visual quality.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved significant progress by extending large language models. Building on this progress, the latest developments in LMMs demonstrate the ability to generate dense pixel-wise segmentation through the integration of segmentation models.Despite the innovations, the textual responses and segmentation masks of existing works remain at the instance level, showing limited ability to perform fine-grained understanding and segmentation even provided with detailed textual cues.To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Multi-Granularity Large Multimodal Model (MGLMM), which is capable of seamlessly adjusting the granularity of Segmentation and Captioning (SegCap) following user instructions, from panoptic SegCap to fine-grained SegCap. We name such a new task Multi-Granularity Segmentation and Captioning (MGSC). Observing the lack of a benchmark for model training and evaluation over the MGSC task, we establish a benchmark with aligned masks and captions in multi-granularity using our customized automated annotation pipeline. This benchmark comprises 10K images and more than 30K image-question pairs. We will release our dataset along with the implementation of our automated dataset annotation pipeline for further research.Besides, we propose a novel unified SegCap data format to unify heterogeneous segmentation datasets; it effectively facilitates learning to associate object concepts with visual features during multi-task training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MGLMM excels at tackling more than eight downstream tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in MGSC, GCG, image captioning, referring segmentation, multiple and empty segmentation, and reasoning segmentation tasks. The great performance and versatility of MGLMM underscore its potential impact on advancing multimodal research.

Instruction-guided video editing has emerged as a rapidly advancing research direction, offering new opportunities for intuitive content transformation while also posing significant challenges for systematic evaluation. Existing video editing benchmarks fail to support the evaluation of instruction-guided video editing adequately and further suffer from limited source diversity, narrow task coverage and incomplete evaluation metrics. To address the above limitations, we introduce IVEBench, a modern benchmark suite specifically designed for instruction-guided video editing assessment. IVEBench comprises a diverse database of 600 high-quality source videos, spanning seven semantic dimensions, and covering video lengths ranging from 32 to 1,024 frames. It further includes 8 categories of editing tasks with 35 subcategories, whose prompts are generated and refined through large language models and expert review. Crucially, IVEBench establishes a three-dimensional evaluation protocol encompassing video quality, instruction compliance and video fidelity, integrating both traditional metrics and multimodal large language model-based assessments. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of IVEBench in benchmarking state-of-the-art instruction-guided video editing methods, showing its ability to provide comprehensive and human-aligned evaluation outcomes.

We study the task of language instruction-guided robotic manipulation, in which an embodied robot is supposed to manipulate the target objects based on the language instructions. In previous studies, the predicted manipulation regions of the target object typically do not change with specification from the language instructions, which means that the language perception and manipulation prediction are separate. However, in human behavioral patterns, the manipulation regions of the same object will change for different language instructions. In this paper, we propose Instruction-Guided Affordance Net (IGANet) for predicting affordance maps of instruction-guided robotic manipulation tasks by utilizing powerful priors from vision and language encoders pre-trained on large-scale datasets. We develop a Vison-Language-Models(VLMs)-based data augmentation pipeline, which can generate a large amount of data automatically for model training. Besides, with the help of Large-Language-Models(LLMs), actions can be effectively executed to finish the tasks defined by instructions. A series of real-world experiments revealed that our method can achieve better performance with generated data. Moreover, our model can generalize better to scenarios with unseen objects and language instructions.

Recent advances in diffusion models have brought remarkable visual fidelity to instruction-guided image editing. However, their global denoising process inherently entangles the edited region with the entire image context, leading to unintended spurious modifications and compromised adherence to editing instructions. In contrast, autoregressive models offer a distinct paradigm by formulating image synthesis as a sequential process over discrete visual tokens. Their causal and compositional mechanism naturally circumvents the adherence challenges of diffusion-based methods. In this paper, we present VAREdit, a visual autoregressive (VAR) framework that reframes image editing as a next-scale prediction problem. Conditioned on source image features and text instructions, VAREdit generates multi-scale target features to achieve precise edits. A core challenge in this paradigm is how to effectively condition the source image tokens. We observe that finest-scale source features cannot effectively guide the prediction of coarser target features. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Scale-Aligned Reference (SAR) module, which injects scale-matched conditioning information into the first self-attention layer. VAREdit demonstrates significant advancements in both editing adherence and efficiency. On standard benchmarks, it outperforms leading diffusion-based methods by 30\%+ higher GPT-Balance score. Moreover, it completes a 512times512 editing in 1.2 seconds, making it 2.2times faster than the similarly sized UltraEdit. The models are available at https://github.com/HiDream-ai/VAREdit.

Recently, we have witnessed great progress in image editing with natural language instructions. Several closed-source models like GPT-Image-1, Seedream, and Google-Nano-Banana have shown highly promising progress. However, the open-source models are still lagging. The main bottleneck is the lack of a reliable reward model to scale up high-quality synthetic training data. To address this critical bottleneck, we built \mname, trained with our new large-scale human preference dataset, meticulously annotated by trained experts following a rigorous protocol containing over 200K preference pairs. \mname demonstrates superior alignment with human preferences in instruction-guided image editing tasks. Experiments show that \mname achieves state-of-the-art human correlation on established benchmarks such as GenAI-Bench, AURORA-Bench, ImagenHub, and our new \benchname, outperforming a wide range of VLM-as-judge models. Furthermore, we use \mname to select a high-quality subset from the existing noisy ShareGPT-4o-Image dataset. We train Step1X-Edit on the selected subset, which shows significant improvement over training on the full set. This demonstrates \mname's ability to serve as a reward model to scale up high-quality training data for image editing. Furthermore, its strong alignment suggests potential for advanced applications like reinforcement learning-based post-training and test-time scaling of image editing models. \mname with its training dataset will be released to help the community build more high-quality image editing training datasets.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently demonstrated strong multimodal understanding, yet their fine-grained visual perception is often constrained by low input resolutions. A common remedy is to partition high-resolution images into multiple sub-images for separate encoding, but this approach drastically inflates the number of visual tokens and introduces prohibitive inference overhead. To overcome this challenge, we propose Pyramid Token Pruning (PTP), a training-free strategy that hierarchically integrates bottom-up visual saliency at both region and token levels with top-down instruction-guided relevance. Inspired by human visual cognition, PTP selectively preserves more tokens from salient regions while further emphasizing those most relevant to task instructions. Extensive experiments on 13 diverse benchmarks show that PTP substantially reduces computational cost, memory usage, and inference latency, with negligible performance degradation.

Multi-modal models show appealing performance in visual recognition tasks recently, as free-form text-guided training evokes the ability to understand fine-grained visual content. However, current models are either inefficient or cannot be trivially upgraded to scene text recognition (STR) due to the composition difference between natural and text images. We propose a novel instruction-guided scene text recognition (IGTR) paradigm that formulates STR as an instruction learning problem and understands text images by predicting character attributes, e.g., character frequency, position, etc. IGTR first devises left langle condition,question,answerright rangle instruction triplets, providing rich and diverse descriptions of character attributes. To effectively learn these attributes through question-answering, IGTR develops lightweight instruction encoder, cross-modal feature fusion module and multi-task answer head, which guides nuanced text image understanding. Furthermore, IGTR realizes different recognition pipelines simply by using different instructions, enabling a character-understanding-based text reasoning paradigm that considerably differs from current methods. Experiments on English and Chinese benchmarks show that IGTR outperforms existing models by significant margins, while maintaining a small model size and efficient inference speed. Moreover, by adjusting the sampling of instructions, IGTR offers an elegant way to tackle the recognition of both rarely appearing and morphologically similar characters, which were previous challenges. Code at https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR{this http URL}.

The applicability of current lesion segmentation models for chest X-rays (CXRs) has been limited both by a small number of target labels and the reliance on long, detailed expert-level text inputs, creating a barrier to practical use. To address these limitations, we introduce a new paradigm: instruction-guided lesion segmentation (ILS), which is designed to segment diverse lesion types based on simple, user-friendly instructions. Under this paradigm, we construct MIMIC-ILS, the first large-scale instruction-answer dataset for CXR lesion segmentation, using our fully automated multimodal pipeline that generates annotations from chest X-ray images and their corresponding reports. MIMIC-ILS contains 1.1M instruction-answer pairs derived from 192K images and 91K unique segmentation masks, covering seven major lesion types. To empirically demonstrate its utility, we introduce ROSALIA, a vision-language model fine-tuned on MIMIC-ILS. ROSALIA can segment diverse lesions and provide textual explanations in response to user instructions. The model achieves high segmentation and textual accuracy in our newly proposed task, highlighting the effectiveness of our pipeline and the value of MIMIC-ILS as a foundational resource for pixel-level CXR lesion grounding.

Despite recent advances in diffusion models, achieving reliable image generation and editing remains challenging due to the inherent diversity induced by stochastic noise in the sampling process. Instruction-guided image editing with diffusion models offers user-friendly capabilities, yet editing failures, such as background distortion, frequently occur. Users often resort to trial and error, adjusting seeds or prompts to achieve satisfactory results, which is inefficient. While seed selection methods exist for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation, they depend on external verifiers, limiting applicability, and evaluating multiple seeds increases computational complexity. To address this, we first establish a multiple-seed-based image editing baseline using background consistency scores, achieving Best-of-N performance without supervision. Building on this, we introduce ELECT (Early-timestep Latent Evaluation for Candidate Selection), a zero-shot framework that selects reliable seeds by estimating background mismatches at early diffusion timesteps, identifying the seed that retains the background while modifying only the foreground. ELECT ranks seed candidates by a background inconsistency score, filtering unsuitable samples early based on background consistency while preserving editability. Beyond standalone seed selection, ELECT integrates into instruction-guided editing pipelines and extends to Multimodal Large-Language Models (MLLMs) for joint seed and prompt selection, further improving results when seed selection alone is insufficient. Experiments show that ELECT reduces computational costs (by 41 percent on average and up to 61 percent) while improving background consistency and instruction adherence, achieving around 40 percent success rates in previously failed cases - without any external supervision or training.

Learning to generate neural network parameters conditioned on task descriptions and architecture specifications is pivotal for advancing model adaptability and transfer learning. Existing methods especially those based on diffusion models suffer from limited scalability to large architectures, rigidity in handling varying network depths, and disjointed parameter generation that undermines inter-layer coherence. In this work, we propose IGPG (Instruction Guided Parameter Generation), an autoregressive framework that unifies parameter synthesis across diverse tasks and architectures. IGPG leverages a VQ-VAE and an autoregressive model to generate neural network parameters, conditioned on task instructions, dataset, and architecture details. By autoregressively generating neural network weights' tokens, IGPG ensures inter-layer coherence and enables efficient adaptation across models and datasets. Operating at the token level, IGPG effectively captures complex parameter distributions aggregated from a broad spectrum of pretrained models. Extensive experiments on multiple vision datasets demonstrate that IGPG consolidates diverse pretrained models into a single, flexible generative framework. The synthesized parameters achieve competitive or superior performance relative to state-of-the-art methods, especially in terms of scalability and efficiency when applied to large architectures. These results underscore ICPG potential as a powerful tool for pretrained weight retrieval, model selection, and rapid task-specific fine-tuning.

Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.

This paper introduces a novel voice conversion (VC) model, guided by text instructions such as "articulate slowly with a deep tone" or "speak in a cheerful boyish voice". Unlike traditional methods that rely on reference utterances to determine the attributes of the converted speech, our model adds versatility and specificity to voice conversion. The proposed VC model is a neural codec language model which processes a sequence of discrete codes, resulting in the code sequence of converted speech. It utilizes text instructions as style prompts to modify the prosody and emotional information of the given speech. In contrast to previous approaches, which often rely on employing separate encoders like prosody and content encoders to handle different aspects of the source speech, our model handles various information of speech in an end-to-end manner. Experiments have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of our model in comprehending instructions and delivering reasonable results.

Generating low-level robot task plans from high-level natural language instructions remains a challenging problem. Although large language models have shown promising results in generating plans, the accuracy of the output remains unverified. Furthermore, the lack of domain-specific language data poses a limitation on the applicability of these models. In this paper, we propose CLAIRIFY, a novel approach that combines automatic iterative prompting with program verification to ensure programs written in data-scarce domain-specific language are syntactically valid and incorporate environment constraints. Our approach provides effective guidance to the language model on generating structured-like task plans by incorporating any errors as feedback, while the verifier ensures the syntactic accuracy of the generated plans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CLAIRIFY in planning chemistry experiments by achieving state-of-the-art results. We also show that the generated plans can be executed on a real robot by integrating them with a task and motion planner.

In this paper, we introduce Fairy, a minimalist yet robust adaptation of image-editing diffusion models, enhancing them for video editing applications. Our approach centers on the concept of anchor-based cross-frame attention, a mechanism that implicitly propagates diffusion features across frames, ensuring superior temporal coherence and high-fidelity synthesis. Fairy not only addresses limitations of previous models, including memory and processing speed. It also improves temporal consistency through a unique data augmentation strategy. This strategy renders the model equivariant to affine transformations in both source and target images. Remarkably efficient, Fairy generates 120-frame 512x384 videos (4-second duration at 30 FPS) in just 14 seconds, outpacing prior works by at least 44x. A comprehensive user study, involving 1000 generated samples, confirms that our approach delivers superior quality, decisively outperforming established methods.

Recent advances in vision-language models like Stable Diffusion have shown remarkable power in creative image synthesis and editing.However, most existing text-to-image editing methods encounter two obstacles: First, the text prompt needs to be carefully crafted to achieve good results, which is not intuitive or user-friendly. Second, they are insensitive to local edits and can irreversibly affect non-edited regions, leaving obvious editing traces. To tackle these problems, we propose a Zero-shot instructiON-guided local image Editing approach, termed ZONE. We first convert the editing intent from the user-provided instruction (e.g., "make his tie blue") into specific image editing regions through InstructPix2Pix. We then propose a Region-IoU scheme for precise image layer extraction from an off-the-shelf segment model. We further develop an edge smoother based on FFT for seamless blending between the layer and the image.Our method allows for arbitrary manipulation of a specific region with a single instruction while preserving the rest. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ZONE achieves remarkable local editing results and user-friendliness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lsl001006/ZONE.

Instruction driven image editing with standard CLIP text encoders often fails in complex scenes with many objects. We present QL-Adapter, a framework for multiple object editing that tackles two challenges: enforcing object counts and spatial layouts, and accommodating diverse categories. QL-Adapter consists of two core modules: the Image-Layout Fusion Module (ILFM) and the Cross-Modal Augmentation Module (CMAM). ILFM fuses layout priors with ViT patch tokens from the CLIP image encoder to strengthen spatial structure understanding. CMAM injects image features into the text branch to enrich textual embeddings and improve instruction following. We further build QL-Dataset, a benchmark that spans broad category, layout, and count variations, and define the task of quantity and layout consistent image editing (QL-Edit). Extensive experiments show that QL-Adapter achieves state of the art performance on QL-Edit and significantly outperforms existing models.

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis. Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent, goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts. Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our code, dataset, and models will be released at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/.

User representation modeling has become increasingly crucial for personalized applications, yet existing approaches struggle with generalizability across domains and sensitivity to noisy behavioral signals. We present InstructUE, an instruction-aware user embedding foundation model that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate general and instruction-aware user representations. InstructUE introduces a multi-encoder architecture with a lightweight adapter that efficiently processes heterogeneous data from six different sources while preserving their structural characteristics. Additionally, it proposes a novel contrastive-autoregressive training framework that bridges language and representation spaces through a curated UserQA dataset. The contrastive-autoregressive training framework simultaneously leverages autoregressive learning to capture domain knowledge in language space and contrastive learning to align user-text embeddings in representation space, thereby enhancing the instruction-awareness and noise-robustness of user embeddings. Through extensive experiments on real-world applications, we demonstrate that InstructUE significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple domains including user prediction, marketing, and recommendation scenarios. Our results show that instruction-aware user modeling can effectively achieve instruction-guided denoising of user information in specific scenarios, paving the way for more generalizable and robust user representation learning.

Recent advances in instruction-guided image editing underscore the need for effective automated evaluation. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been explored as judges, open-source models struggle with alignment, and proprietary models lack transparency and cost efficiency. Additionally, no public training datasets exist to fine-tune open-source VLMs, only small benchmarks with diverse evaluation schemes. To address this, we introduce ADIEE, an automated dataset creation approach which is then used to train a scoring model for instruction-guided image editing evaluation. We generate a large-scale dataset with over 100K samples and use it to fine-tune a LLaVA-NeXT-8B model modified to decode a numeric score from a custom token. The resulting scorer outperforms all open-source VLMs and Gemini-Pro 1.5 across all benchmarks, achieving a 0.0696 (+17.24%) gain in score correlation with human ratings on AURORA-Bench, and improving pair-wise comparison accuracy by 4.03% (+7.21%) on GenAI-Bench and 4.75% (+9.35%) on AURORA-Bench, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art. The scorer can act as a reward model, enabling automated best edit selection and model fine-tuning. Notably, the proposed scorer can boost MagicBrush model's average evaluation score on ImagenHub from 5.90 to 6.43 (+8.98%). Our code and models are available at https://github.com/SherryXTChen/ADIEE.git.

The Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with extensive world knowledge have revitalized autonomous driving, particularly in reasoning tasks within perceivable regions. However, when faced with perception-limited areas (dynamic or static occlusion regions), MLLMs struggle to effectively integrate perception ability with world knowledge for reasoning. These perception-limited regions can conceal crucial safety information, especially for vulnerable road users. In this paper, we propose a framework, which aims to improve autonomous driving performance under perceptionlimited conditions by enhancing the integration of perception capabilities and world knowledge. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play instruction-guided interaction module that bridges modality gaps and significantly reduces the input sequence length, allowing it to adapt effectively to multi-view video inputs. Furthermore, to better integrate world knowledge with driving-related tasks, we have collected and refined a large-scale multi-modal dataset that includes 2 million natural language QA pairs, 1.7 million grounding task data. To evaluate the model's utilization of world knowledge, we introduce an object-level risk assessment dataset comprising 200K QA pairs, where the questions necessitate multi-step reasoning leveraging world knowledge for resolution. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limited. The current de facto approach for these tasks is to design model architectures and loss functions that are tailored to the task at hand. In this paper, we develop a unified language interface for computer vision tasks that abstracts away task-specific design choices and enables task execution by following natural language instructions. Our approach involves casting multiple computer vision tasks as text-to-image generation problems. Here, the text represents an instruction describing the task, and the resulting image is a visually-encoded task output. To train our model, we pool commonly-used computer vision datasets covering a range of tasks, including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and classification. We then use a large language model to paraphrase prompt templates that convey the specific tasks to be conducted on each image, and through this process, we create a multi-modal and multi-task training dataset comprising input and output images along with annotated instructions. Following the InstructPix2Pix architecture, we apply instruction-tuning to a text-to-image diffusion model using our constructed dataset, steering its functionality from a generative model to an instruction-guided multi-task vision learner. Experiments demonstrate that our model, dubbed InstructCV, performs competitively compared to other generalist and task-specific vision models. Moreover, it exhibits compelling generalization capabilities to unseen data, categories, and user instructions.

While real-world applications increasingly demand intricate scene manipulation, existing instruction-guided image editing benchmarks often oversimplify task complexity and lack comprehensive, fine-grained instructions. To bridge this gap, we introduce, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed for complex instruction-guided image editing. CompBench features challenging editing scenarios that incorporate fine-grained instruction following, spatial and contextual reasoning, thereby enabling comprehensive evaluation of image editing models' precise manipulation capabilities. To construct CompBench, We propose an MLLM-human collaborative framework with tailored task pipelines. Furthermore, we propose an instruction decoupling strategy that disentangles editing intents into four key dimensions: location, appearance, dynamics, and objects, ensuring closer alignment between instructions and complex editing requirements. Extensive evaluations reveal that CompBench exposes fundamental limitations of current image editing models and provides critical insights for the development of next-generation instruction-guided image editing systems. The dataset, code, and models are available in https://comp-bench.github.io/.

Recent AIGC systems possess the capability to generate digital multimedia content based on human language instructions, such as text, image and video. However, when it comes to speech, existing methods related to human instruction-to-speech generation exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they require the division of inputs into content prompt (transcript) and description prompt (style and speaker), instead of directly supporting human instruction. This division is less natural in form and does not align with other AIGC models. Secondly, the practice of utilizing an independent description prompt to model speech style, without considering the transcript content, restricts the ability to control speech at a fine-grained level. To address these limitations, we propose VoxInstruct, a novel unified multilingual codec language modeling framework that extends traditional text-to-speech tasks into a general human instruction-to-speech task. Our approach enhances the expressiveness of human instruction-guided speech generation and aligns the speech generation paradigm with other modalities. To enable the model to automatically extract the content of synthesized speech from raw text instructions, we introduce speech semantic tokens as an intermediate representation for instruction-to-content guidance. We also incorporate multiple Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) strategies into our codec language model, which strengthens the generated speech following human instructions. Furthermore, our model architecture and training strategies allow for the simultaneous support of combining speech prompt and descriptive human instruction for expressive speech synthesis, which is a first-of-its-kind attempt. Codes, models and demos are at: https://github.com/thuhcsi/VoxInstruct.

Large-scale text-to-video models have shown remarkable abilities, but their direct application in video editing remains challenging due to limited available datasets. Current video editing methods commonly require per-video fine-tuning of diffusion models or specific inversion optimization to ensure high-fidelity edits. In this paper, we introduce EffiVED, an efficient diffusion-based model that directly supports instruction-guided video editing. To achieve this, we present two efficient workflows to gather video editing pairs, utilizing augmentation and fundamental vision-language techniques. These workflows transform vast image editing datasets and open-world videos into a high-quality dataset for training EffiVED. Experimental results reveal that EffiVED not only generates high-quality editing videos but also executes rapidly. Finally, we demonstrate that our data collection method significantly improves editing performance and can potentially tackle the scarcity of video editing data. The datasets will be made publicly available upon publication.

Editing images with instructions to reflect non-rigid motions, camera viewpoint shifts, object deformations, human articulations, and complex interactions, poses a challenging yet underexplored problem in computer vision. Existing approaches and datasets predominantly focus on static scenes or rigid transformations, limiting their capacity to handle expressive edits involving dynamic motion. To address this gap, we introduce ByteMorph, a comprehensive framework for instruction-based image editing with an emphasis on non-rigid motions. ByteMorph comprises a large-scale dataset, ByteMorph-6M, and a strong baseline model built upon the Diffusion Transformer (DiT), named ByteMorpher. ByteMorph-6M includes over 6 million high-resolution image editing pairs for training, along with a carefully curated evaluation benchmark ByteMorph-Bench. Both capture a wide variety of non-rigid motion types across diverse environments, human figures, and object categories. The dataset is constructed using motion-guided data generation, layered compositing techniques, and automated captioning to ensure diversity, realism, and semantic coherence. We further conduct a comprehensive evaluation of recent instruction-based image editing methods from both academic and commercial domains.

Accurate interpretation of land-cover changes in multi-temporal satellite imagery is critical for real-world scenarios. However, existing methods typically provide only one-shot change masks or static captions, limiting their ability to support interactive, query-driven analysis. In this work, we introduce remote sensing image change analysis (RSICA) as a new paradigm that combines the strengths of change detection and visual question answering to enable multi-turn, instruction-guided exploration of changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. To support this task, we construct ChangeChat-105k, a large-scale instruction-following dataset, generated through a hybrid rule-based and GPT-assisted process, covering six interaction types: change captioning, classification, quantification, localization, open-ended question answering, and multi-turn dialogues. Building on this dataset, we propose DeltaVLM, an end-to-end architecture tailored for interactive RSICA. DeltaVLM features three innovations: (1) a fine-tuned bi-temporal vision encoder to capture temporal differences; (2) a visual difference perception module with a cross-semantic relation measuring (CSRM) mechanism to interpret changes; and (3) an instruction-guided Q-former to effectively extract query-relevant difference information from visual changes, aligning them with textual instructions. We train DeltaVLM on ChangeChat-105k using a frozen large language model, adapting only the vision and alignment modules to optimize efficiency. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that DeltaVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-turn captioning and multi-turn interactive change analysis, outperforming existing multimodal large language models and remote sensing vision-language models. Code, dataset and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/hanlinwu/DeltaVLM.

Instruction-guided text-to-speech (ITTS) enables users to control speech generation through natural language prompts, offering a more intuitive interface than traditional TTS. However, the alignment between user style instructions and listener perception remains largely unexplored. This work first presents a perceptual analysis of ITTS controllability across two expressive dimensions (adverbs of degree and graded emotion intensity) and collects human ratings on speaker age and word-level emphasis attributes. To comprehensively reveal the instruction-perception gap, we provide a data collection with large-scale human evaluations, named Expressive VOice Control (E-VOC) corpus. Furthermore, we reveal that (1) gpt-4o-mini-tts is the most reliable ITTS model with great alignment between instruction and generated utterances across acoustic dimensions. (2) The 5 analyzed ITTS systems tend to generate Adult voices even when the instructions ask to use child or Elderly voices. (3) Fine-grained control remains a major challenge, indicating that most ITTS systems have substantial room for improvement in interpreting slightly different attribute instructions.

Instruction-guided image editing methods have demonstrated significant potential by training diffusion models on automatically synthesized or manually annotated image editing pairs. However, these methods remain far from practical, real-life applications. We identify three primary challenges contributing to this gap. Firstly, existing models have limited editing skills due to the biased synthesis process. Secondly, these methods are trained with datasets with a high volume of noise and artifacts. This is due to the application of simple filtering methods like CLIP-score. Thirdly, all these datasets are restricted to a single low resolution and fixed aspect ratio, limiting the versatility to handle real-world use cases. In this paper, we present \omniedit, which is an omnipotent editor to handle seven different image editing tasks with any aspect ratio seamlessly. Our contribution is in four folds: (1) \omniedit is trained by utilizing the supervision from seven different specialist models to ensure task coverage. (2) we utilize importance sampling based on the scores provided by large multimodal models (like GPT-4o) instead of CLIP-score to improve the data quality. (3) we propose a new editing architecture called EditNet to greatly boost the editing success rate, (4) we provide images with different aspect ratios to ensure that our model can handle any image in the wild. We have curated a test set containing images of different aspect ratios, accompanied by diverse instructions to cover different tasks. Both automatic evaluation and human evaluations demonstrate that \omniedit can significantly outperform all the existing models. Our code, dataset and model will be available at https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/OmniEdit/

Instruction-guided image editing has achieved remarkable progress, yet current models still face challenges with complex instructions and often require multiple samples to produce a desired result. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising solution, but its adoption in image editing has been severely hindered by the lack of a high-fidelity, efficient reward signal. In this work, we present a comprehensive methodology to overcome this barrier, centered on the development of a state-of-the-art, specialized reward model. We first introduce EditReward-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to systematically evaluate reward models on editing quality. Building on this benchmark, we develop EditScore, a series of reward models (7B-72B) for evaluating the quality of instruction-guided image editing. Through meticulous data curation and filtering, EditScore effectively matches the performance of learning proprietary VLMs. Furthermore, coupled with an effective self-ensemble strategy tailored for the generative nature of EditScore, our largest variant even surpasses GPT-5 in the benchmark. We then demonstrate that a high-fidelity reward model is the key to unlocking online RL for image editing. Our experiments show that, while even the largest open-source VLMs fail to provide an effective learning signal, EditScore enables efficient and robust policy optimization. Applying our framework to a strong base model, OmniGen2, results in a final model that shows a substantial and consistent performance uplift. Overall, this work provides the first systematic path from benchmarking to reward modeling to RL training in image editing, showing that a high-fidelity, domain-specialized reward model is the key to unlocking the full potential of RL in this domain.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to process visual inputs has given rise to general-purpose vision systems, unifying various vision-language (VL) tasks by instruction tuning. However, due to the enormous diversity in input-output formats in the vision domain, existing general-purpose models fail to successfully integrate segmentation and multi-image inputs with coarse-level tasks into a single framework. In this work, we introduce VistaLLM, a powerful visual system that addresses coarse- and fine-grained VL tasks over single and multiple input images using a unified framework. VistaLLM utilizes an instruction-guided image tokenizer that filters global embeddings using task descriptions to extract compressed and refined features from numerous images. Moreover, VistaLLM employs a gradient-aware adaptive sampling technique to represent binary segmentation masks as sequences, significantly improving over previously used uniform sampling. To bolster the desired capability of VistaLLM, we curate CoinIt, a comprehensive coarse-to-fine instruction tuning dataset with 6.8M samples. We also address the lack of multi-image grounding datasets by introducing a novel task, AttCoSeg (Attribute-level Co-Segmentation), which boosts the model's reasoning and grounding capability over multiple input images. Extensive experiments on a wide range of V- and VL tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of VistaLLM by achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines across all downstream tasks. Our project page can be found at https://shramanpramanick.github.io/VistaLLM/.

We introduce a large-scale dataset for instruction-guided vector image editing, consisting of over 270,000 pairs of SVG images paired with natural language edit instructions. Our dataset enables training and evaluation of models that modify vector graphics based on textual commands. We describe the data collection process, including image pairing via CLIP similarity and instruction generation with vision-language models. Initial experiments with state-of-the-art large language models reveal that current methods struggle to produce accurate and valid edits, underscoring the challenge of this task. To foster research in natural language-driven vector graphic generation and editing, we make our resources created within this work publicly available.

Recent advances in generative video models have led to significant breakthroughs in high-fidelity video synthesis, specifically in controllable video generation where the generated video is conditioned on text and action inputs, e.g., in instruction-guided video editing and world modeling in robotics. Despite these exceptional capabilities, controllable video models often hallucinate - generating future video frames that are misaligned with physical reality - which raises serious concerns in many tasks such as robot policy evaluation and planning. However, state-of-the-art video models lack the ability to assess and express their confidence, impeding hallucination mitigation. To rigorously address this challenge, we propose C3, an uncertainty quantification (UQ) method for training continuous-scale calibrated controllable video models for dense confidence estimation at the subpatch level, precisely localizing the uncertainty in each generated video frame. Our UQ method introduces three core innovations to empower video models to estimate their uncertainty. First, our method develops a novel framework that trains video models for correctness and calibration via strictly proper scoring rules. Second, we estimate the video model's uncertainty in latent space, avoiding training instability and prohibitive training costs associated with pixel-space approaches. Third, we map the dense latent-space uncertainty to interpretable pixel-level uncertainty in the RGB space for intuitive visualization, providing high-resolution uncertainty heatmaps that identify untrustworthy regions. Through extensive experiments on large-scale robot learning datasets (Bridge and DROID) and real-world evaluations, we demonstrate that our method not only provides calibrated uncertainty estimates within the training distribution, but also enables effective out-of-distribution detection.

Recent text-to-video generation approaches rely on computationally heavy training and require large-scale video datasets. In this paper, we introduce a new task of zero-shot text-to-video generation and propose a low-cost approach (without any training or optimization) by leveraging the power of existing text-to-image synthesis methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion), making them suitable for the video domain. Our key modifications include (i) enriching the latent codes of the generated frames with motion dynamics to keep the global scene and the background time consistent; and (ii) reprogramming frame-level self-attention using a new cross-frame attention of each frame on the first frame, to preserve the context, appearance, and identity of the foreground object. Experiments show that this leads to low overhead, yet high-quality and remarkably consistent video generation. Moreover, our approach is not limited to text-to-video synthesis but is also applicable to other tasks such as conditional and content-specialized video generation, and Video Instruct-Pix2Pix, i.e., instruction-guided video editing. As experiments show, our method performs comparably or sometimes better than recent approaches, despite not being trained on additional video data. Our code will be open sourced at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Text2Video-Zero .

Enabling robots to understand language instructions and react accordingly to visual perception has been a long-standing goal in the robotics research community. Achieving this goal requires cutting-edge advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics engineering. Thus, this paper mainly investigates the potential of integrating the most recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing visual grounding and robotic grasping system to enhance the effectiveness of the human-robot interaction. We introduce the WALL-E (Embodied Robotic WAiter load lifting with Large Language model) as an example of this integration. The system utilizes the LLM of ChatGPT to summarize the preference object of the users as a target instruction via the multi-round interactive dialogue. The target instruction is then forwarded to a visual grounding system for object pose and size estimation, following which the robot grasps the object accordingly. We deploy this LLM-empowered system on the physical robot to provide a more user-friendly interface for the instruction-guided grasping task. The further experimental results on various real-world scenarios demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed framework. See the project website at: https://star-uu-wang.github.io/WALL-E/

This report presents Wan, a comprehensive and open suite of video foundation models designed to push the boundaries of video generation. Built upon the mainstream diffusion transformer paradigm, Wan achieves significant advancements in generative capabilities through a series of innovations, including our novel VAE, scalable pre-training strategies, large-scale data curation, and automated evaluation metrics. These contributions collectively enhance the model's performance and versatility. Specifically, Wan is characterized by four key features: Leading Performance: The 14B model of Wan, trained on a vast dataset comprising billions of images and videos, demonstrates the scaling laws of video generation with respect to both data and model size. It consistently outperforms the existing open-source models as well as state-of-the-art commercial solutions across multiple internal and external benchmarks, demonstrating a clear and significant performance superiority. Comprehensiveness: Wan offers two capable models, i.e., 1.3B and 14B parameters, for efficiency and effectiveness respectively. It also covers multiple downstream applications, including image-to-video, instruction-guided video editing, and personal video generation, encompassing up to eight tasks. Consumer-Grade Efficiency: The 1.3B model demonstrates exceptional resource efficiency, requiring only 8.19 GB VRAM, making it compatible with a wide range of consumer-grade GPUs. Openness: We open-source the entire series of Wan, including source code and all models, with the goal of fostering the growth of the video generation community. This openness seeks to significantly expand the creative possibilities of video production in the industry and provide academia with high-quality video foundation models. All the code and models are available at https://github.com/Wan-Video/Wan2.1.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced multimodal learning but face high computational costs due to the large number of visual tokens, motivating token pruning to improve inference efficiency. The key challenge lies in identifying which tokens are truly important. Most existing approaches rely on attention-based criteria to estimate token importance. However, they inherently suffer from certain limitations, such as positional bias. In this work, we explore a new perspective on token importance based on token transitions in LVLMs. We observe that the transition of token representations provides a meaningful signal of semantic information. Based on this insight, we propose TransPrune, a training-free and efficient token pruning method. Specifically, TransPrune progressively prunes tokens by assessing their importance through a combination of Token Transition Variation (TTV)-which measures changes in both the magnitude and direction of token representations-and Instruction-Guided Attention (IGA), which measures how strongly the instruction attends to image tokens via attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransPrune achieves comparable multimodal performance to original LVLMs, such as LLaVA-v1.5 and LLaVA-Next, across eight benchmarks, while reducing inference TFLOPs by more than half. Moreover, TTV alone can serve as an effective criterion without relying on attention, achieving performance comparable to attention-based methods. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper at https://github.com/liaolea/TransPrune.

Generating visual instructions in a given context is essential for developing interactive world simulators. While prior works address this problem through either text-guided image manipulation or video prediction, these tasks are typically treated in isolation. This separation reveals a fundamental issue: image manipulation methods overlook how actions unfold over time, while video prediction models often ignore the intended outcomes. To this end, we propose ShowMe, a unified framework that enables both tasks by selectively activating the spatial and temporal components of video diffusion models. In addition, we introduce structure and motion consistency rewards to improve structural fidelity and temporal coherence. Notably, this unification brings dual benefits: the spatial knowledge gained through video pretraining enhances contextual consistency and realism in non-rigid image edits, while the instruction-guided manipulation stage equips the model with stronger goal-oriented reasoning for video prediction. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms expert models in both instructional image and video generation, highlighting the strength of video diffusion models as a unified action-object state transformer.

This paper proposes ConsistDreamer - a novel framework that lifts 2D diffusion models with 3D awareness and 3D consistency, thus enabling high-fidelity instruction-guided scene editing. To overcome the fundamental limitation of missing 3D consistency in 2D diffusion models, our key insight is to introduce three synergetic strategies that augment the input of the 2D diffusion model to become 3D-aware and to explicitly enforce 3D consistency during the training process. Specifically, we design surrounding views as context-rich input for the 2D diffusion model, and generate 3D-consistent, structured noise instead of image-independent noise. Moreover, we introduce self-supervised consistency-enforcing training within the per-scene editing procedure. Extensive evaluation shows that our ConsistDreamer achieves state-of-the-art performance for instruction-guided scene editing across various scenes and editing instructions, particularly in complicated large-scale indoor scenes from ScanNet++, with significantly improved sharpness and fine-grained textures. Notably, ConsistDreamer stands as the first work capable of successfully editing complex (e.g., plaid/checkered) patterns. Our project page is at immortalco.github.io/ConsistDreamer.

Recent advancements in large multimodal models like GPT-4o have set a new standard for high-fidelity, instruction-guided image editing. However, the proprietary nature of these models and their training data creates a significant barrier for open-source research. To bridge this gap, we introduce GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M, a publicly available, large-scale image-editing corpus containing more than 1.5 million high-quality triplets (instruction, source image, edited image). We systematically construct this dataset by leveraging the versatile capabilities of GPT-4o to unify and refine three popular image-editing datasets: OmniEdit, HQ-Edit, and UltraEdit. Specifically, our methodology involves 1) regenerating output images to enhance visual quality and instruction alignment, and 2) selectively rewriting prompts to improve semantic clarity. To validate the efficacy of our dataset, we fine-tune advanced open-source models on GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M. The empirical results are exciting, e.g., the fine-tuned FluxKontext achieves highly competitive performance across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, including 7.24 on GEdit-EN, 3.80 on ImgEdit-Full, and 8.78 on Complex-Edit, showing stronger instruction following and higher perceptual quality while maintaining identity. These scores markedly exceed all previously published open-source methods and substantially narrow the gap to leading proprietary models. We hope the full release of GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M can help to catalyze further open research in instruction-guided image editing.

A broad range of NLP tasks involve selecting relevant text spans from given source texts. Despite this shared objective, such content selection tasks have traditionally been studied in isolation, each with its own modeling approaches, datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this work, we propose instruction-guided content selection (IGCS) as a beneficial unified framework for such settings, where the task definition and any instance-specific request are encapsulated as instructions to a language model. To promote this framework, we introduce , the first unified benchmark covering diverse content selection tasks. Further, we create a large generic synthetic dataset that can be leveraged for diverse content selection tasks, and show that transfer learning with these datasets often boosts performance, whether dedicated training for the targeted task is available or not. Finally, we address generic inference time issues that arise in LLM-based modeling of content selection, assess a generic evaluation metric, and overall propose the utility of our resources and methods for future content selection models. Models and datasets available at https://github.com/shmuelamar/igcs.

Image editing has advanced significantly with the development of diffusion models using both inversion-based and instruction-based methods. However, current inversion-based approaches struggle with big modifications (e.g., adding or removing objects) due to the structured nature of inversion noise, which hinders substantial changes. Meanwhile, instruction-based methods often constrain users to black-box operations, limiting direct interaction for specifying editing regions and intensity. To address these limitations, we propose BrushEdit, a novel inpainting-based instruction-guided image editing paradigm, which leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and image inpainting models to enable autonomous, user-friendly, and interactive free-form instruction editing. Specifically, we devise a system enabling free-form instruction editing by integrating MLLMs and a dual-branch image inpainting model in an agent-cooperative framework to perform editing category classification, main object identification, mask acquisition, and editing area inpainting. Extensive experiments show that our framework effectively combines MLLMs and inpainting models, achieving superior performance across seven metrics including mask region preservation and editing effect coherence.

In this technical report, we introduce SEED-Data-Edit: a unique hybrid dataset for instruction-guided image editing, which aims to facilitate image manipulation using open-form language. SEED-Data-Edit is composed of three distinct types of data: (1) High-quality editing data produced by an automated pipeline, ensuring a substantial volume of diverse image editing pairs. (2) Real-world scenario data collected from the internet, which captures the intricacies of user intentions for promoting the practical application of image editing in the real world. (3) High-precision multi-turn editing data annotated by humans, which involves multiple rounds of edits for simulating iterative editing processes. The combination of these diverse data sources makes SEED-Data-Edit a comprehensive and versatile dataset for training language-guided image editing model. We fine-tune a pretrained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that unifies comprehension and generation with SEED-Data-Edit. The instruction tuned model demonstrates promising results, indicating the potential and effectiveness of SEED-Data-Edit in advancing the field of instructional image editing. The datasets are released in https://huggingface.co/datasets/AILab-CVC/SEED-Data-Edit.

Large-scale language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have gained attention for their impressive conversational and generative capabilities. However, the creation of supervised paired question-answering data for instruction tuning presents formidable challenges. This endeavor necessitates substantial human effort for data annotation and wrestles with issues concerning data quality, diversity, accuracy, and other related factors. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce an innovative framework named Self-QA, which replaces the traditional practice of human-written instruction seeds with a vast amount of unsupervised knowledge, enabling the model to generate a larger quantity of correct and domain-specific instruction data. The effectiveness of our proposed method is demonstrated through experiments conducted on unsupervised corpora from various domains.

Robotic manipulation is often challenging due to the long-horizon tasks and the complex object relationships. A common solution is to develop a task and motion planning framework that integrates planning for high-level task and low-level motion. Recently, inspired by the powerful reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based planning approaches have achieved remarkable progress. However, these methods still heavily rely on expert-specific knowledge, often generating invalid plans for unseen and unfamiliar tasks. To address this issue, we propose an innovative language-guided symbolic task planning (LM-SymOpt) framework with optimization. It is the first expert-free planning framework since we combine the world knowledge from LLMs with formal reasoning, resulting in improved generalization capability to new tasks. Specifically, differ to most existing work, our LM-SymOpt employs LLMs to translate natural language instructions into symbolic representations, thereby representing actions as high-level symbols and reducing the search space for planning. Next, after evaluating the action probability of completing the task using LLMs, a weighted random sampling method is introduced to generate candidate plans. Their feasibility is assessed through symbolic reasoning and their cost efficiency is then evaluated using trajectory optimization for selecting the optimal planning. Our experimental results show that LM-SymOpt outperforms existing LLM-based planning approaches.

Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension.

Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generate responses that contradict verifiable facts, i.e., unfaithful hallucination content. Existing efforts generally focus on optimizing model parameters or editing semantic representations, which compromise the internal factual knowledge of target LLMs. In addition, hallucinations typically exhibit multifaceted patterns in downstream tasks, limiting the model's holistic performance across tasks. In this paper, we propose a Comparator-driven Decoding-Time (CDT) framework to alleviate the response hallucination. Firstly, we construct hallucinatory and truthful comparators with multi-task fine-tuning samples. In this case, we present an instruction prototype-guided mixture of experts strategy to enhance the ability of the corresponding comparators to capture different hallucination or truthfulness patterns in distinct task instructions. CDT constrains next-token predictions to factuality-robust distributions by contrasting the logit differences between the target LLMs and these comparators. Systematic experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that our framework can significantly improve the model performance and response factuality.

Data contamination, i.e., the presence of test data from downstream tasks in the training data of large language models (LLMs), is a potential major issue in measuring LLMs' real effectiveness on other tasks. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for identifying data contamination within LLMs. At its core, our approach starts by identifying potential contamination at the instance level; using this information, our approach then assesses wider contamination at the partition level. To estimate contamination of individual instances, we employ "guided instruction:" a prompt consisting of the dataset name, partition type, and the random-length initial segment of a reference instance, asking the LLM to complete it. An instance is flagged as contaminated if the LLM's output either exactly or nearly matches the latter segment of the reference. To understand if an entire partition is contaminated, we propose two ideas. The first idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if the average overlap score with the reference instances (as measured by ROUGE-L or BLEURT) is statistically significantly better with the completions from guided instruction compared to a "general instruction" that does not include the dataset and partition name. The second idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if a classifier based on GPT-4 with few-shot in-context learning prompt marks multiple generated completions as exact/near-exact matches of the corresponding reference instances. Our best method achieves an accuracy between 92% and 100% in detecting if an LLM is contaminated with seven datasets, containing train and test/validation partitions, when contrasted with manual evaluation by human experts. Further, our findings indicate that GPT-4 is contaminated with AG News, WNLI, and XSum datasets.

Remote sensing image-text retrieval plays a crucial role in remote sensing interpretation, yet remains challenging under both closed-domain and open-domain scenarios due to semantic noise and domain shifts. To address these issues, we propose a visual prior-guided vision-language model, PriorCLIP, which leverages visual priors for unbiased representation learning and adaptive vision-language alignment. In the closed-domain setting, PriorCLIP introduces two Progressive Attention Encoder (PAE) structures: Spatial-PAE constructs a belief matrix with instruction embeddings to filter key features and mitigate semantic bias. At the same time, Temporal-PAE exploits cyclic activation across time steps to enhance text representation. For the open-domain setting, we design a two-stage prior representation learning strategy, consisting of large-scale pre-training on coarse-grained image-text pairs, followed by fine-tuning on fine-grained pairs using vision-instruction, which enables robust retrieval across long-tail concepts and vocabulary shifts. Furthermore, a cluster-based symmetric contrastive Attribution Loss is proposed to constrain inter-class relations and alleviate semantic confusion in the shared embedding space. Extensive experiments on RSICD and RSITMD benchmarks demonstrate that PriorCLIP achieves substantial improvements, outperforming existing methods by 4.9% and 4.0% in closed-domain retrieval, and by 7.3% and 9.4% in open-domain retrieval, respectively.

Low-resource machine translation remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), which often lack exposure to these languages during pretraining and have limited parallel data for fine-tuning. We propose a novel approach that enhances translation for low-resource languages by integrating an external dictionary tool and training models end-to-end using reinforcement learning, in addition to supervised fine-tuning. Focusing on the Spanish-Wayuunaiki language pair, we frame translation as a tool-augmented decision-making problem in which the model can selectively consult a bilingual dictionary during generation. Our method combines supervised instruction tuning with Guided Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling the model to learn both when and how to use the tool effectively. BLEU similarity scores are used as rewards to guide this learning process. Preliminary results show that our tool-augmented models achieve up to +3.37 BLEU improvement over previous work, and a 18% relative gain compared to a supervised baseline without dictionary access, on the Spanish-Wayuunaiki test set from the AmericasNLP 2025 Shared Task. We also conduct ablation studies to assess the effects of model architecture and training strategy, comparing Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct with other models such as LLaMA and a prior NLLB-based system. These findings highlight the promise of combining LLMs with external tools and the role of reinforcement learning in improving translation quality in low-resource language settings.

Evaluating the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions has heavily relied on a powerful LLM as the judge, introducing unresolved biases that deviate the judgments from human judges. In this work, we reevaluate various choices for automatic evaluation on a wide range of instruction-following tasks. We experiment with methods that leverage human-written responses and observe that they enhance the reliability of automatic evaluations across a wide range of tasks, resulting in up to a 3.2% improvement in agreement with human judges. We also discovered that human-written responses offer an orthogonal perspective to model-generated responses in following instructions and should be used as an additional context when comparing model responses. Based on these observations, we develop a new evaluation benchmark, Human Response-Guided Evaluation of Instruction Following (HREF), comprising 4,258 samples across 11 task categories with a composite evaluation setup, employing a composite evaluation setup that selects the most reliable method for each category. In addition to providing reliable evaluation, HREF emphasizes individual task performance and is free from contamination. Finally, we study the impact of key design choices in HREF, including the size of the evaluation set, the judge model, the baseline model, and the prompt template. We host a live leaderboard that evaluates LLMs on the private evaluation set of HREF.

Instruction-based image editing improves the controllability and flexibility of image manipulation via natural commands without elaborate descriptions or regional masks. However, human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation via LMs. We investigate how MLLMs facilitate edit instructions and present MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE). MGIE learns to derive expressive instructions and provides explicit guidance. The editing model jointly captures this visual imagination and performs manipulation through end-to-end training. We evaluate various aspects of Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that expressive instructions are crucial to instruction-based image editing, and our MGIE can lead to a notable improvement in automatic metrics and human evaluation while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

Current instruction data synthesis methods primarily focus on single-turn instructions and often neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates in extended conversations. To address this limitation, we propose Skeleton-Guided Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation, a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent. It operates in two stages: (1) Intent Modeling, which captures the global structure of human dialogues by assigning each conversation to one of nine well-defined intent trajectories, ensuring a coherent and goal-oriented information flow; and (2) Skeleton Generation, which constructs a structurally grounded sequence of user queries aligned with the modeled intent, thereby serving as a scaffold that constrains and guides the downstream instruction synthesis process. Based on this process, we construct ConsistentChat, a multi-turn instruction dataset with approximately 15,000 multi-turn conversations and 224,392 utterances. Experiments on the Light, Topdial, and MT-Eval benchmarks show that models fine-tuned on ConsistentChat achieve a 20-30% improvement in chat consistency and up to a 15% increase in task success rate, significantly outperforming models trained on existing single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets.

Recent voxel-wise multimodal brain encoding studies have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit a higher degree of brain alignment compared to unimodal models in both unimodal and multimodal stimulus settings. More recently, instruction-tuned multimodal models have shown to generate task-specific representations that align strongly with brain activity. However, prior work evaluating the brain alignment of MLLMs has primarily focused on unimodal settings or relied on non-instruction-tuned multimodal models for multimodal stimuli. To address this gap, we investigated brain alignment, that is, measuring the degree of predictivity of neural activity recorded while participants were watching naturalistic movies (video along with audio) with representations derived from MLLMs. We utilized instruction-specific embeddings from six video and two audio instruction-tuned MLLMs. Experiments with 13 video task-specific instructions show that instruction-tuned video MLLMs significantly outperform non-instruction-tuned multimodal (by 15%) and unimodal models (by 20%). Our evaluation of MLLMs for both video and audio tasks using language-guided instructions shows clear disentanglement in task-specific representations from MLLMs, leading to precise differentiation of multimodal functional processing in the brain. We also find that MLLM layers align hierarchically with the brain, with early sensory areas showing strong alignment with early layers, while higher-level visual and language regions align more with middle to late layers. These findings provide clear evidence for the role of task-specific instructions in improving the alignment between brain activity and MLLMs, and open new avenues for mapping joint information processing in both the systems. We make the code publicly available [https://github.com/subbareddy248/mllm_videos].

Large language models (LLMs) are aligned with human preferences by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Effective data sampling is crucial for RLHF, as it determines the efficiency of model training, ensuring that models learn from the informative samples. To achieve better data generation, we propose a new sampling method called Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling (PRS). PRS frames the response generation as an optimization process to the explicitly specified user preference described in natural language. It employs a tree-based generation framework to enable an efficient sampling process, which guides the direction of generation through preference and better explores the sampling space with adaptive self-refinement. Notably, PRS can align LLMs to diverse preferences. We study preference-controlled text generation for instruction following and keyword-focused document summarization. Our findings indicate that PRS, across different LLM policies, generates training data with much higher rewards than strong baselines. PRS also excels in post-RL training.

Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit remarkable multi-tasking ability by learning mixed instruction datasets. However, novel tasks would be encountered sequentially in dynamic world, which urges for equipping LMMs with multimodal continual instruction learning (MCIT) ability especially for diverse and challenging generative tasks. Existing MCIT methods do not fully exploit the unique attribute of LMMs and often gain performance at the expense of efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning framework for MCIT to effectively alleviate forgetting of previous knowledge while managing computational complexity with natural image-text supervision. Concretely, we learn prompts for each task and exploit efficient prompt fusion for knowledge transfer and prompt selection for complexity management with dual-modality guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial +14.26% performance gain on MCIT benchmarks with remarkable times 1.42 inference speed free from growing computation. Code is available at https://github.com/AuroraZengfh/ModalPrompt.

Instruction-based language modeling has received significant attention in pretrained language models. However, the efficiency of instruction engineering remains low and hinders the development of instruction studies. Recent studies have focused on automating instruction generation, but they primarily aim to improve performance without considering other crucial objectives that impact instruction quality, such as instruction length and perplexity. Therefore, we propose a novel approach (i.e., InstOptima) that treats instruction generation as an evolutionary multi-objective optimization problem. In contrast to text edition-based methods, our approach utilizes a large language model (LLM) to simulate instruction operators, including mutation and crossover. Furthermore, we introduce an objective-guided mechanism for these operators, allowing the LLM to comprehend the objectives and enhance the quality of the generated instructions. Experimental results demonstrate improved fine-tuning performance and the generation of a diverse set of high-quality instructions.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) is a promising approach to progressively elicit the model's intelligence during inference. Recently, training-based TTS methods, such as continued reinforcement learning (RL), have further surged in popularity, while training-free TTS methods are gradually fading from prominence. However, the additional computation overhead of training amplifies the burden on test-time scaling. In this paper, we focus on training-free TTS methods for reasoning. We first design Conditional Step-level Self-refinement, a fine-grained sequential scaling method guided by process verification. On top of its effectiveness, we further combine it with other classical parallel scaling methods at the step level, to introduce a novel inference paradigm called Hybrid Test-Time Scaling. Extensive experiments on five instruction-tuned LLMs across different scales (3B-14B) and families demonstrate that hybrid strategy incorporating various training-free TTS methods at a fine granularity has considerable potential for expanding the reasoning performance boundaries of LLMs.

In the realm of Large Language Models, the balance between instruction data quality and quantity has become a focal point. Recognizing this, we introduce a self-guided methodology for LLMs to autonomously discern and select cherry samples from vast open-source datasets, effectively minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. Our key innovation, the Instruction-Following Difficulty (IFD) metric, emerges as a pivotal tool to identify discrepancies between a model's expected responses and its autonomous generation prowess. Through the adept application of IFD, cherry samples are pinpointed, leading to a marked uptick in model training efficiency. Empirical validations on renowned datasets like Alpaca and WizardLM underpin our findings; with a mere 10% of conventional data input, our strategy showcases improved results. This synthesis of self-guided cherry-picking and the IFD metric signifies a transformative leap in the optimization of LLMs, promising both efficiency and resource-conscious advancements. Codes, data, and models are available: https://github.com/MingLiiii/Cherry_LLM

Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training exhausts an ever growing compute budget, yet recent research has demonstrated that careful document selection enables comparable model quality with only a fraction of the FLOPs. Inspired by efforts suggesting that domain-specific training document selection is in fact an interpretable process [Gunasekar et al., 2023], as well as research showing that instruction-finetuned LLMs are adept zero-shot data labelers [Gilardi et al.,2023], we explore a promising direction for scalable general-domain document selection; employing a prompted LLM as a document grader, we distill quality labels into a classifier model, which is applied at scale to a large, and already heavily-filtered, web-crawl-derived corpus autonomously. Following the guidance of this classifier, we drop 75% of the corpus and train LLMs on the remaining data. Results across multiple benchmarks show that: 1. Filtering allows us to quality-match a model trained on the full corpus across diverse benchmarks with at most 70% of the FLOPs, 2. More capable LLM labelers and classifier models lead to better results that are less sensitive to the labeler's prompt, 3. In-context learning helps to boost the performance of less-capable labeling models. In all cases we use open-source datasets, models, recipes, and evaluation frameworks, so that results can be reproduced by the community.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved guided image generation with diffusion models by directly optimizing rewards that capture image quality, aesthetics, and instruction following capabilities. However, the resulting generative policies inherit the same iterative sampling process of diffusion models that causes slow generation. To overcome this limitation, consistency models proposed learning a new class of generative models that directly map noise to data, resulting in a model that can generate an image in as few as one sampling iteration. In this work, to optimize text-to-image generative models for task specific rewards and enable fast training and inference, we propose a framework for fine-tuning consistency models via RL. Our framework, called Reinforcement Learning for Consistency Model (RLCM), frames the iterative inference process of a consistency model as an RL procedure. RLCM improves upon RL fine-tuned diffusion models on text-to-image generation capabilities and trades computation during inference time for sample quality. Experimentally, we show that RLCM can adapt text-to-image consistency models to objectives that are challenging to express with prompting, such as image compressibility, and those derived from human feedback, such as aesthetic quality. Comparing to RL finetuned diffusion models, RLCM trains significantly faster, improves the quality of the generation measured under the reward objectives, and speeds up the inference procedure by generating high quality images with as few as two inference steps. Our code is available at https://rlcm.owenoertell.com

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically follow a two-stage training paradigm-pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. Recently, preference optimization, derived from the language domain, has emerged as an effective post-training reinforcement strategy to enhance capabilities of LVLMs. However, constructing high-quality human-annotated preference data and developing robust reward models to mimic these preferences are both costly and challenging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Vision-R1, a novel vision-guided R1-like reinforcement learning algorithm for LVLMs that rewards models with definitive vision feedback. It only leverages curated instruction data, eliminating the need for specialized reward models and handcrafted preference datasets. We incorporate a criterion-driven reward function that further integrates multi-dimensional feedback to evaluate model completions comprehensively based on the vision task logic. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive rule refinement strategy that dynamically adjusts the reward criteria during training, enabling continuous model improvement and mitigating reward hacking. Extensive experiments on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning the 7B LVLMs with Vision-R1 achieves consistent performance gains, with even up to 50% improvement and surpassing the state-of-the-art 10x size model.

We present CM3Leon (pronounced "Chameleon"), a retrieval-augmented, token-based, decoder-only multi-modal language model capable of generating and infilling both text and images. CM3Leon uses the CM3 multi-modal architecture but additionally shows the extreme benefits of scaling up and tuning on more diverse instruction-style data. It is the first multi-modal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. It is also a general-purpose model that can do both text-to-image and image-to-text generation, allowing us to introduce self-contained contrastive decoding methods that produce high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this recipe is highly effective for multi-modal models. CM3Leon achieves state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image generation with 5x less training compute than comparable methods (zero-shot MS-COCO FID of 4.88). After SFT, CM3Leon can also demonstrate unprecedented levels of controllability in tasks ranging from language-guided image editing to image-controlled generation and segmentation.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) aim to improve multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) by supervising intermediate steps and identifying errors. However, building effective PRMs remains challenging due to the lack of scalable, high-quality annotations. Existing approaches rely on costly human labeling, LLM-based self-evaluation that is prone to hallucination, or Monte Carlo (MC) estimation, which infers step quality solely from rollout outcomes and often introduces noisy, misaligned supervision due to credit misattribution. These issues result in three core limitations: noisy rewards, low factual fidelity, and misalignment with step-level reasoning objectives. To address these challenges, we introduce GroundedPRM, a tree-guided and fidelity-aware framework for automatic process supervision. To reduce reward noise and enable fine-grained credit assignment, we construct structured reasoning paths via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). To eliminate hallucinated supervision, we validate each intermediate step using an external tool, providing execution-grounded correctness signals. To combine both step-level validation and global outcome assessment, we design a hybrid reward aggregation mechanism that fuses tool-based verification with MCTS-derived feedback. Finally, we format the reward signal into a rationale-enhanced, generative structure to promote interpretability and compatibility with instruction-tuned LLMs. GroundedPRM is trained on only 40K automatically labeled samples, amounting to just 10% of the data used by the best-performing PRM trained with auto-labeled supervision. Nevertheless, it achieves up to a 26% relative improvement in average performance on ProcessBench. When used for reward-guided greedy search, GroundedPRM outperforms even PRMs trained with human-labeled supervision, offering a scalable and verifiable path toward high-quality process-level reasoning.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework has shown promising potential in knowledge-intensive question answering (QA) by retrieving external corpus and generating based on augmented context. However, existing approaches only consider the query itself, neither specifying the retrieval preferences for the retrievers nor informing the generators of how to refer to the retrieved documents for the answers, which poses a significant challenge to the QA performance. To address these issues, we propose Rule-Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LMs, which explicitly introduces symbolic rules as demonstrations for in-context learning (RuleRAG-ICL) to guide retrievers to retrieve logically related documents in the directions of rules and uniformly guide generators to generate answers attributed by the guidance of the same set of rules. Moreover, the combination of queries and rules can be further used as supervised fine-tuning data to update retrievers and generators (RuleRAG-FT) to achieve better rule-based instruction following capability, leading to retrieve more supportive results and generate more acceptable answers. To emphasize the attribution of rules, we construct five rule-aware QA benchmarks, including three temporal and two static scenarios, and equip RuleRAG with several kinds of retrievers and generators. Experiments demonstrate that training-free RuleRAG-ICL effectively improves the retrieval quality of +89.2% in Recall@10 scores and generation accuracy of +103.1% in exact match scores over standard RAG on average across the five benchmarks, and further fine-tuned RuleRAG-FT consistently yields more significant performance enhancement. Extensive analyses indicate that RuleRAG scales well with increasing numbers of retrieved documents and exhibits generalization ability for untrained rules.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can cause them to lose their general capabilities. However, the intrinsic mechanisms behind such forgetting remain unexplored. In this paper, we begin by examining this phenomenon by focusing on knowledge understanding and instruction following, with the latter identified as the main contributor to forgetting during fine-tuning. Consequently, we propose the Instruction Vector (IV) framework to capture model representations highly related to specific instruction-following capabilities, thereby making it possible to understand model-intrinsic forgetting. Through the analysis of IV dynamics pre and post-training, we suggest that fine-tuning mostly adds specialized reasoning patterns instead of erasing previous skills, which may appear as forgetting. Building on this insight, we develop IV-guided training, which aims to preserve original computation graph, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Empirical tests on three benchmarks confirm the efficacy of this new approach, supporting the relationship between IVs and forgetting. Our code will be made available soon.

In ophthalmic surgery, developing an AI system capable of interpreting surgical videos and predicting subsequent operations requires numerous ophthalmic surgical videos with high-quality annotations, which are difficult to collect due to privacy concerns and labor consumption. Text-guided video generation (T2V) emerges as a promising solution to overcome this issue by generating ophthalmic surgical videos based on surgeon instructions. In this paper, we present Ophora, a pioneering model that can generate ophthalmic surgical videos following natural language instructions. To construct Ophora, we first propose a Comprehensive Data Curation pipeline to convert narrative ophthalmic surgical videos into a large-scale, high-quality dataset comprising over 160K video-instruction pairs, Ophora-160K. Then, we propose a Progressive Video-Instruction Tuning scheme to transfer rich spatial-temporal knowledge from a T2V model pre-trained on natural video-text datasets for privacy-preserved ophthalmic surgical video generation based on Ophora-160K. Experiments on video quality evaluation via quantitative analysis and ophthalmologist feedback demonstrate that Ophora can generate realistic and reliable ophthalmic surgical videos based on surgeon instructions. We also validate the capability of Ophora for empowering downstream tasks of ophthalmic surgical workflow understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/mar-cry/Ophora.

Despite the remarkable success of LLMs in English, there is a significant gap in performance in non-English languages. In order to address this, we introduce a novel recipe for creating a multilingual synthetic instruction tuning dataset, sPhinX, which is created by selectively translating instruction response pairs from English into 50 languages. We test the effectiveness of sPhinX by using it to fine-tune two state-of-the-art models, Phi-3-small and Mistral-7B and then evaluating them across a comprehensive suite of multilingual benchmarks that test reasoning, question answering, and reading comprehension. Our results show that Phi-3-small and Mistral-7B fine-tuned with sPhinX perform better on an average by 4.2%pt and 5%pt respectively as compared to the baselines. We also devise a strategy to incorporate N-shot examples in each fine-tuning sample which further boosts the performance of these models by 3%pt and 10%pt respectively. Additionally, sPhinX also outperforms other multilingual instruction tuning datasets on the same benchmarks along with being sample efficient and diverse, thereby reducing dataset creation costs. Additionally, instruction tuning with sPhinX does not lead to regression on most standard LLM benchmarks.

This paper introduces VisuCraft, a novel framework designed to significantly enhance the capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in complex visual-guided creative content generation. Existing LVLMs often exhibit limitations in maintaining high visual fidelity, genuine creativity, and precise adherence to nuanced user instructions when generating long-form texts. VisuCraft addresses these challenges by integrating a multimodal structured information extractor (E) and a dynamic prompt generation module (G). The extractor distills fine-grained visual attributes from input images into a rich, structured representation, which the dynamic prompt module then combines with user instructions to create highly optimized prompts for underlying LVLMs (e.g., LLaVA, InstructBLIP). Evaluated on the self-constructed ImageStoryGen-500K dataset using VisuGen Metrics (Visual Grounding, Creativity, and Instruction Adherence), VisuCraft consistently outperforms baseline LVLMs across tasks like story generation and poetry composition. Our results demonstrate remarkable improvements, particularly in creativity and instruction adherence, validating VisuCraft's effectiveness in producing imaginative, visually grounded, and user-aligned long-form creative text. This work unlocks new potential for LVLMs in sophisticated creative AI applications.

Instruction-following is a fundamental capability of language models, requiring the model to recognize even the most subtle requirements in the instructions and accurately reflect them in its output. Such an ability is well-suited for and often optimized by preference learning. However, existing methods often directly sample multiple independent responses from the model when creating preference pairs. Such practice can introduce content variations irrelevant to whether the instruction is precisely followed (e.g., different expressions about the same semantic), interfering with the goal of teaching models to recognize the key differences that lead to improved instruction following. In light of this, we introduce SPaR, a self-play framework integrating tree-search self-refinement to yield valid and comparable preference pairs free from distractions. By playing against itself, an LLM employs a tree-search strategy to refine its previous responses with respect to the instruction while minimizing unnecessary variations. Our experiments show that a LLaMA3-8B model, trained over three iterations guided by SPaR, surpasses GPT-4-Turbo on the IFEval benchmark without losing general capabilities. Furthermore, SPaR demonstrates promising scalability and transferability, greatly enhancing models like GLM-4-9B and LLaMA3-70B. We also identify how inference scaling in tree search would impact model performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/SPaR.

Unlocking spatial reasoning in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) is crucial for enabling intelligent interaction with 3D environments. While prior efforts often rely on explicit 3D inputs or specialized model architectures, we ask: can LMMs reason about 3D space using only structured 2D representations derived from perception? We introduce Struct2D, a perception-guided prompting framework that combines bird's-eye-view (BEV) images with object marks and object-centric metadata, optionally incorporating egocentric keyframes when needed. Using Struct2D, we conduct an in-depth zero-shot analysis of closed-source LMMs (e.g., GPT-o3) and find that they exhibit surprisingly strong spatial reasoning abilities when provided with structured 2D inputs, effectively handling tasks such as relative direction estimation and route planning. Building on these insights, we construct Struct2D-Set, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset with 200K fine-grained QA pairs across eight spatial reasoning categories, generated automatically from 3D indoor scenes. We fine-tune an open-source LMM (Qwen2.5VL) on Struct2D-Set, achieving competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, including 3D question answering, dense captioning, and object grounding. Our approach demonstrates that structured 2D inputs can effectively bridge perception and language reasoning in LMMs-without requiring explicit 3D representations as input. We will release both our code and dataset to support future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to produce safe, helpful, and honest content during interaction with human users, but they frequently fail to align with such values when given flawed instructions, e.g., missing context, ambiguous directives, or inappropriate tone, leaving substantial room for improvement along multiple dimensions. A cost-effective yet high-impact way is to pre-align instructions before the model begins decoding. Existing approaches either rely on prohibitive test-time search costs or end-to-end model rewrite, which is powered by a customized training corpus with unclear objectives. In this work, we demonstrate that the goal of efficient and effective preference alignment can be achieved by P-Aligner, a lightweight module generating instructions that preserve the original intents while being expressed in a more human-preferred form. P-Aligner is trained on UltraPrompt, a new dataset synthesized via a proposed principle-guided pipeline using Monte-Carlo Tree Search, which systematically explores the space of candidate instructions that are closely tied to human preference. Experiments across different methods show that P-Aligner generally outperforms strong baselines across various models and benchmarks, including average win-rate gains of 28.35% and 8.69% on GPT-4-turbo and Gemma-2-SimPO, respectively. Further analyses validate its effectiveness and efficiency through multiple perspectives, including data quality, search strategies, iterative deployment, and time overhead.

Instruction finetuning (IFT) is critical for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions. Numerous effective IFT datasets have been proposed in the recent past, but most focus on high resource languages such as English. In this work, we propose a fully synthetic, novel taxonomy (Evol) guided Multilingual, Multi-turn instruction finetuning dataset, called M2Lingual, to better align LLMs on a diverse set of languages and tasks. M2Lingual contains a total of 182K IFT pairs that are built upon diverse seeds, covering 70 languages, 17 NLP tasks and general instruction-response pairs. LLMs finetuned with M2Lingual substantially outperform the majority of existing multilingual IFT datasets. Importantly, LLMs trained with M2Lingual consistently achieve competitive results across a wide variety of evaluation benchmarks compared to existing multilingual IFT datasets. Specifically, LLMs finetuned with M2Lingual achieve strong performance on our translated multilingual, multi-turn evaluation benchmark as well as a wide variety of multilingual tasks. Thus we contribute, and the 2 step Evol taxonomy used for its creation. M2Lingual repository - https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow-AI/M2Lingual

Readability metrics and standards such as Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) exist to guide teachers and educators to properly assess the complexity of educational materials before administering them for classroom use. In this study, we select a diverse set of open and closed-source instruction-tuned language models and investigate their performances in writing story completions and simplifying narratives--tasks that teachers perform--using standard-guided prompts controlling text readability. Our extensive findings provide empirical proof of how globally recognized models like ChatGPT may be considered less effective and may require more refined prompts for these generative tasks compared to other open-sourced models such as BLOOMZ and FlanT5--which have shown promising results.

Multimodal embeddings are widely used in downstream tasks such as multimodal retrieval, enabling alignment of interleaved modalities in a shared representation space. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can serve as strong embedding extractors, existing approaches treat embedding extraction as a direct encoding step, overlooking the fact that MLLMs possess the generative capability for reasoning that could be leveraged to enhance representation quality. In this work, we explore how to explicitly incorporate reasoning into the embedding process. To this end, we propose Reasoning Guided Embeddings (RGE), which preserves the generative rationale process of MLLMs and couples it with contrastive training. Our method first enables the model to perform structured rationale generation conditioned on the instruction, and then extracts representations after reasoning has unfolded. This simple design enhances the context-conditional inference signals within the embedding, leading to improved multimodal representation quality. Experiments on the MMEB benchmark show that reasoning-guided conditioning improves multimodal retrieval performance by 4.9% over the non-reasoning baseline, confirming that explicit reasoning can effectively enhance embedding quality.

Text-guided color editing in images and videos is a fundamental yet unsolved problem, requiring fine-grained manipulation of color attributes, including albedo, light source color, and ambient lighting, while preserving physical consistency in geometry, material properties, and light-matter interactions. Existing training-free methods offer broad applicability across editing tasks but struggle with precise color control and often introduce visual inconsistency in both edited and non-edited regions. In this work, we present ColorCtrl, a training-free color editing method that leverages the attention mechanisms of modern Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiT). By disentangling structure and color through targeted manipulation of attention maps and value tokens, our method enables accurate and consistent color editing, along with word-level control of attribute intensity. Our method modifies only the intended regions specified by the prompt, leaving unrelated areas untouched. Extensive experiments on both SD3 and FLUX.1-dev demonstrate that ColorCtrl outperforms existing training-free approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performances in both edit quality and consistency. Furthermore, our method surpasses strong commercial models such as FLUX.1 Kontext Max and GPT-4o Image Generation in terms of consistency. When extended to video models like CogVideoX, our approach exhibits greater advantages, particularly in maintaining temporal coherence and editing stability. Finally, our method also generalizes to instruction-based editing diffusion models such as Step1X-Edit and FLUX.1 Kontext dev, further demonstrating its versatility.

Reward models are central to aligning LLMs with human preferences, but they are costly to train, requiring large-scale human-labeled preference data and powerful pretrained LLM backbones. Meanwhile, the increasing availability of high-quality synthetic instruction-following datasets raises the question: can simpler, reference-based metrics serve as viable alternatives to reward models during RL-based alignment? In this paper, we show first that BLEU, a basic string-matching metric, surprisingly matches strong reward models in agreement with human preferences on general instruction-following datasets. Based on this insight, we develop BLEUBERI, a method that first identifies challenging instructions and then applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using BLEU directly as the reward function. We demonstrate that BLEUBERI-trained models are competitive with models trained via reward model-guided RL across four challenging instruction-following benchmarks and three different base language models. A human evaluation further supports that the quality of BLEUBERI model outputs is on par with those from reward model-aligned models. Moreover, BLEUBERI models generate outputs that are more factually grounded than competing methods. Overall, we show that given access to high-quality reference outputs (easily obtained via existing instruction-following datasets or synthetic data generation), string matching-based metrics are cheap yet effective proxies for reward models during alignment. We release our code and data at https://github.com/lilakk/BLEUBERI.

With the advent of larger and more complex deep learning models, such as in Natural Language Processing (NLP), model qualities like explainability and interpretability, albeit highly desirable, are becoming harder challenges to tackle and solve. For example, state-of-the-art models in text classification are black-box by design. Although standard explanation methods provide some degree of explainability, these are mostly correlation-based methods and do not provide much insight into the model. The alternative of causal explainability is more desirable to achieve but extremely challenging in NLP due to a variety of reasons. Inspired by recent endeavors to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) as experts, in this work, we aim to leverage the instruction-following and textual understanding capabilities of recent state-of-the-art LLMs to facilitate causal explainability via counterfactual explanation generation for black-box text classifiers. To do this, we propose a three-step pipeline via which, we use an off-the-shelf LLM to: (1) identify the latent or unobserved features in the input text, (2) identify the input features associated with the latent features, and finally (3) use the identified input features to generate a counterfactual explanation. We experiment with our pipeline on multiple NLP text classification datasets, with several recent LLMs, and present interesting and promising findings.

A core challenge in AI-guided autonomy is enabling agents to navigate realistically and effectively in previously unseen environments based on natural language commands. We propose UAV-VLN, a novel end-to-end Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that seamlessly integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual perception to facilitate human-interactive navigation. Our system interprets free-form natural language instructions, grounds them into visual observations, and plans feasible aerial trajectories in diverse environments. UAV-VLN leverages the common-sense reasoning capabilities of LLMs to parse high-level semantic goals, while a vision model detects and localizes semantically relevant objects in the environment. By fusing these modalities, the UAV can reason about spatial relationships, disambiguate references in human instructions, and plan context-aware behaviors with minimal task-specific supervision. To ensure robust and interpretable decision-making, the framework includes a cross-modal grounding mechanism that aligns linguistic intent with visual context. We evaluate UAV-VLN across diverse indoor and outdoor navigation scenarios, demonstrating its ability to generalize to novel instructions and environments with minimal task-specific training. Our results show significant improvements in instruction-following accuracy and trajectory efficiency, highlighting the potential of LLM-driven vision-language interfaces for safe, intuitive, and generalizable UAV autonomy.

With the development of large language models, their ability to follow simple instructions has significantly improved. However, adhering to complex instructions remains a major challenge. Current approaches to generating complex instructions are often irrelevant to the current instruction requirements or suffer from limited scalability and diversity. Moreover, methods such as back-translation, while effective for simple instruction generation, fail to leverage the rich contents and structures in large web corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic iterative refinement framework to generate complex instructions with constraints, which not only better reflects the requirements of real scenarios but also significantly enhances LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions. The AIR framework consists of two stages: (1)Generate an initial instruction from a document; (2)Iteratively refine instructions with LLM-as-judge guidance by comparing the model's output with the document to incorporate valuable constraints. Finally, we construct the AIR-10K dataset with 10K complex instructions and demonstrate that instructions generated with our approach significantly improve the model's ability to follow complex instructions, outperforming existing methods for instruction generation.

Recent advancements in image editing have utilized large-scale multimodal models to enable intuitive, natural instruction-driven interactions. However, conventional methods still face significant challenges, particularly in spatial reasoning, precise region segmentation, and maintaining semantic consistency, especially in complex scenes. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SmartFreeEdit, a novel end-to-end framework that integrates a multimodal large language model (MLLM) with a hypergraph-enhanced inpainting architecture, enabling precise, mask-free image editing guided exclusively by natural language instructions. The key innovations of SmartFreeEdit include:(1)the introduction of region aware tokens and a mask embedding paradigm that enhance the spatial understanding of complex scenes;(2) a reasoning segmentation pipeline designed to optimize the generation of editing masks based on natural language instructions;and (3) a hypergraph-augmented inpainting module that ensures the preservation of both structural integrity and semantic coherence during complex edits, overcoming the limitations of local-based image generation. Extensive experiments on the Reason-Edit benchmark demonstrate that SmartFreeEdit surpasses current state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics, including segmentation accuracy, instruction adherence, and visual quality preservation, while addressing the issue of local information focus and improving global consistency in the edited image. Our project will be available at https://github.com/smileformylove/SmartFreeEdit.

Generating animation of physics-based characters with intuitive control has long been a desirable task with numerous applications. However, generating physically simulated animations that reflect high-level human instructions remains a difficult problem due to the complexity of physical environments and the richness of human language. In this paper, we present InsActor, a principled generative framework that leverages recent advancements in diffusion-based human motion models to produce instruction-driven animations of physics-based characters. Our framework empowers InsActor to capture complex relationships between high-level human instructions and character motions by employing diffusion policies for flexibly conditioned motion planning. To overcome invalid states and infeasible state transitions in planned motions, InsActor discovers low-level skills and maps plans to latent skill sequences in a compact latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InsActor achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including instruction-driven motion generation and instruction-driven waypoint heading. Notably, the ability of InsActor to generate physically simulated animations using high-level human instructions makes it a valuable tool, particularly in executing long-horizon tasks with a rich set of instructions.

Editing images using natural language instructions has become a natural and expressive way to modify visual content; yet, evaluating the performance of such models remains challenging. Existing evaluation approaches often rely on image-text similarity metrics like CLIP, which lack precision. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark designed to evaluate text-guided image editing models in a more grounded manner, along two critical dimensions: (i) functional correctness, assessed via automatically generated multiple-choice questions that verify whether the intended change was successfully applied; and (ii) image content preservation, which ensures that non-targeted regions of the image remain visually consistent using an object-aware masking technique and preservation scoring. The benchmark includes over 1000 high-quality editing examples across 20 diverse content categories, each annotated with detailed editing instructions, evaluation questions, and spatial object masks. We conduct a large-scale study comparing GPT-Image-1, the latest flagship in the text-guided image editing space, against several state-of-the-art editing models, and validate our automatic metrics against human ratings. Results show that GPT-Image-1 leads in instruction-following accuracy, but often over-modifies irrelevant image regions, highlighting a key trade-off in the current model behavior. GIE-Bench provides a scalable, reproducible framework for advancing more accurate evaluation of text-guided image editing.

Preference alignment has emerged as an effective strategy to enhance the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) following supervised fine-tuning. While existing preference alignment methods predominantly target hallucination factors, they overlook the factors essential for multi-modal comprehension capabilities, often narrowing their improvements on hallucination mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-oriented Preference Alignment (IPA), a scalable framework designed to automatically construct alignment preferences grounded in instruction fulfillment efficacy. Our method involves an automated preference construction coupled with a dedicated verification process that identifies instruction-oriented factors, avoiding significant variability in response representations. Additionally, IPA incorporates a progressive preference collection pipeline, further recalling challenging samples through model self-evolution and reference-guided refinement. Experiments conducted on Qwen2VL-7B demonstrate IPA's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks, including hallucination evaluation, visual question answering, and text understanding tasks, highlighting its capability to enhance general comprehension.

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant method for controlling language model outputs, it suffers from high computational costs and training instability. Guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, offers a cost-effective alternative by controlling outputs without re-training models. However, the accuracy of the value function is crucial for value-guided decoding, as inaccuracies can lead to suboptimal decision-making and degraded performance. Existing methods struggle with accurately estimating the optimal value function, leading to less effective control. We propose Iterative Value Function Optimization, a novel framework that addresses these limitations through two key components: Monte Carlo Value Estimation, which reduces estimation variance by exploring diverse trajectories, and Iterative On-Policy Optimization, which progressively improves value estimation through collecting trajectories from value-guided policies. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-turn dialogue, and instruction following demonstrate the effectiveness of value-guided decoding approaches in aligning language models. These approaches not only achieve alignment but also significantly reduce computational costs by leveraging principled value function optimization for efficient and effective control.

Creating high-quality data for training robust language-instructed agents is a long-lasting challenge in embodied AI. In this paper, we introduce a Self-Refining Data Flywheel (SRDF) that generates high-quality and large-scale navigational instruction-trajectory pairs by iteratively refining the data pool through the collaboration between two models, the instruction generator and the navigator, without any human-in-the-loop annotation. Specifically, SRDF starts with using a base generator to create an initial data pool for training a base navigator, followed by applying the trained navigator to filter the data pool. This leads to higher-fidelity data to train a better generator, which can, in turn, produce higher-quality data for training the next-round navigator. Such a flywheel establishes a data self-refining process, yielding a continuously improved and highly effective dataset for large-scale language-guided navigation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that after several flywheel rounds, the navigator elevates the performance boundary from 70% to 78% SPL on the classic R2R test set, surpassing human performance (76%) for the first time. Meanwhile, this process results in a superior generator, evidenced by a SPICE increase from 23.5 to 26.2, better than all previous VLN instruction generation methods. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of our method through increasing environment and instruction diversity, and the generalization ability of our pre-trained navigator across various downstream navigation tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in all cases.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many natural language tasks but still struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning, particularly across diverse disciplines. Existing reasoning datasets often lack disciplinary breadth, reasoning depth, and diversity, and lack guiding principles for question synthesis. We propose DESIGNER: a DESIGN-logic-guidEd Reasoning data synthesis pipeline that leverages naturally available, extensive raw documents (e.g., book corpus and web corpus) to generate multidisciplinary challenging questions. We introduce the concept of "design logic" and instruct LLMs to mimic human educators' question-creation process, enabling automated synthesis of large-scale, high-difficulty questions. We use LLMs to reverse-engineer and abstract over 120,000 design logics from existing questions across various disciplines. By matching these design logics with source documents, we are able to create reasoning questions that far surpass the difficulty and diversity of existing datasets. Using this pipeline, we synthesized two large-scale reasoning datasets that span 75 disciplines: DLR-Book (3.04 million questions from the book corpus) and DLR-Web (1.66 million questions from the web corpus). Data analysis indicates that the questions synthesized by our method exhibit greater difficulty and diversity compared to those in the baseline datasets. We validate our synthesized data through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on the Qwen3 and Llama3 model families. Our data substantially enhances their multidisciplinary reasoning capabilities, outperforming existing datasets. Notably, after SFT on our datasets, the base versions of these models even surpass their official instruction-tuned counterparts.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in contextual understanding. However, their ability to attend to truly critical information during long-context reasoning and generation still falls behind the pace. Specifically, our preliminary experiments reveal that certain distracting patterns can misdirect the model's attention during inference, and removing these patterns substantially improves reasoning accuracy and generation quality. We attribute this phenomenon to spurious correlations in the training data, which obstruct the model's capacity to infer authentic causal instruction-response relationships. This phenomenon may induce redundant reasoning processes, potentially resulting in significant inference overhead and, more critically, the generation of erroneous or suboptimal responses. To mitigate this, we introduce a two-stage framework called Learning to Focus (LeaF) leveraging intervention-based inference to disentangle confounding factors. In the first stage, LeaF employs gradient-based comparisons with an advanced teacher to automatically identify confounding tokens based on causal relationships in the training corpus. Then, in the second stage, it prunes these tokens during distillation to enact intervention, aligning the student's attention with the teacher's focus distribution on truly critical context tokens. Experimental results demonstrate that LeaF not only achieves an absolute improvement in various mathematical reasoning, code generation and multi-hop question answering benchmarks but also effectively suppresses attention to confounding tokens during inference, yielding a more interpretable and reliable reasoning model.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have shown impressive results in generating visually compelling images following user prompts. Building on this, various methods further fine-tune the pre-trained T2I model for specific tasks. However, this requires separate model architectures, training designs, and multiple parameter sets to handle different tasks. In this paper, we introduce UniVG, a generalist diffusion model capable of supporting a diverse range of image generation tasks with a single set of weights. UniVG treats multi-modal inputs as unified conditions to enable various downstream applications, ranging from T2I generation, inpainting, instruction-based editing, identity-preserving generation, and layout-guided generation, to depth estimation and referring segmentation. Through comprehensive empirical studies on data mixing and multi-task training, we provide detailed insights into the training processes and decisions that inform our final designs. For example, we show that T2I generation and other tasks, such as instruction-based editing, can coexist without performance trade-offs, while auxiliary tasks like depth estimation and referring segmentation enhance image editing. Notably, our model can even outperform some task-specific models on their respective benchmarks, marking a significant step towards a unified image generation model.

Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) assistants holds significant promise for enhancing human workflow productivity. While most agents are language-based, relying on closed-source API with text-rich meta-information (e.g., HTML or accessibility tree), they show limitations in perceiving UI visuals as humans do, highlighting the need for GUI visual agents. In this work, we develop a vision-language-action model in digital world, namely ShowUI, which features the following innovations: (i) UI-Guided Visual Token Selection to reduce computational costs by formulating screenshots as an UI connected graph, adaptively identifying their redundant relationship and serve as the criteria for token selection during self-attention blocks; (ii) Interleaved Vision-Language-Action Streaming that flexibly unifies diverse needs within GUI tasks, enabling effective management of visual-action history in navigation or pairing multi-turn query-action sequences per screenshot to enhance training efficiency; (iii) Small-scale High-quality GUI Instruction-following Datasets by careful data curation and employing a resampling strategy to address significant data type imbalances. With above components, ShowUI, a lightweight 2B model using 256K data, achieves a strong 75.1% accuracy in zero-shot screenshot grounding. Its UI-guided token selection further reduces 33% of redundant visual tokens during training and speeds up the performance by 1.4x. Navigation experiments across web Mind2Web, mobile AITW, and online MiniWob environments further underscore the effectiveness and potential of our model in advancing GUI visual agents. The models are available at https://github.com/showlab/ShowUI.

Remote sensing has become critical for understanding environmental dynamics, urban planning, and disaster management. However, traditional remote sensing workflows often rely on explicit segmentation or detection methods, which struggle to handle complex, implicit queries that require reasoning over spatial context, domain knowledge, and implicit user intent. Motivated by this, we introduce a new task, \ie, geospatial pixel reasoning, which allows implicit querying and reasoning and generates the mask of the target region. To advance this task, we construct and release the first large-scale benchmark dataset called EarthReason, which comprises 5,434 manually annotated image masks with over 30,000 implicit question-answer pairs. Moreover, we propose SegEarth-R1, a simple yet effective language-guided segmentation baseline that integrates a hierarchical visual encoder, a large language model (LLM) for instruction parsing, and a tailored mask generator for spatial correlation. The design of SegEarth-R1 incorporates domain-specific adaptations, including aggressive visual token compression to handle ultra-high-resolution remote sensing images, a description projection module to fuse language and multi-scale features, and a streamlined mask prediction pipeline that directly queries description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SegEarth-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both reasoning and referring segmentation tasks, significantly outperforming traditional and LLM-based segmentation methods. Our data and code will be released at https://github.com/earth-insights/SegEarth-R1.

Language models trained on large-scale corpus often generate content that is harmful, toxic, or contrary to human preferences, making their alignment with human values a critical concern. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with algorithms like PPO is a prevalent approach for alignment but is often complex, unstable, and resource-intensive. Recently, ranking-based alignment methods have emerged, offering stability and effectiveness by replacing the RL framework with supervised fine-tuning, but they are costly due to the need for annotated data. Considering that existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are already relatively well-aligned and cost-friendly, researchers have begun to align the language model with human preference from AI feedback. The common practices, which unidirectionally distill the instruction-following responses from LLMs, are constrained by their bottleneck. Thus we introduce CycleAlign to distill alignment capabilities from parameter-invisible LLMs (black-box) to a parameter-visible model (white-box) in an iterative manner. With in-context learning (ICL) as the core of the cycle, the black-box models are able to rank the model-generated responses guided by human-craft instruction and demonstrations about their preferences. During iterative interaction, the white-box models also have a judgment about responses generated by them. Consequently, the agreement ranking could be viewed as a pseudo label to dynamically update the in-context demonstrations and improve the preference ranking ability of black-box models. Through multiple interactions, the CycleAlign framework could align the white-box model with the black-box model effectively in a low-resource way. Empirical results illustrate that the model fine-tuned by CycleAlign remarkably exceeds existing methods, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in alignment with human value.

Recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated remarkable text-guided image editing capabilities, with systems like GPT-4o and Nano-Banana setting new benchmarks. However, the research community's progress remains constrained by the absence of large-scale, high-quality, and openly accessible datasets built from real images. We introduce Pico-Banana-400K, a comprehensive 400K-image dataset for instruction-based image editing. Our dataset is constructed by leveraging Nano-Banana to generate diverse edit pairs from real photographs in the OpenImages collection. What distinguishes Pico-Banana-400K from previous synthetic datasets is our systematic approach to quality and diversity. We employ a fine-grained image editing taxonomy to ensure comprehensive coverage of edit types while maintaining precise content preservation and instruction faithfulness through MLLM-based quality scoring and careful curation. Beyond single turn editing, Pico-Banana-400K enables research into complex editing scenarios. The dataset includes three specialized subsets: (1) a 72K-example multi-turn collection for studying sequential editing, reasoning, and planning across consecutive modifications; (2) a 56K-example preference subset for alignment research and reward model training; and (3) paired long-short editing instructions for developing instruction rewriting and summarization capabilities. By providing this large-scale, high-quality, and task-rich resource, Pico-Banana-400K establishes a robust foundation for training and benchmarking the next generation of text-guided image editing models.

In this paper, we introduce SaulLM-54B and SaulLM-141B, two large language models (LLMs) tailored for the legal sector. These models, which feature architectures of 54 billion and 141 billion parameters, respectively, are based on the Mixtral architecture. The development of SaulLM-54B and SaulLM-141B is guided by large-scale domain adaptation, divided into three strategies: (1) the exploitation of continued pretraining involving a base corpus that includes over 540 billion of legal tokens, (2) the implementation of a specialized legal instruction-following protocol, and (3) the alignment of model outputs with human preferences in legal interpretations. The integration of synthetically generated data in the second and third steps enhances the models' capabilities in interpreting and processing legal texts, effectively reaching state-of-the-art performance and outperforming previous open-source models on LegalBench-Instruct. This work explores the trade-offs involved in domain-specific adaptation at this scale, offering insights that may inform future studies on domain adaptation using strong decoder models. Building upon SaulLM-7B, this study refines the approach to produce an LLM better equipped for legal tasks. We are releasing base, instruct, and aligned versions on top of SaulLM-54B and SaulLM-141B under the MIT License to facilitate reuse and collaborative research.

We posit that to achieve continual model improvement and multifaceted alignment, future models must learn from natural human interaction. Current conversational models are aligned using pre-annotated, expert-generated human feedback. In this work, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Human Interaction (RLHI), a paradigm that learns directly from in-the-wild user conversations. We develop two complementary methods: (1) RLHI with User-Guided Rewrites, which revises unsatisfactory model outputs based on users' natural-language follow-up responses, (2) RLHI with User-Based Rewards, which learns via a reward model conditioned on knowledge of the user's long-term interaction history (termed persona). Together, these methods link long-term user personas to turn-level preferences via persona-conditioned preference optimization. Trained on conversations derived from WildChat, both RLHI variants outperform strong baselines in personalization and instruction-following, and similar feedback enhances performance on reasoning benchmarks. These results suggest organic human interaction offers scalable, effective supervision for personalized alignment.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their ability to perform structured symbolic planning remains limited, particularly in domains requiring formal representations like the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). In this paper, we present a novel instruction tuning framework, PDDL-Instruct, designed to enhance LLMs' symbolic planning capabilities through logical chain-of-thought reasoning. Our approach focuses on teaching models to rigorously reason about action applicability, state transitions, and plan validity using explicit logical inference steps. By developing instruction prompts that guide models through the precise logical reasoning required to determine when actions can be applied in a given state, we enable LLMs to self-correct their planning processes through structured reflection. The framework systematically builds verification skills by decomposing the planning process into explicit reasoning chains about precondition satisfaction, effect application, and invariant preservation. Experimental results on multiple planning domains show that our chain-of-thought reasoning based instruction-tuned models are significantly better at planning, achieving planning accuracy of up to 94% on standard benchmarks, representing a 66% absolute improvement over baseline models. This work bridges the gap between the general reasoning capabilities of LLMs and the logical precision required for automated planning, offering a promising direction for developing better AI planning systems.

We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- Instead of perplexity or simple needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) tests, we use a broad set of long-context tasks, and we evaluate models after SFT with instruction data as this better reveals long-context abilities. Supported by our robust evaluations, we run thorough experiments to decide the data mix for continued pre-training, the instruction tuning dataset, and many other design choices. We find that (1) code repositories and books are excellent sources of long data, but it is crucial to combine them with high-quality short data; (2) training with a sequence length beyond the evaluation length boosts long-context performance; (3) for SFT, using only short instruction datasets yields strong performance on long-context tasks. Our final model, ProLong-8B, which is initialized from Llama-3 and trained on 40B tokens, demonstrates state-of-the-art long-context performance among similarly sized models at a length of 128K. ProLong outperforms Llama-3.18B-Instruct on the majority of long-context tasks despite having seen only 5% as many tokens during long-context training. Additionally, ProLong can effectively process up to 512K tokens, one of the longest context windows of publicly available LMs.

We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated significant potential as generalists in vision-language (VL) tasks. However, there remains a significant gap between state-of-the-art LMMs and human performance when it comes to complex tasks that require a combination of fundamental VL capabilities, as well as tasks involving the grounding of complex instructions. To thoroughly investigate the human-LMM gap and its underlying causes, we propose MOAT, a diverse benchmark with complex real-world VL tasks that are challenging for LMMs. Specifically, the tasks in MOAT require LMMs to engage in generalist problem solving by integrating fundamental VL capabilities such as reading text, counting, understanding spatial relations, grounding textual and visual instructions, etc. All these abilities fit into a taxonomy proposed by us that contains 10 fundamental VL capabilities, enabling MOAT to provide a fine-grained view of LMMs' strengths and weaknesses. Besides, MOAT is the first benchmark to explicitly evaluate LMMs' ability to ground complex text and visual instructions, which is essential to many real-world applications. We evaluate over 20 proprietary and open source LMMs, as well as humans, on MOAT, and found that humans achieved 82.7% accuracy while the best performing LMM (OpenAI o1) achieved only 38.8%. To guide future model development, we analyze common trends in our results and discuss the underlying causes of observed performance gaps between LMMs and humans, focusing on which VL capability forms the bottleneck in complex tasks, whether test time scaling improves performance on MOAT, and how tiling harms LMMs' capability to count. Code and data are available at https://cambrian-yzt.github.io/MOAT.

Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has highlighted the critical roles of both the visual backbone and the underlying language model. While prior work has primarily focused on scaling these components to billions of parameters, the trade-offs between model size, architecture, and performance remain underexplored. Additionally, inconsistencies in training data and evaluation protocols have hindered direct comparisons, making it difficult to derive optimal design choices. In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-MORE, a new family of MLLMs that integrates recent language models with diverse visual backbones. To ensure fair comparisons, we employ a unified training protocol applied consistently across all architectures. Our analysis systematically explores both small- and medium-scale LLMs -- including Phi-4, LLaMA-3.1, and Gemma-2 -- to evaluate multimodal reasoning, generation, and instruction following, while examining the relationship between model size and performance. Beyond evaluating the LLM impact on final results, we conduct a comprehensive study of various visual encoders, ranging from CLIP-based architectures to alternatives such as DINOv2, SigLIP, and SigLIP2. Additional experiments investigate the effects of increased image resolution and variations in pre-training datasets. Overall, our results provide insights into the design of more effective MLLMs, offering a reproducible evaluation framework that facilitates direct comparisons and can guide future model development. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/LLaVA-MORE.

Neural Machine Translation systems built on top of Transformer-based architectures are routinely improving the state-of-the-art in translation quality according to word-overlap metrics. However, a growing number of studies also highlight the inherent gender bias that these models incorporate during training, which reflects poorly in their translations. In this work, we investigate whether these models can be instructed to fix their bias during inference using targeted, guided instructions as contexts. By translating relevant contextual sentences during inference along with the input, we observe large improvements in reducing the gender bias in translations, across three popular test suites (WinoMT, BUG, SimpleGen). We further propose a novel metric to assess several large pre-trained models (OPUS-MT, M2M-100) on their sensitivity towards using contexts during translation to correct their biases. Our approach requires no fine-tuning and thus can be used easily in production systems to de-bias translations from stereotypical gender-occupation bias 1. We hope our method, along with our metric, can be used to build better, bias-free translation systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention in various fields for their cost-effective solutions to diverse challenges, especially with advancements in instruction tuning and quantization. E-commerce, with its complex tasks and extensive product-user interactions, presents a promising application area for LLMs. However, the domain-specific concepts and knowledge inherent in e-commerce pose significant challenges for adapting general LLMs. To address this issue, we developed EC-Guide https://github.com/fzp0424/EC-Guide-KDDUP-2024, a comprehensive e-commerce guide for instruction tuning and quantization of LLMs. We also heuristically integrated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) during inference to enhance arithmetic performance. Our approach achieved the 2nd place in Track 2 and 5th place in Track 5 at the Amazon KDD Cup'24 https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/amazon-kdd-cup-2024-multi-task-online-shopping-challenge-for-llms. Additionally, our solution is model-agnostic, enabling effective scalability across larger systems.

Currently, instruction-based image editing methods have made significant progress by leveraging the powerful cross-modal understanding capabilities of vision language models (VLMs). However, they still face challenges in three key areas: 1) complex scenarios; 2) semantic consistency; and 3) fine-grained editing. To address these issues, we propose FireEdit, an innovative Fine-grained Instruction-based image editing framework that exploits a REgion-aware VLM. FireEdit is designed to accurately comprehend user instructions and ensure effective control over the editing process. Specifically, we enhance the fine-grained visual perception capabilities of the VLM by introducing additional region tokens. Relying solely on the output of the LLM to guide the diffusion model may lead to suboptimal editing results. Therefore, we propose a Time-Aware Target Injection module and a Hybrid Visual Cross Attention module. The former dynamically adjusts the guidance strength at various denoising stages by integrating timestep embeddings with the text embeddings. The latter enhances visual details for image editing, thereby preserving semantic consistency between the edited result and the source image. By combining the VLM enhanced with fine-grained region tokens and the time-dependent diffusion model, FireEdit demonstrates significant advantages in comprehending editing instructions and maintaining high semantic consistency. Extensive experiments indicate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art instruction-based image editing methods. Our project is available at https://zjgans.github.io/fireedit.github.io.

Instruction tuning as an effective technique aligns the outputs of large language models (LLMs) with human preference. But how to generate the seasonal multi-turn dialogues from raw documents for instruction tuning still requires further exploration. In this paper, we present a novel framework named R2S that leverages the CoD-Chain of Dialogue logic to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating knowledge-intensive multi-turn dialogues for instruction tuning. By integrating raw documents from both open-source datasets and domain-specific web-crawled documents into a benchmark K-BENCH, we cover diverse areas such as Wikipedia (English), Science (Chinese), and Artifacts (Chinese). Our approach first decides the logic flow of the current dialogue and then prompts LLMs to produce key phrases for sourcing relevant response content. This methodology enables the creation of the G I NSTRUCT instruction dataset, retaining raw document knowledge within dialoguestyle interactions. Utilizing this dataset, we fine-tune GLLM, a model designed to transform raw documents into structured multi-turn dialogues, thereby injecting comprehensive domain knowledge into the SFT model for enhanced instruction tuning. This work signifies a stride towards refining the adaptability and effectiveness of LLMs in processing and generating more accurate, contextually nuanced responses across various fields.

The integration of visual encoders and large language models (LLMs) has driven recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the scarcity of high-quality instruction-tuning data for vision-language tasks remains a challenge. The current leading paradigm, such as LLaVA, relies on language-only GPT-4 to generate data, which requires pre-annotated image captions and detection bounding boxes, suffering from understanding image details. A practical solution to this problem would be to utilize the available multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate instruction data for vision-language tasks. However, it's worth noting that the currently accessible MLLMs are not as powerful as their LLM counterparts, as they tend to produce inadequate responses and generate false information. As a solution for addressing the current issue, this paper proposes the Visual Instruction Generation and Correction (VIGC) framework that enables multimodal large language models to generate instruction-tuning data and progressively enhance its quality on-the-fly. Specifically, Visual Instruction Generation (VIG) guides the vision-language model to generate diverse instruction-tuning data. To ensure generation quality, Visual Instruction Correction (VIC) adopts an iterative update mechanism to correct any inaccuracies in data produced by VIG, effectively reducing the risk of hallucination. Leveraging the diverse, high-quality data generated by VIGC, we finetune mainstream models and validate data quality based on various evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that VIGC not only compensates for the shortcomings of language-only data generation methods, but also effectively enhances the benchmark performance. The models, datasets, and code are available at https://opendatalab.github.io/VIGC.

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do not always attend to these instructions reliably, and users lack simple mechanisms to emphasize their importance beyond modifying prompt wording or structure. To address this, we present an inference-time method that enables users to emphasize specific parts of their prompt by steering the model's attention toward them, aligning the model's perceived importance of different prompt tokens with user intent. Unlike prior approaches that are limited to static instructions, require significant offline profiling, or rely on fixed biases, we dynamically update the proportion of model attention given to the user-specified parts--ensuring improved instruction following without performance degradation. We demonstrate that our approach improves instruction following across a variety of tasks involving multiple instructions and generalizes across models of varying scales.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen significant progress with diffusion models, enabling generation of photo-realistic images from text prompts. Despite this progress, existing methods still face challenges in following complex text prompts, especially those requiring compositional and multi-step reasoning. Given such complex instructions, SOTA models often make mistakes in faithfully modeling object attributes, and relationships among them. In this work, we present an alternate paradigm for T2I synthesis, decomposing the task of complex multi-step generation into three steps, (a) Generate: we first generate an image using existing diffusion models (b) Plan: we make use of Multi-Modal LLMs (MLLMs) to identify the mistakes in the generated image expressed in terms of individual objects and their properties, and produce a sequence of corrective steps required in the form of an edit-plan. (c) Edit: we make use of an existing text-guided image editing models to sequentially execute our edit-plan over the generated image to get the desired image which is faithful to the original instruction. Our approach derives its strength from the fact that it is modular in nature, is training free, and can be applied over any combination of image generation and editing models. As an added contribution, we also develop a model capable of compositional editing, which further helps improve the overall accuracy of our proposed approach. Our method flexibly trades inference time compute with performance on compositional text prompts. We perform extensive experimental evaluation across 3 benchmarks and 10 T2I models including DALLE-3 and the latest -- SD-3.5-Large. Our approach not only improves the performance of the SOTA models, by upto 3 points, it also reduces the performance gap between weaker and stronger models. https://dair-iitd.github.io/GraPE/{https://dair-iitd.github.io/GraPE/}

Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is a powerful paradigm that strengthens the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but in doing so induces new evaluation metric requirements. We show LLM-based metrics to be well adapted to these requirements, and leverage them to conduct an investigation of task-specialization strategies, quantifying the trade-offs that emerge in practical industrial settings. Our findings offer practitioners actionable insights for real-world IFT model deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) hold the promise of solving diverse tasks when provided with appropriate natural language prompts. However, prompting often leads models to make predictions with lower accuracy compared to finetuning a model with ample training data. On the other hand, while finetuning LLMs on task-specific data generally improves their performance, abundant annotated datasets are not available for all tasks. Previous work has explored generating task-specific data from state-of-the-art LLMs and using this data to finetune smaller models, but this approach requires access to a language model other than the one being trained, which introduces cost, scalability challenges, and legal hurdles associated with continuously relying on more powerful LLMs. In response to these, we propose SELF-GUIDE, a multi-stage mechanism in which we synthesize task-specific input-output pairs from the student LLM, then use these input-output pairs to finetune the student LLM itself. In our empirical evaluation of the Natural Instructions V2 benchmark, we find that SELF-GUIDE improves the performance of LLM by a substantial margin. Specifically, we report an absolute improvement of approximately 15% for classification tasks and 18% for generation tasks in the benchmark's metrics. This sheds light on the promise of self-synthesized data guiding LLMs towards becoming task-specific experts without any external learning signals.

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer significant performance degradation in multi-turn conversations when information is presented incrementally. Given that multi-turn conversations characterize everyday interactions with LLMs, this degradation poses a severe challenge to real world usability. We hypothesize that abrupt increases in model uncertainty signal misalignment in multi-turn LLM interactions, and we exploit this insight to dynamically realign conversational context. We introduce ERGO (Entropy-guided Resetting for Generation Optimization), which continuously quantifies internal uncertainty via Shannon entropy over next token distributions and triggers adaptive prompt consolidation when a sharp spike in entropy is detected. By treating uncertainty as a first class signal rather than a nuisance to eliminate, ERGO embraces variability in language and modeling, representing and responding to uncertainty. In multi-turn tasks with incrementally revealed instructions, ERGO yields a 56.6% average performance gain over standard baselines, increases aptitude (peak performance capability) by 24.7%, and decreases unreliability (variability in performance) by 35.3%, demonstrating that uncertainty aware interventions can improve both accuracy and reliability in conversational AI.

We introduce ClusterLLM, a novel text clustering framework that leverages feedback from an instruction-tuned large language model, such as ChatGPT. Compared with traditional unsupervised methods that builds upon "small" embedders, ClusterLLM exhibits two intriguing advantages: (1) it enjoys the emergent capability of LLM even if its embeddings are inaccessible; and (2) it understands the user's preference on clustering through textual instruction and/or a few annotated data. First, we prompt ChatGPT for insights on clustering perspective by constructing hard triplet questions <does A better correspond to B than C>, where A, B and C are similar data points that belong to different clusters according to small embedder. We empirically show that this strategy is both effective for fine-tuning small embedder and cost-efficient to query ChatGPT. Second, we prompt ChatGPT for helps on clustering granularity by carefully designed pairwise questions <do A and B belong to the same category>, and tune the granularity from cluster hierarchies that is the most consistent with the ChatGPT answers. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets show that ClusterLLM consistently improves clustering quality, at an average cost of ~$0.6 per dataset.

In this work we consider Code World Models, world models generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) in the form of Python code for model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). Calling code instead of LLMs for planning has potential to be more precise, reliable, interpretable, and extremely efficient. However, writing appropriate Code World Models requires the ability to understand complex instructions, to generate exact code with non-trivial logic and to self-debug a long program with feedback from unit tests and environment trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Generate, Improve and Fix with Monte Carlo Tree Search (GIF-MCTS), a new code generation strategy for LLMs. To test our approach in an offline RL setting, we introduce the Code World Models Benchmark (CWMB), a suite of program synthesis and planning tasks comprised of 18 diverse RL environments paired with corresponding textual descriptions and curated trajectories. GIF-MCTS surpasses all baselines on the CWMB and two other benchmarks, and we show that the Code World Models synthesized with it can be successfully used for planning, resulting in model-based RL agents with greatly improved sample efficiency and inference speed.

Language-guided robots performing home and office tasks must navigate in and interact with the world. Grounding language instructions against visual observations and actions to take in an environment is an open challenge. We present Embodied BERT (EmBERT), a transformer-based model which can attend to high-dimensional, multi-modal inputs across long temporal horizons for language-conditioned task completion. Additionally, we bridge the gap between successful object-centric navigation models used for non-interactive agents and the language-guided visual task completion benchmark, ALFRED, by introducing object navigation targets for EmBERT training. We achieve competitive performance on the ALFRED benchmark, and EmBERT marks the first transformer-based model to successfully handle the long-horizon, dense, multi-modal histories of ALFRED, and the first ALFRED model to utilize object-centric navigation targets.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently sparked significant interest, which demonstrates emergent capabilities to serve as a general-purpose model for various vision-language tasks. However, existing methods mainly focus on limited types of instructions with a single image as visual context, which hinders the widespread availability of MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce the I4 benchmark to comprehensively evaluate the instruction following ability on complicated interleaved vision-language instructions, which involve intricate image-text sequential context, covering a diverse range of scenarios (e.g., visually-rich webpages/textbooks, lecture slides, embodied dialogue). Systematic evaluation on our I4 benchmark reveals a common defect of existing methods: the Visual Prompt Generator (VPG) trained on image-captioning alignment objective tends to attend to common foreground information for captioning but struggles to extract specific information required by particular tasks. To address this issue, we propose a generic and lightweight controllable knowledge re-injection module, which utilizes the sophisticated reasoning ability of LLMs to control the VPG to conditionally extract instruction-specific visual information and re-inject it into the LLM. Further, we introduce an annotation-free cross-attention guided counterfactual image training strategy to methodically learn the proposed module by collaborating a cascade of foundation models. Enhanced by the proposed module and training strategy, we present Cheetor, a Transformer-based MLLM that can effectively handle a wide variety of interleaved vision-language instructions and achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all tasks of I4, without high-quality multimodal instruction tuning data. Cheetor also exhibits competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art instruction tuned models on MME benchmark.