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Oct 28

GASP: Unifying Geometric and Semantic Self-Supervised Pre-training for Autonomous Driving

Self-supervised pre-training based on next-token prediction has enabled large language models to capture the underlying structure of text, and has led to unprecedented performance on a large array of tasks when applied at scale. Similarly, autonomous driving generates vast amounts of spatiotemporal data, alluding to the possibility of harnessing scale to learn the underlying geometric and semantic structure of the environment and its evolution over time. In this direction, we propose a geometric and semantic self-supervised pre-training method, GASP, that learns a unified representation by predicting, at any queried future point in spacetime, (1) general occupancy, capturing the evolving structure of the 3D scene; (2) ego occupancy, modeling the ego vehicle path through the environment; and (3) distilled high-level features from a vision foundation model. By modeling geometric and semantic 4D occupancy fields instead of raw sensor measurements, the model learns a structured, generalizable representation of the environment and its evolution through time. We validate GASP on multiple autonomous driving benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in semantic occupancy forecasting, online mapping, and ego trajectory prediction. Our results demonstrate that continuous 4D geometric and semantic occupancy prediction provides a scalable and effective pre-training paradigm for autonomous driving. For code and additional visualizations, see \href{https://research.zenseact.com/publications/gasp/.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 19 2

OccRWKV: Rethinking Efficient 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Linear Complexity

3D semantic occupancy prediction networks have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reconstructing the geometric and semantic structure of 3D scenes, providing crucial information for robot navigation and autonomous driving systems. However, due to their large overhead from dense network structure designs, existing networks face challenges balancing accuracy and latency. In this paper, we introduce OccRWKV, an efficient semantic occupancy network inspired by Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV). OccRWKV separates semantics, occupancy prediction, and feature fusion into distinct branches, each incorporating Sem-RWKV and Geo-RWKV blocks. These blocks are designed to capture long-range dependencies, enabling the network to learn domain-specific representation (i.e., semantics and geometry), which enhances prediction accuracy. Leveraging the sparse nature of real-world 3D occupancy, we reduce computational overhead by projecting features into the bird's-eye view (BEV) space and propose a BEV-RWKV block for efficient feature enhancement and fusion. This enables real-time inference at 22.2 FPS without compromising performance. Experiments demonstrate that OccRWKV outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the SemanticKITTI dataset, achieving a mIoU of 25.1 while being 20 times faster than the best baseline, Co-Occ, making it suitable for real-time deployment on robots to enhance autonomous navigation efficiency. Code and video are available on our project page: https://jmwang0117.github.io/OccRWKV/.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024

GarmageNet: A Multimodal Generative Framework for Sewing Pattern Design and Generic Garment Modeling

Realistic digital garment modeling remains a labor-intensive task due to the intricate process of translating 2D sewing patterns into high-fidelity, simulation-ready 3D garments. We introduce GarmageNet, a unified generative framework that automates the creation of 2D sewing patterns, the construction of sewing relationships, and the synthesis of 3D garment initializations compatible with physics-based simulation. Central to our approach is Garmage, a novel garment representation that encodes each panel as a structured geometry image, effectively bridging the semantic and geometric gap between 2D structural patterns and 3D garment shapes. GarmageNet employs a latent diffusion transformer to synthesize panel-wise geometry images and integrates GarmageJigsaw, a neural module for predicting point-to-point sewing connections along panel contours. To support training and evaluation, we build GarmageSet, a large-scale dataset comprising over 10,000 professionally designed garments with detailed structural and style annotations. Our method demonstrates versatility and efficacy across multiple application scenarios, including scalable garment generation from multi-modal design concepts (text prompts, sketches, photographs), automatic modeling from raw flat sewing patterns, pattern recovery from unstructured point clouds, and progressive garment editing using conventional instructions-laying the foundation for fully automated, production-ready pipelines in digital fashion. Project page: https://style3d.github.io/garmagenet.

InstantStyle-Plus: Style Transfer with Content-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation

Style transfer is an inventive process designed to create an image that maintains the essence of the original while embracing the visual style of another. Although diffusion models have demonstrated impressive generative power in personalized subject-driven or style-driven applications, existing state-of-the-art methods still encounter difficulties in achieving a seamless balance between content preservation and style enhancement. For example, amplifying the style's influence can often undermine the structural integrity of the content. To address these challenges, we deconstruct the style transfer task into three core elements: 1) Style, focusing on the image's aesthetic characteristics; 2) Spatial Structure, concerning the geometric arrangement and composition of visual elements; and 3) Semantic Content, which captures the conceptual meaning of the image. Guided by these principles, we introduce InstantStyle-Plus, an approach that prioritizes the integrity of the original content while seamlessly integrating the target style. Specifically, our method accomplishes style injection through an efficient, lightweight process, utilizing the cutting-edge InstantStyle framework. To reinforce the content preservation, we initiate the process with an inverted content latent noise and a versatile plug-and-play tile ControlNet for preserving the original image's intrinsic layout. We also incorporate a global semantic adapter to enhance the semantic content's fidelity. To safeguard against the dilution of style information, a style extractor is employed as discriminator for providing supplementary style guidance. Codes will be available at https://github.com/instantX-research/InstantStyle-Plus.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 30, 2024 5

Leveraging Semantic Graphs for Efficient and Robust LiDAR SLAM

Accurate and robust simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is crucial for autonomous mobile systems, typically achieved by leveraging the geometric features of the environment. Incorporating semantics provides a richer scene representation that not only enhances localization accuracy in SLAM but also enables advanced cognitive functionalities for downstream navigation and planning tasks. Existing point-wise semantic LiDAR SLAM methods often suffer from poor efficiency and generalization, making them less robust in diverse real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a semantic graph-enhanced SLAM framework, named SG-SLAM, which effectively leverages the geometric, semantic, and topological characteristics inherent in environmental structures. The semantic graph serves as a fundamental component that facilitates critical functionalities of SLAM, including robust relocalization during odometry failures, accurate loop closing, and semantic graph map construction. Our method employs a dual-threaded architecture, with one thread dedicated to online odometry and relocalization, while the other handles loop closure, pose graph optimization, and map update. This design enables our method to operate in real time and generate globally consistent semantic graph maps and point cloud maps. We extensively evaluate our method across the KITTI, MulRAN, and Apollo datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our method has been released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/SG-SLAM.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 14

Urban Architect: Steerable 3D Urban Scene Generation with Layout Prior

Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable success via large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Nevertheless, there is no paradigm for scaling up the methodology to urban scale. Urban scenes, characterized by numerous elements, intricate arrangement relationships, and vast scale, present a formidable barrier to the interpretability of ambiguous textual descriptions for effective model optimization. In this work, we surmount the limitations by introducing a compositional 3D layout representation into text-to-3D paradigm, serving as an additional prior. It comprises a set of semantic primitives with simple geometric structures and explicit arrangement relationships, complementing textual descriptions and enabling steerable generation. Upon this, we propose two modifications -- (1) We introduce Layout-Guided Variational Score Distillation to address model optimization inadequacies. It conditions the score distillation sampling process with geometric and semantic constraints of 3D layouts. (2) To handle the unbounded nature of urban scenes, we represent 3D scene with a Scalable Hash Grid structure, incrementally adapting to the growing scale of urban scenes. Extensive experiments substantiate the capability of our framework to scale text-to-3D generation to large-scale urban scenes that cover over 1000m driving distance for the first time. We also present various scene editing demonstrations, showing the powers of steerable urban scene generation. Website: https://urbanarchitect.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 10, 2024 1

EmbodiedOcc++: Boosting Embodied 3D Occupancy Prediction with Plane Regularization and Uncertainty Sampler

Online 3D occupancy prediction provides a comprehensive spatial understanding of embodied environments. While the innovative EmbodiedOcc framework utilizes 3D semantic Gaussians for progressive indoor occupancy prediction, it overlooks the geometric characteristics of indoor environments, which are primarily characterized by planar structures. This paper introduces EmbodiedOcc++, enhancing the original framework with two key innovations: a Geometry-guided Refinement Module (GRM) that constrains Gaussian updates through plane regularization, along with a Semantic-aware Uncertainty Sampler (SUS) that enables more effective updates in overlapping regions between consecutive frames. GRM regularizes the position update to align with surface normals. It determines the adaptive regularization weight using curvature-based and depth-based constraints, allowing semantic Gaussians to align accurately with planar surfaces while adapting in complex regions. To effectively improve geometric consistency from different views, SUS adaptively selects proper Gaussians to update. Comprehensive experiments on the EmbodiedOcc-ScanNet benchmark demonstrate that EmbodiedOcc++ achieves state-of-the-art performance across different settings. Our method demonstrates improved edge accuracy and retains more geometric details while ensuring computational efficiency, which is essential for online embodied perception. The code will be released at: https://github.com/PKUHaoWang/EmbodiedOcc2.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 13

Towards Understanding Camera Motions in Any Video

We introduce CameraBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark designed to assess and improve camera motion understanding. CameraBench consists of ~3,000 diverse internet videos, annotated by experts through a rigorous multi-stage quality control process. One of our contributions is a taxonomy of camera motion primitives, designed in collaboration with cinematographers. We find, for example, that some motions like "follow" (or tracking) require understanding scene content like moving subjects. We conduct a large-scale human study to quantify human annotation performance, revealing that domain expertise and tutorial-based training can significantly enhance accuracy. For example, a novice may confuse zoom-in (a change of intrinsics) with translating forward (a change of extrinsics), but can be trained to differentiate the two. Using CameraBench, we evaluate Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Video-Language Models (VLMs), finding that SfM models struggle to capture semantic primitives that depend on scene content, while VLMs struggle to capture geometric primitives that require precise estimation of trajectories. We then fine-tune a generative VLM on CameraBench to achieve the best of both worlds and showcase its applications, including motion-augmented captioning, video question answering, and video-text retrieval. We hope our taxonomy, benchmark, and tutorials will drive future efforts towards the ultimate goal of understanding camera motions in any video.

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 21 3

Sherpa3D: Boosting High-Fidelity Text-to-3D Generation via Coarse 3D Prior

Recently, 3D content creation from text prompts has demonstrated remarkable progress by utilizing 2D and 3D diffusion models. While 3D diffusion models ensure great multi-view consistency, their ability to generate high-quality and diverse 3D assets is hindered by the limited 3D data. In contrast, 2D diffusion models find a distillation approach that achieves excellent generalization and rich details without any 3D data. However, 2D lifting methods suffer from inherent view-agnostic ambiguity thereby leading to serious multi-face Janus issues, where text prompts fail to provide sufficient guidance to learn coherent 3D results. Instead of retraining a costly viewpoint-aware model, we study how to fully exploit easily accessible coarse 3D knowledge to enhance the prompts and guide 2D lifting optimization for refinement. In this paper, we propose Sherpa3D, a new text-to-3D framework that achieves high-fidelity, generalizability, and geometric consistency simultaneously. Specifically, we design a pair of guiding strategies derived from the coarse 3D prior generated by the 3D diffusion model: a structural guidance for geometric fidelity and a semantic guidance for 3D coherence. Employing the two types of guidance, the 2D diffusion model enriches the 3D content with diversified and high-quality results. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our Sherpa3D over the state-of-the-art text-to-3D methods in terms of quality and 3D consistency.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

CAD-Tokenizer: Towards Text-based CAD Prototyping via Modality-Specific Tokenization

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a foundational component of industrial prototyping, where models are defined not by raw coordinates but by construction sequences such as sketches and extrusions. This sequential structure enables both efficient prototype initialization and subsequent editing. Text-guided CAD prototyping, which unifies Text-to-CAD generation and CAD editing, has the potential to streamline the entire design pipeline. However, prior work has not explored this setting, largely because standard large language model (LLM) tokenizers decompose CAD sequences into natural-language word pieces, failing to capture primitive-level CAD semantics and hindering attention modules from modeling geometric structure. We conjecture that a multimodal tokenization strategy, aligned with CAD's primitive and structural nature, can provide more effective representations. To this end, we propose CAD-Tokenizer, a framework that represents CAD data with modality-specific tokens using a sequence-based VQ-VAE with primitive-level pooling and constrained decoding. This design produces compact, primitive-aware representations that align with CAD's structural nature. Applied to unified text-guided CAD prototyping, CAD-Tokenizer significantly improves instruction following and generation quality, achieving better quantitative and qualitative performance over both general-purpose LLMs and task-specific baselines.

microsoft Microsoft
·
Sep 25 2

CADDreamer: CAD object Generation from Single-view Images

Diffusion-based 3D generation has made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing 3D generative models often produce overly dense and unstructured meshes, which stand in stark contrast to the compact, structured, and sharply-edged Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models crafted by human designers. To address this gap, we introduce CADDreamer, a novel approach for generating boundary representations (B-rep) of CAD objects from a single image. CADDreamer employs a primitive-aware multi-view diffusion model that captures both local geometric details and high-level structural semantics during the generation process. By encoding primitive semantics into the color domain, the method leverages the strong priors of pre-trained diffusion models to align with well-defined primitives. This enables the inference of multi-view normal maps and semantic maps from a single image, facilitating the reconstruction of a mesh with primitive labels. Furthermore, we introduce geometric optimization techniques and topology-preserving extraction methods to mitigate noise and distortion in the generated primitives. These enhancements result in a complete and seamless B-rep of the CAD model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers high-quality CAD objects from single-view images. Compared to existing 3D generation techniques, the B-rep models produced by CADDreamer are compact in representation, clear in structure, sharp in edges, and watertight in topology.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28

Embeddings to Diagnosis: Latent Fragility under Agentic Perturbations in Clinical LLMs

LLMs for clinical decision support often fail under small but clinically meaningful input shifts such as masking a symptom or negating a finding, despite high performance on static benchmarks. These reasoning failures frequently go undetected by standard NLP metrics, which are insensitive to latent representation shifts that drive diagnosis instability. We propose a geometry-aware evaluation framework, LAPD (Latent Agentic Perturbation Diagnostics), which systematically probes the latent robustness of clinical LLMs under structured adversarial edits. Within this framework, we introduce Latent Diagnosis Flip Rate (LDFR), a model-agnostic diagnostic signal that captures representational instability when embeddings cross decision boundaries in PCA-reduced latent space. Clinical notes are generated using a structured prompting pipeline grounded in diagnostic reasoning, then perturbed along four axes: masking, negation, synonym replacement, and numeric variation to simulate common ambiguities and omissions. We compute LDFR across both foundation and clinical LLMs, finding that latent fragility emerges even under minimal surface-level changes. Finally, we validate our findings on 90 real clinical notes from the DiReCT benchmark (MIMIC-IV), confirming the generalizability of LDFR beyond synthetic settings. Our results reveal a persistent gap between surface robustness and semantic stability, underscoring the importance of geometry-aware auditing in safety-critical clinical AI.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 27

Hyperbolic Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success and demonstrated superior performance across various tasks, including natural language processing (NLP), weather forecasting, biological protein folding, text generation, and solving mathematical problems. However, many real-world data exhibit highly non-Euclidean latent hierarchical anatomy, such as protein networks, transportation networks, financial networks, brain networks, and linguistic structures or syntactic trees in natural languages. Effectively learning intrinsic semantic entailment and hierarchical relationships from these raw, unstructured input data using LLMs remains an underexplored area. Due to its effectiveness in modeling tree-like hierarchical structures, hyperbolic geometry -- a non-Euclidean space -- has rapidly gained popularity as an expressive latent representation space for complex data modeling across domains such as graphs, images, languages, and multi-modal data. Here, we provide a comprehensive and contextual exposition of recent advancements in LLMs that leverage hyperbolic geometry as a representation space to enhance semantic representation learning and multi-scale reasoning. Specifically, the paper presents a taxonomy of the principal techniques of Hyperbolic LLMs (HypLLMs) in terms of four main categories: (1) hyperbolic LLMs through exp/log maps; (2) hyperbolic fine-tuned models; (3) fully hyperbolic LLMs, and (4) hyperbolic state-space models. We also explore crucial potential applications and outline future research directions. A repository of key papers, models, datasets, and code implementations is available at https://github.com/sarangp2402/Hyperbolic-LLM-Models/tree/main.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 6

Spatial-MLLM: Boosting MLLM Capabilities in Visual-based Spatial Intelligence

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced performance on 2D visual tasks. However, improving their spatial intelligence remains a challenge. Existing 3D MLLMs always rely on additional 3D or 2.5D data to incorporate spatial awareness, restricting their utility in scenarios with only 2D inputs, such as images or videos. In this paper, we present Spatial-MLLM, a novel framework for visual-based spatial reasoning from purely 2D observations. Unlike conventional video MLLMs which rely on CLIP-based visual encoders optimized for semantic understanding, our key insight is to unleash the strong structure prior from the feed-forward visual geometry foundation model. Specifically, we propose a dual-encoder architecture: a pretrained 2D visual encoder to extract semantic features, and a spatial encoder-initialized from the backbone of the visual geometry model-to extract 3D structure features. A connector then integrates both features into unified visual tokens for enhanced spatial understanding. Furthermore, we propose a space-aware frame sampling strategy at inference time, which selects the spatially informative frames of a video sequence, ensuring that even under limited token length, the model focuses on frames critical for spatial reasoning. Beyond architecture improvements, we construct the Spatial-MLLM-120k dataset and train the model on it using supervised fine-tuning and GRPO. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that our spatial-MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of visual-based spatial understanding and reasoning tasks. Project page: https://diankun-wu.github.io/Spatial-MLLM/.

  • 4 authors
·
May 29 3

From Occlusion to Insight: Object Search in Semantic Shelves using Large Language Models

How can a robot efficiently extract a desired object from a shelf when it is fully occluded by other objects? Prior works propose geometric approaches for this problem but do not consider object semantics. Shelves in pharmacies, restaurant kitchens, and grocery stores are often organized such that semantically similar objects are placed close to one another. Can large language models (LLMs) serve as semantic knowledge sources to accelerate robotic mechanical search in semantically arranged environments? With Semantic Spatial Search on Shelves (S^4), we use LLMs to generate affinity matrices, where entries correspond to semantic likelihood of physical proximity between objects. We derive semantic spatial distributions by synthesizing semantics with learned geometric constraints. S^4 incorporates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and semantic refinement with predictions from ViLD, an open-vocabulary object detection model. Simulation experiments suggest that semantic spatial search reduces the search time relative to pure spatial search by an average of 24% across three domains: pharmacy, kitchen, and office shelves. A manually collected dataset of 100 semantic scenes suggests that OCR and semantic refinement improve object detection accuracy by 35%. Lastly, physical experiments in a pharmacy shelf suggest 47.1% improvement over pure spatial search. Supplementary material can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/s4-rss/home.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 24, 2023

GeoRef: Referring Expressions in Geometry via Task Formulation, Synthetic Supervision, and Reinforced MLLM-based Solutions

AI-driven geometric problem solving is a complex vision-language task that requires accurate diagram interpretation, mathematical reasoning, and robust cross-modal grounding. A foundational yet underexplored capability for this task is the ability to identify and interpret geometric elements based on natural language queries. To address this, we introduce the task of Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) for geometric problems, which evaluates whether models can localize points, shapes, and spatial relations in diagrams in response to textual prompts. We present GeoRef, a benchmark dataset constructed from existing geometric problem corpora, featuring diverse, high-quality annotations and queries. Due to the lack of annotated data for this task, we generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset using a structured geometric formal language, enabling broad coverage of geometric concepts and facilitating model adaptation. We explore two fine-tuning approaches: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our results show that GRPO significantly outperforms SFT by better aligning model behavior with task-specific rewards. Furthermore, we propose a verify-and-regenerate mechanism that detects incorrect predictions and re-infers answers using contextual reasoning history, further boosting accuracy. Notably, even state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with this task, underscoring the necessity of explicitly evaluating and strengthening geometric grounding as a prerequisite for robust geometric problem solving. Moreover, models trained on GeoRef demonstrate measurable improvements on downstream geometric reasoning tasks, highlighting the broader value of REC as a foundation for multimodal mathematical understanding.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 25

MATHGLANCE: Multimodal Large Language Models Do Not Know Where to Look in Mathematical Diagrams

Diagrams serve as a fundamental form of visual language, representing complex concepts and their inter-relationships through structured symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Unlike natural images, their inherently symbolic and abstract nature poses significant challenges for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current benchmarks conflate perceptual and reasoning tasks, making it difficult to assess whether MLLMs genuinely understand mathematical diagrams beyond superficial pattern recognition. To address this gap, we introduce MATHGLANCE, a benchmark specifically designed to isolate and evaluate mathematical perception in MLLMs. MATHGLANCE comprises 1.2K images and 1.6K carefully curated questions spanning four perception tasks: shape classification, object counting, relationship identification, and object grounding, covering diverse domains including plane geometry, solid geometry, and graphical representations. Our evaluation of MLLMs reveals that their ability to understand diagrams is notably limited, particularly in fine-grained grounding tasks. In response, we construct GeoPeP, a perception-oriented dataset of 200K structured geometry image-text pairs explicitly annotated with geometric primitives and precise spatial relationships. Training MLLM on GeoPeP leads to significant gains in perceptual accuracy, which in turn substantially improves mathematical reasoning. Our benchmark and dataset establish critical standards for evaluating and advancing multimodal mathematical understanding, providing valuable resources and insights to foster future MLLM research.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 26

GraphShaper: Geometry-aware Alignment for Improving Transfer Learning in Text-Attributed Graphs

Graph foundation models represent a transformative paradigm for learning transferable representations across diverse graph domains. Recent methods leverage large language models to unify graph and text modalities into a shared representation space using contrastive learning. However, systematic evaluations reveal significant performance degradation at structural boundaries where distinct topological patterns converge, with accuracy losses exceeding 20 percentage points. This issue arises from a key limitation: current methods assume all graph structures can be encoded within a single Euclidean space. In reality, tree structures require hyperbolic geometry to preserve hierarchical branching, while cyclic patterns depend on spherical geometry for closure properties. At structural boundaries, nodes experience conflicting geometric constraints that uniform encoding spaces cannot resolve. This raises a crucial challenge: Can alignment frameworks be designed to respect the intrinsic geometric diversity of graph structures? We introduce GraphShaper, a geometry-aware framework that enhances graph encoding through multi-geometric specialization. Our approach employs expert networks tailored to different geometric spaces, dynamically computing fusion weights to adaptively integrate geometric properties based on local structural characteristics. This adaptive fusion preserves structural integrity before alignment with text embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphShaper achieves 9.47\% accuracy improvements on citation networks and 7.63\% on social networks in zero-shot settings.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13

GeoSense: Evaluating Identification and Application of Geometric Principles in Multimodal Reasoning

Geometry problem-solving (GPS), a challenging task requiring both visual comprehension and symbolic reasoning, effectively measures the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Humans exhibit strong reasoning ability in this task through accurate identification and adaptive application of geometric principles within visual contexts. However, existing benchmarks fail to jointly assess both dimensions of the human-like geometric reasoning mechanism in MLLMs, remaining a critical gap in assessing their ability to tackle GPS. To this end, we introduce GeoSense, the first comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the geometric reasoning abilities of MLLMs through the lens of geometric principles. GeoSense features a five-level hierarchical framework of geometric principles spanning plane and solid geometry, an intricately annotated dataset of 1,789 problems, and an innovative evaluation strategy. Through extensive experiments on GeoSense with various open-source and closed-source MLLMs, we observe that Gemini-2.0-pro-flash performs best, achieving an overall score of 65.3. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the identification and application of geometric principles remain a bottleneck for leading MLLMs, jointly hindering their reasoning abilities. These findings underscore GeoSense's potential to guide future advancements in MLLMs' geometric reasoning capabilities, paving the way for more robust and human-like reasoning in artificial intelligence.

  • 12 authors
·
Apr 16

REMA: A Unified Reasoning Manifold Framework for Interpreting Large Language Model

Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) perform complex reasoning and their failure mechanisms is a challenge in interpretability research. To provide a measurable geometric analysis perspective, we define the concept of the Reasoning Manifold, a latent low-dimensional geometric structure formed by the internal representations corresponding to all correctly reasoned generations. This structure can be conceptualized as the embodiment of the effective thinking paths that the model has learned to successfully solve a given task. Based on this concept, we build REMA, a framework that explains the origins of failures by quantitatively comparing the spatial relationships of internal model representations corresponding to both erroneous and correct reasoning samples. Specifically, REMA first quantifies the geometric deviation of each erroneous representation by calculating its k-nearest neighbors distance to the approximated manifold formed by correct representations, thereby providing a unified failure signal. It then localizes the divergence points where these deviations first become significant by tracking this deviation metric across the model's layers and comparing it against a baseline of internal fluctuations from correct representations, thus identifying where the reasoning chain begins to go off-track. Our extensive experiments on diverse language and multimodal models and tasks demonstrate the low-dimensional nature of the reasoning manifold and the high separability between erroneous and correct reasoning representations. The results also validate the effectiveness of the REMA framework in analyzing the origins of reasoning failures. This research connects abstract reasoning failures to measurable geometric deviations in representations, providing new avenues for in-depth understanding and diagnosis of the internal computational processes of black-box models.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 26 2

GeoX: Geometric Problem Solving Through Unified Formalized Vision-Language Pre-training

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

  • 15 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024 2

Domain and Function: A Dual-Space Model of Semantic Relations and Compositions

Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are highly similar (carpenter is to wood as mason is to stone; the relations are analogous). Likewise, with representations of dog, house, and kennel, an algorithm should be able to recognize that the semantic composition of dog and house, dog house, is highly similar to kennel (dog house and kennel are synonymous). It seems that these two tasks, recognizing relations and compositions, are closely connected. However, up to now, the best models for relations are significantly different from the best models for compositions. In this paper, we introduce a dual-space model that unifies these two tasks. This model matches the performance of the best previous models for relations and compositions. The dual-space model consists of a space for measuring domain similarity and a space for measuring function similarity. Carpenter and wood share the same domain, the domain of carpentry. Mason and stone share the same domain, the domain of masonry. Carpenter and mason share the same function, the function of artisans. Wood and stone share the same function, the function of materials. In the composition dog house, kennel has some domain overlap with both dog and house (the domains of pets and buildings). The function of kennel is similar to the function of house (the function of shelters). By combining domain and function similarities in various ways, we can model relations, compositions, and other aspects of semantics.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 16, 2013

A Markov Categorical Framework for Language Modeling

Auto-regressive language models factorize sequence probabilities and are trained by minimizing the negative log-likelihood (NLL) objective. While empirically powerful, a deep theoretical understanding of why this simple objective yields such versatile representations remains elusive. This work introduces a unifying analytical framework using Markov Categories (MCs) to deconstruct the AR generation process and the NLL objective. We model the single-step generation map as a composition of Markov kernels in the category Stoch. This compositional view, when enriched with statistical divergences, allows us to dissect information flow and learned geometry. Our framework makes three main contributions. First, we provide a formal, information-theoretic rationale for the success of modern speculative decoding methods like EAGLE, quantifying the information surplus in hidden states that these methods exploit. Second, we formalize how NLL minimization forces the model to learn not just the next token, but the data's intrinsic conditional stochasticity, a process we analyze using categorical entropy. Third, and most centrally, we prove that NLL training acts as an implicit form of spectral contrastive learning. By analyzing the information geometry of the model's prediction head, we show that NLL implicitly forces the learned representation space to align with the eigenspectrum of a predictive similarity operator, thereby learning a geometrically structured space without explicit contrastive pairs. This compositional and information-geometric perspective reveals the deep structural principles underlying the effectiveness of modern LMs. Project Page: https://github.com/asiresearch/lm-theory

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 25

SOLIDGEO: Measuring Multimodal Spatial Math Reasoning in Solid Geometry

Geometry is a fundamental branch of mathematics and plays a crucial role in evaluating the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing multimodal mathematics benchmarks mainly focus on plane geometry and largely ignore solid geometry, which requires spatial reasoning and is more challenging than plane geometry. To address this critical gap, we introduce SolidGeo, the first large-scale benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the performance of MLLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks in solid geometry. SolidGeo consists of 3,113 real-world K-12 and competition-level problems, each paired with visual context and annotated with difficulty levels and fine-grained solid geometry categories. Our benchmark covers a wide range of 3D reasoning subjects such as projection, unfolding, spatial measurement, and spatial vector, offering a rigorous testbed for assessing solid geometry. Through extensive experiments, we observe that MLLMs encounter substantial challenges in solid geometry math tasks, with a considerable performance gap relative to human capabilities on SolidGeo. Moreover, we analyze the performance, inference efficiency and error patterns of various models, offering insights into the solid geometric mathematical reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. We hope SolidGeo serves as a catalyst for advancing MLLMs toward deeper geometric reasoning and spatial intelligence.

  • 9 authors
·
May 27

Tangram: Benchmark for Evaluating Geometric Element Recognition in Large Multimodal Models

Significant advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have enabled them to tackle complex problems involving visual-mathematical reasoning. However, their ability to identify geometric elements remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Tangram, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of LMMs on geometric element recognition. Tangram comprises 1,080 diverse geometric diagrams sourced from primary and secondary school exams, competitions, and textbooks, ranging from simple geometric shapes to complex combinations. Each diagram is paired with four questions, resulting in 4,320 visual-question-answer pairs. Unlike existing benchmarks that emphasize higher-level cognition and reasoning, Tangram focuses on understanding geometric elements, requiring models to perform a ``simple yet challenging" counting task. Systematic evaluation of 13 prominent LMMs, such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, reveals that these models face significant challenges even in seemingly straightforward tasks. The top-performing model achieves an accuracy of only 53.0%, highlighting a substantial gap compared to human performance. These findings underscore the limitations of current multimodal AI systems in handling basic perception tasks and serve to inspire the development of the next generation of expert-level multimodal foundational models. The data and code will be released soon.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 25, 2024

Geospatial Mechanistic Interpretability of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Their ability to process and generate viable text and code has made them ubiquitous in many fields, while their deployment as knowledge bases and "reasoning" tools remains an area of ongoing research. In geography, a growing body of literature has been focusing on evaluating LLMs' geographical knowledge and their ability to perform spatial reasoning. However, very little is still known about the internal functioning of these models, especially about how they process geographical information. In this chapter, we establish a novel framework for the study of geospatial mechanistic interpretability - using spatial analysis to reverse engineer how LLMs handle geographical information. Our aim is to advance our understanding of the internal representations that these complex models generate while processing geographical information - what one might call "how LLMs think about geographic information" if such phrasing was not an undue anthropomorphism. We first outline the use of probing in revealing internal structures within LLMs. We then introduce the field of mechanistic interpretability, discussing the superposition hypothesis and the role of sparse autoencoders in disentangling polysemantic internal representations of LLMs into more interpretable, monosemantic features. In our experiments, we use spatial autocorrelation to show how features obtained for placenames display spatial patterns related to their geographic location and can thus be interpreted geospatially, providing insights into how these models process geographical information. We conclude by discussing how our framework can help shape the study and use of foundation models in geography.

FormalGeo: An Extensible Formalized Framework for Olympiad Geometric Problem Solving

This is the first paper in a series of work we have accomplished over the past three years. In this paper, we have constructed a consistent formal plane geometry system. This will serve as a crucial bridge between IMO-level plane geometry challenges and readable AI automated reasoning. Within this formal framework, we have been able to seamlessly integrate modern AI models with our formal system. AI is now capable of providing deductive reasoning solutions to IMO-level plane geometry problems, just like handling other natural languages, and these proofs are readable, traceable, and verifiable. We propose the geometry formalization theory (GFT) to guide the development of the geometry formal system. Based on the GFT, we have established the FormalGeo, which consists of 88 geometric predicates and 196 theorems. It can represent, validate, and solve IMO-level geometry problems. we also have crafted the FGPS (formal geometry problem solver) in Python. It serves as both an interactive assistant for verifying problem-solving processes and an automated problem solver. We've annotated the formalgeo7k and formalgeo-imo datasets. The former contains 6,981 (expand to 133,818 through data augmentation) geometry problems, while the latter includes 18 (expand to 2,627 and continuously increasing) IMO-level challenging geometry problems. All annotated problems include detailed formal language descriptions and solutions. Implementation of the formal system and experiments validate the correctness and utility of the GFT. The backward depth-first search method only yields a 2.42% problem-solving failure rate, and we can incorporate deep learning techniques to achieve lower one. The source code of FGPS and datasets are available at https://github.com/BitSecret/FGPS.

  • 20 authors
·
Oct 27, 2023

HaLo-NeRF: Learning Geometry-Guided Semantics for Exploring Unconstrained Photo Collections

Internet image collections containing photos captured by crowds of photographers show promise for enabling digital exploration of large-scale tourist landmarks. However, prior works focus primarily on geometric reconstruction and visualization, neglecting the key role of language in providing a semantic interface for navigation and fine-grained understanding. In constrained 3D domains, recent methods have leveraged vision-and-language models as a strong prior of 2D visual semantics. While these models display an excellent understanding of broad visual semantics, they struggle with unconstrained photo collections depicting such tourist landmarks, as they lack expert knowledge of the architectural domain. In this work, we present a localization system that connects neural representations of scenes depicting large-scale landmarks with text describing a semantic region within the scene, by harnessing the power of SOTA vision-and-language models with adaptations for understanding landmark scene semantics. To bolster such models with fine-grained knowledge, we leverage large-scale Internet data containing images of similar landmarks along with weakly-related textual information. Our approach is built upon the premise that images physically grounded in space can provide a powerful supervision signal for localizing new concepts, whose semantics may be unlocked from Internet textual metadata with large language models. We use correspondences between views of scenes to bootstrap spatial understanding of these semantics, providing guidance for 3D-compatible segmentation that ultimately lifts to a volumetric scene representation. Our results show that HaLo-NeRF can accurately localize a variety of semantic concepts related to architectural landmarks, surpassing the results of other 3D models as well as strong 2D segmentation baselines. Our project page is at https://tau-vailab.github.io/HaLo-NeRF/.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024 1

GeoQA: A Geometric Question Answering Benchmark Towards Multimodal Numerical Reasoning

Automatic math problem solving has recently attracted increasing attention as a long-standing AI benchmark. In this paper, we focus on solving geometric problems, which requires a comprehensive understanding of textual descriptions, visual diagrams, and theorem knowledge. However, the existing methods were highly dependent on handcraft rules and were merely evaluated on small-scale datasets. Therefore, we propose a Geometric Question Answering dataset GeoQA, containing 4,998 geometric problems with corresponding annotated programs, which illustrate the solving process of the given problems. Compared with another publicly available dataset GeoS, GeoQA is 25 times larger, in which the program annotations can provide a practical testbed for future research on explicit and explainable numerical reasoning. Moreover, we introduce a Neural Geometric Solver (NGS) to address geometric problems by comprehensively parsing multimodal information and generating interpretable programs. We further add multiple self-supervised auxiliary tasks on NGS to enhance cross-modal semantic representation. Extensive experiments on GeoQA validate the effectiveness of our proposed NGS and auxiliary tasks. However, the results are still significantly lower than human performance, which leaves large room for future research. Our benchmark and code are released at https://github.com/chen-judge/GeoQA .

  • 7 authors
·
May 30, 2021

SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation

Spatial intelligence is a critical component of embodied AI, promoting robots to understand and interact with their environments. While recent advances have enhanced the ability of VLMs to perceive object locations and positional relationships, they still lack the capability to precisely understand object orientations-a key requirement for tasks involving fine-grained manipulations. Addressing this limitation not only requires geometric reasoning but also an expressive and intuitive way to represent orientation. In this context, we propose that natural language offers a more flexible representation space than canonical frames, making it particularly suitable for instruction-following robotic systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic orientation, which defines object orientations using natural language in a reference-frame-free manner (e.g., the ''plug-in'' direction of a USB or the ''handle'' direction of a knife). To support this, we construct OrienText300K, a large-scale dataset of 3D models annotated with semantic orientations that link geometric understanding to functional semantics. By integrating semantic orientation into a VLM system, we enable robots to generate manipulation actions with both positional and orientational constraints. Extensive experiments in simulation and real world demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances robotic manipulation capabilities, e.g., 48.7% accuracy on Open6DOR and 74.9% accuracy on SIMPLER.

  • 18 authors
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Feb 18 2

Geometry Meets Vision: Revisiting Pretrained Semantics in Distilled Fields

Semantic distillation in radiance fields has spurred significant advances in open-vocabulary robot policies, e.g., in manipulation and navigation, founded on pretrained semantics from large vision models. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of visual-only semantic features (e.g., DINO and CLIP) in Gaussian Splatting and neural radiance fields, the potential benefit of geometry-grounding in distilled fields remains an open question. In principle, visual-geometry features seem very promising for spatial tasks such as pose estimation, prompting the question: Do geometry-grounded semantic features offer an edge in distilled fields? Specifically, we ask three critical questions: First, does spatial-grounding produce higher-fidelity geometry-aware semantic features? We find that image features from geometry-grounded backbones contain finer structural details compared to their counterparts. Secondly, does geometry-grounding improve semantic object localization? We observe no significant difference in this task. Thirdly, does geometry-grounding enable higher-accuracy radiance field inversion? Given the limitations of prior work and their lack of semantics integration, we propose a novel framework SPINE for inverting radiance fields without an initial guess, consisting of two core components: coarse inversion using distilled semantics, and fine inversion using photometric-based optimization. Surprisingly, we find that the pose estimation accuracy decreases with geometry-grounded features. Our results suggest that visual-only features offer greater versatility for a broader range of downstream tasks, although geometry-grounded features contain more geometric detail. Notably, our findings underscore the necessity of future research on effective strategies for geometry-grounding that augment the versatility and performance of pretrained semantic features.

  • 3 authors
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Oct 3

Integrating Knowledge Graph embedding and pretrained Language Models in Hypercomplex Spaces

Knowledge Graphs, such as Wikidata, comprise structural and textual knowledge in order to represent knowledge. For each of the two modalities dedicated approaches for graph embedding and language models learn patterns that allow for predicting novel structural knowledge. Few approaches have integrated learning and inference with both modalities and these existing ones could only partially exploit the interaction of structural and textual knowledge. In our approach, we build on existing strong representations of single modalities and we use hypercomplex algebra to represent both, (i), single-modality embedding as well as, (ii), the interaction between different modalities and their complementary means of knowledge representation. More specifically, we suggest Dihedron and Quaternion representations of 4D hypercomplex numbers to integrate four modalities namely structural knowledge graph embedding, word-level representations (e.g.\ Word2vec, Fasttext), sentence-level representations (Sentence transformer), and document-level representations (sentence transformer, Doc2vec). Our unified vector representation scores the plausibility of labelled edges via Hamilton and Dihedron products, thus modeling pairwise interactions between different modalities. Extensive experimental evaluation on standard benchmark datasets shows the superiority of our two new models using abundant textual information besides sparse structural knowledge to enhance performance in link prediction tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 4, 2022

Can Representation Gaps Be the Key to Enhancing Robustness in Graph-Text Alignment?

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) integrates structural connectivity with rich textual semantics, enabling applications in diverse domains. Current methods largely rely on contrastive learning to maximize cross-modal similarity, assuming tighter coupling between graph and text representations improves transfer performance. However, our empirical analysis reveals that both natural gap expansion and forced gap reduction result in performance degradation by disrupting pre-trained knowledge structures and impairing generalization. This arises from the geometric incompatibility between encoders, where graph encoders capture topological patterns, while text encoders capture semantic structures. Over-alignment compresses these distinct spaces into shared subspaces, causing structure collapse that diminishes both topological reasoning and semantic understanding. We propose LLM4GTA, a gap-aware alignment framework that preserves representation gaps as geometric necessities for maintaining modality-specific knowledge and improving transfer performance. LLM4GTA includes an adaptive gap preservation module to prevent over-alignment by monitoring similarity evolution and an intra-modal compensation mechanism that boosts discriminative power using auxiliary classifiers in graph space. Extensive experiments show significant improvements over existing methods in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13

Escaping Plato's Cave: Towards the Alignment of 3D and Text Latent Spaces

Recent works have shown that, when trained at scale, uni-modal 2D vision and text encoders converge to learned features that share remarkable structural properties, despite arising from different representations. However, the role of 3D encoders with respect to other modalities remains unexplored. Furthermore, existing 3D foundation models that leverage large datasets are typically trained with explicit alignment objectives with respect to frozen encoders from other representations. In this work, we investigate the possibility of a posteriori alignment of representations obtained from uni-modal 3D encoders compared to text-based feature spaces. We show that naive post-training feature alignment of uni-modal text and 3D encoders results in limited performance. We then focus on extracting subspaces of the corresponding feature spaces and discover that by projecting learned representations onto well-chosen lower-dimensional subspaces the quality of alignment becomes significantly higher, leading to improved accuracy on matching and retrieval tasks. Our analysis further sheds light on the nature of these shared subspaces, which roughly separate between semantic and geometric data representations. Overall, ours is the first work that helps to establish a baseline for post-training alignment of 3D uni-modal and text feature spaces, and helps to highlight both the shared and unique properties of 3D data compared to other representations.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 7 2

Slow Perception: Let's Perceive Geometric Figures Step-by-step

Recently, "visual o1" began to enter people's vision, with expectations that this slow-thinking design can solve visual reasoning tasks, especially geometric math problems. However, the reality is that current LVLMs (Large Vision Language Models) can hardly even accurately copy a geometric figure, let alone truly understand the complex inherent logic and spatial relationships within geometric shapes. We believe accurate copying (strong perception) is the first step to visual o1. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of "slow perception" (SP), which guides the model to gradually perceive basic point-line combinations, as our humans, reconstruct complex geometric structures progressively. There are two-fold stages in SP: a) perception decomposition. Perception is not instantaneous. In this stage, complex geometric figures are broken down into basic simple units to unify geometry representation. b) perception flow, which acknowledges that accurately tracing a line is not an easy task. This stage aims to avoid "long visual jumps" in regressing line segments by using a proposed "perceptual ruler" to trace each line stroke-by-stroke. Surprisingly, such a human-like perception manner enjoys an inference time scaling law -- the slower, the better. Researchers strive to speed up the model's perception in the past, but we slow it down again, allowing the model to read the image step-by-step and carefully.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 29, 2024 2

ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations

Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability to in-context learn, we can ask whether models alter these pretraining semantics to adopt alternative, context-specified ones. Specifically, if we provide in-context exemplars wherein a concept plays a different role than what the pretraining data suggests, do models reorganize their representations in accordance with these novel semantics? To answer this question, we take inspiration from the theory of conceptual role semantics and define a toy "graph tracing" task wherein the nodes of the graph are referenced via concepts seen during training (e.g., apple, bird, etc.) and the connectivity of the graph is defined via some predefined structure (e.g., a square grid). Given exemplars that indicate traces of random walks on the graph, we analyze intermediate representations of the model and find that as the amount of context is scaled, there is a sudden re-organization from pretrained semantic representations to in-context representations aligned with the graph structure. Further, we find that when reference concepts have correlations in their semantics (e.g., Monday, Tuesday, etc.), the context-specified graph structure is still present in the representations, but is unable to dominate the pretrained structure. To explain these results, we analogize our task to energy minimization for a predefined graph topology, providing evidence towards an implicit optimization process to infer context-specified semantics. Overall, our findings indicate scaling context-size can flexibly re-organize model representations, possibly unlocking novel capabilities.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 29, 2024

Euclid's Gift: Enhancing Spatial Perception and Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Geometric Surrogate Tasks

Spatial intelligence spans a rich suite of abilities, including visualising and transforming shapes, mentally rotating objects, judging relational positions and containment, and estimating numerosity. However, it still remains a critical unresolved challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).To fill this gap, we propose to treat Euclidean geometry problem-solving as a surrogate task. Specifically, we meticulously constructed a curated multimodal dataset, called Euclid30K, comprising approximately 30K plane and solid geometry problems. To enable the model to acquire and apply Euclidean principles from these geometry problems, we employed Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to finetune the Qwen2.5VL family and RoboBrain2.0 family, inspiring the models to identify shapes, count, and relate entities, and perform multi-step deductive reasoning using Euclidean principles. Our experiments demonstrate that the resulting models achieve substantial zero-shot gains across four spatial reasoning benchmarks (Super-CLEVR, Omni3DBench, VSI-Bench, and MindCube) without any task-specific adaptations. Notably, after training on the Euclid30K, the mean VSI-Bench accuracy of all evaluated models rose from 34.5% to 40.5%, improving by 5.5 percentage points. Among them, RoboBrain2.0-Euclid-7B achieves 49.6\% accuracy, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art model, Spatial-MLLM.To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study showing that geometry-centric fine-tuning can confer vision-language models with broadly transferable spatial skills. Code and Euclid30K dataset can be found in https://zgca-ai4edu.github.io/Euclids_Gift.

GeometryZero: Improving Geometry Solving for LLM with Group Contrastive Policy Optimization

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, particularly in mathematical reasoning, amid which geometry problem solving remains a challenging area where auxiliary construction plays a enssential role. Existing approaches either achieve suboptimal performance or rely on massive LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o), incurring massive computational costs. We posit that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (e.g., GRPO) offers a promising direction for training smaller models that effectively combine auxiliary construction with robust geometric reasoning. However, directly applying GRPO to geometric reasoning presents fundamental limitations due to its dependence on unconditional rewards, which leads to indiscriminate and counterproductive auxiliary constructions. To address these challenges, we propose Group Contrastive Policy Optimization (GCPO), a novel reinforcement learning framework featuring two key innovations: (1) Group Contrastive Masking, which adaptively provides positive or negative reward signals for auxiliary construction based on contextual utility, and a (2) length reward that promotes longer reasoning chains. Building on GCPO, we develop GeometryZero, a family of affordable-size geometric reasoning models that judiciously determine when to employ auxiliary construction. Our extensive empirical evaluation across popular geometric benchmarks (Geometry3K, MathVista) demonstrates that GeometryZero models consistently outperform baselines (e.g. GRPO), achieving an average improvement of 4.29% across all benchmarks.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 8 2

What's In Your Field? Mapping Scientific Research with Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models

The scientific literature's exponential growth makes it increasingly challenging to navigate and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for understanding scientific text, but they fail to capture detailed relationships across large bodies of work. Unstructured approaches, like retrieval augmented generation, can sift through such corpora to recall relevant facts; however, when millions of facts influence the answer, unstructured approaches become cost prohibitive. Structured representations offer a natural complement -- enabling systematic analysis across the whole corpus. Recent work enhances LLMs with unstructured or semistructured representations of scientific concepts; to complement this, we try extracting structured representations using LLMs. By combining LLMs' semantic understanding with a schema of scientific concepts, we prototype a system that answers precise questions about the literature as a whole. Our schema applies across scientific fields and we extract concepts from it using only 20 manually annotated abstracts. To demonstrate the system, we extract concepts from 30,000 papers on arXiv spanning astrophysics, fluid dynamics, and evolutionary biology. The resulting database highlights emerging trends and, by visualizing the knowledge graph, offers new ways to explore the ever-growing landscape of scientific knowledge. Demo: abby101/surveyor-0 on HF Spaces. Code: https://github.com/chiral-carbon/kg-for-science.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 12

Text-Scene: A Scene-to-Language Parsing Framework for 3D Scene Understanding

Enabling agents to understand and interact with complex 3D scenes is a fundamental challenge for embodied artificial intelligence systems. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant progress in 2D image understanding, extending such capabilities to 3D scenes remains difficult: 1) 3D environment involves richer concepts such as spatial relationships, affordances, physics, layout, and so on, 2) the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language datasets has posed a significant obstacle. In this paper, we introduce Text-Scene, a framework that automatically parses 3D scenes into textual descriptions for scene understanding. Given a 3D scene, our model identifies object attributes and spatial relationships, and then generates a coherent summary of the whole scene, bridging the gap between 3D observation and language without requiring human-in-the-loop intervention. By leveraging both geometric analysis and MLLMs, Text-Scene produces descriptions that are accurate, detailed, and human-interpretable, capturing object-level details and global-level context. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate that our textual parses can faithfully represent 3D scenes and benefit downstream tasks. To evaluate the reasoning capability of MLLMs, we present InPlan3D, a comprehensive benchmark for 3D task planning, consisting of 3174 long-term planning tasks across 636 indoor scenes. We emphasize clarity and accessibility in our approach, aiming to make 3D scene content understandable through language. Code and datasets will be released.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 20

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Molecule Prediction Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) stand at the forefront of a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite the widespread adoption of LLMs in NLP, much of their potential in broader fields remains largely unexplored, and significant limitations persist in their design and implementation. Notably, LLMs struggle with structured data, such as graphs, and often falter when tasked with answering domain-specific questions requiring deep expertise, such as those in biology and chemistry. In this paper, we explore a fundamental question: Can LLMs effectively handle molecule prediction tasks? Rather than pursuing top-tier performance, our goal is to assess how LLMs can contribute to diverse molecule tasks. We identify several classification and regression prediction tasks across six standard molecule datasets. Subsequently, we carefully design a set of prompts to query LLMs on these tasks and compare their performance with existing Machine Learning (ML) models, which include text-based models and those specifically designed for analysing the geometric structure of molecules. Our investigation reveals several key insights: Firstly, LLMs generally lag behind ML models in achieving competitive performance on molecule tasks, particularly when compared to models adept at capturing the geometric structure of molecules, highlighting the constrained ability of LLMs to comprehend graph data. Secondly, LLMs show promise in enhancing the performance of ML models when used collaboratively. Lastly, we engage in a discourse regarding the challenges and promising avenues to harness LLMs for molecule prediction tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/zhiqiangzhongddu/LLMaMol.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 8, 2024

Explainable Semantic Space by Grounding Language to Vision with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

In natural language processing, most models try to learn semantic representations merely from texts. The learned representations encode the distributional semantics but fail to connect to any knowledge about the physical world. In contrast, humans learn language by grounding concepts in perception and action and the brain encodes grounded semantics for cognition. Inspired by this notion and recent work in vision-language learning, we design a two-stream model for grounding language learning in vision. The model includes a VGG-based visual stream and a Bert-based language stream. The two streams merge into a joint representational space. Through cross-modal contrastive learning, the model first learns to align visual and language representations with the MS COCO dataset. The model further learns to retrieve visual objects with language queries through a cross-modal attention module and to infer the visual relations between the retrieved objects through a bilinear operator with the Visual Genome dataset. After training, the language stream of this model is a stand-alone language model capable of embedding concepts in a visually grounded semantic space. This semantic space manifests principal dimensions explainable with human intuition and neurobiological knowledge. Word embeddings in this semantic space are predictive of human-defined norms of semantic features and are segregated into perceptually distinctive clusters. Furthermore, the visually grounded language model also enables compositional language understanding based on visual knowledge and multimodal image search with queries based on images, texts, or their combinations.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 13, 2021

MechGPT, a language-based strategy for mechanics and materials modeling that connects knowledge across scales, disciplines and modalities

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.

Euclid: Supercharging Multimodal LLMs with Synthetic High-Fidelity Visual Descriptions

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in recent years, yet continue to struggle with low-level visual perception (LLVP) -- particularly the ability to accurately describe the geometric details of an image. This capability is crucial for applications in areas such as robotics, medical image analysis, and manufacturing. In this paper, we first introduce Geoperception, a benchmark designed to evaluate an MLLM's ability to accurately transcribe 2D geometric information from an image. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate the limitations of leading MLLMs, and then conduct a comprehensive empirical study to explore strategies for improving their performance on geometric tasks. Our findings highlight the benefits of certain model architectures, training techniques, and data strategies, including the use of high-fidelity synthetic data and multi-stage training with a data curriculum. Notably, we find that a data curriculum enables models to learn challenging geometry understanding tasks which they fail to learn from scratch. Leveraging these insights, we develop Euclid, a family of models specifically optimized for strong low-level geometric perception. Although purely trained on synthetic multimodal data, Euclid shows strong generalization ability to novel geometry shapes. For instance, Euclid outperforms the best closed-source model, Gemini-1.5-Pro, by up to 58.56% on certain Geoperception benchmark tasks and 10.65% on average across all tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024 2

The Tensor Brain: Semantic Decoding for Perception and Memory

We analyse perception and memory, using mathematical models for knowledge graphs and tensors, to gain insights into the corresponding functionalities of the human mind. Our discussion is based on the concept of propositional sentences consisting of subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples for expressing elementary facts. SPO sentences are the basis for most natural languages but might also be important for explicit perception and declarative memories, as well as intra-brain communication and the ability to argue and reason. A set of SPO sentences can be described as a knowledge graph, which can be transformed into an adjacency tensor. We introduce tensor models, where concepts have dual representations as indices and associated embeddings, two constructs we believe are essential for the understanding of implicit and explicit perception and memory in the brain. We argue that a biological realization of perception and memory imposes constraints on information processing. In particular, we propose that explicit perception and declarative memories require a semantic decoder, which, in a simple realization, is based on four layers: First, a sensory memory layer, as a buffer for sensory input, second, an index layer representing concepts, third, a memoryless representation layer for the broadcasting of information ---the "blackboard", or the "canvas" of the brain--- and fourth, a working memory layer as a processing center and data buffer. We discuss the operations of the four layers and relate them to the global workspace theory. In a Bayesian brain interpretation, semantic memory defines the prior for observable triple statements. We propose that ---in evolution and during development--- semantic memory, episodic memory, and natural language evolved as emergent properties in agents' process to gain a deeper understanding of sensory information.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 29, 2020

Chasing Consistency in Text-to-3D Generation from a Single Image

Text-to-3D generation from a single-view image is a popular but challenging task in 3D vision. Although numerous methods have been proposed, existing works still suffer from the inconsistency issues, including 1) semantic inconsistency, 2) geometric inconsistency, and 3) saturation inconsistency, resulting in distorted, overfitted, and over-saturated generations. In light of the above issues, we present Consist3D, a three-stage framework Chasing for semantic-, geometric-, and saturation-Consistent Text-to-3D generation from a single image, in which the first two stages aim to learn parameterized consistency tokens, and the last stage is for optimization. Specifically, the semantic encoding stage learns a token independent of views and estimations, promoting semantic consistency and robustness. Meanwhile, the geometric encoding stage learns another token with comprehensive geometry and reconstruction constraints under novel-view estimations, reducing overfitting and encouraging geometric consistency. Finally, the optimization stage benefits from the semantic and geometric tokens, allowing a low classifier-free guidance scale and therefore preventing oversaturation. Experimental results demonstrate that Consist3D produces more consistent, faithful, and photo-realistic 3D assets compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, Consist3D also allows background and object editing through text prompts.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 7, 2023

Agentic 3D Scene Generation with Spatially Contextualized VLMs

Despite recent advances in multimodal content generation enabled by vision-language models (VLMs), their ability to reason about and generate structured 3D scenes remains largely underexplored. This limitation constrains their utility in spatially grounded tasks such as embodied AI, immersive simulations, and interactive 3D applications. We introduce a new paradigm that enables VLMs to generate, understand, and edit complex 3D environments by injecting a continually evolving spatial context. Constructed from multimodal input, this context consists of three components: a scene portrait that provides a high-level semantic blueprint, a semantically labeled point cloud capturing object-level geometry, and a scene hypergraph that encodes rich spatial relationships, including unary, binary, and higher-order constraints. Together, these components provide the VLM with a structured, geometry-aware working memory that integrates its inherent multimodal reasoning capabilities with structured 3D understanding for effective spatial reasoning. Building on this foundation, we develop an agentic 3D scene generation pipeline in which the VLM iteratively reads from and updates the spatial context. The pipeline features high-quality asset generation with geometric restoration, environment setup with automatic verification, and ergonomic adjustment guided by the scene hypergraph. Experiments show that our framework can handle diverse and challenging inputs, achieving a level of generalization not observed in prior work. Further results demonstrate that injecting spatial context enables VLMs to perform downstream tasks such as interactive scene editing and path planning, suggesting strong potential for spatially intelligent systems in computer graphics, 3D vision, and embodied applications.

  • 3 authors
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May 26

Lowis3D: Language-Driven Open-World Instance-Level 3D Scene Understanding

Open-world instance-level scene understanding aims to locate and recognize unseen object categories that are not present in the annotated dataset. This task is challenging because the model needs to both localize novel 3D objects and infer their semantic categories. A key factor for the recent progress in 2D open-world perception is the availability of large-scale image-text pairs from the Internet, which cover a wide range of vocabulary concepts. However, this success is hard to replicate in 3D scenarios due to the scarcity of 3D-text pairs. To address this challenge, we propose to harness pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models that encode extensive knowledge from image-text pairs to generate captions for multi-view images of 3D scenes. This allows us to establish explicit associations between 3D shapes and semantic-rich captions. Moreover, to enhance the fine-grained visual-semantic representation learning from captions for object-level categorization, we design hierarchical point-caption association methods to learn semantic-aware embeddings that exploit the 3D geometry between 3D points and multi-view images. In addition, to tackle the localization challenge for novel classes in the open-world setting, we develop debiased instance localization, which involves training object grouping modules on unlabeled data using instance-level pseudo supervision. This significantly improves the generalization capabilities of instance grouping and thus the ability to accurately locate novel objects. We conduct extensive experiments on 3D semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks, covering indoor and outdoor scenes across three datasets. Our method outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin in semantic segmentation (e.g. 34.5%sim65.3%), instance segmentation (e.g. 21.8%sim54.0%) and panoptic segmentation (e.g. 14.7%sim43.3%). Code will be available.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 1, 2023

SUGARCREPE++ Dataset: Vision-Language Model Sensitivity to Semantic and Lexical Alterations

Despite their remarkable successes, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including vision-and-language models (VLMs) and unimodal language models (ULMs), fail to understand precise semantics. For example, semantically equivalent sentences expressed using different lexical compositions elicit diverging representations. The degree of this divergence and its impact on encoded semantics is not very well understood. In this paper, we introduce the SUGARCREPE++ dataset to analyze the sensitivity of VLMs and ULMs to lexical and semantic alterations. Each sample in SUGARCREPE++ dataset consists of an image and a corresponding triplet of captions: a pair of semantically equivalent but lexically different positive captions and one hard negative caption. This poses a 3-way semantic (in)equivalence problem to the language models. We comprehensively evaluate VLMs and ULMs that differ in architecture, pre-training objectives and datasets to benchmark the performance of SUGARCREPE++ dataset. Experimental results highlight the difficulties of VLMs in distinguishing between lexical and semantic variations, particularly in object attributes and spatial relations. Although VLMs with larger pre-training datasets, model sizes, and multiple pre-training objectives achieve better performance on SUGARCREPE++, there is a significant opportunity for improvement. We show that all the models which achieve better performance on compositionality datasets need not perform equally well on SUGARCREPE++, signifying that compositionality alone may not be sufficient for understanding semantic and lexical alterations. Given the importance of the property that the SUGARCREPE++ dataset targets, it serves as a new challenge to the vision-and-language community.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024

Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3D

Reconstructing and understanding 3D structures from a limited number of images is a well-established problem in computer vision. Traditional methods usually break this task into multiple subtasks, each requiring complex transformations between different data representations. For instance, dense reconstruction through Structure-from-Motion (SfM) involves converting images into key points, optimizing camera parameters, and estimating structures. Afterward, accurate sparse reconstructions are required for further dense modeling, which is subsequently fed into task-specific neural networks. This multi-step process results in considerable processing time and increased engineering complexity. In this work, we present the Large Spatial Model (LSM), which processes unposed RGB images directly into semantic radiance fields. LSM simultaneously estimates geometry, appearance, and semantics in a single feed-forward operation, and it can generate versatile label maps by interacting with language at novel viewpoints. Leveraging a Transformer-based architecture, LSM integrates global geometry through pixel-aligned point maps. To enhance spatial attribute regression, we incorporate local context aggregation with multi-scale fusion, improving the accuracy of fine local details. To tackle the scarcity of labeled 3D semantic data and enable natural language-driven scene manipulation, we incorporate a pre-trained 2D language-based segmentation model into a 3D-consistent semantic feature field. An efficient decoder then parameterizes a set of semantic anisotropic Gaussians, facilitating supervised end-to-end learning. Extensive experiments across various tasks show that LSM unifies multiple 3D vision tasks directly from unposed images, achieving real-time semantic 3D reconstruction for the first time.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

Distilling Coarse-to-Fine Semantic Matching Knowledge for Weakly Supervised 3D Visual Grounding

3D visual grounding involves finding a target object in a 3D scene that corresponds to a given sentence query. Although many approaches have been proposed and achieved impressive performance, they all require dense object-sentence pair annotations in 3D point clouds, which are both time-consuming and expensive. To address the problem that fine-grained annotated data is difficult to obtain, we propose to leverage weakly supervised annotations to learn the 3D visual grounding model, i.e., only coarse scene-sentence correspondences are used to learn object-sentence links. To accomplish this, we design a novel semantic matching model that analyzes the semantic similarity between object proposals and sentences in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, we first extract object proposals and coarsely select the top-K candidates based on feature and class similarity matrices. Next, we reconstruct the masked keywords of the sentence using each candidate one by one, and the reconstructed accuracy finely reflects the semantic similarity of each candidate to the query. Additionally, we distill the coarse-to-fine semantic matching knowledge into a typical two-stage 3D visual grounding model, which reduces inference costs and improves performance by taking full advantage of the well-studied structure of the existing architectures. We conduct extensive experiments on ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 18, 2023

JanusVLN: Decoupling Semantics and Spatiality with Dual Implicit Memory for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation requires an embodied agent to navigate through unseen environments, guided by natural language instructions and a continuous video stream. Recent advances in VLN have been driven by the powerful semantic understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models. However, these methods typically rely on explicit semantic memory, such as building textual cognitive maps or storing historical visual frames. This type of method suffers from spatial information loss, computational redundancy, and memory bloat, which impede efficient navigation. Inspired by the implicit scene representation in human navigation, analogous to the left brain's semantic understanding and the right brain's spatial cognition, we propose JanusVLN, a novel VLN framework featuring a dual implicit neural memory that models spatial-geometric and visual-semantic memory as separate, compact, and fixed-size neural representations. This framework first extends the MLLM to incorporate 3D prior knowledge from the spatial-geometric encoder, thereby enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of models based solely on RGB input. Then, the historical key-value caches from the spatial-geometric and visual-semantic encoders are constructed into a dual implicit memory. By retaining only the KVs of tokens in the initial and sliding window, redundant computation is avoided, enabling efficient incremental updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JanusVLN outperforms over 20 recent methods to achieve SOTA performance. For example, the success rate improves by 10.5-35.5 compared to methods using multiple data types as input and by 3.6-10.8 compared to methods using more RGB training data. This indicates that the proposed dual implicit neural memory, as a novel paradigm, explores promising new directions for future VLN research. Ours project page: https://miv-xjtu.github.io/JanusVLN.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26 1

Learning semantic sentence representations from visually grounded language without lexical knowledge

Current approaches to learning semantic representations of sentences often use prior word-level knowledge. The current study aims to leverage visual information in order to capture sentence level semantics without the need for word embeddings. We use a multimodal sentence encoder trained on a corpus of images with matching text captions to produce visually grounded sentence embeddings. Deep Neural Networks are trained to map the two modalities to a common embedding space such that for an image the corresponding caption can be retrieved and vice versa. We show that our model achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art on two popular image-caption retrieval benchmark data sets: MSCOCO and Flickr8k. We evaluate the semantic content of the resulting sentence embeddings using the data from the Semantic Textual Similarity benchmark task and show that the multimodal embeddings correlate well with human semantic similarity judgements. The system achieves state-of-the-art results on several of these benchmarks, which shows that a system trained solely on multimodal data, without assuming any word representations, is able to capture sentence level semantics. Importantly, this result shows that we do not need prior knowledge of lexical level semantics in order to model sentence level semantics. These findings demonstrate the importance of visual information in semantics.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 27, 2019

Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations

Despite progress in perceptual tasks such as image classification, computers still perform poorly on cognitive tasks such as image description and question answering. Cognition is core to tasks that involve not just recognizing, but reasoning about our visual world. However, models used to tackle the rich content in images for cognitive tasks are still being trained using the same datasets designed for perceptual tasks. To achieve success at cognitive tasks, models need to understand the interactions and relationships between objects in an image. When asked "What vehicle is the person riding?", computers will need to identify the objects in an image as well as the relationships riding(man, carriage) and pulling(horse, carriage) in order to answer correctly that "the person is riding a horse-drawn carriage". In this paper, we present the Visual Genome dataset to enable the modeling of such relationships. We collect dense annotations of objects, attributes, and relationships within each image to learn these models. Specifically, our dataset contains over 100K images where each image has an average of 21 objects, 18 attributes, and 18 pairwise relationships between objects. We canonicalize the objects, attributes, relationships, and noun phrases in region descriptions and questions answer pairs to WordNet synsets. Together, these annotations represent the densest and largest dataset of image descriptions, objects, attributes, relationships, and question answers.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 23, 2016

Can Linguistic Knowledge Improve Multimodal Alignment in Vision-Language Pretraining?

The multimedia community has shown a significant interest in perceiving and representing the physical world with multimodal pretrained neural network models, and among them, the visual-language pertaining (VLP) is, currently, the most captivating topic. However, there have been few endeavors dedicated to the exploration of 1) whether essential linguistic knowledge (e.g., semantics and syntax) can be extracted during VLP, and 2) how such linguistic knowledge impact or enhance the multimodal alignment. In response, here we aim to elucidate the impact of comprehensive linguistic knowledge, including semantic expression and syntactic structure, on multimodal alignment. Specifically, we design and release the SNARE, the first large-scale multimodal alignment probing benchmark, to detect the vital linguistic components, e.g., lexical, semantic, and syntax knowledge, containing four tasks: Semantic structure, Negation logic, Attribute ownership, and Relationship composition. Based on our proposed probing benchmarks, our holistic analyses of five advanced VLP models illustrate that the VLP model: i) shows insensitivity towards complex syntax structures and relies on content words for sentence comprehension; ii) demonstrates limited comprehension of combinations between sentences and negations; iii) faces challenges in determining the presence of actions or spatial relationships within visual information and struggles with verifying the correctness of triple combinations. We make our benchmark and code available at https://github.com/WangFei-2019/SNARE/.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 24, 2023

GeoSketch: A Neural-Symbolic Approach to Geometric Multimodal Reasoning with Auxiliary Line Construction and Affine Transformation

Geometric Problem Solving (GPS) poses a unique challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring not only the joint interpretation of text and diagrams but also iterative visuospatial reasoning. While existing approaches process diagrams as static images, they lack the capacity for dynamic manipulation - a core aspect of human geometric reasoning involving auxiliary line construction and affine transformations. We present GeoSketch, a neural-symbolic framework that recasts geometric reasoning as an interactive perception-reasoning-action loop. GeoSketch integrates: (1) a Perception module that abstracts diagrams into structured logic forms, (2) a Symbolic Reasoning module that applies geometric theorems to decide the next deductive step, and (3) a Sketch Action module that executes operations such as drawing auxiliary lines or applying transformations, thereby updating the diagram in a closed loop. To train this agent, we develop a two-stage pipeline: supervised fine-tuning on 2,000 symbolic-curated trajectories followed by reinforcement learning with dense, symbolic rewards to enhance robustness and strategic exploration. To evaluate this paradigm, we introduce the GeoSketch Benchmark, a high-quality set of 390 geometry problems requiring auxiliary construction or affine transformations. Experiments on strong MLLM baselines demonstrate that GeoSketch significantly improves stepwise reasoning accuracy and problem-solving success over static perception methods. By unifying hierarchical decision-making, executable visual actions, and symbolic verification, GeoSketch advances multimodal reasoning from static interpretation to dynamic, verifiable interaction, establishing a new foundation for solving complex visuospatial problems.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 26

LESS: Label-Efficient and Single-Stage Referring 3D Segmentation

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

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

COFAR: Commonsense and Factual Reasoning in Image Search

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries - (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii) Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce - namely COFAR. We make our code and dataset available at https://vl2g.github.io/projects/cofar

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 16, 2022

Semantic Score Distillation Sampling for Compositional Text-to-3D Generation

Generating high-quality 3D assets from textual descriptions remains a pivotal challenge in computer graphics and vision research. Due to the scarcity of 3D data, state-of-the-art approaches utilize pre-trained 2D diffusion priors, optimized through Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). Despite progress, crafting complex 3D scenes featuring multiple objects or intricate interactions is still difficult. To tackle this, recent methods have incorporated box or layout guidance. However, these layout-guided compositional methods often struggle to provide fine-grained control, as they are generally coarse and lack expressiveness. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel SDS approach, Semantic Score Distillation Sampling (SemanticSDS), designed to effectively improve the expressiveness and accuracy of compositional text-to-3D generation. Our approach integrates new semantic embeddings that maintain consistency across different rendering views and clearly differentiate between various objects and parts. These embeddings are transformed into a semantic map, which directs a region-specific SDS process, enabling precise optimization and compositional generation. By leveraging explicit semantic guidance, our method unlocks the compositional capabilities of existing pre-trained diffusion models, thereby achieving superior quality in 3D content generation, particularly for complex objects and scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our SemanticSDS framework is highly effective for generating state-of-the-art complex 3D content. Code: https://github.com/YangLing0818/SemanticSDS-3D

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024 2

Human-like object concept representations emerge naturally in multimodal large language models

Understanding how humans conceptualize and categorize natural objects offers critical insights into perception and cognition. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), a key question arises: can these models develop human-like object representations from linguistic and multimodal data? In this study, we combined behavioral and neuroimaging analyses to explore the relationship between object concept representations in LLMs and human cognition. We collected 4.7 million triplet judgments from LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to derive low-dimensional embeddings that capture the similarity structure of 1,854 natural objects. The resulting 66-dimensional embeddings were stable, predictive, and exhibited semantic clustering similar to human mental representations. Remarkably, the dimensions underlying these embeddings were interpretable, suggesting that LLMs and MLLMs develop human-like conceptual representations of objects. Further analysis showed strong alignment between model embeddings and neural activity patterns in brain regions such as EBA, PPA, RSC, and FFA. This provides compelling evidence that the object representations in LLMs, while not identical to human ones, share fundamental similarities that reflect key aspects of human conceptual knowledge. Our findings advance the understanding of machine intelligence and inform the development of more human-like artificial cognitive systems.

  • 13 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024

MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in textual reasoning, they struggle with mathematical domains like geometry that intrinsically rely on visual aids. Existing approaches to Visual Chain-of-Thought (VCoT) are often limited by rigid external tools or fail to generate the high-fidelity, strategically-timed diagrams necessary for complex problem-solving. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathCanvas, a comprehensive framework designed to endow unified Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with intrinsic VCoT capabilities for mathematics. Our approach consists of two phases. First, a Visual Manipulation stage pre-trains the model on a novel 15.2M-pair corpus, comprising 10M caption-to-diagram pairs (MathCanvas-Imagen) and 5.2M step-by-step editing trajectories (MathCanvas-Edit), to master diagram generation and editing. Second, a Strategic Visual-Aided Reasoning stage fine-tunes the model on MathCanvas-Instruct, a new 219K-example dataset of interleaved visual-textual reasoning paths, teaching it when and how to leverage visual aids. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce MathCanvas-Bench, a challenging benchmark with 3K problems that require models to produce interleaved visual-textual solutions. Our model, BAGEL-Canvas, trained under this framework, achieves an 86% relative improvement over strong LMM baselines on MathCanvas-Bench, demonstrating excellent generalization to other public math benchmarks. Our work provides a complete toolkit-framework, datasets, and benchmark-to unlock complex, human-like visual-aided reasoning in LMMs. Project Page: https://mathcanvas.github.io/

Comprehension Without Competence: Architectural Limits of LLMs in Symbolic Computation and Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) display striking surface fluency yet systematically fail at tasks requiring symbolic reasoning, arithmetic accuracy, and logical consistency. This paper offers a structural diagnosis of such failures, revealing a persistent gap between comprehension and competence. Through controlled experiments and architectural analysis, we demonstrate that LLMs often articulate correct principles without reliably applying them--a failure rooted not in knowledge access, but in computational execution. We term this phenomenon the computational split-brain syndrome, where instruction and action pathways are geometrically and functionally dissociated. This core limitation recurs across domains, from mathematical operations to relational inferences, and explains why model behavior remains brittle even under idealized prompting. We argue that LLMs function as powerful pattern completion engines, but lack the architectural scaffolding for principled, compositional reasoning. Our findings delineate the boundary of current LLM capabilities and motivate future models with metacognitive control, principle lifting, and structurally grounded execution. This diagnosis also clarifies why mechanistic interpretability findings may reflect training-specific pattern coordination rather than universal computational principles, and why the geometric separation between instruction and execution pathways suggests limitations in neural introspection and mechanistic analysis.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 14 1

Reasoning Paths with Reference Objects Elicit Quantitative Spatial Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models

Despite recent advances demonstrating vision-language models' (VLMs) abilities to describe complex relationships in images using natural language, their capability to quantitatively reason about object sizes and distances remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a manually annotated benchmark, Q-Spatial Bench, with 271 questions across five categories designed for quantitative spatial reasoning and systematically investigate the performance of state-of-the-art VLMs on this task. Our analysis reveals that reasoning about distances between objects is particularly challenging for SoTA VLMs; however, some VLMs significantly outperform others, with an over 40-point gap between the two best performing models. We also make the surprising observation that the success rate of the top-performing VLM increases by 19 points when a reasoning path using a reference object emerges naturally in the response. Inspired by this observation, we develop a zero-shot prompting technique, SpatialPrompt, that encourages VLMs to answer quantitative spatial questions using reference objects as visual cues. By instructing VLMs to use reference objects in their reasoning paths via SpatialPrompt, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and GPT-4V improve their success rates by over 40, 20, and 30 points, respectively. We emphasize that these significant improvements are obtained without needing more data, model architectural modifications, or fine-tuning.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15, 2024

Forgotten Polygons: Multimodal Large Language Models are Shape-Blind

Despite strong performance on vision-language tasks, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with mathematical problem-solving, with both open-source and state-of-the-art models falling short of human performance on visual-math benchmarks. To systematically examine visual-mathematical reasoning in MLLMs, we (1) evaluate their understanding of geometric primitives, (2) test multi-step reasoning, and (3) explore a potential solution to improve visual reasoning capabilities. Our findings reveal fundamental shortcomings in shape recognition, with top models achieving under 50% accuracy in identifying regular polygons. We analyze these failures through the lens of dual-process theory and show that MLLMs rely on System 1 (intuitive, memorized associations) rather than System 2 (deliberate reasoning). Consequently, MLLMs fail to count the sides of both familiar and novel shapes, suggesting they have neither learned the concept of sides nor effectively process visual inputs. Finally, we propose Visually Cued Chain-of-Thought (VC-CoT) prompting, which enhances multi-step mathematical reasoning by explicitly referencing visual annotations in diagrams, boosting GPT-4o's accuracy on an irregular polygon side-counting task from 7% to 93%. Our findings suggest that System 2 reasoning in MLLMs remains an open problem, and visually-guided prompting is essential for successfully engaging visual reasoning. Code available at: https://github.com/rsinghlab/Shape-Blind.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 21

Proposing and solving olympiad geometry with guided tree search

Mathematics olympiads are prestigious competitions, with problem proposing and solving highly honored. Building artificial intelligence that proposes and solves olympiads presents an unresolved challenge in automated theorem discovery and proving, especially in geometry for its combination of numerical and spatial elements. We introduce TongGeometry, a Euclidean geometry system supporting tree-search-based guided problem proposing and solving. The efficient geometry system establishes the most extensive repository of geometry theorems to date: within the same computational budget as the existing state-of-the-art, TongGeometry discovers 6.7 billion geometry theorems requiring auxiliary constructions, including 4.1 billion exhibiting geometric symmetry. Among them, 10 theorems were proposed to regional mathematical olympiads with 3 of TongGeometry's proposals selected in real competitions, earning spots in a national team qualifying exam or a top civil olympiad in China and the US. Guided by fine-tuned large language models, TongGeometry solved all International Mathematical Olympiad geometry in IMO-AG-30, outperforming gold medalists for the first time. It also surpasses the existing state-of-the-art across a broader spectrum of olympiad-level problems. The full capabilities of the system can be utilized on a consumer-grade machine, making the model more accessible and fostering widespread democratization of its use. By analogy, unlike existing systems that merely solve problems like students, TongGeometry acts like a geometry coach, discovering, presenting, and proving theorems.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024

Extracting Mathematical Concepts with Large Language Models

We extract mathematical concepts from mathematical text using generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, contributing to the field of automatic term extraction (ATE) and mathematical text processing, and also to the study of LLMs themselves. Our work builds on that of others in that we aim for automatic extraction of terms (keywords) in one mathematical field, category theory, using as a corpus the 755 abstracts from a snapshot of the online journal "Theory and Applications of Categories", circa 2020. Where our study diverges from previous work is in (1) providing a more thorough analysis of what makes mathematical term extraction a difficult problem to begin with; (2) paying close attention to inter-annotator disagreements; (3) providing a set of guidelines which both human and machine annotators could use to standardize the extraction process; (4) introducing a new annotation tool to help humans with ATE, applicable to any mathematical field and even beyond mathematics; (5) using prompts to ChatGPT as part of the extraction process, and proposing best practices for such prompts; and (6) raising the question of whether ChatGPT could be used as an annotator on the same level as human experts. Our overall findings are that the matter of mathematical ATE is an interesting field which can benefit from participation by LLMs, but LLMs themselves cannot at this time surpass human performance on it.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 29, 2023