Daily Papers

Customizable role-playing in large language models (LLMs), also known as character generalization, is gaining increasing attention for its versatility and cost-efficiency in developing and deploying role-playing dialogue agents. This study explores a large-scale data synthesis approach to equip LLMs with character generalization capabilities. We begin by synthesizing large-scale character profiles using personas from Persona Hub and then explore two strategies: response rewriting and response generation, to create character-aligned instructional responses. To validate the effectiveness of our synthetic instruction tuning data for character generalization, we perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using the LLaMA-3 8B model. Our best-performing model strengthens the original LLaMA-3 8B Instruct model and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o models on role-playing dialogue. We release our synthetic characters and instruction-tuning dialogues to support public research.

In this paper, we present FaceShot, a novel training-free portrait animation framework designed to bring any character into life from any driven video without fine-tuning or retraining. We achieve this by offering precise and robust reposed landmark sequences from an appearance-guided landmark matching module and a coordinate-based landmark retargeting module. Together, these components harness the robust semantic correspondences of latent diffusion models to produce facial motion sequence across a wide range of character types. After that, we input the landmark sequences into a pre-trained landmark-driven animation model to generate animated video. With this powerful generalization capability, FaceShot can significantly extend the application of portrait animation by breaking the limitation of realistic portrait landmark detection for any stylized character and driven video. Also, FaceShot is compatible with any landmark-driven animation model, significantly improving overall performance. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed character benchmark CharacBench confirm that FaceShot consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across any character domain. More results are available at our project website https://faceshot2024.github.io/faceshot/.

Authorship identification ascertains the authorship of texts whose origins remain undisclosed. That authorship identification techniques work as reliably as they do has been attributed to the fact that authorial style is properly captured and represented. Although modern authorship identification methods have evolved significantly over the years and have proven effective in distinguishing authorial styles, the generalization of stylistic features across domains has not been systematically reviewed. The presented work addresses the challenge of enhancing the generalization of stylistic representations in authorship identification, particularly when there are discrepancies between training and testing samples. A comprehensive review of empirical studies was conducted, focusing on various stylistic features and their effectiveness in representing an author's style. The influencing factors such as topic, genre, and register on writing style were also explored, along with strategies to mitigate their impact. While some stylistic features, like character n-grams and function words, have proven to be robust and discriminative, others, such as content words, can introduce biases and hinder cross-domain generalization. Representations learned using deep learning models, especially those incorporating character n-grams and syntactic information, show promise in enhancing representation generalization. The findings underscore the importance of selecting appropriate stylistic features for authorship identification, especially in cross-domain scenarios. The recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of various linguistic features paves the way for more accurate authorship identification in diverse contexts.

The escalating reliance on revolutionary online web services has introduced heightened security risks, with persistent challenges posed by phishing despite extensive security measures. Traditional phishing systems, reliant on machine learning and manual features, struggle with evolving tactics. Recent advances in deep learning offer promising avenues for tackling novel phishing challenges and malicious URLs. This paper introduces a two-phase stack generalized model named AntiPhishStack, designed to detect phishing sites. The model leverages the learning of URLs and character-level TF-IDF features symmetrically, enhancing its ability to combat emerging phishing threats. In Phase I, features are trained on a base machine learning classifier, employing K-fold cross-validation for robust mean prediction. Phase II employs a two-layered stacked-based LSTM network with five adaptive optimizers for dynamic compilation, ensuring premier prediction on these features. Additionally, the symmetrical predictions from both phases are optimized and integrated to train a meta-XGBoost classifier, contributing to a final robust prediction. The significance of this work lies in advancing phishing detection with AntiPhishStack, operating without prior phishing-specific feature knowledge. Experimental validation on two benchmark datasets, comprising benign and phishing or malicious URLs, demonstrates the model's exceptional performance, achieving a notable 96.04% accuracy compared to existing studies. This research adds value to the ongoing discourse on symmetry and asymmetry in information security and provides a forward-thinking solution for enhancing network security in the face of evolving cyber threats.

We present a literature and empirical survey that critically assesses the state of the art in character-level modeling for machine translation (MT). Despite evidence in the literature that character-level systems are comparable with subword systems, they are virtually never used in competitive setups in WMT competitions. We empirically show that even with recent modeling innovations in character-level natural language processing, character-level MT systems still struggle to match their subword-based counterparts. Character-level MT systems show neither better domain robustness, nor better morphological generalization, despite being often so motivated. However, we are able to show robustness towards source side noise and that translation quality does not degrade with increasing beam size at decoding time.

In this work we tackle the challenging problem of anime character recognition. Anime, referring to animation produced within Japan and work derived or inspired from it. For this purpose we present DAF:re (DanbooruAnimeFaces:revamped), a large-scale, crowd-sourced, long-tailed dataset with almost 500 K images spread across more than 3000 classes. Additionally, we conduct experiments on DAF:re and similar datasets using a variety of classification models, including CNN based ResNets and self-attention based Vision Transformer (ViT). Our results give new insights into the generalization and transfer learning properties of ViT models on substantially different domain datasets from those used for the upstream pre-training, including the influence of batch and image size in their training. Additionally, we share our dataset, source-code, pre-trained checkpoints and results, as Animesion, the first end-to-end framework for large-scale anime character recognition: https://github.com/arkel23/animesion

Vision-language-action (VLA) models finetuned from vision-language models (VLMs) hold the promise of leveraging rich pretrained representations to build generalist robots across diverse tasks and environments. However, direct fine-tuning on robot data often disrupts these representations and limits generalization. We present a framework that better preserves pretrained features while adapting them for robot manipulation. Our approach introduces three components: (i) a dual-encoder design with one frozen vision encoder to retain pretrained features and another trainable for task adaptation, (ii) a string-based action tokenizer that casts continuous actions into character sequences aligned with the model's pretraining domain, and (iii) a co-training strategy that combines robot demonstrations with vision-language datasets emphasizing spatial reasoning and affordances. Evaluations in simulation and on real robots show that our method improves robustness to visual perturbations, generalization to novel instructions and environments, and overall task success compared to baselines.

Character image animation, which generates high-quality videos from a reference image and target pose sequence, has seen significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods only apply to human figures, which usually do not generalize well on anthropomorphic characters commonly used in industries like gaming and entertainment. Our in-depth analysis suggests to attribute this limitation to their insufficient modeling of motion, which is unable to comprehend the movement pattern of the driving video, thus imposing a pose sequence rigidly onto the target character. To this end, this paper proposes Animate-X, a universal animation framework based on LDM for various character types (collectively named X), including anthropomorphic characters. To enhance motion representation, we introduce the Pose Indicator, which captures comprehensive motion pattern from the driving video through both implicit and explicit manner. The former leverages CLIP visual features of a driving video to extract its gist of motion, like the overall movement pattern and temporal relations among motions, while the latter strengthens the generalization of LDM by simulating possible inputs in advance that may arise during inference. Moreover, we introduce a new Animated Anthropomorphic Benchmark (A^2Bench) to evaluate the performance of Animate-X on universal and widely applicable animation images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of Animate-X compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Character image animation, which generates high-quality videos from a reference image and target pose sequence, has seen significant progress in recent years. However, most existing methods only apply to human figures, which usually do not generalize well on anthropomorphic characters commonly used in industries like gaming and entertainment. Furthermore, previous methods could only generate videos with static backgrounds, which limits the realism of the videos. For the first challenge, our in-depth analysis suggests to attribute this limitation to their insufficient modeling of motion, which is unable to comprehend the movement pattern of the driving video, thus imposing a pose sequence rigidly onto the target character. To this end, this paper proposes Animate-X++, a universal animation framework based on DiT for various character types, including anthropomorphic characters. To enhance motion representation, we introduce the Pose Indicator, which captures comprehensive motion pattern from the driving video through both implicit and explicit manner. The former leverages CLIP visual features of a driving video to extract its gist of motion, like the overall movement pattern and temporal relations among motions, while the latter strengthens the generalization of DiT by simulating possible inputs in advance that may arise during inference. For the second challenge, we introduce a multi-task training strategy that jointly trains the animation and TI2V tasks. Combined with the proposed partial parameter training, this approach achieves not only character animation but also text-driven background dynamics, making the videos more realistic. Moreover, we introduce a new Animated Anthropomorphic Benchmark (A2Bench) to evaluate the performance of Animate-X++ on universal and widely applicable animation images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of Animate-X++.

State-of-the-art models in natural language processing rely on separate rigid subword tokenization algorithms, which limit their generalization ability and adaptation to new settings. In this paper, we propose a new model inductive bias that learns a subword tokenization end-to-end as part of the model. To this end, we introduce a soft gradient-based subword tokenization module (GBST) that automatically learns latent subword representations from characters in a data-driven fashion. Concretely, GBST enumerates candidate subword blocks and learns to score them in a position-wise fashion using a block scoring network. We additionally introduce Charformer, a deep Transformer model that integrates GBST and operates on the byte level. Via extensive experiments on English GLUE, multilingual, and noisy text datasets, we show that Charformer outperforms a series of competitive byte-level baselines while generally performing on par and sometimes outperforming subword-based models. Additionally, Charformer is fast, improving the speed of both vanilla byte-level and subword-level Transformers by 28%-100% while maintaining competitive quality. We believe this work paves the way for highly performant token-free models that are trained completely end-to-end.

Recent advancements in video generation have achieved impressive motion realism, yet they often overlook character-driven storytelling, a crucial task for automated film, animation generation. We introduce Talking Characters, a more realistic task to generate talking character animations directly from speech and text. Unlike talking head, Talking Characters aims at generating the full portrait of one or more characters beyond the facial region. In this paper, we propose MoCha, the first of its kind to generate talking characters. To ensure precise synchronization between video and speech, we propose a speech-video window attention mechanism that effectively aligns speech and video tokens. To address the scarcity of large-scale speech-labeled video datasets, we introduce a joint training strategy that leverages both speech-labeled and text-labeled video data, significantly improving generalization across diverse character actions. We also design structured prompt templates with character tags, enabling, for the first time, multi-character conversation with turn-based dialogue-allowing AI-generated characters to engage in context-aware conversations with cinematic coherence. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, including human preference studies and benchmark comparisons, demonstrate that MoCha sets a new standard for AI-generated cinematic storytelling, achieving superior realism, expressiveness, controllability and generalization.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that use subword tokenization schemes can succeed at a variety of language tasks that require character-level information, despite lacking explicit access to the character composition of tokens. Here, studying a range of models (e.g., GPT- J, BERT, RoBERTa, GloVe), we probe what word pieces encode about character-level information by training classifiers to predict the presence or absence of a particular alphabetical character in a token, based on its embedding (e.g., probing whether the model embedding for "cat" encodes that it contains the character "a"). We find that these models robustly encode character-level information and, in general, larger models perform better at the task. We show that these results generalize to characters from non-Latin alphabets (Arabic, Devanagari, and Cyrillic). Then, through a series of experiments and analyses, we investigate the mechanisms through which PLMs acquire English-language character information during training and argue that this knowledge is acquired through multiple phenomena, including a systematic relationship between particular characters and particular parts of speech, as well as natural variability in the tokenization of related strings.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as role-playing agents, yet their capacity to faithfully and consistently portray version-specific characters -- for example, superheroes across comic and cinematic universes -- remains underexplored. Superhero canons such as Marvel and DC provide a rich testbed: decades of storytelling yield multiple incarnations of the same character with distinct histories, values, and moral codes. To study this problem, we introduce Beyond One World, a benchmark for character-grounded roleplay spanning 30 iconic heroes and 90 canon-specific versions. The benchmark comprises two tasks: (i) Canon Events, which probes factual recall of pivotal life stages, and (ii) Moral Dilemmas, which confronts models with ethically charged scenarios. We score responses for canonical accuracy and reasoning fidelity under a framework that separates internal deliberation ("thinking") from outward decisions ("acting"). We further propose Think-Act Matching, a metric that quantifies alignment between reasons and actions and serves as a proxy for model trustworthiness. Experiments across reasoning- and non-reasoning-oriented models yield three findings: (1) chain-of-thought prompting improves narrative coherence in weaker models but can reduce canonical accuracy in stronger ones; (2) cross-version generalization within a character remains a major obstacle; and (3) models often excel at either thinking or acting, but rarely both. Beyond One World exposes critical gaps in multiversal consistency and reasoning alignment, offering a challenging evaluation for role-playing LLMs.

Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively straightforward tasks. In this paper, we test the Transformer's ability of length generalization using the task of addition of two integers. We show that the success of length generalization is intricately linked to the data format and the type of position encoding. Using the right combination of data format and position encodings, we show for the first time that standard Transformers can extrapolate to a sequence length that is 2.5x the input length. Nevertheless, unlike in-distribution generalization, length generalization remains fragile, significantly influenced by factors like random weight initialization and training data order, leading to large variances across different random seeds.

In this paper, we present CharacterGLM, a series of models built upon ChatGLM, with model sizes ranging from 6B to 66B parameters. Our CharacterGLM is designed for generating Character-based Dialogues (CharacterDial), which aims to equip a conversational AI system with character customization for satisfying people's inherent social desires and emotional needs. On top of CharacterGLM, we can customize various AI characters or social agents by configuring their attributes (identities, interests, viewpoints, experiences, achievements, social relationships, etc.) and behaviors (linguistic features, emotional expressions, interaction patterns, etc.). Our model outperforms most mainstream close-source large langauge models, including the GPT series, especially in terms of consistency, human-likeness, and engagement according to manual evaluations. We will release our 6B version of CharacterGLM and a subset of training data to facilitate further research development in the direction of character-based dialogue generation.

The recent introduction of the Assistants API highlights its potential for large language models (LLMs) in role-playing agents (RPA). However, maintaining consistent character personas remains a significant challenge due to variability in information extraction, which frequently omits critical elements such as backstory or interpersonal relationships. To address this limitation, we introduce CharacterGPT, a framework designed to dynamically reconstruct character personas through Character Persona Training (CPT). This approach incrementally updates personas by extracting traits from chapter-wise novel summaries, reflecting the progression of the narrative. Our framework is evaluated through Big Five personality evaluations and creative tasks, in which characters generate original narratives, demonstrating the efficacy of CharacterGPT in preserving persona consistency. The code and results are available at https://github.com/Jeiyoon/charactergpt

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently taken center stage as pivotal tools in promoting visual creativity across an array of domains such as comic book artistry, children's literature, game development, and web design. These models harness the power of artificial intelligence to convert textual descriptions into vivid images, thereby enabling artists and creators to bring their imaginative concepts to life with unprecedented ease. However, one of the significant hurdles that persist is the challenge of maintaining consistency in character generation across diverse contexts. Variations in textual prompts, even if minor, can yield vastly different visual outputs, posing a considerable problem in projects that require a uniform representation of characters throughout. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework designed to produce consistent character representations from a single text prompt across diverse settings. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods in generating characters with consistent visual identities, underscoring its potential to transform creative industries. By addressing the critical challenge of character consistency, we not only enhance the practical utility of these models but also broaden the horizons for artistic and creative expression.

The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These include theorem proving, solving quantitative mathematics problems, and reading/summarizing novels. In this paper, we run careful empirical studies exploring the length generalization capabilities of transformer-based language models. We first establish that naively finetuning transformers on length generalization tasks shows significant generalization deficiencies independent of model scale. We then show that combining pretrained large language models' in-context learning abilities with scratchpad prompting (asking the model to output solution steps before producing an answer) results in a dramatic improvement in length generalization. We run careful failure analyses on each of the learning modalities and identify common sources of mistakes that highlight opportunities in equipping language models with the ability to generalize to longer problems.

In the field of digital content creation, generating high-quality 3D characters from single images is challenging, especially given the complexities of various body poses and the issues of self-occlusion and pose ambiguity. In this paper, we present CharacterGen, a framework developed to efficiently generate 3D characters. CharacterGen introduces a streamlined generation pipeline along with an image-conditioned multi-view diffusion model. This model effectively calibrates input poses to a canonical form while retaining key attributes of the input image, thereby addressing the challenges posed by diverse poses. A transformer-based, generalizable sparse-view reconstruction model is the other core component of our approach, facilitating the creation of detailed 3D models from multi-view images. We also adopt a texture-back-projection strategy to produce high-quality texture maps. Additionally, we have curated a dataset of anime characters, rendered in multiple poses and views, to train and evaluate our model. Our approach has been thoroughly evaluated through quantitative and qualitative experiments, showing its proficiency in generating 3D characters with high-quality shapes and textures, ready for downstream applications such as rigging and animation.

Current learning-based subject customization approaches, predominantly relying on U-Net architectures, suffer from limited generalization ability and compromised image quality. Meanwhile, optimization-based methods require subject-specific fine-tuning, which inevitably degrades textual controllability. To address these challenges, we propose InstantCharacter, a scalable framework for character customization built upon a foundation diffusion transformer. InstantCharacter demonstrates three fundamental advantages: first, it achieves open-domain personalization across diverse character appearances, poses, and styles while maintaining high-fidelity results. Second, the framework introduces a scalable adapter with stacked transformer encoders, which effectively processes open-domain character features and seamlessly interacts with the latent space of modern diffusion transformers. Third, to effectively train the framework, we construct a large-scale character dataset containing 10-million-level samples. The dataset is systematically organized into paired (multi-view character) and unpaired (text-image combinations) subsets. This dual-data structure enables simultaneous optimization of identity consistency and textual editability through distinct learning pathways. Qualitative experiments demonstrate the advanced capabilities of InstantCharacter in generating high-fidelity, text-controllable, and character-consistent images, setting a new benchmark for character-driven image generation. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/InstantCharacter.

Generating synthetic images of handwritten text in a writer-specific style is a challenging task, especially in the case of unseen styles and new words, and even more when these latter contain characters that are rarely encountered during training. While emulating a writer's style has been recently addressed by generative models, the generalization towards rare characters has been disregarded. In this work, we devise a Transformer-based model for Few-Shot styled handwritten text generation and focus on obtaining a robust and informative representation of both the text and the style. In particular, we propose a novel representation of the textual content as a sequence of dense vectors obtained from images of symbols written as standard GNU Unifont glyphs, which can be considered their visual archetypes. This strategy is more suitable for generating characters that, despite having been seen rarely during training, possibly share visual details with the frequently observed ones. As for the style, we obtain a robust representation of unseen writers' calligraphy by exploiting specific pre-training on a large synthetic dataset. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in generating words in unseen styles and with rare characters more faithfully than existing approaches relying on independent one-hot encodings of the characters.

The stories and characters that captivate us as we grow up shape unique fantasy worlds, with images serving as the primary medium for visually experiencing these realms. Personalizing generative models through fine-tuning with theme-specific data has become a prevalent approach in text-to-image generation. However, unlike object customization, which focuses on learning specific objects, theme-specific generation encompasses diverse elements such as characters, scenes, and objects. Such diversity also introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively generate multi-character, multi-concept, and continuous theme-specific images (TSI). Moreover, fine-tuning approaches often come with significant computational overhead, time costs, and risks of overfitting. This paper explores a fundamental question: Can image generation models directly leverage images as contextual input, similarly to how large language models use text as context? To address this, we present T-Prompter, a novel training-free TSI method for generation. T-Prompter introduces visual prompting, a mechanism that integrates reference images into generative models, allowing users to seamlessly specify the target theme without requiring additional training. To further enhance this process, we propose a Dynamic Visual Prompting (DVP) mechanism, which iteratively optimizes visual prompts to improve the accuracy and quality of generated images. Our approach enables diverse applications, including consistent story generation, character design, realistic character generation, and style-guided image generation. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art personalization methods demonstrate that T-Prompter achieves significantly better results and excels in maintaining character identity preserving, style consistency and text alignment, offering a robust and flexible solution for theme-specific image generation.

Character-based dialogue (aka role-playing) enables users to freely customize characters for interaction, which often relies on LLMs, raising the need to evaluate LLMs' character customization capability. However, existing benchmarks fail to ensure a robust evaluation as they often only involve a single character category or evaluate limited dimensions. Moreover, the sparsity of character features in responses makes feature-focused generative evaluation both ineffective and inefficient. To address these issues, we propose CharacterBench, the largest bilingual generative benchmark, with 22,859 human-annotated samples covering 3,956 characters from 25 detailed character categories. We define 11 dimensions of 6 aspects, classified as sparse and dense dimensions based on whether character features evaluated by specific dimensions manifest in each response. We enable effective and efficient evaluation by crafting tailored queries for each dimension to induce characters' responses related to specific dimensions. Further, we develop CharacterJudge model for cost-effective and stable evaluations. Experiments show its superiority over SOTA automatic judges (e.g., GPT-4) and our benchmark's potential to optimize LLMs' character customization. Our repository is at https://github.com/thu-coai/CharacterBench.

Large language models exhibit surprising emergent generalization properties, yet also struggle on many simple reasoning tasks such as arithmetic and parity. This raises the question of if and when Transformer models can learn the true algorithm for solving a task. We study the scope of Transformers' abilities in the specific setting of length generalization on algorithmic tasks. Here, we propose a unifying framework to understand when and how Transformers can exhibit strong length generalization on a given task. Specifically, we leverage RASP (Weiss et al., 2021) -- a programming language designed for the computational model of a Transformer -- and introduce the RASP-Generalization Conjecture: Transformers tend to length generalize on a task if the task can be solved by a short RASP program which works for all input lengths. This simple conjecture remarkably captures most known instances of length generalization on algorithmic tasks. Moreover, we leverage our insights to drastically improve generalization performance on traditionally hard tasks (such as parity and addition). On the theoretical side, we give a simple example where the "min-degree-interpolator" model of learning from Abbe et al. (2023) does not correctly predict Transformers' out-of-distribution behavior, but our conjecture does. Overall, our work provides a novel perspective on the mechanisms of compositional generalization and the algorithmic capabilities of Transformers.

This paper describes our winning contribution to SemEval 2018 Task 4: Character Identification on Multiparty Dialogues. It is a simple, standard model with one key innovation, an entity library. Our results show that this innovation greatly facilitates the identification of infrequent characters. Because of the generic nature of our model, this finding is potentially relevant to any task that requires effective learning from sparse or unbalanced data.

We teach goal-driven agents to interactively act and speak in situated environments by training on generated curriculums. Our agents operate in LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019) -- a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text adventure game wherein an agent perceives and interacts with the world through textual natural language. Goals in this environment take the form of character-based quests, consisting of personas and motivations. We augment LIGHT by learning to procedurally generate additional novel textual worlds and quests to create a curriculum of steadily increasing difficulty for training agents to achieve such goals. In particular, we measure curriculum difficulty in terms of the rarity of the quest in the original training distribution -- an easier environment is one that is more likely to have been found in the unaugmented dataset. An ablation study shows that this method of learning from the tail of a distribution results in significantly higher generalization abilities as measured by zero-shot performance on never-before-seen quests.

Previous work has modeled the compositionality of words by creating character-level models of meaning, reducing problems of sparsity for rare words. However, in many writing systems compositionality has an effect even on the character-level: the meaning of a character is derived by the sum of its parts. In this paper, we model this effect by creating embeddings for characters based on their visual characteristics, creating an image for the character and running it through a convolutional neural network to produce a visual character embedding. Experiments on a text classification task demonstrate that such model allows for better processing of instances with rare characters in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Additionally, qualitative analyses demonstrate that our proposed model learns to focus on the parts of characters that carry semantic content, resulting in embeddings that are coherent in visual space.

LLMs are increasingly transforming our digital ecosystem, but they often inherit societal biases learned from their training data, for instance stereotypes associating certain attributes with specific identity groups. While whether and how these biases are mitigated may depend on the specific use cases, being able to effectively detect instances of stereotype perpetuation is a crucial first step. Current methods to assess presence of stereotypes in generated language rely on simple template or co-occurrence based measures, without accounting for the variety of sentential contexts they manifest in. We argue that understanding the sentential context is crucial for detecting instances of generalization. We distinguish two types of generalizations: (1) language that merely mentions the presence of a generalization ("people think the French are very rude"), and (2) language that reinforces such a generalization ("as French they must be rude"), from non-generalizing context ("My French friends think I am rude"). For meaningful stereotype evaluations, we need to reliably distinguish such instances of generalizations. We introduce the new task of detecting generalization in language, and build GeniL, a multilingual dataset of over 50K sentences from 9 languages (English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, and Portuguese) annotated for instances of generalizations. We demonstrate that the likelihood of a co-occurrence being an instance of generalization is usually low, and varies across different languages, identity groups, and attributes. We build classifiers to detect generalization in language with an overall PR-AUC of 58.7, with varying degrees of performance across languages. Our research provides data and tools to enable a nuanced understanding of stereotype perpetuation, a crucial step towards more inclusive and responsible language technologies.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation models have unlocked vast potential for visual creativity. However, these models struggle with generation of consistent characters, a crucial aspect for numerous real-world applications such as story visualization, game development asset design, advertising, and more. Current methods typically rely on multiple pre-existing images of the target character or involve labor-intensive manual processes. In this work, we propose a fully automated solution for consistent character generation, with the sole input being a text prompt. We introduce an iterative procedure that, at each stage, identifies a coherent set of images sharing a similar identity and extracts a more consistent identity from this set. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that our method strikes a better balance between prompt alignment and identity consistency compared to the baseline methods, and these findings are reinforced by a user study. To conclude, we showcase several practical applications of our approach. Project page is available at https://omriavrahami.com/the-chosen-one

The character of the "AI assistant" persona generated by modern chatbot large language models influences both surface-level behavior and apparent values, beliefs, and ethics. These all affect interaction quality, perceived intelligence, and alignment with both developer and user intentions. The shaping of this persona, known as character training, is a critical component of industry post-training, yet remains effectively unstudied in the academic literature. We introduce the first open implementation of character training, leveraging Constitutional AI and a new data pipeline using synthetic introspective data to shape the assistant persona in a more effective and controlled manner than alternatives such as constraining system prompts or activation steering. Specifically, we fine-tune three popular open-weights models using 11 example personas, such as humorous, deeply caring, or even malevolent. To track the effects of our approach, we introduce a method which analyzes revealed preferences, uncovering clear and holistic changes in character. We find these changes are more robust to adversarial prompting than the above two alternatives, while also leading to more coherent and realistic generations. Finally, we demonstrate this fine-tuning has little to no effect on general capabilities as measured by common benchmarks. We describe and open-source our full post-training method, the implementation of which can be found at https://github.com/maiush/OpenCharacterTraining.

Length generalization, the ability to generalize from small training context sizes to larger ones, is a critical challenge in the development of Transformer-based language models. Positional encoding (PE) has been identified as a major factor influencing length generalization, but the exact impact of different PE schemes on extrapolation in downstream tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study comparing the length generalization performance of decoder-only Transformers with five different position encoding approaches including Absolute Position Embedding (APE), T5's Relative PE, ALiBi, and Rotary, in addition to Transformers without positional encoding (NoPE). Our evaluation encompasses a battery of reasoning and mathematical tasks. Our findings reveal that the most commonly used positional encoding methods, such as ALiBi, Rotary, and APE, are not well suited for length generalization in downstream tasks. More importantly, NoPE outperforms other explicit positional encoding methods while requiring no additional computation. We theoretically demonstrate that NoPE can represent both absolute and relative PEs, but when trained with SGD, it mostly resembles T5's relative PE attention patterns. Finally, we find that scratchpad is not always helpful to solve length generalization and its format highly impacts the model's performance. Overall, our work suggests that explicit position embeddings are not essential for decoder-only Transformers to generalize well to longer sequences.

Much of recent progress in NLU was shown to be due to models' learning dataset-specific heuristics. We conduct a case study of generalization in NLI (from MNLI to the adversarially constructed HANS dataset) in a range of BERT-based architectures (adapters, Siamese Transformers, HEX debiasing), as well as with subsampling the data and increasing the model size. We report 2 successful and 3 unsuccessful strategies, all providing insights into how Transformer-based models learn to generalize.

We introduce a novel method for low-rank personalization of a generic model for head avatar generation. Prior work proposes generic models that achieve high-quality face animation by leveraging large-scale datasets of multiple identities. However, such generic models usually fail to synthesize unique identity-specific details, since they learn a general domain prior. To adapt to specific subjects, we find that it is still challenging to capture high-frequency facial details via popular solutions like low-rank adaptation (LoRA). This motivates us to propose a specific architecture, a Register Module, that enhances the performance of LoRA, while requiring only a small number of parameters to adapt to an unseen identity. Our module is applied to intermediate features of a pre-trained model, storing and re-purposing information in a learnable 3D feature space. To demonstrate the efficacy of our personalization method, we collect a dataset of talking videos of individuals with distinctive facial details, such as wrinkles and tattoos. Our approach faithfully captures unseen faces, outperforming existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively. We will release the code, models, and dataset to the public.

Training machines to synthesize diverse handwritings is an intriguing task. Recently, RNN-based methods have been proposed to generate stylized online Chinese characters. However, these methods mainly focus on capturing a person's overall writing style, neglecting subtle style inconsistencies between characters written by the same person. For example, while a person's handwriting typically exhibits general uniformity (e.g., glyph slant and aspect ratios), there are still small style variations in finer details (e.g., stroke length and curvature) of characters. In light of this, we propose to disentangle the style representations at both writer and character levels from individual handwritings to synthesize realistic stylized online handwritten characters. Specifically, we present the style-disentangled Transformer (SDT), which employs two complementary contrastive objectives to extract the style commonalities of reference samples and capture the detailed style patterns of each sample, respectively. Extensive experiments on various language scripts demonstrate the effectiveness of SDT. Notably, our empirical findings reveal that the two learned style representations provide information at different frequency magnitudes, underscoring the importance of separate style extraction. Our source code is public at: https://github.com/dailenson/SDT.

Providing dialogue agents with a profile representation can improve their consistency and coherence, leading to better conversations. However, current profile-based dialogue datasets for training such agents contain either explicit profile representations that are simple and dialogue-specific, or implicit representations that are difficult to collect. In this work, we propose a unified framework in which we bring together both standard and more sophisticated profile representations by creating a new resource where each dialogue is aligned with all possible speaker representations such as communication style, biographies, and personality. This framework allows to test several baselines built using generative language models with several profile configurations. The automatic evaluation shows that profile-based models have better generalisation capabilities than models trained on dialogues only, both in-domain and cross-domain settings. These results are consistent for fine-tuned models and instruction-based LLMs. Additionally, human evaluation demonstrates a clear preference for generations consistent with both profile and context. Finally, to account for possible privacy concerns, all experiments are done under two configurations: inter-character and intra-character. In the former, the LM stores the information about the character in its internal representation, while in the latter, the LM does not retain any personal information but uses it only at inference time.

Despite recent progress in offline learning, these methods are still trained and tested on the same environment. In this paper, we compare the generalization abilities of widely used online and offline learning methods such as online reinforcement learning (RL), offline RL, sequence modeling, and behavioral cloning. Our experiments show that offline learning algorithms perform worse on new environments than online learning ones. We also introduce the first benchmark for evaluating generalization in offline learning, collecting datasets of varying sizes and skill-levels from Procgen (2D video games) and WebShop (e-commerce websites). The datasets contain trajectories for a limited number of game levels or natural language instructions and at test time, the agent has to generalize to new levels or instructions. Our experiments reveal that existing offline learning algorithms struggle to match the performance of online RL on both train and test environments. Behavioral cloning is a strong baseline, outperforming state-of-the-art offline RL and sequence modeling approaches when trained on data from multiple environments and tested on new ones. Finally, we find that increasing the diversity of the data, rather than its size, improves performance on new environments for all offline learning algorithms. Our study demonstrates the limited generalization of current offline learning algorithms highlighting the need for more research in this area.

As large-scale text-to-image generation models have made remarkable progress in the field of text-to-image generation, many fine-tuning methods have been proposed. However, these models often struggle with novel objects, especially with one-shot scenarios. Our proposed method aims to address the challenges of generalizability and fidelity in an object-driven way, using only a single input image and the object-specific regions of interest. To improve generalizability and mitigate overfitting, in our paradigm, a prototypical embedding is initialized based on the object's appearance and its class, before fine-tuning the diffusion model. And during fine-tuning, we propose a class-characterizing regularization to preserve prior knowledge of object classes. To further improve fidelity, we introduce object-specific loss, which can also use to implant multiple objects. Overall, our proposed object-driven method for implanting new objects can integrate seamlessly with existing concepts as well as with high fidelity and generalization. Our method outperforms several existing works. The code will be released.

Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis have led to large pretrained transformers with excellent capabilities to generate visualizations from a given text. However, these models are ill-suited for specialized tasks like story visualization, which requires an agent to produce a sequence of images given a corresponding sequence of captions, forming a narrative. Moreover, we find that the story visualization task fails to accommodate generalization to unseen plots and characters in new narratives. Hence, we first propose the task of story continuation, where the generated visual story is conditioned on a source image, allowing for better generalization to narratives with new characters. Then, we enhance or 'retro-fit' the pretrained text-to-image synthesis models with task-specific modules for (a) sequential image generation and (b) copying relevant elements from an initial frame. Then, we explore full-model finetuning, as well as prompt-based tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation, of the pre-trained model. We evaluate our approach StoryDALL-E on two existing datasets, PororoSV and FlintstonesSV, and introduce a new dataset DiDeMoSV collected from a video-captioning dataset. We also develop a model StoryGANc based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for story continuation, and compare it with the StoryDALL-E model to demonstrate the advantages of our approach. We show that our retro-fitting approach outperforms GAN-based models for story continuation and facilitates copying of visual elements from the source image, thereby improving continuity in the generated visual story. Finally, our analysis suggests that pretrained transformers struggle to comprehend narratives containing several characters. Overall, our work demonstrates that pretrained text-to-image synthesis models can be adapted for complex and low-resource tasks like story continuation.

The advent of the Transformer has led to the development of large language models (LLM), which appear to demonstrate human-like capabilities. To assess the generality of this class of models and a variety of other base neural network architectures to multimodal domains, we evaluated and compared their capacity for multimodal generalization. We introduce a multimodal question-answer benchmark to evaluate three specific types of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization performance: distractor generalization (generalization in the presence of distractors), systematic compositional generalization (generalization to new task permutations), and productive compositional generalization (generalization to more complex tasks structures). We found that across model architectures (e.g., RNNs, Transformers, Perceivers, etc.), models with multiple attention layers, or models that leveraged cross-attention mechanisms between input domains, fared better. Our positive results demonstrate that for multimodal distractor and systematic generalization, either cross-modal attention or models with deeper attention layers are key architectural features required to integrate multimodal inputs. On the other hand, neither of these architectural features led to productive generalization, suggesting fundamental limitations of existing architectures for specific types of multimodal generalization. These results demonstrate the strengths and limitations of specific architectural components underlying modern neural models for multimodal reasoning. Finally, we provide Generic COG (gCOG), a configurable benchmark with several multimodal generalization splits, for future studies to explore.

Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization, such as SCAN (Lake and Baroni, 2018) and COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020), expose severe problems in models trained from scratch on these datasets. However, in contrast to this poor performance, state-of-the-art models trained on larger and more general datasets show better generalization ability. In this work, to reconcile this inconsistency, we conduct an empirical analysis by training Transformer models on a variety of training sets with different data factors, including dataset scale, pattern complexity, example difficulty, etc. First, we show that increased dataset complexity can lead to better generalization behavior on multiple different generalization challenges. To further understand this improvement, we show two axes of the benefit from more complex datasets: they provide more diverse examples so compositional understanding becomes more effective, and they also prevent ungeneralizable memorization of the examples due to reduced example repetition frequency. Finally, we explore how training examples of different difficulty levels influence generalization differently. On synthetic datasets, simple examples invoke stronger compositionality than hard examples do. On larger-scale real language datasets, while hard examples become more important potentially to ensure decent data coverage, a balanced mixture of simple and hard examples manages to induce the strongest generalizability. The code and data for this work are available at https://github.com/owenzx/data4comp

We aim to understand grokking, a phenomenon where models generalize long after overfitting their training set. We present both a microscopic analysis anchored by an effective theory and a macroscopic analysis of phase diagrams describing learning performance across hyperparameters. We find that generalization originates from structured representations whose training dynamics and dependence on training set size can be predicted by our effective theory in a toy setting. We observe empirically the presence of four learning phases: comprehension, grokking, memorization, and confusion. We find representation learning to occur only in a "Goldilocks zone" (including comprehension and grokking) between memorization and confusion. We find on transformers the grokking phase stays closer to the memorization phase (compared to the comprehension phase), leading to delayed generalization. The Goldilocks phase is reminiscent of "intelligence from starvation" in Darwinian evolution, where resource limitations drive discovery of more efficient solutions. This study not only provides intuitive explanations of the origin of grokking, but also highlights the usefulness of physics-inspired tools, e.g., effective theories and phase diagrams, for understanding deep learning.

Instruction tuning -- fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) on pairs of instructions and desired outcomes -- is an approach that enables pre-trained language models to perform real-world tasks and follow human instructions. Its practical success depends on the model learning a broader set of instructions than those it was trained on. Yet the factors that determine model generalization to such unseen tasks are not well understood. %To understand the driving factors of generalization, In this paper, we experiment with string rewrites, a symbolic task that serves as a building block for Turing complete Markov algorithms while allowing experimental control of "inputs" and "instructions". We investigate the trade-off between the number of instructions the model is trained on and the number of training samples provided for each instruction and observe that the diversity of the instruction set determines generalization. Generalization emerges once a diverse enough set of tasks is provided, even though very few examples are provided for each task. Instruction diversity also ensures robustness with respect to non-uniform distributions of instructions in the training set.

We train a model to generate images from multimodal prompts of interleaved text and images such as "a <picture of a man> man and his <picture of a dog> dog in an <picture of a cartoon> animated style." We bootstrap a multimodal dataset by extracting semantically meaningful image crops corresponding to words in the image captions of synthetically generated and publicly available text-image data. Our model, MUMU, is composed of a vision-language model encoder with a diffusion decoder and is trained on a single 8xH100 GPU node. Despite being only trained on crops from the same image, MUMU learns to compose inputs from different images into a coherent output. For example, an input of a realistic person and a cartoon will output the same person in the cartoon style, and an input of a standing subject and a scooter will output the subject riding the scooter. As a result, our model generalizes to tasks such as style transfer and character consistency. Our results show the promise of using multimodal models as general purpose controllers for image generation.

Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. It is commonly believed to hinder generalization by encouraging verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This insight holds for even learning factual knowledge that inevitably requires a certain degree of memorization. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs can be trained to generalize from rote memorized data. We introduce a two-phase memorize-then-generalize framework, where the model first rote memorizes factual subject-object associations using a semantically meaningless token and then learns to generalize by fine-tuning on a small set of semantically meaningful prompts. Extensive experiments over 8 LLMs show that the models can reinterpret rote memorized data through the semantically meaningful prompts, as evidenced by the emergence of structured, semantically aligned latent representations between the two. This surprising finding opens the door to both effective and efficient knowledge injection and possible risks of repurposing the memorized data for malicious usage.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly advanced, their ability to exhibit compositional generalization -- the capacity to combine learned skills in novel ways not encountered during training -- has garnered significant attention. This type of generalization, particularly in scenarios beyond training data, is also of great interest in the study of AI safety and alignment. A recent study introduced the SKILL-MIX evaluation, where models are tasked with composing a short paragraph demonstrating the use of a specified k-tuple of language skills. While small models struggled with composing even with k=3, larger models like GPT-4 performed reasonably well with k=5 and 6. In this paper, we employ a setup akin to SKILL-MIX to evaluate the capacity of smaller models to learn compositional generalization from examples. Utilizing a diverse set of language skills -- including rhetorical, literary, reasoning, theory of mind, and common sense -- GPT-4 was used to generate text samples that exhibit random subsets of k skills. Subsequent fine-tuning of 7B and 13B parameter models on these combined skill texts, for increasing values of k, revealed the following findings: (1) Training on combinations of k=2 and 3 skills results in noticeable improvements in the ability to compose texts with k=4 and 5 skills, despite models never having seen such examples during training. (2) When skill categories are split into training and held-out groups, models significantly improve at composing texts with held-out skills during testing despite having only seen training skills during fine-tuning, illustrating the efficacy of the training approach even with previously unseen skills. This study also suggests that incorporating skill-rich (potentially synthetic) text into training can substantially enhance the compositional capabilities of models.

Recent advances in text-to-image models have opened new frontiers in human-centric generation. However, these models cannot be directly employed to generate images with consistent newly coined identities. In this work, we propose CharacterFactory, a framework that allows sampling new characters with consistent identities in the latent space of GANs for diffusion models. More specifically, we consider the word embeddings of celeb names as ground truths for the identity-consistent generation task and train a GAN model to learn the mapping from a latent space to the celeb embedding space. In addition, we design a context-consistent loss to ensure that the generated identity embeddings can produce identity-consistent images in various contexts. Remarkably, the whole model only takes 10 minutes for training, and can sample infinite characters end-to-end during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate excellent performance of the proposed CharacterFactory on character creation in terms of identity consistency and editability. Furthermore, the generated characters can be seamlessly combined with the off-the-shelf image/video/3D diffusion models. We believe that the proposed CharacterFactory is an important step for identity-consistent character generation. Project page is available at: https://qinghew.github.io/CharacterFactory/.

Recent generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating realistic and visually pleasing images grounded on textual prompts. Nevertheless, a significant challenge remains in applying these models for the more intricate task of story visualization. Since it requires resolving pronouns (he, she, they) in the frame descriptions, i.e., anaphora resolution, and ensuring consistent characters and background synthesis across frames. Yet, the emerging Large Language Model (LLM) showcases robust reasoning abilities to navigate through ambiguous references and process extensive sequences. Therefore, we introduce StoryGPT-V, which leverages the merits of the latent diffusion (LDM) and LLM to produce images with consistent and high-quality characters grounded on given story descriptions. First, we train a character-aware LDM, which takes character-augmented semantic embedding as input and includes the supervision of the cross-attention map using character segmentation masks, aiming to enhance character generation accuracy and faithfulness. In the second stage, we enable an alignment between the output of LLM and the character-augmented embedding residing in the input space of the first-stage model. This harnesses the reasoning ability of LLM to address ambiguous references and the comprehension capability to memorize the context. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two visual story visualization benchmarks. Our model reports superior quantitative results and consistently generates accurate characters of remarkable quality with low memory consumption. Our code will be made publicly available.

Pretrained character-level language models were recently shown to be competitive with popular subword models across a range of NLP tasks. However, there has been little research on their effectiveness for neural machine translation (NMT). This work performs an extensive comparison across multiple languages and experimental conditions of state-of-the-art character- and subword-level pre-trained models (ByT5 and mT5, respectively) on NMT, showing the effectiveness of character-level modeling in translation, particularly in cases where training data is limited. In our analysis, we show how character models' performance gains are reflected in better translations of orthographically similar words and rare words. While evaluating the importance of source texts in driving model predictions, we highlight ByT5 word-level patterns suggesting an ability to modulate word and character-level information during the translation, providing insights into a potential weakness of character-level modeling. We conclude by assessing the efficiency tradeoff of character models, suggesting their usage in non-time-critical scenarios to boost translation quality.

Recently, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized generative agents. Among them, Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs) attract considerable attention due to their ability to emotionally engage users. However, the absence of a comprehensive benchmark impedes progress in this field. To bridge this gap, we introduce CharacterEval, a Chinese benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment, complemented by a tailored high-quality dataset. The dataset comprises 1,785 multi-turn role-playing dialogues, encompassing 23,020 examples and featuring 77 characters derived from Chinese novels and scripts. It was carefully constructed, beginning with initial dialogue extraction via GPT-4, followed by rigorous human-led quality control, and enhanced with in-depth character profiles sourced from Baidu Baike. CharacterEval employs a multifaceted evaluation approach, encompassing thirteen targeted metrics on four dimensions. Comprehensive experiments on CharacterEval demonstrate that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in Chinese role-playing conversation. Source code, data source and reward model will be publicly accessible at https://github.com/morecry/CharacterEval.

In this paper we propose to study generalization of neural networks on small algorithmically generated datasets. In this setting, questions about data efficiency, memorization, generalization, and speed of learning can be studied in great detail. In some situations we show that neural networks learn through a process of "grokking" a pattern in the data, improving generalization performance from random chance level to perfect generalization, and that this improvement in generalization can happen well past the point of overfitting. We also study generalization as a function of dataset size and find that smaller datasets require increasing amounts of optimization for generalization. We argue that these datasets provide a fertile ground for studying a poorly understood aspect of deep learning: generalization of overparametrized neural networks beyond memorization of the finite training dataset.

Length generalization refers to the ability to extrapolate from short training sequences to long test sequences and is a challenge for current large language models. While prior work has proposed some architecture or data format changes to achieve length generalization, these proposals typically apply to a limited set of tasks. Building on prior scratchpad and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques, we propose Turing Programs, a novel CoT strategy that decomposes an algorithmic task into steps mimicking the computation of a Turing Machine. This framework is both universal, as it can accommodate any algorithmic task, and simple, requiring only copying text from the context with small modifications. We show that by using Turing Programs, we obtain robust length generalization on a range of algorithmic tasks: addition, multiplication and in-context SGD. We then demonstrate that transformers achieve length generalization on random Turing Programs, suggesting that length generalization is possible for any algorithmic task. Finally, we theoretically prove that transformers can implement Turing Programs, constructing a simple RASP (Weiss et al.) program that simulates an arbitrary Turing machine.

Customized image generation, which seeks to synthesize images with consistent characters, holds significant relevance for applications such as storytelling, portrait generation, and character design. However, previous approaches have encountered challenges in preserving characters with high-fidelity consistency due to inadequate feature extraction and concept confusion of reference characters. Therefore, we propose Character-Adapter, a plug-and-play framework designed to generate images that preserve the details of reference characters, ensuring high-fidelity consistency. Character-Adapter employs prompt-guided segmentation to ensure fine-grained regional features of reference characters and dynamic region-level adapters to mitigate concept confusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of Character-Adapter. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that Character-Adapter achieves the state-of-the-art performance of consistent character generation, with an improvement of 24.8% compared with other methods. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Character-Adapter/Character-Adapte

Imagine an interesting multimodal interactive scenario that you can see, hear, and chat with an AI-generated digital character, who is capable of behaving like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, as a DEEP copy from appearance to personality. Towards this fantastic multimodal chatting scenario, we propose a novel task, named Deep Personalized Character Creation (DPCC): creating multimodal chat personalized characters from multimodal data such as TV shows. Specifically, given a single- or multi-modality input (text, audio, video), the goal of DPCC is to generate a multi-modality (text, audio, video) response, which should be well-matched the personality of a specific character such as Sheldon, and of high quality as well. To support this novel task, we further collect a character centric multimodal dialogue dataset, named Deep Personalized Character Dataset (DPCD), from TV shows. DPCD contains character-specific multimodal dialogue data of ~10k utterances and ~6 hours of audio/video per character, which is around 10 times larger compared to existing related datasets.On DPCD, we present a baseline method for the DPCC task and create 5 Deep personalized digital Characters (DeepCharacters) from Big Bang TV Shows. We conduct both subjective and objective experiments to evaluate the multimodal response from DeepCharacters in terms of characterization and quality. The results demonstrates that, on our collected DPCD dataset, the proposed baseline can create personalized digital characters for generating multimodal response.Our collected DPCD dataset, the code of data collection and our baseline will be published soon.

Despite being trained specifically to follow user instructions, today's instructiontuned language models perform poorly when instructed to produce random outputs. For example, when prompted to pick a number uniformly between one and ten Llama-2-13B-chat disproportionately favors the number five, and when tasked with picking a first name at random, Mistral-7B-Instruct chooses Avery 40 times more often than we would expect based on the U.S. population. When these language models are used for real-world tasks where diversity of outputs is crucial, such as language model assisted dataset construction, their inability to produce diffuse distributions over valid choices is a major hurdle. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning method that encourages language models to output distributions that are diffuse over valid outcomes. The methods we introduce generalize across a variety of tasks and distributions and make large language models practical for synthetic dataset generation with little human intervention.

We introduce Domain-specific Masks for Generalization, a model for improving both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization performance. For domain generalization, the goal is to learn from a set of source domains to produce a single model that will best generalize to an unseen target domain. As such, many prior approaches focus on learning representations which persist across all source domains with the assumption that these domain agnostic representations will generalize well. However, often individual domains contain characteristics which are unique and when leveraged can significantly aid in-domain recognition performance. To produce a model which best generalizes to both seen and unseen domains, we propose learning domain specific masks. The masks are encouraged to learn a balance of domain-invariant and domain-specific features, thus enabling a model which can benefit from the predictive power of specialized features while retaining the universal applicability of domain-invariant features. We demonstrate competitive performance compared to naive baselines and state-of-the-art methods on both PACS and DomainNet.

Text-adventure games and text role-playing games are grand challenges for reinforcement learning game playing agents. Text role-playing games are open-ended environments where an agent must faithfully play a particular character. We consider the distinction between characters and actors, where an actor agent has the ability to play multiple characters. We present a framework we call a thespian agent that can learn to emulate multiple characters along with a soft prompt that can be used to direct it as to which character to play at any time. We further describe an attention mechanism that allows the agent to learn new characters that are based on previously learned characters in a few-shot fashion. We show that our agent outperforms the state of the art agent framework in multi-character learning and few-shot learning.

Transformer models pre-trained with a masked-language-modeling objective (e.g., BERT) encode commonsense knowledge as evidenced by behavioral probes; however, the extent to which this knowledge is acquired by systematic inference over the semantics of the pre-training corpora is an open question. To answer this question, we selectively inject verbalized knowledge into the minibatches of a BERT model during pre-training and evaluate how well the model generalizes to supported inferences. We find generalization does not improve over the course of pre-training, suggesting that commonsense knowledge is acquired from surface-level, co-occurrence patterns rather than induced, systematic reasoning.

Understanding and accurately following instructions is critical for large language models (LLMs) to be effective across diverse tasks. In this work, we rigorously examine the key factors that enable models to generalize to unseen instructions, providing insights to guide the collection of data for instruction-tuning. Through controlled experiments, inspired by the Turing-complete Markov algorithm, we demonstrate that such generalization only emerges when training data is diversified enough across semantic domains. Our findings also reveal that merely diversifying within limited domains fails to ensure robust generalization. In contrast, cross-domain data diversification, even under constrained data budgets, significantly enhances a model's adaptability. We further extend our analysis to real-world scenarios, including fine-tuning of $textbf{specialist} and textbf{generalist}$ models. In both cases, we demonstrate that 1) better performance can be achieved by increasing the diversity of an established dataset while keeping the data size constant, and 2) when scaling up the data, diversifying the semantics of instructions is more effective than simply increasing the quantity of similar data. Our research provides important insights for dataset collation, particularly when optimizing model performance by expanding training data for both specialist and generalist scenarios. We show that careful consideration of data diversification is key: training specialist models with data extending beyond their core domain leads to significant performance improvements, while generalist models benefit from diverse data mixtures that enhance their overall instruction-following capabilities across a wide range of applications. Our results highlight the critical role of strategic diversification and offer clear guidelines for improving data quality.

Imagine Mr. Bean stepping into Tom and Jerry--can we generate videos where characters interact naturally across different worlds? We study inter-character interaction in text-to-video generation, where the key challenge is to preserve each character's identity and behaviors while enabling coherent cross-context interaction. This is difficult because characters may never have coexisted and because mixing styles often causes style delusion, where realistic characters appear cartoonish or vice versa. We introduce a framework that tackles these issues with Cross-Character Embedding (CCE), which learns identity and behavioral logic across multimodal sources, and Cross-Character Augmentation (CCA), which enriches training with synthetic co-existence and mixed-style data. Together, these techniques allow natural interactions between previously uncoexistent characters without losing stylistic fidelity. Experiments on a curated benchmark of cartoons and live-action series with 10 characters show clear improvements in identity preservation, interaction quality, and robustness to style delusion, enabling new forms of generative storytelling.Additional results and videos are available on our project page: https://tingtingliao.github.io/mimix/.

As AI systems become more intelligent and their behavior becomes more challenging to assess, they may learn to game the flaws of human feedback instead of genuinely striving to follow instructions; however, this risk can be mitigated by controlling how LLMs generalize human feedback to situations where it is unreliable. To better understand how reward models generalize, we craft 69 distribution shifts spanning 8 categories. We find that reward models do not learn to evaluate `instruction-following' by default and instead favor personas that resemble internet text. Techniques for interpreting reward models' internal representations achieve better generalization than standard fine-tuning, but still frequently fail to distinguish instruction-following from conflated behaviors. We consolidate the 15 most challenging distribution shifts into the GENeralization analogIES (GENIES) benchmark, which we hope will enable progress toward controlling reward model generalization.

Neural networks adapt very well to distributed and continuous representations, but struggle to generalize from small amounts of data. Symbolic systems commonly achieve data efficient generalization by exploiting modularity to benefit from local and discrete features of a representation. These features allow symbolic programs to be improved one module at a time and to experience combinatorial growth in the values they can successfully process. However, it is difficult to design a component that can be used to form symbolic abstractions and which is adequately overparametrized to learn arbitrary high-dimensional transformations. I present Graph-based Symbolically Synthesized Neural Networks (G-SSNNs), a class of neural modules that operate on representations modified with synthesized symbolic programs to include a fixed set of local and discrete features. I demonstrate that the choice of injected features within a G-SSNN module modulates the data efficiency and generalization of baseline neural models, creating predictable patterns of both heightened and curtailed generalization. By training G-SSNNs, we also derive information about desirable semantics of symbolic programs without manual engineering. This information is compact and amenable to abstraction, but can also be flexibly recontextualized for other high-dimensional settings. In future work, I will investigate data efficient generalization and the transferability of learned symbolic representations in more complex G-SSNN designs based on more complex classes of symbolic programs. Experimental code and data are available at https://github.com/shlomenu/symbolically_synthesized_networks .

A major goal of unsupervised learning is to discover data representations that are useful for subsequent tasks, without access to supervised labels during training. Typically, this involves minimizing a surrogate objective, such as the negative log likelihood of a generative model, with the hope that representations useful for subsequent tasks will arise as a side effect. In this work, we propose instead to directly target later desired tasks by meta-learning an unsupervised learning rule which leads to representations useful for those tasks. Specifically, we target semi-supervised classification performance, and we meta-learn an algorithm -- an unsupervised weight update rule -- that produces representations useful for this task. Additionally, we constrain our unsupervised update rule to a be a biologically-motivated, neuron-local function, which enables it to generalize to different neural network architectures, datasets, and data modalities. We show that the meta-learned update rule produces useful features and sometimes outperforms existing unsupervised learning techniques. We further show that the meta-learned unsupervised update rule generalizes to train networks with different widths, depths, and nonlinearities. It also generalizes to train on data with randomly permuted input dimensions and even generalizes from image datasets to a text task.

Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small set of simple toys and then applying that knowledge to more complex items. Inspired by this, we study if similar generalization capabilities can also be achieved by robots. Our results indicate robots can learn generalizable grasping using randomly assembled objects that are composed from just four shape primitives: spheres, cuboids, cylinders, and rings. We show that training on these "toys" enables robust generalization to real-world objects, yielding strong zero-shot performance. Crucially, we find the key to this generalization is an object-centric visual representation induced by our proposed detection pooling mechanism. Evaluated in both simulation and on physical robots, our model achieves a 67% real-world grasping success rate on the YCB dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches that rely on substantially more in-domain data. We further study how zero-shot generalization performance scales by varying the number and diversity of training toys and the demonstrations per toy. We believe this work offers a promising path to scalable and generalizable learning in robotic manipulation. Demonstration videos, code, checkpoints and our dataset are available on our project page: https://lego-grasp.github.io/ .

Accurate attribution of authorship is crucial for maintaining the integrity of digital content, improving forensic investigations, and mitigating the risks of misinformation and plagiarism. Addressing the imperative need for proper authorship attribution is essential to uphold the credibility and accountability of authentic authorship. The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have blurred the lines between human and machine authorship, posing significant challenges for traditional methods. We presents a comprehensive literature review that examines the latest research on authorship attribution in the era of LLMs. This survey systematically explores the landscape of this field by categorizing four representative problems: (1) Human-written Text Attribution; (2) LLM-generated Text Detection; (3) LLM-generated Text Attribution; and (4) Human-LLM Co-authored Text Attribution. We also discuss the challenges related to ensuring the generalization and explainability of authorship attribution methods. Generalization requires the ability to generalize across various domains, while explainability emphasizes providing transparent and understandable insights into the decisions made by these models. By evaluating the strengths and limitations of existing methods and benchmarks, we identify key open problems and future research directions in this field. This literature review serves a roadmap for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the state of the art in this rapidly evolving field. Additional resources and a curated list of papers are available and regularly updated at https://llm-authorship.github.io

In this work, we are interested in achieving both high text controllability and overall appearance consistency in the generation of personalized human characters. We propose a novel framework, named SerialGen, which is a serial generation method consisting of two stages: first, a standardization stage that standardizes reference images, and then a personalized generation stage based on the standardized reference. Furthermore, we introduce two modules aimed at enhancing the standardization process. Our experimental results validate the proposed framework's ability to produce personalized images that faithfully recover the reference image's overall appearance while accurately responding to a wide range of text prompts. Through thorough analysis, we highlight the critical contribution of the proposed serial generation method and standardization model, evidencing enhancements in appearance consistency between reference and output images and across serial outputs generated from diverse text prompts. The term "Serial" in this work carries a double meaning: it refers to the two-stage method and also underlines our ability to generate serial images with consistent appearance throughout.

Transformer models can use two fundamentally different kinds of information: information stored in weights during training, and information provided ``in-context'' at inference time. In this work, we show that transformers exhibit different inductive biases in how they represent and generalize from the information in these two sources. In particular, we characterize whether they generalize via parsimonious rules (rule-based generalization) or via direct comparison with observed examples (exemplar-based generalization). This is of important practical consequence, as it informs whether to encode information in weights or in context, depending on how we want models to use that information. In transformers trained on controlled stimuli, we find that generalization from weights is more rule-based whereas generalization from context is largely exemplar-based. In contrast, we find that in transformers pre-trained on natural language, in-context learning is significantly rule-based, with larger models showing more rule-basedness. We hypothesise that rule-based generalization from in-context information might be an emergent consequence of large-scale training on language, which has sparse rule-like structure. Using controlled stimuli, we verify that transformers pretrained on data containing sparse rule-like structure exhibit more rule-based generalization.

OpenAI's Sora highlights the potential of video generation for developing world models that adhere to fundamental physical laws. However, the ability of video generation models to discover such laws purely from visual data without human priors can be questioned. A world model learning the true law should give predictions robust to nuances and correctly extrapolate on unseen scenarios. In this work, we evaluate across three key scenarios: in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and combinatorial generalization. We developed a 2D simulation testbed for object movement and collisions to generate videos deterministically governed by one or more classical mechanics laws. This provides an unlimited supply of data for large-scale experimentation and enables quantitative evaluation of whether the generated videos adhere to physical laws. We trained diffusion-based video generation models to predict object movements based on initial frames. Our scaling experiments show perfect generalization within the distribution, measurable scaling behavior for combinatorial generalization, but failure in out-of-distribution scenarios. Further experiments reveal two key insights about the generalization mechanisms of these models: (1) the models fail to abstract general physical rules and instead exhibit "case-based" generalization behavior, i.e., mimicking the closest training example; (2) when generalizing to new cases, models are observed to prioritize different factors when referencing training data: color > size > velocity > shape. Our study suggests that scaling alone is insufficient for video generation models to uncover fundamental physical laws, despite its role in Sora's broader success. See our project page at https://phyworld.github.io

Grokking, i.e., test performance keeps improving long after training loss converged, has been recently witnessed in neural network training, making the mechanism of generalization and other emerging capabilities such as reasoning mysterious. While prior studies usually train small models on a few toy or highly-specific tasks for thousands of epochs, we conduct the first study of grokking on checkpoints during one-pass pretraining of a 7B large language model (LLM), i.e., OLMoE. We compute the training loss and evaluate generalization on diverse benchmark tasks, including math reasoning, code generation, and commonsense/domain-specific knowledge retrieval tasks. Our study, for the first time, verifies that grokking still happens in the pretraining of large-scale foundation models, though different data may enter grokking stages asynchronously. We further demystify grokking's "emergence of generalization" by investigating LLM internal dynamics. Specifically, we find that training samples' pathways (i.e., expert choices across layers) evolve from random, instance-specific to more structured and shareable between samples during grokking. Also, the complexity of a sample's pathway reduces despite the converged loss. These indicate a memorization-to-generalization conversion, providing a mechanistic explanation of delayed generalization. In the study, we develop two novel metrics to quantify pathway distance and the complexity of a single pathway. We show their ability to predict the generalization improvement on diverse downstream tasks. They are efficient, simple to compute and solely dependent on training data. Hence, they have practical value for pretraining, enabling us to monitor the generalization performance without finetuning and test. Theoretically, we show that more structured pathways reduce model complexity and improve the generalization bound.

We investigate the capabilities of transformer large language models (LLMs) on relational reasoning tasks involving abstract symbols. Such tasks have long been studied in the neuroscience literature as fundamental building blocks for more complex abilities in programming, mathematics, and verbal reasoning. For (i) regression tasks, we prove that transformers generalize when trained, but require astonishingly large quantities of training data. For (ii) next-token-prediction tasks with symbolic labels, we show an "inverse scaling law": transformers fail to generalize as their embedding dimension increases. For both settings (i) and (ii), we propose subtle transformer modifications which can reduce the amount of data needed by adding two trainable parameters per head.

In real-world scenarios, achieving domain generalization (DG) presents significant challenges as models are required to generalize to unknown target distributions. Generalizing to unseen multi-modal distributions poses even greater difficulties due to the distinct properties exhibited by different modalities. To overcome the challenges of achieving domain generalization in multi-modal scenarios, we propose SimMMDG, a simple yet effective multi-modal DG framework. We argue that mapping features from different modalities into the same embedding space impedes model generalization. To address this, we propose splitting the features within each modality into modality-specific and modality-shared components. We employ supervised contrastive learning on the modality-shared features to ensure they possess joint properties and impose distance constraints on modality-specific features to promote diversity. In addition, we introduce a cross-modal translation module to regularize the learned features, which can also be used for missing-modality generalization. We demonstrate that our framework is theoretically well-supported and achieves strong performance in multi-modal DG on the EPIC-Kitchens dataset and the novel Human-Animal-Cartoon (HAC) dataset introduced in this paper. Our source code and HAC dataset are available at https://github.com/donghao51/SimMMDG.

A few-shot font generation (FFG) method has to satisfy two objectives: the generated images should preserve the underlying global structure of the target character and present the diverse local reference style. Existing FFG methods aim to disentangle content and style either by extracting a universal representation style or extracting multiple component-wise style representations. However, previous methods either fail to capture diverse local styles or cannot be generalized to a character with unseen components, e.g., unseen language systems. To mitigate the issues, we propose a novel FFG method, named Multiple Localized Experts Few-shot Font Generation Network (MX-Font). MX-Font extracts multiple style features not explicitly conditioned on component labels, but automatically by multiple experts to represent different local concepts, e.g., left-side sub-glyph. Owing to the multiple experts, MX-Font can capture diverse local concepts and show the generalizability to unseen languages. During training, we utilize component labels as weak supervision to guide each expert to be specialized for different local concepts. We formulate the component assign problem to each expert as the graph matching problem, and solve it by the Hungarian algorithm. We also employ the independence loss and the content-style adversarial loss to impose the content-style disentanglement. In our experiments, MX-Font outperforms previous state-of-the-art FFG methods in the Chinese generation and cross-lingual, e.g., Chinese to Korean, generation. Source code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/mxfont.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a robust model from source domains that generalize well on unseen target domains. Recent studies focus on generating novel domain samples or features to diversify distributions complementary to source domains. Yet, these approaches can hardly deal with the restriction that the samples synthesized from various domains can cause semantic distortion. In this paper, we propose an online one-stage Cross Contrasting Feature Perturbation (CCFP) framework to simulate domain shift by generating perturbed features in the latent space while regularizing the model prediction against domain shift. Different from the previous fixed synthesizing strategy, we design modules with learnable feature perturbations and semantic consistency constraints. In contrast to prior work, our method does not use any generative-based models or domain labels. We conduct extensive experiments on a standard DomainBed benchmark with a strict evaluation protocol for a fair comparison. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, and quantitative analyses illustrate that our approach can alleviate the domain shift problem in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios.

What makes generalization hard for imitation learning in visual robotic manipulation? This question is difficult to approach at face value, but the environment from the perspective of a robot can often be decomposed into enumerable factors of variation, such as the lighting conditions or the placement of the camera. Empirically, generalization to some of these factors have presented a greater obstacle than others, but existing work sheds little light on precisely how much each factor contributes to the generalization gap. Towards an answer to this question, we study imitation learning policies in simulation and on a real robot language-conditioned manipulation task to quantify the difficulty of generalization to different (sets of) factors. We also design a new simulated benchmark of 19 tasks with 11 factors of variation to facilitate more controlled evaluations of generalization. From our study, we determine an ordering of factors based on generalization difficulty, that is consistent across simulation and our real robot setup.

Background: Deep learning models are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent or one of its variants. These methods update the weights using their gradient, estimated from a small fraction of the training data. It has been observed that when using large batch sizes there is a persistent degradation in generalization performance - known as the "generalization gap" phenomena. Identifying the origin of this gap and closing it had remained an open problem. Contributions: We examine the initial high learning rate training phase. We find that the weight distance from its initialization grows logarithmically with the number of weight updates. We therefore propose a "random walk on random landscape" statistical model which is known to exhibit similar "ultra-slow" diffusion behavior. Following this hypothesis we conducted experiments to show empirically that the "generalization gap" stems from the relatively small number of updates rather than the batch size, and can be completely eliminated by adapting the training regime used. We further investigate different techniques to train models in the large-batch regime and present a novel algorithm named "Ghost Batch Normalization" which enables significant decrease in the generalization gap without increasing the number of updates. To validate our findings we conduct several additional experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Finally, we reassess common practices and beliefs concerning training of deep models and suggest they may not be optimal to achieve good generalization.

A fundamental question in modern machine learning is why large, over-parameterized models, such as deep neural networks and transformers, tend to generalize well, even when their number of parameters far exceeds the number of training samples. We investigate this phenomenon through the lens of information theory, grounded in universal learning theory. Specifically, we study a Bayesian mixture learner with log-loss and (almost) uniform prior over an expansive hypothesis class. Our key result shows that the learner's regret is not determined by the overall size of the hypothesis class, but rather by the cumulative probability of all models that are close, in Kullback-Leibler divergence distance, to the true data-generating process. We refer to this cumulative probability as the weight of the hypothesis. This leads to a natural notion of model simplicity: simple models are those with large weight and thus require fewer samples to generalize, while complex models have small weight and need more data. This perspective provides a rigorous and intuitive explanation for why over-parameterized models often avoid overfitting: the presence of simple hypotheses allows the posterior to concentrate on them when supported by the data. We further bridge theory and practice by recalling that stochastic gradient descent with Langevin dynamics samples from the correct posterior distribution, enabling our theoretical learner to be approximated using standard machine learning methods combined with ensemble learning. Our analysis yields non-uniform regret bounds and aligns with key practical concepts such as flat minima and model distillation. The results apply broadly across online, batch, and supervised learning settings, offering a unified and principled understanding of the generalization behavior of modern AI systems.

Language-image pre-training is an effective technique for learning powerful representations in general domains. However, when directly turning to person representation learning, these general pre-training methods suffer from unsatisfactory performance. The reason is that they neglect critical person-related characteristics, i.e., fine-grained attributes and identities. To address this issue, we propose a novel language-image pre-training framework for person representation learning, termed PLIP. Specifically, we elaborately design three pretext tasks: 1) Text-guided Image Colorization, aims to establish the correspondence between the person-related image regions and the fine-grained color-part textual phrases. 2) Image-guided Attributes Prediction, aims to mine fine-grained attribute information of the person body in the image; and 3) Identity-based Vision-Language Contrast, aims to correlate the cross-modal representations at the identity level rather than the instance level. Moreover, to implement our pre-train framework, we construct a large-scale person dataset with image-text pairs named SYNTH-PEDES by automatically generating textual annotations. We pre-train PLIP on SYNTH-PEDES and evaluate our models by spanning downstream person-centric tasks. PLIP not only significantly improves existing methods on all these tasks, but also shows great ability in the zero-shot and domain generalization settings. The code, dataset and weights will be released at~https://github.com/Zplusdragon/PLIP

Developing generalist agents that can operate across diverse tasks, environments, and physical embodiments is a grand challenge in robotics and artificial intelligence. In this work, we focus on the axis of embodiment and investigate embodiment scaling lawsx2013the hypothesis that increasing the number of training embodiments improves generalization to unseen ones. Using robot locomotion as a test bed, we procedurally generate a dataset of sim1,000 varied embodiments, spanning humanoids, quadrupeds, and hexapods, and train generalist policies capable of handling diverse observation and action spaces on random subsets. We find that increasing the number of training embodiments improves generalization to unseen ones, and scaling embodiments is more effective in enabling embodiment-level generalization than scaling data on small, fixed sets of embodiments. Notably, our best policy, trained on the full dataset, zero-shot transfers to novel embodiments in the real world, such as Unitree Go2 and H1. These results represent a step toward general embodied intelligence, with potential relevance to adaptive control for configurable robots, co-design of morphology and control, and beyond.

When reading a story, humans can quickly understand new fictional characters with a few observations, mainly by drawing analogies to fictional and real people they already know. This reflects the few-shot and meta-learning essence of humans' inference of characters' mental states, i.e., theory-of-mind (ToM), which is largely ignored in existing research. We fill this gap with a novel NLP dataset, ToM-in-AMC, the first assessment of machines' meta-learning of ToM in a realistic narrative understanding scenario. Our dataset consists of ~1,000 parsed movie scripts, each corresponding to a few-shot character understanding task that requires models to mimic humans' ability of fast digesting characters with a few starting scenes in a new movie. We propose a novel ToM prompting approach designed to explicitly assess the influence of multiple ToM dimensions. It surpasses existing baseline models, underscoring the significance of modeling multiple ToM dimensions for our task. Our extensive human study verifies that humans are capable of solving our problem by inferring characters' mental states based on their previously seen movies. In comparison, our systems based on either state-of-the-art large language models (GPT-4) or meta-learning algorithms lags >20% behind, highlighting a notable limitation in existing approaches' ToM capabilities.

We introduce an approach for augmenting text-to-video generation models with customized motions, extending their capabilities beyond the motions depicted in the original training data. By leveraging a few video samples demonstrating specific movements as input, our method learns and generalizes the input motion patterns for diverse, text-specified scenarios. Our contributions are threefold. First, to achieve our results, we finetune an existing text-to-video model to learn a novel mapping between the depicted motion in the input examples to a new unique token. To avoid overfitting to the new custom motion, we introduce an approach for regularization over videos. Second, by leveraging the motion priors in a pretrained model, our method can produce novel videos featuring multiple people doing the custom motion, and can invoke the motion in combination with other motions. Furthermore, our approach extends to the multimodal customization of motion and appearance of individualized subjects, enabling the generation of videos featuring unique characters and distinct motions. Third, to validate our method, we introduce an approach for quantitatively evaluating the learned custom motion and perform a systematic ablation study. We show that our method significantly outperforms prior appearance-based customization approaches when extended to the motion customization task.

As text generative models can give increasingly long answers, we tackle the problem of synthesizing long text in digital ink. We show that the commonly used models for this task fail to generalize to long-form data and how this problem can be solved by augmenting the training data, changing the model architecture and the inference procedure. These methods use contrastive learning technique and are tailored specifically for the handwriting domain. They can be applied to any encoder-decoder model that works with digital ink. We demonstrate that our method reduces the character error rate on long-form English data by half compared to baseline RNN and by 16% compared to the previous approach that aims at addressing the same problem. We show that all three parts of the method improve recognizability of generated inks. In addition, we evaluate synthesized data in a human study and find that people perceive most of generated data as real.

Foundational image-language models have generated considerable interest due to their efficient adaptation to downstream tasks by prompt learning. Prompt learning treats part of the language model input as trainable while freezing the rest, and optimizes an Empirical Risk Minimization objective. However, Empirical Risk Minimization is known to suffer from distributional shifts which hurt generalizability to prompts unseen during training. By leveraging the regularization ability of Bayesian methods, we frame prompt learning from the Bayesian perspective and formulate it as a variational inference problem. Our approach regularizes the prompt space, reduces overfitting to the seen prompts and improves the prompt generalization on unseen prompts. Our framework is implemented by modeling the input prompt space in a probabilistic manner, as an a priori distribution which makes our proposal compatible with prompt learning approaches that are unconditional or conditional on the image. We demonstrate empirically on 15 benchmarks that Bayesian prompt learning provides an appropriate coverage of the prompt space, prevents learning spurious features, and exploits transferable invariant features. This results in better generalization of unseen prompts, even across different datasets and domains. Code available at: https://github.com/saic-fi/Bayesian-Prompt-Learning

To process novel sentences, language models (LMs) must generalize compositionally -- combine familiar elements in new ways. What aspects of a model's structure promote compositional generalization? Focusing on transformers, we test the hypothesis, motivated by recent theoretical and empirical work, that transformers generalize more compositionally when they are deeper (have more layers). Because simply adding layers increases the total number of parameters, confounding depth and size, we construct three classes of models which trade off depth for width such that the total number of parameters is kept constant (41M, 134M and 374M parameters). We pretrain all models as LMs and fine-tune them on tasks that test for compositional generalization. We report three main conclusions: (1) after fine-tuning, deeper models generalize better out-of-distribution than shallower models do, but the relative benefit of additional layers diminishes rapidly; (2) within each family, deeper models show better language modeling performance, but returns are similarly diminishing; (3) the benefits of depth for compositional generalization cannot be attributed solely to better performance on language modeling or on in-distribution data.

Whether neural networks can learn abstract reasoning or whether they merely rely on superficial statistics is a topic of recent debate. Here, we propose a dataset and challenge designed to probe abstract reasoning, inspired by a well-known human IQ test. To succeed at this challenge, models must cope with various generalisation `regimes' in which the training and test data differ in clearly-defined ways. We show that popular models such as ResNets perform poorly, even when the training and test sets differ only minimally, and we present a novel architecture, with a structure designed to encourage reasoning, that does significantly better. When we vary the way in which the test questions and training data differ, we find that our model is notably proficient at certain forms of generalisation, but notably weak at others. We further show that the model's ability to generalise improves markedly if it is trained to predict symbolic explanations for its answers. Altogether, we introduce and explore ways to both measure and induce stronger abstract reasoning in neural networks. Our freely-available dataset should motivate further progress in this direction.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the difference between SFT and RL on generalization and memorization, focusing on text-based rule variants and visual variants. We introduce GeneralPoints, an arithmetic reasoning card game, and adopt V-IRL, a real-world navigation environment, to assess how models trained with SFT and RL generalize to unseen variants in both textual and visual domains. We show that RL, especially when trained with an outcome-based reward, generalizes across both rule-based textual and visual variants. SFT, in contrast, tends to memorize training data and struggles to generalize out-of-distribution scenarios. Further analysis reveals that RL improves the model's underlying visual recognition capabilities, contributing to its enhanced generalization in the visual domain. Despite RL's superior generalization, we show that SFT remains essential for effective RL training; SFT stabilizes the model's output format, enabling subsequent RL to achieve its performance gains. These findings demonstrates the capability of RL for acquiring generalizable knowledge in complex, multi-modal tasks.

Generalist robot policies trained on large-scale datasets such as Open X-Embodiment (OXE) demonstrate strong performance across a wide range of tasks. However, they often struggle to generalize beyond the distribution of their training data. In this paper, we investigate the underlying cause of this limited generalization capability. We identify shortcut learning -- the reliance on task-irrelevant features -- as a key impediment to generalization. Through comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis, we uncover two primary contributors to shortcut learning: (1) limited diversity within individual sub-datasets, and (2) significant distributional disparities across sub-datasets, leading to dataset fragmentation. These issues arise from the inherent structure of large-scale datasets like OXE, which are typically composed of multiple sub-datasets collected independently across varied environments and embodiments. Our findings provide critical insights into dataset collection strategies that can reduce shortcut learning and enhance the generalization ability of generalist robot policies. Moreover, in scenarios where acquiring new large-scale data is impractical, we demonstrate that carefully selected robotic data augmentation strategies can effectively reduce shortcut learning in existing offline datasets, thereby improving generalization capabilities of generalist robot policies, e.g., pi_0, in both simulation and real-world environments. More information at https://lucky-light-sun.github.io/proj/shortcut-learning-in-grps/.

The ability of language models to learn a task from a few examples in context has generated substantial interest. Here, we provide a perspective that situates this type of supervised few-shot learning within a much broader spectrum of meta-learned in-context learning. Indeed, we suggest that any distribution of sequences in which context non-trivially decreases loss on subsequent predictions can be interpreted as eliciting a kind of in-context learning. We suggest that this perspective helps to unify the broad set of in-context abilities that language models exhibit x2014 such as adapting to tasks from instructions or role play, or extrapolating time series. This perspective also sheds light on potential roots of in-context learning in lower-level processing of linguistic dependencies (e.g. coreference or parallel structures). Finally, taking this perspective highlights the importance of generalization, which we suggest can be studied along several dimensions: not only the ability to learn something novel, but also flexibility in learning from different presentations, and in applying what is learned. We discuss broader connections to past literature in meta-learning and goal-conditioned agents, and other perspectives on learning and adaptation. We close by suggesting that research on in-context learning should consider this broader spectrum of in-context capabilities and types of generalization.

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over training environments to be helpful? When the interaction with the target environment is not allowed, we certify that the best we can obtain is a near-optimal policy in an average sense, and we design an algorithm that achieves this goal. Furthermore, when the agent is allowed to interact with the target environment, we give a surprising result showing that asymptotically, the improvement from pre-training is at most a constant factor. On the other hand, in the non-asymptotic regime, we design an efficient algorithm and prove a distribution-based regret bound in the target environment that is independent of the state-action space.

Supervised learning datasets may contain multiple cues that explain the training set equally well, i.e., learning any of them would lead to the correct predictions on the training data. However, many of them can be spurious, i.e., lose their predictive power under a distribution shift and consequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Recently developed "diversification" methods (Lee et al., 2023; Pagliardini et al., 2023) approach this problem by finding multiple diverse hypotheses that rely on different features. This paper aims to study this class of methods and identify the key components contributing to their OOD generalization abilities. We show that (1) diversification methods are highly sensitive to the distribution of the unlabeled data used for diversification and can underperform significantly when away from a method-specific sweet spot. (2) Diversification alone is insufficient for OOD generalization. The choice of the used learning algorithm, e.g., the model's architecture and pretraining, is crucial. In standard experiments (classification on Waterbirds and Office-Home datasets), using the second-best choice leads to an up to 20\% absolute drop in accuracy. (3) The optimal choice of learning algorithm depends on the unlabeled data and vice versa i.e. they are co-dependent. (4) Finally, we show that, in practice, the above pitfalls cannot be alleviated by increasing the number of diverse hypotheses, the major feature of diversification methods. These findings provide a clearer understanding of the critical design factors influencing the OOD generalization abilities of diversification methods. They can guide practitioners in how to use the existing methods best and guide researchers in developing new, better ones.

Domain Generalization aims to develop models that can generalize to novel and unseen data distributions. In this work, we study how model architectures and pre-training objectives impact feature richness and propose a method to effectively leverage them for domain generalization. Specifically, given a pre-trained feature space, we first discover latent domain structures, referred to as pseudo-domains, that capture domain-specific variations in an unsupervised manner. Next, we augment existing classifiers with these complementary pseudo-domain representations making them more amenable to diverse unseen test domains. We analyze how different pre-training feature spaces differ in the domain-specific variances they capture. Our empirical studies reveal that features from diffusion models excel at separating domains in the absence of explicit domain labels and capture nuanced domain-specific information. On 5 datasets, we show that our very simple framework improves generalization to unseen domains by a maximum test accuracy improvement of over 4% compared to the standard baseline Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM). Crucially, our method outperforms most algorithms that access domain labels during training.

Large Language Models trained on web-scale text acquire language generation abilities that can solve a wide range of tasks, particularly when task knowledge is refined into the generative prior using in-context examples. However, spurious features learned from noisy data hinder their generalizability. Supervised finetuning can introduce task specificity, but introduce data inefficiency. Prior studies indicate that (i) noisy neural circuitries coexist with generalizable ones within LLMs, and (ii) finetuning typically enhances (or suppresses) existing abilities without introducing newer ones. Building upon these, we propose TaRot, a novel method for task adaptation. TaRot intervenes in the neural circuitries using learnable rotation matrices that are optimized using Bayesian Optimization, on labelled samples in the order of standard few-shot prompting examples. Experiments on multiple classification and generation tasks using LLMs of varying sizes reveal the efficacy of TaRot, improving upon both zero- as well as few-shot performance, with average improvements (across models and tasks) of 23.81% and 11.15%, respectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/joykirat18/TaRot

Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) have emerged as a significant application direction for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches typically rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to enable models to imitate character behaviors in specific scenarios, but often neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors. Inspired by cognitive psychology, we introduce CogDual, a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm. By jointly modeling external situational awareness and internal self-awareness, CogDual generates responses with improved character consistency and contextual alignment. To further optimize the performance, we employ reinforcement learning with two general-purpose reward schemes designed for open-domain text generation. Extensive experiments on the CoSER benchmark, as well as Cross-MR and LifeChoice, demonstrate that CogDual consistently outperforms existing baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks.

Recent studies show that image and video generation models can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted content from their training data, raising serious legal concerns around copyright infringement. Copyrighted characters, in particular, pose a difficult challenge for image generation services, with at least one lawsuit already awarding damages based on the generation of these characters. Yet, little research has empirically examined this issue. We conduct a systematic evaluation to fill this gap. First, we build CopyCat, an evaluation suite consisting of diverse copyrighted characters and a novel evaluation pipeline. Our evaluation considers both the detection of similarity to copyrighted characters and generated image's consistency with user input. Our evaluation systematically shows that both image and video generation models can still generate characters even if characters' names are not explicitly mentioned in the prompt, sometimes with only two generic keywords (e.g., prompting with "videogame, plumber" consistently generates Nintendo's Mario character). We then introduce techniques to semi-automatically identify such keywords or descriptions that trigger character generation. Using our evaluation suite, we study runtime mitigation strategies, including both existing methods and new strategies we propose. Our findings reveal that commonly employed strategies, such as prompt rewriting in the DALL-E system, are not sufficient as standalone guardrails. These strategies must be coupled with other approaches, like negative prompting, to effectively reduce the unintended generation of copyrighted characters. Our work provides empirical grounding to the discussion of copyright mitigation strategies and offers actionable insights for model deployers actively implementing them.

We examine the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle diverse domains that extend beyond the traditional language and vision tasks these models are typically trained on. Specifically, our focus lies in areas such as Embodied AI, Games, UI Control, and Planning. To this end, we introduce a process of adapting an MLLM to a Generalist Embodied Agent (GEA). GEA is a single unified model capable of grounding itself across these varied domains through a multi-embodiment action tokenizer. GEA is trained with supervised learning on a large dataset of embodied experiences and with online RL in interactive simulators. We explore the data and algorithmic choices necessary to develop such a model. Our findings reveal the importance of training with cross-domain data and online RL for building generalist agents. The final GEA model achieves strong generalization performance to unseen tasks across diverse benchmarks compared to other generalist models and benchmark-specific approaches.

Current image generation models struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text. In this paper, we investigate a key contributing factor: popular text-to-image models lack character-level input features, making it much harder to predict a word's visual makeup as a series of glyphs. To quantify this effect, we conduct a series of experiments comparing character-aware vs. character-blind text encoders. In the text-only domain, we find that character-aware models provide large gains on a novel spelling task (WikiSpell). Applying our learnings to the visual domain, we train a suite of image generation models, and show that character-aware variants outperform their character-blind counterparts across a range of novel text rendering tasks (our DrawText benchmark). Our models set a much higher state-of-the-art on visual spelling, with 30+ point accuracy gains over competitors on rare words, despite training on far fewer examples.

We propose AMADEUS, which is composed of Adaptive Context-aware Text Splitter (ACTS), Guided Selection (GS), and Attribute Extractor (AE). ACTS finds an optimal chunk length and hierarchical contexts for each character. AE identifies a character's general attributes from the chunks retrieved by GS and uses these attributes as a final context to maintain robust persona consistency even when answering out of knowledge questions. To facilitate the development and evaluation of RAG-based RPAs, we construct CharacterRAG, a role-playing dataset that consists of persona documents for 15 distinct fictional characters totaling 976K written characters, and 450 question and answer pairs. We find that our framework effectively models not only the knowledge possessed by characters, but also various attributes such as personality.

The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heralded a new era of human-AI interaction. These sophisticated models, exemplified by Chat-GPT and its successors, have exhibited remarkable capabilities in language understanding. However, as these LLMs have undergone exponential growth, a crucial dimension that remains understudied is the personalization of these models. Large foundation models such as GPT-3 etc. focus on creating a universal model that serves a broad range of tasks and users. This approach emphasizes the model's generalization capabilities, treating users as a collective rather than as distinct individuals. While practical for many common applications, this one-size-fits-all approach often fails to address the rich tapestry of human diversity and individual needs. To explore this issue we introduce the PEFT-U Benchmark: a new dataset for building and evaluating NLP models for user personalization. consists of a series of user-centered tasks containing diverse and individualized expressions where the preferences of users can potentially differ for the same input. Using PEFT-U, we explore the challenge of efficiently personalizing LLMs to accommodate user-specific preferences in the context of diverse user-centered tasks.

Reliable generalization lies at the heart of safe ML and AI. However, understanding when and how neural networks generalize remains one of the most important unsolved problems in the field. In this work, we conduct an extensive empirical study (20'910 models, 15 tasks) to investigate whether insights from the theory of computation can predict the limits of neural network generalization in practice. We demonstrate that grouping tasks according to the Chomsky hierarchy allows us to forecast whether certain architectures will be able to generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. This includes negative results where even extensive amounts of data and training time never lead to any non-trivial generalization, despite models having sufficient capacity to fit the training data perfectly. Our results show that, for our subset of tasks, RNNs and Transformers fail to generalize on non-regular tasks, LSTMs can solve regular and counter-language tasks, and only networks augmented with structured memory (such as a stack or memory tape) can successfully generalize on context-free and context-sensitive tasks.

For conversational AI and virtual assistants to communicate with humans in a realistic way, they must exhibit human characteristics such as expression of emotion and personality. Current attempts toward constructing human-like dialogue agents have presented significant difficulties. We propose Human Level Attributes (HLAs) based on tropes as the basis of a method for learning dialogue agents that can imitate the personalities of fictional characters. Tropes are characteristics of fictional personalities that are observed recurrently and determined by viewers' impressions. By combining detailed HLA data with dialogue data for specific characters, we present a dataset, HLA-Chat, that models character profiles and gives dialogue agents the ability to learn characters' language styles through their HLAs. We then introduce a three-component system, ALOHA (which stands for Artificial Learning of Human Attributes), that combines character space mapping, character community detection, and language style retrieval to build a character (or personality) specific language model. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that two variations of ALOHA, combined with our proposed dataset, can outperform baseline models at identifying the correct dialogue responses of chosen target characters, and are stable regardless of the character's identity, the genre of the show, and the context of the dialogue.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn domain-generalizable models from one or multiple source domains that can perform well in unseen target domains. Despite its recent progress, most existing work suffers from the misalignment between the difficulty level of training samples and the capability of contemporarily trained models, leading to over-fitting or under-fitting in the trained generalization model. We design MoDify, a Momentum Difficulty framework that tackles the misalignment by balancing the seesaw between the model's capability and the samples' difficulties along the training process. MoDify consists of two novel designs that collaborate to fight against the misalignment while learning domain-generalizable models. The first is MoDify-based Data Augmentation which exploits an RGB Shuffle technique to generate difficulty-aware training samples on the fly. The second is MoDify-based Network Optimization which dynamically schedules the training samples for balanced and smooth learning with appropriate difficulty. Without bells and whistles, a simple implementation of MoDify achieves superior performance across multiple benchmarks. In addition, MoDify can complement existing methods as a plug-in, and it is generic and can work for different visual recognition tasks.

Language models that are sensitive to external context can more effectively capture the speaking patterns of individuals with specific characteristics or in particular environments. However, obtaining and leveraging such annotations can be challenging. In this work, we show how to leverage rich character and film annotations to personalise language models in a scalable manner. Our best model can reduce perplexity by up to 6.5% compared to a parameter-matched language model. Our approach performs on par with speaker-specific fine-tuning when the fine-tuning data (i.e. past dialogue) for individual speakers is available. On top of that, it also generalises well to a scenario with no such data, relying on combinations of demographic characteristics expressed via metadata. Our findings are consistent across two corpora, one of which is also a contribution of this paper: Cornell-rich contains rich manual annotations for 863 speaking characters from the Cornell Movie Dialog Corpus, including features such as characteristic quotes and character descriptions, along with six automatically extracted metadata features for over 95% of the featured films. Finally, we also present a cost-benefit analysis highlighting which annotations are most cost-effective in reducing perplexity.

Role-playing is a crucial capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling a wide range of practical applications, including intelligent non-player characters, digital twins, and emotional companions. Evaluating this capability in LLMs is challenging due to the complex dynamics involved in role-playing, such as maintaining character fidelity throughout a storyline and navigating open-ended narratives without a definitive ground truth. Current evaluation methods, which primarily focus on question-answering or conversational snapshots, fall short of adequately capturing the nuanced character traits and behaviors essential for authentic role-playing. In this paper, we propose CharacterBox, which is a simulation sandbox designed to generate situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories. These behavior trajectories enable a more comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of role-playing capabilities. CharacterBox consists of two main components: the character agent and the narrator agent. The character agent, grounded in psychological and behavioral science, exhibits human-like behaviors, while the narrator agent coordinates interactions between character agents and environmental changes. Additionally, we introduce two trajectory-based methods that leverage CharacterBox to enhance LLM performance. To reduce costs and facilitate the adoption of CharacterBox by public communities, we fine-tune two smaller models, CharacterNR and CharacterRM, as substitutes for GPT API calls, and demonstrate their competitive performance compared to advanced GPT APIs.

Text-to-image personalization aims to teach a pre-trained diffusion model to reason about novel, user provided concepts, embedding them into new scenes guided by natural language prompts. However, current personalization approaches struggle with lengthy training times, high storage requirements or loss of identity. To overcome these limitations, we propose an encoder-based domain-tuning approach. Our key insight is that by underfitting on a large set of concepts from a given domain, we can improve generalization and create a model that is more amenable to quickly adding novel concepts from the same domain. Specifically, we employ two components: First, an encoder that takes as an input a single image of a target concept from a given domain, e.g. a specific face, and learns to map it into a word-embedding representing the concept. Second, a set of regularized weight-offsets for the text-to-image model that learn how to effectively ingest additional concepts. Together, these components are used to guide the learning of unseen concepts, allowing us to personalize a model using only a single image and as few as 5 training steps - accelerating personalization from dozens of minutes to seconds, while preserving quality.

Recent large-scale language models (LLMs) with long Chain-of-Thought reasoning-such as DeepSeek-R1-have achieved impressive results on Olympiad-level mathematics benchmarks. However, they often rely on a narrow set of strategies and struggle with problems that require a novel way of thinking. To systematically investigate these limitations, we introduce OMEGA-Out-of-distribution Math Problems Evaluation with 3 Generalization Axes-a controlled yet diverse benchmark designed to evaluate three axes of out-of-distribution generalization, inspired by Boden's typology of creativity: (1) Exploratory-applying known problem solving skills to more complex instances within the same problem domain; (2) Compositional-combining distinct reasoning skills, previously learned in isolation, to solve novel problems that require integrating these skills in new and coherent ways; and (3) Transformative-adopting novel, often unconventional strategies by moving beyond familiar approaches to solve problems more effectively. OMEGA consists of programmatically generated training-test pairs derived from templated problem generators across geometry, number theory, algebra, combinatorics, logic, and puzzles, with solutions verified using symbolic, numerical, or graphical methods. We evaluate frontier (or top-tier) LLMs and observe sharp performance degradation as problem complexity increases. Moreover, we fine-tune the Qwen-series models across all generalization settings and observe notable improvements in exploratory generalization, while compositional generalization remains limited and transformative reasoning shows little to no improvement. By isolating and quantifying these fine-grained failures, OMEGA lays the groundwork for advancing LLMs toward genuine mathematical creativity beyond mechanical proficiency.

The problem of domain generalization is to learn from multiple training domains, and extract a domain-agnostic model that can then be applied to an unseen domain. Domain generalization (DG) has a clear motivation in contexts where there are target domains with distinct characteristics, yet sparse data for training. For example recognition in sketch images, which are distinctly more abstract and rarer than photos. Nevertheless, DG methods have primarily been evaluated on photo-only benchmarks focusing on alleviating the dataset bias where both problems of domain distinctiveness and data sparsity can be minimal. We argue that these benchmarks are overly straightforward, and show that simple deep learning baselines perform surprisingly well on them. In this paper, we make two main contributions: Firstly, we build upon the favorable domain shift-robust properties of deep learning methods, and develop a low-rank parameterized CNN model for end-to-end DG learning. Secondly, we develop a DG benchmark dataset covering photo, sketch, cartoon and painting domains. This is both more practically relevant, and harder (bigger domain shift) than existing benchmarks. The results show that our method outperforms existing DG alternatives, and our dataset provides a more significant DG challenge to drive future research.

We expect the generalization error to improve with more samples from a similar task, and to deteriorate with more samples from an out-of-distribution (OOD) task. In this work, we show a counter-intuitive phenomenon: the generalization error of a task can be a non-monotonic function of the number of OOD samples. As the number of OOD samples increases, the generalization error on the target task improves before deteriorating beyond a threshold. In other words, there is value in training on small amounts of OOD data. We use Fisher's Linear Discriminant on synthetic datasets and deep networks on computer vision benchmarks such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, CINIC-10, PACS and DomainNet to demonstrate and analyze this phenomenon. In the idealistic setting where we know which samples are OOD, we show that these non-monotonic trends can be exploited using an appropriately weighted objective of the target and OOD empirical risk. While its practical utility is limited, this does suggest that if we can detect OOD samples, then there may be ways to benefit from them. When we do not know which samples are OOD, we show how a number of go-to strategies such as data-augmentation, hyper-parameter optimization, and pre-training are not enough to ensure that the target generalization error does not deteriorate with the number of OOD samples in the dataset.

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.

In the artificial neuron, I replace the dot product with the weighted Lehmer mean, which may emulate different cases of a generalized mean. The single neuron instance is replaced by a multiplet of neurons which have the same averaging weights. A group of outputs feed forward, in lieu of the single scalar. The generalization parameter is typically set to a different value for each neuron in the multiplet. I further extend the concept to a multiplet taken from the Gini mean. Derivatives with respect to the weight parameters and with respect to the two generalization parameters are given. Some properties of the network are investigated, showing the capacity to emulate the classical exclusive-or problem organically in two layers and perform some multiplication and division. The network can instantiate truncated power series and variants, which can be used to approximate different functions, provided that parameters are constrained. Moreover, a mean case slope score is derived that can facilitate a learning-rate novelty based on homogeneity of the selected elements. The multiplet neuron equation provides a way to segment regularization timeframes and approaches.

The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of comparable size? Furthermore, from among all solutions that fit the training data, how does GD find one that generalizes well (when such a well-generalizing solution exists)? We argue that the answer to both questions lies in the interaction of the gradients of different examples during training. Intuitively, if the per-example gradients are well-aligned, that is, if they are coherent, then one may expect GD to be (algorithmically) stable, and hence generalize well. We formalize this argument with an easy to compute and interpretable metric for coherence, and show that the metric takes on very different values on real and random datasets for several common vision networks. The theory also explains a number of other phenomena in deep learning, such as why some examples are reliably learned earlier than others, why early stopping works, and why it is possible to learn from noisy labels. Moreover, since the theory provides a causal explanation of how GD finds a well-generalizing solution when one exists, it motivates a class of simple modifications to GD that attenuate memorization and improve generalization. Generalization in deep learning is an extremely broad phenomenon, and therefore, it requires an equally general explanation. We conclude with a survey of alternative lines of attack on this problem, and argue that the proposed approach is the most viable one on this basis.

Large language models have evolved data-efficient generalists, benefiting from the universal language interface and large-scale pre-training. However, constructing a data-efficient generalist for dense visual prediction presents a distinct challenge due to the variation in label structures across different tasks. Consequently, generalization to unseen dense prediction tasks in the low-data regime is not straightforward and has received less attention from previous vision generalists. In this study, we explore a universal model that can flexibly adapt to unseen dense label structures with a few examples, enabling it to serve as a data-efficient vision generalist in diverse real-world scenarios. To this end, we base our method on a powerful meta-learning framework and explore several axes to improve its performance and versatility for real-world problems, such as flexible adaptation mechanisms and scalability. We evaluate our model across a spectrum of unseen real-world scenarios where low-shot learning is desirable, including video, 3D, medical, biological, and user-interactive tasks. Equipped with a generic architecture and an effective adaptation mechanism, our model flexibly adapts to all of these tasks with at most 50 labeled images, showcasing a significant advancement over existing data-efficient generalist approaches. Codes are available at https://github.com/GitGyun/chameleon.

How cost-effectively can we elicit strong reasoning in language models by leveraging their underlying representations? We answer this question with Resa, a family of 1.5B reasoning models trained via a novel and efficient sparse autoencoder tuning (SAE-Tuning) procedure. This method first trains an SAE to capture reasoning abilities from a source model, and then uses the trained SAE to guide a standard supervised fine-tuning process to elicit such abilities in a target model, all using verified question-answer data without any reasoning traces. Notably, when applied to certain base models before further RL post-training, SAE-Tuning retains >97% of its RL-trained counterpart's reasoning performance while reducing training costs by >2000x to roughly \1 and training time by >450x to around 20 minutes. Furthermore, when applied to lightly RL-trained models (e.g., within 1 hour on 2 GPUs), it enables reasoning performance such as 43.33% Pass@1 on AIME24 and 90% Pass@1 on AMC23 for only around 1 additional cost. Surprisingly, the reasoning abilities extracted via SAEs are potentially both generalizable and modular. Generality means abilities extracted from one dataset still elevate performance on a larger and overlapping corpus. Modularity means abilities extracted from Qwen or Qwen-Math can be attached to the R1-Distill model at test time, without any retraining, and yield comparable gains. Extensive ablations validate these findings and all artifacts are fully open-sourced.

Scene text synthesis involves rendering specified texts onto arbitrary images. Current methods typically formulate this task in an end-to-end manner but lack effective character-level guidance during training. Besides, their text encoders, pre-trained on a single font type, struggle to adapt to the diverse font styles encountered in practical applications. Consequently, these methods suffer from character distortion, repetition, and absence, particularly in polystylistic scenarios. To this end, this paper proposes DreamText for high-fidelity scene text synthesis. Our key idea is to reconstruct the diffusion training process, introducing more refined guidance tailored to this task, to expose and rectify the model's attention at the character level and strengthen its learning of text regions. This transformation poses a hybrid optimization challenge, involving both discrete and continuous variables. To effectively tackle this challenge, we employ a heuristic alternate optimization strategy. Meanwhile, we jointly train the text encoder and generator to comprehensively learn and utilize the diverse font present in the training dataset. This joint training is seamlessly integrated into the alternate optimization process, fostering a synergistic relationship between learning character embedding and re-estimating character attention. Specifically, in each step, we first encode potential character-generated position information from cross-attention maps into latent character masks. These masks are then utilized to update the representation of specific characters in the current step, which, in turn, enables the generator to correct the character's attention in the subsequent steps. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of our method to the state of the art.

While pre-trained Chinese language models have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, the Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task remains a challenge. Previous research has explored using information such as glyphs and phonetics to improve the ability to distinguish misspelled characters, with good results. However, the generalization ability of these models is not well understood: it is unclear whether they incorporate glyph-phonetic information and, if so, whether this information is fully utilized. In this paper, we aim to better understand the role of glyph-phonetic information in the CSC task and suggest directions for improvement. Additionally, we propose a new, more challenging, and practical setting for testing the generalizability of CSC models. All code is made publicly available.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to avoid the performance degradation of the model when the distribution shift between the limited training data and unseen test data occurs. Recently, foundation models with enormous parameters have been pre-trained with huge datasets, demonstrating strong generalization ability and showing promising direction for solving the DG problem. However, fully Fine-Tuning (FT) the foundation models results in unsatisfactory out-of-distribution accuracy due to the destroyed pre-trained generalized features. Recently, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) alleviates the above problem by fine-tuning a small portion of the model parameters while keeping the rest frozen, which achieves better generalization performance compared to FT. Nevertheless, PEFT still suffers from the issue of overfitting to the training domains. To address the above issue, we propose Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal regularization (PEGO) for vision transformers, which effectively preserves the generalization ability of the pre-trained network and learns more diverse knowledge compared with conventional PEFT. Specifically, we inject a group of trainable Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules into the pre-trained model and propose an orthogonal regularization loss to enhance the generalization ability of the model. Our framework achieves SOTA performance on five DG benchmarks, while only requiring training a small number of parameters without adding additional testing cost.

Generalist imitation learning policies trained on large datasets show great promise for solving diverse manipulation tasks. However, to ensure generalization to different conditions, policies need to be trained with data collected across a large set of environmental factor variations (e.g., camera pose, table height, distractors) - a prohibitively expensive undertaking, if done exhaustively. We introduce a principled method for deciding what data to collect and how much to collect for each factor by constructing factored scaling curves (FSC), which quantify how policy performance varies as data scales along individual or paired factors. These curves enable targeted data acquisition for the most influential factor combinations within a given budget. We evaluate the proposed method through extensive simulated and real-world experiments, across both training-from-scratch and fine-tuning settings, and show that it boosts success rates in real-world tasks in new environments by up to 26% over existing data-collection strategies. We further demonstrate how factored scaling curves can effectively guide data collection using an offline metric, without requiring real-world evaluation at scale.

Generalization remains one of the most important desiderata for robust robot learning systems. While recently proposed approaches show promise in generalization to novel objects, semantic concepts, or visual distribution shifts, generalization to new tasks remains challenging. For example, a language-conditioned policy trained on pick-and-place tasks will not be able to generalize to a folding task, even if the arm trajectory of folding is similar to pick-and-place. Our key insight is that this kind of generalization becomes feasible if we represent the task through rough trajectory sketches. We propose a policy conditioning method using such rough trajectory sketches, which we call RT-Trajectory, that is practical, easy to specify, and allows the policy to effectively perform new tasks that would otherwise be challenging to perform. We find that trajectory sketches strike a balance between being detailed enough to express low-level motion-centric guidance while being coarse enough to allow the learned policy to interpret the trajectory sketch in the context of situational visual observations. In addition, we show how trajectory sketches can provide a useful interface to communicate with robotic policies: they can be specified through simple human inputs like drawings or videos, or through automated methods such as modern image-generating or waypoint-generating methods. We evaluate RT-Trajectory at scale on a variety of real-world robotic tasks, and find that RT-Trajectory is able to perform a wider range of tasks compared to language-conditioned and goal-conditioned policies, when provided the same training data.

Cartoons and animation domain videos have very different characteristics compared to real-life images and videos. In addition, this domain carries a large variability in styles. Current computer vision and deep-learning solutions often fail on animated content because they were trained on natural images. In this paper we present a method to refine a semantic representation suitable for specific animated content. We first train a neural network on a large-scale set of animation videos and use the mapping to deep features as an embedding space. Next, we use self-supervision to refine the representation for any specific animation style by gathering many examples of animated characters in this style, using a multi-object tracking. These examples are used to define triplets for contrastive loss training. The refined semantic space allows better clustering of animated characters even when they have diverse manifestations. Using this space we can build dictionaries of characters in an animation videos, and define specialized classifiers for specific stylistic content (e.g., characters in a specific animation series) with very little user effort. These classifiers are the basis for automatically labeling characters in animation videos. We present results on a collection of characters in a variety of animation styles.

Despite significant advancements in multi-label text classification, the ability of existing models to generalize to novel and seldom-encountered complex concepts, which are compositions of elementary ones, remains underexplored. This research addresses this gap. By creating unique data splits across three benchmarks, we assess the compositional generalization ability of existing multi-label text classification models. Our results show that these models often fail to generalize to compositional concepts encountered infrequently during training, leading to inferior performance on tests with these new combinations. To address this, we introduce a data augmentation method that leverages two innovative text generation models designed to enhance the classification models' capacity for compositional generalization. Our experiments show that this data augmentation approach significantly improves the compositional generalization capabilities of classification models on our benchmarks, with both generation models surpassing other text generation baselines.

Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-like models. However, textual personas are limited in describing multi-faceted attributes (e.g., language style, inner character nuances), implicit embedding suffers from personality sparsity, and handicraft prompts lack fine-grained and stable controllability. Hence, these approaches may struggle with complex personalized dialogue generation tasks that require generating controllable responses with multiple personal attributes. To this end, we propose \textsc{Miracle}, a novel personalized dialogue generation method through MultIple PeRsonal Attributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. ttributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. Specifically, our approach first disentangles complex personality into multi-faceted attributes. Subsequently, we employ a conditional variational auto-encoder to align with the dense personalized responses within a latent joint attribute space. We have also tailored a dedicated energy function and customized the ordinary differential equations sampling method to offer flexible attribute composition and precise attribute control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Miracle outperforms several strong baselines in terms of personality controllability and response generation quality. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LZY-the-boys/MIRACLE

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems of longer sequences than those observed during training, poses a core challenge of Transformer-based large language models (LLM). Although existing studies have predominantly focused on data-driven approaches for arithmetic operations and symbolic manipulation tasks, these approaches tend to be task-specific with limited overall performance. To pursue a more general solution, this paper focuses on a broader case of reasoning problems that are computable, i.e., problems that algorithms can solve, thus can be solved by the Turing Machine. From this perspective, this paper proposes Turing MAchine Imitation Learning (TAIL) to improve the length generalization ability of LLMs. TAIL synthesizes chain-of-thoughts (CoT) data that imitate the execution process of a Turing Machine by computer programs, which linearly expands the reasoning steps into atomic states to alleviate shortcut learning and explicit memory fetch mechanism to reduce the difficulties of dynamic and long-range data access in elementary operations. To validate the reliability and universality of TAIL, we construct a challenging synthetic dataset covering 8 classes of algorithms and 18 tasks. Without bells and whistles, TAIL significantly improves the length generalization ability as well as the performance of Qwen2.5-7B on various tasks using only synthetic data, surpassing previous methods and DeepSeek-R1. The experimental results reveal that the key concepts in the Turing Machine, instead of the thinking styles, are indispensable for TAIL for length generalization, through which the model exhibits read-and-write behaviors consistent with the properties of the Turing Machine in their attention layers. This work provides a promising direction for future research in the learning of LLM reasoning from synthetic data.

In infilling tasks, sub-tokens, representing instances where a complete token is segmented into two parts, often emerge at the boundaries of prefixes, middles, and suffixes. Traditional methods focused on training models at the token level, leading to sub-optimal performance in character-level infilling tasks during the inference stage. Alternately, some approaches considered character-level infilling, but they relied on predicting sub-tokens in inference, yet this strategy diminished ability in character-level infilling tasks due to the large perplexity of the model on sub-tokens. In this paper, we introduce FIM-SE, which stands for Fill-In-the-Middle with both Starting and Ending character constraints. The proposed method addresses character-level infilling tasks by utilizing a line-level format to avoid predicting any sub-token in inference. In addition, we incorporate two special tokens to signify the rest of the incomplete lines, thereby enhancing generation guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses previous methods, offering a significant advantage. Code is available at https://github.com/SenseLLM/FIM-SE.