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Yinfei Yang

48 accepted papers

2026

Learning Structured Reasoning via Tractable Trajectory Control

ICML 2026spotlight

Large language models can exhibit emergent reasoning behaviors, often manifested as recurring lexical patterns (e.g., “wait,” indicating verification). However, complex reasoning trajectories remain sparse in unconstrained sampling, and standard RL often fails to guarantee the acquisition of diverse…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MANZANO: A Simple and Scalable Unified Multimodal Model with a Hybrid Vision Tokenizer

ICLR 2026poster

Unified multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) that can both understand and generate visual content hold immense potential. However, existing open-source models often suffer from a performance trade-off between these capabilities. We present Manzano, a simple and scalable unified framework that sub…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing

CVPR 2026

Recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated remarkable text-guided image editing capabilities, with systems like GPT-4o and Nano-Banana setting new benchmarks. However, the research community's progress remains constrained by the absence of large-scale, high-quality, and openly accessible

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SO-Bench: A Structural Output Evaluation of Multimodal LLM

CVPR 2026

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world, agentic settings where outputs must not only be correct, but also conform to pre-defined data schemas. Despite recent progress in structured generation in textual domain, there is still no benchmark that systematically

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

UniGen-1.5: Enhancing Image Generation and Editing through Reward Unification in RL

CVPR 2026

We present UniGen-1.5, a unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) for advanced image understanding, generation and editing. Building upon UniGen, we comprehensively enhance the model architecture and training pipeline to strengthen the image understanding and generation capabilities while unlo

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

iGRPO: Fast Online RL for Flow Matching Model with Dense Reward

ICML 2026poster

Conventional practice assumes that online reinforcement learning for flow-matching models requires sampling full denoising trajectories to compute rewards. This assumption underlies methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), where the policy must traverse the entire reverse process b…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CAR-Flow: Condition-Aware Reparameterization Aligns Source and Target for Better Flow Matching

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Conditional generative modeling aims to learn a conditional data distribution from samples containing data-condition pairs. For this, diffusion and flow-based methods have attained compelling results. These methods use a learned (flow) model to transport an initial standard Gaussian noise that ignor…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CLIP-UP: A Simple and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts CLIP Training Recipe with Sparse Upcycling

EMNLP 2025

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are crucial for scaling model capacity while controlling inference costs. While integrating MoE into multimodal models like CLIP improves performance, training these models is notoriously challenging and expensive. We propose CLIP-Upcycling (CLIP-UP), an efficient alt

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Contrastive Localized Language-Image Pre-Training

ICML 2025poster

CLIP has been a celebrated method for training vision encoders to generate image/text representations facilitating various applications. Recently, it has been widely adopted as the vision backbone of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The success of CLIP relies on aligning web-crawled noisy t…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

Ferret-UI 2: Mastering Universal User Interface Understanding Across Platforms

ICLR 2025poster

Building a generalist model for user interface (UI) understanding is challenging due to various foundational issues, such as platform diversity, resolution variation, and data limitation. In this paper, we introduce Ferret-UI 2, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) designed for universal UI unde…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning

ACL 2025long

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes often relying on datasets dominated by short annotations with minimal rationales. In this work, we show that training VLM on short answer…

2025

MIA-Bench: Towards Better Instruction Following Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Effective evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is essential for understanding their capabilities and limitations. In this paper, we introduce MIA-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess MLLMs’ ability to strictly adhere to complex instructions. Our benchmark comprises a diverse set o…

2025

MM-Spatial: Exploring 3D Spatial Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

ICCV 2025poster

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at 2D visual understanding but remain limited in their ability to reason about 3D space. In this work, we leverage large-scale high-quality 3D scene data with open-set annotations to introduce 1) a novel supervised fine-tuning dataset and 2) a new evalu…

2025

MM1.5: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Fine-tuning

ICLR 2025poster

We present MM1.5, a new family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) designed to enhance capabilities in text-rich image understanding, visual referring and grounding, and multi-image reasoning. Building upon the MM1 architecture, MM1.5 adopts a data-centric approach to model training, systema…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2025

MMEgo: Towards Building Egocentric Multimodal LLMs for Video QA

ICLR 2025poster

This research aims to comprehensively explore building a multimodal foundation model for egocentric video understanding. To achieve this goal, we work on three fronts. First, as there is a lack of QA data for egocentric video understanding, we automatically generate 7M high-quality QA samples for e…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Multimodal Autoregressive Pre-training of Large Vision Encoders

CVPR 2025highlight

We introduce a novel method for pre-training of large-scale vision encoders. Building on recent advancements in autoregressive pre-training of vision models, we extend this framework to a multimodal setting, i.e., images and text. In this paper, we present AIMV2, a family of generalist vision encode…

2025

Revisit Large-Scale Image-Caption Data in Pre-training Multimodal Foundation Models

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

STIV: Scalable Text and Image Conditioned Video Generation

ICCV 2025poster

We present a simple and scalable text and image conditioned video generation method. Our approach, named STIV, integrates a variable number of image conditions into a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) through frame replacement. This design enables STIV to perform both text-to-video (T2V) and text-image-to…

2025

UniGen: Enhanced Training & Test-Time Strategies for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce UniGen, a unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) capable of image understanding and generation. We study the full training pipeline of UniGen from a data-centric perspective, including multi-stage pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and direct preference optimization. More imp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

UniVG: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Unified Image Generation and Editing

ICCV 2025poster

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have shown impressive results in generating visually compelling images following user prompts. Building on this, various methods further fine-tune the pre-trained T2I model for specific tasks. However, this requires separate model architectures, training designs,…

2024

"MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training"

ECCV 2024poster

"In this work, we discuss building performant Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In particular, we study the importance of various architecture components and data choices. Through careful and comprehensive ablations of the image encoder, the vision language connector, and various pre-trainin…

2024

Compressing LLMs: The Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple

ICLR 2024poster

Despite their remarkable achievements, modern Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter exorbitant computational and memory footprints. Recently, several works have shown significant success in *training-free* and *data-free* compression (pruning and quantization) of LLMs achieving 50-60\% sparsity an…

2024

Ferret-UI: Grounded Mobile UI Understanding with Multimodal LLMs

ECCV 2024poster

"Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been noteworthy, yet, these general-domain MLLMs often fall short in their ability to comprehend and interact effectively with user interface (UI) screens. In this paper, we present Ferret-UI, a new MLLM tailored for enhanced unde…

Cited by 109SourcePDFScholar
2024

Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity

ICLR 2024spotlight

We introduce Ferret, a new Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) capable of understanding spatial referring of any shape or granularity within an image and accurately grounding open-vocabulary descriptions. To unify referring and grounding in the LLM paradigm, Ferret employs a novel and powerful hy…

2024

Guiding Instruction-based Image Editing via Multimodal Large Language Models

ICLR 2024spotlight

Instruction-based image editing improves the controllability and flexibility of image manipulation via natural commands without elaborate descriptions or regional masks. However, human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow. Multimodal large language models (M…

2024

MOFI: Learning Image Representations from Noisy Entity Annotated Images

ICLR 2024poster

We present MOFI, Manifold OF Images, a new vision foundation model designed to learn image representations from noisy entity annotated images. MOFI differs from previous work in two key aspects: 1. pre-training data, and 2. training recipe. Regarding data, we introduce a new approach to automaticall…

2024

VeCLIP: Improving CLIP Training via Visual-enriched Captions

ECCV 2024poster

"Large-scale web-crawled datasets are fundamental for the success of pre-training vision-language models, such as CLIP. However, the inherent noise and potential irrelevance of web-crawled AltTexts pose challenges in achieving precise image-text alignment. Existing methods utilizing large language m…

2023

A New Path: Scaling Vision-and-Language Navigation With Synthetic Instructions and Imitation Learning

CVPR 2023poster

Recent studies in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) train RL agents to execute natural-language navigation instructions in photorealistic environments, as a step towards robots that can follow human instructions. However, given the scarcity of human instruction data and limited diversity in the t…

2023

DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics

EMNLP 2023short findings

Automated summary quality assessment falls into two categories: reference-based and reference-free. Reference-based metrics, historically deemed more accurate due to the additional information provided by human-written references, are limited by their reliance on human input. In this paper, we hypot…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Masked Autoencoding Does Not Help Natural Language Supervision at Scale

CVPR 2023poster

Self supervision and natural language supervision have emerged as two exciting ways to train general purpose image encoders which excel at a variety of downstream tasks. Recent works such as M3AE (Geng et al 2022) and SLIP (Mu et al 2022) have suggested that these approaches can be effectively combi…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Perceptual Grouping in Contrastive Vision-Language Models

ICCV 2023poster

Recent advances in zero-shot image recognition suggest that vision-language models learn generic visual representations with a high degree of semantic information that may be arbitrarily probed with natural language phrases. Understanding an image, however, is not just about understanding what conte…

Cited by 53PDFScholar
2023

Robustness in Multimodal Learning under Train-Test Modality Mismatch

ICML 2023poster

Multimodal learning is defined as learning over multiple heterogeneous input modalities such as video, audio, and text. In this work, we are concerned with understanding how models behave as the type of modalities differ between training and deployment, a situation that naturally arises in many appl…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

STAIR: Learning Sparse Text and Image Representation in Grounded Tokens

EMNLP 2023long main

Image and text retrieval is one of the foundational tasks in the vision and language domain with multiple real-world applications. State-of-the-art contrastive approaches, e.g. CLIP, ALIGN, represent images and texts as dense embeddings and calculate the similarity in the dense embedding space as th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Simple and Effective Synthesis of Indoor 3D Scenes

AAAI 2023technical

We study the problem of synthesizing immersive 3D indoor scenes from one or a few images. Our aim is to generate high-resolution images and videos from novel viewpoints, including viewpoints that extrapolate far beyond the input images while maintaining 3D consistency. Existing approaches are highly…

2022

Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding

ACL 2022long

While BERT is an effective method for learning monolingual sentence embeddings for semantic similarity and embedding based transfer learning BERT based cross-lingual sentence embeddings have yet to be explored. We systematically investigate methods for learning multilingual sentence embeddings by co…

2022

Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers

EMNLP 2022main

It has been shown that dual encoders trained on one domain often fail to generalize to other domains for retrieval tasks. One widespread belief is that the bottleneck layer of a dual encoder, where the final score is simply a dot-product between a query vector and a passage vector, is too limited co…

2022

LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences

NAACL 2022findings

Recent work has shown that either (1) increasing the input length or (2) increasing model size can improve the performance of Transformer-based neural models. In this paper, we present LongT5, a new model that explores the effects of scaling both the input length and model size at the same time. Spe…

2022

Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models

ACL 2022findings

We provide the first exploration of sentence embeddings from text-to-text transformers (T5) including the effects of scaling up sentence encoders to 11B parameters. Sentence embeddings are broadly useful for language processing tasks. While T5 achieves impressive performance on language tasks, it is…

2022

SueNes: A Weakly Supervised Approach to Evaluating Single-Document Summarization via Negative Sampling

NAACL 2022long

Canonical automatic summary evaluation metrics, such as ROUGE, focus on lexical similarity which cannot well capture semantics nor linguistic quality and require a reference summary which is costly to obtain. Recently, there have been a growing number of efforts to alleviate either or both of the tw…

2021

A Simple and Effective Method To Eliminate the Self Language Bias in Multilingual Representations

EMNLP 2021main

Language agnostic and semantic-language information isolation is an emerging research direction for multilingual representations models. We explore this problem from a novel angle of geometric algebra and semantic space. A simple but highly effective method “Language Information Removal (LIR)” facto…

2021

Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation

CVPR 2021poster

The output of text-to-image synthesis systems should be coherent, clear, photo-realistic scenes with high semantic fidelity to their conditioned text descriptions. Our Cross-Modal Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network (XMC-GAN) addresses this challenge by maximizing the mutual information betwe…

Cited by 434PDFcodeScholar
2021

MURAL: Multimodal, Multitask Representations Across Languages

EMNLP 2021finding

Both image-caption pairs and translation pairs provide the means to learn deep representations of and connections between languages. We use both types of pairs in MURAL (MUltimodal, MUltitask Representations Across Languages), a dual encoder that solves two tasks: 1) image-text matching and 2) trans…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2021

Multi-stage Training with Improved Negative Contrast for Neural Passage Retrieval

EMNLP 2021main

In the context of neural passage retrieval, we study three promising techniques: synthetic data generation, negative sampling, and fusion. We systematically investigate how these techniques contribute to the performance of the retrieval system and how they complement each other. We propose a multi-s…

2021

Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation

ACL 2021short

Early fusion models with cross-attention have shown better-than-human performance on some question answer benchmarks, while it is a poor fit for retrieval since it prevents pre-computation of the answer representations. We present a supervised data mining method using an accurate early fusion model…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar
2021

Pathdreamer: A World Model for Indoor Navigation

ICCV 2021poster

People navigating in unfamiliar buildings take advantage of myriad visual, spatial and semantic cues to efficiently achieve their navigation goals. Towards equipping computational agents with similar capabilities, we introduce Pathdreamer, a visual world model for agents navigating in novel indoor e…

Cited by 82PDFcodeScholar
2021

Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision

ICML 2021oral

Pre-trained representations are becoming crucial for many NLP and perception tasks. While representation learning in NLP has transitioned to training on raw text without human annotations, visual and vision-language representations still rely heavily on curated training datasets that are expensive o…

Cited by 4467SourcePDFScholar
2021

Universal Sentence Representation Learning with Conditional Masked Language Model

EMNLP 2021main

This paper presents a novel training method, Conditional Masked Language Modeling (CMLM), to effectively learn sentence representations on large scale unlabeled corpora. CMLM integrates sentence representation learning into MLM training by conditioning on the encoded vectors of adjacent sentences. O…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar