Daily Papers

AI personal assistants deployed via robots or wearables require embodied understanding to collaborate with humans effectively. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. To address this gap, we propose three key contributions. First, we introduce the Egocentric Video Understanding Dataset (EVUD) for training VLMs on video captioning and question answering tasks specific to egocentric videos. Second, we present AlanaVLM, a 7B parameter VLM trained using parameter-efficient methods on EVUD. Finally, we evaluate AlanaVLM's capabilities on OpenEQA, a challenging benchmark for embodied video question answering. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming open-source models including strong Socratic models using GPT-4 as a planner by 3.6%. Additionally, we outperform Claude 3 and Gemini Pro Vision 1.0 and showcase competitive results compared to Gemini Pro 1.5 and GPT-4V, even surpassing the latter in spatial reasoning. This research paves the way for building efficient VLMs that can be deployed in robots or wearables, leveraging embodied video understanding to collaborate seamlessly with humans in everyday tasks, contributing to the next generation of Embodied AI.

Many clinical tasks require an understanding of specialized data, such as medical images and genomics, which is not typically found in general-purpose large multimodal models. Building upon Gemini's multimodal models, we develop several models within the new Med-Gemini family that inherit core capabilities of Gemini and are optimized for medical use via fine-tuning with 2D and 3D radiology, histopathology, ophthalmology, dermatology and genomic data. Med-Gemini-2D sets a new standard for AI-based chest X-ray (CXR) report generation based on expert evaluation, exceeding previous best results across two separate datasets by an absolute margin of 1% and 12%, where 57% and 96% of AI reports on normal cases, and 43% and 65% on abnormal cases, are evaluated as "equivalent or better" than the original radiologists' reports. We demonstrate the first ever large multimodal model-based report generation for 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes using Med-Gemini-3D, with 53% of AI reports considered clinically acceptable, although additional research is needed to meet expert radiologist reporting quality. Beyond report generation, Med-Gemini-2D surpasses the previous best performance in CXR visual question answering (VQA) and performs well in CXR classification and radiology VQA, exceeding SoTA or baselines on 17 of 20 tasks. In histopathology, ophthalmology, and dermatology image classification, Med-Gemini-2D surpasses baselines across 18 out of 20 tasks and approaches task-specific model performance. Beyond imaging, Med-Gemini-Polygenic outperforms the standard linear polygenic risk score-based approach for disease risk prediction and generalizes to genetically correlated diseases for which it has never been trained. Although further development and evaluation are necessary in the safety-critical medical domain, our results highlight the potential of Med-Gemini across a wide range of medical tasks.

Medical images and radiology reports are crucial for diagnosing medical conditions, highlighting the importance of quantitative analysis for clinical decision-making. However, the diversity and cross-source heterogeneity of these data challenge the generalizability of current data-mining methods. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently transformed many domains, significantly affecting the medical field. Notably, Gemini-Vision-series (Gemini) and GPT-4-series (GPT-4) models have epitomized a paradigm shift in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for computer vision, showcasing their potential in the biomedical domain. In this study, we evaluated the performance of the Gemini, GPT-4, and 4 popular large models for an exhaustive evaluation across 14 medical imaging datasets, including 5 medical imaging categories (dermatology, radiology, dentistry, ophthalmology, and endoscopy), and 3 radiology report datasets. The investigated tasks encompass disease classification, lesion segmentation, anatomical localization, disease diagnosis, report generation, and lesion detection. Our experimental results demonstrated that Gemini-series models excelled in report generation and lesion detection but faces challenges in disease classification and anatomical localization. Conversely, GPT-series models exhibited proficiency in lesion segmentation and anatomical localization but encountered difficulties in disease diagnosis and lesion detection. Additionally, both the Gemini series and GPT series contain models that have demonstrated commendable generation efficiency. While both models hold promise in reducing physician workload, alleviating pressure on limited healthcare resources, and fostering collaboration between clinical practitioners and artificial intelligence technologies, substantial enhancements and comprehensive validations remain imperative before clinical deployment.

Large language models are well-known to be effective at few-shot in-context learning (ICL). Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have enabled unprecedentedly long context windows, presenting an opportunity to explore their capability to perform ICL with many more demonstrating examples. In this work, we evaluate the performance of multimodal foundation models scaling from few-shot to many-shot ICL. We benchmark GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro across 10 datasets spanning multiple domains (natural imagery, medical imagery, remote sensing, and molecular imagery) and tasks (multi-class, multi-label, and fine-grained classification). We observe that many-shot ICL, including up to almost 2,000 multimodal demonstrating examples, leads to substantial improvements compared to few-shot (<100 examples) ICL across all of the datasets. Further, Gemini 1.5 Pro performance continues to improve log-linearly up to the maximum number of tested examples on many datasets. Given the high inference costs associated with the long prompts required for many-shot ICL, we also explore the impact of batching multiple queries in a single API call. We show that batching up to 50 queries can lead to performance improvements under zero-shot and many-shot ICL, with substantial gains in the zero-shot setting on multiple datasets, while drastically reducing per-query cost and latency. Finally, we measure ICL data efficiency of the models, or the rate at which the models learn from more demonstrating examples. We find that while GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve similar zero-shot performance across the datasets, Gemini 1.5 Pro exhibits higher ICL data efficiency than GPT-4o on most datasets. Our results suggest that many-shot ICL could enable users to efficiently adapt multimodal foundation models to new applications and domains. Our codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/stanfordmlgroup/ManyICL .

Excellence in a wide variety of medical applications poses considerable challenges for AI, requiring advanced reasoning, access to up-to-date medical knowledge and understanding of complex multimodal data. Gemini models, with strong general capabilities in multimodal and long-context reasoning, offer exciting possibilities in medicine. Building on these core strengths of Gemini, we introduce Med-Gemini, a family of highly capable multimodal models that are specialized in medicine with the ability to seamlessly use web search, and that can be efficiently tailored to novel modalities using custom encoders. We evaluate Med-Gemini on 14 medical benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on 10 of them, and surpass the GPT-4 model family on every benchmark where a direct comparison is viable, often by a wide margin. On the popular MedQA (USMLE) benchmark, our best-performing Med-Gemini model achieves SoTA performance of 91.1% accuracy, using a novel uncertainty-guided search strategy. On 7 multimodal benchmarks including NEJM Image Challenges and MMMU (health & medicine), Med-Gemini improves over GPT-4V by an average relative margin of 44.5%. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-Gemini's long-context capabilities through SoTA performance on a needle-in-a-haystack retrieval task from long de-identified health records and medical video question answering, surpassing prior bespoke methods using only in-context learning. Finally, Med-Gemini's performance suggests real-world utility by surpassing human experts on tasks such as medical text summarization, alongside demonstrations of promising potential for multimodal medical dialogue, medical research and education. Taken together, our results offer compelling evidence for Med-Gemini's potential, although further rigorous evaluation will be crucial before real-world deployment in this safety-critical domain.

Generative AI has made rapid advancements in recent years, achieving unprecedented capabilities in multimodal understanding and code generation. This can enable a new paradigm of front-end development, in which multimodal LLMs might directly convert visual designs into code implementations. In this work, we formalize this as a Design2Code task and conduct comprehensive benchmarking. Specifically, we manually curate a benchmark of 484 diverse real-world webpages as test cases and develop a set of automatic evaluation metrics to assess how well current multimodal LLMs can generate the code implementations that directly render into the given reference webpages, given the screenshots as input. We also complement automatic metrics with comprehensive human evaluations. We develop a suite of multimodal prompting methods and show their effectiveness on GPT-4V and Gemini Pro Vision. We further finetune an open-source Design2Code-18B model that successfully matches the performance of Gemini Pro Vision. Both human evaluation and automatic metrics show that GPT-4V performs the best on this task compared to other models. Moreover, annotators think GPT-4V generated webpages can replace the original reference webpages in 49% of cases in terms of visual appearance and content; and perhaps surprisingly, in 64% of cases GPT-4V generated webpages are considered better than the original reference webpages. Our fine-grained break-down metrics indicate that open-source models mostly lag in recalling visual elements from the input webpages and in generating correct layout designs, while aspects like text content and coloring can be drastically improved with proper finetuning.

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.

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.