Daily Papers

The canonical approach to video-text retrieval leverages a coarse-grained or fine-grained alignment between visual and textual information. However, retrieving the correct video according to the text query is often challenging as it requires the ability to reason about both high-level (scene) and low-level (object) visual clues and how they relate to the text query. To this end, we propose a Unified Coarse-to-fine Alignment model, dubbed UCoFiA. Specifically, our model captures the cross-modal similarity information at different granularity levels. To alleviate the effect of irrelevant visual clues, we also apply an Interactive Similarity Aggregation module (ISA) to consider the importance of different visual features while aggregating the cross-modal similarity to obtain a similarity score for each granularity. Finally, we apply the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm to normalize the similarities of each level before summing them, alleviating over- and under-representation issues at different levels. By jointly considering the crossmodal similarity of different granularity, UCoFiA allows the effective unification of multi-grained alignments. Empirically, UCoFiA outperforms previous state-of-the-art CLIP-based methods on multiple video-text retrieval benchmarks, achieving 2.4%, 1.4% and 1.3% improvements in text-to-video retrieval R@1 on MSR-VTT, Activity-Net, and DiDeMo, respectively. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ziyang412/UCoFiA.

Precisely evaluating semantic alignment between text prompts and generated videos remains a challenge in Text-to-Video (T2V) Generation. Existing text-to-video alignment metrics like CLIPScore only generate coarse-grained scores without fine-grained alignment details, failing to align with human preference. To address this limitation, we propose ETVA, a novel Evaluation method of Text-to-Video Alignment via fine-grained question generation and answering. First, a multi-agent system parses prompts into semantic scene graphs to generate atomic questions. Then we design a knowledge-augmented multi-stage reasoning framework for question answering, where an auxiliary LLM first retrieves relevant common-sense knowledge (e.g., physical laws), and then video LLM answers the generated questions through a multi-stage reasoning mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ETVA achieves a Spearman's correlation coefficient of 58.47, showing a much higher correlation with human judgment than existing metrics which attain only 31.0. We also construct a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for text-to-video alignment evaluation, featuring 2k diverse prompts and 12k atomic questions spanning 10 categories. Through a systematic evaluation of 15 existing text-to-video models, we identify their key capabilities and limitations, paving the way for next-generation T2V generation.

While recent progress in video-text retrieval has been advanced by the exploration of better representation learning, in this paper, we present a novel multi-grained sparse learning framework, S3MA, to learn an aligned sparse space shared between the video and the text for video-text retrieval. The shared sparse space is initialized with a finite number of sparse concepts, each of which refers to a number of words. With the text data at hand, we learn and update the shared sparse space in a supervised manner using the proposed similarity and alignment losses. Moreover, to enable multi-grained alignment, we incorporate frame representations for better modeling the video modality and calculating fine-grained and coarse-grained similarities. Benefiting from the learned shared sparse space and multi-grained similarities, extensive experiments on several video-text retrieval benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of S3MA over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/Better_Cross_Modal_Retrieval.

Text-video retrieval is a challenging cross-modal task, which aims to align visual entities with natural language descriptions. Current methods either fail to leverage the local details or are computationally expensive. What's worse, they fail to leverage the heterogeneous concepts in data. In this paper, we propose the Disentangled Conceptualization and Set-to-set Alignment (DiCoSA) to simulate the conceptualizing and reasoning process of human beings. For disentangled conceptualization, we divide the coarse feature into multiple latent factors related to semantic concepts. For set-to-set alignment, where a set of visual concepts correspond to a set of textual concepts, we propose an adaptive pooling method to aggregate semantic concepts to address the partial matching. In particular, since we encode concepts independently in only a few dimensions, DiCoSA is superior at efficiency and granularity, ensuring fine-grained interactions using a similar computational complexity as coarse-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on five datasets, including MSR-VTT, LSMDC, MSVD, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo, demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Referring 3D Segmentation is a visual-language task that segments all points of the specified object from a 3D point cloud described by a sentence of query. Previous works perform a two-stage paradigm, first conducting language-agnostic instance segmentation then matching with given text query. However, the semantic concepts from text query and visual cues are separately interacted during the training, and both instance and semantic labels for each object are required, which is time consuming and human-labor intensive. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel Referring 3D Segmentation pipeline, Label-Efficient and Single-Stage, dubbed LESS, which is only under the supervision of efficient binary mask. Specifically, we design a Point-Word Cross-Modal Alignment module for aligning the fine-grained features of points and textual embedding. Query Mask Predictor module and Query-Sentence Alignment module are introduced for coarse-grained alignment between masks and query. Furthermore, we propose an area regularization loss, which coarsely reduces irrelevant background predictions on a large scale. Besides, a point-to-point contrastive loss is proposed concentrating on distinguishing points with subtly similar features. Through extensive experiments, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on ScanRefer dataset by surpassing the previous methods about 3.7% mIoU using only binary labels. Code is available at https://github.com/mellody11/LESS.

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.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on coarse-grained national labels for pluralistic value alignment. However, such macro-level supervision often obscures intra-country value heterogeneity, yielding a loose alignment. We argue that resolving this limitation requires shifting from national labels to multi-dimensional demographic constraints, which can identify groups with predictable, high-consensus value preference. To this end, we propose DVMap (High-Consensus Demographic-Value Mapping), a framework for fine-grained pluralistic value alignment. In this framework, we first present a demographic archetype extraction strategy to construct a high-quality value alignment corpus of 56,152 samples from the World Values Survey (WVS) by strictly retaining respondents with consistent value preferences under identical demographics. Over this corpus, we introduce a Structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism that explicitly guides LLMs to reason about demographic-value correlations. Subsequently, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to achieve adaptive anchoring of value distributions. To rigorously evaluate generalization, we further establish a triple-generalization benchmark (spanning cross-demographic, cross-country, and cross-value) comprising 21,553 samples. Experimental results demonstrate that DVMap effectively learns the manifold mapping from demographics to values, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness. On cross-demographic tests, Qwen3-8B-DVMap achieves 48.6% accuracy, surpassing the advanced open-source LLM DeepSeek-v3.2 (45.1%). The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/EnlightenedAI/DVMap.

Contrastively pretrained audio-language models (e.g., CLAP) excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks. Existing extensions fail to exploit the varying granularity of real-world audio-text data, where massive clip-level textual descriptions coexist with limited frame-level annotations. This paper proposes Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining (FineLAP), a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data. FineLAP introduces a dual-stream sigmoid loss with a cluster-based sampling strategy to jointly learn from clip- and frame-level supervision. To capture both global semantics and local details, FineLAP uses a decoupled audio projector on top of a self-supervised encoder. To alleviate the scarcity of temporally annotated data, we present FineLAP-100k, a large-scale synthetic SED dataset constructed through a scalable curation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FineLAP achieves SOTA performance across multiple audio understanding tasks, including retrieval, classification, sound event detection, and text-to-audio grounding. Ablation studies further show that coarse- and fine-grained alignment are mutually beneficial, providing insights for building better audio-language models (ALMs).

Anomaly Detection involves identifying deviations from normal data distributions and is critical in fields such as medical diagnostics and industrial defect detection. Traditional AD methods typically require the availability of normal training samples; however, this assumption is not always feasible. Recently, the rich pretraining knowledge of CLIP has shown promising zero-shot generalization in detecting anomalies without the need for training samples from target domains. However, CLIP's coarse-grained image-text alignment limits localization and detection performance for fine-grained anomalies due to: (1) spatial misalignment, and (2) the limited sensitivity of global features to local anomalous patterns. In this paper, we propose Crane which tackles both problems. First, we introduce a correlation-based attention module to retain spatial alignment more accurately. Second, to boost the model's awareness of fine-grained anomalies, we condition the learnable prompts of the text encoder on image context extracted from the vision encoder and perform a local-to-global representation fusion. Moreover, our method can incorporate vision foundation models such as DINOv2 to further enhance spatial understanding and localization. The key insight of Crane is to balance learnable adaptations for modeling anomalous concepts with non-learnable adaptations that preserve and exploit generalized pretrained knowledge, thereby minimizing in-domain overfitting and maximizing performance on unseen domains. Extensive evaluation across 14 diverse industrial and medical datasets demonstrates that Crane consistently improves the state-of-the-art ZSAD from 2% to 28%, at both image and pixel levels, while remaining competitive in inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/AlirezaSalehy/Crane.

The recent contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model has shown great success in a wide range of image-level tasks, revealing remarkable ability for learning powerful visual representations with rich semantics. An open and worthwhile problem is efficiently adapting such a strong model to the video domain and designing a robust video anomaly detector. In this work, we propose VadCLIP, a new paradigm for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) by leveraging the frozen CLIP model directly without any pre-training and fine-tuning process. Unlike current works that directly feed extracted features into the weakly supervised classifier for frame-level binary classification, VadCLIP makes full use of fine-grained associations between vision and language on the strength of CLIP and involves dual branch. One branch simply utilizes visual features for coarse-grained binary classification, while the other fully leverages the fine-grained language-image alignment. With the benefit of dual branch, VadCLIP achieves both coarse-grained and fine-grained video anomaly detection by transferring pre-trained knowledge from CLIP to WSVAD task. We conduct extensive experiments on two commonly-used benchmarks, demonstrating that VadCLIP achieves the best performance on both coarse-grained and fine-grained WSVAD, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, VadCLIP achieves 84.51% AP and 88.02% AUC on XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, respectively. Code and features are released at https://github.com/nwpu-zxr/VadCLIP.

Self-supervised learning has recently gained growing interest in molecular modeling for scientific tasks such as AI-assisted drug discovery. Current studies consider leveraging both 2D and 3D molecular structures for representation learning. However, relying on straightforward alignment strategies that treat each modality separately, these methods fail to exploit the intrinsic correlation between 2D and 3D representations that reflect the underlying structural characteristics of molecules, and only perform coarse-grained molecule-level alignment. To derive fine-grained alignment and promote structural molecule understanding, we introduce an atomic-relation level "blend-then-predict" self-supervised learning approach, MoleBLEND, which first blends atom relations represented by different modalities into one unified relation matrix for joint encoding, then recovers modality-specific information for 2D and 3D structures individually. By treating atom relationships as anchors, MoleBLEND organically aligns and integrates visually dissimilar 2D and 3D modalities of the same molecule at fine-grained atomic level, painting a more comprehensive depiction of each molecule. Extensive experiments show that MoleBLEND achieves state-of-the-art performance across major 2D/3D molecular benchmarks. We further provide theoretical insights from the perspective of mutual-information maximization, demonstrating that our method unifies contrastive, generative (cross-modality prediction) and mask-then-predict (single-modality prediction) objectives into one single cohesive framework.

Evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging because aligning to human values requires the composition of multiple skills and the required set of skills varies depending on the instruction. Recent studies have evaluated the performance of LLMs in two ways, (1) automatic evaluation on several independent benchmarks and (2) human or machined-based evaluation giving an overall score to the response. However, both settings are coarse-grained evaluations, not considering the nature of user instructions that require instance-wise skill composition, which limits the interpretation of the true capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce FLASK (Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment SKill Sets), a fine-grained evaluation protocol that can be used for both model-based and human-based evaluation which decomposes coarse-level scoring to an instance-wise skill set-level. Specifically, we define 12 fine-grained skills needed for LLMs to follow open-ended user instructions and construct an evaluation set by allocating a set of skills for each instance. Additionally, by annotating the target domains and difficulty level for each instance, FLASK provides a holistic view with a comprehensive analysis of a model's performance depending on skill, domain, and difficulty. Through using FLASK, we compare multiple open-sourced and proprietary LLMs and observe highly-correlated findings between model-based and human-based evaluations. FLASK enables developers to more accurately measure the model performance and how it can be improved by analyzing factors that make LLMs proficient in particular skills. For practitioners, FLASK can be used to recommend suitable models for particular situations through comprehensive comparison among various LLMs. We release the evaluation data and code implementation at https://github.com/kaistAI/FLASK.

Hallucination occurs when large language models exhibit behavior that deviates from the boundaries of their knowledge during response generation. To address this critical issue, previous learning-based methods attempt to finetune models but are limited by off-policy sampling and coarse-grained feedback. In this paper, we present \b{Reinforcement Learning for Hallucination} (RLFH), an on-policy self-alignment approach that enables LLMs to actively explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. RLFH introduces a self-assessment framework where the policy serves as its own judge. Through this framework, responses are automatically decomposed into atomic facts and their truthfulness and informativeness are assessed against external knowledge sources. The resulting fine-grained feedback at the statement level are then converted into token-level dense reward signals. This enables online reinforcement learning to achieve precise and timely optimization without human intervention. Comprehensive evaluations on HotpotQA, SQuADv2, and Biography benchmarks validate RLFH's effectiveness in hallucination mitigation.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification but struggles with fine-grained understanding due to its focus on coarse-grained short captions. To address this, we propose Fine-Grained CLIP (FG-CLIP), which enhances fine-grained understanding through three key innovations. First, we leverage large multimodal models to generate 1.6 billion long caption-image pairs for capturing global-level semantic details. Second, a high-quality dataset is constructed with 12 million images and 40 million region-specific bounding boxes aligned with detailed captions to ensure precise, context-rich representations. Third, 10 million hard fine-grained negative samples are incorporated to improve the model's ability to distinguish subtle semantic differences. Corresponding training methods are meticulously designed for these data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FG-CLIP outperforms the original CLIP and other state-of-the-art methods across various downstream tasks, including fine-grained understanding, open-vocabulary object detection, image-text retrieval, and general multimodal benchmarks. These results highlight FG-CLIP's effectiveness in capturing fine-grained image details and improving overall model performance. The related data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/FG-CLIP.

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models have shown significant advancements in the medical domain. Yet, most VLP models align raw reports to images at a very coarse level, without modeling fine-grained relationships between anatomical and pathological concepts outlined in reports and the corresponding semantic counterparts in images. To address this problem, we propose a Medical Dual-Stream Language-Image Pre-training (MeDSLIP) framework. Specifically, MeDSLIP establishes vision-language fine-grained alignments via disentangling visual and textual representations into anatomy-relevant and pathology-relevant streams. Moreover, a novel vision-language Prototypical Contr-astive Learning (ProtoCL) method is adopted in MeDSLIP to enhance the alignment within the anatomical and pathological streams. MeDSLIP further employs cross-stream Intra-image Contrastive Learning (ICL) to ensure the consistent coexistence of paired anatomical and pathological concepts within the same image. Such a cross-stream regularization encourages the model to exploit the synchrony between two streams for a more comprehensive representation learning. MeDSLIP is evaluated under zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings on three public datasets: NIH CXR14, RSNA Pneumonia, and SIIM-ACR Pneumothorax. Under these settings, MeDSLIP outperforms six leading CNN-based models on classification, grounding, and segmentation tasks.

Evaluating the alignment between textual prompts and generated images is critical for ensuring the reliability and usability of text-to-image (T2I) models. However, most existing evaluation methods rely on coarse-grained metrics or static QA pipelines, which lack fine-grained interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences. To address this, we propose REVEALER, a unified framework for element-level alignment evaluation based on reinforcement-guided visual reasoning. Adopting a structured "grounding-reasoning-conclusion" paradigm, our method enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly localize semantic elements and derive interpretable alignment judgments. We optimize the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) using a composite reward function that incorporates structural format, grounding accuracy, and alignment fidelity. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks-EvalMuse-40K, RichHF, MHaluBench, and GenAI-Bench-demonstrate that REVEALER achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our approach consistently outperforms both strong proprietary models and supervised baselines while demonstrating superior inference efficiency compared to existing iterative visual reasoning methods.

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.

Despite advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) alignment, understanding the reasons behind LLM preferences remains crucial for bridging the gap between desired and actual behavior. LLMs often exhibit biases or tendencies that diverge from human preferences, such as favoring certain writing styles or producing overly verbose outputs. However, current methods for evaluating preference alignment often lack explainability, relying on coarse-grained comparisons. To address this, we introduce PROFILE (PRObing Factors of InfLuence for Explainability), a novel framework that uncovers and quantifies the influence of specific factors driving preferences. PROFILE's factor level analysis explains the 'why' behind human-model alignment and misalignment, offering insights into the direction of model improvement. We apply PROFILE to analyze human and LLM preferences across three tasks: summarization, helpful response generation, and document-based question-answering. Our factor level analysis reveals a substantial discrepancy between human and LLM preferences in generation tasks, whereas LLMs show strong alignment with human preferences in evaluation tasks. We demonstrate how leveraging factor level insights, including addressing misaligned factors or exploiting the generation-evaluation gap, can improve alignment with human preferences. This work underscores the importance of explainable preference analysis and highlights PROFILE's potential to provide valuable training signals, driving further improvements in human-model alignment.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are essential as foundation backbones in establishing the visual comprehension capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although most ViTs achieve impressive performance through image-text pair-based contrastive learning or self-supervised mechanisms, they struggle to engage in connector-based co-training directly with LLMs due to potential parameter initialization conflicts and modality semantic gaps. To address the above challenges, this paper proposes SAILViT, a gradual feature learning-enhanced ViT for facilitating MLLMs to break through performance bottlenecks in complex multimodal interactions. SAILViT achieves coarse-to-fine-grained feature alignment and world knowledge infusion with gradual feature refinement, which better serves target training demands. We perform thorough empirical analyses to confirm the powerful robustness and generalizability of SAILViT across different dimensions, including parameter sizes, model architectures, training strategies, and data scales. Equipped with SAILViT, existing MLLMs show significant and consistent performance improvements on the OpenCompass benchmark across extensive downstream tasks. SAILViT series models are released at https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent.

The last year has witnessed the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains. Among them, CodeLLMs have garnered particular attention because they can not only assist in completing various programming tasks but also represent the decision-making and logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, current CodeLLMs mainly focus on pre-training and supervised fine-tuning scenarios, leaving the alignment stage, which is important for post-training LLMs, under-explored. This work first identifies that the commonly used PPO algorithm may be suboptimal for the alignment of CodeLLM because the involved reward rules are routinely coarse-grained and potentially flawed. We then advocate addressing this using the DPO algorithm. Based on only preference data pairs, DPO can render the model rank data automatically, giving rise to a fine-grained rewarding pattern more robust than human intervention. We also contribute a pipeline for collecting preference pairs for DPO on CodeLLMs. Studies show that our method significantly improves the performance of existing CodeLLMs on benchmarks such as MBPP and HumanEval.

With the rapid advancement of intelligent transportation systems, text-driven image generation and editing techniques have demonstrated significant potential in providing rich, controllable visual scene data for applications such as traffic monitoring and autonomous driving. However, several challenges remain, including insufficient semantic richness of generated traffic elements, limited camera viewpoints, low visual fidelity of synthesized images, and poor alignment between textual descriptions and generated content. To address these issues, we propose a unified text-driven framework for both image generation and editing, leveraging a controllable mask mechanism to seamlessly integrate the two tasks. Furthermore, we incorporate both vehicle-side and roadside multi-view data to enhance the geometric diversity of traffic scenes. Our training strategy follows a two-stage paradigm: first, we perform conceptual learning using large-scale coarse-grained text-image data; then, we fine-tune with fine-grained descriptive data to enhance text-image alignment and detail quality. Additionally, we introduce a mask-region-weighted loss that dynamically emphasizes small yet critical regions during training, thereby substantially enhancing the generation fidelity of small-scale traffic elements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves leading performance in text-based image generation and editing within traffic scenes.

The rapid advancements of Text-to-Image (T2I) models have ushered in a new phase of AI-generated content, marked by their growing ability to interpret and follow user instructions. However, existing T2I model evaluation benchmarks fall short in limited prompt diversity and complexity, as well as coarse evaluation metrics, making it difficult to evaluate the fine-grained alignment performance between textual instructions and generated images. In this paper, we present TIIF-Bench (Text-to-Image Instruction Following Benchmark), aiming to systematically assess T2I models' ability in interpreting and following intricate textual instructions. TIIF-Bench comprises a set of 5000 prompts organized along multiple dimensions, which are categorized into three levels of difficulties and complexities. To rigorously evaluate model robustness to varying prompt lengths, we provide a short and a long version for each prompt with identical core semantics. Two critical attributes, i.e., text rendering and style control, are introduced to evaluate the precision of text synthesis and the aesthetic coherence of T2I models. In addition, we collect 100 high-quality designer level prompts that encompass various scenarios to comprehensively assess model performance. Leveraging the world knowledge encoded in large vision language models, we propose a novel computable framework to discern subtle variations in T2I model outputs. Through meticulous benchmarking of mainstream T2I models on TIIF-Bench, we analyze the pros and cons of current T2I models and reveal the limitations of current T2I benchmarks. Project Page: https://a113n-w3i.github.io/TIIF_Bench/.

Text-to-motion generation has advanced with diffusion- and flow-based generative models, yet supervised pretraining remains insufficient to align models with high-level objectives such as semantic consistency, realism, and human preference. Existing post-training methods have key limitations: they (1) target a specific motion representation, such as joints, (2) optimize a particular aspect, such as text-motion alignment, and may compromise other factors; and (3) incur substantial computational overhead, data dependence, and coarse-grained optimization. We present a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that comprises a heterogeneous-representation, multi-dimensional reward model, MotionReward, and an efficient, fine-grained fine-tuning method, EasyTune. To obtain a unified semantics representation, MotionReward maps heterogeneous motions into a shared semantic space anchored by text, enabling multidimensional reward learning; Self-refinement Preference Learning further enhances semantics without additional annotations. For efficient and effective fine-tuning, we identify the recursive gradient dependence across denoising steps as the key bottleneck, and propose EasyTune, which optimizes step-wise rather than over the full trajectory, yielding dense, fine-grained, and memory-efficient updates. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework, achieving FID 0.132 at 22.10 GB peak memory for MLD model and saving up to 15.22 GB over DRaFT. It reduces FID by 22.9% on joint-based ACMDM, and achieves a 12.6% R-Precision gain and 23.3% FID improvement on rotation-based HY Motion. Our project page with code is publicly available.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed. However, existing robot datasets usually pair trajectories with coarse goal-level language, leaving execution-critical details such as active arm, approach direction, and contact region unspecified. This limits steerable policy learning and robotic video understanding. We introduce FineVLA, an open framework for action-aligned fine-grained VLA supervision. The framework includes: (1) a data construction tool that unifies 972,247 trajectories across 85K tasks from 10 open-source robot datasets and builds FineVLA-Data, a human-verified dataset of 47,159 fine-grained trajectories; (2) a held-out benchmark with 500 videos, 10,816 atomic facts, and 1,030 VQA questions; (3) a robotics-specialized VLM annotator for scalable fine-grained annotation; and (4) a steerable VLA policy trained with controlled mixtures of fine-grained and raw goal-level instructions. Our experiments yield three findings. First, fine-grained supervision does not sacrifice goal-level success: FG-only improves over Raw-only by +1.4 to +8.1 success-rate points across settings. Second, fine-grained and raw instructions are complementary, following a consistent inverted-U trend peaking at FG:Raw = 1:2 to 1:1. The best mixed setting reaches 86.8%/82.5% in RoboTwin simulation and 62.7/100 in real-world dual-arm manipulation (vs. 49.9 Raw-only). Third, fine-grained supervision improves steerable control: the largest real-world gains appear on pose (+23), color (+18), and approach direction (+18)--factors where goal-level instructions provide no guidance. Overall, fine-grained language should augment goal-level instructions: specifying how to execute alongside what to achieve. Project page: https://finevla.xlang.ai/

We aim to learn a joint representation between inertial measurement unit (IMU) signals and 2D pose sequences extracted from video, enabling accurate cross-modal retrieval, temporal synchronization, subject and body-part localization, and action recognition. To this end, we introduce MoBind, a hierarchical contrastive learning framework designed to address three challenges: (1) filtering out irrelevant visual background, (2) modeling structured multi-sensor IMU configurations, and (3) achieving fine-grained, sub-second temporal alignment. To isolate motion-relevant cues, MoBind aligns IMU signals with skeletal motion sequences rather than raw pixels. We further decompose full-body motion into local body-part trajectories, pairing each with its corresponding IMU to enable semantically grounded multi-sensor alignment. To capture detailed temporal correspondence, MoBind employs a hierarchical contrastive strategy that first aligns token-level temporal segments, then fuses local (body-part) alignment with global (body-wide) motion aggregation. Evaluated on mRi, TotalCapture, and EgoHumans, MoBind consistently outperforms strong baselines across all four tasks, demonstrating robust fine-grained temporal alignment while preserving coarse semantic consistency across modalities. Code is available at https://github.com/bbvisual/ MoBind.

Text-to-image generative models often struggle with long prompts detailing complex scenes, diverse objects with distinct visual characteristics and spatial relationships. In this work, we propose SCoPE (Scheduled interpolation of Coarse-to-fine Prompt Embeddings), a training-free method to improve text-to-image alignment by progressively refining the input prompt in a coarse-to-fine-grained manner. Given a detailed input prompt, we first decompose it into multiple sub-prompts which evolve from describing broad scene layout to highly intricate details. During inference, we interpolate between these sub-prompts and thus progressively introduce finer-grained details into the generated image. Our training-free plug-and-play approach significantly enhances prompt alignment, achieves an average improvement of more than +8 in Visual Question Answering (VQA) scores over the Stable Diffusion baselines on 83% of the prompts from the GenAI-Bench dataset.

The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and pre-trained vision models have accelerated the development of vision-language large models (VLLMs), enhancing the interaction between visual and linguistic modalities. Despite their notable success across various domains, VLLMs face challenges in modality alignment, which can lead to issues like hallucinations and unsafe content generation. Current alignment techniques often rely on coarse feedback and external datasets, limiting scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose FiSAO (Fine-Grained Self-Alignment Optimization), a novel self-alignment method that utilizes the model's own visual encoder as a fine-grained verifier to improve vision-language alignment without the need for additional data. By leveraging token-level feedback from the vision encoder, FiSAO significantly improves vision-language alignment, even surpassing traditional preference tuning methods that require additional data. Through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation, we demonstrate that FiSAO effectively addresses the misalignment problem in VLLMs, marking the first instance of token-level rewards being applied to such models.

Current self-supervised monocular depth estimation (MDE) approaches encounter performance limitations due to insufficient semantic-spatial knowledge extraction. To address this challenge, we propose Hybrid-depth, a novel framework that systematically integrates foundation models (e.g., CLIP and DINO) to extract visual priors and acquire sufficient contextual information for MDE. Our approach introduces a coarse-to-fine progressive learning framework: 1) Firstly, we aggregate multi-grained features from CLIP (global semantics) and DINO (local spatial details) under contrastive language guidance. A proxy task comparing close-distant image patches is designed to enforce depth-aware feature alignment using text prompts; 2) Next, building on the coarse features, we integrate camera pose information and pixel-wise language alignment to refine depth predictions. This module seamlessly integrates with existing self-supervised MDE pipelines (e.g., Monodepth2, ManyDepth) as a plug-and-play depth encoder, enhancing continuous depth estimation. By aggregating CLIP's semantic context and DINO's spatial details through language guidance, our method effectively addresses feature granularity mismatches. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA methods across all metrics, which also indeed benefits downstream tasks like BEV perception. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhangwenyao1/Hybrid-depth.

This paper presents DriVerse, a generative model for simulating navigation-driven driving scenes from a single image and a future trajectory. Previous autonomous driving world models either directly feed the trajectory or discrete control signals into the generation pipeline, leading to poor alignment between the control inputs and the implicit features of the 2D base generative model, which results in low-fidelity video outputs. Some methods use coarse textual commands or discrete vehicle control signals, which lack the precision to guide fine-grained, trajectory-specific video generation, making them unsuitable for evaluating actual autonomous driving algorithms. DriVerse introduces explicit trajectory guidance in two complementary forms: it tokenizes trajectories into textual prompts using a predefined trend vocabulary for seamless language integration, and converts 3D trajectories into 2D spatial motion priors to enhance control over static content within the driving scene. To better handle dynamic objects, we further introduce a lightweight motion alignment module, which focuses on the inter-frame consistency of dynamic pixels, significantly enhancing the temporal coherence of moving elements over long sequences. With minimal training and no need for additional data, DriVerse outperforms specialized models on future video generation tasks across both the nuScenes and Waymo datasets. The code and models will be released to the public.

Pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) excel at producing coherent articles, yet their outputs may be untruthful, toxic, or fail to align with user expectations. Current approaches focus on using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to improve model alignment, which works by transforming coarse human preferences of LLM outputs into a feedback signal that guides the model learning process. However, because this approach operates on sequence-level feedback, it lacks the precision to identify the exact parts of the output affecting user preferences. To address this gap, we propose a method to enhance LLM alignment through fine-grained token-level supervision. Specifically, we ask annotators to minimally edit less preferred responses within the standard reward modeling dataset to make them more favorable, ensuring changes are made only where necessary while retaining most of the original content. The refined dataset is used to train a token-level reward model, which is then used for training our fine-grained Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) model. Our experiment results demonstrate that this approach can achieve up to an absolute improvement of 5.1% in LLM performance, in terms of win rate against the reference model, compared with the traditional PPO model.

Text-to-video generation has demonstrated promising progress with the advent of diffusion models, yet existing approaches are limited by dataset quality and computational resources. To address these limitations, this paper presents a comprehensive approach that advances both data curation and model design. We introduce CFC-VIDS-1M, a high-quality video dataset constructed through a systematic coarse-to-fine curation pipeline. The pipeline first evaluates video quality across multiple dimensions, followed by a fine-grained stage that leverages vision-language models to enhance text-video alignment and semantic richness. Building upon the curated dataset's emphasis on visual quality and temporal coherence, we develop RACCOON, a transformer-based architecture with decoupled spatial-temporal attention mechanisms. The model is trained through a progressive four-stage strategy designed to efficiently handle the complexities of video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our integrated approach of high-quality data curation and efficient training strategy generates visually appealing and temporally coherent videos while maintaining computational efficiency. We will release our dataset, code, and models.

Volumetric video represents a transformative advancement in visual media, enabling users to freely navigate immersive virtual experiences and narrowing the gap between digital and real worlds. However, the need for extensive manual intervention to stabilize mesh sequences and the generation of excessively large assets in existing workflows impedes broader adoption. In this paper, we present a novel Gaussian-based approach, dubbed DualGS, for real-time and high-fidelity playback of complex human performance with excellent compression ratios. Our key idea in DualGS is to separately represent motion and appearance using the corresponding skin and joint Gaussians. Such an explicit disentanglement can significantly reduce motion redundancy and enhance temporal coherence. We begin by initializing the DualGS and anchoring skin Gaussians to joint Gaussians at the first frame. Subsequently, we employ a coarse-to-fine training strategy for frame-by-frame human performance modeling. It includes a coarse alignment phase for overall motion prediction as well as a fine-grained optimization for robust tracking and high-fidelity rendering. To integrate volumetric video seamlessly into VR environments, we efficiently compress motion using entropy encoding and appearance using codec compression coupled with a persistent codebook. Our approach achieves a compression ratio of up to 120 times, only requiring approximately 350KB of storage per frame. We demonstrate the efficacy of our representation through photo-realistic, free-view experiences on VR headsets, enabling users to immersively watch musicians in performance and feel the rhythm of the notes at the performers' fingertips.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that neural networks trained on different modalities (e.g., text and images) align and eventually converge toward the same representation of reality. If true, this has significant implications for whether modality choice matters at all. We show that the experimental evidence for this hypothesis is fragile and depends critically on the evaluation regime. Alignment is measured using mutual nearest neighbors on small datasets (approx1K samples) and degrades substantially as the dataset is scaled to millions of samples. The alignment that remains between model representations reflects coarse semantic overlap rather than consistent fine-grained structure. Moreover, the evaluations in Huh et al. are done in a one-to-one image-caption setting, a constraint that breaks down in realistic many-to-many settings and further reduces alignment. We also find that the reported trend of stronger language models increasingly aligning with vision does not appear to hold for newer models. Overall, our findings suggest that the current evidence for cross-modal representational convergence is considerably weaker than subsequent works have taken it to be. Models trained on different modalities may learn equally rich representations of the world, just not the same one.

Large vision-language models such as CLIP struggle with long captions because they align images and texts as undifferentiated wholes. Fine-grained vision-language understanding requires hierarchical semantics capturing both global context and localized details across visual and textual domains. Yet linguistic hierarchies from syntax or semantics rarely match visual organization, and purely visual hierarchies tend to fragment scenes into appearance-driven parts without semantic focus. We propose CAFT (Cross-domain Alignment of Forests and Trees), a hierarchical image-text representation learning framework that aligns global and local semantics across images and long captions without pixel-level supervision. Coupling a fine-to-coarse visual encoder with a hierarchical text transformer, it uses a hierarchical alignment loss that matches whole images with whole captions while biasing region-sentence correspondences, so that coarse semantics are built from fine-grained evidence rather than from aggregation untethered to part-level grounding. Trained on 30M image-text pairs, CAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on six long-text retrieval benchmarks and exhibits strong scaling behavior. Experiments show that hierarchical cross-domain alignment enables fine-grained, visually grounded image-text representations to emerge without explicit region-level supervision.

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful reinforcement learning paradigm for post-training video generation models. However, existing GRPO pipelines rely on static, fixed-capacity reward models whose evaluation behavior is frozen during training. Such rigid rewards introduce distributional bias, saturate quickly as the generator improves, and ultimately limit the stability and effectiveness of reinforcement-based alignment. We propose Self-Paced GRPO, a competence-aware GRPO framework in which reward feedback co-evolves with the generator. Our method introduces a progressive reward mechanism that automatically shifts its emphasis from coarse visual fidelity to temporal coherence and fine-grained text-video semantic alignment as generation quality increases. This self-paced curriculum alleviates reward-policy mismatch, mitigates reward exploitation, and yields more stable optimization. Experiments on VBench across multiple video generation backbones demonstrate consistent improvements in both visual quality and semantic alignment over GRPO baselines with static rewards, validating the effectiveness and generality of Self-Paced GRPO.

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have gained traction in Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS) due to their strong generalization capabilities. However, existing DGSS methods often rely exclusively on either VFMs or VLMs, overlooking their complementary strengths. VFMs (e.g., DINOv2) excel at capturing fine-grained features, while VLMs (e.g., CLIP) provide robust text alignment but struggle with coarse granularity. Despite their complementary strengths, effectively integrating VFMs and VLMs with attention mechanisms is challenging, as the increased patch tokens complicate long-sequence modeling. To address this, we propose MFuser, a novel Mamba-based fusion framework that efficiently combines the strengths of VFMs and VLMs while maintaining linear scalability in sequence length. MFuser consists of two key components: MVFuser, which acts as a co-adapter to jointly fine-tune the two models by capturing both sequential and spatial dynamics; and MTEnhancer, a hybrid attention-Mamba module that refines text embeddings by incorporating image priors. Our approach achieves precise feature locality and strong text alignment without incurring significant computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MFuser significantly outperforms state-of-the-art DGSS methods, achieving 68.20 mIoU on synthetic-to-real and 71.87 mIoU on real-to-real benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/devinxzhang/MFuser.

Current open-source diffusion models struggle to generate stable and synchronized audio-visual content, particularly in scenarios demanding complex semantic reasoning. The root cause is that existing methods rely on coarse text embeddings from off-the-shelf encoders to guide audio-video denoising, which discards fine-grained semantics and, critically, lacks a shared long-horizon plan, leading to uncoordinated denoising trajectories and fragile cross-modal alignment. We propose Baton, the first framework that introduces explicit semantic planning into joint video-audio generation. Our key insight is that complementing coarse text guidance with semantically rich, modality-aware planned tokens, jointly reasoned and mutually aligned before denoising, can simultaneously restore fine-grained semantic detail and establish a shared blueprint that coordinates both audio and video denoising trajectories. Concretely, Baton first introduces the VA-Planner, a multimodal language model equipped with dual semantic alignment towers, where learnable queries cross-attend to both video and audio features to produce a pair of semantically aligned video and audio planned tokens as keyframe-level blueprints. These planned tokens are injected into the diffusion backbone via cross-attention layers, providing temporally grounded guidance complementary to coarse text embeddings. Since planned tokens do not share one-to-one spatial-temporal correspondence with diffusion latents, we further propose Relative Semantic RoPE, a relative positional encoding that maps planned tokens and latents into a shared spatial-temporal coordinate frame, enabling each latent to accurately attend to its positionally corresponding semantic cues. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of Baton both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Audiovisual emotion recognition (AVER) aims to infer human emotions from nonverbal visual-audio (VA) cues, offering modality-complementary and language-agnostic advantages. However, AVER remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of emotional expressions, cross-modal expressive disparities, and the scarcity of reliably annotated data. Recent self-supervised AVER approaches have introduced strong multimodal representations, yet they predominantly rely on modality-specific encoders and coarse content-level alignment, limiting fine-grained emotional semantic modeling. To address these issues, we propose VAEmo, an efficient two-stage framework for emotion-centric joint VA representation learning with external knowledge injection. In Stage~1, a unified and lightweight representation network is pre-trained on large-scale speaker-centric VA corpora via masked reconstruction and contrastive objectives, mitigating the modality gap and learning expressive, complementary representations without emotion labels. In Stage~2, multimodal large language models automatically generate detailed affective descriptions according to our well-designed chain-of-thought prompting for only a small subset of VA samples; these rich textual semantics are then injected by aligning their corresponding embeddings with VA representations through dual-path contrastive learning, further bridging the emotion gap. Extensive experiments on multiple downstream AVER benchmarks show that VAEmo achieves state-of-the-art performance with a compact design, highlighting the benefit of unified cross-modal encoding and emotion-aware semantic guidance for efficient, generalizable VA emotion representations.

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) enables high-quality text-to-3D generation by supervising 3D models through the denoising of multi-view 2D renderings, using a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model to align with the input prompt and ensure 3D consistency. However, existing SDS-based methods face two fundamental limitations: (1) their reliance on CLIP-style text encoders leads to coarse semantic alignment and struggles with fine-grained prompts; and (2) 2D diffusion priors lack explicit 3D spatial constraints, resulting in geometric inconsistencies and inaccurate object relationships in multi-object scenes. To address these challenges, we propose VLM3D, a novel text-to-3D generation framework that integrates large vision-language models (VLMs) into the SDS pipeline as differentiable semantic and spatial priors. Unlike standard text-to-image diffusion priors, VLMs leverage rich language-grounded supervision that enables fine-grained prompt alignment. Moreover, their inherent vision language modeling provides strong spatial understanding, which significantly enhances 3D consistency for single-object generation and improves relational reasoning in multi-object scenes. We instantiate VLM3D based on the open-source Qwen2.5-VL model and evaluate it on the GPTeval3D benchmark. Experiments across diverse objects and complex scenes show that VLM3D significantly outperforms prior SDS-based methods in semantic fidelity, geometric coherence, and spatial correctness.

It is inherently ambiguous to lift 2D results from pre-trained diffusion models to a 3D world for text-to-3D generation. 2D diffusion models solely learn view-agnostic priors and thus lack 3D knowledge during the lifting, leading to the multi-view inconsistency problem. We find that this problem primarily stems from geometric inconsistency, and avoiding misplaced geometric structures substantially mitigates the problem in the final outputs. Therefore, we improve the consistency by aligning the 2D geometric priors in diffusion models with well-defined 3D shapes during the lifting, addressing the vast majority of the problem. This is achieved by fine-tuning the 2D diffusion model to be viewpoint-aware and to produce view-specific coordinate maps of canonically oriented 3D objects. In our process, only coarse 3D information is used for aligning. This "coarse" alignment not only resolves the multi-view inconsistency in geometries but also retains the ability in 2D diffusion models to generate detailed and diversified high-quality objects unseen in the 3D datasets. Furthermore, our aligned geometric priors (AGP) are generic and can be seamlessly integrated into various state-of-the-art pipelines, obtaining high generalizability in terms of unseen shapes and visual appearance while greatly alleviating the multi-view inconsistency problem. Our method represents a new state-of-the-art performance with an 85+% consistency rate by human evaluation, while many previous methods are around 30%. Our project page is https://sweetdreamer3d.github.io/

In the text-to-image generation field, recent remarkable progress in Stable Diffusion makes it possible to generate rich kinds of novel photorealistic images. However, current models still face misalignment issues (e.g., problematic spatial relation understanding and numeration failure) in complex natural scenes, which impedes the high-faithfulness text-to-image generation. Although recent efforts have been made to improve controllability by giving fine-grained guidance (e.g., sketch and scribbles), this issue has not been fundamentally tackled since users have to provide such guidance information manually. In this work, we strive to synthesize high-fidelity images that are semantically aligned with a given textual prompt without any guidance. Toward this end, we propose a coarse-to-fine paradigm to achieve layout planning and image generation. Concretely, we first generate the coarse-grained layout conditioned on a given textual prompt via in-context learning based on Large Language Models. Afterward, we propose a fine-grained object-interaction diffusion method to synthesize high-faithfulness images conditioned on the prompt and the automatically generated layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of layout and image generation. Our code and settings are available at https://layoutllm-t2i.github.io.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in fine-grained visual understanding across a range of tasks. However, they often encounter significant challenges due to inadequate alignment for fine-grained knowledge, which restricts their ability to accurately capture local details and attain a comprehensive global perception. While recent advancements have focused on aligning object expressions with grounding information, they typically lack explicit integration of object images, which contain affluent information beyond mere texts or coordinates. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel fine-grained visual knowledge alignment method that effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects, including texts, coordinates, and images. This innovative method is underpinned by our multi-scale fine-grained enhancement data synthesis pipeline, which provides over 300K essential training data to enhance alignment and improve overall performance. Furthermore, we present TinyGroundingGPT, a series of compact models optimized for high-level alignments. With a scale of approximately 3B parameters, TinyGroundingGPT achieves outstanding results in grounding tasks while delivering performance comparable to larger MLLMs in complex visual scenarios.

Coarse-graining (CG) accelerates molecular simulations of protein dynamics by simulating sets of atoms as singular beads. Backmapping is the opposite operation of bringing lost atomistic details back from the CG representation. While machine learning (ML) has produced accurate and efficient CG simulations of proteins, fast and reliable backmapping remains a challenge. Rule-based methods produce poor all-atom geometries, needing computationally costly refinement through additional simulations. Recently proposed ML approaches outperform traditional baselines but are not transferable between proteins and sometimes generate unphysical atom placements with steric clashes and implausible torsion angles. This work addresses both issues to build a fast, transferable, and reliable generative backmapping tool for CG protein representations. We achieve generalization and reliability through a combined set of innovations: representation based on internal coordinates; an equivariant encoder/prior; a custom loss function that helps ensure local structure, global structure, and physical constraints; and expert curation of high-quality out-of-equilibrium protein data for training. Our results pave the way for out-of-the-box backmapping of coarse-grained simulations for arbitrary proteins.

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) showcase remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. Meanwhile, aligned LLMs are also expected to exhibit speciality, excelling in specific applications. However, fine-tuning with extra data, a common practice to gain speciality, often leads to catastrophic forgetting (CF) of previously acquired versatility, hindering the model's performance across diverse tasks. In response to this challenge, we propose CoFiTune, a coarse to fine framework in an attempt to strike the balance between speciality and versatility. At the coarse-grained level, an empirical tree-search algorithm is utilized to pinpoint and update specific modules that are crucial for speciality, while keeping other parameters frozen; at the fine-grained level, a soft-masking mechanism regulates the update to the LLMs, mitigating the CF issue without harming speciality. In an overall evaluation of both speciality and versatility, CoFiTune consistently outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. Compared to the full-parameter SFT, CoFiTune leads to about 14% versatility improvement and marginal speciality loss on a 13B model. Lastly, based on further analysis, we provide a speculative insight into the information forwarding process in LLMs, which helps explain the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/CoFiTune.

We investigate composed image retrieval with text feedback. Users gradually look for the target of interest by moving from coarse to fine-grained feedback. However, existing methods merely focus on the latter, i.e., fine-grained search, by harnessing positive and negative pairs during training. This pair-based paradigm only considers the one-to-one distance between a pair of specific points, which is not aligned with the one-to-many coarse-grained retrieval process and compromises the recall rate. In an attempt to fill this gap, we introduce a unified learning approach to simultaneously modeling the coarse- and fine-grained retrieval by considering the multi-grained uncertainty. The key idea underpinning the proposed method is to integrate fine- and coarse-grained retrieval as matching data points with small and large fluctuations, respectively. Specifically, our method contains two modules: uncertainty modeling and uncertainty regularization. (1) The uncertainty modeling simulates the multi-grained queries by introducing identically distributed fluctuations in the feature space. (2) Based on the uncertainty modeling, we further introduce uncertainty regularization to adapt the matching objective according to the fluctuation range. Compared with existing methods, the proposed strategy explicitly prevents the model from pushing away potential candidates in the early stage, and thus improves the recall rate. On the three public datasets, i.e., FashionIQ, Fashion200k, and Shoes, the proposed method has achieved +4.03%, +3.38%, and +2.40% Recall@50 accuracy over a strong baseline, respectively.

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.

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

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/

Fine-tuning is the primary mechanism for adapting foundation models to downstream tasks; however, standard approaches largely optimize task objectives in isolation and do not account for secondary yet critical alignment objectives (e.g., safety and hallucination avoidance). As a result, downstream fine-tuning can degrade alignment and fail to correct pre-existing misaligned behavior. We propose an alignment-aware fine-tuning framework that integrates feedback from an external alignment signal through policy-gradient-based regularization. Our method introduces an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically balances supervised and alignment-driven gradients on a per-sample basis, prioritizing uncertain or misaligned cases while allowing well-aligned examples to follow standard supervised updates. The framework further learns abstention behavior for fully misaligned inputs, incorporating conservative responses directly into the fine-tuned model. Experiments on general and domain-specific instruction-tuning benchmarks demonstrate consistent reductions in harmful and hallucinated outputs without sacrificing downstream task performance. Additional analyses show robustness to adversarial fine-tuning, prompt-based attacks, and unsafe initializations, establishing adaptively gated alignment optimization as an effective approach for alignment-preserving and alignment-recovering model adaptation.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results, yet existing approaches struggle to effectively handle both temporal and spatial localization simultaneously. This challenge stems from two key issues: first, incorporating spatial-temporal localization introduces a vast number of coordinate combinations, complicating the alignment of linguistic and visual coordinate representations; second, encoding fine-grained temporal and spatial information during video feature compression is inherently difficult. To address these issues, we propose LLaVA-ST, a MLLM for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. In LLaVA-ST, we propose Language-Aligned Positional Embedding, which embeds the textual coordinate special token into the visual space, simplifying the alignment of fine-grained spatial-temporal correspondences. Additionally, we design the Spatial-Temporal Packer, which decouples the feature compression of temporal and spatial resolutions into two distinct point-to-region attention processing streams. Furthermore, we propose ST-Align dataset with 4.3M training samples for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. With ST-align, we present a progressive training pipeline that aligns the visual and textual feature through sequential coarse-to-fine stages.Additionally, we introduce an ST-Align benchmark to evaluate spatial-temporal interleaved fine-grained understanding tasks, which include Spatial-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) , Event Localization and Captioning (ELC) and Spatial Video Grounding (SVG). LLaVA-ST achieves outstanding performance on 11 benchmarks requiring fine-grained temporal, spatial, or spatial-temporal interleaving multimodal understanding. Our code, data and benchmark will be released at Our code, data and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/appletea233/LLaVA-ST .

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that independently trained neural networks converge to increasingly similar latent spaces. However, current strategies for mapping these representations are inherently pairwise, scaling quadratically with the number of models and failing to yield a consistent global reference. In this paper, we study the alignment of M ge 3 models. We first adapt Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) to construct a shared orthogonal universe that preserves the internal geometry essential for tasks like model stitching. We then show that strict isometric alignment is suboptimal for retrieval, where agreement-maximizing methods like Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) typically prevail. To bridge this gap, we finally propose Geometry-Corrected Procrustes Alignment (GCPA), which establishes a robust GPA-based universe followed by a post-hoc correction for directional mismatch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPA consistently improves any-to-any retrieval while retaining a practical shared reference space.

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.

Most existing methods in vision language pre-training rely on object-centric features extracted through object detection and make fine-grained alignments between the extracted features and texts. It is challenging for these methods to learn relations among multiple objects. To this end, we propose a new method called X-VLM to perform `multi-grained vision language pre-training.' The key to learning multi-grained alignments is to locate visual concepts in the image given the associated texts, and in the meantime align the texts with the visual concepts, where the alignments are in multi-granularity. Experimental results show that X-VLM effectively leverages the learned multi-grained alignments to many downstream vision language tasks and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Despite recent progress in using Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatically generating 3D scenes, generated scenes often lack realistic spatial layouts and object attributes found in real-world environments. As this problem stems from insufficiently detailed, coarse-grained instructions, advancing 3D scene synthesis guided by more detailed, fine-grained instructions that reflect real-world environments becomes crucial. Without such realistic scenes, training embodied agents in unrealistic environments can lead them to learn priors that diverge significantly from real-world physics and semantics, degrading their performance when deployed. Thus, verifying the alignment between the fine-grained instruction and the generated scene is essential for effective learning. However, current evaluation methods, such as CLIPScore and vision-language models (VLMs), often fail to reliably assess such alignment. This shortcoming arises primarily from their shallow understanding of 3D scenes, which often leads to improperly grounded scene components. To address this, we introduce LEGO-Eval, an evaluation framework equipped with diverse tools designed to explicitly ground scene components, enabling more accurate alignment assessments. We also present LEGO-Bench, a benchmark of detailed instructions that specify complex layouts and attributes of real-world environments. Experiments demonstrate that LEGO-Eval outperforms VLM-as-a-judge by 0.41 F1 score in assessing scene-instruction alignment. Benchmarking with LEGO-Bench reveals significant limitations in current generation methods. Across all evaluated approaches, success rates reached at most 10% in generating scenes that fully align with fine-grained instructions.

Recent work discovered Emergent Misalignment (EM): fine-tuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can lead them to become broadly misaligned. A survey of experts prior to publication revealed this was highly unexpected, demonstrating critical gaps in our understanding of model alignment. In this work, we both advance understanding and provide tools for future research. Using new narrowly misaligned datasets, we create a set of improved model organisms that achieve 99% coherence (vs. 67% prior), work with smaller 0.5B parameter models (vs. 32B), and that induce misalignment using a single rank-1 LoRA adapter. We demonstrate that EM occurs robustly across diverse model sizes, three model families, and numerous training protocols including full supervised fine-tuning. Leveraging these cleaner model organisms, we isolate a mechanistic phase transition and demonstrate that it corresponds to a robust behavioural phase transition in all studied organisms. Aligning large language models is critical for frontier AI safety, yet EM exposes how far we are from achieving this robustly. By distilling clean model organisms that isolate a minimal alignment-compromising change, and where this is learnt, we establish a foundation for future research into understanding and mitigating alignment risks in LLMs.

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.

Image-text retrieval, as a fundamental and important branch of information retrieval, has attracted extensive research attentions. The main challenge of this task is cross-modal semantic understanding and matching. Some recent works focus more on fine-grained cross-modal semantic matching. With the prevalence of large scale multimodal pretraining models, several state-of-the-art models (e.g. X-VLM) have achieved near-perfect performance on widely-used image-text retrieval benchmarks, i.e. MSCOCO-Test-5K and Flickr30K-Test-1K. In this paper, we review the two common benchmarks and observe that they are insufficient to assess the true capability of models on fine-grained cross-modal semantic matching. The reason is that a large amount of images and texts in the benchmarks are coarse-grained. Based on the observation, we renovate the coarse-grained images and texts in the old benchmarks and establish the improved benchmarks called MSCOCO-FG and Flickr30K-FG. Specifically, on the image side, we enlarge the original image pool by adopting more similar images. On the text side, we propose a novel semi-automatic renovation approach to refine coarse-grained sentences into finer-grained ones with little human effort. Furthermore, we evaluate representative image-text retrieval models on our new benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We also analyze the capability of models on fine-grained semantic comprehension through extensive experiments. The results show that even the state-of-the-art models have much room for improvement in fine-grained semantic understanding, especially in distinguishing attributes of close objects in images. Our code and improved benchmark datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/cwj1412/MSCOCO-Flikcr30K_FG, which we hope will inspire further in-depth research on cross-modal retrieval.

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.

We address the problem of aligning real-world 3D data of garments, which benefits many applications such as texture learning, physical parameter estimation, generative modeling of garments, etc. Existing extrinsic methods typically perform non-rigid iterative closest point and struggle to align details due to incorrect closest matches and rigidity constraints. While intrinsic methods based on functional maps can produce high-quality correspondences, they work under isometric assumptions and become unreliable for garment deformations which are highly non-isometric. To achieve wrinkle-level as well as texture-level alignment, we present a novel coarse-to-fine two-stage method that leverages intrinsic manifold properties with two neural deformation fields, in the 3D space and the intrinsic space, respectively. The coarse stage performs a 3D fitting, where we leverage intrinsic manifold properties to define a manifold deformation field. The coarse fitting then induces a functional map that produces an alignment of intrinsic embeddings. We further refine the intrinsic alignment with a second neural deformation field for higher accuracy. We evaluate our method with our captured garment dataset, GarmCap. The method achieves accurate wrinkle-level and texture-level alignment and works for difficult garment types such as long coats. Our project page is https://jsnln.github.io/iccv2023_intrinsic/index.html.

Instruction tuning is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks and commonly relies on large, diverse corpora. However, small, high-quality subsets, known as coresets, can deliver comparable or superior results, though curating them remains challenging. Existing methods often rely on coarse, sample-level signals like gradients, an approach that is computationally expensive and overlooks fine-grained features. To address this, we introduce TRIM (Token Relevance via Interpretable Multi-layer Attention), a forward-only, token-centric framework. Instead of using gradients, TRIM operates by matching underlying representational patterns identified via attention-based "fingerprints" from a handful of target samples. Such an approach makes TRIM highly efficient and uniquely sensitive to the structural features that define a task. Coresets selected by our method consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines by up to 9% on downstream tasks and even surpass the performance of full-data fine-tuning in some settings. By avoiding expensive backward passes, TRIM achieves this at a fraction of the computational cost. These findings establish TRIM as a scalable and efficient alternative for building high-quality instruction-tuning datasets.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and preferences is essential for making them helpful and safe. However, building efficient tools to perform alignment can be challenging, especially for the largest and most competent LLMs which often contain tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. We create NeMo-Aligner, a toolkit for model alignment that can efficiently scale to using hundreds of GPUs for training. NeMo-Aligner comes with highly optimized and scalable implementations for major paradigms of model alignment such as: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), SteerLM, and Self-Play Fine-Tuning (SPIN). Additionally, our toolkit supports running most of the alignment techniques in a Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) setting. NeMo-Aligner is designed for extensibility, allowing support for other alignment techniques with minimal effort. It is open-sourced with Apache 2.0 License and we invite community contributions at https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo-Aligner

Estimating the 6D pose of arbitrary unseen objects from a single reference image is critical for robotics operating in the long-tail of real-world instances. However, this setting is notoriously challenging: 3D models are rarely available, single-view reconstructions lack metric scale, and domain gaps between generated models and real-world images undermine robustness. We propose OnePoseViaGen, a pipeline that tackles these challenges through two key components. First, a coarse-to-fine alignment module jointly refines scale and pose by combining multi-view feature matching with render-and-compare refinement. Second, a text-guided generative domain randomization strategy diversifies textures, enabling effective fine-tuning of pose estimators with synthetic data. Together, these steps allow high-fidelity single-view 3D generation to support reliable one-shot 6D pose estimation. On challenging benchmarks (YCBInEOAT, Toyota-Light, LM-O), OnePoseViaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance far surpassing prior approaches. We further demonstrate robust dexterous grasping with a real robot hand, validating the practicality of our method in real-world manipulation. Project page: https://gzwsama.github.io/OnePoseviaGen.github.io/

Offline preference optimization allows fine-tuning large models directly from offline data, and has proved effective in recent alignment practices. We propose generalized preference optimization (GPO), a family of offline losses parameterized by a general class of convex functions. GPO enables a unified view over preference optimization, encompassing existing algorithms such as DPO, IPO and SLiC as special cases, while naturally introducing new variants. The GPO framework also sheds light on how offline algorithms enforce regularization, through the design of the convex function that defines the loss. Our analysis and experiments reveal the connections and subtle differences between the offline regularization and the KL divergence regularization intended by the canonical RLHF formulation. In a controlled setting akin to Gao et al 2023, we also show that different GPO variants achieve similar trade-offs between regularization and performance, though the optimal values of hyper-parameter might differ as predicted by theory. In all, our results present new algorithmic toolkits and empirical insights to alignment practitioners.

We introduce Aligner, a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method for aligning multi-billion-parameter-sized Large Language Models (LLMs). Aligner employs a unique design that constructs a globally shared set of tunable tokens that modify the attention of every layer. Remarkably with this method, even when using one token accounting for a mere 5,000 parameters, Aligner can still perform comparably well to state-of-the-art LLM adaptation methods like LoRA that require millions of parameters. This capacity is substantiated in both instruction following and value alignment tasks. Besides the multiple order-of-magnitude improvement in parameter efficiency, the insight Aligner provides into the internal mechanisms of LLMs is also valuable. The architectural features and efficacy of our method, in addition to our experiments demonstrate that an LLM separates its internal handling of "form" and "knowledge" in a somewhat orthogonal manner. This finding promises to motivate new research into LLM mechanism understanding and value alignment.

In various video-language learning tasks, the challenge of achieving cross-modality alignment with multi-grained data persists. We propose a method to tackle this challenge from two crucial perspectives: data and modeling. Given the absence of a multi-grained video-text pretraining dataset, we introduce a Granularity EXpansion (GEX) method with Integration and Compression operations to expand the granularity of a single-grained dataset. To better model multi-grained data, we introduce an Iterative Approximation Module (IAM), which embeds multi-grained videos and texts into a unified, low-dimensional semantic space while preserving essential information for cross-modal alignment. Furthermore, GEXIA is highly scalable with no restrictions on the number of video-text granularities for alignment. We evaluate our work on three categories of video tasks across seven benchmark datasets, showcasing state-of-the-art or comparable performance. Remarkably, our model excels in tasks involving long-form video understanding, even though the pretraining dataset only contains short video clips.

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.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis posits that neural networks trained on different modalities converge toward a shared statistical model of the world. Recent work exploits this convergence by aligning frozen pretrained vision and language models with lightweight alignment layers, but typically relies on contrastive losses and millions of paired samples. In this work, we ask whether meaningful alignment can be achieved with substantially less supervision. We introduce a semi-supervised setting in which pretrained unimodal encoders are aligned using a small number of image-text pairs together with large amounts of unpaired data. To address this challenge, we propose SOTAlign, a two-stage framework that first recovers a coarse shared geometry from limited paired data using a linear teacher, then refines the alignment on unpaired samples via an optimal-transport-based divergence that transfers relational structure without overconstraining the target space. Unlike existing semi-supervised methods, SOTAlign effectively leverages unpaired images and text, learning robust joint embeddings across datasets and encoder pairs, and significantly outperforming supervised and semi-supervised baselines.

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.

Establishing correspondences from image to 3D has been a key task of 6DoF object pose estimation for a long time. To predict pose more accurately, deeply learned dense maps replaced sparse templates. Dense methods also improved pose estimation in the presence of occlusion. More recently researchers have shown improvements by learning object fragments as segmentation. In this work, we present a discrete descriptor, which can represent the object surface densely. By incorporating a hierarchical binary grouping, we can encode the object surface very efficiently. Moreover, we propose a coarse to fine training strategy, which enables fine-grained correspondence prediction. Finally, by matching predicted codes with object surface and using a PnP solver, we estimate the 6DoF pose. Results on the public LM-O and YCB-V datasets show major improvement over the state of the art w.r.t. ADD(-S) metric, even surpassing RGB-D based methods in some cases.

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.

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.

We propose Diffusion-Sharpening, a fine-tuning approach that enhances downstream alignment by optimizing sampling trajectories. Existing RL-based fine-tuning methods focus on single training timesteps and neglect trajectory-level alignment, while recent sampling trajectory optimization methods incur significant inference NFE costs. Diffusion-Sharpening overcomes this by using a path integral framework to select optimal trajectories during training, leveraging reward feedback, and amortizing inference costs. Our method demonstrates superior training efficiency with faster convergence, and best inference efficiency without requiring additional NFEs. Extensive experiments show that Diffusion-Sharpening outperforms RL-based fine-tuning methods (e.g., Diffusion-DPO) and sampling trajectory optimization methods (e.g., Inference Scaling) across diverse metrics including text alignment, compositional capabilities, and human preferences, offering a scalable and efficient solution for future diffusion model fine-tuning. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Diffusion-Sharpening

Large Language Models (LLMs) pose significant hardware challenges related to memory requirements and computational ability. There are two mainstream quantization schemes for LLMs: coarse-grained (e.g., channel-wise) quantization and fine-grained (e.g., group-wise) quantization. Fine-grained quantization has smaller quantization loss, consequently achieving superior performance. However, when applied to weight-activation quantization, it disrupts continuous integer matrix multiplication, leading to inefficient inference. In this paper, we introduce Dual Grained Quantization (DGQ), a novel A8W4 quantization for LLM that maintains superior performance while ensuring fast inference speed. DSQ dequantizes the fine-grained INT4 weight into coarse-grained INT8 representation and preform matrix multiplication using INT8 kernels. Besides, we develop a two-phase grid search algorithm to simplify the determination of fine-grained and coarse-grained quantization scales. We also devise a percentile clipping schema for smoothing the activation outliers without the need for complex optimization techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that DGQ consistently outperforms prior methods across various LLM architectures and a wide range of tasks. Remarkably, by our implemented efficient CUTLASS kernel, we achieve 1.12 times memory reduction and 3.24 times speed gains comparing A16W4 implementation. These advancements enable efficient deployment of A8W4 LLMs for real-world applications.

Open-vocabulary grounding requires accurate vision-language alignment under weak supervision, yet existing methods either rely on global sentence embeddings that lack fine-grained expressiveness or introduce token-level alignment with explicit supervision or heavy cross-attention designs. We propose ExpAlign, a theoretically grounded vision-language alignment framework built on a principled multiple instance learning formulation. ExpAlign introduces an Expectation Alignment Head that performs attention-based soft MIL pooling over token-region similarities, enabling implicit token and instance selection without additional annotations. To further stabilize alignment learning, we develop an energy-based multi-scale consistency regularization scheme, including a Top-K multi-positive contrastive objective and a Geometry-Aware Consistency Objective derived from a Lagrangian-constrained free-energy minimization. Extensive experiments show that ExpAlign consistently improves open-vocabulary detection and zero-shot instance segmentation, particularly on long-tail categories. Most notably, it achieves 36.2 AP_r on the LVIS minival split, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods at comparable model scale, while remaining lightweight and inference-efficient.

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.

While deep learning has revolutionized the prediction of rigid protein structures, modelling the conformational ensembles of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs) remains a key frontier. Current AI paradigms present a trade-off: Protein Language Models (PLMs) capture evolutionary statistics but lack explicit physical grounding, while generative models trained to model full ensembles are computationally expensive. In this work we critically assess these limits and propose a path forward. We introduce GeoGraph, a simulation-informed surrogate trained to predict ensemble-averaged statistics of residue-residue contact-map topology directly from sequence. By featurizing coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations into residue- and sequence-level graph descriptors, we create a robust and information-rich learning target. Our evaluation demonstrates that this approach yields representations that are more predictive of key biophysical properties than existing methods.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) facilitates image retrieval through a multimodal query consisting of a reference image and modification text. The reference image defines the retrieval context, while the modification text specifies desired alterations. However, existing CIR datasets predominantly employ coarse-grained modification text (CoarseMT), which inadequately captures fine-grained retrieval intents. This limitation introduces two key challenges: (1) ignoring detailed differences leads to imprecise positive samples, and (2) greater ambiguity arises when retrieving visually similar images. These issues degrade retrieval accuracy, necessitating manual result filtering or repeated queries. To address these limitations, we develop a robust fine-grained CIR data annotation pipeline that minimizes imprecise positive samples and enhances CIR systems' ability to discern modification intents accurately. Using this pipeline, we refine the FashionIQ and CIRR datasets to create two fine-grained CIR datasets: Fine-FashionIQ and Fine-CIRR. Furthermore, we introduce FineCIR, the first CIR framework explicitly designed to parse the modification text. FineCIR effectively captures fine-grained modification semantics and aligns them with ambiguous visual entities, enhancing retrieval precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FineCIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CIR baselines on both fine-grained and traditional CIR benchmark datasets. Our FineCIR code and fine-grained CIR datasets are available at https://github.com/SDU-L/FineCIR.git.

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.

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.

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.

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 build upon vec2vec, a procedure designed to align text embedding spaces without parallel data. vec2vec finds a near-perfect alignment, but it is expensive and unstable. We present mini-vec2vec, a simple and efficient alternative that requires substantially lower computational cost and is highly robust. Moreover, the learned mapping is a linear transformation. Our method consists of three main stages: a tentative matching of pseudo-parallel embedding vectors, transformation fitting, and iterative refinement. Our linear alternative exceeds the original instantiation of vec2vec by orders of magnitude in efficiency, while matching or exceeding their results. The method's stability and interpretable algorithmic steps facilitate scaling and unlock new opportunities for adoption in new domains and fields.

Post-training alignment of diffusion models relies on simplified signals, such as scalar rewards or binary preferences. This limits alignment with complex human expertise, which is hierarchical and fine-grained. To address this, we first construct a hierarchical, fine-grained evaluation criteria with domain experts, which decomposes image quality into multiple positive and negative attributes organized in a tree structure. Building on this, we propose a two-stage alignment framework. First, we inject domain knowledge to an auxiliary diffusion model via Supervised Fine-Tuning. Second, we introduce Complex Preference Optimization (CPO) that extends DPO to align the target diffusion to our non-binary, hierarchical criteria. Specifically, we reformulate the alignment problem to simultaneously maximize the probability of positive attributes while minimizing the probability of negative attributes with the auxiliary diffusion. We instantiate our approach in the domain of painting generation and conduct CPO training with an annotated dataset of painting with fine-grained attributes based on our criteria. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPO significantly enhances generation quality and alignment with expertise, opening new avenues for fine-grained criteria alignment.

Assessing image-text alignment models such as CLIP is crucial for bridging visual and linguistic representations. Yet existing benchmarks rely on rule-based perturbations or short captions, limiting their ability to measure fine-grained alignment. We introduce AlignBench, a benchmark that provides a new indicator of image-text alignment by evaluating detailed image-caption pairs generated by diverse image-to-text and text-to-image models. Each sentence is annotated for correctness, enabling direct assessment of VLMs as alignment evaluators. Benchmarking a wide range of decoder-based VLMs reveals three key findings: (i) CLIP-based models, even those tailored for compositional reasoning, remain nearly blind; (ii) detectors systematically over-score early sentences; and (iii) they show strong self-preference, favoring their own outputs and harming detection performance. Our project page will be available at https://dahlian00.github.io/AlignBench/.

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.

Decompilation transforms compiled code back into a high-level programming language for analysis when source code is unavailable. Previous work has primarily focused on enhancing decompilation performance by increasing the scale of model parameters or training data for pre-training. Based on the characteristics of the decompilation task, we propose two methods: (1) Without fine-tuning, the Self-Constructed Context Decompilation (sc^2dec) method recompiles the LLM's decompilation results to construct pairs for in-context learning, helping the model improve decompilation performance. (2) Fine-grained Alignment Enhancement (FAE), which meticulously aligns assembly code with source code at the statement level by leveraging debugging information, is employed during the fine-tuning phase to achieve further improvements in decompilation. By integrating these two methods, we achieved a Re-Executability performance improvement of approximately 7.35\% on the Decompile-Eval benchmark, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance of 55.03\%.

Modern ultra-high-resolution image synthesis relies heavily on the robust generative capacity of large-scale pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). While recent representation alignment methods have proven effective by distilling visual priors from foundation models (e.g., SAM or DINO) into generative latent features, scaling these approaches to pre-trained LDMs at extreme resolutions exposes a critical learnability-fidelity conflict. Specifically, forcing direct patch-wise feature distillation inherently perturbs the pre-trained latent manifold, ultimately leading to generation degradation. To address this bottleneck, we propose Spatial Gram Alignment (SGA), a novel framework that explicitly leverages the representation priors of vision foundation models while preserving the native generative capacity of LDMs. Moving beyond restrictive direct alignment, SGA imposes a non-invasive spatial constraint by aligning the internal self-similarities of the generative features with those of the foundation priors. This spatial constraint effectively establishes macroscopic structural coherence, while the native generative objectives retain the microscopic pixel-level fidelity inherent to the original LDMs. Notably, this versatile strategy integrates seamlessly across both intermediate diffusion features and VAE latents within pre-trained LDMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGA achieves state-of-the-art performance for ultra-high-resolution text-to-image synthesis, yielding an effective reconciliation between global structural integrity and fine-grained visual details. Code is available at https://github.com/zhang0jhon/SGA.

Current compositional image-to-3D scene generation approaches construct 3D scenes by time-consuming iterative layout optimization or inflexible joint object-layout generation. Moreover, most methods rely on limited field-of-view perspective images, hindering the creation of complete 360-degree environments. To address these limitations, we design Pano3DComposer, an efficient feed-forward framework for panoramic images. To decouple object generation from layout estimation, we propose a plug-and-play Object-World Transformation Predictor. This module converts the 3D objects generated by off-the-shelf image-to-3D models from local to world coordinates. To achieve this, we adapt the VGGT architecture to Alignment-VGGT by using target object crop, multi-view object renderings and camera parameters to predict the transformation. The predictor is trained using pseudo-geometric supervision to address the shape discrepancy between generated and ground-truth objects. For input images from unseen domains, we further introduce a Coarse-to-Fine (C2F) alignment mechanism for Pano3DComposer that iteratively refines geometric consistency with feedback of scene rendering. Our method achieves superior geometric accuracy for image/text-to-3D tasks on synthetic and real-world datasets. It can generate a high-fidelity 3D scene in approximately 20 seconds on an RTX 4090 GPU. Project page: https://qiuzidian.github.io/pano3dcomposer-page/.

We introduce SPARse Fine-grained Contrastive Alignment (SPARC), a simple method for pretraining more fine-grained multimodal representations from image-text pairs. Given that multiple image patches often correspond to single words, we propose to learn a grouping of image patches for every token in the caption. To achieve this, we use a sparse similarity metric between image patches and language tokens and compute for each token a language-grouped vision embedding as the weighted average of patches. The token and language-grouped vision embeddings are then contrasted through a fine-grained sequence-wise loss that only depends on individual samples and does not require other batch samples as negatives. This enables more detailed information to be learned in a computationally inexpensive manner. SPARC combines this fine-grained loss with a contrastive loss between global image and text embeddings to learn representations that simultaneously encode global and local information. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed method and show improved performance over competing approaches both on image-level tasks relying on coarse-grained information, e.g. classification, as well as region-level tasks relying on fine-grained information, e.g. retrieval, object detection, and segmentation. Moreover, SPARC improves model faithfulness and captioning in foundational vision-language models.

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.

Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges on having a good connector that maps visual features generated by a vision encoder to a shared embedding space with the LLM while preserving semantic similarity. Existing connectors, such as multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), often produce out-of-distribution or noisy inputs, leading to misalignment between the modalities. In this work, we propose a novel vision-text alignment method, AlignVLM, that maps visual features to a weighted average of LLM text embeddings. Our approach leverages the linguistic priors encoded by the LLM to ensure that visual features are mapped to regions of the space that the LLM can effectively interpret. AlignVLM is particularly effective for document understanding tasks, where scanned document images must be accurately mapped to their textual content. Our extensive experiments show that AlignVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to prior alignment methods. We provide further analysis demonstrating improved vision-text feature alignment and robustness to noise.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive speech generation by letting a fast draft model propose tokens that a larger target model verifies. However, for speech LLMs that generate acoustic tokens, exact token matching is overly restrictive: many discrete tokens are acoustically or semantically interchangeable, reducing acceptance rates and limiting speedups. We introduce Principled Coarse-Graining (PCG), which verifies proposals at the level of Acoustic Similarity Groups (ASGs) derived from the target model's embedding space. By splitting each token's probability mass across the overlapping groups that contain it, we define an overlap-aware coarse-grained distribution and perform rejection sampling on the resulting group variable. This yields an exactness guarantee at the group level while allowing the accepted draft token to stand in for any member of the group in practice. On LibriTTS, PCG increases acceptance and throughput relative to standard speculative decoding and prior speech-specific relaxations while maintaining intelligibility and speaker similarity. These results suggest acoustically aware, group-level acceptance as a simple and general way to accelerate speech token generation while maintaining speech quality.

The pursuit of diverse, complex, and large-scale instruction data is crucial for automatically aligning large language models (LLMs). While there are methods capable of generating synthetic instructions at scale, they either suffer from limited grounding sources, leading to a narrow distribution, or rely on trivial extensions that fail to produce meaningful trajectories in terms of complexity. In contrast, instructions that benefit efficient alignment are typically crafted with cognitive insights and grounded in real-world use cases. In this paper, we synthesize such instructions using attributed grounding, which involves 1) a top-down attribution process that grounds a selective set of real instructions to situated users, and 2) a bottom-up synthesis process that leverages web documents to first generate a situation, then a meaningful instruction. This framework allows us to harvest diverse and complex instructions at scale, utilizing the vast range of web documents. Specifically, we construct a dataset of 1 million instructions, called SynthQuestions, and demonstrate that models trained on it achieve leading performance on several common benchmarks, with improvements that continually scale with more web corpora. Data, models and codes will be available at https://github.com/Ignoramus0817/SynthQuestions.

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.

Visual-language models (VLMs) excel at data mappings, but real-world document heterogeneity and unstructuredness disrupt the consistency of cross-modal embeddings. Recent late-interaction methods enhance image-text alignment through multi-vector representations, yet traditional training with limited samples and static strategies cannot adapt to the model's dynamic evolution, causing cross-modal retrieval confusion. To overcome this, we introduce Evo-Retriever, a retrieval framework featuring an LLM-guided curriculum evolution built upon a novel Viewpoint-Pathway collaboration. First, we employ multi-view image alignment to enhance fine-grained matching via multi-scale and multi-directional perspectives. Then, a bidirectional contrastive learning strategy generates "hard queries" and establishes complementary learning paths for visual and textual disambiguation to rebalance supervision. Finally, the model-state summary from the above collaboration is fed into an LLM meta-controller, which adaptively adjusts the training curriculum using expert knowledge to promote the model's evolution. On ViDoRe V2 and MMEB (VisDoc), Evo-Retriever achieves state-of-the-art performance, with nDCG@5 scores of 65.2% and 77.1%.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

We present a method for joint alignment of sparse in-the-wild image collections of an object category. Most prior works assume either ground-truth keypoint annotations or a large dataset of images of a single object category. However, neither of the above assumptions hold true for the long-tail of the objects present in the world. We present a self-supervised technique that directly optimizes on a sparse collection of images of a particular object/object category to obtain consistent dense correspondences across the collection. We use pairwise nearest neighbors obtained from deep features of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) model as noisy and sparse keypoint matches and make them dense and accurate matches by optimizing a neural network that jointly maps the image collection into a learned canonical grid. Experiments on CUB and SPair-71k benchmarks demonstrate that our method can produce globally consistent and higher quality correspondences across the image collection when compared to existing self-supervised methods. Code and other material will be made available at https://kampta.github.io/asic.

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.

Feature matching between image pairs is a fundamental problem in computer vision that drives many applications, such as SLAM. Recently, semi-dense matching approaches have achieved substantial performance enhancements and established a widely-accepted coarse-to-fine paradigm. However, the majority of existing methods focus on improving coarse feature representation rather than the fine-matching module. Prior fine-matching techniques, which rely on point-to-patch matching probability expectation or direct regression, often lack precision and do not guarantee the continuity of feature points across sequential images. To address this limitation, this paper concentrates on enhancing the fine-matching module in the semi-dense matching framework. We employ a lightweight and efficient homography estimation network to generate the perspective mapping between patches obtained from coarse matching. This patch-to-patch approach achieves the overall alignment of two patches, resulting in a higher sub-pixel accuracy by incorporating additional constraints. By leveraging the homography estimation between patches, we can achieve a dense matching result with low computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher accuracy compared to previous semi-dense matchers. Meanwhile, our dense matching results exhibit similar end-point-error accuracy compared to previous dense matchers while maintaining semi-dense efficiency.

Instruction-guided image editing has seen remarkable progress with models like FLUX.2 and Qwen-Image-Edit, yet they still struggle with complex scenarios with multiple similar instances each requiring individual edits. We observe that state-of-the-art models suffer from severe over-editing and spatial misalignment when faced with multiple identical instances and composite instructions. To this end, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate fine-grained consistency in multi-instance and multi-instruction settings. To address the failures of existing methods observed in our benchmark, we propose Multi-Instance Regional Alignment via Guided Editing (MIRAGE), a training-free framework that enables precise, localized editing. By leveraging a vision-language model to parse complex instructions into regional subsets, MIRAGE employs a multi-branch parallel denoising strategy. This approach injects latent representations of target regions into the global representation space while maintaining background integrity through a reference trajectory. Extensive evaluations on MIRA-Bench and RefEdit-Bench demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in achieving precise instance-level modifications while preserving background consistency. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/ZiqianLiu666/MIRAGE.

A fundamental challenge in data science is to match disparate point sets with each other. While optimal transport efficiently minimizes point displacements under a bijectivity constraint, it is inherently sensitive to rotations. Conversely, minimizing distortions via the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) framework addresses this limitation but introduces a non-convex, computationally demanding optimization problem. In this work, we identify a broad class of distortion penalties that reduce to a simple alignment problem within a lifted feature space. Leveraging this insight, we introduce an iterative GW solver with a linear memory footprint and quadratic (rather than cubic) time complexity. Our method is differentiable, comes with strong theoretical guarantees, and scales to hundreds of thousands of points in minutes. This efficiency unlocks a wide range of geometric applications and enables the exploration of the GW energy landscape, whose local minima encode the symmetries of the matching problem.

Word alignment over parallel corpora has a wide variety of applications, including learning translation lexicons, cross-lingual transfer of language processing tools, and automatic evaluation or analysis of translation outputs. The great majority of past work on word alignment has worked by performing unsupervised learning on parallel texts. Recently, however, other work has demonstrated that pre-trained contextualized word embeddings derived from multilingually trained language models (LMs) prove an attractive alternative, achieving competitive results on the word alignment task even in the absence of explicit training on parallel data. In this paper, we examine methods to marry the two approaches: leveraging pre-trained LMs but fine-tuning them on parallel text with objectives designed to improve alignment quality, and proposing methods to effectively extract alignments from these fine-tuned models. We perform experiments on five language pairs and demonstrate that our model can consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art models of all varieties. In addition, we demonstrate that we are able to train multilingual word aligners that can obtain robust performance on different language pairs. Our aligner, AWESOME (Aligning Word Embedding Spaces of Multilingual Encoders), with pre-trained models is available at https://github.com/neulab/awesome-align

Fine-tuning large language models on narrow datasets can cause them to develop broadly misaligned behaviours: a phenomena known as emergent misalignment. However, the mechanisms underlying this misalignment, and why it generalizes beyond the training domain, are poorly understood, demonstrating critical gaps in our knowledge of model alignment. In this work, we train and study a minimal model organism which uses just 9 rank-1 adapters to emergently misalign Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct. Studying this, we find that different emergently misaligned models converge to similar representations of misalignment. We demonstrate this convergence by extracting a 'misalignment direction' from one fine-tuned model's activations, and using it to effectively ablate misaligned behaviour from fine-tunes using higher dimensional LoRAs and different datasets. Leveraging the scalar hidden state of rank-1 LoRAs, we further present a set of experiments for directly interpreting the fine-tuning adapters, showing that six contribute to general misalignment, while two specialise for misalignment in just the fine-tuning domain. Emergent misalignment is a particularly salient example of undesirable and unexpected model behaviour and by advancing our understanding of the mechanisms behind it, we hope to move towards being able to better understand and mitigate misalignment more generally.

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.

MLLMs require high-resolution visual inputs for fine-grained tasks like document understanding and dense scene perception. However, current global resolution scaling paradigms indiscriminately flood the quadratic self-attention mechanism with visually redundant tokens, severely bottlenecking inference throughput while ignoring spatial sparsity and query intent. To overcome this, we propose Q-Zoom, a query-aware adaptive high-resolution perception framework that operates in an efficient coarse-to-fine manner. First, a lightweight Dynamic Gating Network safely bypasses high-resolution processing when coarse global features suffice. Second, for queries demanding fine-grained perception, a Self-Distilled Region Proposal Network (SD-RPN) precisely localizes the task-relevant Region-of-Interest (RoI) directly from intermediate feature spaces. To optimize these modules efficiently, the gating network uses a consistency-aware generation strategy to derive deterministic routing labels, while the SD-RPN employs a fully self-supervised distillation paradigm. A continuous spatio-temporal alignment scheme and targeted fine-tuning then seamlessly fuse the dense local RoI with the coarse global layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Zoom establishes a dominant Pareto frontier. Using Qwen2.5-VL-7B as a primary testbed, Q-Zoom accelerates inference by 2.52 times on Document & OCR benchmarks and 4.39 times in High-Resolution scenarios while matching the baseline's peak accuracy. Furthermore, when configured for maximum perceptual fidelity, Q-Zoom surpasses the baseline's peak performance by 1.1% and 8.1% on these respective benchmarks. These robust improvements transfer seamlessly to Qwen3-VL, LLaVA, and emerging RL-based thinking-with-image models. Project page is available at https://yuhengsss.github.io/Q-Zoom/.

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.

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.

Alignment is the most critical step in building large language models (LLMs) that meet human needs. With the rapid development of LLMs gradually surpassing human capabilities, traditional alignment methods based on human-annotation are increasingly unable to meet the scalability demands. Therefore, there is an urgent need to explore new sources of automated alignment signals and technical approaches. In this paper, we systematically review the recently emerging methods of automated alignment, attempting to explore how to achieve effective, scalable, automated alignment once the capabilities of LLMs exceed those of humans. Specifically, we categorize existing automated alignment methods into 4 major categories based on the sources of alignment signals and discuss the current status and potential development of each category. Additionally, we explore the underlying mechanisms that enable automated alignment and discuss the essential factors that make automated alignment technologies feasible and effective from the fundamental role of alignment.

Establishing dense correspondence between two images is a fundamental computer vision problem, which is typically tackled by matching local feature descriptors. However, without global awareness, such local features are often insufficient for disambiguating similar regions. And computing the pairwise feature correlation across images is both computation-expensive and memory-intensive. To make the local features aware of the global context and improve their matching accuracy, we introduce DenseGAP, a new solution for efficient Dense correspondence learning with a Graph-structured neural network conditioned on Anchor Points. Specifically, we first propose a graph structure that utilizes anchor points to provide sparse but reliable prior on inter- and intra-image context and propagates them to all image points via directed edges. We also design a graph-structured network to broadcast multi-level contexts via light-weighted message-passing layers and generate high-resolution feature maps at low memory cost. Finally, based on the predicted feature maps, we introduce a coarse-to-fine framework for accurate correspondence prediction using cycle consistency. Our feature descriptors capture both local and global information, thus enabling a continuous feature field for querying arbitrary points at high resolution. Through comprehensive ablative experiments and evaluations on large-scale indoor and outdoor datasets, we demonstrate that our method advances the state-of-the-art of correspondence learning on most benchmarks.

While transfer learning is an advantageous strategy, it overlooks the opportunity to leverage knowledge from numerous available models online. Addressing this multi-source transfer learning problem is a promising path to boost adaptability and cut re-training costs. However, existing approaches are inherently coarse-grained, lacking the necessary precision for granular knowledge extraction and the aggregation efficiency required to fuse knowledge from either a large number of source models or those with high parameter counts. We address these limitations by leveraging Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to first decompose each source model into its elementary, rank-one components. A subsequent aggregation stage then selects only the most salient components from all sources, thereby overcoming the previous efficiency and precision limitations. To best preserve and leverage the synthesized knowledge base, our method adapts to the target task by fine-tuning only the principal singular values of the merged matrix. In essence, this process only recalibrates the importance of top SVD components. The proposed framework allows for efficient transfer learning, is robust to perturbations both at the input level and in the parameter space (e.g., noisy or pruned sources), and scales well computationally.

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

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a central computational tool in physics, chemistry, and biology, enabling quantitative prediction of experimental observables as expectations over high-dimensional molecular distributions such as Boltzmann distributions and transition densities. However, conventional MD is fundamentally limited by the high computational cost required to generate independent samples. Generative molecular dynamics (GenMD) has recently emerged as an alternative, learning surrogates of molecular distributions either from data or through interaction with energy models. While these methods enable efficient sampling, their transferability across molecular systems is often limited. In this work, we show that incorporating auxiliary sources of information can improve the data efficiency and generalization of transferable implicit transfer operators (TITO) for molecular dynamics. We find that coarse-grained TITO models are substantially more data-efficient than Boltzmann Emulators, and that incorporating protein language model (pLM) embeddings further improves out-of-distribution generalization. Our approach, PLaTITO, achieves state-of-the-art performance on equilibrium sampling benchmarks for out-of-distribution protein systems, including fast-folding proteins. We further study the impact of additional conditioning signals -- such as structural embeddings, temperature, and large-language-model-derived embeddings -- on model performance.

Aligning large visual generative models with human feedback is often performed through pairwise preference optimization. While such approaches are conceptually simple, they fundamentally rely on annotated pairs, limiting scalability in settings where feedback is collected as independent scalar ratings. In this work, we revisit the KL-regularized alignment objective and show that the optimal policy implicitly compares each sample's reward to an instance-specific baseline that is generally intractable. We propose a threshold-guided alignment framework that replaces this oracle baseline with a data-driven global threshold estimated from empirical score statistics. This formulation turns alignment into a binary decision task on unpaired data, enabling effective optimization directly from scalar feedback. We also incorporate a confidence weighting term to emphasize samples whose scores deviate strongly from the threshold, improving sample efficiency. Experiments across both diffusion and masked generative paradigms, spanning three test sets and five reward models, show that our method consistently improves preference alignment over previous methods. These results position our threshold-guided framework as a simple yet principled alternative for aligning visual generative models without paired comparisons.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time alignment techniques, such as prompting and guided decoding, do not modify the underlying model, and their performance remains dependent on the original model's capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose aligning LLMs through representation editing. The core of our method is to view a pre-trained autoregressive LLM as a discrete-time stochastic dynamical system. To achieve alignment for specific objectives, we introduce external control signals into the state space of this language dynamical system. We train a value function directly on the hidden states according to the Bellman equation, enabling gradient-based optimization to obtain the optimal control signals at test time. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing test-time alignment techniques while requiring significantly fewer resources compared to fine-tuning methods.

In this study, we tackle the challenging fine-grained edge detection task, which refers to predicting specific edges caused by reflectance, illumination, normal, and depth changes, respectively. Prior methods exploit multi-scale convolutional networks, which are limited in three aspects: (1) Convolutions are local operators while identifying the cause of edge formation requires looking at far away pixels. (2) Priors specific to edge cause are fixed in prediction heads. (3) Using separate networks for generic and fine-grained edge detection, and the constraint between them may be violated. To address these three issues, we propose a two-stage transformer-based network sequentially predicting generic edges and fine-grained edges, which has a global receptive field thanks to the attention mechanism. The prior knowledge of edge causes is formulated as four learnable cause tokens in a cause-aware decoder design. Furthermore, to encourage the consistency between generic edges and fine-grained edges, an edge aggregation and alignment loss is exploited. We evaluate our method on the public benchmark BSDS-RIND and several newly derived benchmarks, and achieve new state-of-the-art results. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Daniellli/ECT.git.

Flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models excel in embodied control but suffer from intractable likelihoods during multi-step sampling, hindering online reinforcement learning. We propose \textit{boldsymbolπ-StepNFT} (Step-wise Negative-aware Fine-Tuning), a critic-and-likelihood-free framework that requires only a single forward pass per optimization step and eliminates auxiliary value networks. We identify that wider exploration spaces necessitate finer-grained, step-wise guidance for alignment. Empirically, π-StepNFT unlocks latent potential on LIBERO with competitive few-shot robustness. Moreover, it achieves superior generalization on ManiSkill, outperforming value-based baselines in OOD scenarios by preventing overfitting to multimodal features. This property offers a scalable solution promising for complex real-world applications.

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.

We study methods for efficiently aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences given budgeted online feedback. We first formulate the LLM alignment problem in the frame of contextual dueling bandits. This formulation, subsuming recent paradigms such as online RLHF and online DPO, inherently quests for sample-efficient algorithms that incorporate online active exploration. Leveraging insights from bandit theory, we introduce a unified algorithm based on Thompson sampling and highlight its applications in two distinct LLM alignment scenarios. The practical agent that efficiently implements this algorithm, named SEA (Sample-Efficient Alignment), is empirically validated through extensive experiments across three model scales (1B, 2.8B, 6.9B) and three preference learning algorithms (DPO, IPO, SLiC). The results demonstrate that SEA achieves highly sample-efficient alignment with oracle's preferences, outperforming recent active exploration methods for LLMs. Additionally, we release the implementation of SEA together with an efficient codebase designed for online alignment of LLMs, aiming to accelerate future research in this field.

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.

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.