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SubscribeZeroSCROLLS: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Long Text Understanding
We introduce ZeroSCROLLS, a zero-shot benchmark for natural language understanding over long texts, which contains only test sets, without training or development data. We adapt six tasks from the SCROLLS benchmark, and add four new datasets, including two novel information fusing tasks, such as aggregating the percentage of positive reviews. Using ZeroSCROLLS, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and closed large language models, finding that Claude outperforms ChatGPT, and that GPT-4 achieves the highest average score. However, there is still room for improvement on multiple open challenges in ZeroSCROLLS, such as aggregation tasks, where models struggle to pass the naive baseline. As the state of the art is a moving target, we invite researchers to evaluate their ideas on the live ZeroSCROLLS leaderboard
ViLMA: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Linguistic and Temporal Grounding in Video-Language Models
With the ever-increasing popularity of pretrained Video-Language Models (VidLMs), there is a pressing need to develop robust evaluation methodologies that delve deeper into their visio-linguistic capabilities. To address this challenge, we present ViLMA (Video Language Model Assessment), a task-agnostic benchmark that places the assessment of fine-grained capabilities of these models on a firm footing. Task-based evaluations, while valuable, fail to capture the complexities and specific temporal aspects of moving images that VidLMs need to process. Through carefully curated counterfactuals, ViLMA offers a controlled evaluation suite that sheds light on the true potential of these models, as well as their performance gaps compared to human-level understanding. ViLMA also includes proficiency tests, which assess basic capabilities deemed essential to solving the main counterfactual tests. We show that current VidLMs' grounding abilities are no better than those of vision-language models which use static images. This is especially striking once the performance on proficiency tests is factored in. Our benchmark serves as a catalyst for future research on VidLMs, helping to highlight areas that still need to be explored.
Language Complexity Measurement as a Noisy Zero-Shot Proxy for Evaluating LLM Performance
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language generation but often face challenges in tasks requiring precise calculations and structural analysis. This paper investigates the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs on language complexity measurement tasks, through the computation of the LIX readability metric and Average Dependency Distance (ADD). Using Swedish high school and university-level essays, we evaluate the models' abilities to compute LIX scores and perform dependency parsing, comparing their results to established ground truths. Our findings reveal that while all models demonstrate some capacity for these tasks, ChatGPT-o1-mini performs most consistently, achieving the highest accuracy in both LIX computation and dependency parsing. Additionally, we observe a strong significant correlation -0.875 p 0.026 (N=6) between the models' accuracy in computing LIX and their overall performance on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. These results suggest that language complexity measurement abilities can serve as a noisy zero-shot proxies for assessing the general capabilities of LLMs, providing a practical method for model evaluation without the need for extensive benchmarking datasets.
Understanding Transferable Representation Learning and Zero-shot Transfer in CLIP
Multi-modal learning has become increasingly popular due to its ability to leverage information from different data sources (e.g., text and images) to improve the model performance. Recently, CLIP has emerged as an effective approach that employs vision-language contrastive pretraining to learn joint image and text representations and exhibits remarkable performance in zero-shot learning and text-guided natural image generation. Despite the huge practical success of CLIP, its theoretical understanding remains elusive. In this paper, we formally study transferrable representation learning underlying CLIP and demonstrate how features from different modalities get aligned. We also analyze its zero-shot transfer performance on the downstream tasks. Inspired by our analysis, we propose a new CLIP-type approach, which achieves better performance than CLIP and other state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks
We introduce Grounded SAM, which uses Grounding DINO as an open-set object detector to combine with the segment anything model (SAM). This integration enables the detection and segmentation of any regions based on arbitrary text inputs and opens a door to connecting various vision models. As shown in Fig.1, a wide range of vision tasks can be achieved by using the versatile Grounded SAM pipeline. For example, an automatic annotation pipeline based solely on input images can be realized by incorporating models such as BLIP and Recognize Anything. Additionally, incorporating Stable-Diffusion allows for controllable image editing, while the integration of OSX facilitates promptable 3D human motion analysis. Grounded SAM also shows superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks, achieving 48.7 mean AP on SegInW (Segmentation in the wild) zero-shot benchmark with the combination of Grounding DINO-Base and SAM-Huge models.
Few-Shot Adaptation Benchmark for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models
Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models (RSVLMs) have shown remarkable potential thanks to large-scale pretraining, achieving strong zero-shot performance on various tasks. However, their ability to generalize in low-data regimes, such as few-shot learning, remains insufficiently explored. In this work, we present the first structured benchmark for evaluating few-shot adaptation methods on RSVLMs. We conduct comprehensive experiments across ten remote sensing scene classification datasets, applying five widely used few-shot adaptation strategies to three state-of-the-art RSVLMs with varying backbones. Our findings reveal that models with similar zero-shot performance can exhibit markedly different behavior under few-shot adaptation, with some RSVLMs being inherently more amenable to such adaptation than others. The variability of performance and the absence of a clear winner among existing methods highlight the need for the development of more robust methods for few-shot adaptation tailored to RS. To facilitate future research, we provide a reproducible benchmarking framework and open-source code to systematically evaluate RSVLMs under few-shot conditions. The source code is publicly available on Github: https://github.com/elkhouryk/fewshot_RSVLMs
SpatialPrompting: Keyframe-driven Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf Multimodal Large Language Models
This study introduces SpatialPrompting, a novel framework that harnesses the emergent reasoning capabilities of off-the-shelf multimodal large language models to achieve zero-shot spatial reasoning in three-dimensional (3D) environments. Unlike existing methods that rely on expensive 3D-specific fine-tuning with specialized 3D inputs such as point clouds or voxel-based features, SpatialPrompting employs a keyframe-driven prompt generation strategy. This framework uses metrics such as vision-language similarity, Mahalanobis distance, field of view, and image sharpness to select a diverse and informative set of keyframes from image sequences and then integrates them with corresponding camera pose data to effectively abstract spatial relationships and infer complex 3D structures. The proposed framework not only establishes a new paradigm for flexible spatial reasoning that utilizes intuitive visual and positional cues but also achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on benchmark datasets, such as ScanQA and SQA3D, across several metrics. The proposed method effectively eliminates the need for specialized 3D inputs and fine-tuning, offering a simpler and more scalable alternative to conventional approaches.
BEIR-NL: Zero-shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Dutch Language
Zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval (IR) models is often performed using BEIR; a large and heterogeneous benchmark composed of multiple datasets, covering different retrieval tasks across various domains. Although BEIR has become a standard benchmark for the zero-shot setup, its exclusively English content reduces its utility for underrepresented languages in IR, including Dutch. To address this limitation and encourage the development of Dutch IR models, we introduce BEIR-NL by automatically translating the publicly accessible BEIR datasets into Dutch. Using BEIR-NL, we evaluated a wide range of multilingual dense ranking and reranking models, as well as the lexical BM25 method. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline, and is only outperformed by the larger dense models trained for retrieval. When combined with reranking models, BM25 achieves performance on par with the best dense ranking models. In addition, we explored the impact of translation on the data by back-translating a selection of datasets to English, and observed a performance drop for both dense and lexical methods, indicating the limitations of translation for creating benchmarks. BEIR-NL is publicly available on the Hugging Face hub.
BEIR-PL: Zero Shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Polish Language
The BEIR dataset is a large, heterogeneous benchmark for Information Retrieval (IR) in zero-shot settings, garnering considerable attention within the research community. However, BEIR and analogous datasets are predominantly restricted to the English language. Our objective is to establish extensive large-scale resources for IR in the Polish language, thereby advancing the research in this NLP area. In this work, inspired by mMARCO and Mr.~TyDi datasets, we translated all accessible open IR datasets into Polish, and we introduced the BEIR-PL benchmark -- a new benchmark which comprises 13 datasets, facilitating further development, training and evaluation of modern Polish language models for IR tasks. We executed an evaluation and comparison of numerous IR models on the newly introduced BEIR-PL benchmark. Furthermore, we publish pre-trained open IR models for Polish language,d marking a pioneering development in this field. Additionally, the evaluation revealed that BM25 achieved significantly lower scores for Polish than for English, which can be attributed to high inflection and intricate morphological structure of the Polish language. Finally, we trained various re-ranking models to enhance the BM25 retrieval, and we compared their performance to identify their unique characteristic features. To ensure accurate model comparisons, it is necessary to scrutinise individual results rather than to average across the entire benchmark. Thus, we thoroughly analysed the outcomes of IR models in relation to each individual data subset encompassed by the BEIR benchmark. The benchmark data is available at URL {\bf https://huggingface.co/clarin-knext}.
Hansel: A Chinese Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Entity Linking Benchmark
Modern Entity Linking (EL) systems entrench a popularity bias, yet there is no dataset focusing on tail and emerging entities in languages other than English. We present Hansel, a new benchmark in Chinese that fills the vacancy of non-English few-shot and zero-shot EL challenges. The test set of Hansel is human annotated and reviewed, created with a novel method for collecting zero-shot EL datasets. It covers 10K diverse documents in news, social media posts and other web articles, with Wikidata as its target Knowledge Base. We demonstrate that the existing state-of-the-art EL system performs poorly on Hansel (R@1 of 36.6% on Few-Shot). We then establish a strong baseline that scores a R@1 of 46.2% on Few-Shot and 76.6% on Zero-Shot on our dataset. We also show that our baseline achieves competitive results on TAC-KBP2015 Chinese Entity Linking task.
InstructDial: Improving Zero and Few-shot Generalization in Dialogue through Instruction Tuning
Instruction tuning is an emergent paradigm in NLP wherein natural language instructions are leveraged with language models to induce zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. Instructions have been shown to enable good performance on unseen tasks and datasets in both large and small language models. Dialogue is an especially interesting area to explore instruction tuning because dialogue systems perform multiple kinds of tasks related to language (e.g., natural language understanding and generation, domain-specific interaction), yet instruction tuning has not been systematically explored for dialogue-related tasks. We introduce InstructDial, an instruction tuning framework for dialogue, which consists of a repository of 48 diverse dialogue tasks in a unified text-to-text format created from 59 openly available dialogue datasets. Next, we explore cross-task generalization ability on models tuned on InstructDial across diverse dialogue tasks. Our analysis reveals that InstructDial enables good zero-shot performance on unseen datasets and tasks such as dialogue evaluation and intent detection, and even better performance in a few-shot setting. To ensure that models adhere to instructions, we introduce novel meta-tasks. We establish benchmark zero-shot and few-shot performance of models trained using the proposed framework on multiple dialogue tasks.
FewCLUE: A Chinese Few-shot Learning Evaluation Benchmark
Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success in natural language understanding tasks. While different learning schemes -- fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot learning -- have been widely explored and compared for languages such as English, there is comparatively little work in Chinese to fairly and comprehensively evaluate and compare these methods and thus hinders cumulative progress. In this paper, we introduce the Chinese Few-shot Learning Evaluation Benchmark (FewCLUE), the first comprehensive few-shot evaluation benchmark in Chinese. It includes nine tasks, ranging from single-sentence and sentence-pair classification tasks to machine reading comprehension tasks. We systematically evaluate five state-of-the-art (SOTA) few-shot learning methods (including PET, ADAPET, LM-BFF, P-tuning and EFL), and compare their performance with fine-tuning and zero-shot learning schemes on the newly constructed FewCLUE benchmark. Experimental results reveal that: 1) The effect of different few-shot learning methods is sensitive to the pre-trained model to which the methods are applied; 2) PET and P-tuning achieve the best overall performance with RoBERTa and ERNIE respectively. Our benchmark is used in the few-shot learning contest of NLPCC 2021. In addition, we provide a user-friendly toolkit, as well as an online leaderboard to help facilitate further progress on Chinese few-shot learning. We provide a baseline performance on different learning methods, a reference for future research.
Safurai-Csharp: Harnessing Synthetic Data to improve language-specific Code LLM
This paper introduces Safurai-Csharp, an open-source model designed to specialize in the generation, completion, and debugging of C# code. Safurai-Csharp is built upon the novel CodeLlama 34B model and leverages the EvolInstruct technique, creating a refined and expanded dataset for its fine-tuning process. The results of its performance, a notable score of 56.33% on the Manual MultiPL-E benchmark (Zero-Shot, Pass@1), signal its high capacity to streamline developers' workflows and aid code learning. It shows promise in setting new stakes in the landscape of open-source C# LLMs and hopes to inspire more inclusive and wide-ranging development in the field of language-specific LLMs.
Open-vocabulary Object Segmentation with Diffusion Models
The goal of this paper is to extract the visual-language correspondence from a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, in the form of segmentation map, i.e., simultaneously generating images and segmentation masks for the corresponding visual entities described in the text prompt. We make the following contributions: (i) we pair the existing Stable Diffusion model with a novel grounding module, that can be trained to align the visual and textual embedding space of the diffusion model with only a small number of object categories; (ii) we establish an automatic pipeline for constructing a dataset, that consists of {image, segmentation mask, text prompt} triplets, to train the proposed grounding module; (iii) we evaluate the performance of open-vocabulary grounding on images generated from the text-to-image diffusion model and show that the module can well segment the objects of categories beyond seen ones at training time; (iv) we adopt the augmented diffusion model to build a synthetic semantic segmentation dataset, and show that, training a standard segmentation model on such dataset demonstrates competitive performance on the zero-shot segmentation(ZS3) benchmark, which opens up new opportunities for adopting the powerful diffusion model for discriminative tasks.
No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance
Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification/retrieval and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of multimodal models on downstream concepts influenced by the frequency of these concepts in their pretraining datasets? We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and five standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly. We contribute this long-tail test set as the "Let it Wag!" benchmark to further research in this direction. Taken together, our study reveals an exponential need for training data which implies that the key to "zero-shot" generalization capabilities under large-scale training paradigms remains to be found.
BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models
Existing neural information retrieval (IR) models have often been studied in homogeneous and narrow settings, which has considerably limited insights into their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization capabilities. To address this, and to facilitate researchers to broadly evaluate the effectiveness of their models, we introduce Benchmarking-IR (BEIR), a robust and heterogeneous evaluation benchmark for information retrieval. We leverage a careful selection of 18 publicly available datasets from diverse text retrieval tasks and domains and evaluate 10 state-of-the-art retrieval systems including lexical, sparse, dense, late-interaction and re-ranking architectures on the BEIR benchmark. Our results show BM25 is a robust baseline and re-ranking and late-interaction-based models on average achieve the best zero-shot performances, however, at high computational costs. In contrast, dense and sparse-retrieval models are computationally more efficient but often underperform other approaches, highlighting the considerable room for improvement in their generalization capabilities. We hope this framework allows us to better evaluate and understand existing retrieval systems, and contributes to accelerating progress towards better robust and generalizable systems in the future. BEIR is publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/beir.
LR0.FM: Low-Res Benchmark and Improving Robustness for Zero-Shot Classification in Foundation Models
Visual-language foundation Models (FMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization across diverse tasks, largely attributed to extensive pre-training on largescale datasets. However, their robustness on low-resolution/pixelated (LR) images, a common challenge in real-world scenarios, remains underexplored. We introduce LR0.FM, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating the impact of low resolution on the zero-shot classification performance of 10 FM(s) across 66 backbones and 15 datasets. We propose a novel metric, Weighted Aggregated Robustness, to address the limitations of existing metrics and better evaluate model performance across resolutions and datasets. Our key findings show that: (i) model size positively correlates with robustness to resolution degradation, (ii) pre-training dataset quality is more important than its size, and (iii) fine-tuned and higher resolution models are less robust against LR. Our analysis further reveals that the model makes semantically reasonable predictions at LR, and the lack of fine-grained details in input adversely impacts the model's initial layers more than the deeper layers. We use these insights and introduce a simple strategy, LR-TK0, to enhance the robustness of models without compromising their pre-trained weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LR-TK0 for robustness against low-resolution across several datasets and its generalization capability across backbones and other approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/shyammarjit/LR0.FM
Zero-shot Factual Consistency Evaluation Across Domains
This work addresses the challenge of factual consistency in text generation systems. We unify the tasks of Natural Language Inference, Summarization Evaluation, Factuality Verification and Factual Consistency Evaluation to train models capable of evaluating the factual consistency of source-target pairs across diverse domains. We rigorously evaluate these against eight baselines on a comprehensive benchmark suite comprising 22 datasets that span various tasks, domains, and document lengths. Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on this heterogeneous benchmark while addressing efficiency concerns and attaining cross-domain generalization.
Beyond Color and Lines: Zero-Shot Style-Specific Image Variations with Coordinated Semantics
Traditionally, style has been primarily considered in terms of artistic elements such as colors, brushstrokes, and lighting. However, identical semantic subjects, like people, boats, and houses, can vary significantly across different artistic traditions, indicating that style also encompasses the underlying semantics. Therefore, in this study, we propose a zero-shot scheme for image variation with coordinated semantics. Specifically, our scheme transforms the image-to-image problem into an image-to-text-to-image problem. The image-to-text operation employs vision-language models e.g., BLIP) to generate text describing the content of the input image, including the objects and their positions. Subsequently, the input style keyword is elaborated into a detailed description of this style and then merged with the content text using the reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT. Finally, the text-to-image operation utilizes a Diffusion model to generate images based on the text prompt. To enable the Diffusion model to accommodate more styles, we propose a fine-tuning strategy that injects text and style constraints into cross-attention. This ensures that the output image exhibits similar semantics in the desired style. To validate the performance of the proposed scheme, we constructed a benchmark comprising images of various styles and scenes and introduced two novel metrics. Despite its simplicity, our scheme yields highly plausible results in a zero-shot manner, particularly for generating stylized images with high-fidelity semantics.
AnyAnomaly: Zero-Shot Customizable Video Anomaly Detection with LVLM
Video anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial for video analysis and surveillance in computer vision. However, existing VAD models rely on learned normal patterns, which makes them difficult to apply to diverse environments. Consequently, users should retrain models or develop separate AI models for new environments, which requires expertise in machine learning, high-performance hardware, and extensive data collection, limiting the practical usability of VAD. To address these challenges, this study proposes customizable video anomaly detection (C-VAD) technique and the AnyAnomaly model. C-VAD considers user-defined text as an abnormal event and detects frames containing a specified event in a video. We effectively implemented AnyAnomaly using a context-aware visual question answering without fine-tuning the large vision language model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we constructed C-VAD datasets and demonstrated the superiority of AnyAnomaly. Furthermore, our approach showed competitive performance on VAD benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results on the UBnormal dataset and outperforming other methods in generalization across all datasets. Our code is available online at github.com/SkiddieAhn/Paper-AnyAnomaly.
TempoPFN: Synthetic Pre-training of Linear RNNs for Zero-shot Time Series Forecasting
Foundation models for zero-shot time series forecasting face challenges in efficient long-horizon prediction and reproducibility, with existing synthetic-only approaches underperforming on challenging benchmarks. This paper presents TempoPFN, a univariate time series foundation model based on linear Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) pre-trained exclusively on synthetic data. The model uses a GatedDeltaProduct architecture with state-weaving for fully parallelizable training across sequence lengths, eliminating the need for windowing or summarization techniques while maintaining robust temporal state-tracking. Our comprehensive synthetic data pipeline unifies diverse generators, including stochastic differential equations, Gaussian processes, and audio synthesis, with novel augmentations. In zero-shot evaluations on the Gift-Eval benchmark, TempoPFN achieves top-tier competitive performance, outperforming all existing synthetic-only approaches and surpassing the vast majority of models trained on real-world data, while being more efficient than existing baselines by leveraging fully parallelizable training and inference. We open-source our complete data generation pipeline and training code, providing a reproducible foundation for future research.
LesionLocator: Zero-Shot Universal Tumor Segmentation and Tracking in 3D Whole-Body Imaging
In this work, we present LesionLocator, a framework for zero-shot longitudinal lesion tracking and segmentation in 3D medical imaging, establishing the first end-to-end model capable of 4D tracking with dense spatial prompts. Our model leverages an extensive dataset of 23,262 annotated medical scans, as well as synthesized longitudinal data across diverse lesion types. The diversity and scale of our dataset significantly enhances model generalizability to real-world medical imaging challenges and addresses key limitations in longitudinal data availability. LesionLocator outperforms all existing promptable models in lesion segmentation by nearly 10 dice points, reaching human-level performance, and achieves state-of-the-art results in lesion tracking, with superior lesion retrieval and segmentation accuracy. LesionLocator not only sets a new benchmark in universal promptable lesion segmentation and automated longitudinal lesion tracking but also provides the first open-access solution of its kind, releasing our synthetic 4D dataset and model to the community, empowering future advancements in medical imaging. Code is available at: www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/LesionLocator
Zero-Shot ECG Classification with Multimodal Learning and Test-time Clinical Knowledge Enhancement
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are non-invasive diagnostic tools crucial for detecting cardiac arrhythmic diseases in clinical practice. While ECG Self-supervised Learning (eSSL) methods show promise in representation learning from unannotated ECG data, they often overlook the clinical knowledge that can be found in reports. This oversight and the requirement for annotated samples for downstream tasks limit eSSL's versatility. In this work, we address these issues with the Multimodal ECG Representation Learning (MERL}) framework. Through multimodal learning on ECG records and associated reports, MERL is capable of performing zero-shot ECG classification with text prompts, eliminating the need for training data in downstream tasks. At test time, we propose the Clinical Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Engineering (CKEPE) approach, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to exploit external expert-verified clinical knowledge databases, generating more descriptive prompts and reducing hallucinations in LLM-generated content to boost zero-shot classification. Based on MERL, we perform the first benchmark across six public ECG datasets, showing the superior performance of MERL compared against eSSL methods. Notably, MERL achieves an average AUC score of 75.2% in zero-shot classification (without training data), 3.2% higher than linear probed eSSL methods with 10\% annotated training data, averaged across all six datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/cheliu-computation/MERL
Zero-Shot Object-Centric Representation Learning
The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities. Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.
Supercompiler Code Optimization with Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning
Effective code optimization in compilers plays a central role in computer and software engineering. While compilers can be made to automatically search the optimization space without the need for user interventions, this is not a standard practice since the search is slow and cumbersome. Here we present CodeZero, an artificial intelligence agent trained extensively on large data to produce effective optimization strategies instantly for each program in a single trial of the agent. To overcome the huge range of possible test programs, we prepare a large dataset of training programs that emphasize quality, naturalness, and diversity. To tackle the vast space of possible optimizations, we adapt deep reinforcement learning to train the agent in a sample-efficient manner through interacting with a world model of the compiler environment. Evaluation on both benchmark suites and production-level code optimization problems demonstrates our agent's supercompiler performances and zero-shot generalization abilities, outperforming built-in optimization options designed by compiler experts. Our methodology kindles the great potential of artificial intelligence for engineering and paves the way for scaling machine learning techniques in the realm of code optimization.
Image-free Classifier Injection for Zero-Shot Classification
Zero-shot learning models achieve remarkable results on image classification for samples from classes that were not seen during training. However, such models must be trained from scratch with specialised methods: therefore, access to a training dataset is required when the need for zero-shot classification arises. In this paper, we aim to equip pre-trained models with zero-shot classification capabilities without the use of image data. We achieve this with our proposed Image-free Classifier Injection with Semantics (ICIS) that injects classifiers for new, unseen classes into pre-trained classification models in a post-hoc fashion without relying on image data. Instead, the existing classifier weights and simple class-wise descriptors, such as class names or attributes, are used. ICIS has two encoder-decoder networks that learn to reconstruct classifier weights from descriptors (and vice versa), exploiting (cross-)reconstruction and cosine losses to regularise the decoding process. Notably, ICIS can be cheaply trained and applied directly on top of pre-trained classification models. Experiments on benchmark ZSL datasets show that ICIS produces unseen classifier weights that achieve strong (generalised) zero-shot classification performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ImageFreeZSL .
SAMURAI: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Zero-Shot Visual Tracking with Motion-Aware Memory
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has demonstrated strong performance in object segmentation tasks but faces challenges in visual object tracking, particularly when managing crowded scenes with fast-moving or self-occluding objects. Furthermore, the fixed-window memory approach in the original model does not consider the quality of memories selected to condition the image features for the next frame, leading to error propagation in videos. This paper introduces SAMURAI, an enhanced adaptation of SAM 2 specifically designed for visual object tracking. By incorporating temporal motion cues with the proposed motion-aware memory selection mechanism, SAMURAI effectively predicts object motion and refines mask selection, achieving robust, accurate tracking without the need for retraining or fine-tuning. SAMURAI operates in real-time and demonstrates strong zero-shot performance across diverse benchmark datasets, showcasing its ability to generalize without fine-tuning. In evaluations, SAMURAI achieves significant improvements in success rate and precision over existing trackers, with a 7.1% AUC gain on LaSOT_{ext} and a 3.5% AO gain on GOT-10k. Moreover, it achieves competitive results compared to fully supervised methods on LaSOT, underscoring its robustness in complex tracking scenarios and its potential for real-world applications in dynamic environments. Code and results are available at https://github.com/yangchris11/samurai.
ZeroNVS: Zero-Shot 360-Degree View Synthesis from a Single Real Image
We introduce a 3D-aware diffusion model, ZeroNVS, for single-image novel view synthesis for in-the-wild scenes. While existing methods are designed for single objects with masked backgrounds, we propose new techniques to address challenges introduced by in-the-wild multi-object scenes with complex backgrounds. Specifically, we train a generative prior on a mixture of data sources that capture object-centric, indoor, and outdoor scenes. To address issues from data mixture such as depth-scale ambiguity, we propose a novel camera conditioning parameterization and normalization scheme. Further, we observe that Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) tends to truncate the distribution of complex backgrounds during distillation of 360-degree scenes, and propose "SDS anchoring" to improve the diversity of synthesized novel views. Our model sets a new state-of-the-art result in LPIPS on the DTU dataset in the zero-shot setting, even outperforming methods specifically trained on DTU. We further adapt the challenging Mip-NeRF 360 dataset as a new benchmark for single-image novel view synthesis, and demonstrate strong performance in this setting. Our code and data are at http://kylesargent.github.io/zeronvs/
SA-DVAE: Improving Zero-Shot Skeleton-Based Action Recognition by Disentangled Variational Autoencoders
Existing zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition methods utilize projection networks to learn a shared latent space of skeleton features and semantic embeddings. The inherent imbalance in action recognition datasets, characterized by variable skeleton sequences yet constant class labels, presents significant challenges for alignment. To address the imbalance, we propose SA-DVAE -- Semantic Alignment via Disentangled Variational Autoencoders, a method that first adopts feature disentanglement to separate skeleton features into two independent parts -- one is semantic-related and another is irrelevant -- to better align skeleton and semantic features. We implement this idea via a pair of modality-specific variational autoencoders coupled with a total correction penalty. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets: NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and PKU-MMD, and our experimental results show that SA-DAVE produces improved performance over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/pha123661/SA-DVAE.
Large Language Models are Pretty Good Zero-Shot Video Game Bug Detectors
Video game testing requires game-specific knowledge as well as common sense reasoning about the events in the game. While AI-driven agents can satisfy the first requirement, it is not yet possible to meet the second requirement automatically. Therefore, video game testing often still relies on manual testing, and human testers are required to play the game thoroughly to detect bugs. As a result, it is challenging to fully automate game testing. In this study, we explore the possibility of leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of large language models for video game bug detection. By formulating the bug detection problem as a question-answering task, we show that large language models can identify which event is buggy in a sequence of textual descriptions of events from a game. To this end, we introduce the GameBugDescriptions benchmark dataset, which consists of 167 buggy gameplay videos and a total of 334 question-answer pairs across 8 games. We extensively evaluate the performance of six models across the OPT and InstructGPT large language model families on our benchmark dataset. Our results show promising results for employing language models to detect video game bugs. With the proper prompting technique, we could achieve an accuracy of 70.66%, and on some video games, up to 78.94%. Our code, evaluation data and the benchmark can be found on https://asgaardlab.github.io/LLMxBugs
Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are widely used in many sub-fields of natural language processing (NLP) and generally known as excellent few-shot learners with task-specific exemplars. Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a recent technique for eliciting complex multi-step reasoning through step-by-step answer examples, achieved the state-of-the-art performances in arithmetics and symbolic reasoning, difficult system-2 tasks that do not follow the standard scaling laws for LLMs. While these successes are often attributed to LLMs' ability for few-shot learning, we show that LLMs are decent zero-shot reasoners by simply adding "Let's think step by step" before each answer. Experimental results demonstrate that our Zero-shot-CoT, using the same single prompt template, significantly outperforms zero-shot LLM performances on diverse benchmark reasoning tasks including arithmetics (MultiArith, GSM8K, AQUA-RAT, SVAMP), symbolic reasoning (Last Letter, Coin Flip), and other logical reasoning tasks (Date Understanding, Tracking Shuffled Objects), without any hand-crafted few-shot examples, e.g. increasing the accuracy on MultiArith from 17.7% to 78.7% and GSM8K from 10.4% to 40.7% with large InstructGPT model (text-davinci-002), as well as similar magnitudes of improvements with another off-the-shelf large model, 540B parameter PaLM. The versatility of this single prompt across very diverse reasoning tasks hints at untapped and understudied fundamental zero-shot capabilities of LLMs, suggesting high-level, multi-task broad cognitive capabilities may be extracted by simple prompting. We hope our work not only serves as the minimal strongest zero-shot baseline for the challenging reasoning benchmarks, but also highlights the importance of carefully exploring and analyzing the enormous zero-shot knowledge hidden inside LLMs before crafting finetuning datasets or few-shot exemplars.
Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization
Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models' pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot generalization instead be directly induced by explicit multitask learning? To test this question at scale, we develop a system for easily mapping any natural language tasks into a human-readable prompted form. We convert a large set of supervised datasets, each with multiple prompts with diverse wording. These prompted datasets allow for benchmarking the ability of a model to perform completely held-out tasks. We fine-tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model (Raffel et al., 2020; Lester et al., 2021) on this multitask mixture covering a wide variety of tasks. The model attains strong zero-shot performance on several standard datasets, often outperforming models up to 16x its size. Further, our approach attains strong performance on a subset of tasks from the BIG-bench benchmark, outperforming models up to 6x its size. All trained models are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/t-zero and all prompts are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.
FairerCLIP: Debiasing CLIP's Zero-Shot Predictions using Functions in RKHSs
Large pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP provide compact and general-purpose representations of text and images that are demonstrably effective across multiple downstream zero-shot prediction tasks. However, owing to the nature of their training process, these models have the potential to 1) propagate or amplify societal biases in the training data and 2) learn to rely on spurious features. This paper proposes FairerCLIP, a general approach for making zero-shot predictions of CLIP more fair and robust to spurious correlations. We formulate the problem of jointly debiasing CLIP's image and text representations in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), which affords multiple benefits: 1) Flexibility: Unlike existing approaches, which are specialized to either learn with or without ground-truth labels, FairerCLIP is adaptable to learning in both scenarios. 2) Ease of Optimization: FairerCLIP lends itself to an iterative optimization involving closed-form solvers, which leads to 4times-10times faster training than the existing methods. 3) Sample Efficiency: Under sample-limited conditions, FairerCLIP significantly outperforms baselines when they fail entirely. And, 4) Performance: Empirically, FairerCLIP achieves appreciable accuracy gains on benchmark fairness and spurious correlation datasets over their respective baselines.
Scaling Zero-Shot Reference-to-Video Generation
Reference-to-video (R2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that align with a text prompt while preserving the subject identity from reference images. However, current R2V methods are hindered by the reliance on explicit reference image-video-text triplets, whose construction is highly expensive and difficult to scale. We bypass this bottleneck by introducing Saber, a scalable zero-shot framework that requires no explicit R2V data. Trained exclusively on video-text pairs, Saber employs a masked training strategy and a tailored attention-based model design to learn identity-consistent and reference-aware representations. Mask augmentation techniques are further integrated to mitigate copy-paste artifacts common in reference-to-video generation. Moreover, Saber demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities across a varying number of references and achieves superior performance on the OpenS2V-Eval benchmark compared to methods trained with R2V data.
CapS-Adapter: Caption-based MultiModal Adapter in Zero-Shot Classification
Recent advances in vision-language foundational models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated significant strides in zero-shot classification. However, the extensive parameterization of models like CLIP necessitates a resource-intensive fine-tuning process. In response, TIP-Adapter and SuS-X have introduced training-free methods aimed at bolstering the efficacy of downstream tasks. While these approaches incorporate support sets to maintain data distribution consistency between knowledge cache and test sets, they often fall short in terms of generalization on the test set, particularly when faced with test data exhibiting substantial distributional variations. In this work, we present CapS-Adapter, an innovative method that employs a caption-based support set, effectively harnessing both image and caption features to exceed existing state-of-the-art techniques in training-free scenarios. CapS-Adapter adeptly constructs support sets that closely mirror target distributions, utilizing instance-level distribution features extracted from multimodal large models. By leveraging CLIP's single and cross-modal strengths, CapS-Adapter enhances predictive accuracy through the use of multimodal support sets. Our method achieves outstanding zero-shot classification results across 19 benchmark datasets, improving accuracy by 2.19\% over the previous leading method. Our contributions are substantiated through extensive validation on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior performance and robust generalization capabilities. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/WLuLi/CapS-Adapter.
A Zero-shot Explainable Doctor Ranking Framework with Large Language Models
Online medical service provides patients convenient access to doctors, but effectively ranking doctors based on specific medical needs remains challenging. Current ranking approaches typically lack the interpretability crucial for patient trust and informed decision-making. Additionally, the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and labeled data for supervised learning impedes progress in expertise-aware doctor ranking. To address these challenges, we propose an explainable ranking framework for doctor ranking powered by large language models in a zero-shot setting. Our framework dynamically generates disease-specific ranking criteria to guide the large language model in assessing doctor relevance with transparency and consistency. It further enhances interpretability by generating step-by-step rationales for its ranking decisions, improving the overall explainability of the information retrieval process. To support rigorous evaluation, we built and released DrRank, a novel expertise-driven dataset comprising 38 disease-treatment pairs and 4,325 doctor profiles. On this benchmark, our framework significantly outperforms the strongest baseline by +6.45 NDCG@10. Comprehensive analyses also show our framework is fair across disease types, patient gender, and geographic regions. Furthermore, verification by medical experts confirms the reliability and interpretability of our approach, reinforcing its potential for trustworthy, real-world doctor recommendation. To demonstrate its broader applicability, we validate our framework on two datasets from BEIR benchmark, where it again achieves superior performance. The code and associated data are available at: https://github.com/YangLab-BUPT/DrRank.
CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation
For robots to be generally useful, they must be able to find arbitrary objects described by people (i.e., be language-driven) even without expensive navigation training on in-domain data (i.e., perform zero-shot inference). We explore these capabilities in a unified setting: language-driven zero-shot object navigation (L-ZSON). Inspired by the recent success of open-vocabulary models for image classification, we investigate a straightforward framework, CLIP on Wheels (CoW), to adapt open-vocabulary models to this task without fine-tuning. To better evaluate L-ZSON, we introduce the Pasture benchmark, which considers finding uncommon objects, objects described by spatial and appearance attributes, and hidden objects described relative to visible objects. We conduct an in-depth empirical study by directly deploying 21 CoW baselines across Habitat, RoboTHOR, and Pasture. In total, we evaluate over 90k navigation episodes and find that (1) CoW baselines often struggle to leverage language descriptions, but are proficient at finding uncommon objects. (2) A simple CoW, with CLIP-based object localization and classical exploration -- and no additional training -- matches the navigation efficiency of a state-of-the-art ZSON method trained for 500M steps on Habitat MP3D data. This same CoW provides a 15.6 percentage point improvement in success over a state-of-the-art RoboTHOR ZSON model.
Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks; however, their efficacy in more challenging and domain-specific tasks remains less explored. This paper introduces the GAOKAO-Benchmark (GAOKAO-Bench), an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese Gaokao examination as test samples for evaluating large language models.In order to align the evaluation results with humans as much as possible, we designed a method based on zero-shot prompts to analyze the accuracy and scoring rate of the model by dividing the questions into subjective and objective types. We evaluated the ChatGPT model on GAOKAO-Benchmark performance.Our findings reveal that the ChatGPT model excels in tackling objective questions, while also shedding light on its shortcomings and areas for improvement. To further scrutinize the model's responses, we incorporate human evaluations.In conclusion, this research contributes a robust evaluation benchmark for future large-scale language models and offers valuable insights into the limitations of such models.
TS-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Time Series Foundation Models are Stronger Zero-Shot Forecaster
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Foundation Models (FMs) have recently become prevalent for time series forecasting tasks. While fine-tuning LLMs enables domain adaptation, they often struggle to generalize across diverse and unseen datasets. Moreover, existing Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) still face challenges in handling non-stationary dynamics and distribution shifts, largely due to the lack of effective mechanisms for adaptation. To this end, we present TS-RAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework for time series forecasting that enhances the generalization and interpretability of TSFMs. Specifically, TS-RAG leverages pre-trained time series encoders to retrieve semantically relevant segments from a dedicated knowledge base, enriching the contextual representation of the input query. Furthermore, we propose an Adaptive Retrieval Mixer (ARM) module that dynamically fuses the retrieved patterns with the TSFM's internal representation, improving forecasting accuracy without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Thorough empirical studies on seven public benchmark datasets demonstrate that TS-RAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot forecasting performance, outperforming the existing TSFMs by up to 6.84% across diverse domains while also providing desirable interpretability. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TS-RAG
Local Policies Enable Zero-shot Long-horizon Manipulation
Sim2real for robotic manipulation is difficult due to the challenges of simulating complex contacts and generating realistic task distributions. To tackle the latter problem, we introduce ManipGen, which leverages a new class of policies for sim2real transfer: local policies. Locality enables a variety of appealing properties including invariances to absolute robot and object pose, skill ordering, and global scene configuration. We combine these policies with foundation models for vision, language and motion planning and demonstrate SOTA zero-shot performance of our method to Robosuite benchmark tasks in simulation (97%). We transfer our local policies from simulation to reality and observe they can solve unseen long-horizon manipulation tasks with up to 8 stages with significant pose, object and scene configuration variation. ManipGen outperforms SOTA approaches such as SayCan, OpenVLA, LLMTrajGen and VoxPoser across 50 real-world manipulation tasks by 36%, 76%, 62% and 60% respectively. Video results at https://mihdalal.github.io/manipgen/
OTSeg: Multi-prompt Sinkhorn Attention for Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation
The recent success of CLIP has demonstrated promising results in zero-shot semantic segmentation by transferring muiltimodal knowledge to pixel-level classification. However, leveraging pre-trained CLIP knowledge to closely align text embeddings with pixel embeddings still has limitations in existing approaches. To address this issue, we propose OTSeg, a novel multimodal attention mechanism aimed at enhancing the potential of multiple text prompts for matching associated pixel embeddings. We first propose Multi-Prompts Sinkhorn (MPS) based on the Optimal Transport (OT) algorithm, which leads multiple text prompts to selectively focus on various semantic features within image pixels. Moreover, inspired by the success of Sinkformers in unimodal settings, we introduce the extension of MPS, called Multi-Prompts Sinkhorn Attention (MPSA) , which effectively replaces cross-attention mechanisms within Transformer framework in multimodal settings. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that OTSeg achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with significant gains on Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (ZS3) tasks across three benchmark datasets.
Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot Retriever
In this work, we propose a simple method that applies a large language model (LLM) to large-scale retrieval in zero-shot scenarios. Our method, the Language language model as Retriever (LameR), is built upon no other neural models but an LLM, while breaking brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifting the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets. Essentially, we propose to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query's in-domain candidates. The candidates, regardless of correct or wrong, are obtained by a vanilla retrieval procedure on the target collection. As a part of the prompts, they are likely to help LLM generate more precise answers by pattern imitation or candidate summarization. Even if all the candidates are wrong, the prompts at least make LLM aware of in-collection patterns and genres. Moreover, due to the low performance of a self-supervised retriever, the LLM-based query augmentation becomes less effective as the retriever bottlenecks the whole pipeline. Therefore, we propose to leverage a non-parametric lexicon-based method (e.g., BM25) as the retrieval module to capture query-document overlap in a literal fashion. As such, LameR makes the retrieval procedure transparent to the LLM, thus circumventing the performance bottleneck.
Generating Training Data with Language Models: Towards Zero-Shot Language Understanding
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks: Unidirectional PLMs (e.g., GPT) are well known for their superior text generation capabilities; bidirectional PLMs (e.g., BERT) have been the prominent choice for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While both types of models have achieved promising few-shot learning performance, their potential for zero-shot learning has been underexplored. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses both types of PLMs for fully zero-shot learning of NLU tasks without requiring any task-specific data: A unidirectional PLM generates class-conditioned texts guided by prompts, which are used as the training data for fine-tuning a bidirectional PLM. With quality training data selected based on the generation probability and regularization techniques (label smoothing and temporal ensembling) applied to the fine-tuning stage for better generalization and stability, our approach demonstrates strong performance across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark (e.g., 72.3/73.8 on MNLI-m/mm and 92.8 on SST-2), significantly outperforming zero-shot prompting methods and achieving even comparable results to strong few-shot approaches using 32 training samples per class.
BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting
The BLOOM model is a large open-source multilingual language model capable of zero-shot learning, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To improve its zero-shot performance on unseen languages, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM, but previous works have only explored adapting small language models. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling/.
Seg2Track-SAM2: SAM2-based Multi-object Tracking and Segmentation for Zero-shot Generalization
Autonomous systems require robust Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) capabilities to operate reliably in dynamic environments. MOT ensures consistent object identity assignment and precise spatial delineation. Recent advances in foundation models, such as SAM2, have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization for video segmentation, but their direct application to MOTS (MOT+Segmentation) remains limited by insufficient identity management and memory efficiency. This work introduces Seg2Track-SAM2, a framework that integrates pre-trained object detectors with SAM2 and a novel Seg2Track module to address track initialization, track management, and reinforcement. The proposed approach requires no fine-tuning and remains detector-agnostic. Experimental results on KITTI MOT and KITTI MOTS benchmarks show that Seg2Track-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, ranking fourth overall in both car and pedestrian classes on KITTI MOTS, while establishing a new benchmark in association accuracy (AssA). Furthermore, a sliding-window memory strategy reduces memory usage by up to 75% with negligible performance degradation, supporting deployment under resource constraints. These results confirm that Seg2Track-SAM2 advances MOTS by combining robust zero-shot tracking, enhanced identity preservation, and efficient memory utilization. The code is available at https://github.com/hcmr-lab/Seg2Track-SAM2
A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence
Text-to-image diffusion models have made significant advances in generating and editing high-quality images. As a result, numerous approaches have explored the ability of diffusion model features to understand and process single images for downstream tasks, e.g., classification, semantic segmentation, and stylization. However, significantly less is known about what these features reveal across multiple, different images and objects. In this work, we exploit Stable Diffusion (SD) features for semantic and dense correspondence and discover that with simple post-processing, SD features can perform quantitatively similar to SOTA representations. Interestingly, the qualitative analysis reveals that SD features have very different properties compared to existing representation learning features, such as the recently released DINOv2: while DINOv2 provides sparse but accurate matches, SD features provide high-quality spatial information but sometimes inaccurate semantic matches. We demonstrate that a simple fusion of these two features works surprisingly well, and a zero-shot evaluation using nearest neighbors on these fused features provides a significant performance gain over state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, e.g., SPair-71k, PF-Pascal, and TSS. We also show that these correspondences can enable interesting applications such as instance swapping in two images.
Revisiting non-English Text Simplification: A Unified Multilingual Benchmark
Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sentence pairs in many languages. This paper introduces the MultiSim benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MultiSim with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings. We observe strong performance from Russian in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. We further show that few-shot prompting with BLOOM-176b achieves comparable quality to reference simplifications outperforming fine-tuned models in most languages. We validate these findings through human evaluation.
CIF-Bench: A Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark for Evaluating the Generalizability of Large Language Models
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced the ability to generalize across a wide range of unseen natural language processing (NLP) tasks through instruction-following. Yet, their effectiveness often diminishes in low-resource languages like Chinese, exacerbated by biased evaluations from data leakage, casting doubt on their true generalizability to new linguistic territories. In response, we introduce the Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark (CIF-Bench), designed to evaluate the zero-shot generalizability of LLMs to the Chinese language. CIF-Bench comprises 150 tasks and 15,000 input-output pairs, developed by native speakers to test complex reasoning and Chinese cultural nuances across 20 categories. To mitigate evaluation bias, we release only half of the dataset publicly, with the remainder kept private, and introduce diversified instructions to minimize score variance, totaling 45,000 data instances. Our evaluation of 28 selected LLMs reveals a noticeable performance gap, with the best model scoring only 52.9%, highlighting the limitations of LLMs in less familiar language and task contexts. This work aims to uncover the current limitations of LLMs in handling Chinese tasks, pushing towards the development of more culturally informed and linguistically diverse models with the released data and benchmark (https://yizhilll.github.io/CIF-Bench/).
FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing
Textual scene graph parsing has become increasingly important in various vision-language applications, including image caption evaluation and image retrieval. However, existing scene graph parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from two types of errors. First, the generated scene graphs fail to capture the true semantics of the captions or the corresponding images, resulting in a lack of faithfulness. Second, the generated scene graphs have high inconsistency, with the same semantics represented by different annotations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dataset, which involves re-annotating the captions in Visual Genome (VG) using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR. FACTUAL-MR can be directly converted into faithful and consistent scene graph annotations. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that the parser trained on our dataset outperforms existing approaches in terms of faithfulness and consistency. This improvement leads to a significant performance boost in both image caption evaluation and zero-shot image retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel metric for measuring scene graph similarity, which, when combined with the improved scene graph parser, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple benchmark datasets for the aforementioned tasks. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/FACTUAL .
MAFALDA: A Benchmark and Comprehensive Study of Fallacy Detection and Classification
We introduce MAFALDA, a benchmark for fallacy classification that merges and unites previous fallacy datasets. It comes with a taxonomy that aligns, refines, and unifies existing classifications of fallacies. We further provide a manual annotation of a part of the dataset together with manual explanations for each annotation. We propose a new annotation scheme tailored for subjective NLP tasks, and a new evaluation method designed to handle subjectivity. We then evaluate several language models under a zero-shot learning setting and human performances on MAFALDA to assess their capability to detect and classify fallacies.
Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement
Traditional methods for reasoning segmentation rely on supervised fine-tuning with categorical labels and simple descriptions, limiting its out-of-domain generalization and lacking explicit reasoning processes. To address these limitations, we propose Seg-Zero, a novel framework that demonstrates remarkable generalizability and derives explicit chain-of-thought reasoning through cognitive reinforcement. Seg-Zero introduces a decoupled architecture consisting of a reasoning model and a segmentation model. The reasoning model interprets user intentions, generates explicit reasoning chains, and produces positional prompts, which are subsequently used by the segmentation model to generate precious pixel-level masks. We design a sophisticated reward mechanism that integrates both format and accuracy rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Seg-Zero achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Experiments show that Seg-Zero-7B achieves a zero-shot performance of 57.5 on the ReasonSeg benchmark, surpassing the prior LISA-7B by 18\%. This significant improvement highlights Seg-Zero's ability to generalize across domains while presenting an explicit reasoning process. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Seg-Zero.
A Multi-Language Object-Oriented Programming Benchmark for Large Language Models
Establishing fair and robust benchmarks is essential for evaluating intelligent code generation by large language models (LLMs). Our survey of 35 existing benchmarks uncovers three major imbalances: 85.7% focus on a single programming language; 94.3% target only function-level or statement-level tasks; and over 80% include fewer than ten test cases on average. To address these gaps, we propose MultiOOP, a multi-language object-oriented programming benchmark covering six popular languages (Python, PHP, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript) with 267 tasks per language. We design a translator that extends an existing single-language OOP benchmark and the pass@o metric to a multilingual setting. Moreover, we propose an automated framework for augmenting test cases to ensure the reliability of the evaluation results. We evaluate 14 mainstream LLMs under zero-shot prompting and report three key findings: 1) Substantial performance degradation: pass@1 scores on MultiOOP drop by up to 65.6 percentage points compared to function-level tasks (e.g., HumanEval). 2) Cross-language variability: GPT-4o mini achieves pass@1 of 48.06% in Python but only 0.12%-15.26% in other languages, indicating limited multilingual generalization. 3) Conceptual gaps: pass@o scores are consistently 1.1-19.2 points lower than pass@k, demonstrating that LLMs often generate executable code without fully capturing core OOP concepts. Our benchmark, metric extensions, and evaluation scripts will be publicly released to foster a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of LLMs in object-oriented code generation. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/alphadl/OOP-eval and https://huggingface.co/datasets/codeai-dteam/MultiOOP respectively.
True Detective: A Deep Abductive Reasoning Benchmark Undoable for GPT-3 and Challenging for GPT-4
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated solid zero-shot reasoning capabilities, which is reflected in their performance on the current test tasks. This calls for a more challenging benchmark requiring highly advanced reasoning ability to be solved. In this paper, we introduce such a benchmark, consisting of 191 long-form (1200 words on average) mystery narratives constructed as detective puzzles. Puzzles are sourced from the "5 Minute Mystery" platform and include a multiple-choice question for evaluation. Only 47% of humans solve a puzzle successfully on average, while the best human solvers achieve over 80% success rate. We show that GPT-3 models barely outperform random on this benchmark (with 28% accuracy) while state-of-the-art GPT-4 solves only 38% of puzzles. This indicates that there is still a significant gap in the deep reasoning abilities of LLMs and humans and highlights the need for further research in this area. Our work introduces a challenging benchmark for future studies on reasoning in language models and contributes to a better understanding of the limits of LLMs' abilities.
MULTITuDE: Large-Scale Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection Benchmark
There is a lack of research into capabilities of recent LLMs to generate convincing text in languages other than English and into performance of detectors of machine-generated text in multilingual settings. This is also reflected in the available benchmarks which lack authentic texts in languages other than English and predominantly cover older generators. To fill this gap, we introduce MULTITuDE, a novel benchmarking dataset for multilingual machine-generated text detection comprising of 74,081 authentic and machine-generated texts in 11 languages (ar, ca, cs, de, en, es, nl, pt, ru, uk, and zh) generated by 8 multilingual LLMs. Using this benchmark, we compare the performance of zero-shot (statistical and black-box) and fine-tuned detectors. Considering the multilinguality, we evaluate 1) how these detectors generalize to unseen languages (linguistically similar as well as dissimilar) and unseen LLMs and 2) whether the detectors improve their performance when trained on multiple languages.
Disfl-QA: A Benchmark Dataset for Understanding Disfluencies in Question Answering
Disfluencies is an under-studied topic in NLP, even though it is ubiquitous in human conversation. This is largely due to the lack of datasets containing disfluencies. In this paper, we present a new challenge question answering dataset, Disfl-QA, a derivative of SQuAD, where humans introduce contextual disfluencies in previously fluent questions. Disfl-QA contains a variety of challenging disfluencies that require a more comprehensive understanding of the text than what was necessary in prior datasets. Experiments show that the performance of existing state-of-the-art question answering models degrades significantly when tested on Disfl-QA in a zero-shot setting.We show data augmentation methods partially recover the loss in performance and also demonstrate the efficacy of using gold data for fine-tuning. We argue that we need large-scale disfluency datasets in order for NLP models to be robust to them. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/disfl-qa.
MTOP: A Comprehensive Multilingual Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing Benchmark
Scaling semantic parsing models for task-oriented dialog systems to new languages is often expensive and time-consuming due to the lack of available datasets. Available datasets suffer from several shortcomings: a) they contain few languages b) they contain small amounts of labeled examples per language c) they are based on the simple intent and slot detection paradigm for non-compositional queries. In this paper, we present a new multilingual dataset, called MTOP, comprising of 100k annotated utterances in 6 languages across 11 domains. We use this dataset and other publicly available datasets to conduct a comprehensive benchmarking study on using various state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained models for task-oriented semantic parsing. We achieve an average improvement of +6.3 points on Slot F1 for the two existing multilingual datasets, over best results reported in their experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong zero-shot performance using pre-trained models combined with automatic translation and alignment, and a proposed distant supervision method to reduce the noise in slot label projection.
FinTagging: An LLM-ready Benchmark for Extracting and Structuring Financial Information
We introduce FinTagging, the first full-scope, table-aware XBRL benchmark designed to evaluate the structured information extraction and semantic alignment capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of XBRL-based financial reporting. Unlike prior benchmarks that oversimplify XBRL tagging as flat multi-class classification and focus solely on narrative text, FinTagging decomposes the XBRL tagging problem into two subtasks: FinNI for financial entity extraction and FinCL for taxonomy-driven concept alignment. It requires models to jointly extract facts and align them with the full 10k+ US-GAAP taxonomy across both unstructured text and structured tables, enabling realistic, fine-grained evaluation. We assess a diverse set of LLMs under zero-shot settings, systematically analyzing their performance on both subtasks and overall tagging accuracy. Our results reveal that, while LLMs demonstrate strong generalization in information extraction, they struggle with fine-grained concept alignment, particularly in disambiguating closely related taxonomy entries. These findings highlight the limitations of existing LLMs in fully automating XBRL tagging and underscore the need for improved semantic reasoning and schema-aware modeling to meet the demands of accurate financial disclosure. Code is available at our GitHub repository and data is at our Hugging Face repository.
ONNX-Net: Towards Universal Representations and Instant Performance Prediction for Neural Architectures
Neural architecture search (NAS) automates the design process of high-performing architectures, but remains bottlenecked by expensive performance evaluation. Most existing studies that achieve faster evaluation are mostly tied to cell-based search spaces and graph encodings tailored to those individual search spaces, limiting their flexibility and scalability when applied to more expressive search spaces. In this work, we aim to close the gap of individual search space restrictions and search space dependent network representations. We present ONNX-Bench, a benchmark consisting of a collection of neural networks in a unified format based on ONNX files. ONNX-Bench includes all open-source NAS-bench-based neural networks, resulting in a total size of more than 600k {architecture, accuracy} pairs. This benchmark allows creating a shared neural network representation, ONNX-Net, able to represent any neural architecture using natural language descriptions acting as an input to a performance predictor. This text-based encoding can accommodate arbitrary layer types, operation parameters, and heterogeneous topologies, enabling a single surrogate to generalise across all neural architectures rather than being confined to cell-based search spaces. Experiments show strong zero-shot performance across disparate search spaces using only a small amount of pretraining samples, enabling the unprecedented ability to evaluate any neural network architecture instantly.
Continual-MEGA: A Large-scale Benchmark for Generalizable Continual Anomaly Detection
In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for continual learning in anomaly detection, aimed at better reflecting real-world deployment scenarios. Our benchmark, Continual-MEGA, includes a large and diverse dataset that significantly expands existing evaluation settings by combining carefully curated existing datasets with our newly proposed dataset, ContinualAD. In addition to standard continual learning with expanded quantity, we propose a novel scenario that measures zero-shot generalization to unseen classes, those not observed during continual adaptation. This setting poses a new problem setting that continual adaptation also enhances zero-shot performance. We also present a unified baseline algorithm that improves robustness in few-shot detection and maintains strong generalization. Through extensive evaluations, we report three key findings: (1) existing methods show substantial room for improvement, particularly in pixel-level defect localization; (2) our proposed method consistently outperforms prior approaches; and (3) the newly introduced ContinualAD dataset enhances the performance of strong anomaly detection models. We release the benchmark and code in https://github.com/Continual-Mega/Continual-Mega.
COLE: a Comprehensive Benchmark for French Language Understanding Evaluation
To address the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of French Natural Language Understanding (NLU), we introduce COLE, a new benchmark composed of 23 diverse task covering a broad range of NLU capabilities, including sentiment analysis, paraphrase detection, grammatical judgment, and reasoning, with a particular focus on linguistic phenomena relevant to the French language. We benchmark 94 large language models (LLM), providing an extensive analysis of the current state of French NLU. Our results highlight a significant performance gap between closed- and open-weights models and identify key challenging frontiers for current LLMs, such as zero-shot extractive question-answering (QA), fine-grained word sense disambiguation, and understanding of regional language variations. We release COLE as a public resource to foster further progress in French language modelling.
JAILJUDGE: A Comprehensive Jailbreak Judge Benchmark with Multi-Agent Enhanced Explanation Evaluation Framework
Despite advancements in enhancing LLM safety against jailbreak attacks, evaluating LLM defenses remains a challenge, with current methods often lacking explainability and generalization to complex scenarios, leading to incomplete assessments (e.g., direct judgment without reasoning, low F1 score of GPT-4 in complex cases, bias in multilingual scenarios). To address this, we present JAILJUDGE, a comprehensive benchmark featuring diverse risk scenarios, including synthetic, adversarial, in-the-wild, and multilingual prompts, along with high-quality human-annotated datasets. The JAILJUDGE dataset includes over 35k+ instruction-tune data with reasoning explainability and JAILJUDGETEST, a 4.5k+ labeled set for risk scenarios, and a 6k+ multilingual set across ten languages. To enhance evaluation with explicit reasoning, we propose the JailJudge MultiAgent framework, which enables explainable, fine-grained scoring (1 to 10). This framework supports the construction of instruction-tuning ground truth and facilitates the development of JAILJUDGE Guard, an end-to-end judge model that provides reasoning and eliminates API costs. Additionally, we introduce JailBoost, an attacker-agnostic attack enhancer, and GuardShield, a moderation defense, both leveraging JAILJUDGE Guard. Our experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of JailJudge methods (JailJudge MultiAgent, JAILJUDGE Guard) across diverse models (e.g., GPT-4, Llama-Guard) and zero-shot scenarios. JailBoost and GuardShield significantly improve jailbreak attack and defense tasks under zero-shot settings, with JailBoost enhancing performance by 29.24% and GuardShield reducing defense ASR from 40.46% to 0.15%.
Improving Classification Performance With Human Feedback: Label a few, we label the rest
In the realm of artificial intelligence, where a vast majority of data is unstructured, obtaining substantial amounts of labeled data to train supervised machine learning models poses a significant challenge. To address this, we delve into few-shot and active learning, where are goal is to improve AI models with human feedback on a few labeled examples. This paper focuses on understanding how a continuous feedback loop can refine models, thereby enhancing their accuracy, recall, and precision through incremental human input. By employing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5, BERT, and SetFit, we aim to analyze the efficacy of using a limited number of labeled examples to substantially improve model accuracy. We benchmark this approach on the Financial Phrasebank, Banking, Craigslist, Trec, Amazon Reviews datasets to prove that with just a few labeled examples, we are able to surpass the accuracy of zero shot large language models to provide enhanced text classification performance. We demonstrate that rather than needing to manually label millions of rows of data, we just need to label a few and the model can effectively predict the rest.
VOccl3D: A Video Benchmark Dataset for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation under real Occlusions
Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods have been extensively studied, with many demonstrating high zero-shot performance on in-the-wild images and videos. However, these methods often struggle in challenging scenarios involving complex human poses or significant occlusions. Although some studies address 3D human pose estimation under occlusion, they typically evaluate performance on datasets that lack realistic or substantial occlusions, e.g., most existing datasets introduce occlusions with random patches over the human or clipart-style overlays, which may not reflect real-world challenges. To bridge this gap in realistic occlusion datasets, we introduce a novel benchmark dataset, VOccl3D, a Video-based human Occlusion dataset with 3D body pose and shape annotations. Inspired by works such as AGORA and BEDLAM, we constructed this dataset using advanced computer graphics rendering techniques, incorporating diverse real-world occlusion scenarios, clothing textures, and human motions. Additionally, we fine-tuned recent HPS methods, CLIFF and BEDLAM-CLIFF, on our dataset, demonstrating significant qualitative and quantitative improvements across multiple public datasets, as well as on the test split of our dataset, while comparing its performance with other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we leveraged our dataset to enhance human detection performance under occlusion by fine-tuning an existing object detector, YOLO11, thus leading to a robust end-to-end HPS estimation system under occlusions. Overall, this dataset serves as a valuable resource for future research aimed at benchmarking methods designed to handle occlusions, offering a more realistic alternative to existing occlusion datasets. See the Project page for code and dataset:https://yashgarg98.github.io/VOccl3D-dataset/
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation
Traditional benchmarks struggle to evaluate increasingly sophisticated language models in multilingual and culturally diverse contexts. To address this gap, we introduce MMLU-ProX, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark covering 13 typologically diverse languages with approximately 11,829 questions per language. Building on the challenging reasoning-focused design of MMLU-Pro, our framework employs a semi-automatic translation process: translations generated by state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are rigorously evaluated by expert annotators to ensure conceptual accuracy, terminological consistency, and cultural relevance. We comprehensively evaluate 25 state-of-the-art LLMs using 5-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) and zero-shot prompting strategies, analyzing their performance across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Our experiments reveal consistent performance degradation from high-resource languages to lower-resource ones, with the best models achieving over 70% accuracy on English but dropping to around 40% for languages like Swahili, highlighting persistent gaps in multilingual capabilities despite recent advances. MMLU-ProX is an ongoing project; we are expanding our benchmark by incorporating additional languages and evaluating more language models to provide a more comprehensive assessment of multilingual capabilities.
GAPS: A Large and Diverse Classical Guitar Dataset and Benchmark Transcription Model
We introduce GAPS (Guitar-Aligned Performance Scores), a new dataset of classical guitar performances, and a benchmark guitar transcription model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on GuitarSet in both supervised and zero-shot settings. GAPS is the largest dataset of real guitar audio, containing 14 hours of freely available audio-score aligned pairs, recorded in diverse conditions by over 200 performers, together with high-resolution note-level MIDI alignments and performance videos. These enable us to train a state-of-the-art model for automatic transcription of solo guitar recordings which can generalise well to real world audio that is unseen during training.
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various natural language processing tasks, yet their efficacy in more challenging and domain-specific tasks remains largely unexplored. This paper presents FinEval, a benchmark specifically designed for the financial domain knowledge in the LLMs. FinEval is a collection of high-quality multiple-choice questions covering Finance, Economy, Accounting, and Certificate. It includes 4,661 questions spanning 34 different academic subjects. To ensure a comprehensive model performance evaluation, FinEval employs a range of prompt types, including zero-shot and few-shot prompts, as well as answer-only and chain-of-thought prompts. Evaluating state-of-the-art Chinese and English LLMs on FinEval, the results show that only GPT-4 achieved an accuracy close to 70% in different prompt settings, indicating significant growth potential for LLMs in the financial domain knowledge. Our work offers a more comprehensive financial knowledge evaluation benchmark, utilizing data of mock exams and covering a wide range of evaluated LLMs.
CCMB: A Large-scale Chinese Cross-modal Benchmark
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) on large-scale datasets has shown premier performance on various downstream tasks. In contrast to plenty of available benchmarks with English corpus, large-scale pre-training datasets and downstream datasets with Chinese corpus remain largely unexplored. In this work, we build a large-scale high-quality Chinese Cross-Modal Benchmark named CCMB for the research community, which contains the currently largest public pre-training dataset Zero and five human-annotated fine-tuning datasets for downstream tasks. Zero contains 250 million images paired with 750 million text descriptions, plus two of the five fine-tuning datasets are also currently the largest ones for Chinese cross-modal downstream tasks. Along with the CCMB, we also develop a VLP framework named R2D2, applying a pre-Ranking + Ranking strategy to learn powerful vision-language representations and a two-way distillation method (i.e., target-guided Distillation and feature-guided Distillation) to further enhance the learning capability. With the Zero and the R2D2 VLP framework, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on twelve downstream datasets from five broad categories of tasks including image-text retrieval, image-text matching, image caption, text-to-image generation, and zero-shot image classification. The datasets, models, and codes are available at https://github.com/yuxie11/R2D2
GeneCIS: A Benchmark for General Conditional Image Similarity
We argue that there are many notions of 'similarity' and that models, like humans, should be able to adapt to these dynamically. This contrasts with most representation learning methods, supervised or self-supervised, which learn a fixed embedding function and hence implicitly assume a single notion of similarity. For instance, models trained on ImageNet are biased towards object categories, while a user might prefer the model to focus on colors, textures or specific elements in the scene. In this paper, we propose the GeneCIS ('genesis') benchmark, which measures models' ability to adapt to a range of similarity conditions. Extending prior work, our benchmark is designed for zero-shot evaluation only, and hence considers an open-set of similarity conditions. We find that baselines from powerful CLIP models struggle on GeneCIS and that performance on the benchmark is only weakly correlated with ImageNet accuracy, suggesting that simply scaling existing methods is not fruitful. We further propose a simple, scalable solution based on automatically mining information from existing image-caption datasets. We find our method offers a substantial boost over the baselines on GeneCIS, and further improves zero-shot performance on related image retrieval benchmarks. In fact, though evaluated zero-shot, our model surpasses state-of-the-art supervised models on MIT-States. Project page at https://sgvaze.github.io/genecis/.
TrialPanorama: Database and Benchmark for Systematic Review and Design of Clinical Trials
Developing artificial intelligence (AI) for vertical domains requires a solid data foundation for both training and evaluation. In this work, we introduce TrialPanorama, a large-scale, structured database comprising 1,657,476 clinical trial records aggregated from 15 global sources. The database captures key aspects of trial design and execution, including trial setups, interventions, conditions, biomarkers, and outcomes, and links them to standard biomedical ontologies such as DrugBank and MedDRA. This structured and ontology-grounded design enables TrialPanorama to serve as a unified, extensible resource for a wide range of clinical trial tasks, including trial planning, design, and summarization. To demonstrate its utility, we derive a suite of benchmark tasks directly from the TrialPanorama database. The benchmark spans eight tasks across two categories: three for systematic review (study search, study screening, and evidence summarization) and five for trial design (arm design, eligibility criteria, endpoint selection, sample size estimation, and trial completion assessment). The experiments using five state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) show that while general-purpose LLMs exhibit some zero-shot capability, their performance is still inadequate for high-stakes clinical trial workflows. We release TrialPanorama database and the benchmark to facilitate further research on AI for clinical trials.
SwiLTra-Bench: The Swiss Legal Translation Benchmark
In Switzerland legal translation is uniquely important due to the country's four official languages and requirements for multilingual legal documentation. However, this process traditionally relies on professionals who must be both legal experts and skilled translators -- creating bottlenecks and impacting effective access to justice. To address this challenge, we introduce SwiLTra-Bench, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark of over 180K aligned Swiss legal translation pairs comprising laws, headnotes, and press releases across all Swiss languages along with English, designed to evaluate LLM-based translation systems. Our systematic evaluation reveals that frontier models achieve superior translation performance across all document types, while specialized translation systems excel specifically in laws but under-perform in headnotes. Through rigorous testing and human expert validation, we demonstrate that while fine-tuning open SLMs significantly improves their translation quality, they still lag behind the best zero-shot prompted frontier models such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Additionally, we present SwiLTra-Judge, a specialized LLM evaluation system that aligns best with human expert assessments.
FaithDial: A Faithful Benchmark for Information-Seeking Dialogue
The goal of information-seeking dialogue is to respond to seeker queries with natural language utterances that are grounded on knowledge sources. However, dialogue systems often produce unsupported utterances, a phenomenon known as hallucination. To mitigate this behavior, we adopt a data-centric solution and create FaithDial, a new benchmark for hallucination-free dialogues, by editing hallucinated responses in the Wizard of Wikipedia (WoW) benchmark. We observe that FaithDial is more faithful than WoW while also maintaining engaging conversations. We show that FaithDial can serve as training signal for: i) a hallucination critic, which discriminates whether an utterance is faithful or not, and boosts the performance by 12.8 F1 score on the BEGIN benchmark compared to existing datasets for dialogue coherence; ii) high-quality dialogue generation. We benchmark a series of state-of-the-art models and propose an auxiliary contrastive objective that achieves the highest level of faithfulness and abstractiveness based on several automated metrics. Further, we find that the benefits of FaithDial generalize to zero-shot transfer on other datasets, such as CMU-Dog and TopicalChat. Finally, human evaluation reveals that responses generated by models trained on FaithDial are perceived as more interpretable, cooperative, and engaging.
CAMÕES: A Comprehensive Automatic Speech Recognition Benchmark for European Portuguese
Existing resources for Automatic Speech Recognition in Portuguese are mostly focused on Brazilian Portuguese, leaving European Portuguese (EP) and other varieties under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce CAM\~OES, the first open framework for EP and other Portuguese varieties. It consists of (1) a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, including 46h of EP test data spanning multiple domains; and (2) a collection of state-of-the-art models. For the latter, we consider multiple foundation models, evaluating their zero-shot and fine-tuned performances, as well as E-Branchformer models trained from scratch. A curated set of 425h of EP was used for both fine-tuning and training. Our results show comparable performance for EP between fine-tuned foundation models and the E-Branchformer. Furthermore, the best-performing models achieve relative improvements above 35% WER, compared to the strongest zero-shot foundation model, establishing a new state-of-the-art for EP and other varieties.
PathMMU: A Massive Multimodal Expert-Level Benchmark for Understanding and Reasoning in Pathology
The emergence of large multimodal models has unlocked remarkable potential in AI, particularly in pathology. However, the lack of specialized, high-quality benchmark impeded their development and precise evaluation. To address this, we introduce PathMMU, the largest and highest-quality expert-validated pathology benchmark for LMMs. It comprises 33,573 multimodal multi-choice questions and 21,599 images from various sources, and an explanation for the correct answer accompanies each question. The construction of PathMMU capitalizes on the robust capabilities of GPT-4V, utilizing approximately 30,000 gathered image-caption pairs to generate Q\&As. Significantly, to maximize PathMMU's authority, we invite six pathologists to scrutinize each question under strict standards in PathMMU's validation and test sets, while simultaneously setting an expert-level performance benchmark for PathMMU. We conduct extensive evaluations, including zero-shot assessments of 14 open-sourced and three closed-sourced LMMs and their robustness to image corruption. We also fine-tune representative LMMs to assess their adaptability to PathMMU. The empirical findings indicate that advanced LMMs struggle with the challenging PathMMU benchmark, with the top-performing LMM, GPT-4V, achieving only a 51.7\% zero-shot performance, significantly lower than the 71.4\% demonstrated by human pathologists. After fine-tuning, even open-sourced LMMs can surpass GPT-4V with a performance of over 60\%, but still fall short of the expertise shown by pathologists. We hope that the PathMMU will offer valuable insights and foster the development of more specialized, next-generation LLMs for pathology.
Fields of The World: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset For Global Agricultural Field Boundary Segmentation
Crop field boundaries are foundational datasets for agricultural monitoring and assessments but are expensive to collect manually. Machine learning (ML) methods for automatically extracting field boundaries from remotely sensed images could help realize the demand for these datasets at a global scale. However, current ML methods for field instance segmentation lack sufficient geographic coverage, accuracy, and generalization capabilities. Further, research on improving ML methods is restricted by the lack of labeled datasets representing the diversity of global agricultural fields. We present Fields of The World (FTW) -- a novel ML benchmark dataset for agricultural field instance segmentation spanning 24 countries on four continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America). FTW is an order of magnitude larger than previous datasets with 70,462 samples, each containing instance and semantic segmentation masks paired with multi-date, multi-spectral Sentinel-2 satellite images. We provide results from baseline models for the new FTW benchmark, show that models trained on FTW have better zero-shot and fine-tuning performance in held-out countries than models that aren't pre-trained with diverse datasets, and show positive qualitative zero-shot results of FTW models in a real-world scenario -- running on Sentinel-2 scenes over Ethiopia.
Understanding the Effects of Noise in Text-to-SQL: An Examination of the BIRD-Bench Benchmark
Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of 'noise,' such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found that noise in questions and gold queries are prevalent in the dataset, with varying amounts across domains, and with an uneven distribution between noise types. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark's reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise. All datasets, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/niklaswretblad/the-effects-of-noise-in-text-to-SQL.
Towards Leaving No Indic Language Behind: Building Monolingual Corpora, Benchmark and Models for Indic Languages
Building Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities for Indic languages, which have a collective speaker base of more than one billion speakers is absolutely crucial. In this work, we aim to improve the NLU capabilities of Indic languages by making contributions along 3 important axes (i) monolingual corpora (ii) NLU testsets (iii) multilingual LLMs focusing on Indic languages. Specifically, we curate the largest monolingual corpora, IndicCorp, with 20.9B tokens covering 24 languages from 4 language families - a 2.3x increase over prior work, while supporting 12 additional languages. Next, we create a human-supervised benchmark, IndicXTREME, consisting of nine diverse NLU tasks covering 20 languages. Across languages and tasks, IndicXTREME contains a total of 105 evaluation sets, of which 52 are new contributions to the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort towards creating a standard benchmark for Indic languages that aims to test the multilingual zero-shot capabilities of pretrained language models. Finally, we train IndicBERT v2, a state-of-the-art model supporting all the languages. Averaged across languages and tasks, the model achieves an absolute improvement of 2 points over a strong baseline. The data and models are available at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/IndicBERT.
Wukong: A 100 Million Large-scale Chinese Cross-modal Pre-training Benchmark
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models have shown remarkable performance on various downstream tasks. Their success heavily relies on the scale of pre-trained cross-modal datasets. However, the lack of large-scale datasets and benchmarks in Chinese hinders the development of Chinese VLP models and broader multilingual applications. In this work, we release a large-scale Chinese cross-modal dataset named Wukong, which contains 100 million Chinese image-text pairs collected from the web. Wukong aims to benchmark different multi-modal pre-training methods to facilitate the VLP research and community development. Furthermore, we release a group of models pre-trained with various image encoders (ViT-B/ViT-L/SwinT) and also apply advanced pre-training techniques into VLP such as locked-image text tuning, token-wise similarity in contrastive learning, and reduced-token interaction. Extensive experiments and a benchmarking of different downstream tasks including a new largest human-verified image-text test dataset are also provided. Experiments show that Wukong can serve as a promising Chinese pre-training dataset and benchmark for different cross-modal learning methods. For the zero-shot image classification task on 10 datasets, Wukong_{ViT-L} achieves an average accuracy of 73.03%. For the image-text retrieval task, it achieves a mean recall of 71.6% on AIC-ICC which is 12.9% higher than WenLan 2.0. Also, our Wukong models are benchmarked on downstream tasks with other variants on multiple datasets, e.g., Flickr8K-CN, Flickr-30K-CN, COCO-CN, et al. More information can be referred to: https://wukong-dataset.github.io/wukong-dataset/.
MedEval: A Multi-Level, Multi-Task, and Multi-Domain Medical Benchmark for Language Model Evaluation
Curated datasets for healthcare are often limited due to the need of human annotations from experts. In this paper, we present MedEval, a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. MedEval is comprehensive and consists of data from several healthcare systems and spans 35 human body regions from 8 examination modalities. With 22,779 collected sentences and 21,228 reports, we provide expert annotations at multiple levels, offering a granular potential usage of the data and supporting a wide range of tasks. Moreover, we systematically evaluated 10 generic and domain-specific language models under zero-shot and finetuning settings, from domain-adapted baselines in healthcare to general-purposed state-of-the-art large language models (e.g., ChatGPT). Our evaluations reveal varying effectiveness of the two categories of language models across different tasks, from which we notice the importance of instruction tuning for few-shot usage of large language models. Our investigation paves the way toward benchmarking language models for healthcare and provides valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of adopting large language models in medical domains, informing their practical applications and future advancements.
Mitigating Dialogue Hallucination for Large Multi-modal Models via Adversarial Instruction Tuning
Mitigating hallucinations of Large Multi-modal Models(LMMs) is crucial to enhance their reliability for general-purpose assistants. This paper shows that such hallucinations of LMMs can be significantly exacerbated by preceding user-system dialogues. To precisely measure this, we first present an evaluation benchmark by extending popular multi-modal benchmark datasets with prepended hallucinatory dialogues generated by our novel Adversarial Question Generator, which can automatically generate image-related yet adversarial dialogues by adopting adversarial attacks on LMMs. On our benchmark, the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art LMMs dropped significantly for both the VQA and Captioning tasks. Next, we further reveal this hallucination is mainly due to the prediction bias toward preceding dialogues rather than visual content. To reduce this bias, we propose Adversarial Instruction Tuning that robustly fine-tunes LMMs on augmented multi-modal instruction-following datasets with hallucinatory dialogues. Extensive experiments show that our proposed approach successfully reduces dialogue hallucination while maintaining or even improving performance.
CHIP: A multi-sensor dataset for 6D pose estimation of chairs in industrial settings
Accurate 6D pose estimation of complex objects in 3D environments is essential for effective robotic manipulation. Yet, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating 6D pose estimation methods under realistic industrial conditions, as most datasets focus on household objects in domestic settings, while the few available industrial datasets are limited to artificial setups with objects placed on tables. To bridge this gap, we introduce CHIP, the first dataset designed for 6D pose estimation of chairs manipulated by a robotic arm in a real-world industrial environment. CHIP includes seven distinct chairs captured using three different RGBD sensing technologies and presents unique challenges, such as distractor objects with fine-grained differences and severe occlusions caused by the robotic arm and human operators. CHIP comprises 77,811 RGBD images annotated with ground-truth 6D poses automatically derived from the robot's kinematics, averaging 11,115 annotations per chair. We benchmark CHIP using three zero-shot 6D pose estimation methods, assessing performance across different sensor types, localization priors, and occlusion levels. Results show substantial room for improvement, highlighting the unique challenges posed by the dataset. CHIP will be publicly released.
K-Paths: Reasoning over Graph Paths for Drug Repurposing and Drug Interaction Prediction
Drug discovery is a complex and time-intensive process that requires identifying and validating new therapeutic candidates. Computational approaches using large-scale biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) offer a promising solution to accelerate this process. However, extracting meaningful insights from large-scale KGs remains challenging due to the complexity of graph traversal. Existing subgraph-based methods are tailored to graph neural networks (GNNs), making them incompatible with other models, such as large language models (LLMs). We introduce K-Paths, a retrieval framework that extracts structured, diverse, and biologically meaningful paths from KGs. Integrating these paths enables LLMs and GNNs to effectively predict unobserved drug-drug and drug-disease interactions. Unlike traditional path-ranking approaches, K-Paths retrieves and transforms paths into a structured format that LLMs can directly process, facilitating explainable reasoning. K-Paths employs a diversity-aware adaptation of Yen's algorithm to retrieve the K shortest loopless paths between entities in an interaction query, prioritizing biologically relevant and diverse relationships. Our experiments on benchmark datasets show that K-Paths improves the zero-shot performance of Llama 8.1B's F1-score by 12.45 points on drug repurposing and 13.42 points on interaction severity prediction. We also show that Llama 70B achieves F1-score gains of 6.18 and 8.46 points, respectively. K-Paths also improves the supervised training efficiency of EmerGNN, a state-of-the-art GNN, by reducing KG size by 90% while maintaining strong predictive performance. Beyond its scalability and efficiency, K-Paths uniquely bridges the gap between KGs and LLMs, providing explainable rationales for predicted interactions. These capabilities show that K-Paths is a valuable tool for efficient data-driven drug discovery.
FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models
Collecting high-quality labeled data for model training is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive for various NLP tasks. While copious solutions, such as active learning for small language models (SLMs) and prevalent in-context learning in the era of large language models (LLMs), have been proposed and alleviate the labeling burden to some extent, their performances are still subject to human intervention. It is still underexplored how to reduce the annotation cost in the LLMs era. To bridge this, we revolutionize traditional active learning and propose an innovative collaborative learning framework FreeAL to interactively distill and filter the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. During collaborative training, an LLM serves as an active annotator inculcating its coarse-grained knowledge, while a downstream SLM is incurred as a student to filter out high-quality in-context samples to feedback LLM for the subsequent label refinery. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FreeAL largely enhances the zero-shot performances for both SLM and LLM without any human supervision. The code is available at https://github.com/Justherozen/FreeAL .
LOVM: Language-Only Vision Model Selection
Pre-trained multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their exceptional performance on downstream vision applications, particularly in the few- and zero-shot settings. However, selecting the best-performing VLM for some downstream applications is non-trivial, as it is dataset and task-dependent. Meanwhile, the exhaustive evaluation of all available VLMs on a novel application is not only time and computationally demanding but also necessitates the collection of a labeled dataset for evaluation. As the number of open-source VLM variants increases, there is a need for an efficient model selection strategy that does not require access to a curated evaluation dataset. This paper proposes a novel task and benchmark for efficiently evaluating VLMs' zero-shot performance on downstream applications without access to the downstream task dataset. Specifically, we introduce a new task LOVM: Language-Only Vision Model Selection, where methods are expected to perform both model selection and performance prediction based solely on a text description of the desired downstream application. We then introduced an extensive LOVM benchmark consisting of ground-truth evaluations of 35 pre-trained VLMs and 23 datasets, where methods are expected to rank the pre-trained VLMs and predict their zero-shot performance.
A Progressive Framework of Vision-language Knowledge Distillation and Alignment for Multilingual Scene
Pre-trained vision-language (V-L) models such as CLIP have shown excellent performance in many downstream cross-modal tasks. However, most of them are only applicable to the English context. Subsequent research has focused on this problem and proposed improved models, such as CN-CLIP and AltCLIP, to facilitate their applicability to Chinese and even other languages. Nevertheless, these models suffer from high latency and a large memory footprint in inference, which limits their further deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this work, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective multilingual CLIP Compression framework and train a lightweight multilingual vision-language model, called DC-CLIP, for both Chinese and English context. In this framework, we collect high-quality Chinese and English text-image pairs and design two training stages, including multilingual vision-language feature distillation and alignment. During the first stage, lightweight image/text student models are designed to learn robust visual/multilingual textual feature representation ability from corresponding teacher models, respectively. Subsequently, the multilingual vision-language alignment stage enables effective alignment of visual and multilingual textual features to further improve the model's multilingual performance. Comprehensive experiments in zero-shot image classification, conducted based on the ELEVATER benchmark, showcase that DC-CLIP achieves superior performance in the English context and competitive performance in the Chinese context, even with less training data, when compared to existing models of similar parameter magnitude. The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our designed training mechanism.
DA$^2$: Depth Anything in Any Direction
Panorama has a full FoV (360^circtimes180^circ), offering a more complete visual description than perspective images. Thanks to this characteristic, panoramic depth estimation is gaining increasing traction in 3D vision. However, due to the scarcity of panoramic data, previous methods are often restricted to in-domain settings, leading to poor zero-shot generalization. Furthermore, due to the spherical distortions inherent in panoramas, many approaches rely on perspective splitting (e.g., cubemaps), which leads to suboptimal efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose DA^{2}: Depth Anything in Any Direction, an accurate, zero-shot generalizable, and fully end-to-end panoramic depth estimator. Specifically, for scaling up panoramic data, we introduce a data curation engine for generating high-quality panoramic depth data from perspective, and create sim543K panoramic RGB-depth pairs, bringing the total to sim607K. To further mitigate the spherical distortions, we present SphereViT, which explicitly leverages spherical coordinates to enforce the spherical geometric consistency in panoramic image features, yielding improved performance. A comprehensive benchmark on multiple datasets clearly demonstrates DA^{2}'s SoTA performance, with an average 38% improvement on AbsRel over the strongest zero-shot baseline. Surprisingly, DA^{2} even outperforms prior in-domain methods, highlighting its superior zero-shot generalization. Moreover, as an end-to-end solution, DA^{2} exhibits much higher efficiency over fusion-based approaches. Both the code and the curated panoramic data will be released. Project page: https://depth-any-in-any-dir.github.io/.
LLM-guided Hierarchical Retrieval
Modern IR systems are increasingly tasked with answering complex, multi-faceted queries that require deep reasoning rather than simple keyword or semantic matching. While LLM-based IR has shown great promise, the prevailing retrieve-then-rerank paradigm inherits the limitations of embedding-based retrieval; parametric generative approaches are difficult to update with new information; and long-context methods that place the entire corpus in context are computationally infeasible for large document collections. To address these challenges, we introduce LATTICE, a hierarchical retrieval framework that enables an LLM to reason over and navigate large corpora with logarithmic search complexity by imposing a semantic tree structure on the corpus. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) an offline phase that organizes the corpus into a semantic hierarchy via either a bottom-up agglomerative strategy or a top-down divisive strategy using multi-level summaries and (2) an online traversal phase where a search LLM navigates this tree. A central challenge in such LLM-guided search is that the model's relevance judgments are noisy, context-dependent, and unaware of the hierarchy, making cross-branch and cross-level comparisons difficult. To overcome this, we propose a traversal algorithm that estimates calibrated latent relevance scores from local LLM outputs and aggregates them into a global path relevance metric. Our training-free framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, demonstrating up to 9% improvement in Recall@100 and 5% in nDCG@10 over the next best zero-shot baseline. Furthermore, compared to the fine-tuned SOTA method DIVER-v2, LATTICE attains comparable results on BRIGHT subsets that use a static corpus for evaluation.
MM-Skin: Enhancing Dermatology Vision-Language Model with an Image-Text Dataset Derived from Textbooks
Medical vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise as clinical assistants across various medical fields. However, specialized dermatology VLM capable of delivering professional and detailed diagnostic analysis remains underdeveloped, primarily due to less specialized text descriptions in current dermatology multimodal datasets. To address this issue, we propose MM-Skin, the first large-scale multimodal dermatology dataset that encompasses 3 imaging modalities, including clinical, dermoscopic, and pathological and nearly 10k high-quality image-text pairs collected from professional textbooks. In addition, we generate over 27k diverse, instruction-following vision question answering (VQA) samples (9 times the size of current largest dermatology VQA dataset). Leveraging public datasets and MM-Skin, we developed SkinVL, a dermatology-specific VLM designed for precise and nuanced skin disease interpretation. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations of SkinVL on VQA, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and zero-shot classification tasks across 8 datasets, reveal its exceptional performance for skin diseases in comparison to both general and medical VLM models. The introduction of MM-Skin and SkinVL offers a meaningful contribution to advancing the development of clinical dermatology VLM assistants. MM-Skin is available at https://github.com/ZwQ803/MM-Skin
FIRESPARQL: A LLM-based Framework for SPARQL Query Generation over Scholarly Knowledge Graphs
Question answering over Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) remains a challenging task due to the complexity of scholarly content and the intricate structure of these graphs. Large Language Model (LLM) approaches could be used to translate natural language questions (NLQs) into SPARQL queries; however, these LLM-based approaches struggle with SPARQL query generation due to limited exposure to SKG-specific content and the underlying schema. We identified two main types of errors in the LLM-generated SPARQL queries: (i) structural inconsistencies, such as missing or redundant triples in the queries, and (ii) semantic inaccuracies, where incorrect entities or properties are shown in the queries despite a correct query structure. To address these issues, we propose FIRESPARQL, a modular framework that supports fine-tuned LLMs as a core component, with optional context provided via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a SPARQL query correction layer. We evaluate the framework on the SciQA Benchmark using various configurations (zero-shot, zero-shot with RAG, one-shot, fine-tuning, and fine-tuning with RAG) and compare the performance with baseline and state-of-the-art approaches. We measure query accuracy using BLEU and ROUGE metrics, and query result accuracy using relaxed exact match(RelaxedEM), with respect to the gold standards containing the NLQs, SPARQL queries, and the results of the queries. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning achieves the highest overall performance, reaching 0.90 ROUGE-L for query accuracy and 0.85 RelaxedEM for result accuracy on the test set.
Synthesize, Diagnose, and Optimize: Towards Fine-Grained Vision-Language Understanding
Vision language models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. However, understanding fine-grained visual-linguistic concepts, such as attributes and inter-object relationships, remains a significant challenge. While several benchmarks aim to evaluate VLMs in finer granularity, their primary focus remains on the linguistic aspect, neglecting the visual dimension. Here, we highlight the importance of evaluating VLMs from both a textual and visual perspective. We introduce a progressive pipeline to synthesize images that vary in a specific attribute while ensuring consistency in all other aspects. Utilizing this data engine, we carefully design a benchmark, SPEC, to diagnose the comprehension of object size, position, existence, and count. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough evaluation of four leading VLMs on SPEC. Surprisingly, their performance is close to random guess, revealing significant limitations. With this in mind, we propose a simple yet effective approach to optimize VLMs in fine-grained understanding, achieving significant improvements on SPEC without compromising the zero-shot performance. Results on two additional fine-grained benchmarks also show consistent improvements, further validating the transferability of our approach. Code and data are available at https://github.com/wjpoom/SPEC.
OV-DINO: Unified Open-Vocabulary Detection with Language-Aware Selective Fusion
Open-vocabulary detection is a challenging task due to the requirement of detecting objects based on class names, including those not encountered during training. Existing methods have shown strong zero-shot detection capabilities through pre-training on diverse large-scale datasets. However, these approaches still face two primary challenges: (i) how to universally integrate diverse data sources for end-to-end training, and (ii) how to effectively leverage the language-aware capability for region-level cross-modality understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified open-vocabulary detection method called OV-DINO, which pre-trains on diverse large-scale datasets with language-aware selective fusion in a unified framework. Specifically, we introduce a Unified Data Integration (UniDI) pipeline to enable end-to-end training and eliminate noise from pseudo-label generation by unifying different data sources into detection-centric data. In addition, we propose a Language-Aware Selective Fusion (LASF) module to enable the language-aware ability of the model through a language-aware query selection and fusion process. We evaluate the performance of the proposed OV-DINO on popular open-vocabulary detection benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results with an AP of 50.6\% on the COCO dataset and 40.0\% on the LVIS dataset in a zero-shot manner, demonstrating its strong generalization ability. Furthermore, the fine-tuned OV-DINO on COCO achieves 58.4\% AP, outperforming many existing methods with the same backbone. The code for OV-DINO will be available at https://github.com/wanghao9610/OV-DINO{https://github.com/wanghao9610/OV-DINO}.
ARC-Hunyuan-Video-7B: Structured Video Comprehension of Real-World Shorts
Real-world user-generated short videos, especially those distributed on platforms such as WeChat Channel and TikTok, dominate the mobile internet. However, current large multimodal models lack essential temporally-structured, detailed, and in-depth video comprehension capabilities, which are the cornerstone of effective video search and recommendation, as well as emerging video applications. Understanding real-world shorts is actually challenging due to their complex visual elements, high information density in both visuals and audio, and fast pacing that focuses on emotional expression and viewpoint delivery. This requires advanced reasoning to effectively integrate multimodal information, including visual, audio, and text. In this work, we introduce ARC-Hunyuan-Video, a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and textual signals from raw video inputs end-to-end for structured comprehension. The model is capable of multi-granularity timestamped video captioning and summarization, open-ended video question answering, temporal video grounding, and video reasoning. Leveraging high-quality data from an automated annotation pipeline, our compact 7B-parameter model is trained through a comprehensive regimen: pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, cold start, reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, and final instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative evaluations on our introduced benchmark ShortVid-Bench and qualitative comparisons demonstrate its strong performance in real-world video comprehension, and it supports zero-shot or fine-tuning with a few samples for diverse downstream applications. The real-world production deployment of our model has yielded tangible and measurable improvements in user engagement and satisfaction, a success supported by its remarkable efficiency, with stress tests indicating an inference time of just 10 seconds for a one-minute video on H20 GPU.
ViTamin: Designing Scalable Vision Models in the Vision-Language Era
Recent breakthroughs in vision-language models (VLMs) start a new page in the vision community. The VLMs provide stronger and more generalizable feature embeddings compared to those from ImageNet-pretrained models, thanks to the training on the large-scale Internet image-text pairs. However, despite the amazing achievement from the VLMs, vanilla Vision Transformers (ViTs) remain the default choice for the image encoder. Although pure transformer proves its effectiveness in the text encoding area, it remains questionable whether it is also the case for image encoding, especially considering that various types of networks are proposed on the ImageNet benchmark, which, unfortunately, are rarely studied in VLMs. Due to small data/model scale, the original conclusions of model design on ImageNet can be limited and biased. In this paper, we aim at building an evaluation protocol of vision models in the vision-language era under the contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) framework. We provide a comprehensive way to benchmark different vision models, covering their zero-shot performance and scalability in both model and training data sizes. To this end, we introduce ViTamin, a new vision models tailored for VLMs. ViTamin-L significantly outperforms ViT-L by 2.0% ImageNet zero-shot accuracy, when using the same publicly available DataComp-1B dataset and the same OpenCLIP training scheme. ViTamin-L presents promising results on 60 diverse benchmarks, including classification, retrieval, open-vocabulary detection and segmentation, and large multi-modal models. When further scaling up the model size, our ViTamin-XL with only 436M parameters attains 82.9% ImageNet zero-shot accuracy, surpassing 82.0% achieved by EVA-E that has ten times more parameters (4.4B).
Estimating Time Series Foundation Model Transferability via In-Context Learning
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) offer strong zero-shot forecasting via large-scale pre-training, yet fine-tuning remains critical for boosting performance in domains with limited public data. With the growing number of TSFMs, efficiently identifying the best model for downstream fine-tuning becomes increasingly challenging. In this work, we introduce TimeTic, a transferability estimation framework that recasts model selection as an in-context-learning problem: given observations on known (source) datasets, it predicts how a TSFM will perform after fine-tuning on a downstream (target) dataset. TimeTic flexibly organizes the observed model-data relationships as contextual information, allowing it to adapt seamlessly to various test-time scenarios. Leveraging the natural tabular structure formed by dataset meta-features, model characteristics, and fine-tuned performance, we employ tabular foundation models to serve as in-context learners. We further introduce a novel model characterization based on entropy evolution across model layers, capturing embedding-space distinctions and enabling TimeTic to generalize across arbitrary model sets. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for transferability estimation including 10 datasets, 10 foundation models, and 3 forecasting tasks. On this benchmark, TimeTic's estimation demonstrates strong alignment with actual fine-tuned performance for previously unseen datasets, achieving a mean rank correlation of approximately 0.6 and a 30% improvement compared to using zero-shot performance as the transferability score.
Seurat: From Moving Points to Depth
Accurate depth estimation from monocular videos remains challenging due to ambiguities inherent in single-view geometry, as crucial depth cues like stereopsis are absent. However, humans often perceive relative depth intuitively by observing variations in the size and spacing of objects as they move. Inspired by this, we propose a novel method that infers relative depth by examining the spatial relationships and temporal evolution of a set of tracked 2D trajectories. Specifically, we use off-the-shelf point tracking models to capture 2D trajectories. Then, our approach employs spatial and temporal transformers to process these trajectories and directly infer depth changes over time. Evaluated on the TAPVid-3D benchmark, our method demonstrates robust zero-shot performance, generalizing effectively from synthetic to real-world datasets. Results indicate that our approach achieves temporally smooth, high-accuracy depth predictions across diverse domains.
Language Models in the Loop: Incorporating Prompting into Weak Supervision
We propose a new strategy for applying large pre-trained language models to novel tasks when labeled training data is limited. Rather than apply the model in a typical zero-shot or few-shot fashion, we treat the model as the basis for labeling functions in a weak supervision framework. To create a classifier, we first prompt the model to answer multiple distinct queries about an example and define how the possible responses should be mapped to votes for labels and abstentions. We then denoise these noisy label sources using the Snorkel system and train an end classifier with the resulting training data. Our experimental evaluation shows that prompting large language models within a weak supervision framework can provide significant gains in accuracy. On the WRENCH weak supervision benchmark, this approach can significantly improve over zero-shot performance, an average 19.5% reduction in errors. We also find that this approach produces classifiers with comparable or superior accuracy to those trained from hand-engineered rules.
Efficient Model Adaptation for Continual Learning at the Edge
Most machine learning (ML) systems assume stationary and matching data distributions during training and deployment. This is often a false assumption. When ML models are deployed on real devices, data distributions often shift over time due to changes in environmental factors, sensor characteristics, and task-of-interest. While it is possible to have a human-in-the-loop to monitor for distribution shifts and engineer new architectures in response to these shifts, such a setup is not cost-effective. Instead, non-stationary automated ML (AutoML) models are needed. This paper presents the Encoder-Adaptor-Reconfigurator (EAR) framework for efficient continual learning under domain shifts. The EAR framework uses a fixed deep neural network (DNN) feature encoder and trains shallow networks on top of the encoder to handle novel data. The EAR framework is capable of 1) detecting when new data is out-of-distribution (OOD) by combining DNNs with hyperdimensional computing (HDC), 2) identifying low-parameter neural adaptors to adapt the model to the OOD data using zero-shot neural architecture search (ZS-NAS), and 3) minimizing catastrophic forgetting on previous tasks by progressively growing the neural architecture as needed and dynamically routing data through the appropriate adaptors and reconfigurators for handling domain-incremental and class-incremental continual learning. We systematically evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets for domain adaptation and demonstrate strong performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for OOD detection and few-/zero-shot NAS.
Distilling Fine-grained Sentiment Understanding from Large Language Models
Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FSA) aims to extract and summarize user opinions from vast opinionated text. Recent studies demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) possess exceptional sentiment understanding capabilities. However, directly deploying LLMs for FSA applications incurs high inference costs. Therefore, this paper investigates the distillation of fine-grained sentiment understanding from LLMs into small language models (SLMs). We prompt LLMs to examine and interpret the sentiments of given reviews and then utilize the generated content to pretrain SLMs. Additionally, we develop a comprehensive FSA benchmark to evaluate both SLMs and LLMs. Extensive experiments on this benchmark reveal that: (1) distillation significantly enhances the performance of SLMs in FSA tasks, achieving a 6.00\% improvement in F_1-score, and the distilled model can outperform Llama-2-7b with only 220M parameters; (2) distillation equips SLMs with excellent zero-shot sentiment classification capabilities, enabling them to match or even exceed their teacher models. These results suggest that distillation from LLMs is a highly promising direction for FSA. We will release our code, data, and pretrained model weights at https://github.com/HITSZ-HLT/FSA-Distillation.
Distilling 3D distinctive local descriptors for 6D pose estimation
Three-dimensional local descriptors are crucial for encoding geometric surface properties, making them essential for various point cloud understanding tasks. Among these descriptors, GeDi has demonstrated strong zero-shot 6D pose estimation capabilities but remains computationally impractical for real-world applications due to its expensive inference process. Can we retain GeDi's effectiveness while significantly improving its efficiency? In this paper, we explore this question by introducing a knowledge distillation framework that trains an efficient student model to regress local descriptors from a GeDi teacher. Our key contributions include: an efficient large-scale training procedure that ensures robustness to occlusions and partial observations while operating under compute and storage constraints, and a novel loss formulation that handles weak supervision from non-distinctive teacher descriptors. We validate our approach on five BOP Benchmark datasets and demonstrate a significant reduction in inference time while maintaining competitive performance with existing methods, bringing zero-shot 6D pose estimation closer to real-time feasibility. Project Website: https://tev-fbk.github.io/dGeDi/
HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via Large Language Models
The widespread use of social media necessitates reliable and efficient detection of offensive content to mitigate harmful effects. Although sophisticated models perform well on individual datasets, they often fail to generalize due to varying definitions and labeling of "offensive content." In this paper, we introduce HateCOT, an English dataset with over 52,000 samples from diverse sources, featuring explanations generated by GPT-3.5Turbo and curated by humans. We demonstrate that pretraining on HateCOT significantly enhances the performance of open-source Large Language Models on three benchmark datasets for offensive content detection in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, despite differences in domain and task. Additionally, HateCOT facilitates effective K-shot fine-tuning of LLMs with limited data and improves the quality of their explanations, as confirmed by our human evaluation.
Orchestrator-Agent Trust: A Modular Agentic AI Visual Classification System with Trust-Aware Orchestration and RAG-Based Reasoning
Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II) fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops. Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG, achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable multi-agent AI. This blueprint is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other trust-critical domains. All models, prompts, results, and system components including the complete software source code are openly released to support reproducibility, transparency, and community benchmarking at Github: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust
Chronos: Learning the Language of Time Series
We introduce Chronos, a simple yet effective framework for pretrained probabilistic time series models. Chronos tokenizes time series values using scaling and quantization into a fixed vocabulary and trains existing transformer-based language model architectures on these tokenized time series via the cross-entropy loss. We pretrained Chronos models based on the T5 family (ranging from 20M to 710M parameters) on a large collection of publicly available datasets, complemented by a synthetic dataset that we generated via Gaussian processes to improve generalization. In a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 42 datasets, and comprising both classical local models and deep learning methods, we show that Chronos models: (a) significantly outperform other methods on datasets that were part of the training corpus; and (b) have comparable and occasionally superior zero-shot performance on new datasets, relative to methods that were trained specifically on them. Our results demonstrate that Chronos models can leverage time series data from diverse domains to improve zero-shot accuracy on unseen forecasting tasks, positioning pretrained models as a viable tool to greatly simplify forecasting pipelines.
CLIP-IN: Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Understanding in CLIP via Instruction Editing Data and Long Captions
Despite the success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP in aligning vision and language, their proficiency in detailed, fine-grained visual comprehension remains a key challenge. We present CLIP-IN, a novel framework that bolsters CLIP's fine-grained perception through two core innovations. Firstly, we leverage instruction-editing datasets, originally designed for image manipulation, as a unique source of hard negative image-text pairs. Coupled with a symmetric hard negative contrastive loss, this enables the model to effectively distinguish subtle visual-semantic differences. Secondly, CLIP-IN incorporates long descriptive captions, utilizing rotary positional encodings to capture rich semantic context often missed by standard CLIP. Our experiments demonstrate that CLIP-IN achieves substantial gains on the MMVP benchmark and various fine-grained visual recognition tasks, without compromising robust zero-shot performance on broader classification and retrieval tasks. Critically, integrating CLIP-IN's visual representations into Multimodal Large Language Models significantly reduces visual hallucinations and enhances reasoning abilities. This work underscores the considerable potential of synergizing targeted, instruction-based contrastive learning with comprehensive descriptive information to elevate the fine-grained understanding of VLMs.
Empowering Vision-Language Models to Follow Interleaved Vision-Language Instructions
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.
Chinese CLIP: Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining in Chinese
The tremendous success of CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) has promoted the research and application of contrastive learning for vision-language pretraining. In this work, we construct a large-scale dataset of image-text pairs in Chinese, where most data are retrieved from publicly available datasets, and we pretrain Chinese CLIP models on the new dataset. We develop 5 Chinese CLIP models of multiple sizes, spanning from 77 to 958 million parameters. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage pretraining method, where the model is first trained with the image encoder frozen and then trained with all parameters being optimized, to achieve enhanced model performance. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Chinese CLIP can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on MUGE, Flickr30K-CN, and COCO-CN in the setups of zero-shot learning and finetuning, and it is able to achieve competitive performance in zero-shot image classification based on the evaluation on the ELEVATER benchmark (Li et al., 2022). We have released our codes, models, and demos in https://github.com/OFA-Sys/Chinese-CLIP
Adapting Large Multimodal Models to Distribution Shifts: The Role of In-Context Learning
Recent studies indicate that large multimodal models (LMMs) are highly robust against natural distribution shifts, often surpassing previous baselines. Despite this, domain-specific adaptation is still necessary, particularly in specialized areas like healthcare. Due to the impracticality of fine-tuning LMMs given their vast parameter space, this work investigates in-context learning (ICL) as an effective alternative for enhancing LMMs' adaptability. We find that the success of ICL heavily relies on the choice of demonstration, mirroring challenges seen in large language models but introducing unique complexities for LMMs facing distribution shifts. Our study addresses this by evaluating an unsupervised ICL method, TopKNearestPR, which selects in-context examples through a nearest example search based on feature similarity. We uncover that its effectiveness is limited by the deficiencies of pre-trained vision encoders under distribution shift scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose InvariantSelectPR, a novel method leveraging Class-conditioned Contrastive Invariance (CCI) for more robust demonstration selection. Specifically, CCI enhances pre-trained vision encoders by improving their discriminative capabilities across different classes and ensuring invariance to domain-specific variations. This enhancement allows the encoders to effectively identify and retrieve the most informative examples, which are then used to guide LMMs in adapting to new query samples under varying distributions. Our experiments show that InvariantSelectPR substantially improves the adaptability of LMMs, achieving significant performance gains on benchmark datasets, with a 34.2%uparrow accuracy increase in 7-shot on Camelyon17 and 16.9%uparrow increase in 7-shot on HAM10000 compared to the baseline zero-shot performance.
Toto: Time Series Optimized Transformer for Observability
This technical report describes the Time Series Optimized Transformer for Observability (Toto), a new state of the art foundation model for time series forecasting developed by Datadog. In addition to advancing the state of the art on generalized time series benchmarks in domains such as electricity and weather, this model is the first general-purpose time series forecasting foundation model to be specifically tuned for observability metrics. Toto was trained on a dataset of one trillion time series data points, the largest among all currently published time series foundation models. Alongside publicly available time series datasets, 75% of the data used to train Toto consists of fully anonymous numerical metric data points from the Datadog platform. In our experiments, Toto outperforms existing time series foundation models on observability data. It does this while also excelling at general-purpose forecasting tasks, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on multiple open benchmark datasets.
DetCLIPv3: Towards Versatile Generative Open-vocabulary Object Detection
Existing open-vocabulary object detectors typically require a predefined set of categories from users, significantly confining their application scenarios. In this paper, we introduce DetCLIPv3, a high-performing detector that excels not only at both open-vocabulary object detection, but also generating hierarchical labels for detected objects. DetCLIPv3 is characterized by three core designs: 1. Versatile model architecture: we derive a robust open-set detection framework which is further empowered with generation ability via the integration of a caption head. 2. High information density data: we develop an auto-annotation pipeline leveraging visual large language model to refine captions for large-scale image-text pairs, providing rich, multi-granular object labels to enhance the training. 3. Efficient training strategy: we employ a pre-training stage with low-resolution inputs that enables the object captioner to efficiently learn a broad spectrum of visual concepts from extensive image-text paired data. This is followed by a fine-tuning stage that leverages a small number of high-resolution samples to further enhance detection performance. With these effective designs, DetCLIPv3 demonstrates superior open-vocabulary detection performance, \eg, our Swin-T backbone model achieves a notable 47.0 zero-shot fixed AP on the LVIS minival benchmark, outperforming GLIPv2, GroundingDINO, and DetCLIPv2 by 18.0/19.6/6.6 AP, respectively. DetCLIPv3 also achieves a state-of-the-art 19.7 AP in dense captioning task on VG dataset, showcasing its strong generative capability.
Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4
Recent research has focused on enhancing the capability of smaller models through imitation learning, drawing on the outputs generated by large foundation models (LFMs). A number of issues impact the quality of these models, ranging from limited imitation signals from shallow LFM outputs; small scale homogeneous training data; and most notably a lack of rigorous evaluation resulting in overestimating the small model's capability as they tend to learn to imitate the style, but not the reasoning process of LFMs. To address these challenges, we develop Orca (We are working with our legal team to publicly release a diff of the model weights in accordance with LLaMA's release policy to be published at https://aka.ms/orca-lm), a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs. Orca learns from rich signals from GPT-4 including explanation traces; step-by-step thought processes; and other complex instructions, guided by teacher assistance from ChatGPT. To promote this progressive learning, we tap into large-scale and diverse imitation data with judicious sampling and selection. Orca surpasses conventional state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models such as Vicuna-13B by more than 100% in complex zero-shot reasoning benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) and 42% on AGIEval. Moreover, Orca reaches parity with ChatGPT on the BBH benchmark and shows competitive performance (4 pts gap with optimized system message) in professional and academic examinations like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT, both in zero-shot settings without CoT; while trailing behind GPT-4. Our research indicates that learning from step-by-step explanations, whether these are generated by humans or more advanced AI models, is a promising direction to improve model capabilities and skills.
Grounding DINO 1.5: Advance the "Edge" of Open-Set Object Detection
This paper introduces Grounding DINO 1.5, a suite of advanced open-set object detection models developed by IDEA Research, which aims to advance the "Edge" of open-set object detection. The suite encompasses two models: Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro, a high-performance model designed for stronger generalization capability across a wide range of scenarios, and Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, an efficient model optimized for faster speed demanded in many applications requiring edge deployment. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model advances its predecessor by scaling up the model architecture, integrating an enhanced vision backbone, and expanding the training dataset to over 20 million images with grounding annotations, thereby achieving a richer semantic understanding. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, while designed for efficiency with reduced feature scales, maintains robust detection capabilities by being trained on the same comprehensive dataset. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of Grounding DINO 1.5, with the Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model attaining a 54.3 AP on the COCO detection benchmark and a 55.7 AP on the LVIS-minival zero-shot transfer benchmark, setting new records for open-set object detection. Furthermore, the Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, when optimized with TensorRT, achieves a speed of 75.2 FPS while attaining a zero-shot performance of 36.2 AP on the LVIS-minival benchmark, making it more suitable for edge computing scenarios. Model examples and demos with API will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounding-DINO-1.5-API
Kairos: Towards Adaptive and Generalizable Time Series Foundation Models
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for time series analysis, driven by large-scale pretraining on diverse data corpora. However, time series inherently exhibit heterogeneous information density over time, influenced by system states and signal complexity, presenting significant modeling challenges especially in a zero-shot scenario. Current TSFMs rely on non-adaptive processing pipelines that fail to capture this dynamic nature. For example, common tokenization strategies such as fixed-size patching enforce rigid observational granularity, limiting their ability to adapt to varying information densities. Similarly, conventional positional encodings impose a uniform temporal scale, making it difficult to model diverse periodicities and trends across series. To overcome these limitations, we propose Kairos, a flexible TSFM framework that integrates a dynamic patching tokenizer and an instance-adaptive positional embedding. Kairos adaptively selects tokenization granularity and tailors positional encodings to the unique characteristics of each time series instance. Trained on a large-scale Predictability-Stratified Time Series (PreSTS) corpus comprising over 300 billion time points and adopting a multi-patch prediction strategy in the inference stage, Kairos achieves superior performance with much fewer parameters on two common zero-shot benchmarks, GIFT-Eval and the Time-Series-Library benchmark, consistently outperforming established methods across diverse tasks. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/Kairos .
A Graph Neural Network for the Era of Large Atomistic Models
Foundation models, or large atomistic models (LAMs), aim to universally represent the ground-state potential energy surface (PES) of atomistic systems as defined by density functional theory (DFT). The scaling law is pivotal in the development of large models, suggesting that their generalizability in downstream tasks consistently improves with increased model size, expanded training datasets, and larger computational budgets. In this study, we present DPA3, a multi-layer graph neural network founded on line graph series (LiGS), designed explicitly for the era of LAMs. We demonstrate that the generalization error of the DPA3 model adheres to the scaling law. The scalability in the number of model parameters is attained by stacking additional layers within DPA3. Additionally, the model employs a dataset encoding mechanism that decouples the scaling of training data size from the model size within its multi-task training framework. When trained as problem-oriented potential energy models, the DPA3 model exhibits superior accuracy in the majority of benchmark cases, encompassing systems with diverse features, including molecules, bulk materials, surface and cluster catalysts, two-dimensional materials, and battery materials. When trained as a LAM on the OpenLAM-v1 dataset, the DPA-3.1-3M model exhibits state-of-the-art performance in the LAMBench benchmark suite for LAMs, demonstrating lowest overall zero-shot generalization error across 17 downstream tasks from a broad spectrum of research domains. This performance suggests superior accuracy as an out-of-the-box potential model, requiring minimal fine-tuning data for downstream scientific applications.
Controlling Latent Diffusion Using Latent CLIP
Instead of performing text-conditioned denoising in the image domain, latent diffusion models (LDMs) operate in latent space of a variational autoencoder (VAE), enabling more efficient processing at reduced computational costs. However, while the diffusion process has moved to the latent space, the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models, as used in many image processing tasks, still operate in pixel space. Doing so requires costly VAE-decoding of latent images before they can be processed. In this paper, we introduce Latent-CLIP, a CLIP model that operates directly in the latent space. We train Latent-CLIP on 2.7B pairs of latent images and descriptive texts, and show that it matches zero-shot classification performance of similarly sized CLIP models on both the ImageNet benchmark and a LDM-generated version of it, demonstrating its effectiveness in assessing both real and generated content. Furthermore, we construct Latent-CLIP rewards for reward-based noise optimization (ReNO) and show that they match the performance of their CLIP counterparts on GenEval and T2I-CompBench while cutting the cost of the total pipeline by 21%. Finally, we use Latent-CLIP to guide generation away from harmful content, achieving strong performance on the inappropriate image prompts (I2P) benchmark and a custom evaluation, without ever requiring the costly step of decoding intermediate images.
What is the Visual Cognition Gap between Humans and Multimodal LLMs?
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown great promise in language-guided perceptual tasks such as recognition, segmentation, and object detection. However, their effectiveness in addressing visual cognition problems that require high-level reasoning is not well-established. One such challenge is abstract visual reasoning (AVR) -- the cognitive ability to discern relationships among patterns in a set of images and extrapolate to predict subsequent patterns. This skill is crucial during the early neurodevelopmental stages of children. Inspired by the AVR tasks in Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we propose a new dataset MaRs-VQA and a new benchmark VCog-Bench containing three datasets to evaluate the zero-shot AVR capability of MLLMs and compare their performance with existing human intelligent investigation. Our comparative experiments with different open-source and closed-source MLLMs on the VCog-Bench revealed a gap between MLLMs and human intelligence, highlighting the visual cognitive limitations of current MLLMs. We believe that the public release of VCog-Bench, consisting of MaRs-VQA, and the inference pipeline will drive progress toward the next generation of MLLMs with human-like visual cognition abilities.
InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction
Large language models have unlocked strong multi-task capabilities from reading instructive prompts. However, recent studies have shown that existing large models still have difficulty with information extraction tasks. For example, gpt-3.5-turbo achieved an F1 score of 18.22 on the Ontonotes dataset, which is significantly lower than the state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we propose InstructUIE, a unified information extraction framework based on instruction tuning, which can uniformly model various information extraction tasks and capture the inter-task dependency. To validate the proposed method, we introduce IE INSTRUCTIONS, a benchmark of 32 diverse information extraction datasets in a unified text-to-text format with expert-written instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to Bert in supervised settings and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and gpt3.5 in zero-shot settings.
MFTCoder: Boosting Code LLMs with Multitask Fine-Tuning
Code LLMs have emerged as a specialized research field, with remarkable studies dedicated to enhancing model's coding capabilities through fine-tuning on pre-trained models. Previous fine-tuning approaches were typically tailored to specific downstream tasks or scenarios, which meant separate fine-tuning for each task, requiring extensive training resources and posing challenges in terms of deployment and maintenance. Furthermore, these approaches failed to leverage the inherent interconnectedness among different code-related tasks. To overcome these limitations, we present a multi-task fine-tuning framework, MFTcoder, that enables simultaneous and parallel fine-tuning on multiple tasks. By incorporating various loss functions, we effectively address common challenges in multi-task learning, such as data imbalance, varying difficulty levels, and inconsistent convergence speeds. Extensive experiments have conclusively demonstrated that our multi-task fine-tuning approach outperforms both individual fine-tuning on single tasks and fine-tuning on a mixed ensemble of tasks. Moreover, MFTcoder offers efficient training capabilities, including efficient data tokenization modes and PEFT fine-tuning, resulting in significantly improved speed compared to traditional fine-tuning methods. MFTcoder seamlessly integrates with several mainstream open-source LLMs, such as CodeLLama and Qwen. Leveraging the CodeLLama foundation, our MFTcoder fine-tuned model, CodeFuse-CodeLLama-34B, achieves an impressive pass@1 score of 74.4\% on the HumaneEval benchmark, surpassing GPT-4 performance (67\%, zero-shot). MFTCoder is open-sourced at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/MFTCOder
U-MARVEL: Unveiling Key Factors for Universal Multimodal Retrieval via Embedding Learning with MLLMs
Universal multimodal retrieval (UMR), which aims to address complex retrieval tasks where both queries and candidates span diverse modalities, has been significantly advanced by the emergence of MLLMs. While state-of-the-art MLLM-based methods in the literature predominantly adopt contrastive learning principles, they often differ in their specific training recipes. Despite their success, the mechanisms underlying their retrieval capabilities remain largely unexplored, potentially resulting in suboptimal performance and limited generalization ability. To address these issues, we present a comprehensive study aimed at uncovering the key factors that drive effective embedding learning for UMR using MLLMs. We begin by implementing a general MLLM-based embedding learning pipeline, and systematically analyze the primary contributors to high-performing universal retrieval systems. Based on this, we explore various aspects of the details in embedding generation and training strategies, including progressive transition, hard negative mining and re-ranker distillation. Notably, our findings reveal that often-overlooked factors can have a substantial impact on model performance. Building on these discoveries, we introduce a unified framework termed U-MARVEL (Universal MultimodAl RetrieVal via Embedding Learning), which outperforms state-of-the-art competitors on the M-BEIR benchmark by a large margin in supervised settings, and also exihibits strong zero-shot performance on several tasks such as composed image retrieval and text-to-video retrieval. These results underscore the generalization potential of our framework across various embedding-based retrieval tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/chaxjli/U-MARVEL
Mask-Adapter: The Devil is in the Masks for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation
Recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods adopt mask generators to predict segmentation masks and leverage pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, to classify these masks via mask pooling. Although these approaches show promising results, it is counterintuitive that accurate masks often fail to yield accurate classification results through pooling CLIP image embeddings within the mask regions. In this paper, we reveal the performance limitations of mask pooling and introduce Mask-Adapter, a simple yet effective method to address these challenges in open-vocabulary segmentation. Compared to directly using proposal masks, our proposed Mask-Adapter extracts semantic activation maps from proposal masks, providing richer contextual information and ensuring alignment between masks and CLIP. Additionally, we propose a mask consistency loss that encourages proposal masks with similar IoUs to obtain similar CLIP embeddings to enhance models' robustness to varying predicted masks. Mask-Adapter integrates seamlessly into open-vocabulary segmentation methods based on mask pooling in a plug-and-play manner, delivering more accurate classification results. Extensive experiments across several zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate significant performance gains for the proposed Mask-Adapter on several well-established methods. Notably, Mask-Adapter also extends effectively to SAM and achieves impressive results on several open-vocabulary segmentation datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/MaskAdapter.
Scalable Zero-shot Entity Linking with Dense Entity Retrieval
This paper introduces a conceptually simple, scalable, and highly effective BERT-based entity linking model, along with an extensive evaluation of its accuracy-speed trade-off. We present a two-stage zero-shot linking algorithm, where each entity is defined only by a short textual description. The first stage does retrieval in a dense space defined by a bi-encoder that independently embeds the mention context and the entity descriptions. Each candidate is then re-ranked with a cross-encoder, that concatenates the mention and entity text. Experiments demonstrate that this approach is state of the art on recent zero-shot benchmarks (6 point absolute gains) and also on more established non-zero-shot evaluations (e.g. TACKBP-2010), despite its relative simplicity (e.g. no explicit entity embeddings or manually engineered mention tables). We also show that bi-encoder linking is very fast with nearest neighbour search (e.g. linking with 5.9 million candidates in 2 milliseconds), and that much of the accuracy gain from the more expensive cross-encoder can be transferred to the bi-encoder via knowledge distillation. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/BLINK.
MuSc-V2: Zero-Shot Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Classification and Segmentation with Mutual Scoring of Unlabeled Samples
Zero-shot anomaly classification (AC) and segmentation (AS) methods aim to identify and outline defects without using any labeled samples. In this paper, we reveal a key property that is overlooked by existing methods: normal image patches across industrial products typically find many other similar patches, not only in 2D appearance but also in 3D shapes, while anomalies remain diverse and isolated. To explicitly leverage this discriminative property, we propose a Mutual Scoring framework (MuSc-V2) for zero-shot AC/AS, which flexibly supports single 2D/3D or multimodality. Specifically, our method begins by improving 3D representation through Iterative Point Grouping (IPG), which reduces false positives from discontinuous surfaces. Then we use Similarity Neighborhood Aggregation with Multi-Degrees (SNAMD) to fuse 2D/3D neighborhood cues into more discriminative multi-scale patch features for mutual scoring. The core comprises a Mutual Scoring Mechanism (MSM) that lets samples within each modality to assign score to each other, and Cross-modal Anomaly Enhancement (CAE) that fuses 2D and 3D scores to recover modality-specific missing anomalies. Finally, Re-scoring with Constrained Neighborhood (RsCon) suppresses false classification based on similarity to more representative samples. Our framework flexibly works on both the full dataset and smaller subsets with consistently robust performance, ensuring seamless adaptability across diverse product lines. In aid of the novel framework, MuSc-V2 achieves significant performance improvements: a +23.7% AP gain on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset and a +19.3% boost on the Eyecandies dataset, surpassing previous zero-shot benchmarks and even outperforming most few-shot methods. The code will be available at The code will be available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/MuSc-V2{https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/MuSc-V2}.
