Score function-based natural language generation (NLG) approaches such as REINFORCE, in general, suffer from low sample efficiency and training instability problems. This is mainly due to the non-differentiable nature of the discrete space sampling and thus these methods have to treat the discriminator as a black box and ignore the gradient information. To improve the sample efficiency and reduce the variance of REINFORCE, we propose a novel approach, TaylorGAN, which augments the gradient estimation by off-policy update and the first-order Taylor expansion. This approach enables us to train NLG models from scratch with smaller batch size -- without maximum likelihood pre-training, and outperforms existing GAN-based methods on multiple metrics of quality and diversity. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/MiuLab/TaylorGAN
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities across diverse applications. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of LLMs for generating realistic synthetic tabular data, identifying key prompt design elements to optimize performance. We introduce EPIC, a novel approach that leverages balanced, grouped data samples and consistent formatting with unique variable mapping to guide LLMs in generating accurate synthetic data across all classes, even for imbalanced datasets. Evaluations on real-world datasets show that EPIC achieves state-of-the-art machine learning classification performance, significantly improving generation efficiency. These findings highlight the effectiveness of EPIC for synthetic tabular data generation, particularly in addressing class imbalance. Our source code for our work is available at: https://seharanul17.github.io/project-synthetic-tabular-llm/
We propose a new task, video referring matting, which obtains the alpha matte of a specified instance by inputting a referring caption. We treat the dense prediction task of matting as video generation, leveraging the text-to-video alignment prior of video diffusion models to generate alpha mattes that are temporally coherent and closely related to the corresponding semantic instances. Moreover, we propose a new Latent-Constructive loss to further distinguish different instances, enabling more controllable interactive matting. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale video referring matting dataset with 10,000 videos. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that concurrently contains captions, videos, and instance-level alpha mattes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Hansxsourse/VRMDiff.
This study presents the first comprehensive safety evaluation of the DeepSeek models, focusing on evaluating the safety risks associated with their generated content. Our evaluation encompasses DeepSeek's latest generation of large language models, multimodal large language models, and text-to-image models, systematically examining their performance regarding unsafe content generation. Notably, we developed a bilingual (Chinese-English) safety evaluation dataset tailored to Chinese sociocultural contexts, enabling a more thorough evaluation of the safety capabilities of Chinese-developed models. Experimental results indicate that despite their strong general capabilities, DeepSeek models exhibit significant safety vulnerabilities across multiple risk dimensions, including algorithmic discrimination and sexual content. These findings provide crucial insights for understanding and improving the safety of large foundation models. Our code is available at https://github.com/NY1024/DeepSeek-Safety-Eval.
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a critical technique for enhancing the sample quality of visual generative models. However, in autoregressive (AR) multi-modal generation, CFG introduces design inconsistencies between language and visual content, contradicting the design philosophy of unifying different modalities for visual AR. Motivated by language model alignment methods, we propose \textit{Condition Contrastive Alignment} (CCA) to facilitate guidance-free AR visual generation with high performance and analyze its theoretical connection with guided sampling methods. Unlike guidance methods that alter the sampling process to achieve the ideal sampling distribution, CCA directly fine-tunes pretrained models to fit the same distribution target. Experimental results show that CCA can significantly enhance the guidance-free performance of all tested models with just one epoch of fine-tuning ($\sim$ 1\% of pretraining epochs) on the pretraining dataset, on par with guided sampling methods. This largely removes the need for guided sampling in AR visual generation and cuts the sampling cost by half. Moreover, by adjusting training parameters, CCA can achieve trade-offs between sample diversity and fidelity similar to CFG. This experimentally confirms the strong theoretical connection between language-targeted alignment and visual-targeted guidance methods, unifying two previously independent research fields. Code and model weights: https://github.com/thu-ml/CCA.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for time series data remains a critical challenge in deep learning, with traditional pseudo-labeling strategies failing to capture temporal patterns and channel-wise shifts between domains, producing sub-optimal pseudo-labels. As such, we introduce TransPL, a novel approach that addresses these limitations by modeling the joint distribution $P(\mathbf{X}, y)$ of the source domain through code transition matrices, where the codes are derived from vector quantization (VQ) of time series patches. Our method constructs class- and channel-wise code transition matrices from the source domain and employs Bayes' rule for target domain adaptation, generating pseudo-labels based on channel-wise weighted class-conditional likelihoods. TransPL offers three key advantages: explicit modeling of temporal transitions and channel-wise shifts between different domains, versatility towards different UDA scenarios (e.g., weakly-supervised UDA), and explainable pseudo-label generation. We validate TransPL's effectiveness through extensive analysis on four time series UDA benchmarks and confirm that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art pseudo-labeling methods by a strong margin (6.1% accuracy improvement, 4.9% F1 improvement), while providing interpretable insights into the domain adaptation process through its learned code transition matrices.
In this study, we delve into the generation of high-resolution images from pre-trained diffusion models, addressing persistent challenges, such as repetitive patterns and structural distortions, that emerge when models are applied beyond their trained resolutions. To address this issue, we introduce an innovative, training-free approach FouriScale from the perspective of frequency domain analysis. We replace the original convolutional layers in pre-trained diffusion models by incorporating a dilation technique along with a low-pass operation, intending to achieve structural consistency and scale consistency across resolutions, respectively. Further enhanced by a padding-then-crop strategy, our method can flexibly handle text-to-image generation of various aspect ratios. By using the FouriScale as guidance, our method successfully balances the structural integrity and fidelity of generated images, achieving an astonishing capacity of arbitrary-size, high-resolution, and high-quality generation. With its simplicity and compatibility, our method can provide valuable insights for future explorations into the synthesis of ultra-high-resolution images. The code will be released at https://github.com/LeonHLJ/FouriScale.
With generative models producing high quality images that are indistinguishable from real ones, there is growing concern regarding the malicious usage of AI-generated images. Imperceptible image watermarking is one viable solution towards such concerns. Prior watermarking methods map the image to a latent space for adding the watermark. Moreover, Latent Diffusion Models (LDM) generate the image in the latent space of a pre-trained autoencoder. We argue that this latent space can be used to integrate watermarking into the generation process. To this end, we present LaWa, an in-generation image watermarking method designed for LDMs. By using coarse-to-fine watermark embedding modules, LaWa modifies the latent space of pre-trained autoencoders and achieves high robustness against a wide range of image transformations while preserving perceptual quality of the image. We show that LaWa can also be used as a general image watermarking method. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that LaWa outperforms previous works in perceptual quality, robustness against attacks, and computational complexity, while having very low false positive rate. Code is available here.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, yet they often struggle with multi-step reasoning due to the unstructured nature of retrieved context. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods provide external information, the lack of explicit organization among retrieved passages limits their effectiveness, leading to brittle reasoning pathways. Recent interpretability studies highlighting the importance of structured intermediate reasoning further align with this perspective. We propose Retrieval-And-Structuring (RAS), a framework that dynamically constructs query-specific knowledge graphs through iterative retrieval and structured knowledge building. RAS interleaves targeted retrieval planning with incremental graph construction, enabling models to assemble and reason over evolving knowledge structures tailored to each query. On seven knowledge-intensive benchmarks, RAS consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 6.4% and 7.0% gains with open-source and proprietary LLMs, respectively. Our results demonstrate that dynamic, query-specific knowledge structuring offers a robust path to improving reasoning accuracy and robustness in language model generation. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/pat-jj/RAS.
This study examines 4-bit quantization methods like GPTQ in large language models (LLMs), highlighting GPTQ's overfitting and limited enhancement in Zero-Shot tasks. While prior works merely focusing on zero-shot measurement, we extend task scope to more generative categories such as code generation and abstractive summarization, in which we found that INT4 quantization can significantly underperform. However, simply shifting to higher precision formats like FP6 has been particularly challenging, thus overlooked, due to poor performance caused by the lack of sophisticated integration and system acceleration strategies on current AI hardware. Our results show that FP6, even with a coarse-grain quantization scheme, performs robustly across various algorithms and tasks, demonstrating its superiority in accuracy and versatility. Notably, with the FP6 quantization, \codestar-15B model performs comparably to its FP16 counterpart in code generation, and for smaller models like the 406M it closely matches their baselines in summarization. Neither can be achieved by INT4. To better accommodate various AI hardware and achieve the best system performance, we propose a novel 4+2 design for FP6 to achieve similar latency to the state-of-the-art INT4 fine-grain quantization. With our design, FP6 can become a promising solution to the current 4-bit quantization methods used in LLMs.
AI-generated content has evolved from monolithic models to modular workflows, particularly on platforms like ComfyUI, enabling customization in creative pipelines. However, crafting effective workflows requires great expertise to orchestrate numerous specialized components, presenting a steep learning curve for users. To address this challenge, we introduce ComfyUI-R1, the first large reasoning model for automated workflow generation. Starting with our curated dataset of 4K workflows, we construct long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning data, including node selection, workflow planning, and code-level workflow representation. ComfyUI-R1 is trained through a two-stage framework: (1) CoT fine-tuning for cold start, adapting models to the ComfyUI domain; (2) reinforcement learning for incentivizing reasoning capability, guided by a fine-grained rule-metric hybrid reward, ensuring format validity, structural integrity, and node-level fidelity. Experiments show that our 7B-parameter model achieves a 97\% format validity rate, along with high pass rate, node-level and graph-level F1 scores, significantly surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods that employ leading closed-source models such as GPT-4o and Claude series. Further analysis highlights the critical role of the reasoning process and the advantage of transforming workflows into code. Qualitative comparison reveals our strength in synthesizing intricate workflows with diverse nodes, underscoring the potential of long CoT reasoning in AI art creation.
Text-to-image diffusion models are well-known for their ability to generate realistic images based on textual prompts. However, the existing works have predominantly focused on English, lacking support for non-English text-to-image models. The most commonly used translation methods cannot solve the generation problem related to language culture, while training from scratch on a specific language dataset is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we are inspired to propose a simple plug-and-play language transfer method based on knowledge distillation. All we need to do is train a lightweight MLP-like parameter-efficient adapter (PEA) with only 6M parameters under teacher knowledge distillation along with a small parallel data corpus. We are surprised to find that freezing the parameters of UNet can still achieve remarkable performance on the language-specific prompt evaluation set, demonstrating that PEA can stimulate the potential generation ability of the original UNet. Additionally, it closely approaches the performance of the English text-to-image model on a general prompt evaluation set. Furthermore, our adapter can be used as a plugin to achieve significant results in downstream tasks in cross-lingual text-to-image generation. Code will be available at: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/PEA-Diffusion
Motivation: The visualization and analysis of high-dimensional data are essential in biomedical research. There is a need for secure, scalable, and reproducible tools to facilitate data exploration and interpretation. Results: We introduce DataMap, a browser-based application for visualization of high-dimensional data using heatmaps, principal component analysis (PCA), and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). DataMap runs in the web browser, ensuring data privacy while eliminating the need for installation or a server. The application has an intuitive user interface for data transformation, annotation, and generation of reproducible R code. Availability and Implementation: Freely available as a GitHub page https://gexijin.github.io/datamap/. The source code can be found at https://github.com/gexijin/datamap, and can also be installed as an R package. Contact: [email omitted]
Diffusion models excel in image generation but lack detailed semantic control using text prompts. Additional techniques have been developed to address this limitation. However, conditioning diffusion models solely on text-based descriptions is challenging due to ambiguity and lack of structure. In contrast, scene graphs offer a more precise representation of image content, making them superior for fine-grained control and accurate synthesis in image generation models. The amount of image and scene-graph data is sparse, which makes fine-tuning large diffusion models challenging. We propose multiple approaches to tackle this problem using ControlNet and Gated Self-Attention. We were able to show that using out proposed methods it is possible to generate images from scene graphs with much higher quality, outperforming previous methods. Our source code is publicly available on https://github.com/FrankFundel/SGCond
Current unlearning methods for large language models usually rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. However, this paradigm disrupts the subsequent tokens prediction, degrading model performance and linguistic coherence. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics overemphasize contextual forgetting while inadequately assessing response fluency and relevance. To address these challenges, we propose ReLearn, a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning, along with a comprehensive evaluation framework. This framework introduces Knowledge Forgetting Rate (KFR) and Knowledge Retention Rate (KRR) to measure knowledge-level preservation, and Linguistic Score (LS) to evaluate generation quality. Our experiments show that ReLearn successfully achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality output. Through mechanistic analysis, we further demonstrate how reverse optimization disrupts coherent text generation, while ReLearn preserves this essential capability. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/unlearn.
Brain tumor analysis in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is crucial for accurate diagnosis and treatment planning. However, the task remains challenging due to the complexity and variability of tumor appearances, as well as the scarcity of labeled data. Traditional approaches often address tumor segmentation and image generation separately, limiting their effectiveness in capturing the intricate relationships between healthy and pathological tissue structures. We introduce a novel promptable counterfactual diffusion model as a unified solution for brain tumor segmentation and generation in MRI. The key innovation lies in our mask-level prompting mechanism at the sampling stage, which enables guided generation and manipulation of specific healthy or unhealthy regions in MRI images. Specifically, the model's architecture allows for bidirectional inference, which can segment tumors in existing images and generate realistic tumor structures in healthy brain scans. Furthermore, we present a two-step approach for tumor generation and position transfer, showcasing the model's versatility in synthesizing realistic tumor structures. Experiments on the BRATS2021 dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional counterfactual diffusion approaches, achieving a mean IoU of 0.653 and mean Dice score of 0.785 for tumor segmentation, outperforming the 0.344 and 0.475 of conventional counterfactual diffusion model. Our work contributes to improving brain tumor detection and segmentation accuracy, with potential implications for data augmentation and clinical decision support in neuro-oncology. The code is available at https://github.com/arcadelab/counterfactual_diffusion.
What are the latent questions on some textual data? In this work, we investigate using question generation models for exploring a collection of documents. Our method, dubbed corpus2question, consists of applying a pre-trained question generation model over a corpus and aggregating the resulting questions by frequency and time. This technique is an alternative to methods such as topic modelling and word cloud for summarizing large amounts of textual data. Results show that applying corpus2question on a corpus of scientific articles related to COVID-19 yields relevant questions about the topic. The most frequent questions are "what is covid 19" and "what is the treatment for covid". Among the 1000 most frequent questions are "what is the threshold for herd immunity" and "what is the role of ace2 in viral entry". We show that the proposed method generated similar questions for 13 of the 27 expert-made questions from the CovidQA question answering dataset. The code to reproduce our experiments and the generated questions are available at: https://github.com/unicamp-dl/corpus2question
Zero-shot learning has been actively studied for image classification task to relieve the burden of annotating image labels. Interestingly, semantic segmentation task requires more labor-intensive pixel-wise annotation, but zero-shot semantic segmentation has only attracted limited research interest. Thus, we focus on zero-shot semantic segmentation, which aims to segment unseen objects with only category-level semantic representations provided for unseen categories. In this paper, we propose a novel Context-aware feature Generation Network (CaGNet), which can synthesize context-aware pixel-wise visual features for unseen categories based on category-level semantic representations and pixel-wise contextual information. The synthesized features are used to finetune the classifier to enable segmenting unseen objects. Furthermore, we extend pixel-wise feature generation and finetuning to patch-wise feature generation and finetuning, which additionally considers inter-pixel relationship. Experimental results on Pascal-VOC, Pascal-Context, and COCO-stuff show that our method significantly outperforms the existing zero-shot semantic segmentation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/bcmi/CaGNetv2-Zero-Shot-Semantic-Segmentation.
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance for many vision-language tasks. However, most existing pre-trained models only excel in either understanding-based tasks or generation-based tasks. Furthermore, performance improvement has been largely achieved by scaling up the dataset with noisy image-text pairs collected from the web, which is a suboptimal source of supervision. In this paper, we propose BLIP, a new VLP framework which transfers flexibly to both vision-language understanding and generation tasks. BLIP effectively utilizes the noisy web data by bootstrapping the captions, where a captioner generates synthetic captions and a filter removes the noisy ones. We achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval (+2.7% in average recall@1), image captioning (+2.8% in CIDEr), and VQA (+1.6% in VQA score). BLIP also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to video-language tasks in a zero-shot manner. Code, models, and datasets are released at https://github.com/salesforce/BLIP.
In this paper, we address a challenging task, synchronous motion captioning, that aim to generate a language description synchronized with human motion sequences. This task pertains to numerous applications, such as aligned sign language transcription, unsupervised action segmentation and temporal grounding. Our method introduces mechanisms to control self- and cross-attention distributions of the Transformer, allowing interpretability and time-aligned text generation. We achieve this through masking strategies and structuring losses that push the model to maximize attention only on the most important frames contributing to the generation of a motion word. These constraints aim to prevent undesired mixing of information in attention maps and to provide a monotonic attention distribution across tokens. Thus, the cross attentions of tokens are used for progressive text generation in synchronization with human motion sequences. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach through evaluation on the two available benchmark datasets, KIT-ML and HumanML3D. As visual evaluation is essential for this task, we provide a comprehensive set of animated visual illustrations in the code repository: https://github.com/rd20karim/Synch-Transformer.