Daily Papers

We present Autoregressive Representation Alignment (ARRA), a new training framework that unlocks global-coherent text-to-image generation in autoregressive LLMs without architectural changes. Unlike prior work that requires complex architectural redesigns, ARRA aligns LLM hidden states with visual representations from external visual foundational models via a global visual alignment loss and a hybrid token, <HYBNEXT>. This token enforces dual constraints: local next-token prediction and global semantic distillation, enabling LLMs to implicitly learn spatial and contextual coherence while retaining their original autoregressive paradigm. Extensive experiments validate ARRA's plug-and-play versatility. When training from text-generation-only LLMs or random initialization, ARRA reduces FID by 25.5% (MIMIC-CXR), 8.8% (DeepEyeNet), and 7.5% (ImageNet) for advanced autoregressive LLMs like Chameleon and LlamaGen, all without framework modifications. For domain adaption, ARRA aligns general-purpose LLMs with specialized models (e.g., BioMedCLIP), achieving an 18.6% FID reduction over direct fine-tuning on medical imaging (MIMIC-CXR). By demonstrating that training objective redesign -- not just architectural innovation -- can resolve cross-modal global coherence challenges, ARRA offers a complementary paradigm for advancing autoregressive models. Code and models will be released to advance autoregressive image generation.

Time Series Imputation (TSI), which aims to recover missing values in temporal data, remains a fundamental challenge due to the complex and often high-rate missingness in real-world scenarios. Existing models typically optimize the point-wise reconstruction loss, focusing on recovering numerical values (local information). However, we observe that under high missing rates, these models still perform well in the training phase yet produce poor imputations and distorted latent representation distributions (global information) in the inference phase. This reveals a critical optimization dilemma: current objectives lack global guidance, leading models to overfit local noise and fail to capture global information of the data. To address this issue, we propose a new training paradigm, Glocal Information Bottleneck (Glocal-IB). Glocal-IB is model-agnostic and extends the standard IB framework by introducing a Global Alignment loss, derived from a tractable mutual information approximation. This loss aligns the latent representations of masked inputs with those of their originally observed counterparts. It helps the model retain global structure and local details while suppressing noise caused by missing values, giving rise to better generalization under high missingness. Extensive experiments on nine datasets confirm that Glocal-IB leads to consistently improved performance and aligned latent representations under missingness. Our code implementation is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/NeurIPS-25-Glocal-IB.

Cross-modal alignment is crucial for multimodal representation fusion due to the inherent heterogeneity between modalities. While Transformer-based methods have shown promising results in modeling inter-modal relationships, their quadratic computational complexity limits their applicability to long-sequence or large-scale data. Although recent Mamba-based approaches achieve linear complexity, their sequential scanning mechanism poses fundamental challenges in comprehensively modeling cross-modal relationships. To address this limitation, we propose AlignMamba, an efficient and effective method for multimodal fusion. Specifically, grounded in Optimal Transport, we introduce a local cross-modal alignment module that explicitly learns token-level correspondences between different modalities. Moreover, we propose a global cross-modal alignment loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy to implicitly enforce the consistency between different modal distributions. Finally, the unimodal representations after local and global alignment are passed to the Mamba backbone for further cross-modal interaction and multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments on complete and incomplete multimodal fusion tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is aimed at predicting the location of a query image by referencing a database of geotagged images. For VPR task, often fewer discriminative local regions in an image produce important effects while mundane background regions do not contribute or even cause perceptual aliasing because of easy overlap. However, existing methods lack precisely modeling and full exploitation of these discriminative regions. In this paper, we propose the Focus on Local (FoL) approach to stimulate the performance of image retrieval and re-ranking in VPR simultaneously by mining and exploiting reliable discriminative local regions in images and introducing pseudo-correlation supervision. First, we design two losses, Extraction-Aggregation Spatial Alignment Loss (SAL) and Foreground-Background Contrast Enhancement Loss (CEL), to explicitly model reliable discriminative local regions and use them to guide the generation of global representations and efficient re-ranking. Second, we introduce a weakly-supervised local feature training strategy based on pseudo-correspondences obtained from aggregating global features to alleviate the lack of local correspondences ground truth for the VPR task. Third, we suggest an efficient re-ranking pipeline that is efficiently and precisely based on discriminative region guidance. Finally, experimental results show that our FoL achieves the state-of-the-art on multiple VPR benchmarks in both image retrieval and re-ranking stages and also significantly outperforms existing two-stage VPR methods in terms of computational efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/chenshunpeng/FoL

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has achieved success on multiple downstream tasks by aligning image and text modalities. However, the nature of global contrastive learning limits CLIP's ability to comprehend compositional concepts, such as relations and attributes. Although recent studies employ global hard negative samples to improve compositional understanding, these methods significantly compromise the model's inherent general capabilities by forcibly distancing textual negative samples from images in the embedding space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Decoupled Global-Local Alignment (DeGLA) framework that improves compositional understanding while substantially mitigating losses in general capabilities. To optimize the retention of the model's inherent capabilities, we incorporate a self-distillation mechanism within the global alignment process, aligning the learnable image-text encoder with a frozen teacher model derived from an exponential moving average. Under the constraint of self-distillation, it effectively mitigates the catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge during fine-tuning. To improve compositional understanding, we first leverage the in-context learning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct about 2M high-quality negative captions across five types. Subsequently, we propose the Image-Grounded Contrast (IGC) loss and Text-Grounded Contrast (TGC) loss to enhance vision-language compositionally. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the DeGLA framework. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, DeGLA achieves an average enhancement of 3.5% across the VALSE, SugarCrepe, and ARO benchmarks. Concurrently, it obtains an average performance improvement of 13.0% on zero-shot classification tasks across eleven datasets. Our code will be released at https://github.com/xiaoxing2001/DeGLA

Multimodal recommendation systems are increasingly becoming foundational technologies for e-commerce and content platforms, enabling personalized services by jointly modeling users' historical behaviors and the multimodal features of items (e.g., visual and textual). However, most existing methods rely on either static fusion strategies or graph-based local interaction modeling, facing two critical limitations: (1) insufficient ability to model fine-grained cross-modal associations, leading to suboptimal fusion quality; and (2) a lack of global distribution-level consistency, causing representational bias. To address these, we propose MambaRec, a novel framework that integrates local feature alignment and global distribution regularization via attention-guided learning. At its core, we introduce the Dilated Refinement Attention Module (DREAM), which uses multi-scale dilated convolutions with channel-wise and spatial attention to align fine-grained semantic patterns between visual and textual modalities. This module captures hierarchical relationships and context-aware associations, improving cross-modal semantic modeling. Additionally, we apply Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and contrastive loss functions to constrain global modality alignment, enhancing semantic consistency. This dual regularization reduces mode-specific deviations and boosts robustness. To improve scalability, MambaRec employs a dimensionality reduction strategy to lower the computational cost of high-dimensional multimodal features. Extensive experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets show that MambaRec outperforms existing methods in fusion quality, generalization, and efficiency. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/rkl71/MambaRec.

DNA sequence alignment involves assigning short DNA reads to the most probable locations on an extensive reference genome. This process is crucial for various genomic analyses, including variant calling, transcriptomics, and epigenomics. Conventional methods, refined over decades, tackle this challenge in 2 steps: genome indexing followed by efficient search to locate likely positions for given reads. Building on the success of Large Language Models in encoding text into embeddings, where the distance metric captures semantic similarity, recent efforts have explored whether the same Transformer architecture can produce embeddings for DNA sequences. Such models have shown early promise in classifying short DNA sequences, such as detecting coding/non-coding regions, and enhancer, promoter sequences. However, performance at sequence classification tasks does not translate to sequence alignment, where it is necessary to search across the genome to align each read, a significantly longer-range task. We bridge this gap by framing the Sequence Alignment task for Transformer models as an "Embed-Search-Align" task. In this framework, a novel Reference-Free DNA Embedding model generates embeddings of reads and reference fragments, which are projected into a shared vector space where the read-fragment distance is used as a surrogate for alignment. Technical contributions include: (1) Contrastive loss for self-supervised training of DNA sequence representations, facilitating rich reference-free, sequence-level embeddings, and (2) a DNA vector store to enable search across fragments on a global scale. DNA-ESA is 99% accurate when aligning 250-length reads onto a human genome (3gb), rivaling conventional methods such as Bowtie and BWA-Mem. DNA-ESA exceeds the performance of 6 Transformer model baselines such as Nucleotide Transformer, Hyena-DNA, and shows task transfer across chromosomes and species.

Adapting large-scale image-text pre-training models, e.g., CLIP, to the video domain represents the current state-of-the-art for text-video retrieval. The primary approaches involve transferring text-video pairs to a common embedding space and leveraging cross-modal interactions on specific entities for semantic alignment. Though effective, these paradigms entail prohibitive computational costs, leading to inefficient retrieval. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, Global-Local Semantic Consistent Learning (GLSCL), which capitalizes on latent shared semantics across modalities for text-video retrieval. Specifically, we introduce a parameter-free global interaction module to explore coarse-grained alignment. Then, we devise a shared local interaction module that employs several learnable queries to capture latent semantic concepts for learning fine-grained alignment. Furthermore, an Inter-Consistency Loss (ICL) is devised to accomplish the concept alignment between the visual query and corresponding textual query, and an Intra-Diversity Loss (IDL) is developed to repulse the distribution within visual (textual) queries to generate more discriminative concepts. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmarks (i.e., MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, LSMDC, and ActivityNet) substantiate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Remarkably, our method achieves comparable performance with SOTA as well as being nearly 220 times faster in terms of computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/zchoi/GLSCL.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain vulnerable to transferable adversarial examples. While existing methods typically achieve targeted attacks by aligning global features-such as CLIP's [CLS] token-between adversarial and target samples, they often overlook the rich local information encoded in patch tokens. This leads to suboptimal alignment and limited transferability, particularly for closed-source models. To address this limitation, we propose a targeted transferable adversarial attack method based on feature optimal alignment, called FOA-Attack, to improve adversarial transfer capability. Specifically, at the global level, we introduce a global feature loss based on cosine similarity to align the coarse-grained features of adversarial samples with those of target samples. At the local level, given the rich local representations within Transformers, we leverage clustering techniques to extract compact local patterns to alleviate redundant local features. We then formulate local feature alignment between adversarial and target samples as an optimal transport (OT) problem and propose a local clustering optimal transport loss to refine fine-grained feature alignment. Additionally, we propose a dynamic ensemble model weighting strategy to adaptively balance the influence of multiple models during adversarial example generation, thereby further improving transferability. Extensive experiments across various models demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, especially in transferring to closed-source MLLMs. The code is released at https://github.com/jiaxiaojunQAQ/FOA-Attack.

With the success of 2D and 3D visual generative models, there is growing interest in generating 4D content. Existing methods primarily rely on text prompts to produce 4D content, but they often fall short of accurately defining complex or rare motions. To address this limitation, we propose MagicPose4D, a novel framework for refined control over both appearance and motion in 4D generation. Unlike traditional methods, MagicPose4D accepts monocular videos as motion prompts, enabling precise and customizable motion generation. MagicPose4D comprises two key modules: i) Dual-Phase 4D Reconstruction Module} which operates in two phases. The first phase focuses on capturing the model's shape using accurate 2D supervision and less accurate but geometrically informative 3D pseudo-supervision without imposing skeleton constraints. The second phase refines the model using more accurate pseudo-3D supervision, obtained in the first phase and introduces kinematic chain-based skeleton constraints to ensure physical plausibility. Additionally, we propose a Global-local Chamfer loss that aligns the overall distribution of predicted mesh vertices with the supervision while maintaining part-level alignment without extra annotations. ii) Cross-category Motion Transfer Module} leverages the predictions from the 4D reconstruction module and uses a kinematic-chain-based skeleton to achieve cross-category motion transfer. It ensures smooth transitions between frames through dynamic rigidity, facilitating robust generalization without additional training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MagicPose4D significantly improves the accuracy and consistency of 4D content generation, outperforming existing methods in various benchmarks.

Recently, prompt-tuning with pre-trained language models (PLMs) has demonstrated the significantly enhancing ability of relation extraction (RE) tasks. However, in low-resource scenarios, where the available training data is scarce, previous prompt-based methods may still perform poorly for prompt-based representation learning due to a superficial understanding of the relation. To this end, we highlight the importance of learning high-quality relation representation in low-resource scenarios for RE, and propose a novel prompt-based relation representation method, named MVRE (Multi-View Relation Extraction), to better leverage the capacity of PLMs to improve the performance of RE within the low-resource prompt-tuning paradigm. Specifically, MVRE decouples each relation into different perspectives to encompass multi-view relation representations for maximizing the likelihood during relation inference. Furthermore, we also design a Global-Local loss and a Dynamic-Initialization method for better alignment of the multi-view relation-representing virtual words, containing the semantics of relation labels during the optimization learning process and initialization. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in low-resource settings.

Recent dense audio-visual (AV) models achieve impressive retrieval and emergent localization, but almost all evidence comes from English-centric, caption-rich web video. It is unclear whether these objectives survive in low-resource, code-switched, and noisy multilingual settings that typify developing regions. We show they do**-**and that the choice of aggregation function becomes even more critical. Using a multilingual subset of Project Vaani spanning dozens of Indian languages and dialectal variants, we compare three contrastive objectives: (i) a global mean-pooled loss (CLIP-style), (ii) a dense max-mean token matcher (DenseAV-style), and (iii) a simple hybrid (motivated by frozen-vision alignment strategies). The dense objective delivers a +59% relative R@1 (Audio Visual) improvement over global pooling and substantially lower mean/median ranks, while consistently producing sharp zero-shot localization heatmaps of spoken objects-despite keeping the vision backbone entirely frozen (no LoRA / partial fine-tuning). Our results demonstrate that dense token routing is not a luxury of high-resource English corpora; it is more decisive when annotations and acoustic cleanliness are scarce. We release the codebase and trained models.

This paper presents a novel framework for aligning learnable latent spaces to arbitrary target distributions by leveraging flow-based generative models as priors. Our method first pretrains a flow model on the target features to capture the underlying distribution. This fixed flow model subsequently regularizes the latent space via an alignment loss, which reformulates the flow matching objective to treat the latents as optimization targets. We formally prove that minimizing this alignment loss establishes a computationally tractable surrogate objective for maximizing a variational lower bound on the log-likelihood of latents under the target distribution. Notably, the proposed method eliminates computationally expensive likelihood evaluations and avoids ODE solving during optimization. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate in a controlled setting that the alignment loss landscape closely approximates the negative log-likelihood of the target distribution. We further validate the effectiveness of our approach through large-scale image generation experiments on ImageNet with diverse target distributions, accompanied by detailed discussions and ablation studies. With both theoretical and empirical validation, our framework paves a new way for latent space alignment.

Robust validation metrics remain essential in contemporary deep learning, not only to detect overfitting and poor generalization, but also to monitor training dynamics. In the supervised classification setting, we investigate whether interactions between training data and model weights can yield such a metric that both tracks generalization during training and attributes performance to individual training samples. We introduce Gradient-Weight Alignment (GWA), quantifying the coherence between per-sample gradients and model weights. We show that effective learning corresponds to coherent alignment, while misalignment indicates deteriorating generalization. GWA is efficiently computable during training and reflects both sample-specific contributions and dataset-wide learning dynamics. Extensive experiments show that GWA accurately predicts optimal early stopping, enables principled model comparisons, and identifies influential training samples, providing a validation-set-free approach for model analysis directly from the training data.

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models are typically trained with the cross-entropy loss, which forces the model outputs to be aligned verbatim with the target sentence and will highly penalize small shifts in word positions. Latent alignment models relax the explicit alignment by marginalizing out all monotonic latent alignments with the CTC loss. However, they cannot handle non-monotonic alignments, which is non-negligible as there is typically global word reordering in machine translation. In this work, we explore non-monotonic latent alignments for NAT. We extend the alignment space to non-monotonic alignments to allow for the global word reordering and further consider all alignments that overlap with the target sentence. We non-monotonically match the alignments to the target sentence and train the latent alignment model to maximize the F1 score of non-monotonic matching. Extensive experiments on major WMT benchmarks show that our method substantially improves the translation performance of CTC-based models. Our best model achieves 30.06 BLEU on WMT14 En-De with only one-iteration decoding, closing the gap between non-autoregressive and autoregressive models.

Deep neural networks have reached human-level performance on many computer vision tasks. However, the objectives used to train these networks enforce only that similar images are embedded at similar locations in the representation space, and do not directly constrain the global structure of the resulting space. Here, we explore the impact of supervising this global structure by linearly aligning it with human similarity judgments. We find that a naive approach leads to large changes in local representational structure that harm downstream performance. Thus, we propose a novel method that aligns the global structure of representations while preserving their local structure. This global-local transform considerably improves accuracy across a variety of few-shot learning and anomaly detection tasks. Our results indicate that human visual representations are globally organized in a way that facilitates learning from few examples, and incorporating this global structure into neural network representations improves performance on downstream tasks.

A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first set of human annotated red-teaming prompts in different languages distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory for understanding the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about their applications. To regulate LLMs' responses to such questions, a training strategy called alignment can help. Yet, alignment can be unexpectedly compromised when fine-tuning an LLM for downstream tasks. This paper focuses on recovering the alignment lost during fine-tuning. We observe that there are two distinct directions inherent in an aligned LLM: the aligned direction and the harmful direction. An LLM is inclined to answer questions in the aligned direction while refusing queries in the harmful direction. Therefore, we propose to recover the harmful direction of the fine-tuned model that has been compromised. Specifically, we restore a small subset of the fine-tuned model's weight parameters from the original aligned model using gradient descent. We also introduce a rollback mechanism to avoid aggressive recovery and maintain downstream task performance. Our evaluation on 125 fine-tuned LLMs demonstrates that our method can reduce their harmful rate (percentage of answering harmful questions) from 33.25\% to 1.74\%, without sacrificing task performance much. In contrast, the existing methods either only reduce the harmful rate to a limited extent or significantly impact the normal functionality. Our code is available at https://github.com/kangyangWHU/LLMAlignment

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become a standard tool for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Yet, even minor LoRA updates can induce alignment drift, weakening safety and behavioral constraints through entangled parameter changes. To address this, we propose AlignGuard-LoRA (AGL), a principled framework for preserving alignment during finetuning. AGL introduces several key components: a primary task loss for supervision, Fisher Information Matrix-based regularization to restrict updates in alignment-sensitive subspaces, and task-specific regularization to stabilize the integration of new knowledge. We further introduce collision-aware regularization, blending Riemannian overlap -- which penalizes coordinate-wise interference -- and geodesic separation -- which encourages disjoint update geometry. We curate DriftCaps, a targeted diagnostic benchmark of safe and unsafe prompts designed to quantify alignment drift and safety degradation. Empirical evaluations show that AGL mitigates alignment drift by up to 50% on safety-critical benchmarks without degrading downstream task performance. Comprehensive ablation confirms that each component contributes distinctly to preserving latent safety behaviors. Finally, we derive and validate a scaling law for catastrophic forgetting, revealing that AGL flattens post-finetuning loss escalation while preserving adaptation dynamics. AGL is a structurally grounded refinement of LoRA, ensuring alignment preservation with minimal trade-offs. To encourage further exploration and development, we open-source our implementation.

Loss explosions in training deep neural networks can nullify multi-million dollar training runs. Conventional monitoring metrics like weight and gradient norms are often lagging and ambiguous predictors, as their values vary dramatically across different models and even between layers of the same model, making it difficult to establish a unified standard for detecting impending failure. We introduce Spectral Alignment (SA), a novel, theoretically-grounded metric that monitors the distributional alignment between layer inputs and the principal singular vectors of weight matrices. We show that a collapse in the sign diversity of this alignment is a powerful early predictor of representational collapse and training divergence. Empirical results on language models demonstrate that monitoring the SA distribution provides a significantly earlier and clearer warning of loss explosions than traditional scalar metrics. SA's low computational overhead makes it a practical tool for safeguarding model training.

When applying a pre-trained 2D-to-3D human pose lifting model to a target unseen dataset, large performance degradation is commonly encountered due to domain shift issues. We observe that the degradation is caused by two factors: 1) the large distribution gap over global positions of poses between the source and target datasets due to variant camera parameters and settings, and 2) the deficient diversity of local structures of poses in training. To this end, we combine global adaptation and local generalization in PoseDA, a simple yet effective framework of unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D human pose estimation. Specifically, global adaptation aims to align global positions of poses from the source domain to the target domain with a proposed global position alignment (GPA) module. And local generalization is designed to enhance the diversity of 2D-3D pose mapping with a local pose augmentation (LPA) module. These modules bring significant performance improvement without introducing additional learnable parameters. In addition, we propose local pose augmentation (LPA) to enhance the diversity of 3D poses following an adversarial training scheme consisting of 1) a augmentation generator that generates the parameters of pre-defined pose transformations and 2) an anchor discriminator to ensure the reality and quality of the augmented data. Our approach can be applicable to almost all 2D-3D lifting models. PoseDA achieves 61.3 mm of MPJPE on MPI-INF-3DHP under a cross-dataset evaluation setup, improving upon the previous state-of-the-art method by 10.2\%.

LLM alignment ensures that large language models behave safely and effectively by aligning their outputs with human values, goals, and intentions. Aligning LLMs employ huge amounts of data, computation, and time. Moreover, curating data with human feedback is expensive and takes time. Recent research depicts the benefit of data engineering in the fine-tuning and pre-training paradigms to bring down such costs. However, alignment differs from the afore-mentioned paradigms and it is unclear if data efficient alignment is feasible. In this work, we first aim to understand how the performance of LLM alignment scales with data. We find out that LLM alignment performance follows an exponential plateau pattern which tapers off post a rapid initial increase. Based on this, we identify data subsampling as a viable method to reduce resources required for alignment. Further, we propose an information theory-based methodology for efficient alignment by identifying a small high quality subset thereby reducing the computation and time required by alignment. We evaluate the proposed methodology over multiple datasets and compare the results. We find that the model aligned using our proposed methodology outperforms other sampling methods and performs comparable to the model aligned with the full dataset while using less than 10% data, leading to greater than 90% savings in costs, resources, and faster LLM alignment.

In this paper, we revisit the rotation averaging problem applied in global Structure-from-Motion pipelines. We argue that the main problem of current methods is the minimized cost function that is only weakly connected with the input data via the estimated epipolar geometries.We propose to better model the underlying noise distributions by directly propagating the uncertainty from the point correspondences into the rotation averaging. Such uncertainties are obtained for free by considering the Jacobians of two-view refinements. Moreover, we explore integrating a variant of the MAGSAC loss into the rotation averaging problem, instead of using classical robust losses employed in current frameworks. The proposed method leads to results superior to baselines, in terms of accuracy, on large-scale public benchmarks. The code is public. https://github.com/zhangganlin/GlobalSfMpy

Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned to align with human values often exhibit alignment drift, producing unsafe or policy-violating completions when exposed to adversarial prompts, decoding perturbations, or paraphrased jailbreaks. While prior work has behaviorally characterized alignment failure, little is known about the training-time belief sources underlying these failures. We introduce TraceAlign, a unified framework for tracing unsafe completions back to their root causes in the model's training corpus. Central to our approach is the Belief Conflict Index (BCI), which quantifies semantic inconsistency between generated spans and aligned policies, based on retrieved training documents using suffix-array matching. We propose three complementary interventions: (i) TraceShield, an inference-time safety filter that refuses completions with high-BCI spans, (ii) Contrastive Belief Deconfliction Loss, a contrastive fine-tuning objective penalizing high-BCI continuations during DPO, and (iii) Prov-Decode, a provenance-aware decoding strategy that vetoes beam expansions predicted to yield high-BCI spans. Together, these defenses reduce alignment drift by up to 85% on our curated Alignment Drift Benchmark (ADB) while preserving utility on standard tasks, with delta less than 0.2 and improved refusal quality. We further derive a theoretical upper bound on drift likelihood via suffix-array span statistics, linking memorization frequency and length to adversarial reactivation risk. TraceAlign thus provides the first scalable, traceable, and grounded toolkit for understanding and mitigating alignment failures at source. To encourage further exploration and development, we open-source our implementation at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tracealign-2DA7

In the latest advancements in multimodal learning, effectively addressing the spatial and semantic losses of visual data after encoding remains a critical challenge. This is because the performance of large multimodal models is positively correlated with the coupling between visual encoders and large language models. Existing approaches often face issues such as vector gaps or semantic disparities, resulting in information loss during the propagation process. To address these issues, we propose MAGE (Multimodal Alignment and Generation Enhancement), a novel framework that bridges the semantic spaces of vision and text through an innovative alignment mechanism. By introducing the Intelligent Alignment Network (IAN), MAGE achieves dimensional and semantic alignment. To reduce the gap between synonymous heterogeneous data, we employ a training strategy that combines cross-entropy and mean squared error, significantly enhancing the alignment effect. Moreover, to enhance MAGE's "Any-to-Any" capability, we developed a fine-tuning dataset for multimodal tool-calling instructions to expand the model's output capability boundaries. Finally, our proposed multimodal large model architecture, MAGE, achieved significantly better performance compared to similar works across various evaluation benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, and SEED. Complete code and appendix are available at: https://github.com/GTCOM-NLP/MAGE.

In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance compositional understanding in pre-trained vision and language models (VLMs) without sacrificing performance in zero-shot multi-modal tasks. Traditional fine-tuning approaches often improve compositional reasoning at the cost of degrading multi-modal capabilities, primarily due to the use of global hard negative (HN) loss, which contrasts global representations of images and texts. This global HN loss pushes HN texts that are highly similar to the original ones, damaging the model's multi-modal representations. To overcome this limitation, we propose Fine-grained Selective Calibrated CLIP (FSC-CLIP), which integrates local hard negative loss and selective calibrated regularization. These innovations provide fine-grained negative supervision while preserving the model's representational integrity. Our extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks for both compositionality and multi-modal tasks show that FSC-CLIP not only achieves compositionality on par with state-of-the-art models but also retains strong multi-modal capabilities. Code is available at: https://github.com/ytaek-oh/fsc-clip.

Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning.

To ensure safe usage, Large Language Models (LLMs) typically undergo alignment with human-defined values. However, this alignment often relies on primarily English data and is biased towards Western-centric values, limiting its effectiveness in low-resource language settings. In this paper, we describe our approach for aligning SEA-Lion-v2.1-Instruct (a Llama3-8B variant) to minimize toxicity in Singlish, an English creole specific to Singapore. We find that supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) on paired and unpaired preferences is more sample efficient and yields significantly better results than Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our analysis reveals that DPO implicitly enforces a weaker safety objective than KTO, and that SFT complements KTO by improving training stability. Finally, we introduce a simple but novel modification to KTO, KTO-S, which improves training stability through better gradient exploitation. Overall, we present a general approach for safety alignment conducive to low-resource English languages, successfully reducing toxicity by 99\% on our Singlish benchmark, with gains generalizing to the broader TOXIGEN dataset while maintaining strong performance across standard LLM benchmarks.

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) aims to ensure their outputs adhere to human values, ethical standards, and legal norms. Traditional alignment methods often rely on resource-intensive fine-tuning (FT), which may suffer from knowledge degradation and face challenges in scenarios where the model accessibility or computational resources are constrained. In contrast, training-free (TF) alignment techniques--leveraging in-context learning, decoding-time adjustments, and post-generation corrections--offer a promising alternative by enabling alignment without heavily retraining LLMs, making them adaptable to both open-source and closed-source environments. This paper presents the first systematic review of TF alignment methods, categorizing them by stages of pre-decoding, in-decoding, and post-decoding. For each stage, we provide a detailed examination from the viewpoint of LLMs and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), highlighting their mechanisms and limitations. Furthermore, we identify key challenges and future directions, paving the way for more inclusive and effective TF alignment techniques. By synthesizing and organizing the rapidly growing body of research, this survey offers a guidance for practitioners and advances the development of safer and more reliable LLMs.

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, deep neural networks continue to suffer from performance degradation when applied to new data that differs from training data. Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address this challenge by adapting a model to unlabeled data at test time. TTA can be applied to pretrained networks without modifying their training procedures, enabling them to utilize a well-formed source distribution for adaptation. One possible approach is to align the representation space of test samples to the source distribution (i.e., feature alignment). However, performing feature alignment in TTA is especially challenging in that access to labeled source data is restricted during adaptation. That is, a model does not have a chance to learn test data in a class-discriminative manner, which was feasible in other adaptation tasks (e.g., unsupervised domain adaptation) via supervised losses on the source data. Based on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective feature alignment loss, termed as Class-Aware Feature Alignment (CAFA), which simultaneously 1) encourages a model to learn target representations in a class-discriminative manner and 2) effectively mitigates the distribution shifts at test time. Our method does not require any hyper-parameters or additional losses, which are required in previous approaches. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 different datasets and show our proposed method consistently outperforms existing baselines.

Alignment with human preference is a desired property of large language models (LLMs). Currently, the main alignment approach is based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite the effectiveness of RLHF, it is intricate to implement and train, thus recent studies explore how to develop alternative alignment approaches based on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). A major limitation of SFT is that it essentially does imitation learning, which cannot fully understand what are the expected behaviors. To address this issue, we propose an improved alignment approach named FIGA. Different from prior methods, we incorporate fine-grained (i.e., token or phrase level) quality signals that are derived by contrasting good and bad responses. Our approach has made two major contributions. Firstly, we curate a refined alignment dataset that pairs initial responses and the corresponding revised ones. Secondly, we devise a new loss function can leverage fine-grained quality signals to instruct the learning of LLMs for alignment. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approaches by comparing a number of competitive baselines.

Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal that fine-tuning LLMs on data with the chain of thought (COT) reasoning process can significantly enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, we find that the fine-tuned LLMs suffer from an Assessment Misalignment problem, i.e., they frequently assign higher scores to subpar COTs, leading to potential limitations in their reasoning abilities. To address this problem, we introduce an Alignment Fine-Tuning (AFT) paradigm, which involves three steps: 1) fine-tuning LLMs with COT training data; 2) generating multiple COT responses for each question, and categorizing them into positive and negative ones based on whether they achieve the correct answer; 3) calibrating the scores of positive and negative responses given by LLMs with a novel constraint alignment loss. Specifically, the constraint alignment loss has two objectives: a) Alignment, which guarantees that positive scores surpass negative scores to encourage answers with high-quality COTs; b) Constraint, which keeps the negative scores confined to a reasonable range to prevent the model degradation. Beyond just the binary positive and negative feedback, the constraint alignment loss can be seamlessly adapted to the ranking situations when ranking feedback is accessible. Furthermore, we also delve deeply into recent ranking-based alignment methods, such as DPO, RRHF, and PRO, and discover that the constraint, which has been overlooked by these approaches, is also crucial for their performance. Extensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks with both binary and ranking feedback demonstrate the effectiveness of AFT.

Aligning general-purpose large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks often incurs significant training adjustment costs. Prior research has explored various avenues to enhance alignment efficiency, primarily through minimal-data training or data-driven activations to identify key attention heads. However, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. To address this issue and enhance model alignment efficiency, we propose the \textbf{Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy (ALPS)}, an efficient algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method activates only 10\% of attention parameters during fine-tuning while achieving a 2\% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks. Moreover, the identified task-specific heads are transferable across datasets and mitigate knowledge forgetting. Our work and findings provide a novel perspective on efficient LLM alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/VoiceBeer/ALPS.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is a vital task for LLM practitioners. Current alignment techniques have several limitations: (1) requiring a large amount of annotated data; (2) demanding heavy human involvement; (3) lacking a systematic mechanism to continuously improve. In this work, we study aligning LLMs to a new domain with limited samples (e.g. < 100). We propose an algorithm that can self-align LLMs iteratively without active human involvement. Unlike existing works, our algorithm relies on neither human-crafted instructions nor labeled rewards, significantly reducing human involvement. In addition, our algorithm can self-improve the alignment continuously. The key idea is to first retrieve high-quality samples related to the target domain and use them as In-context Learning examples to generate more samples. Then we use the self-generated samples to finetune the LLM iteratively. We show that our method can unlock the LLMs' self-generalization ability to perform alignment with near-zero human supervision. We test our algorithm on three benchmarks in safety, truthfulness, and instruction-following, and show good performance in alignment, domain adaptability, and scalability.

The "alignment tax" of post-training is typically framed as a drop in task accuracy. We show it also involves a severe loss of calibration, making models overconfident, less reliable, and model outputs less diverse. We show that this trade-off can be navigated effectively via a simple post-hoc intervention: interpolating between a model's weights before and after alignment. Crucially, this is not a strict trade-off. We find that the process consistently reveals Pareto-optimal interpolations - models that improve accuracy beyond both parents while substantially recovering the calibration lost during alignment. Our work demonstrates that simple model merging provides a computationally efficient method for mitigating the full scope of the alignment tax, yielding models that are more capable and more reliable.

Deep learning models are known to exhibit a strong texture bias, while human tends to rely heavily on global shape structure for object recognition. The current benchmark for evaluating a model's global shape bias is a set of style-transferred images with the assumption that resistance to the attack of style transfer is related to the development of global structure sensitivity in the model. In this work, we show that networks trained with style-transfer images indeed learn to ignore style, but its shape bias arises primarily from local detail. We provide a Disrupted Structure Testbench (DiST) as a direct measurement of global structure sensitivity. Our test includes 2400 original images from ImageNet-1K, each of which is accompanied by two images with the global shapes of the original image disrupted while preserving its texture via the texture synthesis program. We found that black{(1) models that performed well on the previous cue-conflict dataset do not fare well in the proposed DiST; (2) the supervised trained Vision Transformer (ViT) lose its global spatial information from positional embedding, leading to no significant advantages over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on DiST. While self-supervised learning methods, especially mask autoencoder significantly improves the global structure sensitivity of ViT. (3) Improving the global structure sensitivity is orthogonal to resistance to style-transfer, indicating that the relationship between global shape structure and local texture detail is not an either/or relationship. Training with DiST images and style-transferred images are complementary, and can be combined to train network together to enhance the global shape sensitivity and robustness of local features.} Our code will be hosted in github: https://github.com/leelabcnbc/DiST

Recent works have shown promising results in connecting speech encoders to large language models (LLMs) for speech recognition. However, several limitations persist, including limited fine-tuning options, a lack of mechanisms to enforce speech-text alignment, and high insertion errors especially in domain mismatch conditions. This paper presents a comprehensive solution to address these issues. We begin by investigating more thoughtful fine-tuning schemes. Next, we propose a matching loss to enhance alignment between modalities. Finally, we explore training and inference methods to mitigate high insertion errors. Experimental results on the Librispeech corpus demonstrate that partially fine-tuning the encoder and LLM using parameter-efficient methods, such as LoRA, is the most cost-effective approach. Additionally, the matching loss improves modality alignment, enhancing performance. The proposed training and inference methods significantly reduce insertion errors.

Aligning language models with human preferences is crucial for reducing errors and biases in these models. Alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), are typically cast as optimizing a tradeoff between human preference rewards and a proximity regularization term that encourages staying close to the unaligned model. Selecting an appropriate level of regularization is critical: insufficient regularization can lead to reduced model capabilities due to reward hacking, whereas excessive regularization hinders alignment. Traditional methods for finding the optimal regularization level require retraining multiple models with varying regularization strengths. This process, however, is resource-intensive, especially for large models. To address this challenge, we propose decoding-time realignment (DeRa), a simple method to explore and evaluate different regularization strengths in aligned models without retraining. DeRa enables control over the degree of alignment, allowing users to smoothly transition between unaligned and aligned models. It also enhances the efficiency of hyperparameter tuning by enabling the identification of effective regularization strengths using a validation dataset.

We introduce ChatGLM, an evolving family of large language models that we have been developing over time. This report primarily focuses on the GLM-4 language series, which includes GLM-4, GLM-4-Air, and GLM-4-9B. They represent our most capable models that are trained with all the insights and lessons gained from the preceding three generations of ChatGLM. To date, the GLM-4 models are pre-trained on ten trillions of tokens mostly in Chinese and English, along with a small set of corpus from 24 languages, and aligned primarily for Chinese and English usage. The high-quality alignment is achieved via a multi-stage post-training process, which involves supervised fine-tuning and learning from human feedback. Evaluations show that GLM-4 1) closely rivals or outperforms GPT-4 in terms of general metrics such as MMLU, GSM8K, MATH, BBH, GPQA, and HumanEval, 2) gets close to GPT-4-Turbo in instruction following as measured by IFEval, 3) matches GPT-4 Turbo (128K) and Claude 3 for long context tasks, and 4) outperforms GPT-4 in Chinese alignments as measured by AlignBench. The GLM-4 All Tools model is further aligned to understand user intent and autonomously decide when and which tool(s) touse -- including web browser, Python interpreter, text-to-image model, and user-defined functions -- to effectively complete complex tasks. In practical applications, it matches and even surpasses GPT-4 All Tools in tasks like accessing online information via web browsing and solving math problems using Python interpreter. Over the course, we have open-sourced a series of models, including ChatGLM-6B (three generations), GLM-4-9B (128K, 1M), GLM-4V-9B, WebGLM, and CodeGeeX, attracting over 10 million downloads on Hugging face in the year 2023 alone. The open models can be accessed through https://github.com/THUDM and https://huggingface.co/THUDM.

Alignment methodologies have emerged as a critical pathway for enhancing language model alignment capabilities. While SFT (supervised fine-tuning) accelerates convergence through direct token-level loss intervention, its efficacy is constrained by offline policy trajectory. In contrast, RL(reinforcement learning) facilitates exploratory policy optimization, but suffers from low sample efficiency and stringent dependency on high-quality base models. To address these dual challenges, we propose GRAO (Group Relative Alignment Optimization), a unified framework that synergizes the respective strengths of SFT and RL through three key innovations: 1) A multi-sample generation strategy enabling comparative quality assessment via reward feedback; 2) A novel Group Direct Alignment Loss formulation leveraging intra-group relative advantage weighting; 3) Reference-aware parameter updates guided by pairwise preference dynamics. Our theoretical analysis establishes GRAO's convergence guarantees and sample efficiency advantages over conventional approaches. Comprehensive evaluations across complex human alignment tasks demonstrate GRAO's superior performance, achieving 57.70\%,17.65\% 7.95\% and 5.18\% relative improvements over SFT, DPO, PPO and GRPO baselines respectively. This work provides both a theoretically grounded alignment framework and empirical evidence for efficient capability evolution in language models.

In today's heavily overparameterized models, the value of the training loss provides few guarantees on model generalization ability. Indeed, optimizing only the training loss value, as is commonly done, can easily lead to suboptimal model quality. Motivated by prior work connecting the geometry of the loss landscape and generalization, we introduce a novel, effective procedure for instead simultaneously minimizing loss value and loss sharpness. In particular, our procedure, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), seeks parameters that lie in neighborhoods having uniformly low loss; this formulation results in a min-max optimization problem on which gradient descent can be performed efficiently. We present empirical results showing that SAM improves model generalization across a variety of benchmark datasets (e.g., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, finetuning tasks) and models, yielding novel state-of-the-art performance for several. Additionally, we find that SAM natively provides robustness to label noise on par with that provided by state-of-the-art procedures that specifically target learning with noisy labels. We open source our code at https://github.com/google-research/sam.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkably powerful capabilities. One of the crucial factors to achieve success is aligning the LLM's output with human preferences. This alignment process often requires only a small amount of data to efficiently enhance the LLM's performance. While effective, research in this area spans multiple domains, and the methods involved are relatively complex to understand. The relationships between different methods have been under-explored, limiting the development of the preference alignment. In light of this, we break down the existing popular alignment strategies into different components and provide a unified framework to study the current alignment strategies, thereby establishing connections among them. In this survey, we decompose all the strategies in preference learning into four components: model, data, feedback, and algorithm. This unified view offers an in-depth understanding of existing alignment algorithms and also opens up possibilities to synergize the strengths of different strategies. Furthermore, we present detailed working examples of prevalent existing algorithms to facilitate a comprehensive understanding for the readers. Finally, based on our unified perspective, we explore the challenges and future research directions for aligning large language models with human preferences.

Multimodal models have demonstrated powerful capabilities in complex tasks requiring multimodal alignment including zero-shot classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, existing models typically rely on millions of paired multimodal samples, which are prohibitively expensive or infeasible to obtain in many domains. In this work, we explore the feasibility of building multimodal models with limited amount of paired data by aligning pretrained unimodal foundation models. We show that high-quality alignment is possible with as few as tens of thousands of paired samplesx2013less than 1% of the data typically used in the field. To achieve this, we introduce STRUCTURE, an effective regularization technique that preserves the neighborhood geometry of the latent space of unimodal encoders. Additionally, we show that aligning last layers is often suboptimal and demonstrate the benefits of aligning the layers with the highest representational similarity across modalities. These two components can be readily incorporated into existing alignment methods, yielding substantial gains across 24 zero-shot image classification and retrieval benchmarks, with average relative improvement of 51.6% in classification and 91.8% in retrieval tasks. Our results highlight the effectiveness and broad applicability of our framework for limited-sample multimodal learning and offer a promising path forward for resource-constrained domains.

Federated Long-Tailed Learning (Fed-LT), a paradigm wherein data collected from decentralized local clients manifests a globally prevalent long-tailed distribution, has garnered considerable attention in recent times. In the context of Fed-LT, existing works have predominantly centered on addressing the data imbalance issue to enhance the efficacy of the generic global model while neglecting the performance at the local level. In contrast, conventional Personalized Federated Learning (pFL) techniques are primarily devised to optimize personalized local models under the presumption of a balanced global data distribution. This paper introduces an approach termed Federated Local and Generic Model Training in Fed-LT (FedLoGe), which enhances both local and generic model performance through the integration of representation learning and classifier alignment within a neural collapse framework. Our investigation reveals the feasibility of employing a shared backbone as a foundational framework for capturing overarching global trends, while concurrently employing individualized classifiers to encapsulate distinct refinements stemming from each client's local features. Building upon this discovery, we establish the Static Sparse Equiangular Tight Frame Classifier (SSE-C), inspired by neural collapse principles that naturally prune extraneous noisy features and foster the acquisition of potent data representations. Furthermore, leveraging insights from imbalance neural collapse's classifier norm patterns, we develop Global and Local Adaptive Feature Realignment (GLA-FR) via an auxiliary global classifier and personalized Euclidean norm transfer to align global features with client preferences. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR-10/100-LT, ImageNet, and iNaturalist demonstrate the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art pFL and Fed-LT approaches.

By compressing diverse narratives, LLMs go beyond memorization, achieving intelligence by capturing generalizable causal relationships. However, they suffer from local 'representation gaps' due to insufficient training data diversity, limiting their real-world utility, especially in tasks requiring strict alignment to rules. Traditional alignment methods relying on heavy human annotations are inefficient and unscalable. Recent self-alignment techniques also fall short, as they often depend on self-selection based prompting and memorization-based learning. To address these issues, we introduce Iterative Graph Alignment (IGA), an annotation-free rule-based alignment algorithm. A teacher model (VLM) employs Iterative Graph Prompting (IGP) to create logical graphs and reference answers. The student model (LLM) identifies local knowledge gaps by attempting to align its responses with these references, collaborating with helper models to generate diverse answers. These aligned responses are then used for iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our evaluations across five rule-based scenarios demonstrate IGP's effectiveness, with a 73.12\% alignment improvement in Claude Sonnet 3.5, and Llama3-8B-Instruct achieving an 86.20\% improvement, outperforming Claude Sonnet 3.5 in rule-based alignment.

Contrastive representation learning has been outstandingly successful in practice. In this work, we identify two key properties related to the contrastive loss: (1) alignment (closeness) of features from positive pairs, and (2) uniformity of the induced distribution of the (normalized) features on the hypersphere. We prove that, asymptotically, the contrastive loss optimizes these properties, and analyze their positive effects on downstream tasks. Empirically, we introduce an optimizable metric to quantify each property. Extensive experiments on standard vision and language datasets confirm the strong agreement between both metrics and downstream task performance. Remarkably, directly optimizing for these two metrics leads to representations with comparable or better performance at downstream tasks than contrastive learning. Project Page: https://tongzhouwang.info/hypersphere Code: https://github.com/SsnL/align_uniform , https://github.com/SsnL/moco_align_uniform

Rapid advancements in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have transformed multimodal understanding but are often constrained by generating English responses regardless of the input language. This phenomenon has been termed as Image-induced Fidelity Loss (IFL) and stems from limited multimodal multilingual training data. To address this, we propose a continuous multilingual integration strategy that injects text-only multilingual data during visual instruction tuning, preserving the language model's original multilingual capabilities. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly improves linguistic fidelity across languages without degradation in visual performance. We also explore model merging, which improves language fidelity but comes at the cost of visual performance. In contrast, our core method achieves robust multilingual alignment without trade-offs, offering a scalable and effective path to mitigating IFL for global VLM adoption.

Cross-lingual alignment, the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models, has been an active field of research in recent years. We survey the literature of techniques to improve cross-lingual alignment, providing a taxonomy of methods and summarising insights from throughout the field. We present different understandings of cross-lingual alignment and their limitations. We provide a qualitative summary of results from a large number of surveyed papers. Finally, we discuss how these insights may be applied not only to encoder models, where this topic has been heavily studied, but also to encoder-decoder or even decoder-only models, and argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key.

Language model alignment has become a critical step in training modern generative language models. The goal of alignment is to finetune a reference model such that the win rate of a sample from the aligned model over a sample from the reference model is high, subject to a KL divergence constraint. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time algorithms (e.g., Best-of-N, controlled decoding, tree search) to decode from language models rather than standard sampling. However, the alignment objective does not capture such inference-time decoding procedures. We show that the existing alignment framework is sub-optimal in view of such inference-time methods. We then modify the alignment objective and propose a framework for inference-aware alignment (IAPO). We prove that for any inference-time decoding algorithm, the optimal solution that optimizes the inference-time win rate of the aligned policy against the reference policy is the solution to the typical RLHF problem with a transformation of the reward. This motivates us to provide the KL-regularized calibrate-and-transform RL (CTRL) algorithm to solve this problem, which involves a reward calibration step and a KL-regularized reward maximization step with a transformation of the calibrated reward. We particularize our study to two important inference-time strategies: best-of-N sampling and best-of-N jailbreaking, where N responses are sampled from the model and the one with the highest or lowest reward is selected. We propose specific transformations for these strategies and demonstrate that our framework offers significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods for language model alignment. Empirically, we outperform baselines that are designed without taking inference-time decoding into consideration by 8-12% and 4-9% on inference-time win rates over the Anthropic helpfulness and harmlessness dialog benchmark datasets.

The last year has seen astonishing progress in text-prompted image generation premised on the idea of a cross-modal representation space in which the text and image domains are represented jointly. In ASR, this idea has found application as joint speech-text encoders that can scale to the capacities of very large parameter models by being trained on both unpaired speech and text. While these methods show promise, they have required special treatment of the sequence-length mismatch inherent in speech and text, either by up-sampling heuristics or an explicit alignment model. In this work, we offer evidence that joint speech-text encoders naturally achieve consistent representations across modalities by disregarding sequence length, and argue that consistency losses could forgive length differences and simply assume the best alignment. We show that such a loss improves downstream WER in both a large-parameter monolingual and multilingual system.

Vision-language models like CLIP have shown impressive capabilities in aligning images and text, but they often struggle with lengthy and detailed text descriptions because of their training focus on short and concise captions. We present GOAL (Global-local Object Alignment Learning), a novel fine-tuning method that enhances CLIP's ability to handle lengthy text by leveraging both global and local semantic alignments between image and lengthy text. Our approach consists of two key components: Local Image-Sentence Matching (LISM), which identifies corresponding pairs between image segments and descriptive sentences, and Token Similarity-based Learning (TSL), which efficiently propagates local element attention through these matched pairs. Evaluating GOAL on three new benchmarks for image-lengthy text retrieval, we demonstrate significant improvements over baseline CLIP fine-tuning, establishing a simple yet effective approach for adapting CLIP to detailed textual descriptions. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method's focus on local semantic alignment alongside global context leads to more nuanced and representative embeddings, particularly beneficial for tasks requiring fine-grained understanding of lengthy text descriptions.

Recent vision-language foundation models still frequently produce outputs misaligned with their inputs, evidenced by object hallucination in captioning and prompt misalignment in the text-to-image generation model. Recent studies have explored methods for identifying misaligned elements, aiming not only to enhance interpretability but also to improve model performance. However, current approaches primarily rely on large foundation models in a zero-shot manner or fine-tuned models with human annotations, which limits scalability due to significant computational costs. This work proposes a novel approach, dubbed CLIP4DM, for detecting dense misalignments from pre-trained CLIP, specifically focusing on pinpointing misaligned words between image and text. We carefully revamp the gradient-based attribution computation method, enabling negative gradient of individual text tokens to indicate misalignment. We also propose F-CLIPScore, which aggregates misaligned attributions with a global alignment score. We evaluate our method on various dense misalignment detection benchmarks, covering various image and text domains and misalignment types. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot models and competitive performance with fine-tuned models while maintaining superior efficiency. Our qualitative examples show that our method has a unique strength to detect entity-level objects, intangible objects, and attributes that can not be easily detected for existing works. We conduct ablation studies and analyses to highlight the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/naver-ai/CLIP4DM.

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities at task-specific applications through fine-tuning, extending these benefits across diverse languages is essential for broad accessibility. However, effective cross-lingual transfer is hindered by LLM performance gaps across languages and the scarcity of fine-tuning data in many languages. Through analysis of LLM internal representations from over 1,000+ language pairs, we discover that middle layers exhibit the strongest potential for cross-lingual alignment. Building on this finding, we propose a middle-layer alignment objective integrated into task-specific training. Our experiments on slot filling, machine translation, and structured text generation show consistent improvements in cross-lingual transfer, especially to lower-resource languages. The method is robust to the choice of alignment languages and generalizes to languages unseen during alignment. Furthermore, we show that separately trained alignment modules can be merged with existing task-specific modules, improving cross-lingual capabilities without full re-training. Our code is publicly available (https://github.com/dannigt/mid-align).

Efforts to align Large Language Models (LLMs) are mainly conducted via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods. However, RLHF encounters major challenges including training reward models, actor-critic engineering, and importantly, it requires access to LLM parameters. Here we introduce Aligner, a new efficient alignment paradigm that bypasses the whole RLHF process by learning the correctional residuals between the aligned and the unaligned answers. Our Aligner offers several key advantages. Firstly, it is an autoregressive seq2seq model that is trained on the query-answer-correction dataset via supervised learning; this offers a parameter-efficient alignment solution with minimal resources. Secondly, the Aligner facilitates weak-to-strong generalization; finetuning large pretrained models by Aligner's supervisory signals demonstrates strong performance boost. Thirdly, Aligner functions as a model-agnostic plug-and-play module, allowing for its direct application on different open-source and API-based models. Remarkably, Aligner-7B improves 11 different LLMs by 21.9% in helpfulness and 23.8% in harmlessness on average (GPT-4 by 17.5% and 26.9%). When finetuning (strong) Llama2-70B with (weak) Aligner-13B's supervision, we can improve Llama2 by 8.2% in helpfulness and 61.6% in harmlessness. See our dataset and code at https://aligner2024.github.io

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) integrates structural connectivity with rich textual semantics, enabling applications in diverse domains. Current methods largely rely on contrastive learning to maximize cross-modal similarity, assuming tighter coupling between graph and text representations improves transfer performance. However, our empirical analysis reveals that both natural gap expansion and forced gap reduction result in performance degradation by disrupting pre-trained knowledge structures and impairing generalization. This arises from the geometric incompatibility between encoders, where graph encoders capture topological patterns, while text encoders capture semantic structures. Over-alignment compresses these distinct spaces into shared subspaces, causing structure collapse that diminishes both topological reasoning and semantic understanding. We propose LLM4GTA, a gap-aware alignment framework that preserves representation gaps as geometric necessities for maintaining modality-specific knowledge and improving transfer performance. LLM4GTA includes an adaptive gap preservation module to prevent over-alignment by monitoring similarity evolution and an intra-modal compensation mechanism that boosts discriminative power using auxiliary classifiers in graph space. Extensive experiments show significant improvements over existing methods in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.

Genomic language models (gLMs) have shown mostly modest success in identifying evolutionarily constrained elements in mammalian genomes. To address this issue, we introduce a novel framework for training gLMs that explicitly models nucleotide evolution on phylogenetic trees using multispecies whole-genome alignments. Our approach integrates an alignment into the loss function during training but does not require it for making predictions, thereby enhancing the model's applicability. We applied this framework to train PhyloGPN, a model that excels at predicting functionally disruptive variants from a single sequence alone and demonstrates strong transfer learning capabilities.

The alignment tuning process of large language models (LLMs) typically involves instruction learning through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference tuning via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). A recent study, LIMA (Zhou et al. 2023), shows that using merely 1K examples for SFT can achieve significant alignment performance as well, suggesting that the effect of alignment tuning might be "superficial." This raises questions about how exactly the alignment tuning transforms a base LLM. We analyze the effect of alignment tuning by examining the token distribution shift between base LLMs and their aligned counterpart. Our findings reveal that base LLMs and their alignment-tuned versions perform nearly identically in decoding on the majority of token positions. Most distribution shifts occur with stylistic tokens. These direct evidence strongly supports the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis suggested by LIMA. Based on these findings, we rethink the alignment of LLMs by posing the research question: how effectively can we align base LLMs without SFT or RLHF? To address this, we introduce a simple, tuning-free alignment method, URIAL. URIAL achieves effective alignment purely through in-context learning (ICL) with base LLMs, requiring as few as three constant stylistic examples and a system prompt. We conduct a fine-grained and interpretable evaluation on a diverse set of examples, named JUST-EVAL-INSTRUCT. Results demonstrate that base LLMs with URIAL can match or even surpass the performance of LLMs aligned with SFT or SFT+RLHF. We show that the gap between tuning-free and tuning-based alignment methods can be significantly reduced through strategic prompting and ICL. Our findings on the superficial nature of alignment tuning and results with URIAL suggest that deeper analysis and theoretical understanding of alignment is crucial to future LLM research.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) combine a vision encoder and a large language model (LLM) through alignment training, showing strong performance on multimodal tasks. A central component in this architecture is the projection layer, which maps visual features into the LLM's embedding space. Despite its importance, its ability to generalize to unseen visual concepts has not been systematically evaluated. To address this, we propose a benchmark for evaluating projection-layer generalization. We adapt object detection datasets (rich in fine-grained annotations) into a prompting format and design train/test splits with disjoint label sets, enabling precise control over seen and unseen concept separation. Experimental results show that the projection layer retains about 79 to 88 percent of the performance on unseen classes compared to seen ones across various settings, suggesting a non-trivial level of generalization even without explicit alignment supervision on those concepts. We further analyze this behavior through a mechanistic interpretability lens. Our findings indicate that the feed-forward network in the projection layer functions like a key-value memory, processing seen and unseen tokens in similar ways. This study introduces a new evaluation framework for alignment generalization and highlights the potential for efficient VLM training with limited aligned data.

We introduce SeaS, a unified industrial generative model for automatically creating diverse anomalies, authentic normal products, and precise anomaly masks. While extensive research exists, most efforts either focus on specific tasks, i.e., anomalies or normal products only, or require separate models for each anomaly type. Consequently, prior methods either offer limited generative capability or depend on a vast array of anomaly-specific models. We demonstrate that U-Net's differentiated learning ability captures the distinct visual traits of slightly-varied normal products and diverse anomalies, enabling us to construct a unified model for all tasks. Specifically, we first introduce an Unbalanced Abnormal (UA) Text Prompt, comprising one normal token and multiple anomaly tokens. More importantly, our Decoupled Anomaly Alignment (DA) loss decouples anomaly attributes and binds them to distinct anomaly tokens of UA, enabling SeaS to create unseen anomalies by recombining these attributes. Furthermore, our Normal-image Alignment (NA) loss aligns the normal token to normal patterns, making generated normal products globally consistent and locally varied. Finally, SeaS produces accurate anomaly masks by fusing discriminative U-Net features with high-resolution VAE features. SeaS sets a new benchmark for industrial generation, significantly enhancing downstream applications, with average improvements of +8.66% pixel-level AP for synthesis-based AD approaches, +1.10% image-level AP for unsupervised AD methods, and +12.79% IoU for supervised segmentation models. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/SeaS{https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/SeaS}.

Understanding alignment techniques begins with comprehending zero-shot generalization brought by instruction tuning, but little of the mechanism has been understood. Existing work has largely been confined to the task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. To bridge this gap, we investigate zero-shot generalization from the perspective of the data itself. We first demonstrate that zero-shot generalization happens very early during instruction tuning, with loss serving as a stable indicator. Next, we investigate training data arrangement through similarity and granularity perspectives, confirming that the timing of exposure to certain training examples may greatly facilitate generalization on unseen tasks. Finally, we propose a more grounded training data arrangement framework, Test-centric Multi-turn Arrangement, and show its effectiveness in promoting continual learning and further loss reduction. For the first time, we show that zero-shot generalization during instruction tuning is a form of similarity-based generalization between training and test data at the instance level. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/Dynamics-of-Zero-Shot-Generalization.

The original CLIP text encoder is limited by a maximum input length of 77 tokens, which hampers its ability to effectively process long texts and perform fine-grained semantic understanding. In addition, the CLIP text encoder lacks support for multilingual inputs. All these limitations significantly restrict its applicability across a broader range of tasks. Recent studies have attempted to replace the CLIP text encoder with an LLM-based embedder to enhance its ability in processing long texts, multilingual understanding, and fine-grained semantic comprehension. However, because the representation spaces of LLMs and the vision-language space of CLIP are pretrained independently without alignment priors, direct alignment using contrastive learning can disrupt the intrinsic vision-language alignment in the CLIP image encoder, leading to an underutilization of the knowledge acquired during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose ProCLIP, a curriculum learning-based progressive vision-language alignment framework to effectively align the CLIP image encoder with an LLM-based embedder. Specifically, ProCLIP first distills knowledge from CLIP's text encoder into the LLM-based embedder to leverage CLIP's rich pretrained knowledge while establishing initial alignment between the LLM embedder and CLIP image encoder. Subsequently, ProCLIP further aligns the CLIP image encoder with the LLM-based embedder through image-text contrastive tuning, employing self-distillation regularization to avoid overfitting. To achieve a more effective alignment, instance semantic alignment loss and embedding structure alignment loss are employed during representation inheritance and contrastive tuning. The Code is available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/ProCLIP

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) is a widely used criterion for training supervised sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models. It enables learning the relations between input and output sequences, termed alignments, by marginalizing over perfect alignments (that yield the ground truth), at the expense of imperfect alignments. This binary differentiation of perfect and imperfect alignments falls short of capturing other essential alignment properties that hold significance in other real-world applications. Here we propose Align With Purpose, a general Plug-and-Play framework for enhancing a desired property in models trained with the CTC criterion. We do that by complementing the CTC with an additional loss term that prioritizes alignments according to a desired property. Our method does not require any intervention in the CTC loss function, enables easy optimization of a variety of properties, and allows differentiation between both perfect and imperfect alignments. We apply our framework in the domain of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and show its generality in terms of property selection, architectural choice, and scale of training dataset (up to 280,000 hours). To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we apply it to two unrelated properties: emission time and word error rate (WER). For the former, we report an improvement of up to 570ms in latency optimization with a minor reduction in WER, and for the latter, we report a relative improvement of 4.5% WER over the baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, these applications have never been demonstrated to work on a scale of data as large as ours. Notably, our method can be implemented using only a few lines of code, and can be extended to other alignment-free loss functions and to domains other than ASR.

Recent direct preference alignment algorithms (DPA), such as DPO, have shown great promise in aligning large language models to human preferences. While this has motivated the development of many new variants of the original DPO loss, understanding the differences between these recent proposals, as well as developing new DPA loss functions, remains difficult given the lack of a technical and conceptual framework for reasoning about the underlying semantics of these algorithms. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this by formalizing DPA losses in terms of discrete reasoning problems. Specifically, we ask: Given an existing DPA loss, can we systematically derive a symbolic expression that characterizes its semantics? How do the semantics of two losses relate to each other? We propose a novel formalism for characterizing preference losses for single model and reference model based approaches, and identify symbolic forms for a number of commonly used DPA variants. Further, we show how this formal view of preference learning sheds new light on both the size and structure of the DPA loss landscape, making it possible to not only rigorously characterize the relationships between recent loss proposals but also to systematically explore the landscape and derive new loss functions from first principles. We hope our framework and findings will help provide useful guidance to those working on human AI alignment.

The composition of training data mixtures is critical for effectively training large language models (LLMs), as it directly impacts their performance on downstream tasks. Our goal is to identify an optimal data mixture to specialize an LLM for a specific task with access to only a few examples. Traditional approaches to this problem include ad-hoc reweighting methods, importance sampling, and gradient alignment techniques. This paper focuses on gradient alignment and introduces Dynamic Gradient Alignment (DGA), a scalable online gradient alignment algorithm. DGA dynamically estimates the pre-training data mixture on which the models' gradients align as well as possible with those of the model on the specific task. DGA is the first gradient alignment approach that incurs minimal overhead compared to standard pre-training and outputs a competitive model, eliminating the need for retraining the model. Experimentally, we demonstrate significant improvements over importance sampling in two key scenarios: (i) when the pre-training set is small and importance sampling overfits due to limited data; and (ii) when there is insufficient specialized data, trapping importance sampling on narrow pockets of data. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of gradient alignment methods in optimizing training data mixtures, particularly in data-constrained environments, and offer a practical solution for enhancing LLM performance on specific tasks with limited data availability.

Harmful fine-tuning issue qi2023fine poses serious safety concerns for Large language models' fine-tuning-as-a-service. While existing defenses huang2024vaccine,rosati2024representation have been proposed to mitigate the issue, their performances are still far away from satisfactory, and the root cause of the problem has not been fully recovered. For the first time in the literature, we in this paper show that harmful perturbation over the model weights should be the root cause of alignment-broken of harmful fine-tuning. In order to attenuate the negative impact of harmful perturbation, we propose an alignment-stage solution, dubbed Booster. Technically, along with the original alignment loss, we append a loss regularizer in the alignment stage's optimization. The regularizer ensures that the model's harmful loss reduction before/after simulated harmful perturbation is attenuated, thereby mitigating the subsequent fine-tuning risk. Empirical results show that Booster can effectively reduce the harmful score of the fine-tuned models while maintaining the performance of downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Booster.

We present YORO - a multi-modal transformer encoder-only architecture for the Visual Grounding (VG) task. This task involves localizing, in an image, an object referred via natural language. Unlike the recent trend in the literature of using multi-stage approaches that sacrifice speed for accuracy, YORO seeks a better trade-off between speed an accuracy by embracing a single-stage design, without CNN backbone. YORO consumes natural language queries, image patches, and learnable detection tokens and predicts coordinates of the referred object, using a single transformer encoder. To assist the alignment between text and visual objects, a novel patch-text alignment loss is proposed. Extensive experiments are conducted on 5 different datasets with ablations on architecture design choices. YORO is shown to support real-time inference and outperform all approaches in this class (single-stage methods) by large margins. It is also the fastest VG model and achieves the best speed/accuracy trade-off in the literature.

Federated Learning (FL) is a rising approach towards collaborative and privacy-preserving machine learning where large-scale medical datasets remain localized to each client. However, the issue of data heterogeneity among clients often compels local models to diverge, leading to suboptimal global models. To mitigate the impact of data heterogeneity on FL performance, we start with analyzing how FL training influence FL performance by decomposing the global loss into three terms: local loss, distribution shift loss and aggregation loss. Remarkably, our loss decomposition reveals that existing local training-based FL methods attempt to reduce the distribution shift loss, while the global aggregation-based FL methods propose better aggregation strategies to reduce the aggregation loss. Nevertheless, a comprehensive joint effort to minimize all three terms is currently limited in the literature, leading to subpar performance when dealing with data heterogeneity challenges. To fill this gap, we propose a novel FL method based on global loss decomposition, called FedLD, to jointly reduce these three loss terms. Our FedLD involves a margin control regularization in local training to reduce the distribution shift loss, and a principal gradient-based server aggregation strategy to reduce the aggregation loss. Notably, under different levels of data heterogeneity, our strategies achieve better and more robust performance on retinal and chest X-ray classification compared to other FL algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zeng-Shuang/FedLD.

Reward models (RMs) guide the alignment of large language models (LLMs), steering them toward behaviors preferred by humans. Evaluating RMs is the key to better aligning LLMs. However, the current evaluation of RMs may not directly correspond to their alignment performance due to the limited distribution of evaluation data and evaluation methods that are not closely related to alignment objectives. To address these limitations, we propose RMB, a comprehensive RM benchmark that covers over 49 real-world scenarios and includes both pairwise and Best-of-N (BoN) evaluations to better reflect the effectiveness of RMs in guiding alignment optimization. We demonstrate a positive correlation between our benchmark and the downstream alignment task performance. Based on our benchmark, we conduct extensive analysis on the state-of-the-art RMs, revealing their generalization defects that were not discovered by previous benchmarks, and highlighting the potential of generative RMs. Furthermore, we delve into open questions in reward models, specifically examining the effectiveness of majority voting for the evaluation of reward models and analyzing the impact factors of generative RMs, including the influence of evaluation criteria and instructing methods. Our evaluation code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Zhou-Zoey/RMB-Reward-Model-Benchmark.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the role of AI, yet also pose potential risks of propagating unethical content. Alignment technologies have been introduced to steer LLMs towards human preference, gaining increasing attention. Despite notable breakthroughs in this direction, existing methods heavily rely on high-quality positive-negative training pairs, suffering from noisy labels and the marginal distinction between preferred and dispreferred response data. Given recent LLMs' proficiency in generating helpful responses, this work pivots towards a new research focus: achieving alignment using solely human-annotated negative samples, preserving helpfulness while reducing harmfulness. For this purpose, we propose Distributional Dispreference Optimization (D^2O), which maximizes the discrepancy between the generated responses and the dispreferred ones to effectively eschew harmful information. We theoretically demonstrate that D^2O is equivalent to learning a distributional instead of instance-level preference model reflecting human dispreference against the distribution of negative responses. Besides, D^2O integrates an implicit Jeffrey Divergence regularization to balance the exploitation and exploration of reference policies and converges to a non-negative one during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable generation quality and surpasses the latest baselines in producing less harmful and more informative responses with better training stability and faster convergence.

Watermarking techniques for large language models (LLMs) can significantly impact output quality, yet their effects on truthfulness, safety, and helpfulness remain critically underexamined. This paper presents a systematic analysis of how two popular watermarking approaches-Gumbel and KGW-affect these core alignment properties across four aligned LLMs. Our experiments reveal two distinct degradation patterns: guard attenuation, where enhanced helpfulness undermines model safety, and guard amplification, where excessive caution reduces model helpfulness. These patterns emerge from watermark-induced shifts in token distribution, surfacing the fundamental tension that exists between alignment objectives. To mitigate these degradations, we propose Alignment Resampling (AR), an inference-time sampling method that uses an external reward model to restore alignment. We establish a theoretical lower bound on the improvement in expected reward score as the sample size is increased and empirically demonstrate that sampling just 2-4 watermarked generations effectively recovers or surpasses baseline (unwatermarked) alignment scores. To overcome the limited response diversity of standard Gumbel watermarking, our modified implementation sacrifices strict distortion-freeness while maintaining robust detectability, ensuring compatibility with AR. Experimental results confirm that AR successfully recovers baseline alignment in both watermarking approaches, while maintaining strong watermark detectability. This work reveals the critical balance between watermark strength and model alignment, providing a simple inference-time solution to responsibly deploy watermarked LLMs in practice.

As large language models rapidly evolve to support longer context, there is a notable disparity in their capability to generate output at greater lengths. Recent study suggests that the primary cause for this imbalance may arise from the lack of data with long-output during alignment training. In light of this observation, attempts are made to re-align foundation models with data that fills the gap, which result in models capable of generating lengthy output when instructed. In this paper, we explore the impact of data-quality in tuning a model for long output, and the possibility of doing so from the starting points of human-aligned (instruct or chat) models. With careful data curation, we show that it possible to achieve similar performance improvement in our tuned models, with only a small fraction of training data instances and compute. In addition, we assess the generalizability of such approaches by applying our tuning-recipes to several models. our findings suggest that, while capacities for generating long output vary across different models out-of-the-box, our approach to tune them with high-quality data using lite compute, consistently yields notable improvement across all models we experimented on. We have made public our curated dataset for tuning long-writing capability, the implementations of model tuning and evaluation, as well as the fine-tuned models, all of which can be openly-accessed.

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

Due to the remarkable capabilities and growing impact of large language models (LLMs), they have been deeply integrated into many aspects of society. Thus, ensuring their alignment with human values and intentions has emerged as a critical challenge. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of practical alignment techniques, training protocols, and empirical findings in LLM alignment. We analyze the development of alignment methods across diverse paradigms, characterizing the fundamental trade-offs between core alignment objectives. Our analysis shows that while supervised fine-tuning enables basic instruction-following, preference-based methods offer more flexibility for aligning with nuanced human intent. We discuss state-of-the-art techniques, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Constitutional AI, brain-inspired methods, and alignment uncertainty quantification (AUQ), highlighting their approaches to balancing quality and efficiency. We review existing evaluation frameworks and benchmarking datasets, emphasizing limitations such as reward misspecification, distributional robustness, and scalable oversight. We summarize strategies adopted by leading AI labs to illustrate the current state of practice. We conclude by outlining open problems in oversight, value pluralism, robustness, and continuous alignment. This survey aims to inform both researchers and practitioners navigating the evolving landscape of LLM alignment.

Fully convolutional models for dense prediction have proven successful for a wide range of visual tasks. Such models perform well in a supervised setting, but performance can be surprisingly poor under domain shifts that appear mild to a human observer. For example, training on one city and testing on another in a different geographic region and/or weather condition may result in significantly degraded performance due to pixel-level distribution shift. In this paper, we introduce the first domain adaptive semantic segmentation method, proposing an unsupervised adversarial approach to pixel prediction problems. Our method consists of both global and category specific adaptation techniques. Global domain alignment is performed using a novel semantic segmentation network with fully convolutional domain adversarial learning. This initially adapted space then enables category specific adaptation through a generalization of constrained weak learning, with explicit transfer of the spatial layout from the source to the target domains. Our approach outperforms baselines across different settings on multiple large-scale datasets, including adapting across various real city environments, different synthetic sub-domains, from simulated to real environments, and on a novel large-scale dash-cam dataset.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is a critical ability for deep learning models in many real-world scenarios including healthcare and autonomous vehicles. Recently, different techniques have been proposed to improve OOD generalization. Among these methods, gradient-based regularizers have shown promising performance compared with other competitors. Despite this success, our understanding of the role of Hessian and gradient alignment in domain generalization is still limited. To address this shortcoming, we analyze the role of the classifier's head Hessian matrix and gradient in domain generalization using recent OOD theory of transferability. Theoretically, we show that spectral norm between the classifier's head Hessian matrices across domains is an upper bound of the transfer measure, a notion of distance between target and source domains. Furthermore, we analyze all the attributes that get aligned when we encourage similarity between Hessians and gradients. Our analysis explains the success of many regularizers like CORAL, IRM, V-REx, Fish, IGA, and Fishr as they regularize part of the classifier's head Hessian and/or gradient. Finally, we propose two simple yet effective methods to match the classifier's head Hessians and gradients in an efficient way, based on the Hessian Gradient Product (HGP) and Hutchinson's method (Hutchinson), and without directly calculating Hessians. We validate the OOD generalization ability of proposed methods in different scenarios, including transferability, severe correlation shift, label shift and diversity shift. Our results show that Hessian alignment methods achieve promising performance on various OOD benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Federated-Learning/tree/main/HessianAlignment.

Recent progress in 3D object generation has been fueled by the strong priors offered by diffusion models. However, existing models are tailored to specific tasks, accommodating only one modality at a time and necessitating retraining to change modalities. Given an image-to-3D model and a text prompt, a naive approach is to convert text prompts to images and then use the image-to-3D model for generation. This approach is both time-consuming and labor-intensive, resulting in unavoidable information loss during modality conversion. To address this, we introduce XBind, a unified framework for any-to-3D generation using cross-modal pre-alignment techniques. XBind integrates an multimodal-aligned encoder with pre-trained diffusion models to generate 3D objects from any modalities, including text, images, and audio. We subsequently present a novel loss function, termed Modality Similarity (MS) Loss, which aligns the embeddings of the modality prompts and the rendered images, facilitating improved alignment of the 3D objects with multiple modalities. Additionally, Hybrid Diffusion Supervision combined with a Three-Phase Optimization process improves the quality of the generated 3D objects. Extensive experiments showcase XBind's broad generation capabilities in any-to-3D scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first method to generate 3D objects from any modality prompts. Project page: https://zeroooooooow1440.github.io/.

The ability to translate diverse patterns of inputs into structured patterns of behavior has been thought to rest on both humans' and machines' ability to learn robust representations of relevant concepts. The rapid advancement of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has led to a diversity of computational ingredients -- architectures, fine tuning methods, and training datasets among others -- but it remains unclear which of these ingredients are most crucial for building models that develop human-like representations. Further, most current LLM benchmarks are not suited to measuring representational alignment between humans and models, making benchmark scores unreliable for assessing if current LLMs are making progress towards becoming useful cognitive models. We address these limitations by first evaluating a set of over 70 models that widely vary in their computational ingredients on a triplet similarity task, a method well established in the cognitive sciences for measuring human conceptual representations, using concepts from the THINGS database. Comparing human and model representations, we find that models that undergo instruction-finetuning and which have larger dimensionality of attention heads are among the most human aligned, while multimodal pretraining and parameter size have limited bearing on alignment. Correlations between alignment scores and scores on existing benchmarks reveal that while some benchmarks (e.g., MMLU) are better suited than others (e.g., MUSR) for capturing representational alignment, no existing benchmark is capable of fully accounting for the variance of alignment scores, demonstrating their insufficiency in capturing human-AI alignment. Taken together, our findings help highlight the computational ingredients most essential for advancing LLMs towards models of human conceptual representation and address a key benchmarking gap in LLM evaluation.

This paper studies the problem of training a two-layer ReLU network for binary classification using gradient flow with small initialization. We consider a training dataset with well-separated input vectors: Any pair of input data with the same label are positively correlated, and any pair with different labels are negatively correlated. Our analysis shows that, during the early phase of training, neurons in the first layer try to align with either the positive data or the negative data, depending on its corresponding weight on the second layer. A careful analysis of the neurons' directional dynamics allows us to provide an O(log n{mu}) upper bound on the time it takes for all neurons to achieve good alignment with the input data, where n is the number of data points and mu measures how well the data are separated. After the early alignment phase, the loss converges to zero at a O(1{t}) rate, and the weight matrix on the first layer is approximately low-rank. Numerical experiments on the MNIST dataset illustrate our theoretical findings.

Large Vision-Language Models like CLIP have become a powerful foundation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation due to their strong zero-shot generalization. State-of-the-art methods typically leverage CLIP to generate pseudo-labels for the target domain, then fine-tune the model to learn domain-invariant features. However, these methods attempt to align source and target domains using all pseudo-labeled data simultaneously. This one-shot alignment struggles with noisy, hard-to-classify samples, leading to error propagation and suboptimal feature learning. The problem is even more amplified in the multi-source scenario, where diverse domain gaps and varying noise levels across multiple source domains further destabilize the alignment process. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a progressive alignment strategy for adapting CLIP to unlabeled downstream task. Our method begins by training the model on a high-confidence subset of target samples, allowing it to first learn a well-aligned representation from the most reliable data. As training progresses, it gradually incorporates more challenging samples, guiding the model to refine its understanding without being overwhelmed by initial label noise. This progressive approach effectively mitigates confirmation bias and promotes a more robust convergence, allowing for the learning of genuinely domain-invariant features. We name our approach MP^2A and test it on three popular UDA benchmarks, namely ImageCLEF, Office-Home, and the most challenging DomainNet. Experiments showcase that MP^2A achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared with most recent CLIP-based MS-UDA approaches, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

We propose procedures for evaluating and strengthening contextual embedding alignment and show that they are useful in analyzing and improving multilingual BERT. In particular, after our proposed alignment procedure, BERT exhibits significantly improved zero-shot performance on XNLI compared to the base model, remarkably matching pseudo-fully-supervised translate-train models for Bulgarian and Greek. Further, to measure the degree of alignment, we introduce a contextual version of word retrieval and show that it correlates well with downstream zero-shot transfer. Using this word retrieval task, we also analyze BERT and find that it exhibits systematic deficiencies, e.g. worse alignment for open-class parts-of-speech and word pairs written in different scripts, that are corrected by the alignment procedure. These results support contextual alignment as a useful concept for understanding large multilingual pre-trained models.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their outputs align with human values and safety standards has become critical. The field has developed diverse alignment approaches including traditional fine-tuning methods (RLHF, instruction tuning), post-hoc correction systems, and inference-time interventions, each with distinct advantages and limitations. However, the lack of unified evaluation frameworks makes it difficult to systematically compare these paradigms and guide deployment decisions. This paper introduces a multi-dimensional evaluation of alignment techniques for LLMs, a comprehensive evaluation framework that provides a systematic comparison across all major alignment paradigms. Our framework assesses methods along four key dimensions: alignment detection, alignment quality, computational efficiency, and robustness. Through experiments across diverse base models and alignment strategies, we demonstrate the utility of our framework in identifying strengths and limitations of current state-of-the-art models, providing valuable insights for future research directions.

The objective of domain generalization (DG) is to enhance the transferability of the model learned from a source domain to unobserved domains. To prevent overfitting to a specific domain, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) reduces source domain's loss sharpness. Although SAM variants have delivered significant improvements in DG, we highlight that there's still potential for improvement in generalizing to unknown domains through the exploration on data space. This paper introduces an objective rooted in both parameter and data perturbed regions for domain generalization, coined Unknown Domain Inconsistency Minimization (UDIM). UDIM reduces the loss landscape inconsistency between source domain and unknown domains. As unknown domains are inaccessible, these domains are empirically crafted by perturbing instances from the source domain dataset. In particular, by aligning the loss landscape acquired in the source domain to the loss landscape of perturbed domains, we expect to achieve generalization grounded on these flat minima for the unknown domains. Theoretically, we validate that merging SAM optimization with the UDIM objective establishes an upper bound for the true objective of the DG task. In an empirical aspect, UDIM consistently outperforms SAM variants across multiple DG benchmark datasets. Notably, UDIM shows statistically significant improvements in scenarios with more restrictive domain information, underscoring UDIM's generalization capability in unseen domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/SJShin-AI/UDIM.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized lots of fields of research. Although it is well-known that fine-tuning is essential for enhancing the capabilities of LLMs, existing research suggests that there is potential redundancy in the fine-tuning process and therefore proposes to update only a subset of parameters. However, these methods fail to leverage the task-specific information to identify important parameters during training. Based on the insight that gradients inherently contain information on task-specific data, we propose Gradient-Mask Tuning (GMT), a method that selectively updates parameters during training based on their gradient information. Specifically, we compute the absolute values of the gradients and apply masking to those with relatively smaller magnitudes. Our empirical results across various tasks demonstrate that GMT not only outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods but also elevates the upper limits of LLM performance. Further analysis indicates that GMT exhibits insensitivity to mask ratio and possesses computational efficiency comparable to vanilla SFT.

Many existing FL methods assume clients with fully-labeled data, while in realistic settings, clients have limited labels due to the expensive and laborious process of labeling. Limited labeled local data of the clients often leads to their local model having poor generalization abilities to their larger unlabeled local data, such as having class-distribution mismatch with the unlabeled data. As a result, clients may instead look to benefit from the global model trained across clients to leverage their unlabeled data, but this also becomes difficult due to data heterogeneity across clients. In our work, we propose FedLabel where clients selectively choose the local or global model to pseudo-label their unlabeled data depending on which is more of an expert of the data. We further utilize both the local and global models' knowledge via global-local consistency regularization which minimizes the divergence between the two models' outputs when they have identical pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. Unlike other semi-supervised FL baselines, our method does not require additional experts other than the local or global model, nor require additional parameters to be communicated. We also do not assume any server-labeled data or fully labeled clients. For both cross-device and cross-silo settings, we show that FedLabel outperforms other semi-supervised FL baselines by 8-24%, and even outperforms standard fully supervised FL baselines (100% labeled data) with only 5-20% of labeled data.

Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation can be attributed to three key factors in training data: large volume, diverse translation directions, and high quality. In the current practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for translation, we revisit the importance of all these factors. We find that LLMs display strong translation capability after being fine-tuned on as few as 32 training instances, and that fine-tuning on a single translation direction effectively enables LLMs to translate in multiple directions. However, the choice of direction is critical: fine-tuning LLMs with English on the target side can lead to task misinterpretation, which hinders translations into non-English languages. A similar problem arises when noise is introduced into the target side of parallel data, especially when the target language is well-represented in the LLM's pre-training. In contrast, noise in an under-represented language has a less pronounced effect. Our findings suggest that attaining successful alignment hinges on teaching the model to maintain a "superficial" focus, thereby avoiding the learning of erroneous biases beyond translation.

In this work, we propose a modular approach for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task by decomposing the problem into four sub-modules that use state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in a zero-shot setting. Given navigation instruction in natural language, we first prompt LLM to extract the landmarks and the order in which they are visited. Assuming the known model of the environment, we retrieve the top-k locations of the last landmark and generate k path hypotheses from the starting location to the last landmark using the shortest path algorithm on the topological map of the environment. Each path hypothesis is represented by a sequence of panoramas. We then use dynamic programming to compute the alignment score between the sequence of panoramas and the sequence of landmark names, which match scores obtained from VLM. Finally, we compute the nDTW metric between the hypothesis that yields the highest alignment score to evaluate the path fidelity. We demonstrate superior performance compared to other approaches that use joint semantic maps like VLMaps vlmaps on the complex R2R-Habitat r2r instruction dataset and quantify in detail the effect of visual grounding on navigation performance.

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit undesirable behaviors. Recent efforts have focused on aligning these models to prevent harmful generation. Despite these efforts, studies have shown that even a well-conducted alignment process can be easily circumvented, whether intentionally or accidentally. Do alignment fine-tuning have robust effects on models, or are merely superficial? In this work, we answer this question through both theoretical and empirical means. Empirically, we demonstrate the elasticity of post-alignment models, i.e., the tendency to revert to the behavior distribution formed during the pre-training phase upon further fine-tuning. Using compression theory, we formally derive that such fine-tuning process disproportionately undermines alignment compared to pre-training, potentially by orders of magnitude. We conduct experimental validations to confirm the presence of elasticity across models of varying types and sizes. Specifically, we find that model performance declines rapidly before reverting to the pre-training distribution, after which the rate of decline drops significantly. We further reveal that elasticity positively correlates with increased model size and the expansion of pre-training data. Our discovery signifies the importance of taming the inherent elasticity of LLMs, thereby overcoming the resistance of LLMs to alignment finetuning.

Large language models (LLMs) are now rapidly advancing and surpassing human abilities on many natural language tasks. However, aligning these super-human LLMs with human knowledge remains challenging because the supervision signals from human annotators may be wrong. This issue, known as the "super-alignment" problem, requires enhancing weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong LLM must generalize from imperfect supervision provided by a weaker source. To address this issue, we propose an approach to improve weak-to-strong generalization by involving the reliability of weak supervision signals in the alignment process. In our method, we query the weak supervisor for multiple answers, estimate the answer reliability, and enhance the alignment process by filtering out uncertain data or re-weighting reliable data. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our methods effectively identify the quality of weak labels and significantly enhance weak-to-strong generalization. Our work presents effective techniques for error-robust model alignment, reducing error propagation from noisy supervision and enhancing the accuracy and reliability of LLMs. Codes are publicly available at http://github.com/Irenehere/ReliableAlignment.

Text-to-image generation advancements have been predominantly English-centric, creating barriers for non-English speakers and perpetuating digital inequities. While existing systems rely on translation pipelines, these introduce semantic drift, computational overhead, and cultural misalignment. We introduce NeoBabel, a novel multilingual image generation framework that sets a new Pareto frontier in performance, efficiency and inclusivity, supporting six languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, Hindi, and Persian. The model is trained using a combination of large-scale multilingual pretraining and high-resolution instruction tuning. To evaluate its capabilities, we expand two English-only benchmarks to multilingual equivalents: m-GenEval and m-DPG. NeoBabel achieves state-of-the-art multilingual performance while retaining strong English capability, scoring 0.75 on m-GenEval and 0.68 on m-DPG. Notably, it performs on par with leading models on English tasks while outperforming them by +0.11 and +0.09 on multilingual benchmarks, even though these models are built on multilingual base LLMs. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our targeted alignment training for preserving and extending crosslingual generalization. We further introduce two new metrics to rigorously assess multilingual alignment and robustness to code-mixed prompts. Notably, NeoBabel matches or exceeds English-only models while being 2-4x smaller. We release an open toolkit, including all code, model checkpoints, a curated dataset of 124M multilingual text-image pairs, and standardized multilingual evaluation protocols, to advance inclusive AI research. Our work demonstrates that multilingual capability is not a trade-off but a catalyst for improved robustness, efficiency, and cultural fidelity in generative AI.

Data heterogeneity in federated learning, characterized by a significant misalignment between local and global distributions, leads to divergent local optimization directions and hinders global model training. Existing studies mainly focus on optimizing local updates or global aggregation, but these indirect approaches demonstrate instability when handling highly heterogeneous data distributions, especially in scenarios where label skew and domain skew coexist. To address this, we propose a geometry-guided data generation method that centers on simulating the global embedding distribution locally. We first introduce the concept of the geometric shape of an embedding distribution and then address the challenge of obtaining global geometric shapes under privacy constraints. Subsequently, we propose GGEUR, which leverages global geometric shapes to guide the generation of new samples, enabling a closer approximation to the ideal global distribution. In single-domain scenarios, we augment samples based on global geometric shapes to enhance model generalization; in multi-domain scenarios, we further employ class prototypes to simulate the global distribution across domains. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the performance of existing approaches in handling highly heterogeneous data, including scenarios with label skew, domain skew, and their coexistence. Code published at: https://github.com/WeiDai-David/2025CVPR_GGEUR

Extending large language models to effectively handle long contexts requires instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length. To address this, we present LongAlign -- a recipe of the instruction data, training, and evaluation for long context alignment. First, we construct a long instruction-following dataset using Self-Instruct. To ensure the data diversity, it covers a broad range of tasks from various long context sources. Second, we adopt the packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-tuning on data with varied length distributions. Additionally, we develop a loss weighting method to balance the contribution to the loss across different sequences during packing training. Third, we introduce the LongBench-Chat benchmark for evaluating instruction-following capabilities on queries of 10k-100k in length. Experiments show that LongAlign outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by up to 30\%, while also maintaining their proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. The code, data, and long-aligned models are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/LongAlign.

Vision-language representation learning largely benefits from image-text alignment through contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE loss). The success of this alignment strategy is attributed to its capability in maximizing the mutual information (MI) between an image and its matched text. However, simply performing cross-modal alignment (CMA) ignores data potential within each modality, which may result in degraded representations. For instance, although CMA-based models are able to map image-text pairs close together in the embedding space, they fail to ensure that similar inputs from the same modality stay close by. This problem can get even worse when the pre-training data is noisy. In this paper, we propose triple contrastive learning (TCL) for vision-language pre-training by leveraging both cross-modal and intra-modal self-supervision. Besides CMA, TCL introduces an intra-modal contrastive objective to provide complementary benefits in representation learning. To take advantage of localized and structural information from image and text input, TCL further maximizes the average MI between local regions of image/text and their global summary. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that takes into account local structure information for multi-modality representation learning. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is competitive and achieves the new state of the art on various common down-stream vision-language tasks such as image-text retrieval and visual question answering.

Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the issues of verbosity and likelihood displacement, which can be driven by the noisy preference pairs that induce similar likelihood for preferred and dispreferred responses. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we propose a new preference alignment method based on comparison oracles and provide the convergence guarantee for its basic scheme. Second, we improve our method using some heuristics and conduct the experiments to demonstrate the flexibility and compatibility of practical scheme in improving the performance of LLMs using noisy preference pairs. Evaluations are conducted across multiple base and instruction-tuned models (Mistral-7B, Llama-3-8B and Gemma-2-9B) with benchmarks (AlpacaEval 2, MT-Bench and Arena-Hard). Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method as an alternative to addressing the limitations of existing direct alignment methods. A highlight of our work is that we evidence the importance of designing specialized methods for preference pairs with distinct likelihood margin, which complements the recent findings in Razin-2025-Unintentional.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advancements, however, the common learning paradigm treats LLMs as passive information repositories, neglecting their potential for active learning and alignment. Some approaches train LLMs using their own generated synthetic data, exploring the possibility of active alignment. However, there is still a huge gap between these one-time alignment methods and the continuous automatic alignment of humans. In this paper, we introduce I-SHEEP, an Iterative Self-EnHancEmEnt Paradigm.This human-like paradigm enables LLMs to continuously self-align from scratch with nothing. Compared to the one-time alignment method Dromedary sun2023principledriven, which refers to the first iteration in this paper, I-SHEEP can significantly enhance capacities on both Qwen and Llama models. I-SHEEP achieves a maximum relative improvement of 78.2\% in the Alpaca Eval, 24.0\% in the MT Bench, and an absolute increase of 8.88\% in the IFEval accuracy over subsequent iterations in Qwen-1.5 72B model. Additionally, I-SHEEP surpasses the base model in various standard benchmark generation tasks, achieving an average improvement of 24.77\% in code generation tasks, 12.04\% in TrivialQA, and 20.29\% in SQuAD. We also provide new insights based on the experiment results. Our codes, datasets, and models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/I-SHEEP.

Deep learning (e.g., Transformer) has been widely and successfully used in multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF). Unlike existing methods that focus on training models from a single modal of time series input, large language models (LLMs) based MTSF methods with cross-modal text and time series input have recently shown great superiority, especially with limited temporal data. However, current LLM-based MTSF methods usually focus on adapting and fine-tuning LLMs, while neglecting the distribution discrepancy between textual and temporal input tokens, thus leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross-Modal LLM Fine-Tuning (CALF) framework for MTSF by reducing the distribution discrepancy between textual and temporal data, which mainly consists of the temporal target branch with temporal input and the textual source branch with aligned textual input. To reduce the distribution discrepancy, we develop the cross-modal match module to first align cross-modal input distributions. Additionally, to minimize the modality distribution gap in both feature and output spaces, feature regularization loss is developed to align the intermediate features between the two branches for better weight updates, while output consistency loss is introduced to allow the output representations of both branches to correspond effectively. Thanks to the modality alignment, CALF establishes state-of-the-art performance for both long-term and short-term forecasting tasks with low computational complexity, and exhibiting favorable few-shot and zero-shot abilities similar to that in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Hank0626/LLaTA.

Dense feature matching is an important computer vision task that involves estimating all correspondences between two images of a 3D scene. In this paper, we revisit robust losses for matching from a Markov chain perspective, yielding theoretical insights and large gains in performance. We begin by constructing a unifying formulation of matching as a Markov chain, based on which we identify two key stages which we argue should be decoupled for matching. The first is the coarse stage, where the estimated result needs to be globally consistent. The second is the refinement stage, where the model needs precise localization capabilities. Inspired by the insight that these stages concern distinct issues, we propose a coarse matcher following the regression-by-classification paradigm that provides excellent globally consistent, albeit not exactly localized, matches. This is followed by a local feature refinement stage using well-motivated robust regression losses, yielding extremely precise matches. Our proposed approach, which we call RoMa, achieves significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/Parskatt/RoMa

Preference optimization techniques have become a standard final stage for training state-of-art large language models (LLMs). However, despite widespread adoption, the vast majority of work to-date has focused on first-class citizen languages like English and Chinese. This captures a small fraction of the languages in the world, but also makes it unclear which aspects of current state-of-the-art research transfer to a multilingual setting. In this work, we perform an exhaustive study to achieve a new state-of-the-art in aligning multilingual LLMs. We introduce a novel, scalable method for generating high-quality multilingual feedback data to balance data coverage. We establish the benefits of cross-lingual transfer and increased dataset size in preference training. Our preference-trained model achieves a 54.4% win-rate against Aya 23 8B, the current state-of-the-art multilingual LLM in its parameter class, and a 69.5% win-rate or higher against widely used models like Gemma-1.1-7B-it, Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3. As a result of our study, we expand the frontier of alignment techniques to 23 languages covering half of the world's population.

With the growing utilization of large language models (LLMs) across domains, alignment towards human preferences has become one of the most critical aspects of training models. At the forefront of state-of-the-art human alignment methods are preference optimization methods (*PO). However, prior research has often concentrated on identifying the best-performing method, typically involving a grid search over hyperparameters, which can be impractical for general practitioners. In this paper, we aim to identify the algorithm that, while being performant, is simultaneously more robust to varying hyperparameters, thereby increasing the likelihood of achieving better results. We focus on a realistic out-of-distribution (OOD) scenario that mirrors real-world applications of human alignment, offering practical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. Furthermore, to better understand the shortcomings of generations from the different methods, we analyze the model generations through the lens of KL divergence of the SFT model and the response length statistics. Our analysis reveals that the widely adopted DPO method consistently produces lengthy responses of inferior quality that are very close to the SFT responses. Motivated by these findings, we propose an embarrassingly simple extension to the DPO algorithm, LN-DPO, resulting in more concise responses without sacrificing quality compared to the policy obtained by vanilla DPO.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved photorealistic novel views synthesis; however, the requirement of accurate camera poses limits its application. Despite analysis-by-synthesis extensions for jointly learning neural 3D representations and registering camera frames exist, they are susceptible to suboptimal solutions if poorly initialized. We propose L2G-NeRF, a Local-to-Global registration method for bundle-adjusting Neural Radiance Fields: first, a pixel-wise flexible alignment, followed by a frame-wise constrained parametric alignment. Pixel-wise local alignment is learned in an unsupervised way via a deep network which optimizes photometric reconstruction errors. Frame-wise global alignment is performed using differentiable parameter estimation solvers on the pixel-wise correspondences to find a global transformation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of high-fidelity reconstruction and resolving large camera pose misalignment. Our module is an easy-to-use plugin that can be applied to NeRF variants and other neural field applications. The Code and supplementary materials are available at https://rover-xingyu.github.io/L2G-NeRF/.

The training data for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is typically structured as input-output pairs. However, for many tasks, there can be multiple equally valid output variations for the same input. Recent studies have observed that the choice of output variation used in training can affect the model's performance. This raises an important question: how can we generate the most effective output from the many possible response generation strategy options? Rather than relying on the traditional but resource-intensive train-and-evaluate approach, this paper proposes a scalable, approximate method for estimating the quality of a small subset of generated training data derived from the same input. We then evaluate how well this small subset of generated output fits the target model we are trying to train. We present a large-scale benchmark covering diverse reasoning-based datasets to support our study. The central idea is that a good output should closely resemble the output generated by the target LLM. We formalize this 'closeness' as the expected alignment score between a candidate output and the output sampled from the target LLM. We connect this measurement to the perplexity metric used in previous literature and demonstrate that leveraging an alignment-based metric can provide better predictions of model performance. Using this strategy, we can evaluate a small subset of the generated output from each response generation strategy option, then select the most effective strategy. We show that an LLM trained on data generated by the selected strategy could lead to a significant performance gain in many cases.

Alignment has become a critical step for instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to become helpful assistants. However, effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. To fill in this gap, we introduce AlignBench, a comprehensive multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs' alignment in Chinese. Equipped with a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, our benchmark employs a rule-calibrated multi-dimensional LLM-as-Judge with Chain-of-Thought to generate explanations and final ratings as evaluations, ensuring high reliability and interpretability. Furthermore, we report AlignBench evaluated by CritiqueLLM, a dedicated Chinese evaluator LLM that recovers 95% of GPT-4's evaluation ability. We will provide public APIs for evaluating AlignBench with CritiqueLLM to facilitate the evaluation of LLMs' Chinese alignment. All evaluation codes, data, and LLM generations are available at https://github.com/THUDM/AlignBench.

The goal of face recognition (FR) can be viewed as a pair similarity optimization problem, maximizing a similarity set S^p over positive pairs, while minimizing similarity set S^n over negative pairs. Ideally, it is expected that FR models form a well-discriminative feature space (WDFS) that satisfies mathcal{S^p} > mathcal{S^n}. With regard to WDFS, the existing deep feature learning paradigms (i.e., metric and classification losses) can be expressed as a unified perspective on different pair generation (PG) strategies. Unfortunately, in the metric loss (ML), it is infeasible to generate negative pairs taking all classes into account in each iteration because of the limited mini-batch size. In contrast, in classification loss (CL), it is difficult to generate extremely hard negative pairs owing to the convergence of the class weight vectors to their center. This leads to a mismatch between the two similarity distributions of the sampled pairs and all negative pairs. Thus, this paper proposes a unified negative pair generation (UNPG) by combining two PG strategies (i.e., MLPG and CLPG) from a unified perspective to alleviate the mismatch. UNPG introduces useful information about negative pairs using MLPG to overcome the CLPG deficiency. Moreover, it includes filtering the similarities of noisy negative pairs to guarantee reliable convergence and improved performance. Exhaustive experiments show the superiority of UNPG by achieving state-of-the-art performance across recent loss functions on public benchmark datasets. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available.

Text-to-image generative models have made significant advancements in recent years; however, accurately capturing intricate details in textual prompts, such as entity missing, attribute binding errors, and incorrect relationships remains a formidable challenge. In response, we present an innovative, training-free method that directly addresses these challenges by incorporating tailored objectives to account for textual constraints. Unlike layout-based approaches that enforce rigid structures and limit diversity, our proposed approach offers a more flexible arrangement of the scene by imposing just the extracted constraints from the text, without any unnecessary additions. These constraints are formulated as losses-entity missing, entity mixing, attribute binding, and spatial relationships, integrated into a unified loss that is applied in the first generation stage. Furthermore, we introduce a feedback-driven system for fine-grained initial noise refinement. This system integrates a verifier that evaluates the generated image, identifies inconsistencies, and provides corrective feedback. Leveraging this feedback, our refinement method first targets the unmet constraints by refining the faulty attention maps caused by initial noise, through the optimization of selective losses associated with these constraints. Subsequently, our unified loss function is reapplied to proceed the second generation phase. Experimental results demonstrate that our method, relying solely on our proposed objective functions, significantly enhances compositionality, achieving a 24% improvement in human evaluation and a 25% gain in spatial relationships. Furthermore, our fine-grained noise refinement proves effective, boosting performance by up to 5%. Code is available at https://github.com/hadi-hosseini/noise-refinement.

Joint Alignment (JA) of images aims to align a collection of images into a unified coordinate frame, such that semantically-similar features appear at corresponding spatial locations. Most existing approaches often require long training times, large-capacity models, and extensive hyperparameter tuning. We introduce FastJAM, a rapid, graph-based method that drastically reduces the computational complexity of joint alignment tasks. FastJAM leverages pairwise matches computed by an off-the-shelf image matcher, together with a rapid nonparametric clustering, to construct a graph representing intra- and inter-image keypoint relations. A graph neural network propagates and aggregates these correspondences, efficiently predicting per-image homography parameters via image-level pooling. Utilizing an inverse-compositional loss, that eliminates the need for a regularization term over the predicted transformations (and thus also obviates the hyperparameter tuning associated with such terms), FastJAM performs image JA quickly and effectively. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that FastJAM achieves results better than existing modern JA methods in terms of alignment quality, while reducing computation time from hours or minutes to mere seconds. Our code is available at our project webpage, https://bgu-cs-vil.github.io/FastJAM/

Speech-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text translation are currently dynamic areas of research. To contribute to these fields, we present SpeechAlign, a framework to evaluate the underexplored field of source-target alignment in speech models. Our framework has two core components. First, to tackle the absence of suitable evaluation datasets, we introduce the Speech Gold Alignment dataset, built upon a English-German text translation gold alignment dataset. Secondly, we introduce two novel metrics, Speech Alignment Error Rate (SAER) and Time-weighted Speech Alignment Error Rate (TW-SAER), to evaluate alignment quality in speech models. By publishing SpeechAlign we provide an accessible evaluation framework for model assessment, and we employ it to benchmark open-source Speech Translation models.

Lyrics alignment gained considerable attention in recent years. State-of-the-art systems either re-use established speech recognition toolkits, or design end-to-end solutions involving a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. However, both approaches suffer from specific weaknesses: toolkits are known for their complexity, and CTC systems use a loss designed for transcription which can limit alignment accuracy. In this paper, we use instead a contrastive learning procedure that derives cross-modal embeddings linking the audio and text domains. This way, we obtain a novel system that is simple to train end-to-end, can make use of weakly annotated training data, jointly learns a powerful text model, and is tailored to alignment. The system is not only the first to yield an average absolute error below 0.2 seconds on the standard Jamendo dataset but it is also robust to other languages, even when trained on English data only. Finally, we release word-level alignments for the JamendoLyrics Multi-Lang dataset.

Current LLM alignment techniques use pairwise human preferences at a sample level, and as such, they do not imply an alignment on the distributional level. We propose in this paper Alignment via Optimal Transport (AOT), a novel method for distributional preference alignment of LLMs. AOT aligns LLMs on unpaired preference data by making the reward distribution of the positive samples stochastically dominant in the first order on the distribution of negative samples. We introduce a convex relaxation of this first-order stochastic dominance and cast it as an optimal transport problem with a smooth and convex cost. Thanks to the one-dimensional nature of the resulting optimal transport problem and the convexity of the cost, it has a closed-form solution via sorting on empirical measures. We fine-tune LLMs with this AOT objective, which enables alignment by penalizing the violation of the stochastic dominance of the reward distribution of the positive samples on the reward distribution of the negative samples. We analyze the sample complexity of AOT by considering the dual of the OT problem and show that it converges at the parametric rate. Empirically, we show on a diverse set of alignment datasets and LLMs that AOT leads to state-of-the-art models in the 7B family of models when evaluated with Open LLM Benchmarks and AlpacaEval.

A family of loss functions built on pair-based computation have been proposed in the literature which provide a myriad of solutions for deep metric learning. In this paper, we provide a general weighting framework for understanding recent pair-based loss functions. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we establish a General Pair Weighting (GPW) framework, which casts the sampling problem of deep metric learning into a unified view of pair weighting through gradient analysis, providing a powerful tool for understanding recent pair-based loss functions; (2) we show that with GPW, various existing pair-based methods can be compared and discussed comprehensively, with clear differences and key limitations identified; (3) we propose a new loss called multi-similarity loss (MS loss) under the GPW, which is implemented in two iterative steps (i.e., mining and weighting). This allows it to fully consider three similarities for pair weighting, providing a more principled approach for collecting and weighting informative pairs. Finally, the proposed MS loss obtains new state-of-the-art performance on four image retrieval benchmarks, where it outperforms the most recent approaches, such as ABEKim_2018_ECCV and HTL by a large margin: 60.6% to 65.7% on CUB200, and 80.9% to 88.0% on In-Shop Clothes Retrieval dataset at Recall@1. Code is available at https://github.com/MalongTech/research-ms-loss.

Evaluating explanations of image classifiers regarding ground truth, e.g. segmentation masks defined by human perception, primarily evaluates the quality of the models under consideration rather than the explanation methods themselves. Driven by this observation, we propose a framework for jointly evaluating the robustness of safety-critical systems that combine a deep neural network with an explanation method. These are increasingly used in real-world applications like medical image analysis or robotics. We introduce a fine-tuning procedure to (mis)align modelx2013explanation pipelines with ground truth and use it to quantify the potential discrepancy between worst and best-case scenarios of human alignment. Experiments across various model architectures and post-hoc local interpretation methods provide insights into the robustness of vision transformers and the overall vulnerability of such AI systems to potential adversarial attacks.

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task. Specifically, the model first self-labels word alignments for parallel sentences. Then we randomly mask tokens in a bitext pair. Given a masked token, the model uses a pointer network to predict the aligned token in the other language. We alternately perform the above two steps in an expectation-maximization manner. Experimental results show that our method improves cross-lingual transferability on various datasets, especially on the token-level tasks, such as question answering, and structured prediction. Moreover, the model can serve as a pretrained word aligner, which achieves reasonably low error rates on the alignment benchmarks. The code and pretrained parameters are available at https://github.com/CZWin32768/XLM-Align.

Word alignment, which aims to align translationally equivalent words between source and target sentences, plays an important role in many natural language processing tasks. Current unsupervised neural alignment methods focus on inducing alignments from neural machine translation models, which does not leverage the full context in the target sequence. In this paper, we propose Mask-Align, a self-supervised word alignment model that takes advantage of the full context on the target side. Our model masks out each target token and predicts it conditioned on both source and the remaining target tokens. This two-step process is based on the assumption that the source token contributing most to recovering the masked target token should be aligned. We also introduce an attention variant called leaky attention, which alleviates the problem of unexpected high cross-attention weights on special tokens such as periods. Experiments on four language pairs show that our model outperforms previous unsupervised neural aligners and obtains new state-of-the-art results.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. However, effectively leveraging their vast knowledge for training smaller downstream models remains an open challenge, especially in domains like tabular data learning, where simpler models are often preferred due to interpretability and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel yet straightforward method for incorporating LLM-generated global task feature attributions into the training process of smaller networks. Specifically, we propose an attribution-matching regularization term that aligns the training dynamics of the smaller model with the insights provided by the LLM. By doing so, our approach yields superior performance in few-shot learning scenarios. Notably, our method requires only black-box API access to the LLM, making it easy to integrate into existing training pipelines with minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this method can be used to address common issues in real-world datasets, such as skewness and bias. By integrating high-level knowledge from LLMs, our approach improves generalization, even when training data is limited or imbalanced. We validate its effectiveness through extensive experiments across multiple tasks, demonstrating improved learning efficiency and model robustness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) need to be aligned with human expectations to ensure their safety and utility in most applications. Alignment is challenging, costly, and needs to be repeated for every LLM and alignment criterion. We propose to decouple LLMs and alignment by training aligner models that can be used to align any LLM for a given criteria on an as-needed basis, thus also reducing the potential negative impacts of alignment on performance. Our recipe for training the aligner models solely relies on synthetic data generated with a (prompted) LLM and can be easily adjusted for a variety of alignment criteria. We illustrate our method by training an "ethical" aligner and verify its efficacy empirically.

Online video segmentation methods excel at handling long sequences and capturing gradual changes, making them ideal for real-world applications. However, achieving temporally consistent predictions remains a challenge, especially with gradual accumulation of noise or drift in on-line propagation, abrupt occlusions and scene transitions. This paper introduces Local2Global, an online framework, for video instance segmentation, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance with simple baseline and training purely in online fashion. Leveraging the DETR-based query propagation framework, we introduce two novel sets of queries:(1) local queries that capture initial object-specific spatial features from each frame and (2) global queries containing past spatio-temporal representations. We propose the L2G-aligner, a novel lightweight transformer decoder, to facilitate an early alignment between local and global queries. This alignment allows our model to effectively utilize current frame information while maintaining temporal consistency, producing a smooth transition between frames. Furthermore, L2G-aligner is integrated within the segmentation model, without relying on additional complex heuristics, or memory mechanisms. Extensive experiments across various challenging VIS and VPS datasets showcase the superiority of our method with simple online training, surpassing current benchmarks without bells and rings. For instance, we achieve 54.3 and 49.4 AP on Youtube-VIS-19/-21 datasets and 37.0 AP on OVIS dataset respectively withthe ResNet-50 backbone.

The abundance of intestinal flora is closely related to human diseases, but diseases are not caused by a single gut microbe. Instead, they result from the complex interplay of numerous microbial entities. This intricate and implicit connection among gut microbes poses a significant challenge for disease prediction using abundance information from OTU data. Recently, several methods have shown potential in predicting corresponding diseases. However, these methods fail to learn the inner association among gut microbes from different hosts, leading to unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we present a novel architecture, Unsupervised Multi-graph Merge Adversarial Network (UMMAN). UMMAN can obtain the embeddings of nodes in the Multi-Graph in an unsupervised scenario, so that it helps learn the multiplex association. Our method is the first to combine Graph Neural Network with the task of intestinal flora disease prediction. We employ complex relation-types to construct the Original-Graph and disrupt the relationships among nodes to generate corresponding Shuffled-Graph. We introduce the Node Feature Global Integration (NFGI) module to represent the global features of the graph. Furthermore, we design a joint loss comprising adversarial loss and hybrid attention loss to ensure that the real graph embedding aligns closely with the Original-Graph and diverges from the Shuffled-Graph. Comprehensive experiments on five classical OTU gut microbiome datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method. (We will release our code soon.)

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

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are widely regarded as crucial in the exploration of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The core of MLLMs lies in their capability to achieve cross-modal alignment. To attain this goal, current MLLMs typically follow a two-phase training paradigm: the pre-training phase and the instruction-tuning phase. Despite their success, there are shortcomings in the modeling of alignment capabilities within these models. Firstly, during the pre-training phase, the model usually assumes that all image-text pairs are uniformly aligned, but in fact the degree of alignment between different image-text pairs is inconsistent. Secondly, the instructions currently used for finetuning incorporate a variety of tasks, different tasks's instructions usually require different levels of alignment capabilities, but previous MLLMs overlook these differentiated alignment needs. To tackle these issues, we propose a new multimodal large language model AlignGPT. In the pre-training stage, instead of treating all image-text pairs equally, we assign different levels of alignment capabilities to different image-text pairs. Then, in the instruction-tuning phase, we adaptively combine these different levels of alignment capabilities to meet the dynamic alignment needs of different instructions. Extensive experimental results show that our model achieves competitive performance on 12 benchmarks.

Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are simultaneously processed for joint visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design four pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Word-Region Alignment (WRA). Different from previous work that applies joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditional masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). In addition to ITM for global image-text alignment, we also propose WRA via the use of Optimal Transport (OT) to explicitly encourage fine-grained alignment between words and image regions during pre-training. Comprehensive analysis shows that both conditional masking and OT-based WRA contribute to better pre-training. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR^2. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenRocks/UNITER.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant approach for language model (LM) alignment. At its core, RLHF uses a margin-based loss for preference optimization, specifying ideal LM behavior only by the difference between preferred and dispreferred responses. In this paper, we identify a common pitfall of margin-based methods -- the under-specification of ideal LM behavior on preferred and dispreferred responses individually, which leads to two unintended consequences as the margin increases: (1) The probability of dispreferred (e.g., unsafe) responses may increase, resulting in potential safety alignment failures. (2) The probability of preferred responses may decrease, even when those responses are ideal. We demystify the reasons behind these problematic behaviors: margin-based losses couple the change in the preferred probability to the gradient of the dispreferred one, and vice versa, often preventing the preferred probability from increasing while the dispreferred one decreases, and thus causing a synchronized increase or decrease in both probabilities. We term this effect, inherent in margin-based objectives, gradient entanglement. Formally, we derive conditions for general margin-based alignment objectives under which gradient entanglement becomes concerning: the inner product of the gradients of preferred and dispreferred log-probabilities is large relative to the individual gradient norms. We theoretically investigate why such inner products can be large when aligning language models and empirically validate our findings. Empirical implications of our framework extend to explaining important differences in the training dynamics of various preference optimization algorithms, and suggesting potential algorithm designs to mitigate the under-specification issue of margin-based methods and thereby improving language model alignment.

Word alignments are useful for tasks like statistical and neural machine translation (NMT) and cross-lingual annotation projection. Statistical word aligners perform well, as do methods that extract alignments jointly with translations in NMT. However, most approaches require parallel training data, and quality decreases as less training data is available. We propose word alignment methods that require no parallel data. The key idea is to leverage multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualized, for word alignment. Our multilingual embeddings are created from monolingual data only without relying on any parallel data or dictionaries. We find that alignments created from embeddings are superior for four and comparable for two language pairs compared to those produced by traditional statistical aligners, even with abundant parallel data; e.g., contextualized embeddings achieve a word alignment F1 for English-German that is 5 percentage points higher than eflomal, a high-quality statistical aligner, trained on 100k parallel sentences.

We study a family of loss functions named label-distributionally robust (LDR) losses for multi-class classification that are formulated from distributionally robust optimization (DRO) perspective, where the uncertainty in the given label information are modeled and captured by taking the worse case of distributional weights. The benefits of this perspective are several fold: (i) it provides a unified framework to explain the classical cross-entropy (CE) loss and SVM loss and their variants, (ii) it includes a special family corresponding to the temperature-scaled CE loss, which is widely adopted but poorly understood; (iii) it allows us to achieve adaptivity to the uncertainty degree of label information at an instance level. Our contributions include: (1) we study both consistency and robustness by establishing top-k (forall kgeq 1) consistency of LDR losses for multi-class classification, and a negative result that a top-1 consistent and symmetric robust loss cannot achieve top-k consistency simultaneously for all kgeq 2; (2) we propose a new adaptive LDR loss that automatically adapts the individualized temperature parameter to the noise degree of class label of each instance; (3) we demonstrate stable and competitive performance for the proposed adaptive LDR loss on 7 benchmark datasets under 6 noisy label and 1 clean settings against 13 loss functions, and on one real-world noisy dataset. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Optimization-AI/ICML2023_LDR.

Recent advances in learning aligned multimodal representations have been primarily driven by training large neural networks on massive, noisy paired-modality datasets. In this work, we ask whether it is possible to achieve similar results with substantially less training time and data. We achieve this by taking advantage of existing pretrained unimodal encoders and careful curation of alignment data relevant to the downstream task of interest. We study a natural approach to aligning existing encoders via small auxiliary functions, and we find that this method is competitive with (or outperforms) state of the art in many settings while being less prone to overfitting, less costly to train, and more robust to distribution shift. With a properly chosen alignment distribution, our method surpasses prior state of the art for ImageNet zero-shot classification on public data while using two orders of magnitude less time and data and training 77% fewer parameters.

AI alignment aims to make AI systems behave in line with human intentions and values. As AI systems grow more capable, so do risks from misalignment. To provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the alignment field, in this survey, we delve into the core concepts, methodology, and practice of alignment. First, we identify four principles as the key objectives of AI alignment: Robustness, Interpretability, Controllability, and Ethicality (RICE). Guided by these four principles, we outline the landscape of current alignment research and decompose them into two key components: forward alignment and backward alignment. The former aims to make AI systems aligned via alignment training, while the latter aims to gain evidence about the systems' alignment and govern them appropriately to avoid exacerbating misalignment risks. On forward alignment, we discuss techniques for learning from feedback and learning under distribution shift. On backward alignment, we discuss assurance techniques and governance practices. We also release and continually update the website (www.alignmentsurvey.com) which features tutorials, collections of papers, blog posts, and other resources.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, LLMs are often required to handle a diverse set of tasks from multiple domains, a scenario naturally addressed by multi-task learning (MTL). Within this MTL context, a prevailing trend involves LoRA variants with multiple adapters or heads, which advocate for structural diversity to capture task-specific knowledge. Our findings present a direct challenge to this paradigm. We first show that a simplified multi-head architecture with high inter-head similarity substantially outperforms complex multi-adapter and multi-head systems. This leads us to question the multi-component paradigm itself, and we further demonstrate that a standard single-adapter LoRA, with a sufficiently increased rank, also achieves highly competitive performance. These results lead us to a new hypothesis: effective MTL generalization hinges on learning robust shared representations, not isolating task-specific features. To validate this, we propose Align-LoRA, which incorporates an explicit loss to align task representations within the shared adapter space. Experiments confirm that Align-LoRA significantly surpasses all baselines, establishing a simpler yet more effective paradigm for adapting LLMs to multiple tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/jinda-liu/Align-LoRA.

We focus on the problem of species distribution modeling using global-scale presence-only data. Most previous studies have mapped the range of a given species using geographical and environmental features alone. To capture a stronger implicit relationship between species, we encode the taxonomic hierarchy of species using a large language model. This enables range mapping for any taxonomic rank and unseen species without additional supervision. Further, we propose a novel proximity-aware evaluation metric that enables evaluating species distribution models using any pixel-level representation of ground-truth species range map. The proposed metric penalizes the predictions of a model based on its proximity to the ground truth. We describe the effectiveness of our model by systematically evaluating on the task of species range prediction, zero-shot prediction and geo-feature regression against the state-of-the-art. Results show our model outperforms the strong baselines when trained with a variety of multi-label learning losses.

The unsupervised task of Joint Alignment (JA) of images is beset by challenges such as high complexity, geometric distortions, and convergence to poor local or even global optima. Although Vision Transformers (ViT) have recently provided valuable features for JA, they fall short of fully addressing these issues. Consequently, researchers frequently depend on expensive models and numerous regularization terms, resulting in long training times and challenging hyperparameter tuning. We introduce the Spatial Joint Alignment Model (SpaceJAM), a novel approach that addresses the JA task with efficiency and simplicity. SpaceJAM leverages a compact architecture with only 16K trainable parameters and uniquely operates without the need for regularization or atlas maintenance. Evaluations on SPair-71K and CUB datasets demonstrate that SpaceJAM matches the alignment capabilities of existing methods while significantly reducing computational demands and achieving at least a 10x speedup. SpaceJAM sets a new standard for rapid and effective image alignment, making the process more accessible and efficient. Our code is available at: https://bgu-cs-vil.github.io/SpaceJAM/.

Big models, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), are models typically pre-trained on massive data and comprised of enormous parameters, which not only obtain significantly improved performance across diverse tasks but also present emergent capabilities absent in smaller models. However, the growing intertwining of big models with everyday human lives poses potential risks and might cause serious social harm. Therefore, many efforts have been made to align LLMs with humans to make them better follow user instructions and satisfy human preferences. Nevertheless, `what to align with' has not been fully discussed, and inappropriate alignment goals might even backfire. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of different alignment goals in existing work and trace their evolution paths to help identify the most essential goal. Particularly, we investigate related works from two perspectives: the definition of alignment goals and alignment evaluation. Our analysis encompasses three distinct levels of alignment goals and reveals a goal transformation from fundamental abilities to value orientation, indicating the potential of intrinsic human values as the alignment goal for enhanced LLMs. Based on such results, we further discuss the challenges of achieving such intrinsic value alignment and provide a collection of available resources for future research on the alignment of big models.

Machine unlearning aims to remove information derived from forgotten data while preserving that of the remaining dataset in a well-trained model. With the increasing emphasis on data privacy, several approaches to machine unlearning have emerged. However, these methods typically rely on complete supervision throughout the unlearning process. Unfortunately, obtaining such supervision, whether for the forgetting or remaining data, can be impractical due to the substantial cost associated with annotating real-world datasets. This challenge prompts us to propose a supervision-free unlearning approach that operates without the need for labels during the unlearning process. Specifically, we introduce a variational approach to approximate the distribution of representations for the remaining data. Leveraging this approximation, we adapt the original model to eliminate information from the forgotten data at the representation level. To further address the issue of lacking supervision information, which hinders alignment with ground truth, we introduce a contrastive loss to facilitate the matching of representations between the remaining data and those of the original model, thus preserving predictive performance. Experimental results across various unlearning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, Label-Agnostic Forgetting (LAF) without using any labels, which achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods that rely on full supervision information. Furthermore, our approach excels in semi-supervised scenarios, leveraging limited supervision information to outperform fully supervised baselines. This work not only showcases the viability of supervision-free unlearning in deep models but also opens up a new possibility for future research in unlearning at the representation level.

Text-to-image person retrieval aims to identify the target person based on a given textual description query. The primary challenge is to learn the mapping of visual and textual modalities into a common latent space. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by leveraging separately pre-trained unimodal models to extract visual and textual features. However, these approaches lack the necessary underlying alignment capabilities required to match multimodal data effectively. Besides, these works use prior information to explore explicit part alignments, which may lead to the distortion of intra-modality information. To alleviate these issues, we present IRRA: a cross-modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning framework that learns relations between local visual-textual tokens and enhances global image-text matching without requiring additional prior supervision. Specifically, we first design an Implicit Relation Reasoning module in a masked language modeling paradigm. This achieves cross-modal interaction by integrating the visual cues into the textual tokens with a cross-modal multimodal interaction encoder. Secondly, to globally align the visual and textual embeddings, Similarity Distribution Matching is proposed to minimize the KL divergence between image-text similarity distributions and the normalized label matching distributions. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all three public datasets, with a notable margin of about 3%-9% for Rank-1 accuracy compared to prior methods.

Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with safety alignment can be jail-broken by fine-tuning on a dataset mixed with harmful data. First time in the literature, we show that the jail-broken effect can be mitigated by separating states in the finetuning stage to optimize the alignment and user datasets. Unfortunately, our subsequent study shows that this simple Bi-State Optimization (BSO) solution experiences convergence instability when steps invested in its alignment state is too small, leading to downgraded alignment performance. By statistical analysis, we show that the excess drift towards consensus could be a probable reason for the instability. To remedy this issue, we propose Lazy(i) safety alignment (Lisa), which introduces a proximal term to constraint the drift of each state. Theoretically, the benefit of the proximal term is supported by the convergence analysis, wherein we show that a sufficient large proximal factor is necessary to guarantee Lisa's convergence. Empirically, our results on four downstream finetuning tasks show that Lisa with a proximal term can significantly increase alignment performance while maintaining the LLM's accuracy on the user tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Lisa.

Despite being the standard loss function to train multi-class neural networks, the log-softmax has two potential limitations. First, it involves computations that scale linearly with the number of output classes, which can restrict the size of problems we are able to tackle with current hardware. Second, it remains unclear how close it matches the task loss such as the top-k error rate or other non-differentiable evaluation metrics which we aim to optimize ultimately. In this paper, we introduce an alternative classification loss function, the Z-loss, which is designed to address these two issues. Unlike the log-softmax, it has the desirable property of belonging to the spherical loss family (Vincent et al., 2015), a class of loss functions for which training can be performed very efficiently with a complexity independent of the number of output classes. We show experimentally that it significantly outperforms the other spherical loss functions previously investigated. Furthermore, we show on a word language modeling task that it also outperforms the log-softmax with respect to certain ranking scores, such as top-k scores, suggesting that the Z-loss has the flexibility to better match the task loss. These qualities thus makes the Z-loss an appealing candidate to train very efficiently large output networks such as word-language models or other extreme classification problems. On the One Billion Word (Chelba et al., 2014) dataset, we are able to train a model with the Z-loss 40 times faster than the log-softmax and more than 4 times faster than the hierarchical softmax.

Machine learning models often struggle with distribution shifts in real-world scenarios, whereas humans exhibit robust adaptation. Models that better align with human perception may achieve higher out-of-distribution generalization. In this study, we investigate how various characteristics of large-scale computer vision models influence their alignment with human capabilities and robustness. Our findings indicate that increasing model and data size and incorporating rich semantic information and multiple modalities enhance models' alignment with human perception and their overall robustness. Our empirical analysis demonstrates a strong correlation between out-of-distribution accuracy and human alignment.

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information. Traditional alignment methods based on reinforcement learning often struggle with the identified instability, whereas preference optimization methods are limited by their overfitting to pre-collected hard-label datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM alignment framework named iREPO, which utilizes implicit Reward pairwise difference regression for Empirical Preference Optimization. Particularly, iREPO employs self-generated datasets labelled by empirical human (or AI annotator) preference to iteratively refine the aligned policy through a novel regression-based loss function. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative algorithm backed by theoretical guarantees for achieving optimal results under ideal assumptions and providing a practical performance-gap result without such assumptions. Experimental results with Phi-2 and Mistral-7B demonstrate that iREPO effectively achieves self-alignment using soft-label, self-generated responses and the logit of empirical AI annotators. Furthermore, our approach surpasses preference optimization baselines in evaluations using the Language Model Evaluation Harness and Multi-turn benchmarks.

Post-training alignment has increasingly become a crucial factor in enhancing the usability of language models (LMs). However, the strength of alignment varies depending on individual preferences. This paper proposes a method to incorporate alignment control into a single model, referred to as CLM. This approach adds one identity layer preceding the initial layers and performs preference learning only on this layer to map unaligned input token embeddings into the aligned space. Experimental results demonstrate that this efficient fine-tuning method performs comparable to full fine-tuning. During inference, the input embeddings are processed through the aligned and unaligned layers, which are then merged through the interpolation coefficient. By controlling this parameter, the alignment exhibits a clear interpolation and extrapolation phenomenon.

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has shown reasonable capability for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer when fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Since mBERT is not pre-trained with explicit cross-lingual supervision, transfer performance can further be improved by aligning mBERT with cross-lingual signal. Prior work proposes several approaches to align contextualised embeddings. In this paper we analyse how different forms of cross-lingual supervision and various alignment methods influence the transfer capability of mBERT in zero-shot setting. Specifically, we compare parallel corpora vs. dictionary-based supervision and rotational vs. fine-tuning based alignment methods. We evaluate the performance of different alignment methodologies across eight languages on two tasks: Name Entity Recognition and Semantic Slot Filling. In addition, we propose a novel normalisation method which consistently improves the performance of rotation-based alignment including a notable 3% F1 improvement for distant and typologically dissimilar languages. Importantly we identify the biases of the alignment methods to the type of task and proximity to the transfer language. We also find that supervision from parallel corpus is generally superior to dictionary alignments.

Precise alignment in Text-to-Image (T2I) systems is crucial to ensure that generated visuals not only accurately encapsulate user intents but also conform to stringent ethical and aesthetic benchmarks. Incidents like the Google Gemini fiasco, where misaligned outputs triggered significant public backlash, underscore the critical need for robust alignment mechanisms. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved notable success in alignment. Building on these advancements, researchers are eager to apply similar alignment techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), to T2I systems to enhance image generation fidelity and reliability. We present YinYangAlign, an advanced benchmarking framework that systematically quantifies the alignment fidelity of T2I systems, addressing six fundamental and inherently contradictory design objectives. Each pair represents fundamental tensions in image generation, such as balancing adherence to user prompts with creative modifications or maintaining diversity alongside visual coherence. YinYangAlign includes detailed axiom datasets featuring human prompts, aligned (chosen) responses, misaligned (rejected) AI-generated outputs, and explanations of the underlying contradictions.

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) often assumes that using more clean data yields better outcomes, overlooking the match between model capacity and example difficulty. Challenging this, we propose a new principle: Preference data vary in difficulty, and overly difficult examples hinder alignment, by exceeding the model's capacity. Through systematic experimentation, we validate this principle with three key findings: (1) preference examples vary in difficulty, as evidenced by consistent learning orders across alignment runs; (2) overly difficult examples significantly degrade performance across four LLMs and two datasets; and (3) the capacity of a model dictates its threshold for handling difficult examples, underscoring a critical relationship between data selection and model capacity. Building on this principle, we introduce Selective DPO, which filters out overly difficult examples. This simple adjustment improves alignment performance by 9-16% in win rates on the AlpacaEval 2 benchmark compared to the DPO baseline, suppressing a series of DPO variants with different algorithmic adjustments. Together, these results illuminate the importance of aligning data difficulty with model capacity, offering a transformative perspective for improving alignment strategies in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/glorgao/SelectiveDPO.

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

Existing losses used in deep metric learning (DML) for image retrieval often lead to highly non-uniform intra-class and inter-class representation structures across test classes and data distributions. When combined with the common practice of using a fixed threshold to declare a match, this gives rise to significant performance variations in terms of false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR) across test classes and data distributions. We define this issue in DML as threshold inconsistency. In real-world applications, such inconsistency often complicates the threshold selection process when deploying commercial image retrieval systems. To measure this inconsistency, we propose a novel variance-based metric called Operating-Point-Inconsistency-Score (OPIS) that quantifies the variance in the operating characteristics across classes. Using the OPIS metric, we find that achieving high accuracy levels in a DML model does not automatically guarantee threshold consistency. In fact, our investigation reveals a Pareto frontier in the high-accuracy regime, where existing methods to improve accuracy often lead to degradation in threshold consistency. To address this trade-off, we introduce the Threshold-Consistent Margin (TCM) loss, a simple yet effective regularization technique that promotes uniformity in representation structures across classes by selectively penalizing hard sample pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate TCM's effectiveness in enhancing threshold consistency while preserving accuracy, simplifying the threshold selection process in practical DML settings.

In this paper, we introduce a collaborative training algorithm of balanced random forests with convolutional neural networks for domain adaptation tasks. In real scenarios, most domain adaptation algorithms face the challenges from noisy, insufficient training data and open set categorization. In such cases, conventional methods suffer from overfitting and fail to successfully transfer the knowledge of the source to the target domain. To address these issues, the following two techniques are proposed. First, we introduce the optimized decision tree construction method with convolutional neural networks, in which the data at each node are split into equal sizes while maximizing the information gain. It generates balanced decision trees on deep features because of the even-split constraint, which contributes to enhanced discrimination power and reduced overfitting problem. Second, to tackle the domain misalignment problem, we propose the domain alignment loss which penalizes uneven splits of the source and target domain data. By collaboratively optimizing the information gain of the labeled source data as well as the entropy of unlabeled target data distributions, the proposed CoBRF algorithm achieves significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for global enterprise applications due to substantial performance gaps between high-resource and mid/low-resource languages, driven by English-centric pretraining and internal reasoning biases. This inconsistency undermines customer experience and operational reliability in multilingual settings such as customer support, content moderation, and information retrieval. Even with advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, we observe up to an 29% accuracy drop in non-English languages compared to English. We propose a practical, batch-wise alignment strategy for fine-tuning LLMs, leveraging semantically equivalent multilingual data in each training batch to directly align model outputs across languages. This approach improves non-English accuracy by up to 23.9\% without compromising English performance, model reasoning, or retrieval quality. Our method is simple to implement, scalable, and integrates seamlessly with existing LLM training \& deployment pipelines, enabling more robust and equitable multilingual AI solutions in industry.

With increasing applications of semantic segmentation, numerous datasets have been proposed in the past few years. Yet labeling remains expensive, thus, it is desirable to jointly train models across aggregations of datasets to enhance data volume and diversity. However, label spaces differ across datasets and may even be in conflict with one another. This paper proposes UniSeg, an effective approach to automatically train models across multiple datasets with differing label spaces, without any manual relabeling efforts. Specifically, we propose two losses that account for conflicting and co-occurring labels to achieve better generalization performance in unseen domains. First, a gradient conflict in training due to mismatched label spaces is identified and a class-independent binary cross-entropy loss is proposed to alleviate such label conflicts. Second, a loss function that considers class-relationships across datasets is proposed for a better multi-dataset training scheme. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on road-scene datasets show that UniSeg improves over multi-dataset baselines, especially on unseen datasets, e.g., achieving more than 8% gain in IoU on KITTI averaged over all the settings.

Neural language models are probabilistic models of human text. They are predominantly trained using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which is equivalent to minimizing the forward cross-entropy between the empirical data distribution and the model distribution. However, various degeneration phenomena are still widely observed when decoding from the distributions learned by such models. We establish that the forward cross-entropy is suboptimal as a distance metric for aligning human and model distribution due to its (1) recall-prioritization (2) negative diversity ignorance and (3) train-test mismatch. In this paper, we propose Earth Mover Distance Optimization (EMO) for auto-regressive language modeling. EMO capitalizes on the inherent properties of earth mover distance to address the aforementioned challenges. Due to the high complexity of direct computation, we further introduce a feasible upper bound for EMO to ease end-to-end training. Upon extensive evaluation of language models trained using EMO and MLE. We find that EMO demonstrates a consistently better language modeling performance than MLE across domains. Moreover, EMO demonstrates noteworthy enhancements in downstream performance with minimal fine-tuning on merely 25,000 sentences. This highlights the tremendous potential of EMO as a lightweight calibration method for enhancing large-scale pre-trained language models.

Standard human preference-based alignment methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are a cornerstone technology for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, these methods are all underpinned by a critical, yet flawed assumption: human preferences are homogeneous (representing a single, unified preference) and the collected data is noiseless (free from error). In reality, neither is true since human preference is pluralistic and annotators can make mistakes. This creates a discrepancy between the recorded data and the ground-truth preferences, which can misguide the model and degrade its performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Latent Collective Preference Optimization (LCPO). LCPO leverages an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to learn the latent collective consensus from noisy data. It operates by inferring the correctness of each preference label and using this probability as an adaptive weight to re-calibrate each data point's contribution to the training loss, thereby mitigating noise. We generalize this approach by establishing a theoretical link between arbitrary preference losses and their corresponding probabilistic models, elevating LCPO from a specific algorithm to a general framework for robust preference alignment. Theoretically, we prove that under the condition of a perfectly calibrated model, LCPO is guaranteed to converge to the true noise level of the dataset. Our experiments demonstrate LCPO's effectiveness as a general framework, consistently enhancing four state-of-the-art alignment algorithms (DPO, IPO, SimPO, and CPO). When applied to Mistral and Llama 3 models, the LCPO-enhanced methods achieve substantial win rate gains on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard, with improvements of up to 7.0% on both benchmarks.

The rising importance of 3D representation learning, pivotal in computer vision, autonomous driving, and robotics, is evident. However, a prevailing trend, which straightforwardly resorted to transferring 2D alignment strategies to the 3D domain, encounters three distinct challenges: (1) Information Degradation: This arises from the alignment of 3D data with mere single-view 2D images and generic texts, neglecting the need for multi-view images and detailed subcategory texts. (2) Insufficient Synergy: These strategies align 3D representations to image and text features individually, hampering the overall optimization for 3D models. (3) Underutilization: The fine-grained information inherent in the learned representations is often not fully exploited, indicating a potential loss in detail. To address these issues, we introduce JM3D, a comprehensive approach integrating point cloud, text, and image. Key contributions include the Structured Multimodal Organizer (SMO), enriching vision-language representation with multiple views and hierarchical text, and the Joint Multi-modal Alignment (JMA), combining language understanding with visual representation. Our advanced model, JM3D-LLM, marries 3D representation with large language models via efficient fine-tuning. Evaluations on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN establish JM3D's superiority. The superior performance of JM3D-LLM further underscores the effectiveness of our representation transfer approach. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Mr-Neko/JM3D.

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a critical challenge in modality alignment, often exhibiting a bias towards textual information at the expense of other modalities like vision. This paper conducts a systematic information-theoretic analysis of the widely used cross-entropy loss in MLLMs, uncovering its implicit alignment objective. Our theoretical investigation reveals that this implicit objective has inherent limitations, leading to a degradation of cross-modal alignment as text sequence length increases, thereby hindering effective multimodal information fusion. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose Vision-Text Alignment (VISTA), a novel approach guided by our theoretical insights. VISTA introduces an explicit alignment objective designed to maximize cross-modal mutual information, preventing the degradation of visual alignment. Notably, VISTA enhances the visual understanding capabilities of existing MLLMs without requiring any additional trainable modules or extra training data, making it both efficient and practical. Our method significantly outperforms baseline models across more than a dozen benchmark datasets, including VQAv2, MMStar, and MME, paving the way for new directions in MLLM modal alignment research.

The crux of learning vision-language models is to extract semantically aligned information from visual and linguistic data. Existing attempts usually face the problem of coarse alignment, e.g., the vision encoder struggles in localizing an attribute-specified object. In this work, we propose an embarrassingly simple approach to better align image and text features with no need of additional data formats other than image-text pairs. Concretely, given an image and its paired text, we manage to parse objects (e.g., cat) and attributes (e.g., black) from the description, which are highly likely to exist in the image. It is noteworthy that the parsing pipeline is fully automatic and thus enjoys good scalability. With these parsed semantics as supervision signals, we can complement the commonly used image-text contrastive loss with the multi-tag classification loss. Extensive experimental results on a broad suite of semantic segmentation datasets substantiate the average 3.65\% improvement of our framework over existing alternatives. Furthermore, the visualization results indicate that attribute supervision makes vision-language models accurately localize attribute-specified objects. Project page and code can be found at https://qinying-liu.github.io/Tag-Align.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences through preference optimization has been crucial but labor-intensive, necessitating for each prompt a comparison of both a chosen and a rejected text completion by evaluators. Recently, Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) has demonstrated that LLMs can be aligned using merely binary "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" signals on each prompt-completion pair. In this paper, we present theoretical foundations to explain the successful alignment achieved through these binary signals. Our analysis uncovers a new perspective: optimizing a binary classifier, whose logit is a reward, implicitly induces minimizing the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) loss. In the process of this discovery, we identified two techniques for effective alignment: reward shift and underlying distribution matching. Consequently, we propose a new algorithm, Binary Classifier Optimization, that integrates the techniques. We validate our methodology in two settings: first, on a paired preference dataset, where our method performs on par with DPO and KTO; and second, on binary signal datasets simulating real-world conditions with divergent underlying distributions between thumbs-up and thumbs-down data. Our model consistently demonstrates effective and robust alignment across two base LLMs and three different binary signal datasets, showcasing the strength of our approach to learning from binary feedback.

Targeting at both high efficiency and performance, we propose AlignTTS to predict the mel-spectrum in parallel. AlignTTS is based on a Feed-Forward Transformer which generates mel-spectrum from a sequence of characters, and the duration of each character is determined by a duration predictor.Instead of adopting the attention mechanism in Transformer TTS to align text to mel-spectrum, the alignment loss is presented to consider all possible alignments in training by use of dynamic programming. Experiments on the LJSpeech dataset show that our model achieves not only state-of-the-art performance which outperforms Transformer TTS by 0.03 in mean option score (MOS), but also a high efficiency which is more than 50 times faster than real-time.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences becomes a key component to obtaining state-of-the-art performance, but it yields a huge cost to construct a large human-annotated preference dataset. To tackle this problem, we propose a new framework that boosts the alignment of LLMs through Self-generated Preference data (Selfie) using only a very small amount of human-annotated preference data. Our key idea is leveraging the human prior knowledge within the small (seed) data and progressively improving the alignment of LLM, by iteratively generating the responses and learning from them with the self-annotated preference data. To be specific, we propose to derive the preference label from the logits of LLM to explicitly extract the model's inherent preference. Compared to the previous approaches using external reward models or implicit in-context learning, we observe that the proposed approach is significantly more effective. In addition, we introduce a noise-aware preference learning algorithm to mitigate the risk of low quality within generated preference data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly boosts the alignment of LLMs. For example, we achieve superior alignment performance on AlpacaEval 2.0 with only 3.3\% of the ground-truth preference labels in the Ultrafeedback data compared to the cases using the entire data or state-of-the-art baselines.

The rapid advancement of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has enabled them to generate unprecedented results from given texts. However, as text inputs become longer, existing encoding methods like CLIP face limitations, and aligning the generated images with long texts becomes challenging. To tackle these issues, we propose LongAlign, which includes a segment-level encoding method for processing long texts and a decomposed preference optimization method for effective alignment training. For segment-level encoding, long texts are divided into multiple segments and processed separately. This method overcomes the maximum input length limits of pretrained encoding models. For preference optimization, we provide decomposed CLIP-based preference models to fine-tune diffusion models. Specifically, to utilize CLIP-based preference models for T2I alignment, we delve into their scoring mechanisms and find that the preference scores can be decomposed into two components: a text-relevant part that measures T2I alignment and a text-irrelevant part that assesses other visual aspects of human preference. Additionally, we find that the text-irrelevant part contributes to a common overfitting problem during fine-tuning. To address this, we propose a reweighting strategy that assigns different weights to these two components, thereby reducing overfitting and enhancing alignment. After fine-tuning 512 times 512 Stable Diffusion (SD) v1.5 for about 20 hours using our method, the fine-tuned SD outperforms stronger foundation models in T2I alignment, such as PixArt-alpha and Kandinsky v2.2. The code is available at https://github.com/luping-liu/LongAlign.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for real-world deployment, yet existing methods like RLHF face computational and stability challenges. While DPO establishes an offline paradigm with single hyperparameter beta, subsequent methods like SimPO reintroduce complexity through dual parameters (beta, gamma). We propose {ReLU-based Preference Optimization (RePO)}, a streamlined algorithm that eliminates beta via two advances: (1) retaining SimPO's reference-free margins but removing beta through gradient analysis, and (2) adopting a ReLU-based max-margin loss that naturally filters trivial pairs. Theoretically, RePO is characterized as SimPO's limiting case (beta to infty), where the logistic weighting collapses to binary thresholding, forming a convex envelope of the 0-1 loss. Empirical results on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard show that RePO outperforms DPO and SimPO across multiple base models, requiring only one hyperparameter to tune.

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling typically with a cross-entropy objective, requiring a large amount of high-quality instruction-response pairs. However, the quality of widely used SFT datasets can not be guaranteed due to the high cost and intensive labor for the creation and maintenance in practice. To overcome the limitations associated with the quality of SFT datasets, we introduce a novel preference-oriented supervised fine-tuning approach, namely PoFT. The intuition is to boost SFT by imposing a particular preference: favoring the target model over aligned LLMs on the same SFT data. This preference encourages the target model to predict a higher likelihood than that predicted by the aligned LLMs, incorporating assessment information on data quality (i.e., predicted likelihood by the aligned LLMs) into the training process. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. PoFT achieves stable and consistent improvements over the SFT baselines across different training datasets and base models. Moreover, we prove that PoFT can be integrated with existing SFT data filtering methods to achieve better performance, and further improved by following preference optimization procedures, such as DPO.

Machine translation systems are vulnerable to domain mismatch, especially in a low-resource scenario. Out-of-domain translations are often of poor quality and prone to hallucinations, due to exposure bias and the decoder acting as a language model. We adopt two approaches to alleviate this problem: lexical shortlisting restricted by IBM statistical alignments, and hypothesis re-ranking based on similarity. The methods are computationally cheap, widely known, but not extensively experimented on domain adaptation. We demonstrate success on low-resource out-of-domain test sets, however, the methods are ineffective when there is sufficient data or too great domain mismatch. This is due to both the IBM model losing its advantage over the implicitly learned neural alignment, and issues with subword segmentation of out-of-domain words.

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the conventional wisdom that preference learning trains models to assign higher likelihoods to more preferred outputs than less preferred outputs, measured via ranking accuracy. Surprisingly, we find that most state-of-the-art preference-tuned models achieve a ranking accuracy of less than 60% on common preference datasets. We furthermore derive the idealized ranking accuracy that a preference-tuned LLM would achieve if it optimized the DPO or RLHF objective perfectly. We demonstrate that existing models exhibit a significant alignment gap -- i.e., a gap between the observed and idealized ranking accuracies. We attribute this discrepancy to the DPO objective, which is empirically and theoretically ill-suited to fix even mild ranking errors in the reference model, and derive a simple and efficient formula for quantifying the difficulty of learning a given preference datapoint. Finally, we demonstrate that ranking accuracy strongly correlates with the empirically popular win rate metric when the model is close to the reference model used in the objective, shedding further light on the differences between on-policy (e.g., RLHF) and off-policy (e.g., DPO) preference learning algorithms.

In this work, we show that it is possible to extract significant amounts of alignment training data from a post-trained model -- useful to steer the model to improve certain capabilities such as long-context reasoning, safety, instruction following, and maths. While the majority of related work on memorisation has focused on measuring success of training data extraction through string matching, we argue that embedding models are better suited for our specific goals. Distances measured through a high quality embedding model can identify semantic similarities between strings that a different metric such as edit distance will struggle to capture. In fact, in our investigation, approximate string matching would have severely undercounted (by a conservative estimate of 10times) the amount of data that can be extracted due to trivial artifacts that deflate the metric. Interestingly, we find that models readily regurgitate training data that was used in post-training phases such as SFT or RL. We show that this data can be then used to train a base model, recovering a meaningful amount of the original performance. We believe our work exposes a possibly overlooked risk towards extracting alignment data. Finally, our work opens up an interesting discussion on the downstream effects of distillation practices: since models seem to be regurgitating aspects of their training set, distillation can therefore be thought of as indirectly training on the model's original dataset.

Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss, which encourages an exact token-by-token match between a target sequence with a generated sequence. Such training objective is sub-optimal when the target sequence is not perfect, e.g., when the target sequence is corrupted with noises, or when only weak sequence supervision is available. To address the challenge, we propose a novel Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss (EISL), which computes the matching loss of a target n-gram with all n-grams in the generated sequence. EISL is designed to be robust to various noises and edits in the target sequences. Moreover, the EISL computation is essentially an approximate convolution operation with target n-grams as kernels, which is easy to implement and efficient to compute with existing libraries. To demonstrate the effectiveness of EISL, we conduct experiments on a wide range of tasks, including machine translation with noisy target sequences, unsupervised text style transfer with only weak training signals, and non-autoregressive generation with non-predefined generation order. Experimental results show our method significantly outperforms the common CE loss and other strong baselines on all the tasks. EISL has a simple API that can be used as a drop-in replacement of the CE loss: https://github.com/guangyliu/EISL.

While language models have exceptional capabilities at text generation, they lack a natural inductive bias for emitting numbers and thus struggle in tasks involving reasoning over quantities, especially arithmetics. This has particular relevance in scientific datasets where combinations of text and numerical data are abundant. One fundamental limitation is the nature of the CE loss, which assumes a nominal (categorical) scale and thus cannot convey proximity between generated number tokens. As a remedy, we here present two versions of a number token loss. The first is based on an L_p loss between the ground truth token value and the weighted sum of the predicted class probabilities. The second loss minimizes the Wasserstein-1 distance between the distribution of the predicted output probabilities and the ground truth distribution. These regression-like losses can easily be added to any language model and extend the CE objective during training. We compare the proposed schemes on a mathematics dataset against existing tokenization, encoding, and decoding schemes for improving number representation in language models. Our results reveal a significant improvement in numerical accuracy when equipping a standard T5 model with the proposed loss schemes.

We address the problem of regressing 3D human pose and shape from a single image, with a focus on 3D accuracy. The current best methods leverage large datasets of 3D pseudo-ground-truth (p-GT) and 2D keypoints, leading to robust performance. With such methods, we observe a paradoxical decline in 3D pose accuracy with increasing 2D accuracy. This is caused by biases in the p-GT and the use of an approximate camera projection model. We quantify the error induced by current camera models and show that fitting 2D keypoints and p-GT accurately causes incorrect 3D poses. Our analysis defines the invalid distances within which minimizing 2D and p-GT losses is detrimental. We use this to formulate a new loss Threshold-Adaptive Loss Scaling (TALS) that penalizes gross 2D and p-GT losses but not smaller ones. With such a loss, there are many 3D poses that could equally explain the 2D evidence. To reduce this ambiguity we need a prior over valid human poses but such priors can introduce unwanted bias. To address this, we exploit a tokenized representation of human pose and reformulate the problem as token prediction. This restricts the estimated poses to the space of valid poses, effectively providing a uniform prior. Extensive experiments on the EMDB and 3DPW datasets show that our reformulated keypoint loss and tokenization allows us to train on in-the-wild data while improving 3D accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Our models and code are available for research at https://tokenhmr.is.tue.mpg.de.

Mining data streams with multi-label outputs poses significant challenges due to evolving distributions, high-dimensional label spaces, sparse label occurrences, and complex label dependencies. Moreover, concept drift affects not only input distributions but also label correlations and imbalance ratios over time, complicating model adaptation. To address these challenges, structured learners are categorized into local and global methods. Local methods break down the task into simpler components, while global methods adapt the algorithm to the full output space, potentially yielding better predictions by exploiting label correlations. This work introduces iHOMER (Incremental Hierarchy Of Multi-label Classifiers), an online multi-label learning framework that incrementally partitions the label space into disjoint, correlated clusters without relying on predefined hierarchies. iHOMER leverages online divisive-agglomerative clustering based on Jaccard similarity and a global tree-based learner driven by a multivariate Bernoulli process to guide instance partitioning. To address non-stationarity, it integrates drift detection mechanisms at both global and local levels, enabling dynamic restructuring of label partitions and subtrees. Experiments across 23 real-world datasets show iHOMER outperforms 5 state-of-the-art global baselines, such as MLHAT, MLHT of Pruned Sets and iSOUPT, by 23\%, and 12 local baselines, such as binary relevance transformations of kNN, EFDT, ARF, and ADWIN bagging/boosting ensembles, by 32\%, establishing its robustness for online multi-label classification.

Vision-language pre-training like CLIP has shown promising performance on various downstream tasks such as zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. Most of the existing CLIP-alike works usually adopt relatively large image encoders like ResNet50 and ViT, while the lightweight counterparts are rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose a multi-level interaction paradigm for training lightweight CLIP models. Firstly, to mitigate the problem that some image-text pairs are not strictly one-to-one correspondence, we improve the conventional global instance-level alignment objective by softening the label of negative samples progressively. Secondly, a relaxed bipartite matching based token-level alignment objective is introduced for finer-grained alignment between image patches and textual words. Moreover, based on the observation that the accuracy of CLIP model does not increase correspondingly as the parameters of text encoder increase, an extra objective of masked language modeling (MLM) is leveraged for maximizing the potential of the shortened text encoder. In practice, an auxiliary fusion module injecting unmasked image embedding into masked text embedding at different network stages is proposed for enhancing the MLM. Extensive experiments show that without introducing additional computational cost during inference, the proposed method achieves a higher performance on multiple downstream tasks.

Aligning large language models with human objectives is paramount, yet common approaches including RLHF suffer from unstable and resource-intensive training. In response to this challenge, we introduce ARGS, Alignment as Reward-Guided Search, a novel framework that integrates alignment into the decoding process, eliminating the need for expensive RL training. By adjusting the model's probabilistic predictions using a reward signal, ARGS generates texts with semantic diversity while being aligned with human preferences, offering a promising and flexible solution for aligning language models. Notably, ARGS demonstrates consistent enhancements in average reward compared to baselines across diverse alignment tasks and various model dimensions. For example, under the same greedy-based decoding strategy, our method improves the average reward by 19.56% relative to the baseline and secures a preference or tie score of 64.33% in GPT-4 evaluation. We believe that our framework, emphasizing decoding-time alignment, paves the way for more responsive language models in the future. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/args.

Large language models (LLMs) can handle a wide variety of general tasks with simple prompts, without the need for task-specific training. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built upon LLMs, have demonstrated impressive potential in tackling complex tasks involving visual, auditory, and textual data. However, critical issues related to truthfulness, safety, o1-like reasoning, and alignment with human preference remain insufficiently addressed. This gap has spurred the emergence of various alignment algorithms, each targeting different application scenarios and optimization goals. Recent studies have shown that alignment algorithms are a powerful approach to resolving the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of alignment algorithms for MLLMs. Specifically, we explore four key aspects: (1) the application scenarios covered by alignment algorithms, including general image understanding, multi-image, video, and audio, and extended multimodal applications; (2) the core factors in constructing alignment datasets, including data sources, model responses, and preference annotations; (3) the benchmarks used to evaluate alignment algorithms; and (4) a discussion of potential future directions for the development of alignment algorithms. This work seeks to help researchers organize current advancements in the field and inspire better alignment methods. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models/tree/Alignment.

The process of camera calibration involves estimating the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, which are essential for accurately performing tasks such as 3D reconstruction, object tracking and augmented reality. In this work, we propose a novel constraints-based loss for measuring the intrinsic (focal length: (f_x, f_y) and principal point: (p_x, p_y)) and extrinsic (baseline: (b), disparity: (d), translation: (t_x, t_y, t_z), and rotation specifically pitch: (theta_p)) camera parameters. Our novel constraints are based on geometric properties inherent in the camera model, including the anatomy of the projection matrix (vanishing points, image of world origin, axis planes) and the orthonormality of the rotation matrix. Thus we proposed a novel Unsupervised Geometric Constraint Loss (UGCL) via a multitask learning framework. Our methodology is a hybrid approach that employs the learning power of a neural network to estimate the desired parameters along with the underlying mathematical properties inherent in the camera projection matrix. This distinctive approach not only enhances the interpretability of the model but also facilitates a more informed learning process. Additionally, we introduce a new CVGL Camera Calibration dataset, featuring over 900 configurations of camera parameters, incorporating 63,600 image pairs that closely mirror real-world conditions. By training and testing on both synthetic and real-world datasets, our proposed approach demonstrates improvements across all parameters when compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks. The code and the updated dataset can be found here: https://github.com/CVLABLUMS/CVGL-Camera-Calibration

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, ensuring their alignment with human values becomes increasingly critical. Traditional alignment methods heavily rely on human feedback to fine-tune models. With the emergence of superhuman models whose outputs may surpass human understanding, evaluating and aligning these models using human judgments poses significant challenges. To address the challenges, recent works use weak supervisors to elicit knowledge from much stronger models. However, there are important disanalogies between the empirical setup in the existing works and the genuine goal of alignment. We remark that existing works investigate the phenomenon of weak-to-strong generation in analogous setup (i.e., binary classification), rather than practical alignment-relevant tasks (e.g., safety). In this paper, we bridge this gap by extending weak-to-strong generation to the context of practical alignment. We empirically demonstrate the widespread phenomenon of weak-to-strong generation in three complicated alignment tasks: safety, toxicity, and legal reasoning}. Furthermore, we explore efficient strategies for improving alignment performance to enhance the quality of model outcomes. Lastly, we summarize and analyze the challenges and potential solutions in regard to specific alignment tasks, which we hope to catalyze the research progress on the topic of weak-to-strong generalization. Our code is released at https://github.com/yeruimeng/WTS.git.

There is extensive interest in metric learning methods for image retrieval. Many metric learning loss functions focus on learning a correct ranking of training samples, but strongly overfit semantically inconsistent labels and require a large amount of data. To address these shortcomings, we propose a new metric learning method, called contextual loss, which optimizes contextual similarity in addition to cosine similarity. Our contextual loss implicitly enforces semantic consistency among neighbors while converging to the correct ranking. We empirically show that the proposed loss is more robust to label noise, and is less prone to overfitting even when a large portion of train data is withheld. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art across four image retrieval benchmarks and multiple different evaluation settings. Code is available at: https://github.com/Chris210634/metric-learning-using-contextual-similarity

Although deep neural networks have achieved reasonable accuracy in solving face alignment, it is still a challenging task, specifically when we deal with facial images, under occlusion, or extreme head poses. Heatmap-based Regression (HBR) and Coordinate-based Regression (CBR) are among the two mainly used methods for face alignment. CBR methods require less computer memory, though their performance is less than HBR methods. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Coordinate-based Regression (ACR) loss to improve the accuracy of CBR for face alignment. Inspired by the Active Shape Model (ASM), we generate Smooth-Face objects, a set of facial landmark points with less variations compared to the ground truth landmark points. We then introduce a method to estimate the level of difficulty in predicting each landmark point for the network by comparing the distribution of the ground truth landmark points and the corresponding Smooth-Face objects. Our proposed ACR Loss can adaptively modify its curvature and the influence of the loss based on the difficulty level of predicting each landmark point in a face. Accordingly, the ACR Loss guides the network toward challenging points than easier points, which improves the accuracy of the face alignment task. Our extensive evaluation shows the capabilities of the proposed ACR Loss in predicting facial landmark points in various facial images.

Text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) is a compelling topic in the cross-modal community, which aims to retrieve the target person based on a textual query. Although numerous TIReID methods have been proposed and achieved promising performance, they implicitly assume the training image-text pairs are correctly aligned, which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. In practice, the image-text pairs inevitably exist under-correlated or even false-correlated, a.k.a noisy correspondence (NC), due to the low quality of the images and annotation errors. To address this problem, we propose a novel Robust Dual Embedding method (RDE) that can learn robust visual-semantic associations even with NC. Specifically, RDE consists of two main components: 1) A Confident Consensus Division (CCD) module that leverages the dual-grained decisions of dual embedding modules to obtain a consensus set of clean training data, which enables the model to learn correct and reliable visual-semantic associations. 2) A Triplet-Alignment Loss (TAL) relaxes the conventional triplet-ranking loss with hardest negatives, which tends to rapidly overfit NC, to a log-exponential upper bound over all negatives, thus preventing the model from overemphasizing false image-text pairs. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReID, to evaluate the performance and robustness of our RDE. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results both with and without synthetic noisy correspondences on all three datasets.

In the domain of computer vision, Parameter-Efficient Tuning (PET) is increasingly replacing the traditional paradigm of pre-training followed by full fine-tuning. PET is particularly favored for its effectiveness in large foundation models, as it streamlines transfer learning costs and optimizes hardware utilization. However, the current PET methods are mainly designed for single-modal optimization. While some pioneering studies have undertaken preliminary explorations, they still remain at the level of aligned encoders (e.g., CLIP) and lack exploration of misaligned encoders. These methods show sub-optimal performance with misaligned encoders, as they fail to effectively align the multimodal features during fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce DETRIS, a parameter-efficient tuning framework designed to enhance low-rank visual feature propagation by establishing dense interconnections between each layer and all preceding layers, which enables effective cross-modal feature interaction and adaptation to misaligned encoders. We also suggest using text adapters to improve textual features. Our simple yet efficient approach greatly surpasses state-of-the-art methods with 0.9% to 1.8% backbone parameter updates, evaluated on challenging benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/jiaqihuang01/DETRIS.

Efficiency is a key property to foster inclusiveness and reduce environmental costs, especially in an era of LLMs. In this work, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of efficiency for MT evaluation metrics. Our approach involves replacing computation-intensive transformers with lighter alternatives and employing linear and quadratic approximations for alignment algorithms on top of LLM representations. We evaluate six (reference-free and reference-based) metrics across three MT datasets and examine 16 lightweight transformers. In addition, we look into the training efficiency of metrics like COMET by utilizing adapters. Our results indicate that (a) TinyBERT provides the optimal balance between quality and efficiency, (b) CPU speed-ups are more substantial than those on GPU; (c) WMD approximations yield no efficiency gains while reducing quality and (d) adapters enhance training efficiency (regarding backward pass speed and memory requirements) as well as, in some cases, metric quality. These findings can help to strike a balance between evaluation speed and quality, which is essential for effective NLG systems. Furthermore, our research contributes to the ongoing efforts to optimize NLG evaluation metrics with minimal impact on performance. To our knowledge, ours is the most comprehensive analysis of different aspects of efficiency for MT metrics conducted so far.

While multilingual neural machine translation has achieved great success, it suffers from the off-target issue, where the translation is in the wrong language. This problem is more pronounced on zero-shot translation tasks. In this work, we find that failing in encoding discriminative target language signal will lead to off-target and a closer lexical distance (i.e., KL-divergence) between two languages' vocabularies is related with a higher off-target rate. We also find that solely isolating the vocab of different languages in the decoder can alleviate the problem. Motivated by the findings, we propose Language Aware Vocabulary Sharing (LAVS), a simple and effective algorithm to construct the multilingual vocabulary, that greatly alleviates the off-target problem of the translation model by increasing the KL-divergence between languages. We conduct experiments on a multilingual machine translation benchmark in 11 languages. Experiments show that the off-target rate for 90 translation tasks is reduced from 29\% to 8\%, while the overall BLEU score is improved by an average of 1.9 points without extra training cost or sacrificing the supervised directions' performance. We release the code at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/Off-Target-MNMT for reproduction.

Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages, and learn isolated distributions of sentence representations across languages. To bridge this gap, we propose a simple yet effective alignment framework exploiting pairs of translation sentences. It aligns the internal sentence representations across different languages via multilingual contrastive learning and aligns model outputs by answering prompts in different languages. Experimental results demonstrate that even with less than 0.1 {\textperthousand} of pre-training tokens, our alignment framework significantly boosts the cross-lingual abilities of generative models and mitigates the performance gap. Further analysis reveals that it results in a better internal multilingual representation distribution of multilingual models.

Despite rapid advancements in the research and deployment of large language models (LLMs), the statistical distribution of model parameters, as well as their influence on initialization, training dynamics, and downstream efficiency, has received surprisingly little attention. A recent work introduced BackSlash, a training-time compression algorithm. It first demonstrated that pre-trained LLM parameters follow generalized Gaussian distributions (GGDs) better. By optimizing GG priors during training, BackSlash can reduce parameters by up to 90\% with minimal performance loss. Building on this foundational insight, we propose a unified, end-to-end framework for LLM optimization based on the GG model. Our contributions are threefold: (1) GG-based initialization scheme that aligns with the statistical structure of trained models, resulting in faster convergence and improved accuracy; (2) DeepShape, a post-training regularization method that reshapes weight distributions to match a GG profile, improving compressibility with minimized degradation in performance; and (3) RF8, a compact and hardware-efficient 8-bit floating-point format designed for GG-distributed-initialized BackSlash training, enabling low-cost inference without compromising accuracy. Experiments across diverse model architectures show that our framework consistently yields smaller and faster models that match or outperform standard training baselines. By grounding LLM development in principled statistical modeling, this work forges a new path toward efficient, scalable, and hardware-aware AI systems. The code is available on our project page: https://huggingface.co/spaces/shifeng3711/gg_prior.

The emergence of foundational models has greatly improved performance across various downstream tasks, with fine-tuning often yielding even better results. However, existing fine-tuning approaches typically require access to model weights and layers, leading to challenges such as managing multiple model copies or inference pipelines, inefficiencies in edge device optimization, and concerns over proprietary rights, privacy, and exposure to unsafe model variants. In this paper, we address these challenges by exploring "Gray-box" fine-tuning approaches, where the model's architecture and weights remain hidden, allowing only gradient propagation. We introduce a novel yet simple and effective framework that adapts to new tasks using two lightweight learnable modules at the model's input and output. Additionally, we present a less restrictive variant that offers more entry points into the model, balancing performance with model exposure. We evaluate our approaches across several backbones on benchmarks such as text-image alignment, text-video alignment, and sketch-image alignment. Results show that our Gray-box approaches are competitive with full-access fine-tuning methods, despite having limited access to the model.

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples equally. This may lead to suboptimal data efficiency and model performance. In response, we propose uncertainty-aware learning (UAL) to improve the model alignment of different task scenarios, by introducing the sample uncertainty (elicited from more capable LLMs). We implement UAL in a simple fashion -- adaptively setting the label smoothing value of training according to the uncertainty of individual samples. Analysis shows that our UAL indeed facilitates better token clustering in the feature space, validating our hypothesis. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our UAL significantly and consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning. Notably, LLMs aligned in a mixed scenario have achieved an average improvement of 10.62\% on high-entropy tasks (i.e., AlpacaEval leaderboard), and 1.81\% on complex low-entropy tasks (i.e., MetaMath and GSM8K).

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference phase. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization (\model), which provides an efficient and policy-agnostic solution for aligning LLMs with humans. By directly performing alignment at sentence level, \model~avoids the time latency associated with token-level generation. Designed as a plug-and-play module, \model~can be seamlessly integrated with various base models to enhance their alignment. Extensive experiments on AlpacaEval 2, MT-bench, and HH-RLHF demonstrate that \model~achieves superior alignment performance across various settings, achieving a favorable trade-off between alignment quality and inference-time latency. Furthermore, \model~demonstrates model-agnostic scalability, significantly improving the performance of large models such as Llama-3-70B.

While existing image-text alignment models reach high quality binary assessments, they fall short of pinpointing the exact source of misalignment. In this paper, we present a method to provide detailed textual and visual explanation of detected misalignments between text-image pairs. We leverage large language models and visual grounding models to automatically construct a training set that holds plausible misaligned captions for a given image and corresponding textual explanations and visual indicators. We also publish a new human curated test set comprising ground-truth textual and visual misalignment annotations. Empirical results show that fine-tuning vision language models on our training set enables them to articulate misalignments and visually indicate them within images, outperforming strong baselines both on the binary alignment classification and the explanation generation tasks. Our method code and human curated test set are available at: https://mismatch-quest.github.io/

Unified visual grounding pursues a simple and generic technical route to leverage multi-task data with less task-specific design. The most advanced methods typically present boxes and masks as vertex sequences to model referring detection and segmentation as an autoregressive sequential vertex generation paradigm. However, generating high-dimensional vertex sequences sequentially is error-prone because the upstream of the sequence remains static and cannot be refined based on downstream vertex information, even if there is a significant location gap. Besides, with limited vertexes, the inferior fitting of objects with complex contours restricts the performance upper bound. To deal with this dilemma, we propose a parallel vertex generation paradigm for superior high-dimension scalability with a diffusion model by simply modifying the noise dimension. An intuitive materialization of our paradigm is Parallel Vertex Diffusion (PVD) to directly set vertex coordinates as the generation target and use a diffusion model to train and infer. We claim that it has two flaws: (1) unnormalized coordinate caused a high variance of loss value; (2) the original training objective of PVD only considers point consistency but ignores geometry consistency. To solve the first flaw, Center Anchor Mechanism (CAM) is designed to convert coordinates as normalized offset values to stabilize the training loss value. For the second flaw, Angle summation loss (ASL) is designed to constrain the geometry difference of prediction and ground truth vertexes for geometry-level consistency. Empirical results show that our PVD achieves state-of-the-art in both referring detection and segmentation, and our paradigm is more scalable and efficient than sequential vertex generation with high-dimension data.

Many applications of large language models (LLMs), ranging from chatbots to creative writing, require nuanced subjective judgments that can differ significantly across different groups. Existing alignment algorithms can be expensive to align for each group, requiring prohibitive amounts of group-specific preference data and computation for real-world use cases. We introduce Group Preference Optimization (GPO), an alignment framework that steers language models to preferences of individual groups in a few-shot manner. In GPO, we augment the base LLM with an independent transformer module trained to predict the preferences of a group for the LLM generations. For few-shot learning, we parameterize this module as an in-context autoregressive transformer and train it via meta-learning on several groups. We empirically validate the efficacy of GPO through rigorous evaluations using LLMs with varied sizes on three human opinion adaptation tasks. These tasks involve adapting to the preferences of US demographic groups, global countries, and individual users. Our results demonstrate that GPO not only aligns models more accurately but also requires fewer group-specific preferences, and less training and inference computing resources, outperforming existing strategies such as in-context steering and fine-tuning methods.

Current methods for large language model alignment typically use scalar human preference labels. However, this convention tends to oversimplify the multi-dimensional and heterogeneous nature of human preferences, leading to reduced expressivity and even misalignment. This paper presents Panacea, an innovative approach that reframes alignment as a multi-dimensional preference optimization problem. Panacea trains a single model capable of adapting online and Pareto-optimally to diverse sets of preferences without the need for further tuning. A major challenge here is using a low-dimensional preference vector to guide the model's behavior, despite it being governed by an overwhelmingly large number of parameters. To address this, Panacea is designed to use singular value decomposition (SVD)-based low-rank adaptation, which allows the preference vector to be simply injected online as singular values. Theoretically, we prove that Panacea recovers the entire Pareto front with common loss aggregation methods under mild conditions. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, the feasibility of aligning a single LLM to represent a spectrum of human preferences through various optimization methods. Our work marks a step forward in effectively and efficiently aligning models to diverse and intricate human preferences in a controllable and Pareto-optimal manner.

Earth System Models (ESM) are our main tool for projecting the impacts of climate change. However, running these models at sufficient resolution for local-scale risk-assessments is not computationally feasible. Deep learning-based super-resolution models offer a promising solution to downscale ESM outputs to higher resolutions by learning from data. Yet, due to regional variations in climatic processes, these models typically require retraining for each geographical area-demanding high-resolution observational data, which is unevenly available across the globe. This highlights the need to assess how well these models generalize across geographic regions. To address this, we introduce RainShift, a dataset and benchmark for evaluating downscaling under geographic distribution shifts. We evaluate state-of-the-art downscaling approaches including GANs and diffusion models in generalizing across data gaps between the Global North and Global South. Our findings reveal substantial performance drops in out-of-distribution regions, depending on model and geographic area. While expanding the training domain generally improves generalization, it is insufficient to overcome shifts between geographically distinct regions. We show that addressing these shifts through, for example, data alignment can improve spatial generalization. Our work advances the global applicability of downscaling methods and represents a step toward reducing inequities in access to high-resolution climate information.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human values has become increasingly important as it enables sophisticated steering of LLMs, e.g., making them follow given instructions while keeping them less toxic. However, it requires a significant amount of human demonstrations and feedback. Recently, open-sourced models have attempted to replicate the alignment learning process by distilling data from already aligned LLMs like InstructGPT or ChatGPT. While this process reduces human efforts, constructing these datasets has a heavy dependency on the teacher models. In this work, we propose a novel framework for alignment learning with almost no human labor and no dependency on pre-aligned LLMs. First, we perform reward modeling (RM) with synthetic feedback by contrasting responses from vanilla LLMs with various sizes and prompts. Then, we use the RM for simulating high-quality demonstrations to train a supervised policy and for further optimizing the model with reinforcement learning. Our resulting model, Aligned Language Model with Synthetic Training dataset (ALMoST), outperforms open-sourced models, including Alpaca, Dolly, and OpenAssistant, which are trained on the outputs of InstructGPT or human-annotated instructions. Our 7B-sized model outperforms the 12-13B models in the A/B tests using GPT-4 as the judge with about 75% winning rate on average.

User intentions are typically formalized as evaluation rewards to be maximized when fine-tuning language models (LMs). Existing alignment methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are mainly tailored for pairwise preference data where rewards are implicitly defined rather than explicitly given. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for LM alignment, leveraging Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) to bridge the gap in handling reward datasets explicitly annotated with scalar evaluations. Our framework comprises two parallel algorithms, NCA and InfoNCA, both enabling the direct extraction of an LM policy from reward data as well as preference data. Notably, we show that the DPO loss is a special case of our proposed InfoNCA objective under pairwise preference settings, thereby integrating and extending current alignment theories. By contrasting NCA and InfoNCA, we show that InfoNCA and DPO adjust relative likelihood across different responses to a single instruction, while NCA optimizes absolute likelihood for each response. We apply our methods to align a 7B language model with a GPT-4 annotated reward dataset. Experimental results suggest that InfoNCA surpasses the DPO baseline in GPT-4 evaluations, while NCA enjoys better training stability with competitive performance.

Modern computer vision pipelines handle large images in one of two sub-optimal ways: down-sampling or cropping. These two methods incur significant losses in the amount of information and context present in an image. There are many downstream applications in which global context matters as much as high frequency details, such as in real-world satellite imagery; in such cases researchers have to make the uncomfortable choice of which information to discard. We introduce xT, a simple framework for vision transformers which effectively aggregates global context with local details and can model large images end-to-end on contemporary GPUs. We select a set of benchmark datasets across classic vision tasks which accurately reflect a vision model's ability to understand truly large images and incorporate fine details over large scales and assess our method's improvement on them. By introducing a nested tokenization scheme for large images in conjunction with long-sequence length models normally used for natural language processing, we are able to increase accuracy by up to 8.6% on challenging classification tasks and F_1 score by 11.6 on context-dependent segmentation in large images.

Text-attributed graphs are widely used across domains, offering rich opportunities for zero-shot learning via graph-text alignment. However, existing methods struggle with tasks requiring fine-grained pattern recognition, particularly on heterophilic graphs. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify an over-abstraction problem: current approaches operate at excessively large hyperbolic radii, compressing multi-scale structural information into uniform high-level abstractions. This abstraction-induced information loss obscures critical local patterns essential for accurate predictions. By analyzing embeddings in hyperbolic space, we demonstrate that optimal graph learning requires faithful preservation of fine-grained structural details, better retained by representations positioned closer to the origin. To address this, we propose H4G, a framework that systematically reduces embedding radii using learnable block-diagonal scaling matrices and M\"obius matrix multiplication. This approach restores access to fine-grained patterns while maintaining global receptive ability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments show H4G achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with 12.8\% improvement on heterophilic graphs and 8.4\% on homophilic graphs, confirming that radius reduction enables faithful multi-scale representation for advancing zero-shot graph learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multilingual capabilities, however, how to evaluate cross-lingual alignment remains underexplored. Existing alignment benchmarks primarily focus on sentence embeddings, but prior research has shown that neural models tend to induce a non-smooth representation space, which impact of semantic alignment evaluation on low-resource languages. Inspired by neuroscientific findings that similar information activates overlapping neuronal regions, we propose a novel Neuron State-Based Cross-Lingual Alignment (NeuronXA) to assess the cross-lingual a lignment capabilities of LLMs, which offers a more semantically grounded approach to assess cross-lingual alignment. We evaluate NeuronXA on several prominent multilingual LLMs (LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, GLM, and OLMo) across two transfer tasks and three multilingual benchmarks. The results demonstrate that with only 100 parallel sentence pairs, NeuronXA achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.9556 with downstream tasks performance and 0.8514 with transferability. These findings demonstrate NeuronXA's effectiveness in assessing both cross-lingual alignment and transferability, even with a small dataset. This highlights its potential to advance cross-lingual alignment research and to improve the semantic understanding of multilingual LLMs.

This work examines the challenges of training neural networks using vector quantization using straight-through estimation. We find that a primary cause of training instability is the discrepancy between the model embedding and the code-vector distribution. We identify the factors that contribute to this issue, including the codebook gradient sparsity and the asymmetric nature of the commitment loss, which leads to misaligned code-vector assignments. We propose to address this issue via affine re-parameterization of the code vectors. Additionally, we introduce an alternating optimization to reduce the gradient error introduced by the straight-through estimation. Moreover, we propose an improvement to the commitment loss to ensure better alignment between the codebook representation and the model embedding. These optimization methods improve the mathematical approximation of the straight-through estimation and, ultimately, the model performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on several common model architectures, such as AlexNet, ResNet, and ViT, across various tasks, including image classification and generative modeling.

Cultural biases in multilingual datasets pose significant challenges for their effectiveness as global benchmarks. These biases stem not only from language but also from the cultural knowledge required to interpret questions, reducing the practical utility of translated datasets like MMLU. Furthermore, translation often introduces artifacts that can distort the meaning or clarity of questions in the target language. A common practice in multilingual evaluation is to rely on machine-translated evaluation sets, but simply translating a dataset is insufficient to address these challenges. In this work, we trace the impact of both of these issues on multilingual evaluations and ensuing model performances. Our large-scale evaluation of state-of-the-art open and proprietary models illustrates that progress on MMLU depends heavily on learning Western-centric concepts, with 28% of all questions requiring culturally sensitive knowledge. Moreover, for questions requiring geographic knowledge, an astounding 84.9% focus on either North American or European regions. Rankings of model evaluations change depending on whether they are evaluated on the full portion or the subset of questions annotated as culturally sensitive, showing the distortion to model rankings when blindly relying on translated MMLU. We release Global-MMLU, an improved MMLU with evaluation coverage across 42 languages -- with improved overall quality by engaging with compensated professional and community annotators to verify translation quality while also rigorously evaluating cultural biases present in the original dataset. This comprehensive Global-MMLU set also includes designated subsets labeled as culturally sensitive and culturally agnostic to allow for more holistic, complete evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive few-shot generalization on many tasks via in-context learning (ICL). Despite their success in showing such emergent abilities, the scale and complexity of larger models also lead to unprecedentedly high computational demands and deployment challenges. In reaction, researchers explore transferring the powerful capabilities of larger models to more efficient and compact models by typically aligning the output of smaller models with that of larger models. Existing methods either train smaller models on the generated outputs of larger models or to imitate their token-level probability distributions. However, these distillation methods pay little to no attention to the input part, which also plays a crucial role in ICL. Based on the finding that the performance of ICL is highly sensitive to the selection of demonstration examples, we propose Bidirectional Alignment (BiAlign) to fully leverage the models' preferences for ICL examples to improve the ICL abilities of smaller models. Specifically, we introduce the alignment of input preferences between smaller and larger models by incorporating a novel ranking loss, in addition to aligning the token-level output distribution. With extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that BiAlign can consistently outperform existing baselines on a variety of tasks including language understanding, reasoning, and coding.

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning these models with human preferences and values is critical to ensuring ethical and safe applications. However, existing alignment techniques such as RLHF or DPO often require direct fine-tuning on LLMs with billions of parameters, resulting in substantial computational costs and inefficiencies. To address this, we propose Micro token-level Accept-Reject Aligning (MARA) approach designed to operate independently of the language models. MARA simplifies the alignment process by decomposing sentence-level preference learning into token-level binary classification, where a compact three-layer fully-connected network determines whether candidate tokens are "Accepted" or "Rejected" as part of the response. Extensive experiments across seven different LLMs and three open-source datasets show that MARA achieves significant improvements in alignment performance while reducing computational costs.

Time-aligned lyrics can enrich the music listening experience by enabling karaoke, text-based song retrieval and intra-song navigation, and other applications. Compared to text-to-speech alignment, lyrics alignment remains highly challenging, despite many attempts to combine numerous sub-modules including vocal separation and detection in an effort to break down the problem. Furthermore, training required fine-grained annotations to be available in some form. Here, we present a novel system based on a modified Wave-U-Net architecture, which predicts character probabilities directly from raw audio using learnt multi-scale representations of the various signal components. There are no sub-modules whose interdependencies need to be optimized. Our training procedure is designed to work with weak, line-level annotations available in the real world. With a mean alignment error of 0.35s on a standard dataset our system outperforms the state-of-the-art by an order of magnitude.

Fine-grained vision-language understanding requires precise alignment between visual content and linguistic descriptions, a capability that remains limited in current models, particularly in non-English settings. While models like CLIP perform well on global alignment, they often struggle to capture fine-grained details in object attributes, spatial relations, and linguistic expressions, with limited support for bilingual comprehension. To address these challenges, we introduce FG-CLIP 2, a bilingual vision-language model designed to advance fine-grained alignment for both English and Chinese. Our approach leverages rich fine-grained supervision, including region-text matching and long-caption modeling, alongside multiple discriminative objectives. We further introduce the Textual Intra-modal Contrastive (TIC) loss to better distinguish semantically similar captions. Trained on a carefully curated mixture of large-scale English and Chinese data, FG-CLIP 2 achieves powerful bilingual performance. To enable rigorous evaluation, we present a new benchmark for Chinese multimodal understanding, featuring long-caption retrieval and bounding box classification. Extensive experiments on 29 datasets across 8 tasks show that FG-CLIP 2 outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in both languages. We release the model, code, and benchmark to facilitate future research on bilingual fine-grained alignment.

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.

Evaluating the alignment capabilities of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is essential for determining their effectiveness as helpful assistants. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing AlignMMBench, a comprehensive alignment benchmark specifically designed for emerging Chinese VLMs. This benchmark is meticulously curated from real-world scenarios and Chinese Internet sources, encompassing thirteen specific tasks across three categories, and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Incorporating a prompt rewrite strategy, AlignMMBench encompasses 1,054 images and 4,978 question-answer pairs. To facilitate the evaluation pipeline, we propose CritiqueVLM, a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability. Finally, we report the performance of representative VLMs on AlignMMBench, offering insights into the capabilities and limitations of different VLM architectures. All evaluation codes and data are available on https://alignmmbench.github.io.

Despite recent advancements in vision-language models, their performance remains suboptimal on images from non-western cultures due to underrepresentation in training datasets. Various benchmarks have been proposed to test models' cultural inclusivity, but they have limited coverage of cultures and do not adequately assess cultural diversity across universal as well as culture-specific local concepts. To address these limitations, we introduce the GlobalRG benchmark, comprising two challenging tasks: retrieval across universals and cultural visual grounding. The former task entails retrieving culturally diverse images for universal concepts from 50 countries, while the latter aims at grounding culture-specific concepts within images from 15 countries. Our evaluation across a wide range of models reveals that the performance varies significantly across cultures -- underscoring the necessity for enhancing multicultural understanding in vision-language models.

Modern deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on tasks from image classification to natural language processing. Surprisingly, these complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canonical datasets when training until convergence. In particular, it has been observed that the last-layer features collapse to their class-means, and those class-means are the vertices of a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF). This phenomenon is known as Neural Collapse (NC). Recent papers have theoretically shown that NC emerges in the global minimizers of training problems with the simplified "unconstrained feature model". In this context, we take a step further and prove the NC occurrences in deep linear networks for the popular mean squared error (MSE) and cross entropy (CE) losses, showing that global solutions exhibit NC properties across the linear layers. Furthermore, we extend our study to imbalanced data for MSE loss and present the first geometric analysis of NC under bias-free setting. Our results demonstrate the convergence of the last-layer features and classifiers to a geometry consisting of orthogonal vectors, whose lengths depend on the amount of data in their corresponding classes. Finally, we empirically validate our theoretical analyses on synthetic and practical network architectures with both balanced and imbalanced scenarios.

The data appetite for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has continuously scaled up from the early millions to billions today, which faces an untenable trade-off with data quality and inevitably introduces Noisy Correspondence (NC) samples. Undoubtedly, such semantically unrelated data significantly impairs the performance of VLMs. Previous efforts mainly address this challenge by estimating refined alignment for more precise guidance. However, such resource-intensive pipelines that train VLMs from scratch struggle to meet realistic data demands. In this paper, we present a brand new perspective that seeks to directly eliminate the harmful effects of NC in pre-trained VLMs. Specifically, we propose NCU, a Noisy Correspondence Unlearning fine-tuning framework that efficiently enhances VLMs' robustness by forgetting learned noisy knowledge. The key to NCU is learning the hardest negative information, which can provide explicit unlearning direction for both false positives and false negatives. Such twin goals unlearning process can be formalized into one unified optimal transport objective for fast fine-tuning. We validate our approach with the prevailing CLIP model over various downstream tasks. Remarkably, NCU surpasses the robust pre-trained method on zero-shot transfer while with lower computational overhead. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally relies on costly training and human preference annotations. Self-alignment seeks to reduce these expenses by enabling models to align themselves. To further lower costs and achieve alignment without any expensive tuning or annotations, we introduce a new tuning-free approach for self-alignment, Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization (DRPO). Our approach leverages a search-based optimization framework that allows LLMs to iteratively self-improve and craft the optimal alignment instructions, all without additional training or human intervention. The core of DRPO is a dynamic rewarding mechanism, which identifies and rectifies model-specific alignment weaknesses, allowing LLMs to adapt efficiently to diverse alignment challenges. Empirical evaluations on eight recent LLMs, both open- and closed-sourced, demonstrate that DRPO significantly enhances alignment performance, with base models outperforming their SFT/RLHF-tuned counterparts. Moreover, the prompts automatically optimized by DRPO surpass those curated by human experts, further validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings highlight the great potential of current LLMs to achieve adaptive self-alignment through inference-time optimization, complementing tuning-based alignment methods.

Text generation models are notoriously vulnerable to errors in the training data. With the wide-spread availability of massive amounts of web-crawled data becoming more commonplace, how can we enhance the robustness of models trained on a massive amount of noisy web-crawled text? In our work, we propose Error Norm Truncation (ENT), a robust enhancement method to the standard training objective that truncates noisy data. Compared to methods that only uses the negative log-likelihood loss to estimate data quality, our method provides a more accurate estimation by considering the distribution of non-target tokens, which is often overlooked by previous work. Through comprehensive experiments across language modeling, machine translation, and text summarization, we show that equipping text generation models with ENT improves generation quality over standard training and previous soft and hard truncation methods. Furthermore, we show that our method improves the robustness of models against two of the most detrimental types of noise in machine translation, resulting in an increase of more than 2 BLEU points over the MLE baseline when up to 50% of noise is added to the data.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often memorize sensitive, private, or copyrighted data during pre-training. LLM unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of undesirable data from the pre-trained model while preserving the model's utilities on other tasks. Several practical methods have recently been proposed for LLM unlearning, mostly based on gradient ascent (GA) on the loss of undesirable data. However, on certain unlearning tasks, these methods either fail to effectively unlearn the target data or suffer from catastrophic collapse -- a drastic degradation of the model's utilities. In this paper, we propose Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), a simple alignment-inspired method that could efficiently and effectively unlearn a target dataset. We theoretically show that the progression toward catastrophic collapse by minimizing the NPO loss is exponentially slower than GA. Through experiments on synthetic data and the benchmark TOFU dataset, we demonstrate that NPO-based methods achieve a better balance between unlearning the undesirable data and maintaining the model's utilities. We also observe that NPO-based methods generate more sensible outputs than GA-based methods, whose outputs are often gibberish. Remarkably, on TOFU, NPO-based methods are the first to achieve reasonable unlearning results in forgetting 50% (or more) of the training data, whereas existing methods already struggle with forgetting 10% of training data.

Live commerce is the act of selling products online through live streaming. The customer's diverse demands for online products introduce more challenges to Livestreaming Product Recognition. Previous works have primarily focused on fashion clothing data or utilize single-modal input, which does not reflect the real-world scenario where multimodal data from various categories are present. In this paper, we present LPR4M, a large-scale multimodal dataset that covers 34 categories, comprises 3 modalities (image, video, and text), and is 50x larger than the largest publicly available dataset. LPR4M contains diverse videos and noise modality pairs while exhibiting a long-tailed distribution, resembling real-world problems. Moreover, a cRoss-vIew semantiC alignmEnt (RICE) model is proposed to learn discriminative instance features from the image and video views of the products. This is achieved through instance-level contrastive learning and cross-view patch-level feature propagation. A novel Patch Feature Reconstruction loss is proposed to penalize the semantic misalignment between cross-view patches. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RICE and provide insights into the importance of dataset diversity and expressivity. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/adxcreative/RICE

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies measuring the impact of various design choices throughout the whole training process. We first conduct a rigorous analysis over a three-stage training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, offline preference learning, and online preference learning. We have found that using techniques like sequence packing, loss masking in SFT, increasing the preference dataset size in DPO, and online DPO training can significantly improve the performance of language models. We then train from Gemma-2b-base and LLama-3-8b-base, and find that our best models exceed the performance of the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/Columbia-NLP-Lab/LionAlignment.

Modular vision-language models (Vision-LLMs) align pretrained image encoders with (pretrained) large language models (LLMs), representing a computationally much more efficient alternative to end-to-end training of large vision-language models from scratch, which is prohibitively expensive for most. Vision-LLMs instead post-hoc condition LLMs to `understand' the output of an image encoder. With the abundance of readily available high-quality English image-text data as well as monolingual English LLMs, the research focus has been on English-only Vision-LLMs. Multilingual vision-language models are still predominantly obtained via expensive end-to-end pretraining, resulting in comparatively smaller models, trained on limited multilingual image data supplemented with text-only multilingual corpora. In this work, we present mBLIP, the first multilingual Vision-LLM, which we obtain in a computationally efficient manner -- on consumer hardware using only a few million training examples -- by leveraging a pretrained multilingual LLM. To this end, we re-align an image encoder previously tuned to an English LLM to a new, multilingual LLM -- for this, we leverage multilingual data from a mix of vision-and-language tasks, which we obtain by machine-translating high-quality English data to 95 languages. On the IGLUE benchmark, mBLIP yields results competitive with state-of-the-art models. Moreover, in image captioning on XM3600, mBLIP (zero-shot) even outperforms PaLI-X (a model with 55B parameters). Compared to these very large multilingual vision-language models trained from scratch, we obtain mBLIP by training orders of magnitude fewer parameters on magnitudes less data. We release our model and code at https://github.com/gregor-ge/mBLIP.

Contrastive learning (CL) continuously achieves significant breakthroughs across multiple domains. However, the most common InfoNCE-based methods suffer from some dilemmas, such as uniformity-tolerance dilemma (UTD) and gradient reduction, both of which are related to a P_{ij} term. It has been identified that UTD can lead to unexpected performance degradation. We argue that the fixity of temperature is to blame for UTD. To tackle this challenge, we enrich the CL loss family by presenting a Model-Aware Contrastive Learning (MACL) strategy, whose temperature is adaptive to the magnitude of alignment that reflects the basic confidence of the instance discrimination task, then enables CL loss to adjust the penalty strength for hard negatives adaptively. Regarding another dilemma, the gradient reduction issue, we derive the limits of an involved gradient scaling factor, which allows us to explain from a unified perspective why some recent approaches are effective with fewer negative samples, and summarily present a gradient reweighting to escape this dilemma. Extensive remarkable empirical results in vision, sentence, and graph modality validate our approach's general improvement for representation learning and downstream tasks.

Human perception integrates multiple modalities, such as vision, hearing, and language, into a unified understanding of the surrounding reality. While recent multimodal models have achieved significant progress by aligning pairs of modalities via contrastive learning, their solutions are unsuitable when scaling to multiple modalities. These models typically align each modality to a designated anchor without ensuring the alignment of all modalities with each other, leading to suboptimal performance in tasks requiring a joint understanding of multiple modalities. In this paper, we structurally rethink the pairwise conventional approach to multimodal learning and we present the novel Gramian Representation Alignment Measure (GRAM), which overcomes the above-mentioned limitations. GRAM learns and then aligns n modalities directly in the higher-dimensional space in which modality embeddings lie by minimizing the Gramian volume of the k-dimensional parallelotope spanned by the modality vectors, ensuring the geometric alignment of all modalities simultaneously. GRAM can replace cosine similarity in any downstream method, holding for 2 to n modalities and providing more meaningful alignment with respect to previous similarity measures. The novel GRAM-based contrastive loss function enhances the alignment of multimodal models in the higher-dimensional embedding space, leading to new state-of-the-art performance in downstream tasks such as video-audio-text retrieval and audio-video classification. The project page, the code, and the pretrained models are available at https://ispamm.github.io/GRAM/.

Aligning language models with preferences can be posed as approximating a target distribution representing some desired behavior. Existing approaches differ both in the functional form of the target distribution and the algorithm used to approximate it. For instance, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) corresponds to minimizing a reverse KL from an implicit target distribution arising from a KL penalty in the objective. On the other hand, Generative Distributional Control (GDC) has an explicit target distribution and minimizes a forward KL from it using the Distributional Policy Gradient (DPG) algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new approach, f-DPG, which allows the use of any f-divergence to approximate any target distribution that can be evaluated. f-DPG unifies both frameworks (RLHF, GDC) and the approximation methods (DPG, RL with KL penalties). We show the practical benefits of various choices of divergence objectives and demonstrate that there is no universally optimal objective but that different divergences present different alignment and diversity trade-offs. We show that Jensen-Shannon divergence strikes a good balance between these objectives, and frequently outperforms forward KL divergence by a wide margin, leading to significant improvements over prior work. These distinguishing characteristics between divergences persist as the model size increases, highlighting the importance of selecting appropriate divergence objectives.

Cross-domain alignment between two sets of entities (e.g., objects in an image, words in a sentence) is fundamental to both computer vision and natural language processing. Existing methods mainly focus on designing advanced attention mechanisms to simulate soft alignment, with no training signals to explicitly encourage alignment. The learned attention matrices are also dense and lacks interpretability. We propose Graph Optimal Transport (GOT), a principled framework that germinates from recent advances in Optimal Transport (OT). In GOT, cross-domain alignment is formulated as a graph matching problem, by representing entities into a dynamically-constructed graph. Two types of OT distances are considered: (i) Wasserstein distance (WD) for node (entity) matching; and (ii) Gromov-Wasserstein distance (GWD) for edge (structure) matching. Both WD and GWD can be incorporated into existing neural network models, effectively acting as a drop-in regularizer. The inferred transport plan also yields sparse and self-normalized alignment, enhancing the interpretability of the learned model. Experiments show consistent outperformance of GOT over baselines across a wide range of tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, image captioning, machine translation, and text summarization.

Aligning language models (LMs) with human preferences has become a key area of research, enabling these models to meet diverse user needs better. Inspired by weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong LM fine-tuned on labels generated by a weaker model can consistently outperform its weak supervisor, we extend this idea to model alignment. In this work, we observe that the alignment behavior in weaker models can be effectively transferred to stronger models and even exhibit an amplification effect. Based on this insight, we propose a method called Weak-to-Strong Preference Optimization (WSPO), which achieves strong model alignment by learning the distribution differences before and after the alignment of the weak model. Experiments demonstrate that WSPO delivers outstanding performance, improving the win rate of Qwen2-7B-Instruct on Arena-Hard from 39.70 to 49.60, achieving a remarkable 47.04 length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2, and scoring 7.33 on MT-bench. Our results suggest that using the weak model to elicit a strong model with a high alignment ability is feasible.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for their applications. Recently, decoding-time alignment has emerged as an effective plug-and-play technique that avoids fine-tuning model parameters. This approach retains the general utility of pretrained LLMs but often suffers from significant inefficiencies during decoding, primarily due to wasted token generation and excessive reward evaluations. To address these challenges, we introduce Cascade Reward Sampling (CARDS) to resolve both efficiency bottlenecks in decoding-time alignment. Specifically, we develop a segment-level rejection sampling algorithm that minimizes redundant computations of both LLMs and reward models (RMs). Central to CARDS is an uncertainty-based segmentation mechanism, which ensures the accuracy of RMs evaluations on incomplete segments. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of reward scores on segments to elucidate the improved alignment performance. Experimental results demonstrate that CARDS significantly improves decoding efficiency, alignment quality, and general utility compared to existing decoding-time alignment methods, achieving approximately a 70% reduction in decoding time and over 90% win-ties in utility and safety benchmarks.

Large language models demonstrate reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. However, the spontaneous multilingual alignment in these models is shown to be weak, leading to unsatisfactory cross-lingual transfer and knowledge sharing. Previous works attempt to address this issue by explicitly injecting multilingual alignment information during or after pretraining. Thus for the early stage in pretraining, the alignment is weak for sharing information or knowledge across languages. In this paper, we propose PreAlign, a framework that establishes multilingual alignment prior to language model pretraining. PreAlign injects multilingual alignment by initializing the model to generate similar representations of aligned words and preserves this alignment using a code-switching strategy during pretraining. Extensive experiments in a synthetic English to English-Clone setting demonstrate that PreAlign significantly outperforms standard multilingual joint training in language modeling, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and cross-lingual knowledge application. Further experiments in real-world scenarios further validate PreAlign's effectiveness across various model sizes.

Domain-specific embedding models have shown promise for applications that require specialized semantic understanding, such as coding agents and financial retrieval systems, often achieving higher performance gains than general models. However, state-of-the-art embedding models are typically based on LLMs, which contain billions of parameters, making deployment challenging in resource-constrained environments. Model compression through pruning offers a promising solution, but existing pruning methods treat all parameters uniformly, failing to distinguish between general semantic representations and domain-specific patterns, leading to suboptimal pruning decisions. Thus, we propose GAPrune, a pruning framework that addresses this challenge by considering both domain importance and preserving general linguistic foundation. Our method uses Fisher Information to measure importance and general-domain gradient alignment to assess parameter behavior, then combines these signals using our Domain Alignment Importance (DAI) scoring. Lower DAI scores indicate that the parameter is either less important for the domain task or creates conflicts between domain and general objectives. Experiments on two domain benchmarks, FinMTEB and ChemTEB, show that GAPrune maintains performance within 2.5% of dense models in one-shot pruning at 50% sparsity, while outperforming all baselines. With retraining in 100 steps, GAPrune achieves +4.51% improvement on FinMTEB and +1.73% on ChemTEB, demonstrating that our pruning strategy not only preserves but enhances domain-specific capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that principled pruning strategies can achieve model compression and enhanced domain specialization, providing the research community with a new approach for development.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can understand the world comprehensively by integrating rich information from different modalities, achieving remarkable advancements on various multimodal downstream tasks. However, deploying LVLMs is often problematic due to their massive computational/energy costs and carbon consumption. Such issues make it infeasible to adopt conventional iterative global pruning, which is costly due to computing the Hessian matrix of the entire large model for sparsification. Alternatively, several studies have recently proposed layer-wise pruning approaches to avoid the expensive computation of global pruning and efficiently compress model weights according to their importance within a layer. However, they often suffer from suboptimal model compression due to their lack of a global perspective. To address this limitation in recent efficient pruning methods for large models, we propose Efficient Coarse-to-Fine LayerWise Pruning (ECoFLaP), a two-stage coarse-to-fine weight pruning approach for LVLMs. We first determine the sparsity ratios of different layers or blocks by leveraging the global importance score, which is efficiently computed based on the zeroth-order approximation of the global model gradients. Then, the model performs local layer-wise unstructured weight pruning based on globally-informed sparsity ratios. We validate our proposed method across various multimodal and unimodal models and datasets, demonstrating significant performance improvements over prevalent pruning techniques in the high-sparsity regime.

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens X and makes them interact through pairwise similarities computed as softmax(XQK^top X^top), where (K,Q) are the trainable key-query parameters. In this work, we establish a formal equivalence between the optimization geometry of self-attention and a hard-margin SVM problem that separates optimal input tokens from non-optimal tokens using linear constraints on the outer-products of token pairs. This formalism allows us to characterize the implicit bias of 1-layer transformers optimized with gradient descent: (1) Optimizing the attention layer with vanishing regularization, parameterized by (K,Q), converges in direction to an SVM solution minimizing the nuclear norm of the combined parameter W=KQ^top. Instead, directly parameterizing by W minimizes a Frobenius norm objective. We characterize this convergence, highlighting that it can occur toward locally-optimal directions rather than global ones. (2) Complementing this, we prove the local/global directional convergence of gradient descent under suitable geometric conditions. Importantly, we show that over-parameterization catalyzes global convergence by ensuring the feasibility of the SVM problem and by guaranteeing a benign optimization landscape devoid of stationary points. (3) While our theory applies primarily to linear prediction heads, we propose a more general SVM equivalence that predicts the implicit bias with nonlinear heads. Our findings are applicable to arbitrary datasets and their validity is verified via experiments. We also introduce several open problems and research directions. We believe these findings inspire the interpretation of transformers as a hierarchy of SVMs that separates and selects optimal tokens.