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Oct 29

Benchmarking Algorithmic Bias in Face Recognition: An Experimental Approach Using Synthetic Faces and Human Evaluation

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational datasets only permit correlational conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is different on female and male faces in dataset X.". By contrast, experimental methods manipulate attributes individually and thus permit causal conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is affected by gender and skin color." Our method is based on generating synthetic faces using a neural face generator, where each attribute of interest is modified independently while leaving all other attributes constant. Human observers crucially provide the ground truth on perceptual identity similarity between synthetic image pairs. We validate our method quantitatively by evaluating race and gender biases of three research-grade face recognition models. Our synthetic pipeline reveals that for these algorithms, accuracy is lower for Black and East Asian population subgroups. Our method can also quantify how perceptual changes in attributes affect face identity distances reported by these models. Our large synthetic dataset, consisting of 48,000 synthetic face image pairs (10,200 unique synthetic faces) and 555,000 human annotations (individual attributes and pairwise identity comparisons) is available to researchers in this important area.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

Instance Segmentation in the Dark

Existing instance segmentation techniques are primarily tailored for high-visibility inputs, but their performance significantly deteriorates in extremely low-light environments. In this work, we take a deep look at instance segmentation in the dark and introduce several techniques that substantially boost the low-light inference accuracy. The proposed method is motivated by the observation that noise in low-light images introduces high-frequency disturbances to the feature maps of neural networks, thereby significantly degrading performance. To suppress this ``feature noise", we propose a novel learning method that relies on an adaptive weighted downsampling layer, a smooth-oriented convolutional block, and disturbance suppression learning. These components effectively reduce feature noise during downsampling and convolution operations, enabling the model to learn disturbance-invariant features. Furthermore, we discover that high-bit-depth RAW images can better preserve richer scene information in low-light conditions compared to typical camera sRGB outputs, thus supporting the use of RAW-input algorithms. Our analysis indicates that high bit-depth can be critical for low-light instance segmentation. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated RAW datasets, we leverage a low-light RAW synthetic pipeline to generate realistic low-light data. In addition, to facilitate further research in this direction, we capture a real-world low-light instance segmentation dataset comprising over two thousand paired low/normal-light images with instance-level pixel-wise annotations. Remarkably, without any image preprocessing, we achieve satisfactory performance on instance segmentation in very low light (4~\% AP higher than state-of-the-art competitors), meanwhile opening new opportunities for future research.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 27, 2023

Toward General Instruction-Following Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Following natural instructions is crucial for the effective application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), research on assessing and improving instruction-following (IF) alignment within the RAG domain remains limited. To address this issue, we propose VIF-RAG, the first automated, scalable, and verifiable synthetic pipeline for instruction-following alignment in RAG systems. We start by manually crafting a minimal set of atomic instructions (<100) and developing combination rules to synthesize and verify complex instructions for a seed set. We then use supervised models for instruction rewriting while simultaneously generating code to automate the verification of instruction quality via a Python executor. Finally, we integrate these instructions with extensive RAG and general data samples, scaling up to a high-quality VIF-RAG-QA dataset (>100k) through automated processes. To further bridge the gap in instruction-following auto-evaluation for RAG systems, we introduce FollowRAG Benchmark, which includes approximately 3K test samples, covering 22 categories of general instruction constraints and four knowledge-intensive QA datasets. Due to its robust pipeline design, FollowRAG can seamlessly integrate with different RAG benchmarks. Using FollowRAG and eight widely-used IF and foundational abilities benchmarks for LLMs, we demonstrate that VIF-RAG markedly enhances LLM performance across a broad range of general instruction constraints while effectively leveraging its capabilities in RAG scenarios. Further analysis offers practical insights for achieving IF alignment in RAG systems. Our code and datasets are released at https://FollowRAG.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 12, 2024 3

HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024 3

Surveying the Effects of Quality, Diversity, and Complexity in Synthetic Data From Large Language Models

Synthetic data generation with Large Language Models is a promising paradigm for augmenting natural data over a nearly infinite range of tasks. Given this variety, direct comparisons among synthetic data generation algorithms are scarce, making it difficult to understand where improvement comes from and what bottlenecks exist. We propose to evaluate algorithms via the makeup of synthetic data generated by each algorithm in terms of data quality, diversity, and complexity. We choose these three characteristics for their significance in open-ended processes and the impact each has on the capabilities of downstream models. We find quality to be essential for in-distribution model generalization, diversity to be essential for out-of-distribution generalization, and complexity to be beneficial for both. Further, we emphasize the existence of Quality-Diversity trade-offs in training data and the downstream effects on model performance. We then examine the effect of various components in the synthetic data pipeline on each data characteristic. This examination allows us to taxonomize and compare synthetic data generation algorithms through the components they utilize and the resulting effects on data QDC composition. This analysis extends into a discussion on the importance of balancing QDC in synthetic data for efficient reinforcement learning and self-improvement algorithms. Analogous to the QD trade-offs in training data, often there exist trade-offs between model output quality and output diversity which impact the composition of synthetic data. We observe that many models are currently evaluated and optimized only for output quality, thereby limiting output diversity and the potential for self-improvement. We argue that balancing these trade-offs is essential to the development of future self-improvement algorithms and highlight a number of works making progress in this direction.

  • 20 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024 3

FLAMES: Improving LLM Math Reasoning via a Fine-Grained Analysis of the Data Synthesis Pipeline

Recent works improving LLM math reasoning with synthetic data have used unique setups, making comparison of data synthesis strategies impractical. This leaves many unanswered questions about the roles of different factors in the synthetic data pipeline, such as the impact of filtering low-quality problems. To address this gap, we introduce FLAMES, a Framework for LLM Assessment of Math rEasoning Data Synthesis, and perform a systematic study of 10 existing data synthesis strategies and multiple other factors impacting the performance of synthetic math reasoning data. Our FLAMES experiments provide several valuable insights about the optimal balance of difficulty and diversity of synthetic data. First, data agents designed to increase problem complexity lead to best improvements on most math metrics. Second, with a fixed data generation budget, keeping higher problem coverage is more important than keeping only problems with reliable solutions. Third, GSM8K- and MATH-based synthetic data can lead to improvements on competition-level benchmarks, showcasing easy-to-hard generalization. Leveraging insights from our FLAMES experiments, we design two novel data synthesis strategies for improving out-of-domain generalization and robustness. Further, we develop the FLAMES dataset, an effective blend of our novel and existing data synthesis strategies, outperforming public datasets on OlympiadBench (+15.7), CollegeMath (+4.5), GSMPlus (+6.5), and MATH (+3.1). Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Math-7B on the FLAMES dataset achieves 81.4% on MATH, surpassing larger Llama3 405B, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

amazon Amazon
·
Aug 22 1

CircuitSense: A Hierarchical Circuit System Benchmark Bridging Visual Comprehension and Symbolic Reasoning in Engineering Design Process

Engineering design operates through hierarchical abstraction from system specifications to component implementations, requiring visual understanding coupled with mathematical reasoning at each level. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at natural image tasks, their ability to extract mathematical models from technical diagrams remains unexplored. We present CircuitSense, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating circuit understanding across this hierarchy through 8,006+ problems spanning component-level schematics to system-level block diagrams. Our benchmark uniquely examines the complete engineering workflow: Perception, Analysis, and Design, with a particular emphasis on the critical but underexplored capability of deriving symbolic equations from visual inputs. We introduce a hierarchical synthetic generation pipeline consisting of a grid-based schematic generator and a block diagram generator with auto-derived symbolic equation labels. Comprehensive evaluation of six state-of-the-art MLLMs, including both closed-source and open-source models, reveals fundamental limitations in visual-to-mathematical reasoning. Closed-source models achieve over 85\% accuracy on perception tasks involving component recognition and topology identification, yet their performance on symbolic derivation and analytical reasoning falls below 19\%, exposing a critical gap between visual parsing and symbolic reasoning. Models with stronger symbolic reasoning capabilities consistently achieve higher design task accuracy, confirming the fundamental role of mathematical understanding in circuit synthesis and establishing symbolic reasoning as the key metric for engineering competence.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26

Leveraging Vision-Language Models for Visual Grounding and Analysis of Automotive UI

Modern automotive infotainment systems require intelligent and adaptive solutions to handle frequent User Interface (UI) updates and diverse design variations. We introduce a vision-language framework for understanding and interacting with automotive infotainment systems, enabling seamless adaptation across different UI designs. To further support research in this field, we release AutomotiveUI-Bench-4K, an open-source dataset of 998 images with 4,208 annotations. Additionally, we present a synthetic data pipeline to generate training data. We fine-tune a Molmo-7B-based model using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRa) and incorporating reasoning generated by our pipeline, along with visual grounding and evaluation capabilities. The fine-tuned Evaluative Large Action Model (ELAM) achieves strong performance on AutomotiveUI-Bench-4K (model and dataset are available on Hugging Face) and demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization, including a +5.2% improvement on ScreenSpot over the baseline model. Notably, our approach achieves 80.4% average accuracy on ScreenSpot, closely matching or even surpassing specialized models for desktop, mobile, and web, such as ShowUI, despite being trained for the infotainment domain. This research investigates how data collection and subsequent fine-tuning can lead to AI-driven progress within automotive UI understanding and interaction. The applied method is cost-efficient and fine-tuned models can be deployed on consumer-grade GPUs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 9

MirrorVerse: Pushing Diffusion Models to Realistically Reflect the World

Diffusion models have become central to various image editing tasks, yet they often fail to fully adhere to physical laws, particularly with effects like shadows, reflections, and occlusions. In this work, we address the challenge of generating photorealistic mirror reflections using diffusion-based generative models. Despite extensive training data, existing diffusion models frequently overlook the nuanced details crucial to authentic mirror reflections. Recent approaches have attempted to resolve this by creating synhetic datasets and framing reflection generation as an inpainting task; however, they struggle to generalize across different object orientations and positions relative to the mirror. Our method overcomes these limitations by introducing key augmentations into the synthetic data pipeline: (1) random object positioning, (2) randomized rotations, and (3) grounding of objects, significantly enhancing generalization across poses and placements. To further address spatial relationships and occlusions in scenes with multiple objects, we implement a strategy to pair objects during dataset generation, resulting in a dataset robust enough to handle these complex scenarios. Achieving generalization to real-world scenes remains a challenge, so we introduce a three-stage training curriculum to develop the MirrorFusion 2.0 model to improve real-world performance. We provide extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations to support our approach. The project page is available at: https://mirror-verse.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 21

DreamOmni: Unified Image Generation and Editing

Currently, the success of large language models (LLMs) illustrates that a unified multitasking approach can significantly enhance model usability, streamline deployment, and foster synergistic benefits across different tasks. However, in computer vision, while text-to-image (T2I) models have significantly improved generation quality through scaling up, their framework design did not initially consider how to unify with downstream tasks, such as various types of editing. To address this, we introduce DreamOmni, a unified model for image generation and editing. We begin by analyzing existing frameworks and the requirements of downstream tasks, proposing a unified framework that integrates both T2I models and various editing tasks. Furthermore, another key challenge is the efficient creation of high-quality editing data, particularly for instruction-based and drag-based editing. To this end, we develop a synthetic data pipeline using sticker-like elements to synthesize accurate, high-quality datasets efficiently, which enables editing data scaling up for unified model training. For training, DreamOmni jointly trains T2I generation and downstream tasks. T2I training enhances the model's understanding of specific concepts and improves generation quality, while editing training helps the model grasp the nuances of the editing task. This collaboration significantly boosts editing performance. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of DreamOmni. The code and model will be released.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 22, 2024

SIG: A Synthetic Identity Generation Pipeline for Generating Evaluation Datasets for Face Recognition

As Artificial Intelligence applications expand, the evaluation of models faces heightened scrutiny. Ensuring public readiness requires evaluation datasets, which differ from training data by being disjoint and ethically sourced in compliance with privacy regulations. The performance and fairness of face recognition systems depend significantly on the quality and representativeness of these evaluation datasets. This data is sometimes scraped from the internet without user's consent, causing ethical concerns that can prohibit its use without proper releases. In rare cases, data is collected in a controlled environment with consent, however, this process is time-consuming, expensive, and logistically difficult to execute. This creates a barrier for those unable to conjure the immense resources required to gather ethically sourced evaluation datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce the Synthetic Identity Generation pipeline, or SIG, that allows for the targeted creation of ethical, balanced datasets for face recognition evaluation. Our proposed and demonstrated pipeline generates high-quality images of synthetic identities with controllable pose, facial features, and demographic attributes, such as race, gender, and age. We also release an open-source evaluation dataset named ControlFace10k, consisting of 10,008 face images of 3,336 unique synthetic identities balanced across race, gender, and age, generated using the proposed SIG pipeline. We analyze ControlFace10k along with a non-synthetic BUPT dataset using state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms to demonstrate its effectiveness as an evaluation tool. This analysis highlights the dataset's characteristics and its utility in assessing algorithmic bias across different demographic groups.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

SAGE-RT: Synthetic Alignment data Generation for Safety Evaluation and Red Teaming

We introduce Synthetic Alignment data Generation for Safety Evaluation and Red Teaming (SAGE-RT or SAGE) a novel pipeline for generating synthetic alignment and red-teaming data. Existing methods fall short in creating nuanced and diverse datasets, providing necessary control over the data generation and validation processes, or require large amount of manually generated seed data. SAGE addresses these limitations by using a detailed taxonomy to produce safety-alignment and red-teaming data across a wide range of topics. We generated 51,000 diverse and in-depth prompt-response pairs, encompassing over 1,500 topics of harmfulness and covering variations of the most frequent types of jailbreaking prompts faced by large language models (LLMs). We show that the red-teaming data generated through SAGE jailbreaks state-of-the-art LLMs in more than 27 out of 32 sub-categories, and in more than 58 out of 279 leaf-categories (sub-sub categories). The attack success rate for GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-turbo is 100% over the sub-categories of harmfulness. Our approach avoids the pitfalls of synthetic safety-training data generation such as mode collapse and lack of nuance in the generation pipeline by ensuring a detailed coverage of harmful topics using iterative expansion of the topics and conditioning the outputs on the generated raw-text. This method can be used to generate red-teaming and alignment data for LLM Safety completely synthetically to make LLMs safer or for red-teaming the models over a diverse range of topics.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 14, 2024

Beyond Contrastive Learning: Synthetic Data Enables List-wise Training with Multiple Levels of Relevance

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have allowed the augmentation of information retrieval (IR) pipelines with synthetic data in various ways. Yet, the main training paradigm remains: contrastive learning with binary relevance labels and the InfoNCE loss, where one positive document is compared against one or more negatives. This objective treats all documents that are not explicitly annotated as relevant on an equally negative footing, regardless of their actual degree of relevance, thus (a) missing subtle nuances that are useful for ranking and (b) being susceptible to annotation noise. To overcome this limitation, in this work we forgo real training documents and annotations altogether and use open-source LLMs to directly generate synthetic documents that answer real user queries according to several different levels of relevance. This fully synthetic ranking context of graduated relevance, together with an appropriate list-wise loss (Wasserstein distance), enables us to train dense retrievers in a way that better captures the ranking task. Experiments on various IR datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms conventional training with InfoNCE by a large margin. Without using any real documents for training, our dense retriever significantly outperforms the same retriever trained through self-supervision. More importantly, it matches the performance of the same retriever trained on real, labeled training documents of the same dataset, while being more robust to distribution shift and clearly outperforming it when evaluated zero-shot on the BEIR dataset collection.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 29

BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion

We show, for the first time, that neural networks trained only on synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the problem of 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation from real images. Previous synthetic datasets have been small, unrealistic, or lacked realistic clothing. Achieving sufficient realism is non-trivial and we show how to do this for full bodies in motion. Specifically, our BEDLAM dataset contains monocular RGB videos with ground-truth 3D bodies in SMPL-X format. It includes a diversity of body shapes, motions, skin tones, hair, and clothing. The clothing is realistically simulated on the moving bodies using commercial clothing physics simulation. We render varying numbers of people in realistic scenes with varied lighting and camera motions. We then train various HPS regressors using BEDLAM and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on real-image benchmarks despite training with synthetic data. We use BEDLAM to gain insights into what model design choices are important for accuracy. With good synthetic training data, we find that a basic method like HMR approaches the accuracy of the current SOTA method (CLIFF). BEDLAM is useful for a variety of tasks and all images, ground truth bodies, 3D clothing, support code, and more are available for research purposes. Additionally, we provide detailed information about our synthetic data generation pipeline, enabling others to generate their own datasets. See the project page: https://bedlam.is.tue.mpg.de/.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 29, 2023

LingVarBench: Benchmarking LLM for Automated Named Entity Recognition in Structured Synthetic Spoken Transcriptions

Phone call transcript labeling is prohibitively expensive (approximately 2 USD per minute) due to privacy regulations, consent requirements, and manual annotation costs requiring 3 hours of expert time per hour of audio. Existing extraction methods fail on conversational speech containing disfluencies, interruptions, and speaker overlap. We introduce LingVarBench, a synthetic data generation pipeline that addresses these constraints through automated validation. First, we prompt an LLM to generate realistic structured field values across multiple use cases. Second, we recursively prompt the model to transform these values into thousands of natural conversational utterances containing typical phone call characteristics. Third, we validate each synthetic utterance by testing whether a separate LLM-based extractor can recover the original structured information. We employ DSPy's SIMBA optimizer to automatically synthesize extraction prompts from validated synthetic transcripts, eliminating manual prompt engineering. Our optimized prompts achieve up to 95 percent accuracy for numeric fields (vs. 88-89 percent zero-shot), 90 percent for names (vs. 47-79 percent), and over 80 percent for dates (vs. 72-77 percent) on real customer transcripts, demonstrating substantial gains over zero-shot prompting. The synthetic-to-real transfer demonstrates that conversational patterns learned from generated data generalize effectively to authentic phone calls containing background noise and domain-specific terminology. LingVarBench provides the first systematic benchmark for structured extraction from synthetic conversational data, demonstrating that automated prompt optimization overcomes cost and privacy barriers preventing large-scale phone call analysis in commercial settings.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 13

SynSpill: Improved Industrial Spill Detection With Synthetic Data

Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have transformed general-purpose visual recognition through strong zero-shot capabilities. However, their performance degrades significantly in niche, safety-critical domains such as industrial spill detection, where hazardous events are rare, sensitive, and difficult to annotate. This scarcity -- driven by privacy concerns, data sensitivity, and the infrequency of real incidents -- renders conventional fine-tuning of detectors infeasible for most industrial settings. We address this challenge by introducing a scalable framework centered on a high-quality synthetic data generation pipeline. We demonstrate that this synthetic corpus enables effective Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of VLMs and substantially boosts the performance of state-of-the-art object detectors such as YOLO and DETR. Notably, in the absence of synthetic data (SynSpill dataset), VLMs still generalize better to unseen spill scenarios than these detectors. When SynSpill is used, both VLMs and detectors achieve marked improvements, with their performance becoming comparable. Our results underscore that high-fidelity synthetic data is a powerful means to bridge the domain gap in safety-critical applications. The combination of synthetic generation and lightweight adaptation offers a cost-effective, scalable pathway for deploying vision systems in industrial environments where real data is scarce/impractical to obtain. Project Page: https://synspill.vercel.app

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 13

PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data

Personalization is critical in AI assistants, particularly in the context of private AI models that work with individual users. A key scenario in this domain involves enabling AI models to access and interpret a user's private data (e.g., conversation history, user-AI interactions, app usage) to understand personal details such as biographical information, preferences, and social connections. However, due to the sensitive nature of such data, there are no publicly available datasets that allow us to assess an AI model's ability to understand users through direct access to personal information. To address this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates diverse, realistic user profiles and private documents simulating human activities. Leveraging this synthetic data, we present PersonaBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI models' performance in understanding personal information derived from simulated private user data. We evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using questions directly related to a user's personal information, supported by the relevant private documents provided to the models. Our results reveal that current retrieval-augmented AI models struggle to answer private questions by extracting personal information from user documents, highlighting the need for improved methodologies to enhance personalization capabilities in AI.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 27

GECTurk: Grammatical Error Correction and Detection Dataset for Turkish

Grammatical Error Detection and Correction (GEC) tools have proven useful for native speakers and second language learners. Developing such tools requires a large amount of parallel, annotated data, which is unavailable for most languages. Synthetic data generation is a common practice to overcome the scarcity of such data. However, it is not straightforward for morphologically rich languages like Turkish due to complex writing rules that require phonological, morphological, and syntactic information. In this work, we present a flexible and extensible synthetic data generation pipeline for Turkish covering more than 20 expert-curated grammar and spelling rules (a.k.a., writing rules) implemented through complex transformation functions. Using this pipeline, we derive 130,000 high-quality parallel sentences from professionally edited articles. Additionally, we create a more realistic test set by manually annotating a set of movie reviews. We implement three baselines formulating the task as i) neural machine translation, ii) sequence tagging, and iii) prefix tuning with a pretrained decoder-only model, achieving strong results. Furthermore, we perform exhaustive experiments on out-of-domain datasets to gain insights on the transferability and robustness of the proposed approaches. Our results suggest that our corpus, GECTurk, is high-quality and allows knowledge transfer for the out-of-domain setting. To encourage further research on Turkish GEC, we release our datasets, baseline models, and the synthetic data generation pipeline at https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/gecturk.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023 1

RoboMonkey: Scaling Test-Time Sampling and Verification for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visuomotor control, yet ensuring their robustness in unstructured real-world environments remains a persistent challenge. In this paper, we investigate test-time scaling through the lens of sampling and verification as means to enhance the robustness and generalization of VLAs. We first demonstrate that the relationship between action error and the number of generated samples follows an exponentiated power law across a range of VLAs, indicating the existence of inference-time scaling laws. Building on these insights, we introduce RoboMonkey, a test-time scaling framework for VLAs. At deployment, RoboMonkey samples a small set of actions from a VLA, applies Gaussian perturbation and majority voting to construct an action proposal distribution, and then uses a Vision Language Model (VLM)-based verifier to select the optimal action. We propose a synthetic data generation pipeline for training such VLM-based action verifiers, and demonstrate that scaling the synthetic dataset consistently improves verification and downstream accuracy. Through extensive simulated and hardware experiments, we show that pairing existing VLAs with RoboMonkey yields significant performance gains, achieving a 25% absolute improvement on out-of-distribution tasks and 9% on in-distribution tasks. Additionally, when adapting to new robot setups, we show that fine-tuning both VLAs and action verifiers yields a 7% performance increase compared to fine-tuning VLAs alone.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 21

Generative Video Matting

Video matting has traditionally been limited by the lack of high-quality ground-truth data. Most existing video matting datasets provide only human-annotated imperfect alpha and foreground annotations, which must be composited to background images or videos during the training stage. Thus, the generalization capability of previous methods in real-world scenarios is typically poor. In this work, we propose to solve the problem from two perspectives. First, we emphasize the importance of large-scale pre-training by pursuing diverse synthetic and pseudo-labeled segmentation datasets. We also develop a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline that can render diverse human bodies and fine-grained hairs, yielding around 200 video clips with a 3-second duration for fine-tuning. Second, we introduce a novel video matting approach that can effectively leverage the rich priors from pre-trained video diffusion models. This architecture offers two key advantages. First, strong priors play a critical role in bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real-world scenes. Second, unlike most existing methods that process video matting frame-by-frame and use an independent decoder to aggregate temporal information, our model is inherently designed for video, ensuring strong temporal consistency. We provide a comprehensive quantitative evaluation across three benchmark datasets, demonstrating our approach's superior performance, and present comprehensive qualitative results in diverse real-world scenes, illustrating the strong generalization capability of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/GVM.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 11

Single-Step Latent Diffusion for Underwater Image Restoration

Underwater image restoration algorithms seek to restore the color, contrast, and appearance of a scene that is imaged underwater. They are a critical tool in applications ranging from marine ecology and aquaculture to underwater construction and archaeology. While existing pixel-domain diffusion-based image restoration approaches are effective at restoring simple scenes with limited depth variation, they are computationally intensive and often generate unrealistic artifacts when applied to scenes with complex geometry and significant depth variation. In this work we overcome these limitations by combining a novel network architecture (SLURPP) with an accurate synthetic data generation pipeline. SLURPP combines pretrained latent diffusion models -- which encode strong priors on the geometry and depth of scenes -- with an explicit scene decomposition -- which allows one to model and account for the effects of light attenuation and backscattering. To train SLURPP we design a physics-based underwater image synthesis pipeline that applies varied and realistic underwater degradation effects to existing terrestrial image datasets. This approach enables the generation of diverse training data with dense medium/degradation annotations. We evaluate our method extensively on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, SLURPP is over 200X faster than existing diffusion-based methods while offering ~ 3 dB improvement in PSNR on synthetic benchmarks. It also offers compelling qualitative improvements on real-world data. Project website https://tianfwang.github.io/slurpp/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 10

Why Registration Quality Matters: Enhancing sCT Synthesis with IMPACT-Based Registration

We participated in the SynthRAD2025 challenge (Tasks 1 and 2) with a unified pipeline for synthetic CT (sCT) generation from MRI and CBCT, implemented using the KonfAI framework. Our model is a 2.5D U-Net++ with a ResNet-34 encoder, trained jointly across anatomical regions and fine-tuned per region. The loss function combined pixel-wise L1 loss with IMPACT-Synth, a perceptual loss derived from SAM and TotalSegmentator to enhance structural fidelity. Training was performed using AdamW (initial learning rate = 0.001, halved every 25k steps) on patch-based, normalized, body-masked inputs (320x320 for MRI, 256x256 for CBCT), with random flipping as the only augmentation. No post-processing was applied. Final predictions leveraged test-time augmentation and five-fold ensembling. The best model was selected based on validation MAE. Two registration strategies were evaluated: (i) Elastix with mutual information, consistent with the challenge pipeline, and (ii) IMPACT, a feature-based similarity metric leveraging pretrained segmentation networks. On the local test sets, IMPACT-based registration achieved more accurate and anatomically consistent alignments than mutual-information-based registration, resulting in improved sCT synthesis with lower MAE and more realistic anatomical structures. On the public validation set, however, models trained with Elastix-aligned data achieved higher scores, reflecting a registration bias favoring alignment strategies consistent with the evaluation pipeline. This highlights how registration errors can propagate into supervised learning, influencing both training and evaluation, and potentially inflating performance metrics at the expense of anatomical fidelity. By promoting anatomically consistent alignment, IMPACT helps mitigate this bias and supports the development of more robust and generalizable sCT synthesis models.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24

StressTest: Can YOUR Speech LM Handle the Stress?

Sentence stress refers to emphasis, placed on specific words within a spoken utterance to highlight or contrast an idea, or to introduce new information. It is often used to imply an underlying intention that is not explicitly stated. Recent advances in speech-aware language models (SLMs) have enabled direct processing of audio, allowing models to bypass transcription and access the full richness of the speech signal and perform audio reasoning tasks such as spoken question answering. Despite the crucial role of sentence stress in shaping meaning and speaker intent, it remains largely overlooked in evaluation and development of such models. In this work, we address this gap by introducing StressTest, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate a model's ability to distinguish between interpretations of spoken sentences based on the stress pattern. We assess the performance of several leading SLMs and find that, despite their overall capabilities, they perform poorly on such tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel synthetic data generation pipeline, and create Stress17k, a training set that simulates change of meaning implied by stress variation. Then, we empirically show that optimizing models with this synthetic dataset aligns well with real-world recordings and enables effective finetuning of SLMs. Results suggest, that our finetuned model, StresSLM, significantly outperforms existing models on both sentence stress reasoning and detection tasks. Code, models, data, and audio samples - pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/stresstest.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28 2

Generative Zoo

The model-based estimation of 3D animal pose and shape from images enables computational modeling of animal behavior. Training models for this purpose requires large amounts of labeled image data with precise pose and shape annotations. However, capturing such data requires the use of multi-view or marker-based motion-capture systems, which are impractical to adapt to wild animals in situ and impossible to scale across a comprehensive set of animal species. Some have attempted to address the challenge of procuring training data by pseudo-labeling individual real-world images through manual 2D annotation, followed by 3D-parameter optimization to those labels. While this approach may produce silhouette-aligned samples, the obtained pose and shape parameters are often implausible due to the ill-posed nature of the monocular fitting problem. Sidestepping real-world ambiguity, others have designed complex synthetic-data-generation pipelines leveraging video-game engines and collections of artist-designed 3D assets. Such engines yield perfect ground-truth annotations but are often lacking in visual realism and require considerable manual effort to adapt to new species or environments. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach to synthetic-data generation: rendering with a conditional image-generation model. We introduce a pipeline that samples a diverse set of poses and shapes for a variety of mammalian quadrupeds and generates realistic images with corresponding ground-truth pose and shape parameters. To demonstrate the scalability of our approach, we introduce GenZoo, a synthetic dataset containing one million images of distinct subjects. We train a 3D pose and shape regressor on GenZoo, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world animal pose and shape estimation benchmark, despite being trained solely on synthetic data. https://genzoo.is.tue.mpg.de

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024

MarkushGrapher: Joint Visual and Textual Recognition of Markush Structures

The automated analysis of chemical literature holds promise to accelerate discovery in fields such as material science and drug development. In particular, search capabilities for chemical structures and Markush structures (chemical structure templates) within patent documents are valuable, e.g., for prior-art search. Advancements have been made in the automatic extraction of chemical structures from text and images, yet the Markush structures remain largely unexplored due to their complex multi-modal nature. In this work, we present MarkushGrapher, a multi-modal approach for recognizing Markush structures in documents. Our method jointly encodes text, image, and layout information through a Vision-Text-Layout encoder and an Optical Chemical Structure Recognition vision encoder. These representations are merged and used to auto-regressively generate a sequential graph representation of the Markush structure along with a table defining its variable groups. To overcome the lack of real-world training data, we propose a synthetic data generation pipeline that produces a wide range of realistic Markush structures. Additionally, we present M2S, the first annotated benchmark of real-world Markush structures, to advance research on this challenging task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art chemistry-specific and general-purpose vision-language models in most evaluation settings. Code, models, and datasets will be available.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20

Improving Synthetic Image Detection Towards Generalization: An Image Transformation Perspective

With recent generative models facilitating photo-realistic image synthesis, the proliferation of synthetic images has also engendered certain negative impacts on social platforms, thereby raising an urgent imperative to develop effective detectors. Current synthetic image detection (SID) pipelines are primarily dedicated to crafting universal artifact features, accompanied by an oversight about SID training paradigm. In this paper, we re-examine the SID problem and identify two prevalent biases in current training paradigms, i.e., weakened artifact features and overfitted artifact features. Meanwhile, we discover that the imaging mechanism of synthetic images contributes to heightened local correlations among pixels, suggesting that detectors should be equipped with local awareness. In this light, we propose SAFE, a lightweight and effective detector with three simple image transformations. Firstly, for weakened artifact features, we substitute the down-sampling operator with the crop operator in image pre-processing to help circumvent artifact distortion. Secondly, for overfitted artifact features, we include ColorJitter and RandomRotation as additional data augmentations, to help alleviate irrelevant biases from color discrepancies and semantic differences in limited training samples. Thirdly, for local awareness, we propose a patch-based random masking strategy tailored for SID, forcing the detector to focus on local regions at training. Comparative experiments are conducted on an open-world dataset, comprising synthetic images generated by 26 distinct generative models. Our pipeline achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, with remarkable improvements of 4.5% in accuracy and 2.9% in average precision against existing methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ouxiang-Li/SAFE.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

Deep Aramaic: Towards a Synthetic Data Paradigm Enabling Machine Learning in Epigraphy

Epigraphy increasingly turns to modern artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning (ML) for extracting insights from ancient inscriptions. However, scarce labeled data for training ML algorithms severely limits current techniques, especially for ancient scripts like Old Aramaic. Our research pioneers an innovative methodology for generating synthetic training data tailored to Old Aramaic letters. Our pipeline synthesizes photo-realistic Aramaic letter datasets, incorporating textural features, lighting, damage, and augmentations to mimic real-world inscription diversity. Despite minimal real examples, we engineer a dataset of 250,000 training and 25,000 validation images covering the 22 letter classes in the Aramaic alphabet. This comprehensive corpus provides a robust volume of data for training a residual neural network (ResNet) to classify highly degraded Aramaic letters. The ResNet model demonstrates high accuracy in classifying real images from the 8th century BCE Hadad statue inscription. Additional experiments validate performance on varying materials and styles, proving effective generalization. Our results validate the model's capabilities in handling diverse real-world scenarios, proving the viability of our synthetic data approach and avoiding the dependence on scarce training data that has constrained epigraphic analysis. Our innovative framework elevates interpretation accuracy on damaged inscriptions, thus enhancing knowledge extraction from these historical resources.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

PANORAMA: A synthetic PII-laced dataset for studying sensitive data memorization in LLMs

The memorization of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) by large language models (LLMs) poses growing privacy risks as models scale and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Existing efforts to study sensitive and PII data memorization and develop mitigation strategies are hampered by the absence of comprehensive, realistic, and ethically sourced datasets reflecting the diversity of sensitive information found on the web. We introduce PANORAMA - Profile-based Assemblage for Naturalistic Online Representation and Attribute Memorization Analysis, a large-scale synthetic corpus of 384,789 samples derived from 9,674 synthetic profiles designed to closely emulate the distribution, variety, and context of PII and sensitive data as it naturally occurs in online environments. Our data generation pipeline begins with the construction of internally consistent, multi-attribute human profiles using constrained selection to reflect real-world demographics such as education, health attributes, financial status, etc. Using a combination of zero-shot prompting and OpenAI o3-mini, we generate diverse content types - including wiki-style articles, social media posts, forum discussions, online reviews, comments, and marketplace listings - each embedding realistic, contextually appropriate PII and other sensitive information. We validate the utility of PANORAMA by fine-tuning the Mistral-7B model on 1x, 5x, 10x, and 25x data replication rates with a subset of data and measure PII memorization rates - revealing not only consistent increases with repetition but also variation across content types, highlighting PANORAMA's ability to model how memorization risks differ by context. Our dataset and code are publicly available, providing a much-needed resource for privacy risk assessment, model auditing, and the development of privacy-preserving LLMs.

  • 2 authors
·
May 18

Pre-training on Synthetic Driving Data for Trajectory Prediction

Accumulating substantial volumes of real-world driving data proves pivotal in the realm of trajectory forecasting for autonomous driving. Given the heavy reliance of current trajectory forecasting models on data-driven methodologies, we aim to tackle the challenge of learning general trajectory forecasting representations under limited data availability. We propose a pipeline-level solution to mitigate the issue of data scarcity in trajectory forecasting. The solution is composed of two parts: firstly, we adopt HD map augmentation and trajectory synthesis for generating driving data, and then we learn representations by pre-training on them. Specifically, we apply vector transformations to reshape the maps, and then employ a rule-based model to generate trajectories on both original and augmented scenes; thus enlarging the driving data without collecting additional real ones. To foster the learning of general representations within this augmented dataset, we comprehensively explore the different pre-training strategies, including extending the concept of a Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) for trajectory forecasting. Without bells and whistles, our proposed pipeline-level solution is general, simple, yet effective: we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our data expansion and pre-training strategies, which outperform the baseline prediction model by large margins, e.g. 5.04%, 3.84% and 8.30% in terms of MR_6, minADE_6 and minFDE_6. The pre-training dataset and the codes for pre-training and fine-tuning are released at https://github.com/yhli123/Pretraining_on_Synthetic_Driving_Data_for_Trajectory_Prediction.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Dataset

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually suffer from extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality data samples. Motivated by this, we explore the procedurally synthetic 3D data generation paradigm to equip individuals with the full capability of creating large-scale annotated photogrammetry point clouds. Specifically, we introduce a synthetic aerial photogrammetry point clouds generation pipeline that takes full advantage of open geospatial data sources and off-the-shelf commercial packages. Unlike generating synthetic data in virtual games, where the simulated data usually have limited gaming environments created by artists, the proposed pipeline simulates the reconstruction process of the real environment by following the same UAV flight pattern on different synthetic terrain shapes and building densities, which ensure similar quality, noise pattern, and diversity with real data. In addition, the precise semantic and instance annotations can be generated fully automatically, avoiding the expensive and time-consuming manual annotation. Based on the proposed pipeline, we present a richly-annotated synthetic 3D aerial photogrammetry point cloud dataset, termed STPLS3D, with more than 16 km^2 of landscapes and up to 18 fine-grained semantic categories. For verification purposes, we also provide a parallel dataset collected from four areas in the real environment. Extensive experiments conducted on our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and quality of the proposed synthetic dataset.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 16, 2022

APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplay

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on tau-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Synthetic Data Using Generative Models

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2024

From Fake to Real: Pretraining on Balanced Synthetic Images to Prevent Spurious Correlations in Image Recognition

Visual recognition models are prone to learning spurious correlations induced by a biased training set where certain conditions B (\eg, Indoors) are over-represented in certain classes Y (\eg, Big Dogs). Synthetic data from off-the-shelf large-scale generative models offers a promising direction to mitigate this issue by augmenting underrepresented subgroups in the real dataset. However, by using a mixed distribution of real and synthetic data, we introduce another source of bias due to distributional differences between synthetic and real data (\eg synthetic artifacts). As we will show, prior work's approach for using synthetic data to resolve the model's bias toward B do not correct the model's bias toward the pair (B, G), where G denotes whether the sample is real or synthetic. Thus, the model could simply learn signals based on the pair (B, G) (\eg, Synthetic Indoors) to make predictions about Y (\eg, Big Dogs). To address this issue, we propose a simple, easy-to-implement, two-step training pipeline that we call From Fake to Real (FFR). The first step of FFR pre-trains a model on balanced synthetic data to learn robust representations across subgroups. In the second step, FFR fine-tunes the model on real data using ERM or common loss-based bias mitigation methods. By training on real and synthetic data separately, FFR does not expose the model to the statistical differences between real and synthetic data and thus avoids the issue of bias toward the pair (B, G). Our experiments show that FFR improves worst group accuracy over the state-of-the-art by up to 20\% over three datasets. Code available: https://github.com/mqraitem/From-Fake-to-Real

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 8, 2023

A Synthetic Dataset for Personal Attribute Inference

Recently, powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) have become easily accessible to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. However, their strong capabilities and vast world knowledge do not come without associated privacy risks. In this work, we focus on the emerging privacy threat LLMs pose - the ability to accurately infer personal information from online texts. Despite the growing importance of LLM-based author profiling, research in this area has been hampered by a lack of suitable public datasets, largely due to ethical and privacy concerns associated with real personal data. In this work, we take two steps to address this problem: (i) we construct a simulation framework for the popular social media platform Reddit using LLM agents seeded with synthetic personal profiles; (ii) using this framework, we generate SynthPAI, a diverse synthetic dataset of over 7800 comments manually labeled for personal attributes. We validate our dataset with a human study showing that humans barely outperform random guessing on the task of distinguishing our synthetic comments from real ones. Further, we verify that our dataset enables meaningful personal attribute inference research by showing across 18 state-of-the-art LLMs that our synthetic comments allow us to draw the same conclusions as real-world data. Together, this indicates that our dataset and pipeline provide a strong and privacy-preserving basis for future research toward understanding and mitigating the inference-based privacy threats LLMs pose.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 11, 2024

EgoGen: An Egocentric Synthetic Data Generator

Understanding the world in first-person view is fundamental in Augmented Reality (AR). This immersive perspective brings dramatic visual changes and unique challenges compared to third-person views. Synthetic data has empowered third-person-view vision models, but its application to embodied egocentric perception tasks remains largely unexplored. A critical challenge lies in simulating natural human movements and behaviors that effectively steer the embodied cameras to capture a faithful egocentric representation of the 3D world. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoGen, a new synthetic data generator that can produce accurate and rich ground-truth training data for egocentric perception tasks. At the heart of EgoGen is a novel human motion synthesis model that directly leverages egocentric visual inputs of a virtual human to sense the 3D environment. Combined with collision-avoiding motion primitives and a two-stage reinforcement learning approach, our motion synthesis model offers a closed-loop solution where the embodied perception and movement of the virtual human are seamlessly coupled. Compared to previous works, our model eliminates the need for a pre-defined global path, and is directly applicable to dynamic environments. Combined with our easy-to-use and scalable data generation pipeline, we demonstrate EgoGen's efficacy in three tasks: mapping and localization for head-mounted cameras, egocentric camera tracking, and human mesh recovery from egocentric views. EgoGen will be fully open-sourced, offering a practical solution for creating realistic egocentric training data and aiming to serve as a useful tool for egocentric computer vision research. Refer to our project page: https://ego-gen.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

SOS: Synthetic Object Segments Improve Detection, Segmentation, and Grounding

Visual grouping -- operationalized via instance segmentation, visual grounding, and object detection -- underpins applications from robotic perception to photo editing. Large annotated datasets are costly, biased in coverage, and hard to scale. Synthetic data are promising but often lack flexibility, accuracy, and compositional diversity. We present SOS, a simple and scalable data synthesis pipeline based on an object-centric composition strategy. It pastes high-quality synthetic object segments into new images using structured layout priors and generative relighting, producing accurate and diverse masks, boxes, and referring expressions. Models trained on 100000 synthetic images from SOS outperform those trained on larger real-image datasets such as GRIT (20M) and V3Det (200K) on detection and grounding tasks, achieving +10.9 AP on LVIS detection and +8.4 N_{Acc} on gRefCOCO grounding. SOS enables controllable dataset construction and improves generalization in both low-data and closed-vocabulary settings. Augmenting LVIS and COCO with synthetic object segments yields strong performance across real-data scales and even larger gains under extremely limited real data (for example, +3.83 AP_{rare} on LVIS instance segmentation and +6.59 AP with a 1 percent COCO setup). This controllability also supports targeted data generation for challenging intra-class referring in visual grounding.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10

Improving Performance, Robustness, and Fairness of Radiographic AI Models with Finely-Controllable Synthetic Data

Achieving robust performance and fairness across diverse patient populations remains a challenge in developing clinically deployable deep learning models for diagnostic imaging. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising strategy to address limitations in dataset scale and diversity. We introduce RoentGen-v2, a text-to-image diffusion model for chest radiographs that enables fine-grained control over both radiographic findings and patient demographic attributes, including sex, age, and race/ethnicity. RoentGen-v2 is the first model to generate clinically plausible images with demographic conditioning, facilitating the creation of a large, demographically balanced synthetic dataset comprising over 565,000 images. We use this large synthetic dataset to evaluate optimal training pipelines for downstream disease classification models. In contrast to prior work that combines real and synthetic data naively, we propose an improved training strategy that leverages synthetic data for supervised pretraining, followed by fine-tuning on real data. Through extensive evaluation on over 137,000 chest radiographs from five institutions, we demonstrate that synthetic pretraining consistently improves model performance, generalization to out-of-distribution settings, and fairness across demographic subgroups. Across datasets, synthetic pretraining led to a 6.5% accuracy increase in the performance of downstream classification models, compared to a modest 2.7% increase when naively combining real and synthetic data. We observe this performance improvement simultaneously with the reduction of the underdiagnosis fairness gap by 19.3%. These results highlight the potential of synthetic imaging to advance equitable and generalizable medical deep learning under real-world data constraints. We open source our code, trained models, and synthetic dataset at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/RoentGen-v2 .

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 22

Automating Safety Enhancement for LLM-based Agents with Synthetic Risk Scenarios

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in real-world applications such as "digital assistants, autonomous customer service, and decision-support systems", where their ability to "interact in multi-turn, tool-augmented environments" makes them indispensable. However, ensuring the safety of these agents remains a significant challenge due to the diverse and complex risks arising from dynamic user interactions, external tool usage, and the potential for unintended harmful behaviors. To address this critical issue, we propose AutoSafe, the first framework that systematically enhances agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. Concretely, 1) we introduce an open and extensible threat model, OTS, which formalizes how unsafe behaviors emerge from the interplay of user instructions, interaction contexts, and agent actions. This enables precise modeling of safety risks across diverse scenarios. 2) we develop a fully automated data generation pipeline that simulates unsafe user behaviors, applies self-reflective reasoning to generate safe responses, and constructs a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality safety training dataset-eliminating the need for hazardous real-world data collection. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we design comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world safety benchmarks. Results demonstrate that AutoSafe boosts safety scores by 45% on average and achieves a 28.91% improvement on real-world tasks, validating the generalization ability of our learned safety strategies. These results highlight the practical advancement and scalability of AutoSafe in building safer LLM-based agents for real-world deployment. We have released the project page at https://auto-safe.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
·
May 23 1

FFHQ-Makeup: Paired Synthetic Makeup Dataset with Facial Consistency Across Multiple Styles

Paired bare-makeup facial images are essential for a wide range of beauty-related tasks, such as virtual try-on, facial privacy protection, and facial aesthetics analysis. However, collecting high-quality paired makeup datasets remains a significant challenge. Real-world data acquisition is constrained by the difficulty of collecting large-scale paired images, while existing synthetic approaches often suffer from limited realism or inconsistencies between bare and makeup images. Current synthetic methods typically fall into two categories: warping-based transformations, which often distort facial geometry and compromise the precision of makeup; and text-to-image generation, which tends to alter facial identity and expression, undermining consistency. In this work, we present FFHQ-Makeup, a high-quality synthetic makeup dataset that pairs each identity with multiple makeup styles while preserving facial consistency in both identity and expression. Built upon the diverse FFHQ dataset, our pipeline transfers real-world makeup styles from existing datasets onto 18K identities by introducing an improved makeup transfer method that disentangles identity and makeup. Each identity is paired with 5 different makeup styles, resulting in a total of 90K high-quality bare-makeup image pairs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses specifically on constructing a makeup dataset. We hope that FFHQ-Makeup fills the gap of lacking high-quality bare-makeup paired datasets and serves as a valuable resource for future research in beauty-related tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 5

Automatic Synthetic Data and Fine-grained Adaptive Feature Alignment for Composed Person Retrieval

Person retrieval has attracted rising attention. Existing methods are mainly divided into two retrieval modes, namely image-only and text-only. However, they are unable to make full use of the available information and are difficult to meet diverse application requirements. To address the above limitations, we propose a new Composed Person Retrieval (CPR) task, which combines visual and textual queries to identify individuals of interest from large-scale person image databases. Nevertheless, the foremost difficulty of the CPR task is the lack of available annotated datasets. Therefore, we first introduce a scalable automatic data synthesis pipeline, which decomposes complex multimodal data generation into the creation of textual quadruples followed by identity-consistent image synthesis using fine-tuned generative models. Meanwhile, a multimodal filtering method is designed to ensure the resulting SynCPR dataset retains 1.15 million high-quality and fully synthetic triplets. Additionally, to improve the representation of composed person queries, we propose a novel Fine-grained Adaptive Feature Alignment (FAFA) framework through fine-grained dynamic alignment and masked feature reasoning. Moreover, for objective evaluation, we manually annotate the Image-Text Composed Person Retrieval (ITCPR) test set. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the SynCPR dataset and the superiority of the proposed FAFA framework when compared with the state-of-the-art methods. All code and data will be provided at https://github.com/Delong-liu-bupt/Composed_Person_Retrieval.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 25, 2023

When Synthetic Traces Hide Real Content: Analysis of Stable Diffusion Image Laundering

In recent years, methods for producing highly realistic synthetic images have significantly advanced, allowing the creation of high-quality images from text prompts that describe the desired content. Even more impressively, Stable Diffusion (SD) models now provide users with the option of creating synthetic images in an image-to-image translation fashion, modifying images in the latent space of advanced autoencoders. This striking evolution, however, brings an alarming consequence: it is possible to pass an image through SD autoencoders to reproduce a synthetic copy of the image with high realism and almost no visual artifacts. This process, known as SD image laundering, can transform real images into lookalike synthetic ones and risks complicating forensic analysis for content authenticity verification. Our paper investigates the forensic implications of image laundering, revealing a serious potential to obscure traces of real content, including sensitive and harmful materials that could be mistakenly classified as synthetic, thereby undermining the protection of individuals depicted. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage detection pipeline that effectively differentiates between pristine, laundered, and fully synthetic images (those generated from text prompts), showing robustness across various conditions. Finally, we highlight another alarming property of image laundering, which appears to mask the unique artifacts exploited by forensic detectors to solve the camera model identification task, strongly undermining their performance. Our experimental code is available at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/synthetic-image-detection.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

A Multi Camera Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Pipeline for Object Detection in Cultural Sites through Adversarial Learning and Self-Training

Object detection algorithms allow to enable many interesting applications which can be implemented in different devices, such as smartphones and wearable devices. In the context of a cultural site, implementing these algorithms in a wearable device, such as a pair of smart glasses, allow to enable the use of augmented reality (AR) to show extra information about the artworks and enrich the visitors' experience during their tour. However, object detection algorithms require to be trained on many well annotated examples to achieve reasonable results. This brings a major limitation since the annotation process requires human supervision which makes it expensive in terms of time and costs. A possible solution to reduce these costs consist in exploiting tools to automatically generate synthetic labeled images from a 3D model of the site. However, models trained with synthetic data do not generalize on real images acquired in the target scenario in which they are supposed to be used. Furthermore, object detectors should be able to work with different wearable devices or different mobile devices, which makes generalization even harder. In this paper, we present a new dataset collected in a cultural site to study the problem of domain adaptation for object detection in the presence of multiple unlabeled target domains corresponding to different cameras and a labeled source domain obtained considering synthetic images for training purposes. We present a new domain adaptation method which outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches combining the benefits of aligning the domains at the feature and pixel level with a self-training process. We release the dataset at the following link https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/OBJ-MDA/ and the code of the proposed architecture at https://github.com/fpv-iplab/STMDA-RetinaNet.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2022

A Text-to-Speech Pipeline, Evaluation Methodology, and Initial Fine-Tuning Results for Child Speech Synthesis

Speech synthesis has come a long way as current text-to-speech (TTS) models can now generate natural human-sounding speech. However, most of the TTS research focuses on using adult speech data and there has been very limited work done on child speech synthesis. This study developed and validated a training pipeline for fine-tuning state-of-the-art (SOTA) neural TTS models using child speech datasets. This approach adopts a multi-speaker TTS retuning workflow to provide a transfer-learning pipeline. A publicly available child speech dataset was cleaned to provide a smaller subset of approximately 19 hours, which formed the basis of our fine-tuning experiments. Both subjective and objective evaluations were performed using a pretrained MOSNet for objective evaluation and a novel subjective framework for mean opinion score (MOS) evaluations. Subjective evaluations achieved the MOS of 3.95 for speech intelligibility, 3.89 for voice naturalness, and 3.96 for voice consistency. Objective evaluation using a pretrained MOSNet showed a strong correlation between real and synthetic child voices. Speaker similarity was also verified by calculating the cosine similarity between the embeddings of utterances. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is also used to provide a word error rate (WER) comparison between the real and synthetic child voices. The final trained TTS model was able to synthesize child-like speech from reference audio samples as short as 5 seconds.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 22, 2022

Don't Retrieve, Generate: Prompting LLMs for Synthetic Training Data in Dense Retrieval

Training effective dense retrieval models often relies on hard negative (HN) examples mined from the document corpus via methods like BM25 or cross-encoders (CE), processes that can be computationally demanding and require full corpus access. This paper introduces a different approach, an end-to-end pipeline where a Large Language Model (LLM) first generates a query from a passage, and then generates a hard negative example using only that query text. This corpus-free negative generation contrasts with standard mining techniques. We evaluated this LLM Query rightarrow LLM HN approach against traditional LLM Query rightarrow BM25 HN and LLM Query rightarrow CE HN pipelines using E5-Base and GTE-Base models on several BEIR benchmark datasets. Our results show the proposed all-LLM pipeline achieves performance identical to both the BM25 and the computationally intensive CE baselines across nDCG@10, Precision@10, and Recall@100 metrics. This demonstrates that our corpus-free negative generation method matches the effectiveness of complex, corpus-dependent mining techniques, offering a potentially simpler and more efficient pathway for training high-performance retrievers without sacrificing results. We make the dataset including the queries and the hard-negatives for all three methods publicly available https://huggingface.co/collections/chungimungi/arxiv-hard-negatives-68027bbc601ff6cc8eb1f449.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 20

Enhancing Domain-Specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Synthetic Data Generation and Evaluation using Reasoning Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face significant performance gaps when applied to technical domains requiring precise information extraction from complex documents. Current evaluation methodologies relying on document-level metrics inadequately capture token-resolution retrieval accuracy that is critical for domain-related documents. We propose a framework combining granular evaluation metrics with synthetic data generation to optimize domain-specific RAG performance. First, we introduce token-aware metrics Precision Omega and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) that quantify context preservation versus information density trade-offs inherent in technical texts. Second, we develop a reasoning model-driven pipeline using instruction-tuned LLMs (DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek-R1 distilled variants, and Phi-4) to generate context-anchored QA pairs with discontinuous reference spans across three specialized corpora: SEC 10-K filings (finance), biomedical abstracts (PubMed), and APT threat reports (cybersecurity). Our empirical analysis reveals critical insights: smaller chunks (less than 10 tokens) improve precision by 31-42% (IoU = 0.071 vs. baseline 0.053) at recall costs (-18%), while domain-specific embedding strategies yield 22% variance in optimal chunk sizing (5-20 tokens). The DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B model demonstrates superior concept alignment (+14% mean IoU over alternatives), though no configuration universally dominates. Financial texts favor larger chunks for risk factor coverage (Recall = 0.81 at size = 20), whereas cybersecurity content benefits from atomic segmentation, Precision Omega = 0.28 at size = 5. Our code is available on https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Synthetic-Data-Generation-and-Evaluation-using-Reasoning-Model

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 21

AudioSetCaps: An Enriched Audio-Caption Dataset using Automated Generation Pipeline with Large Audio and Language Models

With the emergence of audio-language models, constructing large-scale paired audio-language datasets has become essential yet challenging for model development, primarily due to the time-intensive and labour-heavy demands involved. While large language models (LLMs) have improved the efficiency of synthetic audio caption generation, current approaches struggle to effectively extract and incorporate detailed audio information. In this paper, we propose an automated pipeline that integrates audio-language models for fine-grained content extraction, LLMs for synthetic caption generation, and a contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) model-based refinement process to improve the quality of captions. Specifically, we employ prompt chaining techniques in the content extraction stage to obtain accurate and fine-grained audio information, while we use the refinement process to mitigate potential hallucinations in the generated captions. Leveraging the AudioSet dataset and the proposed approach, we create AudioSetCaps, a dataset comprising 1.9 million audio-caption pairs, the largest audio-caption dataset at the time of writing. The models trained with AudioSetCaps achieve state-of-the-art performance on audio-text retrieval with R@1 scores of 46.3% for text-to-audio and 59.7% for audio-to-text retrieval and automated audio captioning with the CIDEr score of 84.8. As our approach has shown promising results with AudioSetCaps, we create another dataset containing 4.1 million synthetic audio-language pairs based on the Youtube-8M and VGGSound datasets. To facilitate research in audio-language learning, we have made our pipeline, datasets with 6 million audio-language pairs, and pre-trained models publicly available at https://github.com/JishengBai/AudioSetCaps.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 28, 2024

Tiny QA Benchmark++: Ultra-Lightweight, Synthetic Multilingual Dataset Generation & Smoke-Tests for Continuous LLM Evaluation

Tiny QA Benchmark++ (TQB++) presents an ultra-lightweight, multilingual smoke-test suite designed to give large-language-model (LLM) pipelines a unit-test style safety net dataset that runs in seconds with minimal cost. Born out of the tight feedback-loop demands building the Comet Opik prompt-optimization SDK, where waiting on heavyweight benchmarks breaks developer flow. TQB++ couples a 52-item English gold set (less than 20 kB) with a tiny synthetic-data generator pypi package built on provider-agnostic LiteLLM. The generator lets practitioners mint their own tiny packs in any language, domain, or difficulty, while ten ready-made packs already cover Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Every dataset ships with Croissant metadata and plug-and-play files for OpenAI-Evals, LangChain, and standard CI tools, so teams can drop deterministic micro-benchmarks directly into pull-request gates, prompt-engineering loops, and production dashboards without touching GPU budgets. A complete TQB++ run adds only a few seconds to pipeline latency yet reliably flags prompt-template errors, tokenizer drift, and fine-tuning side-effects long before full-scale suites like MMLU or BIG-Bench would finish configuring. The entire framework is released to accelerate continuous, resource-efficient quality assurance across the generative-AI ecosystem.

  • 1 authors
·
May 17 3

SoK: Can Synthetic Images Replace Real Data? A Survey of Utility and Privacy of Synthetic Image Generation

Advances in generative models have transformed the field of synthetic image generation for privacy-preserving data synthesis (PPDS). However, the field lacks a comprehensive survey and comparison of synthetic image generation methods across diverse settings. In particular, when we generate synthetic images for the purpose of training a classifier, there is a pipeline of generation-sampling-classification which takes private training as input and outputs the final classifier of interest. In this survey, we systematically categorize existing image synthesis methods, privacy attacks, and mitigations along this generation-sampling-classification pipeline. To empirically compare diverse synthesis approaches, we provide a benchmark with representative generative methods and use model-agnostic membership inference attacks (MIAs) as a measure of privacy risk. Through this study, we seek to answer critical questions in PPDS: Can synthetic data effectively replace real data? Which release strategy balances utility and privacy? Do mitigations improve the utility-privacy tradeoff? Which generative models perform best across different scenarios? With a systematic evaluation of diverse methods, our study provides actionable insights into the utility-privacy tradeoffs of synthetic data generation methods and guides the decision on optimal data releasing strategies for real-world applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 24

SYNFAC-EDIT: Synthetic Imitation Edit Feedback for Factual Alignment in Clinical Summarization

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT & Llama have demonstrated significant achievements in summarization tasks but struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. To counter the high costs and limited availability of expert-annotated data for factual alignment, this study introduces an innovative pipeline that utilizes >100B parameter GPT variants like GPT-3.5 & GPT-4 to act as synthetic experts to generate high-quality synthetics feedback aimed at enhancing factual consistency in clinical note summarization. Our research primarily focuses on edit feedback generated by these synthetic feedback experts without additional human annotations, mirroring and optimizing the practical scenario in which medical professionals refine AI system outputs. Although such 100B+ parameter GPT variants have proven to demonstrate expertise in various clinical NLP tasks, such as the Medical Licensing Examination, there is scant research on their capacity to act as synthetic feedback experts and deliver expert-level edit feedback for improving the generation quality of weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs like GPT-2 (1.5B) & Llama 2 (7B) in clinical domain. So in this work, we leverage 100B+ GPT variants to act as synthetic feedback experts offering expert-level edit feedback, that is used to reduce hallucinations and align weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs with medical facts using two distinct alignment algorithms (DPO & SALT), endeavoring to narrow the divide between AI-generated content and factual accuracy. This highlights the substantial potential of LLM-based synthetic edits in enhancing the alignment of clinical factuality.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 21, 2024

LEGION: Learning to Ground and Explain for Synthetic Image Detection

The rapid advancements in generative technology have emerged as a double-edged sword. While offering powerful tools that enhance convenience, they also pose significant social concerns. As defenders, current synthetic image detection methods often lack artifact-level textual interpretability and are overly focused on image manipulation detection, and current datasets usually suffer from outdated generators and a lack of fine-grained annotations. In this paper, we introduce SynthScars, a high-quality and diverse dataset consisting of 12,236 fully synthetic images with human-expert annotations. It features 4 distinct image content types, 3 categories of artifacts, and fine-grained annotations covering pixel-level segmentation, detailed textual explanations, and artifact category labels. Furthermore, we propose LEGION (LEarning to Ground and explain for Synthetic Image detectiON), a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based image forgery analysis framework that integrates artifact detection, segmentation, and explanation. Building upon this capability, we further explore LEGION as a controller, integrating it into image refinement pipelines to guide the generation of higher-quality and more realistic images. Extensive experiments show that LEGION outperforms existing methods across multiple benchmarks, particularly surpassing the second-best traditional expert on SynthScars by 3.31% in mIoU and 7.75% in F1 score. Moreover, the refined images generated under its guidance exhibit stronger alignment with human preferences. The code, model, and dataset will be released.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 19 2

MindGYM: Enhancing Vision-Language Models via Synthetic Self-Challenging Questions

Large vision-language models (VLMs) face challenges in achieving robust, transferable reasoning abilities due to reliance on labor-intensive manual instruction datasets or computationally expensive self-supervised methods. To address these issues, we introduce MindGYM, a framework that enhances VLMs through synthetic self-challenging questions, consisting of three stages: (1) Seed Single-Hop Question Synthesis, generating cognitive questions across textual (e.g., logical deduction) and multimodal contexts (e.g., diagram-based queries) spanning eight semantic areas like ethical analysis; (2) Challenging Multi-Hop Question Synthesis, combining seed questions via diverse principles like bridging, visual-textual alignment, to create multi-step problems demanding deeper reasoning; and (3) Thinking-Induced Curriculum Fine-Tuning, a structured pipeline that progressively trains the model from scaffolded reasoning to standalone inference. By leveraging the model's self-synthesis capability, MindGYM achieves high data efficiency (e.g., +16% gains on MathVision-Mini with only 400 samples), computational efficiency (reducing both training and inference costs), and robust generalization across tasks. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks demonstrate superior performance over strong baselines, with notable improvements (+15.77% win rates) in reasoning depth and breadth validated via GPT-based scoring. MindGYM underscores the viability of self-challenging for refining VLM capabilities while minimizing human intervention and resource demands. Code and data are released to advance multimodal reasoning research.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12

The Fellowship of the LLMs: Multi-Agent Workflows for Synthetic Preference Optimization Dataset Generation

This paper presents synthetic Preference Optimization (PO) datasets generated using multi-agent workflows and evaluates the effectiveness and potential of these workflows in the dataset generation process. PO dataset generation requires two modules: (1) response evaluation, and (2) response generation. In the response evaluation module, the responses from Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated and ranked - a task typically carried out by human annotators that we automate using LLMs. We assess the response evaluation module in a 2 step process. In step 1, we assess LLMs as evaluators using three distinct prompting strategies. In step 2, we apply the winning prompting strategy to compare the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge, LLMs-as-a-Jury, and LLM Debate. In each step, we use inter-rater agreement using Cohen's Kappa between human annotators and LLMs. For the response generation module, we compare different configurations for the LLM Feedback Loop using the identified LLM evaluator configuration. We use the win rate (the fraction of times a generation framework is selected as the best by an LLM evaluator) to determine the best multi-agent configuration for generation. After identifying the best configurations for both modules, we use models from the GPT, Gemma, and Llama families to generate our PO datasets using the above pipeline. We generate two types of PO datasets, one to improve the generation capabilities of individual LLM and the other to improve the multi-agent workflow. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4o-as-a-Judge is more consistent across datasets when the candidate responses do not include responses from the GPT family. Additionally, we find that the LLM Feedback Loop, with Llama as the generator and Gemma as the reviewer, achieves a notable 71.8% and 73.8% win rate over single-agent Llama and Gemma, respectively.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024

AniMer+: Unified Pose and Shape Estimation Across Mammalia and Aves via Family-Aware Transformer

In the era of foundation models, achieving a unified understanding of different dynamic objects through a single network has the potential to empower stronger spatial intelligence. Moreover, accurate estimation of animal pose and shape across diverse species is essential for quantitative analysis in biological research. However, this topic remains underexplored due to the limited network capacity of previous methods and the scarcity of comprehensive multi-species datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce AniMer+, an extended version of our scalable AniMer framework. In this paper, we focus on a unified approach for reconstructing mammals (mammalia) and birds (aves). A key innovation of AniMer+ is its high-capacity, family-aware Vision Transformer (ViT) incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Its architecture partitions network layers into taxa-specific components (for mammalia and aves) and taxa-shared components, enabling efficient learning of both distinct and common anatomical features within a single model. To overcome the critical shortage of 3D training data, especially for birds, we introduce a diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. This pipeline produces two large-scale synthetic datasets: CtrlAni3D for quadrupeds and CtrlAVES3D for birds. To note, CtrlAVES3D is the first large-scale, 3D-annotated dataset for birds, which is crucial for resolving single-view depth ambiguities. Trained on an aggregated collection of 41.3k mammalian and 12.4k avian images (combining real and synthetic data), our method demonstrates superior performance over existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks, including the challenging out-of-domain Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both our novel network architecture and the generated synthetic datasets in enhancing real-world application performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 31

Datarus-R1: An Adaptive Multi-Step Reasoning LLM for Automated Data Analysis

We present Datarus-R1-14B, a 14 B-parameter open-weights language model fine-tuned from Qwen 2.5-14B-Instruct to act as a virtual data analyst and graduate-level problem solver. Datarus is trained not on isolated question-answer pairs but on full analytical trajectories including reasoning steps, code execution, error traces, self-corrections, and final conclusions, all captured in a ReAct-style notebook format spanning finance, medicine, numerical analysis, and other quantitative domains. Our training pipeline combines (i) a trajectory-centric synthetic data generator that yielded 144 000 tagged notebook episodes, (ii) a dual-reward framework blending a lightweight tag-based structural signal with a Hierarchical Reward Model (HRM) that scores both single-step soundness and end-to-end coherence, and (iii) a memory-optimized implementation of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) featuring KV-cache reuse, sequential generation, and reference-model sharding. A cosine curriculum smoothly shifts emphasis from structural fidelity to semantic depth, reducing the format collapse and verbosity that often plague RL-aligned LLMs. A central design choice in Datarus is it dual reasoning interface. In agentic mode the model produces ReAct-tagged steps that invoke Python tools to execute real code; in reflection mode it outputs compact Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces delimited by <think> and <answer> tags. On demanding postgraduate-level problems, Datarus exhibits an "AHA-moment" pattern: it sketches hypotheses, revises them once or twice, and converges avoiding the circular, token-inflating loops common to contemporary systems. Across standard public benchmarks Datarus surpasses similar size models and even reaches the level of larger reasoning models such as QwQ-32B achieving up to 30% higher accuracy on AIME 2024/2025 and LiveCodeBench while emitting 18-49% fewer tokens per solution.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 18

VCR: Visual Caption Restoration

We introduce Visual Caption Restoration (VCR), a novel vision-language task that challenges models to accurately restore partially obscured texts using pixel-level hints within images. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images is intrinsically different from common visual elements and natural language due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While numerous works have integrated text embedded in images into visual question-answering tasks, approaches to these tasks generally rely on optical character recognition or masked language modeling, thus reducing the task to mainly text-based processing. However, text-based processing becomes ineffective in VCR as accurate text restoration depends on the combined information from provided images, context, and subtle cues from the tiny exposed areas of masked texts. We develop a pipeline to generate synthetic images for the VCR task using image-caption pairs, with adjustable caption visibility to control the task difficulty. With this pipeline, we construct a dataset for VCR called VCR-Wiki using images with captions from Wikipedia, comprising 2.11M English and 346K Chinese entities in both easy and hard split variants. Our results reveal that current vision language models significantly lag behind human performance in the VCR task, and merely fine-tuning the models on our dataset does not lead to notable improvements. We release VCR-Wiki and the data construction code to facilitate future research.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024 1

RAVEN: RAnking and Validation of ExoplaNets

We present RAVEN, a newly developed vetting and validation pipeline for TESS exoplanet candidates. The pipeline employs a Bayesian framework to derive the posterior probability of a candidate being a planet against a set of False Positive (FP) scenarios, through the use of a Gradient Boosted Decision Tree and a Gaussian Process classifier, trained on comprehensive synthetic training sets of simulated planets and 8 astrophysical FP scenarios injected into TESS lightcurves. These training sets allow large scale candidate vetting and performance verification against individual FP scenarios. A Non-Simulated FP training set consisting of real TESS candidates caused primarily by stellar variability and systematic noise is also included. The machine learning derived probabilities are combined with scenario specific prior probabilities, including the candidates' positional probabilities, to compute the final posterior probabilities. Candidates with a planetary posterior probability greater than 99% against each FP scenario and whose implied planetary radius is less than 8R_{oplus} are considered to be statistically validated by the pipeline. In this first version, the pipeline has been developed for candidates with a lightcurve released from the TESS Science Processing Operations Centre, an orbital period between 0.5 and 16 days and a transit depth greater than 300ppm. The pipeline obtained area-under-curve (AUC) scores > 97% on all FP scenarios and > 99% on all but one. Testing on an independent external sample of 1361 pre-classified TOIs, the pipeline achieved an overall accuracy of 91%, demonstrating its effectiveness for automated ranking of TESS candidates. For a probability threshold of 0.9 the pipeline reached a precision of 97% with a recall score of 66% on these TOIs. The RAVEN pipeline is publicly released as a cloud-hosted app, making it easily accessible to the community.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 22

CultureGuard: Towards Culturally-Aware Dataset and Guard Model for Multilingual Safety Applications

The increasing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in agentic applications highlights the need for robust safety guard models. While content safety in English is well-studied, non-English languages lack similar advancements due to the high cost of collecting culturally aligned labeled datasets. We present CultureGuard, a novel solution for curating culturally aligned, high-quality safety datasets across multiple languages. Our approach introduces a four-stage synthetic data generation and filtering pipeline: cultural data segregation, cultural data adaptation, machine translation, and quality filtering. This pipeline enables the conversion and expansion of the Nemotron-Content-Safety-Dataset-V2 English safety dataset into eight distinct languages: Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese. The resulting dataset, Nemotron-Content-Safety-Dataset-Multilingual-v1, comprises 386,661 samples in 9 languages and facilitates the training of Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Safety-Guard-Multilingual-8B-v1 via LoRA-based fine-tuning. The final model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several multilingual content safety benchmarks. We also benchmark the latest open LLMs on multilingual safety and observe that these LLMs are more prone to give unsafe responses when prompted in non-English languages. This work represents a significant step toward closing the safety gap in multilingual LLMs by enabling the development of culturally aware safety guard models.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 3

The Change You Want To Detect: Semantic Change Detection In Earth Observation With Hybrid Data Generation

Bi-temporal change detection at scale based on Very High Resolution (VHR) images is crucial for Earth monitoring. This remains poorly addressed so far: methods either require large volumes of annotated data (semantic case), or are limited to restricted datasets (binary set-ups). Most approaches do not exhibit the versatility required for temporal and spatial adaptation: simplicity in architecture design and pretraining on realistic and comprehensive datasets. Synthetic datasets are the key solution but still fail to handle complex and diverse scenes. In this paper, we present HySCDG a generative pipeline for creating a large hybrid semantic change detection dataset that contains both real VHR images and inpainted ones, along with land cover semantic map at both dates and the change map. Being semantically and spatially guided, HySCDG generates realistic images, leading to a comprehensive and hybrid transfer-proof dataset FSC-180k. We evaluate FSC-180k on five change detection cases (binary and semantic), from zero-shot to mixed and sequential training, and also under low data regime training. Experiments demonstrate that pretraining on our hybrid dataset leads to a significant performance boost, outperforming SyntheWorld, a fully synthetic dataset, in every configuration. All codes, models, and data are available here: https://yb23.github.io/projects/cywd/

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19

HairCUP: Hair Compositional Universal Prior for 3D Gaussian Avatars

We present a universal prior model for 3D head avatars with explicit hair compositionality. Existing approaches to build generalizable priors for 3D head avatars often adopt a holistic modeling approach, treating the face and hair as an inseparable entity. This overlooks the inherent compositionality of the human head, making it difficult for the model to naturally disentangle face and hair representations, especially when the dataset is limited. Furthermore, such holistic models struggle to support applications like 3D face and hairstyle swapping in a flexible and controllable manner. To address these challenges, we introduce a prior model that explicitly accounts for the compositionality of face and hair, learning their latent spaces separately. A key enabler of this approach is our synthetic hairless data creation pipeline, which removes hair from studio-captured datasets using estimated hairless geometry and texture derived from a diffusion prior. By leveraging a paired dataset of hair and hairless captures, we train disentangled prior models for face and hair, incorporating compositionality as an inductive bias to facilitate effective separation. Our model's inherent compositionality enables seamless transfer of face and hair components between avatars while preserving identity. Additionally, we demonstrate that our model can be fine-tuned in a few-shot manner using monocular captures to create high-fidelity, hair-compositional 3D head avatars for unseen subjects. These capabilities highlight the practical applicability of our approach in real-world scenarios, paving the way for flexible and expressive 3D avatar generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 25

EasyPortrait -- Face Parsing and Portrait Segmentation Dataset

Recently, due to COVID-19 and the growing demand for remote work, video conferencing apps have become especially widespread. The most valuable features of video chats are real-time background removal and face beautification. While solving these tasks, computer vision researchers face the problem of having relevant data for the training stage. There is no large dataset with high-quality labeled and diverse images of people in front of a laptop or smartphone camera to train a lightweight model without additional approaches. To boost the progress in this area, we provide a new image dataset, EasyPortrait, for portrait segmentation and face parsing tasks. It contains 20,000 primarily indoor photos of 8,377 unique users, and fine-grained segmentation masks separated into 9 classes. Images are collected and labeled from crowdsourcing platforms. Unlike most face parsing datasets, in EasyPortrait, the beard is not considered part of the skin mask, and the inside area of the mouth is separated from the teeth. These features allow using EasyPortrait for skin enhancement and teeth whitening tasks. This paper describes the pipeline for creating a large-scale and clean image segmentation dataset using crowdsourcing platforms without additional synthetic data. Moreover, we trained several models on EasyPortrait and showed experimental results. Proposed dataset and trained models are publicly available.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 26, 2023

DCSEG: Decoupled 3D Open-Set Segmentation using Gaussian Splatting

Open-set 3D segmentation represents a major point of interest for multiple downstream robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. We present a decoupled 3D segmentation pipeline to ensure modularity and adaptability to novel 3D representations as well as semantic segmentation foundation models. We first reconstruct a scene with 3D Gaussians and learn class-agnostic features through contrastive supervision from a 2D instance proposal network. These 3D features are then clustered to form coarse object- or part-level masks. Finally, we match each 3D cluster to class-aware masks predicted by a 2D open-vocabulary segmentation model, assigning semantic labels without retraining the 3D representation. Our decoupled design (1) provides a plug-and-play interface for swapping different 2D or 3D modules, (2) ensures multi-object instance segmentation at no extra cost, and (3) leverages rich 3D geometry for robust scene understanding. We evaluate on synthetic and real-world indoor datasets, demonstrating improved performance over comparable NeRF-based pipelines on mIoU and mAcc, particularly for challenging or long-tail classes. We also show how varying the 2D backbone affects the final segmentation, highlighting the modularity of our framework. These results confirm that decoupling 3D mask proposal and semantic classification can deliver flexible, efficient, and open-vocabulary 3D segmentation.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 14, 2024

TextSSR: Diffusion-based Data Synthesis for Scene Text Recognition

Scene text recognition (STR) suffers from challenges of either less realistic synthetic training data or the difficulty of collecting sufficient high-quality real-world data, limiting the effectiveness of trained models. Meanwhile, despite producing holistically appealing text images, diffusion-based visual text generation methods struggle to synthesize accurate and realistic instance-level text at scale. To tackle this, we introduce TextSSR: a novel pipeline for Synthesizing Scene Text Recognition training data. TextSSR targets three key synthesizing characteristics: accuracy, realism, and scalability. It achieves accuracy through a proposed region-centric text generation with position-glyph enhancement, ensuring proper character placement. It maintains realism by guiding style and appearance generation using contextual hints from surrounding text or background. This character-aware diffusion architecture enjoys precise character-level control and semantic coherence preservation, without relying on natural language prompts. Therefore, TextSSR supports large-scale generation through combinatorial text permutations. Based on these, we present TextSSR-F, a dataset of 3.55 million quality-screened text instances. Extensive experiments show that STR models trained on TextSSR-F outperform those trained on existing synthetic datasets by clear margins on common benchmarks, and further improvements are observed when mixed with real-world training data. Code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/TextSSR.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024

Constrained composite Bayesian optimization for rational synthesis of polymeric particles

Polymeric nano- and micro-scale particles have critical roles in tackling critical healthcare and energy challenges with their miniature characteristics. However, tailoring their synthesis process to meet specific design targets has traditionally depended on domain expertise and costly trial-and-errors. Recently, modeling strategies, particularly Bayesian optimization (BO), have been proposed to aid materials discovery for maximized/minimized properties. Coming from practical demands, this study for the first time integrates constrained and composite Bayesian optimization (CCBO) to perform efficient target value optimization under black-box feasibility constraints and limited data for laboratory experimentation. Using a synthetic problem that simulates electrospraying, a model nanomanufacturing process, CCBO strategically avoided infeasible conditions and efficiently optimized particle production towards predefined size targets, surpassing standard BO pipelines and providing decisions comparable to human experts. Further laboratory experiments validated CCBO capability to guide the rational synthesis of poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) particles with diameters of 300 nm and 3.0 mum via electrospraying. With minimal initial data and unknown experiment constraints, CCBO reached the design targets within 4 iterations. Overall, the CCBO approach presents a versatile and holistic optimization paradigm for next-generation target-driven particle synthesis empowered by artificial intelligence (AI).

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024

SciLitLLM: How to Adapt LLMs for Scientific Literature Understanding

Scientific literature understanding is crucial for extracting targeted information and garnering insights, thereby significantly advancing scientific discovery. Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they face challenges in scientific literature understanding, primarily due to (1) a lack of scientific knowledge and (2) unfamiliarity with specialized scientific tasks. To develop an LLM specialized in scientific literature understanding, we propose a hybrid strategy that integrates continual pre-training (CPT) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to simultaneously infuse scientific domain knowledge and enhance instruction-following capabilities for domain-specific tasks.cIn this process, we identify two key challenges: (1) constructing high-quality CPT corpora, and (2) generating diverse SFT instructions. We address these challenges through a meticulous pipeline, including PDF text extraction, parsing content error correction, quality filtering, and synthetic instruction creation. Applying this strategy, we present a suite of LLMs: SciLitLLM, specialized in scientific literature understanding. These models demonstrate promising performance on scientific literature understanding benchmarks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present an effective framework that integrates CPT and SFT to adapt LLMs to scientific literature understanding, which can also be easily adapted to other domains. (2) We propose an LLM-based synthesis method to generate diverse and high-quality scientific instructions, resulting in a new instruction set -- SciLitIns -- for supervised fine-tuning in less-represented scientific domains. (3) SciLitLLM achieves promising performance improvements on scientific literature understanding benchmarks.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024 1

Gazal-R1: Achieving State-of-the-Art Medical Reasoning with Parameter-Efficient Two-Stage Training

We present Gazal-R1, a 32-billion-parameter language model that achieves state-of-the-art performance in medical reasoning while providing transparent, step-by-step explanations for clinical decision-making. Built upon Qwen3 32B, our model demonstrates that strategic training can enable mid-sized models to outperform significantly larger counterparts in specialized domains. We developed a novel two-stage training pipeline: first, supervised fine-tuning on a carefully curated dataset of 107,033 synthetic medical reasoning examples that teaches structured clinical thinking, enhanced by advanced parameter-efficient techniques including Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) and Rank-Stabilized LoRA (rsLoRA); second, reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a sophisticated multi-component reward system that refines accuracy, format adherence, and reasoning quality. Gazal-R1 achieves exceptional performance across medical benchmarks, scoring 87.1% on MedQA, 81.6% on MMLU Pro (Medical), and 79.6% on PubMedQA, surpassing models up to 12x larger. Beyond its strong empirical results, this work provides detailed insights into the challenges of training reasoning-capable models in specialized domains, including issues with reward hacking, training instability, and the fundamental tension between factual recall and detailed reasoning. Our methodology offers a reproducible framework for developing high-capability, domain-specific language models that balance performance, efficiency, and explainability.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 18 1

DIFFA: Large Language Diffusion Models Can Listen and Understand

Recent advances in Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across textual and multimodal domains. In parallel, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative to the autoregressive paradigm, offering improved controllability, bidirectional context modeling, and robust generation. However, their application to the audio modality remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce DIFFA, the first diffusion-based Large Audio-Language Model designed to perform spoken language understanding. DIFFA integrates a frozen diffusion language model with a lightweight dual-adapter architecture that bridges speech understanding and natural language reasoning. We employ a two-stage training pipeline: first, aligning semantic representations via an ASR objective; then, learning instruction-following abilities through synthetic audio-caption pairs automatically generated by prompting LLMs. Despite being trained on only 960 hours of ASR and 127 hours of synthetic instruction data, DIFFA demonstrates competitive performance on major benchmarks, including MMSU, MMAU, and VoiceBench, outperforming several autoregressive open-source baselines. Our results reveal the potential of diffusion-based language models for efficient and scalable audio understanding, opening a new direction for speech-driven AI. Our code will be available at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/DIFFA.git.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 24

Goedel-Prover-V2: Scaling Formal Theorem Proving with Scaffolded Data Synthesis and Self-Correction

We introduce Goedel-Prover-V2, a series of open-source language models that set a new state-of-the-art in automated theorem proving. Built on the standard expert iteration and reinforcement learning pipeline, our approach incorporates three key innovations: (1) Scaffolded data synthesis: We generate synthetic tasks of increasing difficulty to train the model to master increasingly complex theorems; (2) Verifier-guided self-correction: We enable the model to iteratively revise its proofs by leveraging feedback from the Lean compiler; (3) Model averaging: We merge model checkpoints to mitigate the decrease in model output diversity in later stages of training. Our small model, Goedel-Prover-V2-8B, reaches 84.6% pass@32 on MiniF2F and outperforms DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B under the same metric, despite being 80X smaller. Our flagship model, Goedel-Prover-V2-32B, achieves 88.1% on MiniF2F at pass@32 in standard mode and 90.4% in self-correction mode, outperforming prior SOTA by a large margin. Additionally, our flagship model solves 86 problems on PutnamBench at pass@184, securing the first place among open-source models on the leaderboard, surpassing DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B's record of solving 47 problems by pass@1024 with a significantly smaller model size and compute budget. At the time of its release (July-August 2025), Goedel-Prover-V2 achieves the strongest overall performance among all open-source theorem provers. It also ranks among the top-performing models--including closed-source systems with publicly reported performance--under a constrained test-time compute budget. Our models, code, and data are released at https://github.com/Goedel-LM/Goedel-Prover-V2.

Gen2Det: Generate to Detect

Recently diffusion models have shown improvement in synthetic image quality as well as better control in generation. We motivate and present Gen2Det, a simple modular pipeline to create synthetic training data for object detection for free by leveraging state-of-the-art grounded image generation methods. Unlike existing works which generate individual object instances, require identifying foreground followed by pasting on other images, we simplify to directly generating scene-centric images. In addition to the synthetic data, Gen2Det also proposes a suite of techniques to best utilize the generated data, including image-level filtering, instance-level filtering, and better training recipe to account for imperfections in the generation. Using Gen2Det, we show healthy improvements on object detection and segmentation tasks under various settings and agnostic to detection methods. In the long-tailed detection setting on LVIS, Gen2Det improves the performance on rare categories by a large margin while also significantly improving the performance on other categories, e.g. we see an improvement of 2.13 Box AP and 1.84 Mask AP over just training on real data on LVIS with Mask R-CNN. In the low-data regime setting on COCO, Gen2Det consistently improves both Box and Mask AP by 2.27 and 1.85 points. In the most general detection setting, Gen2Det still demonstrates robust performance gains, e.g. it improves the Box and Mask AP on COCO by 0.45 and 0.32 points.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023

Query-Kontext: An Unified Multimodal Model for Image Generation and Editing

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in text-to-image generation (T2I) and editing (TI2I), whether instantiated as assembled unified frameworks which couple powerful vision-language model (VLM) with diffusion-based generator, or as naive Unified Multimodal Models with an early fusion of understanding and generation modalities. We contend that in current unified frameworks, the crucial capability of multimodal generative reasoning which encompasses instruction understanding, grounding, and image referring for identity preservation and faithful reconstruction, is intrinsically entangled with high-fidelity synthesis. In this work, we introduce Query-Kontext, a novel approach that bridges the VLM and diffusion model via a multimodal ``kontext'' composed of semantic cues and coarse-grained image conditions encoded from multimodal inputs. This design delegates the complex ability of multimodal generative reasoning to powerful VLM while reserving diffusion model's role for high-quality visual synthesis. To achieve this, we propose a three-stage progressive training strategy. First, we connect the VLM to a lightweight diffusion head via multimodal kontext tokens to unleash the VLM's generative reasoning ability. Second, we scale this head to a large, pre-trained diffusion model to enhance visual detail and realism. Finally, we introduce a low-level image encoder to improve image fidelity and perform instruction tuning on downstream tasks. Furthermore, we build a comprehensive data pipeline integrating real, synthetic, and open-source datasets, covering diverse multimodal reference-to-image scenarios, including image generation, instruction-driven editing, customized generation, and multi-subject composition. Experiments show that our approach matches strong unified baselines and even outperforms task-specific state-of-the-art methods in several cases.

  • 11 authors
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Sep 30

EDoG: Adversarial Edge Detection For Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely applied to different tasks such as bioinformatics, drug design, and social networks. However, recent studies have shown that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks which aim to mislead the node or subgraph classification prediction by adding subtle perturbations. Detecting these attacks is challenging due to the small magnitude of perturbation and the discrete nature of graph data. In this paper, we propose a general adversarial edge detection pipeline EDoG without requiring knowledge of the attack strategies based on graph generation. Specifically, we propose a novel graph generation approach combined with link prediction to detect suspicious adversarial edges. To effectively train the graph generative model, we sample several sub-graphs from the given graph data. We show that since the number of adversarial edges is usually low in practice, with low probability the sampled sub-graphs will contain adversarial edges based on the union bound. In addition, considering the strong attacks which perturb a large number of edges, we propose a set of novel features to perform outlier detection as the preprocessing for our detection. Extensive experimental results on three real-world graph datasets including a private transaction rule dataset from a major company and two types of synthetic graphs with controlled properties show that EDoG can achieve above 0.8 AUC against four state-of-the-art unseen attack strategies without requiring any knowledge about the attack type; and around 0.85 with knowledge of the attack type. EDoG significantly outperforms traditional malicious edge detection baselines. We also show that an adaptive attack with full knowledge of our detection pipeline is difficult to bypass it.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 27, 2022

Program Synthesis Benchmark for Visual Programming in XLogoOnline Environment

Large language and multimodal models have shown remarkable successes on various benchmarks focused on specific skills such as general-purpose programming, natural language understanding, math word problem-solving, and visual question answering. However, it is unclear how well these models perform on tasks that require a combination of these skills. In this paper, we curate a novel program synthesis benchmark based on the XLogoOnline visual programming environment. The benchmark comprises 85 real-world tasks from the Mini-level of the XLogoOnline environment, each requiring a combination of different skills such as spatial planning, basic programming, and logical reasoning. Our evaluation shows that current state-of-the-art models like GPT-4V and Llama3-70B struggle to solve these tasks, achieving only 20% and 2.35% success rates. Next, we develop a fine-tuning pipeline to boost the performance of models by leveraging a large-scale synthetic training dataset with over 80000 tasks. Moreover, we showcase how emulator-driven feedback can be used to design a curriculum over training data distribution. We showcase that a fine-tuned Llama3-8B drastically outperforms GPT-4V and Llama3-70B models, and provide an in-depth analysis of the models' expertise across different skill dimensions. We will publicly release the benchmark for future research on program synthesis in visual programming.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

UltraCUA: A Foundation Model for Computer Use Agents with Hybrid Action

Multimodal agents for computer use rely exclusively on primitive actions (click, type, scroll) that require accurate visual grounding and lengthy execution chains, leading to cascading failures and performance bottlenecks. While other agents leverage rich programmatic interfaces (APIs, MCP servers, tools), computer-use agents (CUAs) remain isolated from these capabilities. We present UltraCUA, a foundation model that bridges this gap through hybrid action -- seamlessly integrating GUI primitives with high-level programmatic tool calls. To achieve this, our approach comprises four key components: (1) an automated pipeline that scales programmatic tools from software documentation, open-source repositories, and code generation; (2) a synthetic data engine producing over 17,000 verifiable tasks spanning real-world computer-use scenarios; (3) a large-scale high-quality hybrid action trajectory collection with both low-level GUI actions and high-level programmatic tool calls; and (4) a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning with online reinforcement learning, enabling strategic alternation between low-level and high-level actions. Experiments with our 7B and 32B models demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art agents. On OSWorld, UltraCUA models achieve an average 22% relative improvement over base models, while being 11% faster in terms of steps. Out-of-domain evaluation on WindowsAgentArena shows our model reaches 21.7% success rate, outperforming baselines trained on Windows data. The hybrid action mechanism proves critical, reducing error propagation while maintaining execution efficiency.

apple Apple
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Oct 20 2

Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence

We introduce Kimi K2, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model with 32 billion activated parameters and 1 trillion total parameters. We propose the MuonClip optimizer, which improves upon Muon with a novel QK-clip technique to address training instability while enjoying the advanced token efficiency of Muon. Based on MuonClip, K2 was pre-trained on 15.5 trillion tokens with zero loss spike. During post-training, K2 undergoes a multi-stage post-training process, highlighted by a large-scale agentic data synthesis pipeline and a joint reinforcement learning (RL) stage, where the model improves its capabilities through interactions with real and synthetic environments. Kimi K2 achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source non-thinking models, with strengths in agentic capabilities. Notably, K2 obtains 66.1 on Tau2-Bench, 76.5 on ACEBench (En), 65.8 on SWE-Bench Verified, and 47.3 on SWE-Bench Multilingual -- surpassing most open and closed-sourced baselines in non-thinking settings. It also exhibits strong capabilities in coding, mathematics, and reasoning tasks, with a score of 53.7 on LiveCodeBench v6, 49.5 on AIME 2025, 75.1 on GPQA-Diamond, and 27.1 on OJBench, all without extended thinking. These results position Kimi K2 as one of the most capable open-source large language models to date, particularly in software engineering and agentic tasks. We release our base and post-trained model checkpoints to facilitate future research and applications of agentic intelligence.

Relightful Harmonization: Lighting-aware Portrait Background Replacement

Portrait harmonization aims to composite a subject into a new background, adjusting its lighting and color to ensure harmony with the background scene. Existing harmonization techniques often only focus on adjusting the global color and brightness of the foreground and ignore crucial illumination cues from the background such as apparent lighting direction, leading to unrealistic compositions. We introduce Relightful Harmonization, a lighting-aware diffusion model designed to seamlessly harmonize sophisticated lighting effect for the foreground portrait using any background image. Our approach unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce a lighting representation module that allows our diffusion model to encode lighting information from target image background. Second, we introduce an alignment network that aligns lighting features learned from image background with lighting features learned from panorama environment maps, which is a complete representation for scene illumination. Last, to further boost the photorealism of the proposed method, we introduce a novel data simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training pairs from a diverse range of natural images, which are used to refine the model. Our method outperforms existing benchmarks in visual fidelity and lighting coherence, showing superior generalization in real-world testing scenarios, highlighting its versatility and practicality.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

Pruning-based Topology Refinement of 3D Mesh using a 2D Alpha Mask

Image-based 3D reconstruction has increasingly stunning results over the past few years with the latest improvements in computer vision and graphics. Geometry and topology are two fundamental concepts when dealing with 3D mesh structures. But the latest often remains a side issue in the 3D mesh-based reconstruction literature. Indeed, performing per-vertex elementary displacements over a 3D sphere mesh only impacts its geometry and leaves the topological structure unchanged and fixed. Whereas few attempts propose to update the geometry and the topology, all need to lean on costly 3D ground-truth to determine the faces/edges to prune. We present in this work a method that aims to refine the topology of any 3D mesh through a face-pruning strategy that extensively relies upon 2D alpha masks and camera pose information. Our solution leverages a differentiable renderer that renders each face as a 2D soft map. Its pixel intensity reflects the probability of being covered during the rendering process by such a face. Based on the 2D soft-masks available, our method is thus able to quickly highlight all the incorrectly rendered faces for a given viewpoint. Because our module is agnostic to the network that produces the 3D mesh, it can be easily plugged into any self-supervised image-based (either synthetic or natural) 3D reconstruction pipeline to get complex meshes with a non-spherical topology.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2022

LLM-driven Indoor Scene Layout Generation via Scaled Human-aligned Data Synthesis and Multi-Stage Preference Optimization

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 9

Federated Learning on Virtual Heterogeneous Data with Local-global Distillation

While Federated Learning (FL) is gaining popularity for training machine learning models in a decentralized fashion, numerous challenges persist, such as asynchronization, computational expenses, data heterogeneity, and gradient and membership privacy attacks. Lately, dataset distillation has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the aforementioned challenges by generating a compact synthetic dataset that preserves a model's training efficacy. However, we discover that using distilled local datasets can amplify the heterogeneity issue in FL. To address this, we propose Federated Learning on Virtual Heterogeneous Data with Local-Global Dataset Distillation (FedLGD), where we seamlessly integrate dataset distillation algorithms into FL pipeline and train FL using a smaller synthetic dataset (referred as virtual data). Specifically, to harmonize the domain shifts, we propose iterative distribution matching to inpaint global information to local virtual data and use federated gradient matching to distill global virtual data that serve as anchor points to rectify heterogeneous local training, without compromising data privacy. We experiment on both benchmark and real-world datasets that contain heterogeneous data from different sources, and further scale up to an FL scenario that contains a large number of clients with heterogeneous and class-imbalanced data. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous FL algorithms under various settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ubc-tea/FedLGD.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3, 2023

A New Dataset and Performance Benchmark for Real-time Spacecraft Segmentation in Onboard Flight Computers

Spacecraft deployed in outer space are routinely subjected to various forms of damage due to exposure to hazardous environments. In addition, there are significant risks to the subsequent process of in-space repairs through human extravehicular activity or robotic manipulation, incurring substantial operational costs. Recent developments in image segmentation could enable the development of reliable and cost-effective autonomous inspection systems. While these models often require large amounts of training data to achieve satisfactory results, publicly available annotated spacecraft segmentation data are very scarce. Here, we present a new dataset of nearly 64k annotated spacecraft images that was created using real spacecraft models, superimposed on a mixture of real and synthetic backgrounds generated using NASA's TTALOS pipeline. To mimic camera distortions and noise in real-world image acquisition, we also added different types of noise and distortion to the images. Finally, we finetuned YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 segmentation models to generate performance benchmarks for the dataset under well-defined hardware and inference time constraints to mimic real-world image segmentation challenges for real-time onboard applications in space on NASA's inspector spacecraft. The resulting models, when tested under these constraints, achieved a Dice score of 0.92, Hausdorff distance of 0.69, and an inference time of about 0.5 second. The dataset and models for performance benchmark are available at https://github.com/RiceD2KLab/SWiM.

  • 9 authors
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Jul 14

AniMer: Animal Pose and Shape Estimation Using Family Aware Transformer

Quantitative analysis of animal behavior and biomechanics requires accurate animal pose and shape estimation across species, and is important for animal welfare and biological research. However, the small network capacity of previous methods and limited multi-species dataset leave this problem underexplored. To this end, this paper presents AniMer to estimate animal pose and shape using family aware Transformer, enhancing the reconstruction accuracy of diverse quadrupedal families. A key insight of AniMer is its integration of a high-capacity Transformer-based backbone and an animal family supervised contrastive learning scheme, unifying the discriminative understanding of various quadrupedal shapes within a single framework. For effective training, we aggregate most available open-sourced quadrupedal datasets, either with 3D or 2D labels. To improve the diversity of 3D labeled data, we introduce CtrlAni3D, a novel large-scale synthetic dataset created through a new diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. CtrlAni3D consists of about 10k images with pixel-aligned SMAL labels. In total, we obtain 41.3k annotated images for training and validation. Consequently, the combination of a family aware Transformer network and an expansive dataset enables AniMer to outperform existing methods not only on 3D datasets like Animal3D and CtrlAni3D, but also on out-of-distribution Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of our network design and CtrlAni3D in enhancing the performance of AniMer for in-the-wild applications. The project page of AniMer is https://luoxue-star.github.io/AniMer_project_page/.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 1, 2024

Meta Knowledge for Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique used to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with contextually relevant, time-critical, or domain-specific information without altering the underlying model parameters. However, constructing RAG systems that can effectively synthesize information from large and diverse set of documents remains a significant challenge. We introduce a novel data-centric RAG workflow for LLMs, transforming the traditional retrieve-then-read system into a more advanced prepare-then-rewrite-then-retrieve-then-read framework, to achieve higher domain expert-level understanding of the knowledge base. Our methodology relies on generating metadata and synthetic Questions and Answers (QA) for each document, as well as introducing the new concept of Meta Knowledge Summary (MK Summary) for metadata-based clusters of documents. The proposed innovations enable personalized user-query augmentation and in-depth information retrieval across the knowledge base. Our research makes two significant contributions: using LLMs as evaluators and employing new comparative performance metrics, we demonstrate that (1) using augmented queries with synthetic question matching significantly outperforms traditional RAG pipelines that rely on document chunking (p < 0.01), and (2) meta knowledge-augmented queries additionally significantly improve retrieval precision and recall, as well as the final answers breadth, depth, relevancy, and specificity. Our methodology is cost-effective, costing less than $20 per 2000 research papers using Claude 3 Haiku, and can be adapted with any fine-tuning of either the language or embedding models to further enhance the performance of end-to-end RAG pipelines.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024

Minimizing the Accumulated Trajectory Error to Improve Dataset Distillation

Model-based deep learning has achieved astounding successes due in part to the availability of large-scale real-world data. However, processing such massive amounts of data comes at a considerable cost in terms of computations, storage, training and the search for good neural architectures. Dataset distillation has thus recently come to the fore. This paradigm involves distilling information from large real-world datasets into tiny and compact synthetic datasets such that processing the latter ideally yields similar performances as the former. State-of-the-art methods primarily rely on learning the synthetic dataset by matching the gradients obtained during training between the real and synthetic data. However, these gradient-matching methods suffer from the so-called accumulated trajectory error caused by the discrepancy between the distillation and subsequent evaluation. To mitigate the adverse impact of this accumulated trajectory error, we propose a novel approach that encourages the optimization algorithm to seek a flat trajectory. We show that the weights trained on synthetic data are robust against the accumulated errors perturbations with the regularization towards the flat trajectory. Our method, called Flat Trajectory Distillation (FTD), is shown to boost the performance of gradient-matching methods by up to 4.7% on a subset of images of the ImageNet dataset with higher resolution images. We also validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method with datasets of different resolutions and demonstrate its applicability to neural architecture search. Code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/FTD-distillation.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 20, 2022

SkipPipe: Partial and Reordered Pipelining Framework for Training LLMs in Heterogeneous Networks

Data and pipeline parallelism are ubiquitous for training of Large Language Models (LLM) on distributed nodes. Driven by the need for cost-effective training, recent work explores efficient communication arrangement for end to end training. Motivated by LLM's resistance to layer skipping and layer reordering, in this paper, we explore stage (several consecutive layers) skipping in pipeline training, and challenge the conventional practice of sequential pipeline execution. We derive convergence and throughput constraints (guidelines) for pipelining with skipping and swapping pipeline stages. Based on these constraints, we propose SkipPipe, the first partial pipeline framework to reduce the end-to-end training time for LLMs while preserving the convergence. The core of SkipPipe is a path scheduling algorithm that optimizes the paths for individual microbatches and reduces idle time (due to microbatch collisions) on the distributed nodes, complying with the given stage skipping ratio. We extensively evaluate SkipPipe on LLaMa models from 500M to 8B parameters on up to 20 nodes. Our results show that SkipPipe reduces training iteration time by up to 55% compared to full pipeline. Our partial pipeline training also improves resistance to layer omission during inference, experiencing a drop in perplexity of only 7% when running only half the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/skippipe.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 27

ELT-Bench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on ELT Pipelines

Practitioners are increasingly turning to Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) pipelines with the widespread adoption of cloud data warehouses. However, designing these pipelines often involves significant manual work to ensure correctness. Recent advances in AI-based methods, which have shown strong capabilities in data tasks, such as text-to-SQL, present an opportunity to alleviate manual efforts in developing ELT pipelines. Unfortunately, current benchmarks in data engineering only evaluate isolated tasks, such as using data tools and writing data transformation queries, leaving a significant gap in evaluating AI agents for generating end-to-end ELT pipelines. To fill this gap, we introduce ELT-Bench, an end-to-end benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of AI agents to build ELT pipelines. ELT-Bench consists of 100 pipelines, including 835 source tables and 203 data models across various domains. By simulating realistic scenarios involving the integration of diverse data sources and the use of popular data tools, ELT-Bench evaluates AI agents' abilities in handling complex data engineering workflows. AI agents must interact with databases and data tools, write code and SQL queries, and orchestrate every pipeline stage. We evaluate two representative code agent frameworks, Spider-Agent and SWE-Agent, using six popular Large Language Models (LLMs) on ELT-Bench. The highest-performing agent, Spider-Agent Claude-3.7-Sonnet with extended thinking, correctly generates only 3.9% of data models, with an average cost of $4.30 and 89.3 steps per pipeline. Our experimental results demonstrate the challenges of ELT-Bench and highlight the need for a more advanced AI agent to reduce manual effort in ELT workflows. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/ELT-Bench.

  • 3 authors
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Apr 7

KramaBench: A Benchmark for AI Systems on Data-to-Insight Pipelines over Data Lakes

Constructing real-world data-to-insight pipelines often involves data extraction from data lakes, data integration across heterogeneous data sources, and diverse operations from data cleaning to analysis. The design and implementation of data science pipelines require domain knowledge, technical expertise, and even project-specific insights. AI systems have shown remarkable reasoning, coding, and understanding capabilities. However, it remains unclear to what extent these capabilities translate into successful design and execution of such complex pipelines. We introduce KRAMABENCH: a benchmark composed of 104 manually-curated real-world data science pipelines spanning 1700 data files from 24 data sources in 6 different domains. We show that these pipelines test the end-to-end capabilities of AI systems on data processing, requiring data discovery, wrangling and cleaning, efficient processing, statistical reasoning, and orchestrating data processing steps given a high-level task. Our evaluation tests 5 general models and 3 code generation models using our reference framework, DS-GURU, which instructs the AI model to decompose a question into a sequence of subtasks, reason through each step, and synthesize Python code that implements the proposed design. Our results on KRAMABENCH show that, although the models are sufficiently capable of solving well-specified data science code generation tasks, when extensive data processing and domain knowledge are required to construct real-world data science pipelines, existing out-of-box models fall short. Progress on KramaBench represents crucial steps towards developing autonomous data science agents for real-world applications. Our code, reference framework, and data are available at https://github.com/mitdbg/KramaBench.

  • 19 authors
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Jun 6

Neon: Negative Extrapolation From Self-Training Improves Image Generation

Scaling generative AI models is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-quality training data. The ease of synthesizing from a generative model suggests using (unverified) synthetic data to augment a limited corpus of real data for the purpose of fine-tuning in the hope of improving performance. Unfortunately, however, the resulting positive feedback loop leads to model autophagy disorder (MAD, aka model collapse) that results in a rapid degradation in sample quality and/or diversity. In this paper, we introduce Neon (for Negative Extrapolation frOm self-traiNing), a new learning method that turns the degradation from self-training into a powerful signal for self-improvement. Given a base model, Neon first fine-tunes it on its own self-synthesized data but then, counterintuitively, reverses its gradient updates to extrapolate away from the degraded weights. We prove that Neon works because typical inference samplers that favor high-probability regions create a predictable anti-alignment between the synthetic and real data population gradients, which negative extrapolation corrects to better align the model with the true data distribution. Neon is remarkably easy to implement via a simple post-hoc merge that requires no new real data, works effectively with as few as 1k synthetic samples, and typically uses less than 1% additional training compute. We demonstrate Neon's universality across a range of architectures (diffusion, flow matching, autoregressive, and inductive moment matching models) and datasets (ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and FFHQ). In particular, on ImageNet 256x256, Neon elevates the xAR-L model to a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.02 with only 0.36% additional training compute. Code is available at https://github.com/SinaAlemohammad/Neon

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3

AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows

Synthetic data is becoming increasingly important for accelerating the development of language models, both large and small. Despite several successful use cases, researchers also raised concerns around model collapse and drawbacks of imitating other models. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that synthetic data varies in quality and diversity. Effective use of synthetic data usually requires significant human effort in curating the data. We focus on using synthetic data for post-training, specifically creating data by powerful models to teach a new skill or behavior to another model, we refer to this setting as Generative Teaching. We introduce AgentInstruct, an extensible agentic framework for automatically creating large amounts of diverse and high-quality synthetic data. AgentInstruct can create both the prompts and responses, using only raw data sources like text documents and code files as seeds. We demonstrate the utility of AgentInstruct by creating a post training dataset of 25M pairs to teach language models different skills, such as text editing, creative writing, tool usage, coding, reading comprehension, etc. The dataset can be used for instruction tuning of any base model. We post-train Mistral-7b with the data. When comparing the resulting model Orca-3 to Mistral-7b-Instruct (which uses the same base model), we observe significant improvements across many benchmarks. For example, 40% improvement on AGIEval, 19% improvement on MMLU, 54% improvement on GSM8K, 38% improvement on BBH and 45% improvement on AlpacaEval. Additionally, it consistently outperforms other models such as LLAMA-8B-instruct and GPT-3.5-turbo.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024 16

Scaling Laws of Synthetic Data for Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by high-quality web data used in pre-training. However, recent studies indicate this data source is rapidly depleting. Synthetic data emerges as a promising alternative, but it remains unclear whether synthetic datasets exhibit predictable scalability comparable to raw pre-training data. In this work, we systematically investigate the scaling laws of synthetic data by introducing SynthLLM, a scalable framework that transforms pre-training corpora into diverse, high-quality synthetic datasets. Our approach achieves this by automatically extracting and recombining high-level concepts across multiple documents using a graph algorithm. Key findings from our extensive mathematical experiments on SynthLLM include: (1) SynthLLM generates synthetic data that reliably adheres to the rectified scaling law across various model sizes; (2) Performance improvements plateau near 300B tokens; and (3) Larger models approach optimal performance with fewer training tokens. For instance, an 8B model peaks at 1T tokens, while a 3B model requires 4T. Moreover, comparisons with existing synthetic data generation and augmentation methods demonstrate that SynthLLM achieves superior performance and scalability. Our findings highlight synthetic data as a scalable and reliable alternative to organic pre-training corpora, offering a viable path toward continued improvement in model performance.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 25

RealGen: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controllable Traffic Scenarios

Simulation plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to the potential risks associated with real-world testing. Although significant progress has been made in the visual aspects of simulators, generating complex behavior among agents remains a formidable challenge. It is not only imperative to ensure realism in the scenarios generated but also essential to incorporate preferences and conditions to facilitate controllable generation for AV training and evaluation. Traditional methods, mainly relying on memorizing the distribution of training datasets, often fall short in generating unseen scenarios. Inspired by the success of retrieval augmented generation in large language models, we present RealGen, a novel retrieval-based in-context learning framework for traffic scenario generation. RealGen synthesizes new scenarios by combining behaviors from multiple retrieved examples in a gradient-free way, which may originate from templates or tagged scenarios. This in-context learning framework endows versatile generative capabilities, including the ability to edit scenarios, compose various behaviors, and produce critical scenarios. Evaluations show that RealGen offers considerable flexibility and controllability, marking a new direction in the field of controllable traffic scenario generation. Check our project website for more information: https://realgen.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

ArFake: A Multi-Dialect Benchmark and Baselines for Arabic Spoof-Speech Detection

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26

Recycling the Web: A Method to Enhance Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for Language Models

Scaling laws predict that the performance of large language models improves with increasing model size and data size. In practice, pre-training has been relying on massive web crawls, using almost all data sources publicly available on the internet so far. However, this pool of natural data does not grow at the same rate as the compute supply. Furthermore, the availability of high-quality texts is even more limited: data filtering pipelines often remove up to 99% of the initial web scrapes to achieve state-of-the-art. To address the "data wall" of pre-training scaling, our work explores ways to transform and recycle data discarded in existing filtering processes. We propose REWIRE, REcycling the Web with guIded REwrite, a method to enrich low-quality documents so that they could become useful for training. This in turn allows us to increase the representation of synthetic data in the final pre-training set. Experiments at 1B, 3B and 7B scales of the DCLM benchmark show that mixing high-quality raw texts and our rewritten texts lead to 1.0, 1.3 and 2.5 percentage points improvement respectively across 22 diverse tasks, compared to training on only filtered web data. Training on the raw-synthetic data mix is also more effective than having access to 2x web data. Through further analysis, we demonstrate that about 82% of the mixed in texts come from transforming lower-quality documents that would otherwise be discarded. REWIRE also outperforms related approaches of generating synthetic data, including Wikipedia-style paraphrasing, question-answer synthesizing and knowledge extraction. These results suggest that recycling web texts holds the potential for being a simple and effective approach for scaling pre-training data.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 5

DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data

Proof assistants like Lean have revolutionized mathematical proof verification, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in mathematical reasoning, their advancement in formal theorem proving is hindered by a lack of training data. To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems. This approach involves translating natural language problems into formal statements, filtering out low-quality statements, and generating proofs to create synthetic data. After fine-tuning the DeepSeekMath 7B model on this synthetic dataset, which comprises 8 million formal statements with proofs, our model achieved whole-proof generation accuracies of 46.3% with 64 samples and 52% cumulatively on the Lean 4 miniF2F test, surpassing the baseline GPT-4 at 23.0% with 64 samples and a tree search reinforcement learning method at 41.0%. Additionally, our model successfully proved 5 out of 148 problems in the Lean 4 Formalized International Mathematical Olympiad (FIMO) benchmark, while GPT-4 failed to prove any. These results demonstrate the potential of leveraging large-scale synthetic data to enhance theorem-proving capabilities in LLMs. Both the synthetic dataset and the model will be made available to facilitate further research in this promising field.

  • 9 authors
·
May 23, 2024 6

RoboVerse: Towards a Unified Platform, Dataset and Benchmark for Scalable and Generalizable Robot Learning

Data scaling and standardized evaluation benchmarks have driven significant advances in natural language processing and computer vision. However, robotics faces unique challenges in scaling data and establishing evaluation protocols. Collecting real-world data is resource-intensive and inefficient, while benchmarking in real-world scenarios remains highly complex. Synthetic data and simulation offer promising alternatives, yet existing efforts often fall short in data quality, diversity, and benchmark standardization. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboVerse, a comprehensive framework comprising a simulation platform, a synthetic dataset, and unified benchmarks. Our simulation platform supports multiple simulators and robotic embodiments, enabling seamless transitions between different environments. The synthetic dataset, featuring high-fidelity physics and photorealistic rendering, is constructed through multiple approaches. Additionally, we propose unified benchmarks for imitation learning and reinforcement learning, enabling evaluation across different levels of generalization. At the core of the simulation platform is MetaSim, an infrastructure that abstracts diverse simulation environments into a universal interface. It restructures existing simulation environments into a simulator-agnostic configuration system, as well as an API aligning different simulator functionalities, such as launching simulation environments, loading assets with initial states, stepping the physics engine, etc. This abstraction ensures interoperability and extensibility. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RoboVerse enhances the performance of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, world model learning, and sim-to-real transfer. These results validate the reliability of our dataset and benchmarks, establishing RoboVerse as a robust solution for advancing robot learning.

Dexonomy: Synthesizing All Dexterous Grasp Types in a Grasp Taxonomy

Generalizable dexterous grasping with suitable grasp types is a fundamental skill for intelligent robots. Developing such skills requires a large-scale and high-quality dataset that covers numerous grasp types (i.e., at least those categorized by the GRASP taxonomy), but collecting such data is extremely challenging. Existing automatic grasp synthesis methods are often limited to specific grasp types or object categories, hindering scalability. This work proposes an efficient pipeline capable of synthesizing contact-rich, penetration-free, and physically plausible grasps for any grasp type, object, and articulated hand. Starting from a single human-annotated template for each hand and grasp type, our pipeline tackles the complicated synthesis problem with two stages: optimize the object to fit the hand template first, and then locally refine the hand to fit the object in simulation. To validate the synthesized grasps, we introduce a contact-aware control strategy that allows the hand to apply the appropriate force at each contact point to the object. Those validated grasps can also be used as new grasp templates to facilitate future synthesis. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms previous type-unaware grasp synthesis baselines in simulation. Using our algorithm, we construct a dataset containing 10.7k objects and 9.5M grasps, covering 31 grasp types in the GRASP taxonomy. Finally, we train a type-conditional generative model that successfully performs the desired grasp type from single-view object point clouds, achieving an 82.3% success rate in real-world experiments. Project page: https://pku-epic.github.io/Dexonomy.

  • 4 authors
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Apr 26

Towards Lossless Dataset Distillation via Difficulty-Aligned Trajectory Matching

The ultimate goal of Dataset Distillation is to synthesize a small synthetic dataset such that a model trained on this synthetic set will perform equally well as a model trained on the full, real dataset. Until now, no method of Dataset Distillation has reached this completely lossless goal, in part due to the fact that previous methods only remain effective when the total number of synthetic samples is extremely small. Since only so much information can be contained in such a small number of samples, it seems that to achieve truly loss dataset distillation, we must develop a distillation method that remains effective as the size of the synthetic dataset grows. In this work, we present such an algorithm and elucidate why existing methods fail to generate larger, high-quality synthetic sets. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on trajectory-matching, or optimizing the synthetic data to induce similar long-term training dynamics as the real data. We empirically find that the training stage of the trajectories we choose to match (i.e., early or late) greatly affects the effectiveness of the distilled dataset. Specifically, early trajectories (where the teacher network learns easy patterns) work well for a low-cardinality synthetic set since there are fewer examples wherein to distribute the necessary information. Conversely, late trajectories (where the teacher network learns hard patterns) provide better signals for larger synthetic sets since there are now enough samples to represent the necessary complex patterns. Based on our findings, we propose to align the difficulty of the generated patterns with the size of the synthetic dataset. In doing so, we successfully scale trajectory matching-based methods to larger synthetic datasets, achieving lossless dataset distillation for the very first time. Code and distilled datasets are available at https://gzyaftermath.github.io/DATM.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM

Large language models have led to state-of-the-art accuracies across a range of tasks. However, training these models efficiently is challenging for two reasons: a) GPU memory capacity is limited, making it impossible to fit large models on even a multi-GPU server, and b) the number of compute operations required to train these models can result in unrealistically long training times. Consequently, new methods of model parallelism such as tensor and pipeline parallelism have been proposed. Unfortunately, naive usage of these methods leads to fundamental scaling issues at thousands of GPUs, e.g., due to expensive cross-node communication or devices spending significant time waiting on other devices to make progress. In this paper, we show how different types of parallelism methods (tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism) can be composed to scale to thousands of GPUs and models with trillions of parameters. We survey techniques for pipeline parallelism and propose a novel interleaved pipeline parallelism schedule that can improve throughput by 10+% with memory footprint comparable to existing approaches. We quantitatively study the trade-offs between tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism, and provide intuition as to how to configure distributed training of a large model. Our approach allows us to perform training iterations on a model with 1 trillion parameters at 502 petaFLOP/s on 3072 GPUs with achieved per-GPU throughput of 52% of theoretical peak. Our code is open sourced at https://github.com/nvidia/megatron-lm.

  • 12 authors
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Apr 9, 2021

RoboTwin 2.0: A Scalable Data Generator and Benchmark with Strong Domain Randomization for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Simulation-based data synthesis has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing real-world robotic manipulation. However, existing synthetic datasets remain insufficient for robust bimanual manipulation due to two challenges: (1) the lack of an efficient, scalable data generation method for novel tasks, and (2) oversimplified simulation environments that fail to capture real-world complexity. We present RoboTwin 2.0, a scalable simulation framework that enables automated, large-scale generation of diverse and realistic data, along with unified evaluation protocols for dual-arm manipulation. We first construct RoboTwin-OD, a large-scale object library comprising 731 instances across 147 categories, each annotated with semantic and manipulation-relevant labels. Building on this foundation, we develop an expert data synthesis pipeline that combines multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with simulation-in-the-loop refinement to generate task-level execution code automatically. To improve sim-to-real transfer, RoboTwin 2.0 incorporates structured domain randomization along five axes: clutter, lighting, background, tabletop height and language instructions, thereby enhancing data diversity and policy robustness. We instantiate this framework across 50 dual-arm tasks spanning five robot embodiments, and pre-collect over 100,000 domain-randomized expert trajectories. Empirical results show a 10.9% gain in code generation success and improved generalization to novel real-world scenarios. A VLA model fine-tuned on our dataset achieves a 367% relative improvement (42.0% vs. 9.0%) on unseen scene real-world tasks, while zero-shot models trained solely on our synthetic data achieve a 228% relative gain, highlighting strong generalization without real-world supervision. We release the data generator, benchmark, dataset, and code to support scalable research in robust bimanual manipulation.

  • 26 authors
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Jun 22 1

Superpipeline: A Universal Approach for Reducing GPU Memory Usage in Large Models

The rapid growth in machine learning models, especially in natural language processing and computer vision, has led to challenges when running these models on hardware with limited resources. This paper introduces Superpipeline, a new framework designed to optimize the execution of large AI models on constrained hardware during both training and inference. Our approach involves dynamically managing model execution by dividing models into individual layers and efficiently transferring these layers between GPU and CPU memory. Superpipeline reduces GPU memory usage by up to 60% in our experiments while maintaining model accuracy and acceptable processing speeds. This allows models that would otherwise exceed available GPU memory to run effectively. Unlike existing solutions that focus mainly on inference or specific model types, Superpipeline can be applied to large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and vision-based models. We tested Superpipeline's performance across various models and hardware setups. The method includes two key parameters that allow fine-tuning the balance between GPU memory use and processing speed. Importantly, Superpipeline does not require retraining or changing model parameters, ensuring that the original model's output remains unchanged. Superpipeline's simplicity and flexibility make it useful for researchers and professionals working with advanced AI models on limited hardware. It enables the use of larger models or bigger batch sizes on existing hardware, potentially speeding up innovation across many machine learning applications. This work marks an important step toward making advanced AI models more accessible and optimizing their deployment in resource-limited environments. The code for Superpipeline is available at https://github.com/abbasiReza/super-pipeline.

  • 2 authors
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Oct 11, 2024

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding

Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challenging benchmarks. Previous studies on fine-tuning MLLMs with synthetic charts are often restricted by their inadequate similarity to the real charts, which could compromise model training and performance on complex real-world charts. In this study, we show that modularizing chart generation and diversifying visual details improves chart understanding capabilities. In particular, we design a five-step data synthesis pipeline, where we separate data and function creation for single plot generation, condition the generation of later subplots on earlier ones for multi-subplot figures, visually diversify the generated figures, filter out low quality data, and finally generate the question-answer (QA) pairs with GPT-4o. This approach allows us to streamline the generation of fine-tuning datasets and introduce the effective chart dataset (ECD), which contains 10k+ chart images and 300k+ QA pairs, covering 25 topics and featuring 250+ chart type combinations with high visual complexity. We show that ECD consistently improves the performance of various MLLMs on a range of real-world and synthetic test sets. Code, data and models are available at: https://github.com/yuweiyang-anu/ECD.

  • 8 authors
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Aug 8

BeyondWeb: Lessons from Scaling Synthetic Data for Trillion-scale Pretraining

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining have shown that simply scaling data quantity eventually leads to diminishing returns, hitting a data wall. In response, the use of synthetic data for pretraining has emerged as a promising paradigm for pushing the frontier of performance. Despite this, the factors affecting synthetic data quality remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce BeyondWeb, a synthetic data generation framework that produces high-quality synthetic data for pretraining. BeyondWeb significantly extends the capabilities of traditional web-scale datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art synthetic pretraining datasets such as Cosmopedia and Nemotron-CC's high-quality synthetic subset (Nemotron-Synth) by up to 5.1 percentage points (pp) and 2.6pp, respectively, when averaged across a suite of 14 benchmark evaluations. It delivers up to 7.7x faster training than open web data and 2.7x faster than Nemotron-Synth. Remarkably, a 3B model trained for 180B tokens on BeyondWeb outperforms an 8B model trained for the same token budget on Cosmopedia. We also present several insights from BeyondWeb on synthetic data for pretraining: what drives its benefits, which data to rephrase and how, and the impact of model size and family on data quality. Overall, our work shows that there's no silver bullet for generating high-quality synthetic pretraining data. The best outcomes require jointly optimizing many factors, a challenging task that requires rigorous science and practical expertise. Naive approaches can yield modest improvements, potentially at great cost, while well-executed methods can yield transformative improvements, as exemplified by BeyondWeb.

WorkflowLLM: Enhancing Workflow Orchestration Capability of Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

  • 10 authors
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Nov 8, 2024

Automated Creation of Digital Cousins for Robust Policy Learning

Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 9, 2024

Regression Transformer: Concurrent sequence regression and generation for molecular language modeling

Despite significant progress of generative models in the natural sciences, their controllability remains challenging. One fundamentally missing aspect of molecular or protein generative models is an inductive bias that can reflect continuous properties of interest. To that end, we propose the Regression Transformer (RT), a novel method that abstracts regression as a conditional sequence modeling problem. This introduces a new paradigm of multitask language models which seamlessly bridge sequence regression and conditional sequence generation. We thoroughly demonstrate that, despite using a nominal-scale training objective, the RT matches or surpasses the performance of conventional regression models in property prediction tasks of small molecules, proteins and chemical reactions. Critically, priming the same model with continuous properties yields a highly competitive conditional generative model that outperforms specialized approaches in a substructure-constrained, property-driven molecule generation benchmark. Our dichotomous approach is facilitated by a novel, alternating training scheme that enables the model to decorate seed sequences by desired properties, e.g., to optimize reaction yield. In sum, the RT is the first report of a multitask model that concurrently excels at predictive and generative tasks in biochemistry. This finds particular application in property-driven, local exploration of the chemical or protein space and could pave the road toward foundation models in material design. The code to reproduce all experiments of the paper is available at: https://github.com/IBM/regression-transformer

  • 2 authors
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Feb 1, 2022

UnitCoder: Scalable Iterative Code Synthesis with Unit Test Guidance

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, yet code generation remains a major challenge. Current approaches for obtaining high-quality code data primarily focus on (i) collecting large-scale pre-training data and (ii) synthesizing instruction data through prompt engineering with powerful models. While pre-training data faces quality consistency issues, instruction-based synthesis suffers from limited instruction diversity and inherent biases of LLMs. To address this gap, we introduce UnitCoder, a systematic pipeline leveraging model-generated unit tests to both guide and validate the code generation process. Combined with large-scale package-based retrieval from pre-training corpus, we generate a dataset of 500K+ verifiable programs containing diverse API calls. Evaluations on multiple Python benchmarks (BigCodeBench, HumanEval, MBPP) demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our synthetic data exhibit consistent performance improvements. Notably, Llama3.1-8B and InternLM2.5-7B improve from 31\% and 28\% to 40\% and 39\% success rates on BigCodeBench, respectively. Our work presents a scalable approach that leverages model-generated unit tests to guide the synthesis of high-quality code data from pre-training corpora, demonstrating the potential for producing diverse and high-quality post-training data at scale. All code and data will be released (https://github.com).

  • 8 authors
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Feb 17

MiniMax-Speech: Intrinsic Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with a Learnable Speaker Encoder

We introduce MiniMax-Speech, an autoregressive Transformer-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) model that generates high-quality speech. A key innovation is our learnable speaker encoder, which extracts timbre features from a reference audio without requiring its transcription. This enables MiniMax-Speech to produce highly expressive speech with timbre consistent with the reference in a zero-shot manner, while also supporting one-shot voice cloning with exceptionally high similarity to the reference voice. In addition, the overall quality of the synthesized audio is enhanced through the proposed Flow-VAE. Our model supports 32 languages and demonstrates excellent performance across multiple objective and subjective evaluations metrics. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on objective voice cloning metrics (Word Error Rate and Speaker Similarity) and has secured the top position on the public TTS Arena leaderboard. Another key strength of MiniMax-Speech, granted by the robust and disentangled representations from the speaker encoder, is its extensibility without modifying the base model, enabling various applications such as: arbitrary voice emotion control via LoRA; text to voice (T2V) by synthesizing timbre features directly from text description; and professional voice cloning (PVC) by fine-tuning timbre features with additional data. We encourage readers to visit https://minimax-ai.github.io/tts_tech_report for more examples.

  • 20 authors
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May 12 4

DATED: Guidelines for Creating Synthetic Datasets for Engineering Design Applications

Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significant challenge for researchers aiming to apply these breakthroughs in engineering design. Synthetic datasets emerge as a viable alternative. However, practitioners are often uncertain about generating high-quality datasets that accurately represent real-world data and are suitable for the intended downstream applications. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing comprehensive guidelines for generating, annotating, and validating synthetic datasets. The trade-offs and methods associated with each of these aspects are elaborated upon. Further, the practical implications of these guidelines are illustrated through the creation of a turbo-compressors dataset. The study underscores the importance of thoughtful sampling methods to ensure the appropriate size, diversity, utility, and realism of a dataset. It also highlights that design diversity does not equate to performance diversity or realism. By employing test sets that represent uniform, real, or task-specific samples, the influence of sample size and sampling strategy is scrutinized. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers intending to create and publish synthetic datasets for engineering design, thereby paving the way for more effective applications of AI advancements in the field. The code and data for the dataset and methods are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/cyrilpic/radcomp .

  • 3 authors
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May 15, 2023

SWE-Factory: Your Automated Factory for Issue Resolution Training Data and Evaluation Benchmarks

Constructing large-scale datasets for the GitHub issue resolution task is crucial for both training and evaluating the software engineering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the traditional process for creating such benchmarks is notoriously challenging and labor-intensive, particularly in the stages of setting up evaluation environments, grading test outcomes, and validating task instances. In this paper, we propose SWE-Factory, an automated pipeline designed to address these challenges. To tackle these issues, our pipeline integrates three core automated components. First, we introduce SWE-Builder, a multi-agent system that automates evaluation environment construction, which employs four specialized agents that work in a collaborative, iterative loop and leverages an environment memory pool to enhance efficiency. Second, we introduce a standardized, exit-code-based grading method that eliminates the need for manually writing custom parsers. Finally, we automate the fail2pass validation process using these reliable exit code signals. Experiments on 671 issues across four programming languages show that our pipeline can effectively construct valid task instances; for example, with GPT-4.1-mini, our SWE-Builder constructs 269 valid instances at 0.045 per instance, while with Gemini-2.5-flash, it achieves comparable performance at the lowest cost of 0.024 per instance. We also demonstrate that our exit-code-based grading achieves 100% accuracy compared to manual inspection, and our automated fail2pass validation reaches a precision of 0.92 and a recall of 1.00. We hope our automated pipeline will accelerate the collection of large-scale, high-quality GitHub issue resolution datasets for both training and evaluation. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/swe-factory.

  • 9 authors
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Jun 12 2

Training Language Models on Synthetic Edit Sequences Improves Code Synthesis

Software engineers mainly write code by editing existing programs. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) autoregressively synthesize programs in a single pass. One explanation for this is the scarcity of open-sourced edit data. While high-quality instruction data for code synthesis is already scarce, high-quality edit data is even scarcer. To fill this gap, we develop a synthetic data generation algorithm called LintSeq. This algorithm refactors existing code into a sequence of code edits by using a linter to procedurally sample across the error-free insertions that can be used to sequentially write programs. It outputs edit sequences as text strings consisting of consecutive program diffs. To test LintSeq, we use it to refactor a dataset of instruction + program pairs into instruction + program-diff-sequence tuples. Then, we instruction finetune a series of smaller LLMs ranging from 2.6B to 14B parameters on both the re-factored and original versions of this dataset, comparing zero-shot performance on code synthesis benchmarks. We show that during repeated sampling, edit sequence finetuned models produce more diverse programs than baselines. This results in better inference-time scaling for benchmark coverage as a function of samples, i.e. the fraction of problems "pass@k" solved by any attempt given "k" tries. For example, on HumanEval pass@50, small LLMs finetuned on synthetic edit sequences are competitive with GPT-4 and outperform models finetuned on the baseline dataset by +20% (+/-3%) in absolute score. Finally, we also pretrain our own tiny LMs for code understanding. We show that finetuning tiny models on synthetic code edits results in state-of-the-art code synthesis for the on-device model class. Our 150M parameter edit sequence LM matches or outperforms code models with twice as many parameters, both with and without repeated sampling, including Codex and AlphaCode.

  • 3 authors
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Oct 3, 2024 3

Differentially Private Synthetic Data via Foundation Model APIs 1: Images

Generating differentially private (DP) synthetic data that closely resembles the original private data is a scalable way to mitigate privacy concerns in the current data-driven world. In contrast to current practices that train customized models for this task, we aim to generate DP Synthetic Data via APIs (DPSDA), where we treat foundation models as blackboxes and only utilize their inference APIs. Such API-based, training-free approaches are easier to deploy as exemplified by the recent surge in the number of API-based apps. These approaches can also leverage the power of large foundation models which are only accessible via their inference APIs. However, this comes with greater challenges due to strictly more restrictive model access and the need to protect privacy from the API provider. In this paper, we present a new framework called Private Evolution (PE) to solve this problem and show its initial promise on synthetic images. Surprisingly, PE can match or even outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods without any model training. For example, on CIFAR10 (with ImageNet as the public data), we achieve FID <= 7.9 with privacy cost {\epsilon} = 0.67, significantly improving the previous SOTA from {\epsilon} = 32. We further demonstrate the promise of applying PE on large foundation models such as Stable Diffusion to tackle challenging private datasets with a small number of high-resolution images. The code and data are released at https://github.com/microsoft/DPSDA.

  • 5 authors
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May 24, 2023

Differentially Private Synthetic Data via Foundation Model APIs 2: Text

Text data has become extremely valuable due to the emergence of machine learning algorithms that learn from it. A lot of high-quality text data generated in the real world is private and therefore cannot be shared or used freely due to privacy concerns. Generating synthetic replicas of private text data with a formal privacy guarantee, i.e., differential privacy (DP), offers a promising and scalable solution. However, existing methods necessitate DP finetuning of large language models (LLMs) on private data to generate DP synthetic data. This approach is not viable for proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5) and also demands considerable computational resources for open-source LLMs. Lin et al. (2024) recently introduced the Private Evolution (PE) algorithm to generate DP synthetic images with only API access to diffusion models. In this work, we propose an augmented PE algorithm, named Aug-PE, that applies to the complex setting of text. We use API access to an LLM and generate DP synthetic text without any model training. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that Aug-PE produces DP synthetic text that yields competitive utility with the SOTA DP finetuning baselines. This underscores the feasibility of relying solely on API access of LLMs to produce high-quality DP synthetic texts, thereby facilitating more accessible routes to privacy-preserving LLM applications. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/AI-secure/aug-pe.

  • 12 authors
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Mar 4, 2024

Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale

Sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) has been widely adopted to scale deep learning models to trillion-plus parameters with fixed computational cost. The algorithmic performance of MoE relies on its token routing mechanism that forwards each input token to the right sub-models or experts. While token routing dynamically determines the amount of expert workload at runtime, existing systems suffer inefficient computation due to their static execution, namely static parallelism and pipelining, which does not adapt to the dynamic workload. We present Flex, a highly scalable stack design and implementation for MoE with dynamically adaptive parallelism and pipelining. Flex designs an identical layout for distributing MoE model parameters and input data, which can be leveraged by all possible parallelism or pipelining methods without any mathematical inequivalence or tensor migration overhead. This enables adaptive parallelism/pipelining optimization at zero cost during runtime. Based on this key design, Flex also implements various MoE acceleration techniques. Aggregating all techniques, Flex finally delivers huge speedup at any scale -- 4.96x and 5.75x speedup of a single MoE layer over 16 and 2,048 A100 GPUs, respectively, over the previous state-of-the-art. Our evaluation shows that Flex efficiently and effectively runs a real-world MoE-based model named SwinV2-MoE, built upon Swin Transformer V2, a state-of-the-art computer vision architecture. On efficiency, Flex accelerates SwinV2-MoE, achieving up to 1.55x and 2.11x speedup in training and inference over Fairseq, respectively. On effectiveness, the SwinV2-MoE model achieves superior accuracy in both pre-training and down-stream computer vision tasks such as COCO object detection than the counterpart dense model, indicating the readiness of Flex for end-to-end real-world model training and inference.

  • 15 authors
·
Jun 7, 2022

Text-to-CadQuery: A New Paradigm for CAD Generation with Scalable Large Model Capabilities

Computer-aided design (CAD) is fundamental to modern engineering and manufacturing, but creating CAD models still requires expert knowledge and specialized software. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) open up the possibility of generative CAD, where natural language is directly translated into parametric 3D models. However, most existing methods generate task-specific command sequences that pretrained models cannot directly handle. These sequences must be converted into CAD representations such as CAD vectors before a 3D model can be produced, which requires training models from scratch and adds unnecessary complexity. To tackle this issue, we propose generating CadQuery code directly from text, leveraging the strengths of pretrained LLMs to produce 3D models without intermediate representations, using this Python-based scripting language. Since LLMs already excel at Python generation and spatial reasoning, fine-tuning them on Text-to-CadQuery data proves highly effective. Given that these capabilities typically improve with scale, we hypothesize that larger models will perform better after fine-tuning. To enable this, we augment the Text2CAD dataset with 170,000 CadQuery annotations. We fine-tune six open-source LLMs of varying sizes and observe consistent improvements. Our best model achieves a top-1 exact match of 69.3%, up from 58.8%, and reduces Chamfer Distance by 48.6%. Project page: https://github.com/Text-to-CadQuery/Text-to-CadQuery.

  • 2 authors
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May 10

RAP: 3D Rasterization Augmented End-to-End Planning

Imitation learning for end-to-end driving trains policies only on expert demonstrations. Once deployed in a closed loop, such policies lack recovery data: small mistakes cannot be corrected and quickly compound into failures. A promising direction is to generate alternative viewpoints and trajectories beyond the logged path. Prior work explores photorealistic digital twins via neural rendering or game engines, but these methods are prohibitively slow and costly, and thus mainly used for evaluation. In this work, we argue that photorealism is unnecessary for training end-to-end planners. What matters is semantic fidelity and scalability: driving depends on geometry and dynamics, not textures or lighting. Motivated by this, we propose 3D Rasterization, which replaces costly rendering with lightweight rasterization of annotated primitives, enabling augmentations such as counterfactual recovery maneuvers and cross-agent view synthesis. To transfer these synthetic views effectively to real-world deployment, we introduce a Raster-to-Real feature-space alignment that bridges the sim-to-real gap. Together, these components form Rasterization Augmented Planning (RAP), a scalable data augmentation pipeline for planning. RAP achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop robustness and long-tail generalization, ranking first on four major benchmarks: NAVSIM v1/v2, Waymo Open Dataset Vision-based E2E Driving, and Bench2Drive. Our results show that lightweight rasterization with feature alignment suffices to scale E2E training, offering a practical alternative to photorealistic rendering. Project page: https://alan-lanfeng.github.io/RAP/.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 5

Emilia: A Large-Scale, Extensive, Multilingual, and Diverse Dataset for Speech Generation

Recent advancements in speech generation have been driven by the large-scale training datasets. However, current models fall short of capturing the spontaneity and variability inherent in real-world human speech, due to their reliance on audiobook datasets limited to formal read-aloud speech styles. To bridge this gap, we introduce Emilia-Pipe, an open-source preprocessing pipeline to extract high-quality training data from valuable yet underexplored in-the-wild data that capture spontaneous human speech in real-world contexts. By leveraging Emilia-Pipe, we construct Emilia, the first multilingual speech generation dataset derived from in-the-wild speech data. This dataset comprises over 101k hours of speech across six languages: English, Chinese, German, French, Japanese, and Korean. Besides, we expand Emilia to Emilia-Large, a dataset exceeding 216k hours, making it the largest open-source speech generation dataset available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Emilia significantly outperforms traditional audiobook datasets in generating spontaneous and human-like speech, showcasing superior performance in capturing diverse speaker timbre and speaking styles of real-world human speech. Furthermore, this work underscores the importance of scaling dataset size to advance speech generation research and validates the effectiveness of Emilia for both multilingual and crosslingual speech generation.

  • 14 authors
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Jan 27 2

DataDAM: Efficient Dataset Distillation with Attention Matching

Researchers have long tried to minimize training costs in deep learning while maintaining strong generalization across diverse datasets. Emerging research on dataset distillation aims to reduce training costs by creating a small synthetic set that contains the information of a larger real dataset and ultimately achieves test accuracy equivalent to a model trained on the whole dataset. Unfortunately, the synthetic data generated by previous methods are not guaranteed to distribute and discriminate as well as the original training data, and they incur significant computational costs. Despite promising results, there still exists a significant performance gap between models trained on condensed synthetic sets and those trained on the whole dataset. In this paper, we address these challenges using efficient Dataset Distillation with Attention Matching (DataDAM), achieving state-of-the-art performance while reducing training costs. Specifically, we learn synthetic images by matching the spatial attention maps of real and synthetic data generated by different layers within a family of randomly initialized neural networks. Our method outperforms the prior methods on several datasets, including CIFAR10/100, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-1K, and subsets of ImageNet-1K across most of the settings, and achieves improvements of up to 6.5% and 4.1% on CIFAR100 and ImageNet-1K, respectively. We also show that our high-quality distilled images have practical benefits for downstream applications, such as continual learning and neural architecture search.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

TarGEN: Targeted Data Generation with Large Language Models

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked interest in data synthesis techniques, aiming to generate diverse and high-quality synthetic datasets. However, these synthetic datasets often suffer from a lack of diversity and added noise. In this paper, we present TarGEN, a multi-step prompting strategy for generating high-quality synthetic datasets utilizing a LLM. An advantage of TarGEN is its seedless nature; it does not require specific task instances, broadening its applicability beyond task replication. We augment TarGEN with a method known as self-correction empowering LLMs to rectify inaccurately labeled instances during dataset creation, ensuring reliable labels. To assess our technique's effectiveness, we emulate 8 tasks from the SuperGLUE benchmark and finetune various language models, including encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only models on both synthetic and original training sets. Evaluation on the original test set reveals that models trained on datasets generated by TarGEN perform approximately 1-2% points better than those trained on original datasets (82.84% via syn. vs. 81.12% on og. using Flan-T5). When incorporating instruction tuning, the performance increases to 84.54% on synthetic data vs. 81.49% on original data by Flan-T5. A comprehensive analysis of the synthetic dataset compared to the original dataset reveals that the synthetic dataset demonstrates similar or higher levels of dataset complexity and diversity. Furthermore, the synthetic dataset displays a bias level that aligns closely with the original dataset. Finally, when pre-finetuned on our synthetic SuperGLUE dataset, T5-3B yields impressive results on the OpenLLM leaderboard, surpassing the model trained on the Self-Instruct dataset by 4.14% points. We hope that TarGEN can be helpful for quality data generation and reducing the human efforts to create complex benchmarks.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 26, 2023 2

ElasWave: An Elastic-Native System for Scalable Hybrid-Parallel Training

Large-scale LLM pretraining now runs across 10^5--10^6 accelerators, making failures routine and elasticity mandatory. We posit that an elastic-native training system must jointly deliver (i) parameter consistency, (ii) low mean time to recovery (MTTR), (iii) high post-change throughput, and (iv) computation consistency. No prior system achieves all four simultaneously. To achieve these goals, we present ElasWave, which delivers per-step fault tolerance via multi-dimensional scheduling across graph, dataflow, DVFS, and RNG. ElasWave reshapes and reshards micro-batches while preserving the global batch size and gradient scale. It performs online pipeline resharding with asynchronous parameter migration and interleaves ZeRO partitions, reducing parameter recovery processes to disjoint rank-to-rank transfers. It further leverages DVFS to absorb pipeline bubbles and reshards RNG to keep computation consistency. Together, a dynamic communicator enables in-place communication group edits, while per-step in-memory snapshots support online verification and redistribution. We evaluate ElasWave on 96 NPUs and benchmark it against state-of-the-art baselines: throughput improves by 1.35times over ReCycle and 1.60times over TorchFT; communicator recovery completes within one second (up to 82times/3.6times faster than full/partial rebuilds); migration MTTR drops by as much as 51%; and convergence deviation is reduced by approximately 78%.

  • 19 authors
·
Oct 1

TRADES: Generating Realistic Market Simulations with Diffusion Models

Financial markets are complex systems characterized by high statistical noise, nonlinearity, and constant evolution. Thus, modeling them is extremely hard. We address the task of generating realistic and responsive Limit Order Book (LOB) market simulations, which are fundamental for calibrating and testing trading strategies, performing market impact experiments, and generating synthetic market data. Previous works lack realism, usefulness, and responsiveness of the generated simulations. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel TRAnsformer-based Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Engine for LOB Simulations (TRADES). TRADES generates realistic order flows conditioned on the state of the market, leveraging a transformer-based architecture that captures the temporal and spatial characteristics of high-frequency market data. There is a notable absence of quantitative metrics for evaluating generative market simulation models in the literature. To tackle this problem, we adapt the predictive score, a metric measured as an MAE, by training a stock price predictive model on synthetic data and testing it on real data. We compare TRADES with previous works on two stocks, reporting an x3.27 and x3.47 improvement over SoTA according to the predictive score, demonstrating that we generate useful synthetic market data for financial downstream tasks. We assess TRADES's market simulation realism and responsiveness, showing that it effectively learns the conditional data distribution and successfully reacts to an experimental agent, giving sprout to possible calibrations and evaluations of trading strategies and market impact experiments. We developed DeepMarket, the first open-source Python framework for market simulation with deep learning. Our repository includes a synthetic LOB dataset composed of TRADES's generates simulations. We release the code at github.com/LeonardoBerti00/DeepMarket.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 31

MetaSynth: Meta-Prompting-Driven Agentic Scaffolds for Diverse Synthetic Data Generation

Recent smaller language models such Phi-3.5 and Phi-4 rely on synthetic data generated using larger Language models. Questions remain about leveraging synthetic data for other use cases, such as adapting LLMs to specific domains. A key limitation of synthetic data is low diversity, which negatively impacts its downstream applicability for improving other models. To address this, we propose MetaSynth, a method for generating synthetic data that enhances diversity through meta-prompting, where a language model orchestrates multiple "expert" LLM agents to collaboratively generate data. Using only 25 million tokens of synthetic data generated with MetaSynth, we successfully adapt a well-trained LLM (Mistral-7B-v0.3) to two specialized domains-Finance and Biomedicine-without compromising the capabilities of the resulting model in general tasks. In addition, we evaluate the diversity of our synthetic data using seven automated metrics, and find that it approaches the diversity of LLM pre-training corpora. Continually pre-training Mistral-7B-v0.3 with MetaSynth notably outperforms the base LLM, showing improvements of up to 4.08% in Finance and 13.75% in Biomedicine. The same model shows degraded performance when trained on data generated using a template prompt, even when the template includes prior generations and varying In-Context exemplars of real data. Our findings suggest that a few million tokens of diverse synthetic data without mixing any real data, is sufficient for effective domain adaptation when using MetaSynth.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 16 2

Rethinking Driving World Model as Synthetic Data Generator for Perception Tasks

Recent advancements in driving world models enable controllable generation of high-quality RGB videos or multimodal videos. Existing methods primarily focus on metrics related to generation quality and controllability. However, they often overlook the evaluation of downstream perception tasks, which are really crucial for the performance of autonomous driving. Existing methods usually leverage a training strategy that first pretrains on synthetic data and finetunes on real data, resulting in twice the epochs compared to the baseline (real data only). When we double the epochs in the baseline, the benefit of synthetic data becomes negligible. To thoroughly demonstrate the benefit of synthetic data, we introduce Dream4Drive, a novel synthetic data generation framework designed for enhancing the downstream perception tasks. Dream4Drive first decomposes the input video into several 3D-aware guidance maps and subsequently renders the 3D assets onto these guidance maps. Finally, the driving world model is fine-tuned to produce the edited, multi-view photorealistic videos, which can be used to train the downstream perception models. Dream4Drive enables unprecedented flexibility in generating multi-view corner cases at scale, significantly boosting corner case perception in autonomous driving. To facilitate future research, we also contribute a large-scale 3D asset dataset named DriveObj3D, covering the typical categories in driving scenarios and enabling diverse 3D-aware video editing. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that Dream4Drive can effectively boost the performance of downstream perception models under various training epochs. Page: https://wm-research.github.io/Dream4Drive/ GitHub Link: https://github.com/wm-research/Dream4Drive

  • 15 authors
·
Oct 21

Pipette: Automatic Fine-grained Large Language Model Training Configurator for Real-World Clusters

Training large language models (LLMs) is known to be challenging because of the huge computational and memory capacity requirements. To address these issues, it is common to use a cluster of GPUs with 3D parallelism, which splits a model along the data batch, pipeline stage, and intra-layer tensor dimensions. However, the use of 3D parallelism produces the additional challenge of finding the optimal number of ways on each dimension and mapping the split models onto the GPUs. Several previous studies have attempted to automatically find the optimal configuration, but many of these lacked several important aspects. For instance, the heterogeneous nature of the interconnect speeds is often ignored. While the peak bandwidths for the interconnects are usually made equal, the actual attained bandwidth varies per link in real-world clusters. Combined with the critical path modeling that does not properly consider the communication, they easily fall into sub-optimal configurations. In addition, they often fail to consider the memory requirement per GPU, often recommending solutions that could not be executed. To address these challenges, we propose Pipette, which is an automatic fine-grained LLM training configurator for real-world clusters. By devising better performance models along with the memory estimator and fine-grained individual GPU assignment, Pipette achieves faster configurations that satisfy the memory constraints. We evaluated Pipette on large clusters to show that it provides a significant speedup over the prior art. The implementation of Pipette is available at https://github.com/yimjinkyu1/date2024_pipette.

  • 7 authors
·
May 28, 2024

CausalTime: Realistically Generated Time-series for Benchmarking of Causal Discovery

Time-series causal discovery (TSCD) is a fundamental problem of machine learning. However, existing synthetic datasets cannot properly evaluate or predict the algorithms' performance on real data. This study introduces the CausalTime pipeline to generate time-series that highly resemble the real data and with ground truth causal graphs for quantitative performance evaluation. The pipeline starts from real observations in a specific scenario and produces a matching benchmark dataset. Firstly, we harness deep neural networks along with normalizing flow to accurately capture realistic dynamics. Secondly, we extract hypothesized causal graphs by performing importance analysis on the neural network or leveraging prior knowledge. Thirdly, we derive the ground truth causal graphs by splitting the causal model into causal term, residual term, and noise term. Lastly, using the fitted network and the derived causal graph, we generate corresponding versatile time-series proper for algorithm assessment. In the experiments, we validate the fidelity of the generated data through qualitative and quantitative experiments, followed by a benchmarking of existing TSCD algorithms using these generated datasets. CausalTime offers a feasible solution to evaluating TSCD algorithms in real applications and can be generalized to a wide range of fields. For easy use of the proposed approach, we also provide a user-friendly website, hosted on www.causaltime.cc.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. Despite their utility in advancing digital automation, a critical bottleneck persists: collecting high-quality trajectory data for training. Common practices for collecting such data rely on human supervision or synthetic data generation through executing pre-defined tasks, which are either resource-intensive or unable to guarantee data quality. Moreover, these methods suffer from limited data diversity and significant gaps between synthetic data and real-world environments. To address these challenges, we propose OS-Genesis, a novel GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverses the conventional trajectory collection process. Instead of relying on pre-defined tasks, OS-Genesis enables agents first to perceive environments and perform step-wise interactions, then retrospectively derive high-quality tasks to enable trajectory-level exploration. A trajectory reward model is then employed to ensure the quality of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with OS-Genesis significantly improves their performance on highly challenging online benchmarks. In-depth analysis further validates OS-Genesis's efficiency and its superior data quality and diversity compared to existing synthesis methods. Our codes, data, and checkpoints are available at https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Genesis-Home/{OS-Genesis Homepage}.

  • 15 authors
·
Dec 27, 2024 3

Few-step Flow for 3D Generation via Marginal-Data Transport Distillation

Flow-based 3D generation models typically require dozens of sampling steps during inference. Though few-step distillation methods, particularly Consistency Models (CMs), have achieved substantial advancements in accelerating 2D diffusion models, they remain under-explored for more complex 3D generation tasks. In this study, we propose a novel framework, MDT-dist, for few-step 3D flow distillation. Our approach is built upon a primary objective: distilling the pretrained model to learn the Marginal-Data Transport. Directly learning this objective needs to integrate the velocity fields, while this integral is intractable to be implemented. Therefore, we propose two optimizable objectives, Velocity Matching (VM) and Velocity Distillation (VD), to equivalently convert the optimization target from the transport level to the velocity and the distribution level respectively. Velocity Matching (VM) learns to stably match the velocity fields between the student and the teacher, but inevitably provides biased gradient estimates. Velocity Distillation (VD) further enhances the optimization process by leveraging the learned velocity fields to perform probability density distillation. When evaluated on the pioneer 3D generation framework TRELLIS, our method reduces sampling steps of each flow transformer from 25 to 1 or 2, achieving 0.68s (1 step x 2) and 0.94s (2 steps x 2) latency with 9.0x and 6.5x speedup on A800, while preserving high visual and geometric fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing CM distillation methods, and enables TRELLIS to achieve superior performance in few-step 3D generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 4 2