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Mar 14

OpenBezoar: Small, Cost-Effective and Open Models Trained on Mixes of Instruction Data

Instruction fine-tuning pretrained LLMs for diverse downstream tasks has demonstrated remarkable success and has captured the interest of both academics and practitioners. To ensure such fine-tuned LLMs align with human preferences, techniques such as RLHF and DPO have emerged. At the same time, there is increasing interest in smaller parameter counts for models. In this work, using OpenLLaMA 3Bv2 as a base model, we describe the recipe used to fine-tune the OpenBezoar family of models. In this recipe: We first generate synthetic instruction fine-tuning data using an open and commercially non-restrictive instruction fine-tuned variant of the Falcon-40B model under three schemes based on: LaMini-LM, WizardLM/Evol-Instruct (with databricks-dolly-15k as a seed dataset) and Orca (with the Flan Collection as a seed dataset), then filter these generations using GPT-4 as a human proxy. We then perform cost-effective QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning sequentially with each scheme. The resulting checkpoint is further fine-tuned with a subset of the HH-RLHF dataset to minimize distribution shift prior to using the DPO loss to obtain the final checkpoint. Evaluation is done with the LM Eval Harness tasks/metrics as well as on MT-Bench using the "LLM-as-a-judge" framework with Claude 2.1, with the finding that the final checkpoint, "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-DPO", demonstrates superior performance over many models at the 3B parameter scale, even outperforming the top model in one of the categories on the Huggingface Open LLM Leaderboard. We release "OpenBezoar-SFT", "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-SFT", "OpenBezoar-HH-RLHF-DPO" checkpoints, alongside our generated datasets on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/SurgeGlobal/open-bezoar-6620a24923e12127e9e2b9cc and our codebase at https://bitbucket.org/paladinanalytics/workspace/projects/OP.

Cabrita: closing the gap for foreign languages

The strategy of training the model from scratch in a specific language or domain serves two essential purposes: i) enhancing performance in the particular linguistic or domain context, and ii) ensuring effective tokenization. The main limitation inherent to this approach lies in the associated cost, which can reach six to seven-digit dollar values, depending on the model size and the number of parameters involved. The main solution to overcome the cost challenge is to rely on available pre-trained models, which, despite recent advancements such as the LLaMA and LLaMA-2 models, still demonstrate inefficiency for certain specific domain problems or prove ineffective in scenarios involving conversational memory resources, given the large number of tokens required to represent text. To overcome this issue, we present a methodology named Cabrita, which, as our research demonstrates, successfully addresses the performance and efficient tokenization problem, all at an affordable cost. We believe that this methodology can be applied to any transformer-like architecture model. To validate the study, we conducted continuous pre-training exclusively using Portuguese text on a 3-billion-parameter model known as OpenLLaMA, resulting in a model named openCabrita 3B. The openCabrita 3B also features a new tokenizer that results in a significant reduction in the number of tokens required to represent the text. In our assessment, for few-shot learning tasks, we achieved similar results with this 3B model compared to a traditional continuous pre-training approach as well as to 7B models English pre-trained models.

Efficient Continual Pre-training by Mitigating the Stability Gap

Continual pre-training has increasingly become the predominant approach for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new domains. This process involves updating the pre-trained LLM with a corpus from a new domain, resulting in a shift in the training distribution. To study the behavior of LLMs during this shift, we measured the model's performance throughout the continual pre-training process. we observed a temporary performance drop at the beginning, followed by a recovery phase, a phenomenon known as the "stability gap," previously noted in vision models classifying new classes. To address this issue and enhance LLM performance within a fixed compute budget, we propose three effective strategies: (1) Continually pre-training the LLM on a subset with a proper size for multiple epochs, resulting in faster performance recovery than pre-training the LLM on a large corpus in a single epoch; (2) Pre-training the LLM only on high-quality sub-corpus, which rapidly boosts domain performance; and (3) Using a data mixture similar to the pre-training data to reduce distribution gap. We conduct various experiments on Llama-family models to validate the effectiveness of our strategies in both medical continual pre-training and instruction tuning. For example, our strategies improve the average medical task performance of the OpenLlama-3B model from 36.2% to 40.7% with only 40% of the original training budget and enhance the average general task performance without causing forgetting. Furthermore, we apply our strategies to the Llama-3-8B model. The resulting model, Llama-3-Physician, achieves the best medical performance among current open-source models, and performs comparably to or even better than GPT-4 on several medical benchmarks. We release our models at https://huggingface.co/YiDuo1999/Llama-3-Physician-8B-Instruct.

BlueLM-V-3B: Algorithm and System Co-Design for Multimodal Large Language Models on Mobile Devices

The emergence and growing popularity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significant potential to enhance various aspects of daily life, from improving communication to facilitating learning and problem-solving. Mobile phones, as essential daily companions, represent the most effective and accessible deployment platform for MLLMs, enabling seamless integration into everyday tasks. However, deploying MLLMs on mobile phones presents challenges due to limitations in memory size and computational capability, making it difficult to achieve smooth and real-time processing without extensive optimization. In this paper, we present BlueLM-V-3B, an algorithm and system co-design approach specifically tailored for the efficient deployment of MLLMs on mobile platforms. To be specific, we redesign the dynamic resolution scheme adopted by mainstream MLLMs and implement system optimization for hardware-aware deployment to optimize model inference on mobile phones. BlueLM-V-3B boasts the following key highlights: (1) Small Size: BlueLM-V-3B features a language model with 2.7B parameters and a vision encoder with 400M parameters. (2) Fast Speed: BlueLM-V-3B achieves a generation speed of 24.4 token/s on the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor with 4-bit LLM weight quantization. (3) Strong Performance: BlueLM-V-3B has attained the highest average score of 66.1 on the OpenCompass benchmark among models with leq 4B parameters and surpassed a series of models with much larger parameter sizes (e.g., MiniCPM-V-2.6, InternVL2-8B).

Qwen2.5 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce Qwen2.5, a comprehensive series of large language models (LLMs) designed to meet diverse needs. Compared to previous iterations, Qwen 2.5 has been significantly improved during both the pre-training and post-training stages. In terms of pre-training, we have scaled the high-quality pre-training datasets from the previous 7 trillion tokens to 18 trillion tokens. This provides a strong foundation for common sense, expert knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. In terms of post-training, we implement intricate supervised finetuning with over 1 million samples, as well as multistage reinforcement learning. Post-training techniques enhance human preference, and notably improve long text generation, structural data analysis, and instruction following. To handle diverse and varied use cases effectively, we present Qwen2.5 LLM series in rich sizes. Open-weight offerings include base and instruction-tuned models, with quantized versions available. In addition, for hosted solutions, the proprietary models currently include two mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants: Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus, both available from Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. Qwen2.5 has demonstrated top-tier performance on a wide range of benchmarks evaluating language understanding, reasoning, mathematics, coding, human preference alignment, etc. Specifically, the open-weight flagship Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct outperforms a number of open and proprietary models and demonstrates competitive performance to the state-of-the-art open-weight model, Llama-3-405B-Instruct, which is around 5 times larger. Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus offer superior cost-effectiveness while performing competitively against GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o respectively. Additionally, as the foundation, Qwen2.5 models have been instrumental in training specialized models such as Qwen2.5-Math, Qwen2.5-Coder, QwQ, and multimodal models.

Baichuan Alignment Technical Report

We introduce Baichuan Alignment, a detailed analysis of the alignment techniques employed in the Baichuan series of models. This represents the industry's first comprehensive account of alignment methodologies, offering valuable insights for advancing AI research. We investigate the critical components that enhance model performance during the alignment process, including optimization methods, data strategies, capability enhancements, and evaluation processes. The process spans three key stages: Prompt Augmentation System (PAS), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and Preference Alignment. The problems encountered, the solutions applied, and the improvements made are thoroughly recorded. Through comparisons across well-established benchmarks, we highlight the technological advancements enabled by Baichuan Alignment. Baichuan-Instruct is an internal model, while Qwen2-Nova-72B and Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B are instruct versions of the Qwen2-72B and Llama-3-70B base models, optimized through Baichuan Alignment. Baichuan-Instruct demonstrates significant improvements in core capabilities, with user experience gains ranging from 17% to 28%, and performs exceptionally well on specialized benchmarks. In open-source benchmark evaluations, both Qwen2-Nova-72B and Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B consistently outperform their respective official instruct versions across nearly all datasets. This report aims to clarify the key technologies behind the alignment process, fostering a deeper understanding within the community. Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B model is available at https://huggingface.co/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B.

Can Open-Source LLMs Compete with Commercial Models? Exploring the Few-Shot Performance of Current GPT Models in Biomedical Tasks

Commercial large language models (LLMs), like OpenAI's GPT-4 powering ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus, have dominated natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks across different domains. New competing Open-Source alternatives like Mixtral 8x7B or Llama 3 have emerged and seem to be closing the gap while often offering higher throughput and being less costly to use. Open-Source LLMs can also be self-hosted, which makes them interesting for enterprise and clinical use cases where sensitive data should not be processed by third parties. We participated in the 12th BioASQ challenge, which is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) setting, and explored the performance of current GPT models Claude 3 Opus, GPT-3.5-turbo and Mixtral 8x7b with in-context learning (zero-shot, few-shot) and QLoRa fine-tuning. We also explored how additional relevant knowledge from Wikipedia added to the context-window of the LLM might improve their performance. Mixtral 8x7b was competitive in the 10-shot setting, both with and without fine-tuning, but failed to produce usable results in the zero-shot setting. QLoRa fine-tuning and Wikipedia context did not lead to measurable performance gains. Our results indicate that the performance gap between commercial and open-source models in RAG setups exists mainly in the zero-shot setting and can be closed by simply collecting few-shot examples for domain-specific use cases. The code needed to rerun these experiments is available through GitHub.

2 OLMo 2 Furious

We present OLMo 2, the next generation of our fully open language models. OLMo 2 includes dense autoregressive models with improved architecture and training recipe, pretraining data mixtures, and instruction tuning recipes. Our modified model architecture and training recipe achieve both better training stability and improved per-token efficiency. Our updated pretraining data mixture introduces a new, specialized data mix called Dolmino Mix 1124, which significantly improves model capabilities across many downstream task benchmarks when introduced via late-stage curriculum training (i.e. specialized data during the annealing phase of pretraining). Finally, we incorporate best practices from T\"ulu 3 to develop OLMo 2-Instruct, focusing on permissive data and extending our final-stage reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Our OLMo 2 base models sit at the Pareto frontier of performance to compute, often matching or outperforming open-weight only models like Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 while using fewer FLOPs and with fully transparent training data, code, and recipe. Our fully open OLMo 2-Instruct models are competitive with or surpassing open-weight only models of comparable size, including Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.1 and Gemma 2. We release all OLMo 2 artifacts openly -- models at 7B and 13B scales, both pretrained and post-trained, including their full training data, training code and recipes, training logs and thousands of intermediate checkpoints. The final instruction model is available on the Ai2 Playground as a free research demo.

MAP-Neo: Highly Capable and Transparent Bilingual Large Language Model Series

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made great strides in recent years to achieve unprecedented performance across different tasks. However, due to commercial interest, the most competitive models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude have been gated behind proprietary interfaces without disclosing the training details. Recently, many institutions have open-sourced several strong LLMs like LLaMA-3, comparable to existing closed-source LLMs. However, only the model's weights are provided with most details (e.g., intermediate checkpoints, pre-training corpus, and training code, etc.) being undisclosed. To improve the transparency of LLMs, the research community has formed to open-source truly open LLMs (e.g., Pythia, Amber, OLMo), where more details (e.g., pre-training corpus and training code) are being provided. These models have greatly advanced the scientific study of these large models including their strengths, weaknesses, biases and risks. However, we observe that the existing truly open LLMs on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks are still inferior to existing state-of-the-art LLMs with similar model sizes. To this end, we open-source MAP-Neo, a highly capable and transparent bilingual language model with 7B parameters trained from scratch on 4.5T high-quality tokens. Our MAP-Neo is the first fully open-sourced bilingual LLM with comparable performance compared to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, we open-source all details to reproduce our MAP-Neo, where the cleaned pre-training corpus, data cleaning pipeline, checkpoints, and well-optimized training/evaluation framework are provided. Finally, we hope our MAP-Neo will enhance and strengthen the open research community and inspire more innovations and creativities to facilitate the further improvements of LLMs.

JetMoE: Reaching Llama2 Performance with 0.1M Dollars

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results, but their increasing resource demand has become a major obstacle to the development of powerful and accessible super-human intelligence. This report introduces JetMoE-8B, a new LLM trained with less than $0.1 million, using 1.25T tokens from carefully mixed open-source corpora and 30,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite its low cost, the JetMoE-8B demonstrates impressive performance, with JetMoE-8B outperforming the Llama2-7B model and JetMoE-8B-Chat surpassing the Llama2-13B-Chat model. These results suggest that LLM training can be much more cost-effective than generally thought. JetMoE-8B is based on an efficient Sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architecture, composed of attention and feedforward experts. Both layers are sparsely activated, allowing JetMoE-8B to have 8B parameters while only activating 2B for each input token, reducing inference computation by about 70% compared to Llama2-7B. Moreover, JetMoE-8B is highly open and academia-friendly, using only public datasets and training code. All training parameters and data mixtures have been detailed in this report to facilitate future efforts in the development of open foundation models. This transparency aims to encourage collaboration and further advancements in the field of accessible and efficient LLMs. The model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/myshell-ai/JetMoE.

Fully Open Source Moxin-7B Technical Report

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone a significant transformation, marked by a rapid rise in both their popularity and capabilities. Leading this evolution are proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-o1, which have captured widespread attention in the AI community due to their remarkable performance and versatility. Simultaneously, open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and Mistral, have made great contributions to the ever-increasing popularity of LLMs due to the ease to customize and deploy the models across diverse applications. Although open-source LLMs present unprecedented opportunities for innovation and research, the commercialization of LLMs has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open-source LLMs fail to meet fundamental transparency requirements by withholding essential components like training code and data, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be "open-source," which may hinder further innovations on LLMs. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Moxin 7B, a fully open-source LLM developed in accordance with the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that evaluates AI models based on model completeness and openness, adhering to principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. Our model achieves the highest MOF classification level of "open science" through the comprehensive release of pre-training code and configurations, training and fine-tuning datasets, and intermediate and final checkpoints. Experiments show that our model achieves superior performance in zero-shot evaluation compared with popular 7B models and performs competitively in few-shot evaluation.

The Fine Line: Navigating Large Language Model Pretraining with Down-streaming Capability Analysis

Uncovering early-stage metrics that reflect final model performance is one core principle for large-scale pretraining. The existing scaling law demonstrates the power-law correlation between pretraining loss and training flops, which serves as an important indicator of the current training state for large language models. However, this principle only focuses on the model's compression properties on the training data, resulting in an inconsistency with the ability improvements on the downstream tasks. Some follow-up works attempted to extend the scaling-law to more complex metrics (such as hyperparameters), but still lacked a comprehensive analysis of the dynamic differences among various capabilities during pretraining. To address the aforementioned limitations, this paper undertakes a comprehensive comparison of model capabilities at various pretraining intermediate checkpoints. Through this analysis, we confirm that specific downstream metrics exhibit similar training dynamics across models of different sizes, up to 67 billion parameters. In addition to our core findings, we've reproduced Amber and OpenLLaMA, releasing their intermediate checkpoints. This initiative offers valuable resources to the research community and facilitates the verification and exploration of LLM pretraining by open-source researchers. Besides, we provide empirical summaries, including performance comparisons of different models and capabilities, and tuition of key metrics for different training phases. Based on these findings, we provide a more user-friendly strategy for evaluating the optimization state, offering guidance for establishing a stable pretraining process.

How Good Are Low-bit Quantized LLaMA3 Models? An Empirical Study

Meta's LLaMA family has become one of the most powerful open-source Large Language Model (LLM) series. Notably, LLaMA3 models have recently been released and achieve impressive performance across various with super-large scale pre-training on over 15T tokens of data. Given the wide application of low-bit quantization for LLMs in resource-limited scenarios, we explore LLaMA3's capabilities when quantized to low bit-width. This exploration holds the potential to unveil new insights and challenges for low-bit quantization of LLaMA3 and other forthcoming LLMs, especially in addressing performance degradation problems that suffer in LLM compression. Specifically, we evaluate the 10 existing post-training quantization and LoRA-finetuning methods of LLaMA3 on 1-8 bits and diverse datasets to comprehensively reveal LLaMA3's low-bit quantization performance. Our experiment results indicate that LLaMA3 still suffers non-negligent degradation in these scenarios, especially in ultra-low bit-width. This highlights the significant performance gap under low bit-width that needs to be bridged in future developments. We expect that this empirical study will prove valuable in advancing future models, pushing the LLMs to lower bit-width with higher accuracy for being practical. Our project is released on https://github.com/Macaronlin/LLaMA3-Quantization and quantized LLaMA3 models are released in https://huggingface.co/LLMQ.

BiMediX2: Bio-Medical EXpert LMM for Diverse Medical Modalities

This paper introduces BiMediX2, a bilingual (Arabic-English) Bio-Medical EXpert Large Multimodal Model (LMM) with a unified architecture that integrates text and visual modalities, enabling advanced image understanding and medical applications. BiMediX2 leverages the Llama3.1 architecture and integrates text and visual capabilities to facilitate seamless interactions in both English and Arabic, supporting text-based inputs and multi-turn conversations involving medical images. The model is trained on an extensive bilingual healthcare dataset consisting of 1.6M samples of diverse medical interactions for both text and image modalities, mixed in Arabic and English. We also propose the first bilingual GPT-4o based medical LMM benchmark named BiMed-MBench. BiMediX2 is benchmarked on both text-based and image-based tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across several medical benchmarks. It outperforms recent state-of-the-art models in medical LLM evaluation benchmarks. Our model also sets a new benchmark in multimodal medical evaluations with over 9% improvement in English and over 20% in Arabic evaluations. Additionally, it surpasses GPT-4 by around 9% in UPHILL factual accuracy evaluations and excels in various medical Visual Question Answering, Report Generation, and Report Summarization tasks. The project page including source code and the trained model, is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/BiMediX2.

Did the Neurons Read your Book? Document-level Membership Inference for Large Language Models

With large language models (LLMs) poised to become embedded in our daily lives, questions are starting to be raised about the data they learned from. These questions range from potential bias or misinformation LLMs could retain from their training data to questions of copyright and fair use of human-generated text. However, while these questions emerge, developers of the recent state-of-the-art LLMs become increasingly reluctant to disclose details on their training corpus. We here introduce the task of document-level membership inference for real-world LLMs, i.e. inferring whether the LLM has seen a given document during training or not. First, we propose a procedure for the development and evaluation of document-level membership inference for LLMs by leveraging commonly used data sources for training and the model release date. We then propose a practical, black-box method to predict document-level membership and instantiate it on OpenLLaMA-7B with both books and academic papers. We show our methodology to perform very well, reaching an AUC of 0.856 for books and 0.678 for papers. We then show our approach to outperform the sentence-level membership inference attacks used in the privacy literature for the document-level membership task. We further evaluate whether smaller models might be less sensitive to document-level inference and show OpenLLaMA-3B to be approximately as sensitive as OpenLLaMA-7B to our approach. Finally, we consider two mitigation strategies and find the AUC to slowly decrease when only partial documents are considered but to remain fairly high when the model precision is reduced. Taken together, our results show that accurate document-level membership can be inferred for LLMs, increasing the transparency of technology poised to change our lives.

OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model

Large policies pretrained on a combination of Internet-scale vision-language data and diverse robot demonstrations have the potential to change how we teach robots new skills: rather than training new behaviors from scratch, we can fine-tune such vision-language-action (VLA) models to obtain robust, generalizable policies for visuomotor control. Yet, widespread adoption of VLAs for robotics has been challenging as 1) existing VLAs are largely closed and inaccessible to the public, and 2) prior work fails to explore methods for efficiently fine-tuning VLAs for new tasks, a key component for adoption. Addressing these challenges, we introduce OpenVLA, a 7B-parameter open-source VLA trained on a diverse collection of 970k real-world robot demonstrations. OpenVLA builds on a Llama 2 language model combined with a visual encoder that fuses pretrained features from DINOv2 and SigLIP. As a product of the added data diversity and new model components, OpenVLA demonstrates strong results for generalist manipulation, outperforming closed models such as RT-2-X (55B) by 16.5% in absolute task success rate across 29 tasks and multiple robot embodiments, with 7x fewer parameters. We further show that we can effectively fine-tune OpenVLA for new settings, with especially strong generalization results in multi-task environments involving multiple objects and strong language grounding abilities, and outperform expressive from-scratch imitation learning methods such as Diffusion Policy by 20.4%. We also explore compute efficiency; as a separate contribution, we show that OpenVLA can be fine-tuned on consumer GPUs via modern low-rank adaptation methods and served efficiently via quantization without a hit to downstream success rate. Finally, we release model checkpoints, fine-tuning notebooks, and our PyTorch codebase with built-in support for training VLAs at scale on Open X-Embodiment datasets.

MM-RLHF: The Next Step Forward in Multimodal LLM Alignment

Despite notable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), most state-of-the-art models have not undergone thorough alignment with human preferences. This gap exists because current alignment research has primarily achieved progress in specific areas (e.g., hallucination reduction), while the broader question of whether aligning models with human preferences can systematically enhance MLLM capability remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce MM-RLHF, a dataset containing 120k fine-grained, human-annotated preference comparison pairs. This dataset represents a substantial advancement over existing resources, offering superior size, diversity, annotation granularity, and quality. Leveraging this dataset, we propose several key innovations to improve both the quality of reward models and the efficiency of alignment algorithms. Notably, we introduce a Critique-Based Reward Model, which generates critiques of model outputs before assigning scores, offering enhanced interpretability and more informative feedback compared to traditional scalar reward mechanisms. Additionally, we propose Dynamic Reward Scaling, a method that adjusts the loss weight of each sample according to the reward signal, thereby optimizing the use of high-quality comparison pairs. Our approach is rigorously evaluated across 10 distinct dimensions and 27 benchmarks, with results demonstrating significant and consistent improvements in model performance. Specifically, fine-tuning LLaVA-ov-7B with MM-RLHF and our alignment algorithm leads to a 19.5% increase in conversational abilities and a 60% improvement in safety. We have open-sourced the preference dataset, reward model, training and evaluation code, as well as reward modeling and safety benchmarks. For more details, please visit our project page: https://mm-rlhf.github.io.

ToolBeHonest: A Multi-level Hallucination Diagnostic Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being integrated into real-world applications. Due to the lack of benchmarks, the community still needs to fully understand the hallucination issues within these models. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark, ToolBH. Specifically, we assess the LLM's hallucinations through two perspectives: depth and breadth. In terms of depth, we propose a multi-level diagnostic process, including (1) solvability detection, (2) solution planning, and (3) missing-tool analysis. For breadth, we consider three scenarios based on the characteristics of the toolset: missing necessary tools, potential tools, and limited functionality tools. Furthermore, we developed seven tasks and collected 700 evaluation samples through multiple rounds of manual annotation. The results show the significant challenges presented by the ToolBH benchmark. The current advanced models Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4o only achieve a total score of 45.3 and 37.0, respectively, on a scale of 100. In this benchmark, larger model parameters do not guarantee better performance; the training data and response strategies also play a crucial role in tool-enhanced LLM scenarios. Our diagnostic analysis indicates that the primary reason for model errors lies in assessing task solvability. Additionally, open-weight models suffer from performance drops with verbose replies, whereas proprietary models excel with longer reasoning.

OpenIns3D: Snap and Lookup for 3D Open-vocabulary Instance Segmentation

Current 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding methods mostly utilize well-aligned 2D images as the bridge to learn 3D features with language. However, applying these approaches becomes challenging in scenarios where 2D images are absent. In this work, we introduce a completely new pipeline, namely, OpenIns3D, which requires no 2D image inputs, for 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding at the instance level. The OpenIns3D framework employs a "Mask-Snap-Lookup" scheme. The "Mask" module learns class-agnostic mask proposals in 3D point clouds. The "Snap" module generates synthetic scene-level images at multiple scales and leverages 2D vision language models to extract interesting objects. The "Lookup" module searches through the outcomes of "Snap" with the help of Mask2Pixel maps, which contain the precise correspondence between 3D masks and synthetic images, to assign category names to the proposed masks. This 2D input-free, easy-to-train, and flexible approach achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of indoor and outdoor datasets with a large margin. Furthermore, OpenIns3D allows for effortless switching of 2D detectors without re-training. When integrated with state-of-the-art 2D open-world models such as ODISE and GroundingDINO, superb results are observed on open-vocabulary instance segmentation. When integrated with LLM-powered 2D models like LISA, it demonstrates a remarkable capacity to process highly complex text queries, including those that require intricate reasoning and world knowledge. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/OpenIns3D/

Biomedical Large Languages Models Seem not to be Superior to Generalist Models on Unseen Medical Data

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in biomedical applications, leading to efforts to fine-tune them on domain-specific data. However, the effectiveness of this approach remains unclear. This study evaluates the performance of biomedically fine-tuned LLMs against their general-purpose counterparts on a variety of clinical tasks. We evaluated their performance on clinical case challenges from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and on several clinical tasks (e.g., information extraction, document summarization, and clinical coding). Using benchmarks specifically chosen to be likely outside the fine-tuning datasets of biomedical models, we found that biomedical LLMs mostly perform inferior to their general-purpose counterparts, especially on tasks not focused on medical knowledge. While larger models showed similar performance on case tasks (e.g., OpenBioLLM-70B: 66.4% vs. Llama-3-70B-Instruct: 65% on JAMA cases), smaller biomedical models showed more pronounced underperformance (e.g., OpenBioLLM-8B: 30% vs. Llama-3-8B-Instruct: 64.3% on NEJM cases). Similar trends were observed across the CLUE (Clinical Language Understanding Evaluation) benchmark tasks, with general-purpose models often performing better on text generation, question answering, and coding tasks. Our results suggest that fine-tuning LLMs to biomedical data may not provide the expected benefits and may potentially lead to reduced performance, challenging prevailing assumptions about domain-specific adaptation of LLMs and highlighting the need for more rigorous evaluation frameworks in healthcare AI. Alternative approaches, such as retrieval-augmented generation, may be more effective in enhancing the biomedical capabilities of LLMs without compromising their general knowledge.

Transfer Visual Prompt Generator across LLMs

While developing a new vision-language LLM (VL-LLM) by pre-training on tremendous image-text pairs from scratch can be exceedingly resource-consuming, connecting an existing LLM with a comparatively lightweight visual prompt generator (VPG) becomes a feasible paradigm. However, further tuning the VPG part of the VL-LLM still suffers from indispensable computational costs, i.e., requiring thousands of GPU hours and millions of training data. One alternative solution is to transfer an existing VPG from any existing VL-LLMs for the target VL-LLM. In this work, we for the first time investigate the VPG transferability across LLMs, and explore a solution to reduce the cost of VPG transfer. We first study the VPG transfer across different LLM sizes (e.g., small-to-large), and across different LLM types, through which we diagnose the key factors to maximize the transfer efficiency. Based on our observation, we design a two-stage transfer framework named VPGTrans, which is simple yet highly effective. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VPGTrans helps significantly speed up the transfer learning process without compromising performance. Remarkably, it helps achieve the VPG transfer from BLIP-2 OPT_2.7B to BLIP-2 OPT_6.7B with over 10 times speed-up and 10.7% training data compared with connecting a VPG to OPT_6.7B from scratch. Further, a series of intriguing findings and potential rationales behind them are provided and discussed. Finally, we showcase the practical value of our VPGTrans approach, by customizing two novel VL-LLMs, including VL-LLaMA and VL-Vicuna, with recently released LLaMA and Vicuna LLMs.

Cross-Modality Jailbreak and Mismatched Attacks on Medical Multimodal Large Language Models

Security concerns related to Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively explored, yet the safety implications for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly in medical contexts (MedMLLMs), remain insufficiently studied. This paper delves into the underexplored security vulnerabilities of MedMLLMs, especially when deployed in clinical environments where the accuracy and relevance of question-and-answer interactions are critically tested against complex medical challenges. By combining existing clinical medical data with atypical natural phenomena, we redefine two types of attacks: mismatched malicious attack (2M-attack) and optimized mismatched malicious attack (O2M-attack). Using our own constructed voluminous 3MAD dataset, which covers a wide range of medical image modalities and harmful medical scenarios, we conduct a comprehensive analysis and propose the MCM optimization method, which significantly enhances the attack success rate on MedMLLMs. Evaluations with this dataset and novel attack methods, including white-box attacks on LLaVA-Med and transfer attacks on four other state-of-the-art models, indicate that even MedMLLMs designed with enhanced security features are vulnerable to security breaches. Our work underscores the urgent need for a concerted effort to implement robust security measures and enhance the safety and efficacy of open-source MedMLLMs, particularly given the potential severity of jailbreak attacks and other malicious or clinically significant exploits in medical settings. For further research and replication, anonymous access to our code is available at https://github.com/dirtycomputer/O2M_attack. Warning: Medical large model jailbreaking may generate content that includes unverified diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Always consult professional medical advice.

VITA: Towards Open-Source Interactive Omni Multimodal LLM

The remarkable multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o underscore their necessity in practical applications, yet open-source models rarely excel in both areas. In this paper, we introduce VITA, the first-ever open-source Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at simultaneous processing and analysis of Video, Image, Text, and Audio modalities, and meanwhile has an advanced multimodal interactive experience. Starting from Mixtral 8x7B as a language foundation, we expand its Chinese vocabulary followed by bilingual instruction tuning. We further endow the language model with visual and audio capabilities through two-stage multi-task learning of multimodal alignment and instruction tuning. VITA demonstrates robust foundational capabilities of multilingual, vision, and audio understanding, as evidenced by its strong performance across a range of both unimodal and multimodal benchmarks. Beyond foundational capabilities, we have made considerable progress in enhancing the natural multimodal human-computer interaction experience. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to exploit non-awakening interaction and audio interrupt in MLLM. VITA is the first step for the open-source community to explore the seamless integration of multimodal understanding and interaction. While there is still lots of work to be done on VITA to get close to close-source counterparts, we hope that its role as a pioneer can serve as a cornerstone for subsequent research. Project Page: https://vita-home.github.io.

MMSci: A Multimodal Multi-Discipline Dataset for PhD-Level Scientific Comprehension

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has heightened the demand for AI-based scientific assistants capable of understanding scientific articles and figures. Despite progress, there remains a significant gap in evaluating models' comprehension of professional, graduate-level, and even PhD-level scientific content. Current datasets and benchmarks primarily focus on relatively simple scientific tasks and figures, lacking comprehensive assessments across diverse advanced scientific disciplines. To bridge this gap, we collected a multimodal, multidisciplinary dataset from open-access scientific articles published in Nature Communications journals. This dataset spans 72 scientific disciplines, ensuring both diversity and quality. We created benchmarks with various tasks and settings to comprehensively evaluate LMMs' capabilities in understanding scientific figures and content. Our evaluation revealed that these tasks are highly challenging: many open-source models struggled significantly, and even GPT-4V and GPT-4o faced difficulties. We also explored using our dataset as training resources by constructing visual instruction-following data, enabling the 7B LLaVA model to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4V/o on our benchmark. Additionally, we investigated the use of our interleaved article texts and figure images for pre-training LMMs, resulting in improvements on the material generation task. The source dataset, including articles, figures, constructed benchmarks, and visual instruction-following data, is open-sourced.

Magpie: Alignment Data Synthesis from Scratch by Prompting Aligned LLMs with Nothing

High-quality instruction data is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs). Although some models, such as Llama-3-Instruct, have open weights, their alignment data remain private, which hinders the democratization of AI. High human labor costs and a limited, predefined scope for prompting prevent existing open-source data creation methods from scaling effectively, potentially limiting the diversity and quality of public alignment datasets. Is it possible to synthesize high-quality instruction data at scale by extracting it directly from an aligned LLM? We present a self-synthesis method for generating large-scale alignment data named Magpie. Our key observation is that aligned LLMs like Llama-3-Instruct can generate a user query when we input only the left-side templates up to the position reserved for user messages, thanks to their auto-regressive nature. We use this method to prompt Llama-3-Instruct and generate 4 million instructions along with their corresponding responses. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the extracted data and select 300K high-quality instances. To compare Magpie data with other public instruction datasets, we fine-tune Llama-3-8B-Base with each dataset and evaluate the performance of the fine-tuned models. Our results indicate that in some tasks, models fine-tuned with Magpie perform comparably to the official Llama-3-8B-Instruct, despite the latter being enhanced with 10 million data points through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and subsequent feedback learning. We also show that using Magpie solely for SFT can surpass the performance of previous public datasets utilized for both SFT and preference optimization, such as direct preference optimization with UltraFeedback. This advantage is evident on alignment benchmarks such as AlpacaEval, ArenaHard, and WildBench.