Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness of this approach heavily relies on the balance between performance and efficiency of the draft model. In our research, we focus on enhancing the proportion of draft tokens that are accepted to the final output by generating multiple hypotheses instead of just one. This allows the LLM more options to choose from and select the longest sequence that meets its standards. Our analysis reveals that hypotheses produced by the draft model share many common token sequences, suggesting a potential for optimizing computation. Leveraging this observation, we introduce an innovative approach utilizing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to manage the drafted hypotheses. This structure enables us to efficiently predict and merge recurring token sequences, vastly reducing the computational demands of the draft model. We term this approach Graph-structured Speculative Decoding (GSD). We apply GSD across a range of LLMs, including a 70-billion parameter LLaMA-2 model, and observe a remarkable speedup of 1.70× to 1.94 ×, significantly surpassing standard speculative decoding.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. As these models become more integral to research and applications, conducting comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities has grown increasingly important. However, most existing benchmarks fail to consider that, in certain situations, images need to be interpreted within a broader context. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark, named as CODIS, designed to assess the ability of models to use context provided in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. Our findings indicate that MLLMs consistently fall short of human performance on this benchmark. Further analysis confirms that these models struggle to effectively extract and utilize contextual information to improve their understanding of images. This underscores the pressing need to enhance the ability of MLLMs to comprehend visuals in a context-dependent manner.

With the bloom of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate LLMs with pre-trained vision models have recently demonstrated impressive performance across diverse vision-language tasks. However, they fall short to comprehend context involving multiple images. A primary reason for this shortcoming is that the visual features for each images are encoded individually by frozen encoders before feeding into the LLM backbone, lacking awareness of other images and the multimodal instructions. We term this issue as prior-LLM modality isolation and propose a two phase paradigm, browse-and-concentrate, to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. This paradigm initially “browses” through the inputs for essential insights, and then revisits the inputs to “concentrate” on crucial details, guided by these insights, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the multimodal inputs. Additionally, we develop training strategies specifically to enhance the understanding of multi-image inputs. Our method markedly boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively.

Recent developments in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown rapid progress, moving towards the goal of creating versatile MLLMs that understand inputs from various modalities. However, existing methods typically rely on joint training with paired multimodal instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm through the model composition of existing MLLMs to create a new model that retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. Our basic implementation, NaiveMC, demonstrates the effectiveness of this paradigm by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. Furthermore, we introduce DAMC to address parameter interference and mismatch issues during the merging process, thereby enhancing the model performance. To facilitate research in this area, we propose MCUB, a benchmark for assessing ability of MLLMs to understand inputs from diverse modalities. Experiments on this benchmark and four other multimodal understanding tasks show significant improvements over baselines, proving that model composition can create a versatile model capable of processing inputs from multiple modalities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning ability and the maintenance of world knowledge not only in natural language tasks, but also in some vision-language tasks such as open-domain knowledge-based visual question answering (OK-VQA). As images are invisible to LLMs, researchers convert images to text to engage LLMs into the visual question reasoning procedure. This leads to discrepancies between images and their textual representations presented to LLMs, which consequently impedes final reasoning performance. To fill the information gap and better leverage the reasoning capability, we design a framework that enables LLMs to proactively ask relevant questions to unveil more details in the image, along with filters for refining the generated information. We validate our idea on OK-VQA and A-OKVQA. Our method continuously boosts the performance of baselines methods by an average gain of 2.15% on OK-VQA, and achieves consistent improvements across different LLMs.

Legal Tech is developed to help people with legal services and solve legal problems via machines. To achieve this, one of the key requirements for machines is to utilize legal knowledge and comprehend legal context. This can be fulfilled by natural language processing (NLP) techniques, for instance, text representation, text categorization, question answering (QA) and natural language inference, etc. To this end, we introduce a freely available Chinese Legal Tech system (IFlyLegal) that benefits from multiple NLP tasks. It is an integrated system that performs legal consulting, multi-way law searching, and legal document analysis by exploiting techniques such as deep contextual representations and various attention mechanisms. To our knowledge, IFlyLegal is the first Chinese legal system that employs up-to-date NLP techniques and caters for needs of different user groups, such as lawyers, judges, procurators, and clients. Since Jan, 2019, we have gathered 2,349 users and 28,238 page views (till June, 23, 2019).