OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Circuit Representation Learning with Masked Gate Modeling and Verilog-AIG Alignment
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Understanding the structure and function of circuits is crucial for electronic design automation (EDA). Circuits can be formulated as And-Inverter graphs (AIGs), enabling efficient implementation of representation learning through graph neural networks (GNNs). Masked modeling paradigms have been proven effective in graph representation learning. However, masking augmentation to original circuits will destroy their logical equivalence, which is unsuitable for circuit representation learning. Moreover, existing masked modeling paradigms often prioritize structural information at the expense of abstract information such as circuit function. To address these limitations, we introduce MGVGA, a novel constrained masked modeling paradigm incorporating masked gate modeling (MGM) and Verilog-AIG alignment (VGA). Specifically, MGM preserves logical equivalence by masking gates in the latent space rather than in the original circuits, subsequently reconstructing the attributes of these masked gates. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an excellent understanding of the Verilog code functionality. Building upon this capability, VGA performs masking operations on original circuits and reconstructs masked gates under the constraints of equivalent Verilog codes, enabling GNNs to learn circuit functions from LLMs. We evaluate MGVGA on various logic synthesis tasks for EDA and show the superior performance of MGVGA compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/MGVGA.
VILA-U: a Unified Foundation Model Integrating Visual Understanding and Generation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

VILA-U is a Unified foundation model that integrates Video, Image, Language understanding and generation. Traditional visual language models (VLMs) use separate modules for understanding and generating visual content, which can lead to misalignment and increased complexity. In contrast, VILA-U employs a single autoregressive next-token prediction framework for both tasks, eliminating the need for additional components like diffusion models. This approach not only simplifies the model but also achieves near state-of-the-art performance in visual language understanding and generation. The success of VILA-U is attributed to two main factors: the unified vision tower that aligns discrete visual tokens with textual inputs during pretraining, which enhances visual perception, and autoregressive image generation can achieve similar quality as diffusion models with high-quality dataset. This allows VILA-U to perform comparably to more complex models using a fully token-based autoregressive framework.
Instructional Segment Embedding: Improving LLM Safety with Instruction Hierarchy
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to security and safety threats, such as prompt injection, prompt extraction, and harmful requests. One major cause of these vulnerabilities is the lack of an instruction hierarchy. Modern LLM architectures treat all inputs equally, failing to distinguish between and prioritize various types of instructions, such as system messages, user prompts, and data. As a result, lower-priority user prompts may override more critical system instructions, including safety protocols. Existing approaches to achieving instruction hierarchy, such as delimiters and instruction-based training, do not address this issue at the architectural level. We introduce the Instructional Segment Embedding (ISE) technique, inspired by BERT, to modern large language models, which embeds instruction priority information directly into the model. This approach enables models to explicitly differentiate and prioritize various instruction types, significantly improving safety against malicious prompts that attempt to override priority rules. Our experiments on the Structured Query and Instruction Hierarchy benchmarks demonstrate an average robust accuracy increase of up to 15.75% and 18.68%, respectively. Furthermore, we observe an improvement in instruction-following capability of up to 4.1% evaluated on AlpacaEval. Overall, our approach offers a promising direction for enhancing the safety and effectiveness of LLM architectures.
SMITE: Segment Me In TimE
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Segmenting an object in a video presents significant challenges. Each pixel must be accurately labelled, and these labels must remain consistent across frames. The difficulty increases when the segmentation is with arbitrary granularity, meaning the number of segments can vary arbitrarily, and masks are defined based on only one or a few sample images. In this paper, we address this issue by employing a pre-trained text to image diffusion model supplemented with an additional tracking mechanism. We demonstrate that our approach can effectively manage various segmentation scenarios and outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives.
SWIFT: On-the-Fly Self-Speculative Decoding for LLM Inference Acceleration
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to verify them in parallel. While this technique has achieved notable speedups, most existing approaches necessitate either additional parameters or extensive training to construct effective draft models, thereby restricting their applicability across different LLMs and tasks. To address this limitation, we explore a novel plug-and-play SD solution with layer-skipping, which skips intermediate layers of the target LLM as the compact draft model. Our analysis reveals that LLMs exhibit great potential for self-acceleration through layer sparsity and the task-specific nature of this sparsity. Building on these insights, we introduce SWIFT, an on-the-fly self-speculative decoding algorithm that adaptively selects intermediate layers of LLMs to skip during inference. SWIFT does not require auxiliary models or additional training, making it a plug-and-play solution for accelerating LLM inference across diverse input data streams. Our extensive experiments across a wide range of models and downstream tasks demonstrate that SWIFT can achieve over a 1.3x-1.6x speedup while preserving the original distribution of the generated text. We release our code in https://github.com/hemingkx/SWIFT.
Towards Understanding Why Label Smoothing Degrades Selective Classification and How to Fix It
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Label smoothing (LS) is a popular regularisation method for training neural networks as it is effective in improving test accuracy and is simple to implement. ``Hard'' one-hot labels are ``smoothed'' by uniformly distributing probability mass to other classes, reducing overfitting. Prior work has suggested that in some cases LS can degrade selective classification (SC) -- where the aim is to reject misclassifications using a model's uncertainty. In this work, we first demonstrate empirically across an extended range of large-scale tasks and architectures that LS consistently degrades SC. We then address a gap in existing knowledge, providing an explanation for this behaviour by analysing logit-level gradients: LS degrades the uncertainty rank ordering of correct vs incorrect predictions by suppressing the max logit more when a prediction is likely to be correct, and less when it is likely to be wrong. This elucidates previously reported experimental results where strong classifiers underperform in SC. We then demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of post-hoc logit normalisation for recovering lost SC performance caused by LS. Furthermore, linking back to our gradient analysis, we again provide an explanation for why such normalisation is effective.
MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation, enabling models to produce and interpret both images and text in arbitrary sequences, have become a pivotal area in multimodal learning. Despite significant advancements, the evaluation of this capability remains insufficient. Existing benchmarks suffer from limitations in data scale, scope, and evaluation depth, while current evaluation metrics are often costly or biased, lacking in reliability for practical applications. To address these challenges, we introduce MMIE, a large-scale knowledge-intensive benchmark for evaluating interleaved multimodal comprehension and generation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). MMIE comprises 20K meticulously curated multimodal queries, spanning 3 categories, 12 fields, and 102 subfields, including mathematics, coding, physics, literature, health, and arts. It supports both interleaved inputs and outputs, offering a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended question formats to evaluate diverse competencies. Moreover, we propose a reliable automated evaluation metric, leveraging a scoring model fine-tuned with human-annotated data and systematic evaluation criteria, aimed at reducing bias and improving evaluation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and metrics in providing a comprehensive evaluation of interleaved LVLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight LVLMs, revealing that even the best models show significant room for improvement, with most achieving only moderate results. We believe MMIE will drive further advancements in the development of interleaved LVLMs. We publicly release our benchmark and code in https://mmie-bench.github.io/.
GeoX: Geometric Problem Solving Through Unified Formalized Vision-Language Pre-training
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Despite their proficiency in general tasks, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with automatic Geometry Problem Solving (GPS), which demands understanding diagrams, interpreting symbols, and performing complex reasoning. This limitation arises from their pre-training on natural images and texts, along with the lack of automated verification in the problem-solving process. Besides, current geometric specialists are limited by their task-specific designs, making them less effective for broader geometric problems. To this end, we present GeoX, a multi-modal large model focusing on geometric understanding and reasoning tasks. Given the significant differences between geometric diagram-symbol and natural image-text, we introduce unimodal pre-training to develop a diagram encoder and symbol decoder, enhancing the understanding of geometric images and corpora. Furthermore, we introduce geometry-language alignment, an effective pre-training paradigm that bridges the modality gap between unimodal geometric experts. We propose a Generator-And-Sampler Transformer (GS-Former) to generate discriminative queries and eliminate uninformative representations from unevenly distributed geometric signals. Finally, GeoX benefits from visual instruction tuning, empowering it to take geometric images and questions as input and generate verifiable solutions. Experiments show that GeoX outperforms both generalists and geometric specialists on publicly recognized benchmarks, such as GeoQA, UniGeo, Geometry3K, and PGPS9k.
SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are advancing the ability to reason about complex sports scenarios by integrating textual and visual information. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce SPORTU, a benchmark designed to assess MLLMs across multi-level sports reasoning tasks. SPORTU comprises two key components: SPORTU-text, featuring 900 multiple-choice questions with human-annotated explanations for rule comprehension and strategy understanding. This component focuses on testing models' ability to reason about sports solely through question-answering (QA), without requiring visual inputs; SPORTU-video, consisting of 1,701 slow-motion video clips across 7 different sports and 12,048 QA pairs, designed to assess multi-level reasoning, from simple sports recognition to complex tasks like foul detection and rule application. We evaluate four prevalent LLMs mainly utilizing few-shot learning paradigms supplemented by chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on the SPORTU-text part. We evaluate four LLMs using few-shot learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting on SPORTU-text. GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy of 71%, but still falls short of human-level performance, highlighting room for improvement in rule comprehension and reasoning. The evaluation for the SPORTU-video part includes 7 proprietary and 6 open-source MLLMs. Experiments show that models fall short on hard tasks that require deep reasoning and rule-based understanding. Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs the best with only 52.6% accuracy on the hard task, showing large room for improvement. We hope that SPORTU will serve as a critical step toward evaluating models' capabilities in sports understanding and reasoning.
Vision-LSTM: xLSTM as Generic Vision Backbone
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Transformers are widely used as generic backbones in computer vision, despite initially introduced for natural language processing. Recently, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has been extended to a scalable and performant architecture - the xLSTM - which overcomes long-standing LSTM limitations via exponential gating and parallelizable matrix memory structure. In this report, we introduce Vision-LSTM (ViL), an adaption of the xLSTM building blocks to computer vision. ViL comprises a stack of xLSTM blocks where odd blocks process the sequence of patch tokens from top to bottom while even blocks go from bottom to top. Experiments show that ViL holds promise to be further deployed as new generic backbone for computer vision architectures.
Spatial-Mamba: Effective Visual State Space Models via Structure-Aware State Fusion
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Selective state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, highly excel at capturing long-range dependencies in 1D sequential data, while their applications to 2D vision tasks still face challenges. Current visual SSMs often convert images into 1D sequences and employ various scanning patterns to incorporate local spatial dependencies. However, these methods are limited in effectively capturing the complex image spatial structures and the increased computational cost caused by the lengthened scanning paths. To address these limitations, we propose Spatial-Mamba, a novel approach that establishes neighborhood connectivity directly in the state space. Instead of relying solely on sequential state transitions, we introduce a structure-aware state fusion equation, which leverages dilated convolutions to capture image spatial structural dependencies, significantly enhancing the flow of visual contextual information. Spatial-Mamba proceeds in three stages: initial state computation in a unidirectional scan, spatial context acquisition through structure-aware state fusion, and final state computation using the observation equation. Our theoretical analysis shows that Spatial-Mamba unifies the original Mamba and linear attention under the same matrix multiplication framework, providing a deeper understanding of our method. Experimental results demonstrate that Spatial-Mamba, even with a single scan, attains or surpasses the state-of-the-art SSM-based models in image classification, detection and segmentation. Source codes and trained models can be found at https://github.com/EdwardChasel/Spatial-Mamba.
Neuron-based Multifractal Analysis of Neuron Interaction Dynamics in Large Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, there has been increasing attention on the capabilities of large models, particularly in handling complex tasks that small-scale models are unable to perform. Notably, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated ``intelligent'' abilities such as complex reasoning and abstract language comprehension, reflecting cognitive-like behaviors. However, current research on emergent abilities in large models predominantly focuses on the relationship between model performance and size, leaving a significant gap in the systematic quantitative analysis of the internal structures and mechanisms driving these emergent abilities. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience research on brain network structure and self-organization, we propose (i) a general network representation of large models, (ii) a new analytical framework, called Neuron-based Multifractal Analysis (NeuroMFA), for structural analysis, and (iii) a novel structure-based metric as a proxy for emergent abilities of large models. By linking structural features to the capabilities of large models, NeuroMFA provides a quantitative framework for analyzing emergent phenomena in large models. Our experiments show that the proposed method yields a comprehensive measure of network's evolving heterogeneity and organization, offering theoretical foundations and a new perspective for investigating emergent abilities in large models.
SimPER: A Minimalist Approach to Preference Alignment without Hyperparameters
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Existing preference optimization objectives for language model alignment require additional hyperparameters that must be extensively tuned to achieve optimal performance, increasing both the complexity and time required for fine-tuning large language models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective hyperparameter-free preference optimization algorithm for alignment. We observe that promising performance can be achieved simply by optimizing inverse perplexity, which is calculated as the inverse of the exponentiated average log-likelihood of the chosen and rejected responses in the preference dataset. The resulting simple learning objective, SimPER, is easy to implement and eliminates the need for expensive hyperparameter tuning and a reference model, making it both computationally and memory efficient. Extensive experiments on widely used real-world benchmarks, including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval 2, and 10 key benchmarks of the Open LLM Leaderboard with 5 base models, demonstrate that SimPER consistently and significantly outperforms existing approaches-even without any hyperparameters or a reference model . For example, despite its simplicity, SimPER outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 5.7 points on AlpacaEval 2 and achieves the highest average ranking across 10 benchmarks on the Open LLM Leaderboard. The source code for SimPER is publicly available at: https://github.com/tengxiao1/SimPER.
DynaPrompt: Dynamic Test-Time Prompt Tuning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Test-time prompt tuning enhances zero-shot generalization of vision-language models but tends to ignore the relatedness among test samples during inference. Online test-time prompt tuning provides a simple way to leverage the information in previous test samples, albeit with the risk of prompt collapse due to error accumulation. To enhance test-time prompt tuning, we propose DynaPrompt, short for dynamic test-time prompt tuning, exploiting relevant data distribution information while reducing error accumulation. Built on an online prompt buffer, DynaPrompt adaptively selects and optimizes the relevant prompts for each test sample during tuning. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic prompt selection strategy based on two metrics: prediction entropy and probability difference. For unseen test data information, we develop dynamic prompt appending, which allows the buffer to append new prompts and delete the inactive ones. By doing so, the prompts are optimized to exploit beneficial information on specific test data, while alleviating error accumulation. Experiments on fourteen datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic test-time prompt tuning.
On a Connection Between Imitation Learning and RLHF
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

This work studies the alignment of large language models with preference data from an imitation learning perspective. We establish a close theoretical connection between reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF and imitation learning (IL), revealing that RLHF implicitly performs imitation learning on the preference data distribution. Building on this connection, we propose DIL, a principled framework that directly optimizes the imitation learning objective. DIL provides a unified imitation learning perspective on alignment, encompassing existing alignment algorithms as special cases while naturally introducing new variants. By bridging IL and RLHF, DIL offers new insights into alignment with RLHF. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIL outperforms existing methods on various challenging benchmarks.
Human Simulacra: Benchmarking the Personification of Large Language Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Large language models (LLMs) are recognized as systems that closely mimic aspects of human intelligence. This capability has attracted attention from the social science community, who see the potential in leveraging LLMs to replace human participants in experiments, thereby reducing research costs and complexity. In this paper, we introduce a framework for large language models personification, including a strategy for constructing virtual characters' life stories from the ground up, a Multi-Agent Cognitive Mechanism capable of simulating human cognitive processes, and a psychology-guided evaluation method to assess human simulations from both self and observational perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our constructed simulacra can produce personified responses that align with their target characters. Our work is a preliminary exploration which offers great potential in practical applications. All the code and datasets will be released, with the hope of inspiring further investigations. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/hasakiXie123/Human-Simulacra.
Gaussian Splatting Lucas-Kanade
Venue: Conference ICLR 2025
Year: 2025

Gaussian Splatting and its dynamic extensions are effective for reconstructing 3D scenes from 2D images when there is significant camera movement to facilitate motion parallax and when scene objects remain relatively static. However, in many real-world scenarios, these conditions are not met. As a consequence, data-driven semantic and geometric priors have been favored as regularizers, despite their bias toward training data and their neglect of broader movement dynamics. Departing from this practice, we propose a novel analytical approach that adapts the classical Lucas-Kanade method to dynamic Gaussian splatting. By leveraging the intrinsic properties of the forward warp field network, we derive an analytical velocity field that, through time integration, facilitates accurate scene flow computation. This enables the precise enforcement of motion constraints on warp fields, thus constraining both 2D motion and 3D positions of the Gaussians. Our method excels in reconstructing highly dynamic scenes with minimal camera movement, as demonstrated through experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes.