Tech Frontier

Pretrained language models underpin several AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as BLOOM and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. However, such existing models face challenges: limited multilingual capabilities, continual pretraining causing catastrophic forgetting, where...

We present Gecko, a compact and versatile text embedding model. Gecko achieves strong retrieval performance by leveraging a key idea: distilling knowledge from large language models (LLMs) into a retriever. Our two-step distillation process begins with generating diverse, synthetic paired data using an LLM. Next, we further refine the data quality by retrieving a set of candidate passages for each...

While novel view synthesis (NVS) has made substantial progress in 3D computer vision, it typically requires an initial estimation of camera intrinsics and extrinsics from dense viewpoints. This pre-processing is usually conducted via a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline, a procedure that can be slow and unreliable, particularly in sparse-view scenarios with insufficient matched features for accu...

In an effort to reduce the computational load of Transformers, research on linear attention has gained significant momentum. However, the improvement strategies for attention mechanisms typically necessitate extensive retraining, which is impractical for large language models with a vast array of parameters. In this paper, we present DiJiang, a novel Frequency Domain Kernelization approach that en...

Touch and vision go hand in hand, mutually enhancing our ability to understand the world. From a research perspective, the problem of mixing touch and vision is underexplored and presents interesting challenges. To this end, we propose Tactile-Informed 3DGS, a novel approach that incorporates touch data (local depth maps) with multi-view vision data to achieve surface reconstruction and novel view...

This paper introduces a novel and significant challenge for Vision Language Models (VLMs), termed Unsolvable Problem Detection (UPD). UPD examines the VLM's ability to withhold answers when faced with unsolvable problems in the context of Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. UPD encompasses three distinct settings: Absent Answer Detection (AAD), Incompatible Answer Set Detection (IASD), and Inco...

Recent advances in deep learning have mainly relied on Transformers due to their data dependency and ability to learn at scale. The attention module in these architectures, however, exhibits quadratic time and space in input size, limiting their scalability for long-sequence modeling. Despite recent attempts to design efficient and effective architecture backbone for multi-dimensional data, such a...

We present Jamba, a new base large language model based on a novel hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, Jamba interleaves blocks of Transformer and Mamba layers, enjoying the benefits of both model families. MoE is added in some of these layers to increase model capacity while keeping active parameter usage manageable. This flexible architecture allows reso...