Daily Papers

We address natural language pick-and-place in unseen, unpredictable indoor environments with AnywhereVLA, a modular framework for mobile manipulation. A user text prompt serves as an entry point and is parsed into a structured task graph that conditions classical SLAM with LiDAR and cameras, metric semantic mapping, and a task-aware frontier exploration policy. An approach planner then selects visibility and reachability aware pre grasp base poses. For interaction, a compact SmolVLA manipulation head is fine tuned on platform pick and place trajectories for the SO-101 by TheRobotStudio, grounding local visual context and sub-goals into grasp and place proposals. The full system runs fully onboard on consumer-level hardware, with Jetson Orin NX for perception and VLA and an Intel NUC for SLAM, exploration, and control, sustaining real-time operation. We evaluated AnywhereVLA in a multi-room lab under static scenes and normal human motion. In this setting, the system achieves a 46% overall task success rate while maintaining throughput on embedded compute. By combining a classical stack with a fine-tuned VLA manipulation, the system inherits the reliability of geometry-based navigation with the agility and task generalization of language-conditioned manipulation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown substantial potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, fine-tuning these models through supervised learning struggles to achieve robust performance due to limited, inconsistent demonstrations, especially in contact-rich environments. In this paper, we propose a reinforced fine-tuning approach for VLA models, named ConRFT, which consists of offline and online fine-tuning with a unified consistency-based training objective, to address these challenges. In the offline stage, our method integrates behavior cloning and Q-learning to effectively extract policy from a small set of demonstrations and stabilize value estimating. In the online stage, the VLA model is further fine-tuned via consistency policy, with human interventions to ensure safe exploration and high sample efficiency. We evaluate our approach on eight diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It achieves an average success rate of 96.3% within 45-90 minutes of online fine-tuning, outperforming prior supervised methods with a 144% improvement in success rate and 1.9x shorter episode length. This work highlights the potential of integrating reinforcement learning to enhance the performance of VLA models for real-world robotic applications. Videos and code are available at our project website https://cccedric.github.io/conrft/.

Transformers are responsible for the vast majority of recent advances in natural language processing. The majority of practical natural language processing applications of these models are typically enabled through transfer learning. This paper studies if corpus-specific tokenization used for fine-tuning improves the resulting performance of the model. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that such tokenization combined with the initialization and fine-tuning strategy for the vocabulary tokens speeds up the transfer and boosts the performance of the fine-tuned model. We call this aspect of transfer facilitation vocabulary transfer.

This paper presents VLAI, a transformer-based model that predicts software vulnerability severity levels directly from text descriptions. Built on RoBERTa, VLAI is fine-tuned on over 600,000 real-world vulnerabilities and achieves over 82% accuracy in predicting severity categories, enabling faster and more consistent triage ahead of manual CVSS scoring. The model and dataset are open-source and integrated into the Vulnerability-Lookup service.

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world experiments. However, their success rates are often not on par with expert policies, and they require fine-tuning when the setup changes. In this work, we introduce Refined Policy Distillation (RPD), a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based policy refinement method that bridges this performance gap through a combination of on-policy RL with behavioral cloning. The core idea of RPD is to distill and refine VLAs into compact, high-performing expert policies by guiding the student policy during RL exploration using the actions of a teacher VLA, resulting in increased sample efficiency and faster convergence. We complement our method by fine-tuned versions of Octo and OpenVLA for ManiSkill3 to evaluate RPD in simulation. While this is a key requirement for applying RL, it also yields new insights beyond existing studies on VLA performance in real-world settings. Our experimental results across various manipulation tasks show that RPD enables the RL student to learn expert policies that outperform the VLA teacher in both dense and sparse reward settings, while also achieving faster convergence than the RL baseline. Our approach is even robust to changes in camera perspective and can generalize to task variations that the underlying VLA cannot solve. Our code, dataset, VLA checkpoints, and videos are available at https://refined-policy-distillation.github.io

RaceVLA presents an innovative approach for autonomous racing drone navigation by leveraging Visual-Language-Action (VLA) to emulate human-like behavior. This research explores the integration of advanced algorithms that enable drones to adapt their navigation strategies based on real-time environmental feedback, mimicking the decision-making processes of human pilots. The model, fine-tuned on a collected racing drone dataset, demonstrates strong generalization despite the complexity of drone racing environments. RaceVLA outperforms OpenVLA in motion (75.0 vs 60.0) and semantic generalization (45.5 vs 36.3), benefiting from the dynamic camera and simplified motion tasks. However, visual (79.6 vs 87.0) and physical (50.0 vs 76.7) generalization were slightly reduced due to the challenges of maneuvering in dynamic environments with varying object sizes. RaceVLA also outperforms RT-2 across all axes - visual (79.6 vs 52.0), motion (75.0 vs 55.0), physical (50.0 vs 26.7), and semantic (45.5 vs 38.8), demonstrating its robustness for real-time adjustments in complex environments. Experiments revealed an average velocity of 1.04 m/s, with a maximum speed of 2.02 m/s, and consistent maneuverability, demonstrating RaceVLA's ability to handle high-speed scenarios effectively. These findings highlight the potential of RaceVLA for high-performance navigation in competitive racing contexts. The RaceVLA codebase, pretrained weights, and dataset are available at this http URL: https://racevla.github.io/

Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) build upon pretrained vision-language models and leverage diverse robot datasets to demonstrate strong task execution, language following ability, and semantic generalization. Despite these successes, VLAs struggle with novel robot setups and require fine-tuning to achieve good performance, yet how to most effectively fine-tune them is unclear given many possible strategies. In this work, we study key VLA adaptation design choices such as different action decoding schemes, action representations, and learning objectives for fine-tuning, using OpenVLA as our representative base model. Our empirical analysis informs an Optimized Fine-Tuning (OFT) recipe that integrates parallel decoding, action chunking, a continuous action representation, and a simple L1 regression-based learning objective to altogether improve inference efficiency, policy performance, and flexibility in the model's input-output specifications. We propose OpenVLA-OFT, an instantiation of this recipe, which sets a new state of the art on the LIBERO simulation benchmark, significantly boosting OpenVLA's average success rate across four task suites from 76.5% to 97.1% while increasing action generation throughput by 26times. In real-world evaluations, our fine-tuning recipe enables OpenVLA to successfully execute dexterous, high-frequency control tasks on a bimanual ALOHA robot and outperform other VLAs (pi_0 and RDT-1B) fine-tuned using their default recipes, as well as strong imitation learning policies trained from scratch (Diffusion Policy and ACT) by up to 15% (absolute) in average success rate. We release code for OFT and pretrained model checkpoints at https://openvla-oft.github.io/.

Code summarization is a critical task in natural language processing and software engineering, which aims to generate concise descriptions of source code. Recent advancements have improved the quality of these summaries, enhancing code readability and maintainability. However, the content of a repository or a class has not been considered in function code summarization. This study investigated the effectiveness of code summarization models beyond the function level, exploring the impact of class and repository contexts on the summary quality. The study involved revising benchmarks for evaluating models at class and repository levels, assessing baseline models, and evaluating LLMs with in-context learning to determine the enhancement of summary quality with additional context. The findings revealed that the fine-tuned state-of-the-art CodeT5+ base model excelled in code summarization, while incorporating few-shot learning and retrieved code chunks from RAG significantly enhanced the performance of LLMs in this task. Notably, the Deepseek Coder 1.3B and Starcoder2 15B models demonstrated substantial improvements in metrics such as BLEURT, METEOR, and BLEU-4 at both class and repository levels. Repository-level summarization exhibited promising potential but necessitates significant computational resources and gains from the inclusion of structured context. Lastly, we employed the recent SIDE code summarization metric in our evaluation. This study contributes to refining strategies for prompt engineering, few-shot learning, and RAG, addressing gaps in benchmarks for code summarization at various levels. Finally, we publish all study details, code, datasets, and results of evaluation in the GitHub repository available at https://github.com/kilimanj4r0/code-summarization-beyond-function-level.

Capturing symmetric (e.g., country borders another country) and antisymmetric (e.g., parent_of) relations is crucial for a variety of applications. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel Wikidata-derived natural language inference dataset designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that LLMs perform comparably to random chance on this benchmark, highlighting a gap in relational understanding. To address this, we explore encoder retraining via contrastive learning with k-nearest neighbors. The retrained encoder matches the performance of fine-tuned classification heads while offering additional benefits, including greater efficiency in few-shot learning and improved mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.

This work introduces ILIAS, a new test dataset for Instance-Level Image retrieval At Scale. It is designed to evaluate the ability of current and future foundation models and retrieval techniques to recognize particular objects. The key benefits over existing datasets include large scale, domain diversity, accurate ground truth, and a performance that is far from saturated. ILIAS includes query and positive images for 1,000 object instances, manually collected to capture challenging conditions and diverse domains. Large-scale retrieval is conducted against 100 million distractor images from YFCC100M. To avoid false negatives without extra annotation effort, we include only query objects confirmed to have emerged after 2014, i.e. the compilation date of YFCC100M. An extensive benchmarking is performed with the following observations: i) models fine-tuned on specific domains, such as landmarks or products, excel in that domain but fail on ILIAS ii) learning a linear adaptation layer using multi-domain class supervision results in performance improvements, especially for vision-language models iii) local descriptors in retrieval re-ranking are still a key ingredient, especially in the presence of severe background clutter iv) the text-to-image performance of the vision-language foundation models is surprisingly close to the corresponding image-to-image case. website: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/ilias/

We present the first large-scale open-set benchmark for multilingual audio-video deepfake detection. Our dataset comprises over 250 hours of real and fake videos across eight languages, with 60% of data being generated. For each language, the fake videos are generated with seven distinct deepfake generation models, selected based on the quality of the generated content. We organize the training, validation and test splits such that only a subset of the chosen generative models and languages are available during training, thus creating several challenging open-set evaluation setups. We perform experiments with various pre-trained and fine-tuned deepfake detectors proposed in recent literature. Our results show that state-of-the-art detectors are not currently able to maintain their performance levels when tested in our open-set scenarios. We publicly release our data and code at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/unibuc-cs/MAVOS-DD.

We introduce dense vision transformers, an architecture that leverages vision transformers in place of convolutional networks as a backbone for dense prediction tasks. We assemble tokens from various stages of the vision transformer into image-like representations at various resolutions and progressively combine them into full-resolution predictions using a convolutional decoder. The transformer backbone processes representations at a constant and relatively high resolution and has a global receptive field at every stage. These properties allow the dense vision transformer to provide finer-grained and more globally coherent predictions when compared to fully-convolutional networks. Our experiments show that this architecture yields substantial improvements on dense prediction tasks, especially when a large amount of training data is available. For monocular depth estimation, we observe an improvement of up to 28% in relative performance when compared to a state-of-the-art fully-convolutional network. When applied to semantic segmentation, dense vision transformers set a new state of the art on ADE20K with 49.02% mIoU. We further show that the architecture can be fine-tuned on smaller datasets such as NYUv2, KITTI, and Pascal Context where it also sets the new state of the art. Our models are available at https://github.com/intel-isl/DPT.

With the increasing quality and spread of LLM-based assistants, the amount of LLM-generated content is growing rapidly. In many cases and tasks, such texts are already indistinguishable from those written by humans, and the quality of generation tends to only increase. At the same time, detection methods are developing more slowly, making it challenging to prevent misuse of generative AI technologies. In this work, we investigate the task of generated text detection by proposing the GigaCheck. Our research explores two approaches: (i) distinguishing human-written texts from LLM-generated ones, and (ii) detecting LLM-generated intervals in Human-Machine collaborative texts. For the first task, our approach utilizes a general-purpose LLM, leveraging its extensive language abilities to fine-tune efficiently for the downstream task of LLM-generated text detection, achieving high performance even with limited data. For the second task, we propose a novel approach that combines computer vision and natural language processing techniques. Specifically, we use a fine-tuned general-purpose LLM in conjunction with a DETR-like detection model, adapted from computer vision, to localize AI-generated intervals within text. We evaluate the GigaCheck on five classification datasets with English texts and three datasets designed for Human-Machine collaborative text analysis. Our results demonstrate that GigaCheck outperforms previous methods, even in out-of-distribution settings, establishing a strong baseline across all datasets.

We present the shared task on artificial text detection in Russian, which is organized as a part of the Dialogue Evaluation initiative, held in 2022. The shared task dataset includes texts from 14 text generators, i.e., one human writer and 13 text generative models fine-tuned for one or more of the following generation tasks: machine translation, paraphrase generation, text summarization, text simplification. We also consider back-translation and zero-shot generation approaches. The human-written texts are collected from publicly available resources across multiple domains. The shared task consists of two sub-tasks: (i) to determine if a given text is automatically generated or written by a human; (ii) to identify the author of a given text. The first task is framed as a binary classification problem. The second task is a multi-class classification problem. We provide count-based and BERT-based baselines, along with the human evaluation on the first sub-task. A total of 30 and 8 systems have been submitted to the binary and multi-class sub-tasks, correspondingly. Most teams outperform the baselines by a wide margin. We publicly release our codebase, human evaluation results, and other materials in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/dialogue-evaluation/RuATD).

Recent advances in generative modeling enable image editing assistants that follow natural language instructions without additional user input. Their supervised training requires millions of triplets: original image, instruction, edited image. Yet mining pixel-accurate examples is hard. Each edit must affect only prompt-specified regions, preserve stylistic coherence, respect physical plausibility, and retain visual appeal. The lack of robust automated edit-quality metrics hinders reliable automation at scale. We present an automated, modular pipeline that mines high-fidelity triplets across domains, resolutions, instruction complexities, and styles. Built on public generative models and running without human intervention, our system uses a task-tuned Gemini validator to score instruction adherence and aesthetics directly, removing any need for segmentation or grounding models. Inversion and compositional bootstrapping enlarge the mined set by approximately 2.2x, enabling large-scale high-fidelity training data. By automating the most repetitive annotation steps, the approach allows a new scale of training without human labeling effort. To democratize research in this resource-intensive area, we release NHR-Edit: an open dataset of 358k high-quality triplets. In the largest cross-dataset evaluation, it surpasses all public alternatives. We also release Bagel-NHR-Edit, an open-source fine-tuned Bagel model, which achieves state-of-the-art metrics in our experiments.

This paper introduces LLM-MARS, first technology that utilizes a Large Language Model based Artificial Intelligence for Multi-Agent Robot Systems. LLM-MARS enables dynamic dialogues between humans and robots, allowing the latter to generate behavior based on operator commands and provide informative answers to questions about their actions. LLM-MARS is built on a transformer-based Large Language Model, fine-tuned from the Falcon 7B model. We employ a multimodal approach using LoRa adapters for different tasks. The first LoRa adapter was developed by fine-tuning the base model on examples of Behavior Trees and their corresponding commands. The second LoRa adapter was developed by fine-tuning on question-answering examples. Practical trials on a multi-agent system of two robots within the Eurobot 2023 game rules demonstrate promising results. The robots achieve an average task execution accuracy of 79.28% in compound commands. With commands containing up to two tasks accuracy exceeded 90%. Evaluation confirms the system's answers on operators questions exhibit high accuracy, relevance, and informativeness. LLM-MARS and similar multi-agent robotic systems hold significant potential to revolutionize logistics, enabling autonomous exploration missions and advancing Industry 5.0.

Large pre-trained language models have been shown to store factual knowledge in their parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art results when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks. However, their ability to access and precisely manipulate knowledge is still limited, and hence on knowledge-intensive tasks, their performance lags behind task-specific architectures. Additionally, providing provenance for their decisions and updating their world knowledge remain open research problems. Pre-trained models with a differentiable access mechanism to explicit non-parametric memory can overcome this issue, but have so far been only investigated for extractive downstream tasks. We explore a general-purpose fine-tuning recipe for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) -- models which combine pre-trained parametric and non-parametric memory for language generation. We introduce RAG models where the parametric memory is a pre-trained seq2seq model and the non-parametric memory is a dense vector index of Wikipedia, accessed with a pre-trained neural retriever. We compare two RAG formulations, one which conditions on the same retrieved passages across the whole generated sequence, the other can use different passages per token. We fine-tune and evaluate our models on a wide range of knowledge-intensive NLP tasks and set the state-of-the-art on three open domain QA tasks, outperforming parametric seq2seq models and task-specific retrieve-and-extract architectures. For language generation tasks, we find that RAG models generate more specific, diverse and factual language than a state-of-the-art parametric-only seq2seq baseline.

Most existing robotic manipulation benchmarks focus on simplified tabletop scenarios, typically involving a stationary robotic arm interacting with various objects on a flat surface. To address this limitation, we introduce RoboBenchMart, a more challenging and realistic benchmark designed for dark store environments, where robots must perform complex manipulation tasks with diverse grocery items. This setting presents significant challenges, including dense object clutter and varied spatial configurations -- with items positioned at different heights, depths, and in close proximity. By targeting the retail domain, our benchmark addresses a setting with strong potential for near-term automation impact. We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art generalist models struggle to solve even common retail tasks. To support further research, we release the RoboBenchMart suite, which includes a procedural store layout generator, a trajectory generation pipeline, evaluation tools and fine-tuned baseline models.

This work introduces Gemma, a family of lightweight, state-of-the art open models built from the research and technology used to create Gemini models. Gemma models demonstrate strong performance across academic benchmarks for language understanding, reasoning, and safety. We release two sizes of models (2 billion and 7 billion parameters), and provide both pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints. Gemma outperforms similarly sized open models on 11 out of 18 text-based tasks, and we present comprehensive evaluations of safety and responsibility aspects of the models, alongside a detailed description of model development. We believe the responsible release of LLMs is critical for improving the safety of frontier models, and for enabling the next wave of LLM innovations.

We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report.

Simulation-based data synthesis has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing real-world robotic manipulation. However, existing synthetic datasets remain insufficient for robust bimanual manipulation due to two challenges: (1) the lack of an efficient, scalable data generation method for novel tasks, and (2) oversimplified simulation environments that fail to capture real-world complexity. We present RoboTwin 2.0, a scalable simulation framework that enables automated, large-scale generation of diverse and realistic data, along with unified evaluation protocols for dual-arm manipulation. We first construct RoboTwin-OD, a large-scale object library comprising 731 instances across 147 categories, each annotated with semantic and manipulation-relevant labels. Building on this foundation, we develop an expert data synthesis pipeline that combines multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with simulation-in-the-loop refinement to generate task-level execution code automatically. To improve sim-to-real transfer, RoboTwin 2.0 incorporates structured domain randomization along five axes: clutter, lighting, background, tabletop height and language instructions, thereby enhancing data diversity and policy robustness. We instantiate this framework across 50 dual-arm tasks spanning five robot embodiments, and pre-collect over 100,000 domain-randomized expert trajectories. Empirical results show a 10.9% gain in code generation success and improved generalization to novel real-world scenarios. A VLA model fine-tuned on our dataset achieves a 367% relative improvement (42.0% vs. 9.0%) on unseen scene real-world tasks, while zero-shot models trained solely on our synthetic data achieve a 228% relative gain, highlighting strong generalization without real-world supervision. We release the data generator, benchmark, dataset, and code to support scalable research in robust bimanual manipulation.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models reformulate vision-language models by tuning them with millions of robotic demonstrations. While they perform well when fine-tuned for a single embodiment or task family, extending them to multi-skill settings remains challenging: directly merging VLA experts trained on different tasks results in near-zero success rates. This raises a fundamental question: what prevents VLAs from mastering multiple skills within one model? With an empirical decomposition of learnable parameters during VLA fine-tuning, we identify two key sources of non-mergeability: (1) Finetuning drives LoRA adapters in the VLM backbone toward divergent, task-specific directions beyond the capacity of existing merging methods to unify. (2) Action experts develop inter-block dependencies through self-attention feedback, causing task information to spread across layers and preventing modular recombination. To address these challenges, we present MergeVLA, a merging-oriented VLA architecture that preserves mergeability by design. MergeVLA introduces sparsely activated LoRA adapters via task masks to retain consistent parameters and reduce irreconcilable conflicts in the VLM. Its action expert replaces self-attention with cross-attention-only blocks to keep specialization localized and composable. When the task is unknown, it uses a test-time task router to adaptively select the appropriate task mask and expert head from the initial observation, enabling unsupervised task inference. Across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin, and multi-task experiments on the real SO101 robotic arm, MergeVLA achieves performance comparable to or even exceeding individually finetuned experts, demonstrating robust generalization across tasks, embodiments, and environments.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues yet typically demands costly real-world interactions or suffers from sim-to-real gaps. We introduce VLA-RFT, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that leverages a data-driven world model as a controllable simulator. Trained from real interaction data, the simulator predicts future visual observations conditioned on actions, allowing policy rollouts with dense, trajectory-level rewards derived from goal-achieving references. This design delivers an efficient and action-aligned learning signal, drastically lowering sample requirements. With fewer than 400 fine-tuning steps, VLA-RFT surpasses strong supervised baselines and achieves greater efficiency than simulator-based RL. Moreover, it exhibits strong robustness under perturbed conditions, sustaining stable task execution. Our results establish world-model-based RFT as a practical post-training paradigm to enhance the generalization and robustness of VLA models. For more details, please refer to https://vla-rft.github.io/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained much attention from the research community thanks to their strength in translating multimodal observations with linguistic instructions into robotic actions. Despite their recent advancements, VLAs often overlook the explicit reasoning and only learn the functional input-action mappings, omitting these crucial logical steps for interpretability and generalization for complex, long-horizon manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose ReFineVLA, a multimodal reasoning-aware framework that fine-tunes VLAs with teacher-guided reasons. We first augment robotic datasets with reasoning rationales generated by an expert teacher model, guiding VLA models to learn to reason about their actions. Then, we use ReFineVLA to fine-tune pre-trained VLAs with the reasoning-enriched datasets, while maintaining their inherent generalization abilities and boosting reasoning capabilities. In addition, we conduct an attention map visualization to analyze the alignment among visual attention, linguistic prompts, and to-be-executed actions of ReFineVLA, showcasing its ability to focus on relevant tasks and actions. Through the latter step, we explore that ReFineVLA-trained models exhibit a meaningful attention shift towards relevant objects, highlighting the enhanced multimodal understanding and improved generalization. Evaluated across manipulation tasks, ReFineVLA outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, it achieves an average increase of 5.0% success rate on SimplerEnv WidowX Robot tasks, improves by an average of 8.6% in variant aggregation settings, and by 1.7% in visual matching settings for SimplerEnv Google Robot tasks. The source code will be publicly available.

Vision-Language Action (VLA) models significantly advance robotic manipulation by leveraging the strong perception capabilities of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). By integrating action modules into these pretrained models, VLA methods exhibit improved generalization. However, training them from scratch is costly. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective distillation-based framework that equips VLMs with action-execution capability by transferring knowledge from pretrained small action models. Our architecture retains the original VLM structure, adding only an action token and a state encoder to incorporate physical inputs. To distill action knowledge, we adopt a two-stage training strategy. First, we perform lightweight alignment by mapping VLM hidden states into the action space of the small action model, enabling effective reuse of its pretrained action decoder and avoiding expensive pretraining. Second, we selectively fine-tune the language model, state encoder, and action modules, enabling the system to integrate multimodal inputs with precise action generation. Specifically, the action token provides the VLM with a direct handle for predicting future actions, while the state encoder allows the model to incorporate robot dynamics not captured by vision alone. This design yields substantial efficiency gains over training large VLA models from scratch. Compared with previous state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves 97.3% average success rate on LIBERO (11.8% improvement) and 93.5% on LIBERO-LONG (24.5% improvement). In real-world experiments across five manipulation tasks, our method consistently outperforms the teacher model, achieving 82.0% success rate (17% improvement), which demonstrate that action distillation effectively enables VLMs to generate precise actions while substantially reducing training costs.

Recent high-capacity vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive performance on a range of robotic manipulation tasks by imitating human demonstrations. However, exploiting offline data with limited visited states will cause execution failure in out-of-distribution scenarios. Intuitively, an exploration-based method that improves on online collected data at test time could address this limitation. We present VLA-RL, an algorithmic and systematic framework that leverages online reinforcement learning (RL) to improve pretrained auto-regressive VLAs in downstream tasks. Within a unified perspective, we first introduce a trajectory-level RL formulation for auto-regressive VLA training, which models general robotic manipulation trajectory as multi-modal multi-turn conversation. To address the challenge of sparse rewards, we fine-tune a pretrained vision-language model as a robotic process reward model, which is trained on pseudo reward labels annotated on automatically extracted task segments. To scale up, we identify several implementation findings that improve the stability and efficiency including curriculum selection strategy, GPU-balanced vectorized environments, batch decoding, and critic warmup. VLA-RL enables OpenVLA-7B to surpass the strongest finetuned baseline by 4.5% on 40 challenging robotic manipulation tasks in LIBERO, and even matches the performance of advanced commercial models such as pi_0-FAST. Notably, we observe that VLA-RL benefits from increased test-time optimization, indicating an early spark of inference scaling laws in robotics.

Simulation offers a scalable and low-cost way to enrich vision-language-action (VLA) training, reducing reliance on expensive real-robot demonstrations. However, most sim-real co-training methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which treats simulation as a static source of demonstrations and does not exploit large-scale closed-loop interaction. Consequently, real-world gains and generalization are often limited. In this paper, we propose an \textit{RL}-based sim-real \textit{Co}-training (RL-Co) framework that leverages interactive simulation while preserving real-world capabilities. Our method follows a generic two-stage design: we first warm-start the policy with SFT on a mixture of real and simulated demonstrations, then fine-tune it with reinforcement learning in simulation while adding an auxiliary supervised loss on real-world data to anchor the policy and mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our framework on four real-world tabletop manipulation tasks using two representative VLA architectures, OpenVLA and π_{0.5}, and observe consistent improvements over real-only fine-tuning and SFT-based co-training, including +24% real-world success on OpenVLA and +20% on π_{0.5}. Beyond higher success rates, RL co-training yields stronger generalization to unseen task variations and substantially improved real-world data efficiency, providing a practical and scalable pathway for leveraging simulation to enhance real-robot deployment.

While large-scale pretrained language models have significantly improved writing assistance functionalities such as autocomplete, more complex and controllable writing assistants have yet to be explored. We leverage advances in language modeling to build an interactive writing assistant that generates and rephrases text according to fine-grained author specifications. Users provide input to our Intent-Guided Assistant (IGA) in the form of text interspersed with tags that correspond to specific rhetorical directives (e.g., adding description or contrast, or rephrasing a particular sentence). We fine-tune a language model on a dataset heuristically-labeled with author intent, which allows IGA to fill in these tags with generated text that users can subsequently edit to their liking. A series of automatic and crowdsourced evaluations confirm the quality of IGA's generated outputs, while a small-scale user study demonstrates author preference for IGA over baseline methods in a creative writing task. We release our dataset, code, and demo to spur further research into AI-assisted writing.

We propose a novel approach for 3D mesh reconstruction from multi-view images. Our method takes inspiration from large reconstruction models like LRM that use a transformer-based triplane generator and a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) model trained on multi-view images. However, in our method, we introduce several important modifications that allow us to significantly enhance 3D reconstruction quality. First of all, we examine the original LRM architecture and find several shortcomings. Subsequently, we introduce respective modifications to the LRM architecture, which lead to improved multi-view image representation and more computationally efficient training. Second, in order to improve geometry reconstruction and enable supervision at full image resolution, we extract meshes from the NeRF field in a differentiable manner and fine-tune the NeRF model through mesh rendering. These modifications allow us to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both 2D and 3D evaluation metrics, such as a PSNR of 28.67 on Google Scanned Objects (GSO) dataset. Despite these superior results, our feed-forward model still struggles to reconstruct complex textures, such as text and portraits on assets. To address this, we introduce a lightweight per-instance texture refinement procedure. This procedure fine-tunes the triplane representation and the NeRF color estimation model on the mesh surface using the input multi-view images in just 4 seconds. This refinement improves the PSNR to 29.79 and achieves faithful reconstruction of complex textures, such as text. Additionally, our approach enables various downstream applications, including text- or image-to-3D generation.

This paper introduces CognitiveDog, a pioneering development of quadruped robot with Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of not only communicating with humans verbally but also physically interacting with the environment through object manipulation. The system was realized on Unitree Go1 robot-dog equipped with a custom gripper and demonstrated autonomous decision-making capabilities, independently determining the most appropriate actions and interactions with various objects to fulfill user-defined tasks. These tasks do not necessarily include direct instructions, challenging the robot to comprehend and execute them based on natural language input and environmental cues. The paper delves into the intricacies of this system, dataset characteristics, and the software architecture. Key to this development is the robot's proficiency in navigating space using Visual-SLAM, effectively manipulating and transporting objects, and providing insightful natural language commentary during task execution. Experimental results highlight the robot's advanced task comprehension and adaptability, underscoring its potential in real-world applications. The dataset used to fine-tune the robot-dog behavior generation model is provided at the following link: huggingface.co/datasets/ArtemLykov/CognitiveDog_dataset

Training text-to-image models with web scale image-text pairs enables the generation of a wide range of visual concepts from text. However, these pre-trained models often face challenges when it comes to generating highly aesthetic images. This creates the need for aesthetic alignment post pre-training. In this paper, we propose quality-tuning to effectively guide a pre-trained model to exclusively generate highly visually appealing images, while maintaining generality across visual concepts. Our key insight is that supervised fine-tuning with a set of surprisingly small but extremely visually appealing images can significantly improve the generation quality. We pre-train a latent diffusion model on 1.1 billion image-text pairs and fine-tune it with only a few thousand carefully selected high-quality images. The resulting model, Emu, achieves a win rate of 82.9% compared with its pre-trained only counterpart. Compared to the state-of-the-art SDXLv1.0, Emu is preferred 68.4% and 71.3% of the time on visual appeal on the standard PartiPrompts and our Open User Input benchmark based on the real-world usage of text-to-image models. In addition, we show that quality-tuning is a generic approach that is also effective for other architectures, including pixel diffusion and masked generative transformer models.

We present As-Plausible-as-Possible (APAP) mesh deformation technique that leverages 2D diffusion priors to preserve the plausibility of a mesh under user-controlled deformation. Our framework uses per-face Jacobians to represent mesh deformations, where mesh vertex coordinates are computed via a differentiable Poisson Solve. The deformed mesh is rendered, and the resulting 2D image is used in the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) process, which enables extracting meaningful plausibility priors from a pretrained 2D diffusion model. To better preserve the identity of the edited mesh, we fine-tune our 2D diffusion model with LoRA. Gradients extracted by SDS and a user-prescribed handle displacement are then backpropagated to the per-face Jacobians, and we use iterative gradient descent to compute the final deformation that balances between the user edit and the output plausibility. We evaluate our method with 2D and 3D meshes and demonstrate qualitative and quantitative improvements when using plausibility priors over geometry-preservation or distortion-minimization priors used by previous techniques. Our project page is at: https://as-plausible-aspossible.github.io/

Forecasting future links is a central task in temporal graph (TG) reasoning, requiring models to leverage historical interactions to predict upcoming ones. Traditional neural approaches, such as temporal graph neural networks, achieve strong performance but lack explainability and cannot be applied to unseen graphs without retraining. Recent studies have begun to explore using large language models (LLMs) for graph reasoning, but most of them are constrained to static graphs or small synthetic TGs and lack the evaluation of the quality of reasoning traces generated by LLMs. In this work, we present Reasoning-Enhanced Learning for Temporal Graphs (ReaL-TG), a reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes LLMs to perform explainable link forecasting on real-world TGs. ReaL-TG uses outcome-based reward to encourage models to self-explore reasoning strategies from graph structure and to produce explanations that directly justify their predictions. To enable evaluation on LLM-generated reasoning traces, we propose a new evaluation protocol combining ranking metrics with an LLM-as-a-Judge system that assesses both the quality of reasoning and the impact of hallucinations. Experiments with ReaL-TG-4B, obtained by fine-tuning Qwen3-4B under our framework, show that it outperforms much larger frontier LLMs, including GPT-5 mini, on ranking metrics, while producing high-quality explanations confirmed by both the LLM judge and human evaluation.

Standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically fine-tune a monolithic Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbone explicitly for robotic control. However, this approach creates a critical tension between maintaining high-level general semantic understanding and learning low-level, fine-grained sensorimotor skills, often leading to "catastrophic forgetting" of the model's open-world capabilities. To resolve this conflict, we introduce TwinBrainVLA, a novel architecture that coordinates a generalist VLM retaining universal semantic understanding and a specialist VLM dedicated to embodied proprioception for joint robotic control. TwinBrainVLA synergizes a frozen "Left Brain", which retains robust general visual reasoning, with a trainable "Right Brain", specialized for embodied perception, via a novel Asymmetric Mixture-of-Transformers (AsyMoT) mechanism. This design allows the Right Brain to dynamically query semantic knowledge from the frozen Left Brain and fuse it with proprioceptive states, providing rich conditioning for a Flow-Matching Action Expert to generate precise continuous controls. Extensive experiments on SimplerEnv and RoboCasa benchmarks demonstrate that TwinBrainVLA achieves superior manipulation performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines while explicitly preserving the comprehensive visual understanding capabilities of the pre-trained VLM, offering a promising direction for building general-purpose robots that simultaneously achieve high-level semantic understanding and low-level physical dexterity.

We introduce RIPT-VLA, a simple and scalable reinforcement-learning-based interactive post-training paradigm that fine-tunes pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models using only sparse binary success rewards. Existing VLA training pipelines rely heavily on offline expert demonstration data and supervised imitation, limiting their ability to adapt to new tasks and environments under low-data regimes. RIPT-VLA addresses this by enabling interactive post-training with a stable policy optimization algorithm based on dynamic rollout sampling and leave-one-out advantage estimation. RIPT-VLA has the following characteristics. First, it applies to various VLA models, resulting in an improvement on the lightweight QueST model by 21.2%, and the 7B OpenVLA-OFT model to an unprecedented 97.5% success rate. Second, it is computationally efficient and data-efficient: with only one demonstration, RIPT-VLA enables an unworkable SFT model (4%) to succeed with a 97% success rate within 15 iterations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the policy learned by RIPT-VLA generalizes across different tasks and scenarios and is robust to the initial state context. These results highlight RIPT-VLA as a practical and effective paradigm for post-training VLA models through minimal supervision.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made impressive progress toward general-purpose robotic manipulation by post-training large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for action prediction. Yet most VLAs entangle perception and control in a monolithic pipeline optimized purely for action, which can erode language-conditioned grounding. In our real-world tabletop tests, policies over-grasp when the target is absent, are distracted by clutter, and overfit to background appearance. To address these issues, we propose OBEYED-VLA (OBject-centric and gEometrY groundED VLA), a framework that explicitly disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning. Instead of operating directly on raw RGB, OBEYED-VLA augments VLAs with a perception module that grounds multi-view inputs into task-conditioned, object-centric, and geometry-aware observations. This module includes a VLM-based object-centric grounding stage that selects task-relevant object regions across camera views, along with a complementary geometric grounding stage that emphasizes the 3D structure of these objects over their appearance. The resulting grounded views are then fed to a pretrained VLA policy, which we fine-tune exclusively on single-object demonstrations collected without environmental clutter or non-target objects. On a real-world UR10e tabletop setup, OBEYED-VLA substantially improves robustness over strong VLA baselines across four challenging regimes and multiple difficulty levels: distractor objects, absent-target rejection, background appearance changes, and cluttered manipulation of unseen objects. Ablation studies confirm that both semantic grounding and geometry-aware grounding are critical to these gains. Overall, the results indicate that making perception an explicit, object-centric component is an effective way to strengthen and generalize VLA-based robotic manipulation.

To teach robots complex manipulation tasks, it is now a common practice to fine-tune a pre-trained vision-language-action model (VLA) on task-specific data. However, since this recipe updates existing representations, it is unsuitable for long-term operation in the real world, where robots must continually adapt to new tasks and environments while retaining the knowledge they have already acquired. Existing continual learning methods for robotics commonly require storing previous data (exemplars), struggle with long task sequences, or rely on task identifiers for deployment. To address these limitations, we propose CLARE, a general, parameter-efficient framework for exemplar-free continual learning with VLAs. CLARE introduces lightweight modular adapters into selected feedforward layers and autonomously expands the model only where necessary when learning a new task, guided by layer-wise feature similarity. During deployment, an autoencoder-based routing mechanism dynamically activates the most relevant adapters without requiring task labels. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we show that CLARE achieves high performance on new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks, significantly outperforming even exemplar-based methods. Code and data are available at https://tum-lsy.github.io/clare.

Embodied agents operating in real-world environments must interpret ambiguous and under-specified human instructions. A capable household robot should recognize ambiguity and ask relevant clarification questions to infer the user intent accurately, leading to more effective task execution. To study this problem, we introduce the Ask-to-Act task, where an embodied agent must fetch a specific object instance given an ambiguous instruction in a home environment. The agent must strategically ask minimal, yet relevant, clarification questions to resolve ambiguity while navigating under partial observability. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach that fine-tunes multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as vision-language-action (VLA) policies using online reinforcement learning (RL) with LLM-generated rewards. Our method eliminates the need for large-scale human demonstrations or manually engineered rewards for training such agents. We benchmark against strong zero-shot baselines, including GPT-4o, and supervised fine-tuned MLLMs, on our task. Our results demonstrate that our RL-finetuned MLLM outperforms all baselines by a significant margin (19.1-40.3%), generalizing well to novel scenes and tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of adapting MLLMs as VLA agents that can act and ask for help using LLM-generated rewards with online RL.

Imitation learning has proven to be highly effective in teaching robots dexterous manipulation skills. However, it typically relies on large amounts of human demonstration data, which limits its scalability and applicability in dynamic, real-world environments. One key challenge in this context is object generalization, where a robot trained to perform a task with one object, such as "hand over the apple," struggles to transfer its skills to a semantically similar but visually different object, such as "hand over the peach." This gap in generalization to new objects beyond those in the same category has yet to be adequately addressed in previous work on end-to-end visuomotor policy learning. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach for achieving object generalization through Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, referred to as ObjectVLA. Our model enables robots to generalize learned skills to novel objects without requiring explicit human demonstrations for each new target object. By leveraging vision-language pair data, our method provides a lightweight and scalable way to inject knowledge about the target object, establishing an implicit link between the object and the desired action. We evaluate ObjectVLA on a real robotic platform, demonstrating its ability to generalize across 100 novel objects with a 64\% success rate in selecting objects not seen during training. Furthermore, we propose a more accessible method for enhancing object generalization in VLA models, using a smartphone to capture a few images and fine-tune the pre-trained model. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in enabling object-level generalization and reducing the need for extensive human demonstrations, paving the way for more flexible and scalable robotic learning systems.

Large policies pretrained on a combination of Internet-scale vision-language data and diverse robot demonstrations have the potential to change how we teach robots new skills: rather than training new behaviors from scratch, we can fine-tune such vision-language-action (VLA) models to obtain robust, generalizable policies for visuomotor control. Yet, widespread adoption of VLAs for robotics has been challenging as 1) existing VLAs are largely closed and inaccessible to the public, and 2) prior work fails to explore methods for efficiently fine-tuning VLAs for new tasks, a key component for adoption. Addressing these challenges, we introduce OpenVLA, a 7B-parameter open-source VLA trained on a diverse collection of 970k real-world robot demonstrations. OpenVLA builds on a Llama 2 language model combined with a visual encoder that fuses pretrained features from DINOv2 and SigLIP. As a product of the added data diversity and new model components, OpenVLA demonstrates strong results for generalist manipulation, outperforming closed models such as RT-2-X (55B) by 16.5% in absolute task success rate across 29 tasks and multiple robot embodiments, with 7x fewer parameters. We further show that we can effectively fine-tune OpenVLA for new settings, with especially strong generalization results in multi-task environments involving multiple objects and strong language grounding abilities, and outperform expressive from-scratch imitation learning methods such as Diffusion Policy by 20.4%. We also explore compute efficiency; as a separate contribution, we show that OpenVLA can be fine-tuned on consumer GPUs via modern low-rank adaptation methods and served efficiently via quantization without a hit to downstream success rate. Finally, we release model checkpoints, fine-tuning notebooks, and our PyTorch codebase with built-in support for training VLAs at scale on Open X-Embodiment datasets.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential in real-world robotic manipulation. However, pre-trained VLA policies still suffer from substantial performance degradation during downstream deployment. Although fine-tuning can mitigate this issue, its reliance on costly demonstration collection and intensive computation makes it impractical in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce VLA-Pilot, a plug-and-play inference-time policy steering method for zero-shot deployment of pre-trained VLA without any additional fine-tuning or data collection. We evaluate VLA-Pilot on six real-world downstream manipulation tasks across two distinct robotic embodiments, encompassing both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VLA-Pilot substantially boosts the success rates of off-the-shelf pre-trained VLA policies, enabling robust zero-shot generalization to diverse tasks and embodiments. Experimental videos and code are available at: https://rip4kobe.github.io/vla-pilot/.

The advent of next-generation radio telescopes is set to transform radio astronomy by producing massive data volumes that challenge traditional processing methods. Deep learning techniques have shown strong potential in automating radio analysis tasks, yet are often constrained by the limited availability of large annotated datasets. Recent progress in self-supervised learning has led to foundational radio vision models, but adapting them for new tasks typically requires coding expertise, limiting their accessibility to a broader astronomical community. Text-based AI interfaces offer a promising alternative by enabling task-specific queries and example-driven learning. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs), with their remarkable zero-shot capabilities, are increasingly used in scientific domains. However, deploying large-scale models remains resource-intensive, and there is a growing demand for AI systems that can reason over both visual and textual data in astronomical analysis. This study explores small-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as AI assistants for radio astronomy, combining LLM capabilities with vision transformers. We fine-tuned the LLaVA VLM on a dataset of 59k radio images from multiple surveys, enriched with 38k image-caption pairs from the literature. The fine-tuned models show clear improvements over base models in radio-specific tasks, achieving ~30% F1-score gains in extended source detection, but they underperform pure vision models and exhibit ~20% drop on general multimodal tasks. Inclusion of caption data and LoRA fine-tuning enhances instruction-following and helps recover ~10% accuracy on standard benchmarks. This work lays the foundation for future advancements in radio VLMs, highlighting their potential and limitations, such as the need for better multimodal alignment, higher-quality datasets, and mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in robotic manipulation,enabling robots to execute natural language commands through end-to-end learning from visual observations.However, deploying large-scale VLA models on affordable robotic platforms remains challenging due to computational constraints and the need for efficient adaptation to new robot embodiments. This paper presents an efficient fine-tuning methodology and real-world deployment analysis for adapting VLA models to low-cost robotic manipulation systems.We propose a resource-efficient fine-tuning strategy using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and quantization techniques that enable multi-billion parameter VLA models ( 3.1B parameters) to run on consumer-grade GPUs with 8GB VRAM. Our methodology addresses the critical challenge of adapting pre-trained VLA models to new robot embodiments with limited demonstration data, focusing on the trade-offs between frozen and unfrozen vision encoders. Through real-world deployment on the SO101 robotic arm for a button-pressing manipulation task, we demonstrate that our approach achieves effective manipulation performance while maintaining computational efficiency. We provide detailed analysis of deployment challenges, failure modes, and the relationship between training data quantity and real-world performance,trained on 200 demonstration episodes. Our results show that with proper fine-tuning methodology, VLA models can be successfully deployed on affordable robotic platforms,making advanced manipulation capabilities accessible beyond expensive research robots.

Recent progress in vision and language foundation models has significantly advanced multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation, inspiring a surge of interest in extending such capabilities to embodied settings through vision-language-action (VLA) models. Yet, most VLA models are still trained with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which struggles to generalize under distribution shifts due to error accumulation. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising alternative by directly optimizing task performance through interaction, but existing attempts remain fragmented and lack a unified platform for fair and systematic comparison across model architectures and algorithmic designs. To address this gap, we introduce RLinf-VLA, a unified and efficient framework for scalable RL training of VLA models. The system adopts a highly flexible resource allocation design that addresses the challenge of integrating rendering, training, and inference in RL+VLA training. In particular, for GPU-parallelized simulators, RLinf-VLA implements a novel hybrid fine-grained pipeline allocation mode, achieving a 1.61x-1.88x speedup in training. Through a unified interface, RLinf-VLA seamlessly supports diverse VLA architectures (e.g., OpenVLA, OpenVLA-OFT), multiple RL algorithms (e.g., PPO, GRPO), and various simulators (e.g., ManiSkill, LIBERO). In simulation, a unified model achieves 98.11\% across 130 LIBERO tasks and 97.66\% across 25 ManiSkill tasks. Beyond empirical performance, our study distills a set of best practices for applying RL to VLA training and sheds light on emerging patterns in this integration. Furthermore, we present preliminary deployment on a real-world Franka robot, where RL-trained policies exhibit stronger generalization than those trained with SFT. We envision RLinf-VLA as a foundation to accelerate and standardize research on embodied intelligence.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate significant potential for developing generalized policies in real-world robotic control. This progress inspires researchers to explore fine-tuning these models with Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, fine-tuning VLA models with RL still faces challenges related to sample efficiency, compatibility with action chunking, and training stability. To address these challenges, we explore the fine-tuning of VLA models through offline reinforcement learning incorporating action chunking. In this work, we propose Chunked RL, a novel reinforcement learning framework specifically designed for VLA models. Within this framework, we extend temporal difference (TD) learning to incorporate action chunking, a prominent characteristic of VLA models. Building upon this framework, we propose CO-RFT, an algorithm aimed at fine-tuning VLA models using a limited set of demonstrations (30 to 60 samples). Specifically, we first conduct imitation learning (IL) with full parameter fine-tuning to initialize both the backbone and the policy. Subsequently, we implement offline RL with action chunking to optimize the pretrained policy. Our empirical results in real-world environments demonstrate that CO-RFT outperforms previous supervised methods, achieving a 57% improvement in success rate and a 22.3% reduction in cycle time. Moreover, our method exhibits robust positional generalization capabilities, attaining a success rate of 44.3% in previously unseen positions.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit strong priors from pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but naive fine-tuning often disrupts these representations and harms generalization. Existing fixes -- freezing modules or applying uniform regularization -- either overconstrain adaptation or ignore the differing roles of VLA components. We present MAPS (Module-Wise Proximity Scheduling), the first robust fine-tuning framework for VLAs. Through systematic analysis, we uncover an empirical order in which proximity constraints should be relaxed to balance stability and flexibility. MAPS linearly schedules this relaxation, enabling visual encoders to stay close to their pretrained priors while action-oriented language layers adapt more freely. MAPS introduces no additional parameters or data, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing VLAs. Across MiniVLA-VQ, MiniVLA-OFT, OpenVLA-OFT, and challenging benchmarks such as SimplerEnv, CALVIN, LIBERO, as well as real-world evaluations on the Franka Emika Panda platform, MAPS consistently boosts both in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance (up to +30%). Our findings highlight empirically guided proximity to pretrained VLMs as a simple yet powerful principle for preserving broad generalization in VLM-to-VLA transfer.

We investigate fine-tuning Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for multi-task medical image understanding, focusing on detection, localization, and counting of findings in medical images. Our objective is to evaluate whether instruction-tuned VLMs can simultaneously improve these tasks, with the goal of enhancing diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. Using MedMultiPoints, a multimodal dataset with annotations from endoscopy (polyps and instruments) and microscopy (sperm cells), we reformulate each task into instruction-based prompts suitable for vision-language reasoning. We fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) across multiple task combinations. Results show that multi-task training improves robustness and accuracy. For example, it reduces the Count Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and increases Matching Accuracy in the Counting + Pointing task. However, trade-offs emerge, such as more zero-case point predictions, indicating reduced reliability in edge cases despite overall performance gains. Our study highlights the potential of adapting general-purpose VLMs to specialized medical tasks via prompt-driven fine-tuning. This approach mirrors clinical workflows, where radiologists simultaneously localize, count, and describe findings - demonstrating how VLMs can learn composite diagnostic reasoning patterns. The model produces interpretable, structured outputs, offering a promising step toward explainable and versatile medical AI. Code, model weights, and scripts will be released for reproducibility at https://github.com/simula/PointDetectCount.

Vision language model (VLM) has been designed for large scale image-text alignment as a pretrained foundation model. For downstream few shot classification tasks, parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) VLM has gained much popularity in the computer vision community. PEFT methods like prompt tuning and linear adapter have been studied for fine-tuning VLM while low rank adaptation (LoRA) algorithm has rarely been considered for few shot fine-tuning VLM. The main obstacle to use LoRA for few shot fine-tuning is the catastrophic forgetting problem. Because the visual language alignment knowledge is important for the generality in few shot learning, whereas low rank adaptation interferes with the most informative direction of the pretrained weight matrix. We propose the complementary subspace low rank adaptation (Comp-LoRA) method to regularize the catastrophic forgetting problem in few shot VLM finetuning. In detail, we optimize the low rank matrix in the complementary subspace, thus preserving the general vision language alignment ability of VLM when learning the novel few shot information. We conduct comparison experiments of the proposed Comp-LoRA method and other PEFT methods on fine-tuning VLM for few shot classification. And we also present the suppression on the catastrophic forgetting problem of our proposed method against directly applying LoRA to VLM. The results show that the proposed method surpasses the baseline method by about +1.0\% Top-1 accuracy and preserves the VLM zero-shot performance over the baseline method by about +1.3\% Top-1 accuracy.

Recent studies have successfully integrated large vision-language models (VLMs) into low-level robotic control by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with expert robotic datasets, resulting in what we term vision-language-action (VLA) models. Although the VLA models are powerful, how to improve these large models during interaction with environments remains an open question. In this paper, we explore how to further improve these VLA models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), a commonly used fine-tuning technique for large models. However, we find that directly applying online RL to large VLA models presents significant challenges, including training instability that severely impacts the performance of large models, and computing burdens that exceed the capabilities of most local machines. To address these challenges, we propose iRe-VLA framework, which iterates between Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning to effectively improve VLA models, leveraging the exploratory benefits of RL while maintaining the stability of supervised learning. Experiments in two simulated benchmarks and a real-world manipulation suite validate the effectiveness of our method.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in world knowledge understanding, adapting them to specific subfields requires precise adjustments. Due to the model's vast scale, traditional global fine-tuning methods for large models can be computationally expensive and impact generalization. To address this challenge, a range of innovative Parameters-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged and achieved remarkable success in both LLMs and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). In the medical domain, fine-tuning a medical Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) model is essential for adapting it to specific tasks. Can the fine-tuning methods for large models be transferred to the medical field to enhance transfer learning efficiency? In this paper, we delve into the fine-tuning methods of LLMs and conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of fine-tuning methods for large models on the existing multimodal model in the medical domain from the training data level and the model structure level. We show the different impacts of fine-tuning methods for large models on medical VLMs and develop the most efficient ways to fine-tune medical VLP models. We hope this research can guide medical domain researchers in optimizing VLMs' training costs, fostering the broader application of VLMs in healthcare fields. The code and dataset have been released at https://github.com/TIMMY-CHAN/MILE.

Fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) often capture spurious correlations between image features and textual attributes, resulting in degraded zero-shot performance at test time. Existing approaches for addressing spurious correlations (i) primarily operate at the global image-level rather than intervening directly on fine-grained image features and (ii) are predominantly designed for unimodal settings. In this work, we present RaVL, which takes a fine-grained perspective on VLM robustness by discovering and mitigating spurious correlations using local image features rather than operating at the global image level. Given a fine-tuned VLM, RaVL first discovers spurious correlations by leveraging a region-level clustering approach to identify precise image features contributing to zero-shot classification errors. Then, RaVL mitigates the identified spurious correlation with a novel region-aware loss function that enables the VLM to focus on relevant regions and ignore spurious relationships during fine-tuning. We evaluate RaVL on 654 VLMs with various model architectures, data domains, and learned spurious correlations. Our results show that RaVL accurately discovers (191% improvement over the closest baseline) and mitigates (8.2% improvement on worst-group image classification accuracy) spurious correlations. Qualitative evaluations on general-domain and medical-domain VLMs confirm our findings.

Fine-tuning is a crucial process for adapting large language models (LLMs) to diverse applications. In certain scenarios, such as multi-tenant serving, deploying multiple LLMs becomes necessary to meet complex demands. Recent studies suggest decomposing a fine-tuned LLM into a base model and corresponding delta weights, which are then compressed using low-rank or low-bit approaches to reduce costs. In this work, we observe that existing low-rank and low-bit compression methods can significantly harm the model performance for task-specific fine-tuned LLMs (e.g., WizardMath for math problems). Motivated by the long-tail distribution of singular values in the delta weights, we propose a delta quantization approach using mixed-precision. This method employs higher-bit representation for singular vectors corresponding to larger singular values. We evaluate our approach on various fine-tuned LLMs, including math LLMs, code LLMs, chat LLMs, and even VLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs comparably to full fine-tuned LLMs, surpassing both low-rank and low-bit baselines by a considerable margin. Additionally, we show that our method is compatible with various backbone LLMs, such as Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral, highlighting its generalizability.

Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under distribution shifts. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to overcome these limitations by optimizing for task objectives via trial-and-error, yet a systematic understanding of its specific generalization benefits for VLAs compared to SFT is lacking. To address this, our study introduces a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLA generalization and systematically investigates the impact of RL fine-tuning across diverse visual, semantic, and execution dimensions. Our extensive experiments reveal that RL fine-tuning, particularly with PPO, significantly enhances generalization in semantic understanding and execution robustness over SFT, while maintaining comparable visual robustness. We identify PPO as a more effective RL algorithm for VLAs than LLM-derived methods like DPO and GRPO. We also develop a simple recipe for efficient PPO training on VLAs, and demonstrate its practical utility for improving VLA generalization. The project page is at https://rlvla.github.io

Fine-tuning is a prominent technique to adapt a pre-trained language model to downstream scenarios. In parameter-efficient fine-tuning, only a small subset of modules are trained over the downstream datasets, while leaving the rest of the pre-trained model frozen to save computation resources. In recent years, a popular productization form arises as Model-as-a-Service (MaaS), in which vendors provide abundant pre-trained language models, server resources and core functions, and customers can fine-tune, deploy and invoke their customized model by accessing the one-stop MaaS with their own private dataset. In this paper, we identify the model and data privacy leakage risks in MaaS fine-tuning, and propose a Split-and-Privatize (SAP) framework, which manage to mitigate the privacy issues by adapting the existing split learning architecture. The proposed SAP framework is sufficiently investigated by experiments, and the results indicate that it can enhance the empirical privacy by 62% at the cost of 1% model performance degradation on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank dataset.

Fine-tuning is a key approach for adapting language models to specific downstream tasks, but updating all model parameters becomes impractical as model sizes increase. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), address this challenge by introducing additional adaptation parameters into pre-trained weight matrices. However, LoRA's performance varies across different insertion points within the model, highlighting potential parameter inefficiency due to unnecessary insertions. To this end, we propose SSMLoRA (State Space Model Low-Rank Adaptation), an extension of LoRA that incorporates a State Space Model (SSM) to interconnect low-rank matrices. SSMLoRA ensures that performance is maintained even with sparser insertions. SSMLoRA allows the model to not only map inputs to a low-rank space for better feature extraction but also leverage the computations from the previous low-rank space. Our method achieves comparable performance to LoRA on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark while using only half the parameters. Additionally, due to its structure, SSMLoRA shows promise in handling tasks with longer input sequences. .You can find our code here:https://github.com/yuhkalhic/SSMLoRA.

There is great interest in fine-tuning frontier large language models (LLMs) to inject new information and update existing knowledge. While commercial LLM fine-tuning APIs from providers such as OpenAI and Google promise flexible adaptation for various applications, the efficacy of fine-tuning remains unclear. In this study, we introduce FineTuneBench, an evaluation framework and dataset for understanding how well commercial fine-tuning APIs can successfully learn new and updated knowledge. We analyze five frontier LLMs with commercially available fine-tuning APIs, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, on their effectiveness in two settings: (1) ingesting novel information, such as recent news events and new people profiles, and (2) updating existing knowledge, such as updated medical guidelines and code frameworks. Our results reveal substantial shortcomings in all the models' abilities to effectively learn new information through fine-tuning, with an average generalization accuracy of 37% across all models. When updating existing knowledge, such as incorporating medical guideline updates, commercial fine-tuning APIs show even more limited capability (average generalization accuracy of 19%). Overall, fine-tuning GPT-4o mini is the most effective for infusing new knowledge and updating knowledge, followed by GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o. The fine-tuning APIs for Gemini 1.5 Flesh and Gemini 1.5 Pro are unable to learn new knowledge or update existing knowledge. These findings underscore a major shortcoming in using current commercial fine-tuning services to achieve reliable knowledge infusion in common scenarios. We open source the FineTuneBench dataset at https://github.com/kevinwu23/StanfordFineTuneBench.

The development of general robotic systems capable of manipulating in unstructured environments is a significant challenge. While Vision-Language Models(VLM) excel in high-level commonsense reasoning, they lack the fine-grained 3D spatial understanding required for precise manipulation tasks. Fine-tuning VLM on robotic datasets to create Vision-Language-Action Models(VLA) is a potential solution, but it is hindered by high data collection costs and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object-centric representation that bridges the gap between VLM's high-level reasoning and the low-level precision required for manipulation. Our key insight is that an object's canonical space, defined by its functional affordances, provides a structured and semantically meaningful way to describe interaction primitives, such as points and directions. These primitives act as a bridge, translating VLM's commonsense reasoning into actionable 3D spatial constraints. In this context, we introduce a dual closed-loop, open-vocabulary robotic manipulation system: one loop for high-level planning through primitive resampling, interaction rendering and VLM checking, and another for low-level execution via 6D pose tracking. This design ensures robust, real-time control without requiring VLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, highlighting the potential of this approach for automating large-scale simulation data generation.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly prominent in the field of artificial intelligence. Visual instruction fine-tuning (IFT) is a vital process for aligning MLLMs' output with user's intentions. High-quality and diversified instruction following data is the key to this fine-tuning process. Recent studies propose to construct visual IFT datasets through a multifaceted approach: transforming existing datasets with rule-based templates, employing GPT-4 for rewriting annotations, and utilizing GPT-4V for visual dataset pseudo-labeling. LLaVA-1.5 adopted similar approach and construct LLaVA-mix-665k, which is one of the simplest, most widely used, yet most effective IFT datasets today. Notably, when properly fine-tuned with this dataset, MLLMs can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks. However, we noticed that models trained with this dataset often struggle to follow user instructions properly in multi-round dialog. In addition, tradition caption and VQA evaluation benchmarks, with their closed-form evaluation structure, are not fully equipped to assess the capabilities of modern open-ended generative MLLMs. This problem is not unique to the LLaVA-mix-665k dataset, but may be a potential issue in all IFT datasets constructed from image captioning or VQA sources, though the extent of this issue may vary. We argue that datasets with diverse and high-quality detailed instruction following annotations are essential and adequate for MLLMs IFT. In this work, we establish a new IFT dataset, with images sourced from the COCO dataset along with more diverse instructions. Our experiments show that when fine-tuned with out proposed dataset, MLLMs achieve better performance on open-ended evaluation benchmarks in both single-round and multi-round dialog setting.

Radiologists play a crucial role by translating medical images into medical reports. However, the field faces staffing shortages and increasing workloads. While automated approaches using vision-language models (VLMs) show promise as assistants, they require exceptionally high accuracy. Most current VLMs in radiology rely solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Meanwhile, in the general domain, additional preference fine-tuning has become standard practice. The challenge in radiology lies in the prohibitive cost of obtaining radiologist feedback. We propose a scalable automated preference alignment technique for VLMs in radiology, focusing on chest X-ray (CXR) report generation. Our method leverages publicly available datasets with an LLM-as-a-Judge mechanism, eliminating the need for additional expert radiologist feedback. We evaluate and benchmark five direct alignment algorithms (DAAs). Our results show up to a 57.4% improvement in average GREEN scores, a LLM-based metric for evaluating CXR reports, and a 9.2% increase in an average across six metrics (domain specific and general), compared to the SFT baseline. We study reward overoptimization via length exploitation, with reports lengthening by up to 3.2x. To assess a potential alignment tax, we benchmark on six additional diverse tasks, finding no significant degradations. A reader study involving four board-certified radiologists indicates win rates of up to 0.62 over the SFT baseline, while significantly penalizing verbosity. Our analysis provides actionable insights for the development of VLMs in high-stakes fields like radiology.

Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence of harmful data during vision-language instruction fine-tuning, and that VLLM fine-tuning can cause forgetting of safety alignment previously learned by the underpinning LLM. To address this issue, we first curate a vision-language safe instruction-following dataset VLGuard covering various harmful categories. Our experiments demonstrate that integrating this dataset into standard vision-language fine-tuning or utilizing it for post-hoc fine-tuning effectively safety aligns VLLMs. This alignment is achieved with minimal impact on, or even enhancement of, the models' helpfulness. The versatility of our safety fine-tuning dataset makes it a valuable resource for safety-testing existing VLLMs, training new models or safeguarding pre-trained VLLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that fine-tuned VLLMs effectively reject unsafe instructions and substantially reduce the success rates of several black-box adversarial attacks, which approach zero in many cases. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ys-zong/VLGuard.

Automated Program Repair (APR) has evolved significantly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). Fine-tuning LLMs for program repair is a recent avenue of research, with many dimensions which have not been explored. Existing work mostly fine-tunes LLMs with naive code representations and is fundamentally limited in its ability to fine-tune larger LLMs. To address this problem, we propose RepairLLaMA, a novel program repair approach that combines 1) code representations for APR and 2) the state-of-the-art parameter-efficient LLM fine-tuning technique called LoRA. This results in RepairLLaMA producing a highly effective `program repair adapter' for fixing bugs with language models. Our experiments demonstrate the validity of both concepts. First, fine-tuning adapters with program repair specific code representations enables the model to use meaningful repair signals. Second, parameter-efficient fine-tuning helps fine-tuning to converge and contributes to the effectiveness of the repair adapter to fix data-points outside the fine-tuning data distribution. Overall, RepairLLaMA correctly fixes 125 Defects4J v2 and 82 HumanEval-Java bugs, outperforming all baselines.

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for down-stream tasks is a critical step in the AI deployment pipeline. Reinforcement learning (RL) is arguably the most prominent fine-tuning method, contributing to the birth of many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast, evolution strategies (ES), which once showed comparable performance to RL on models with a few million parameters, was neglected due to the pessimistic perception of its scalability to larger models. In this work, we report the first successful attempt to scale up ES for fine-tuning the full parameters of LLMs, showing the surprising fact that ES can search efficiently over billions of parameters and outperform existing RL fine-tuning methods in multiple respects, including sample efficiency, tolerance to long-horizon rewards, robustness to different base LLMs, less tendency to reward hacking, and more stable performance across runs. It therefore serves as a basis to unlock a new direction in LLM fine-tuning beyond what current RL techniques provide. The source codes are provided at: https://github.com/VsonicV/es-fine-tuning-paper.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in artificial intelli-gence, capable of integrating textual and visual data for a unified understanding of complex scenes. While models such as Florence2, built on transformer architectures, have shown promise across general tasks, their performance in object detection within unstructured or cluttered environments remains underexplored. In this study, we fi-ne-tuned the Florence2 model for object detection tasks in non-constructed, complex environments. A comprehensive experimental framework was established involving multiple hardware configurations (NVIDIA T4, L4, and A100 GPUs), optimizers (AdamW, SGD), and varied hyperparameters including learning rates and LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) setups. Model training and evaluation were conducted on challenging datasets representative of real-world, disordered settings. The optimized Florence2 models exhibited significant improvements in object detection accuracy, with Mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics approaching or matching those of estab-lished models such as YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10. The integration of LoRA and careful fine-tuning of transformer layers contributed notably to these gains. Our find-ings highlight the adaptability of transformer-based VLMs like Florence2 for do-main-specific tasks, particularly in visually complex environments. The study under-scores the potential of fine-tuned VLMs to rival traditional convolution-based detec-tors, offering a flexible and scalable approach for advanced vision applications in re-al-world, unstructured settings.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially when the robot's embodiment or the task itself differs from the pre-training data. This discrepancy leads to a significant mismatch in action distributions, demanding extensive data and compute for effective fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce Align-Then-stEer (\texttt{ATE)}, a novel, data-efficient, and plug-and-play adaptation framework. ATE first aligns disparate action spaces by constructing a unified latent space, where a variational autoencoder constrained by reverse KL divergence embeds adaptation actions into modes of the pre-training action latent distribution. Subsequently, it steers the diffusion- or flow-based VLA's generation process during fine-tuning via a guidance mechanism that pushes the model's output distribution towards the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-embodiment and cross-task manipulation in both simulation and real world. Compared to direct fine-tuning of representative VLAs, our method improves the average multi-task success rate by up to 9.8\% in simulation and achieves a striking 32\% success rate gain in a real-world cross-embodiment setting. Our work presents a general and lightweight solution that greatly enhances the practicality of deploying VLA models to new robotic platforms and tasks.

Fine-tuning is the primary methodology for tailoring pre-trained large language models to specific tasks. As the model's scale and the diversity of tasks expand, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods are of paramount importance. One of the most widely used family of methods is low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants. LoRA encodes weight update as the product of two low-rank matrices. Despite its advantages, LoRA falls short of full-parameter fine-tuning in terms of generalization error for certain tasks. We introduce Chain of LoRA (COLA), an iterative optimization framework inspired by the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, to bridge the gap between LoRA and full parameter fine-tuning, without incurring additional computational costs or memory overheads. COLA employs a residual learning procedure where it merges learned LoRA modules into the pre-trained language model parameters and re-initilize optimization for new born LoRA modules. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees as well as empirical results to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Across various models (OPT and llama-2) and seven benchmarking tasks, we demonstrate that COLA can consistently outperform LoRA without additional computational or memory costs.

Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities, making them essential for several downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning these models at scale remains challenging, particularly in federated environments where data is decentralized and non-iid across clients. Existing parameter-efficient tuning methods like LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) reduce computational overhead but struggle with heterogeneous client data, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose FedVLM, a federated LoRA fine-tuning framework that enables decentralized adaptation of VLMs while preserving model privacy and reducing reliance on centralized training. To further tackle data heterogeneity, we introduce personalized LoRA (pLoRA), which dynamically adapts LoRA parameters to each client's unique data distribution, significantly improving local adaptation while maintaining global model aggregation. Experiments on the RLAIF-V dataset show that pLoRA improves client-specific performance by 24.5% over standard LoRA, demonstrating superior adaptation in non-iid settings. FedVLM provides a scalable and efficient solution for fine-tuning VLMs in federated settings, advancing personalized adaptation in distributed learning scenarios.

Fine-tuning open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) creates a critical yet underexplored attack surface: vulnerabilities in the base VLM could be retained in fine-tuned variants, rendering them susceptible to transferable jailbreak attacks. To demonstrate this risk, we introduce the Simulated Ensemble Attack (SEA), a novel grey-box jailbreak method in which the adversary has full access to the base VLM but no knowledge of the fine-tuned target's weights or training configuration. To improve jailbreak transferability across fine-tuned VLMs, SEA combines two key techniques: Fine-tuning Trajectory Simulation (FTS) and Targeted Prompt Guidance (TPG). FTS generates transferable adversarial images by simulating the vision encoder's parameter shifts, while TPG is a textual strategy that steers the language decoder toward adversarially optimized outputs. Experiments on the Qwen2-VL family (2B and 7B) demonstrate that SEA achieves high transfer attack success rates exceeding 86.5% and toxicity rates near 49.5% across diverse fine-tuned variants, even those specifically fine-tuned to improve safety behaviors. Notably, while direct PGD-based image jailbreaks rarely transfer across fine-tuned VLMs, SEA reliably exploits inherited vulnerabilities from the base model, significantly enhancing transferability. These findings highlight an urgent need to safeguard fine-tuned proprietary VLMs against transferable vulnerabilities inherited from open-source foundations, motivating the development of holistic defenses across the entire model lifecycle.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Within the realm of software engineering, specialized tasks on code, such as program repair, present unique challenges, necessitating fine-tuning to unlock state-of-the-art performance. Fine-tuning approaches proposed in the literature for LLMs on program repair tasks are however generally overlooking the need to reason about the logic behind code changes, beyond syntactic patterns in the data. High-performing fine-tuning experiments also usually come at very high computational costs. With MORepair, we propose a novel perspective on the learning focus of LLM fine-tuning for program repair: we not only adapt the LLM parameters to the syntactic nuances of the task of code transformation (objective 1), but we also specifically fine-tune the LLM with respect to the logical reason behind the code change in the training data (objective 2). Such a multi-objective fine-tuning will instruct LLMs to generate high-quality patches. We apply MORepair to fine-tune four open-source LLMs with different sizes and architectures. Experimental results on C++ and Java repair benchmarks show that the implemented fine-tuning effectively boosts LLM repair performance by 7.6% to 10% in Top-10 repair suggestions. We further show that our fine-tuning strategy yields superior performance compared to the incumbent state-of-the-art in fine-tuned models for program repair, Fine-tune-CoT and RepairLLaMA.

As pre-trained models automate many code intelligence tasks, a widely used paradigm is to fine-tune a model on the task dataset for each programming language. A recent study reported that multilingual fine-tuning benefits a range of tasks and models. However, we find that multilingual fine-tuning leads to performance degradation on recent models UniXcoder and CodeT5. To alleviate the potentially catastrophic forgetting issue in multilingual models, we fix all pre-trained model parameters, insert the parameter-efficient structure adapter, and fine-tune it. Updating only 0.6\% of the overall parameters compared to full-model fine-tuning for each programming language, adapter tuning yields consistent improvements on code search and summarization tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results. In addition, we experimentally show its effectiveness in cross-lingual and low-resource scenarios. Multilingual fine-tuning with 200 samples per programming language approaches the results fine-tuned with the entire dataset on code summarization. Our experiments on three probing tasks show that adapter tuning significantly outperforms full-model fine-tuning and effectively overcomes catastrophic forgetting.

Recently, fine-tuning language models pre-trained on large text corpora have provided huge improvements on vision-and-language (V&L) tasks as well as on pure language tasks. However, fine-tuning the entire parameter set of pre-trained models becomes impractical since the model size is growing rapidly. Hence, in this paper, we introduce adapter-based parameter-efficient transfer learning techniques to V&L models such as VL-BART and VLT5. We evaluate our methods in a unified multi-task setup on both image-text and video-text benchmarks. For the image-text tasks, we use four diverse V&L datasets: VQAv2, GQA, NLVR2 , and MSCOCO image captioning. For video-text tasks, we use TVQA, How2QA, TVC, and YC2C. With careful training and thorough experiments, we benchmark three popular adapter-based methods (Adapter, Hyperformer, Compacter) against the standard full fine-tuning and the recently proposed prompt-tuning approach. We also enhance the efficiency and performance of adapters by sharing their weights to attain knowledge across tasks. Our results demonstrate that training the adapter with the weight-sharing technique (4.18% of total parameters for image-text tasks and 3.39% for video-text tasks) can match the performance of fine-tuning the entire model. Lastly, we present a comprehensive analysis including the combination of adapter and task-specific prompts and the impact of V&L pre-training on adapters. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ylsung/VL_adapter.

We surface a new threat to closed-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) that enables an attacker to compute optimization-based prompt injections. Specifically, we characterize how an attacker can leverage the loss-like information returned from the remote fine-tuning interface to guide the search for adversarial prompts. The fine-tuning interface is hosted by an LLM vendor and allows developers to fine-tune LLMs for their tasks, thus providing utility, but also exposes enough information for an attacker to compute adversarial prompts. Through an experimental analysis, we characterize the loss-like values returned by the Gemini fine-tuning API and demonstrate that they provide a useful signal for discrete optimization of adversarial prompts using a greedy search algorithm. Using the PurpleLlama prompt injection benchmark, we demonstrate attack success rates between 65% and 82% on Google's Gemini family of LLMs. These attacks exploit the classic utility-security tradeoff - the fine-tuning interface provides a useful feature for developers but also exposes the LLMs to powerful attacks.

While significant research has focused on developing embodied reasoning capabilities using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) or integrating advanced VLMs into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for end-to-end robot control, few studies directly address the critical gap between upstream VLM-based reasoning and downstream VLA policy learning. In this work, we take an initial step toward bridging embodied reasoning with VLA policy learning by introducing Vlaser - a Vision-Language-Action Model with synergistic embodied reasoning capability, which is a foundational vision-language model designed to integrate high-level reasoning with low-level control for embodied agents. Built upon the high-quality Vlaser-6M dataset, Vlaser achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of embodied reasoning benchmarks - including spatial reasoning, embodied grounding, embodied QA, and task planning. Furthermore, we systematically examine how different VLM initializations affect supervised VLA fine-tuning, offering novel insights into mitigating the domain shift between internet-scale pre-training data and embodied-specific policy learning data. Based on these insights, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the WidowX benchmark and competitive performance on the Google Robot benchmark.

Using vision-language models (VLMs) in web development presents a promising strategy to increase efficiency and unblock no-code solutions: by providing a screenshot or a sketch of a UI, a VLM could generate the code to reproduce it, for instance in a language like HTML. Despite the advancements in VLMs for various tasks, the specific challenge of converting a screenshot into a corresponding HTML has been minimally explored. We posit that this is mainly due to the absence of a suitable, high-quality dataset. This work introduces WebSight, a synthetic dataset consisting of 2 million pairs of HTML codes and their corresponding screenshots. We fine-tune a foundational VLM on our dataset and show proficiency in converting webpage screenshots to functional HTML code. To accelerate the research in this area, we open-source WebSight.

Recent research looks to harness the general knowledge and reasoning of large language models (LLMs) into agents that accomplish user-specified goals in interactive environments. Vision-language models (VLMs) extend LLMs to multi-modal data and provide agents with the visual reasoning necessary for new applications in areas such as computer automation. However, agent tasks emphasize skills where accessible open-weight VLMs lag behind their LLM equivalents. For example, VLMs are less capable of following an environment's strict output syntax requirements and are more focused on open-ended question answering. Overcoming these limitations requires supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on task-specific expert demonstrations. Our work approaches these challenges from an offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) perspective. RL lets us fine-tune VLMs to agent tasks while learning from the unsuccessful decisions of our own model or more capable (larger) models. We explore an off-policy RL solution that retains the stability and simplicity of the widely used SFT workflow while allowing our agent to self-improve and learn from low-quality datasets. We demonstrate this technique with two open-weight VLMs across three multi-modal agent domains.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as recent Qwen and Gemini models, are positioned as general-purpose AI systems capable of reasoning across domains. Yet their capabilities in scientific imaging, especially on unfamiliar and potentially previously unseen data distributions, remain poorly understood. In this work, we assess whether generic VLMs, presumed to lack exposure to astronomical corpora, can perform morphology-based classification of radio galaxies using the MiraBest FR-I/FR-II dataset. We explore prompting strategies using natural language and schematic diagrams, and, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce visual in-context examples within prompts in astronomy. Additionally, we evaluate lightweight supervised adaptation via LoRA fine-tuning. Our findings reveal three trends: (i) even prompt-based approaches can achieve good performance, suggesting that VLMs encode useful priors for unfamiliar scientific domains; (ii) however, outputs are highly unstable, i.e. varying sharply with superficial prompt changes such as layout, ordering, or decoding temperature, even when semantic content is held constant; and (iii) with just 15M trainable parameters and no astronomy-specific pretraining, fine-tuned Qwen-VL achieves near state-of-the-art performance (3% Error rate), rivaling domain-specific models. These results suggest that the apparent "reasoning" of VLMs often reflects prompt sensitivity rather than genuine inference, raising caution for their use in scientific domains. At the same time, with minimal adaptation, generic VLMs can rival specialized models, offering a promising but fragile tool for scientific discovery.

Multi-modal foundation models like OpenFlamingo, LLaVA, and GPT-4 are increasingly used for various real-world tasks. Prior work has shown that these models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the vision modality. These attacks can be leveraged to spread fake information or defraud users, and thus pose a significant risk, which makes the robustness of large multi-modal foundation models a pressing problem. The CLIP model, or one of its variants, is used as a frozen vision encoder in many vision-language models (VLMs), e.g. LLaVA and OpenFlamingo. We propose an unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning scheme to obtain a robust CLIP vision encoder, which yields robustness on all vision down-stream tasks (VLMs, zero-shot classification) that rely on CLIP. In particular, we show that stealth-attacks on users of VLMs by a malicious third party providing manipulated images are no longer possible once one replaces the original CLIP model with our robust one. No retraining or fine-tuning of the VLM is required. The code and robust models are available at https://github.com/chs20/RobustVLM

Many Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models flatten image patches into a 1D token sequence, weakening the 2D spatial cues needed for precise manipulation. We introduce IVRA, a lightweight, training-free method that improves spatial understanding by exploiting affinity hints already available in the model's built-in vision encoder, without requiring any external encoder or retraining. IVRA selectively injects these affinity signals into a language-model layer in which instance-level features reside. This inference-time intervention realigns visual-token interactions and better preserves geometric structure while keeping all model parameters fixed. We demonstrate the generality of IVRA by applying it to diverse VLA architectures (LLaRA, OpenVLA, and FLOWER) across simulated benchmarks spanning both 2D and 3D manipulation (VIMA and LIBERO) and on various real-robot tasks. On 2D VIMA, IVRA improves average success by +4.2% over the baseline LLaRA in a low-data regime. On 3D LIBERO, it yields consistent gains over the OpenVLA and FLOWER baselines, including improvements when baseline accuracy is near saturation (96.3% to 97.1%). All code and models will be released publicly. Visualizations are available at: jongwoopark7978.github.io/IVRA

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning optimizes large, pre-trained foundation models by updating a subset of parameters; in this class, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is particularly effective. Inspired by an effort to investigate the different roles of LoRA matrices during fine-tuning, this paper characterizes and leverages unexpected asymmetry in the importance of low-rank adapter matrices. Specifically, when updating the parameter matrices of a neural network by adding a product BA, we observe that the B and A matrices have distinct functions: A extracts features from the input, while B uses these features to create the desired output. Based on this observation, we demonstrate that fine-tuning B is inherently more effective than fine-tuning A, and that a random untrained A should perform nearly as well as a fine-tuned one. Using an information-theoretic lens, we also bound the generalization of low-rank adapters, showing that the parameter savings of exclusively training B improves the bound. We support our conclusions with experiments on RoBERTa, BART-Large, LLaMA-2, and ViTs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance across a wide array of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Fine-tuning techniques are commonly utilized to tailor pre-trained models to specific applications. While methods like LoRA have effectively tackled GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their applicability is often restricted to limited performance, especially on multi-task. On the other hand, Mix-of-Expert (MoE) models, such as Mixtral 8x7B, demonstrate remarkable performance across multiple NLP tasks while maintaining a reduced parameter count. However, the resource requirements of these MoEs still challenging, particularly for consumer-grade GPUs only have limited VRAM. To address these challenge, we propose MixLoRA, an innovative approach aimed at constructing a resource-efficient sparse MoE model based on LoRA. MixLoRA inserts multiple LoRA-based experts within the feed-forward network block of a frozen pre-trained dense model through fine-tuning, employing a commonly used top-k router. Unlike other LoRA based MoE methods, MixLoRA enhances model performance by utilizing independently configurable attention-layer LoRA adapters, supporting the use of LoRA and its variants for the construction of experts, and applying auxiliary load balance loss to address the imbalance problem of the router. In experiments, MixLoRA achieves commendable performance across all evaluation metrics in both single-task and multi-task learning scenarios. Implemented within the m-LoRA framework, MixLoRA enables parallel fine-tuning of multiple mixture-of-experts models on a single 24GB consumer-grade GPU without quantization, thereby reducing GPU memory consumption by 41\% and latency during the training process by 17\%.

Visual Information Extraction (VIE) converts unstructured document images into structured formats like JSON, critical for medical applications such as report analysis and online consultations. Traditional methods rely on OCR and language models, while end-to-end multimodal models offer direct JSON generation. However, domain-specific schemas and high annotation costs limit their effectiveness in medical VIE. We base our approach on the Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework to address these challenges using only 100 annotated samples. Our approach ensures dataset diversity, a balanced precision-recall reward mechanism to reduce hallucinations and improve field coverage, and innovative sampling strategies to enhance reasoning capabilities. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our RLVR method, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on medical VIE tasks, significantly improving F1, precision, and recall. While our models excel on tasks similar to medical datasets, performance drops on dissimilar tasks, highlighting the need for domain-specific optimization. Case studies further demonstrate the value of reasoning during training and inference for VIE.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have great potential in medical tasks, like Visual Question Answering (VQA), where they could act as interactive assistants for both patients and clinicians. Yet their robustness to distribution shifts on unseen data remains a key concern for safe deployment. Evaluating such robustness requires a controlled experimental setup that allows for systematic insights into the model's behavior. However, we demonstrate that current setups fail to offer sufficiently thorough evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework, called SURE-VQA, centered around three key requirements to overcome current pitfalls and systematically analyze VLM robustness: 1) Since robustness on synthetic shifts does not necessarily translate to real-world shifts, it should be measured on real-world shifts that are inherent to the VQA data; 2) Traditional token-matching metrics often fail to capture underlying semantics, necessitating the use of large language models (LLMs) for more accurate semantic evaluation; 3) Model performance often lacks interpretability due to missing sanity baselines, thus meaningful baselines should be reported that allow assessing the multimodal impact on the VLM. To demonstrate the relevance of this framework, we conduct a study on the robustness of various Fine-Tuning (FT) methods across three medical datasets with four types of distribution shifts. Our study highlights key insights into robustness: 1) No FT method consistently outperforms others in robustness, and 2) robustness trends are more stable across FT methods than across distribution shifts. Additionally, we find that simple sanity baselines that do not use the image data can perform surprisingly well and confirm LoRA as the best-performing FT method on in-distribution data. Code is provided at https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/sure-vqa.

Recently, mobile AI agents based on VLMs have been gaining increasing attention. These works typically utilize VLM as a foundation, fine-tuning it with instruction-based mobile datasets. However, these VLMs are typically pre-trained on general-domain data, which often results in a lack of fundamental capabilities specific to the mobile domain. Therefore, they may struggle to recognize specific UI elements and understand intra-UI fine-grained information. In addition, the current fine-tuning task focuses on interacting with the most relevant element for the given instruction. These fine-tuned VLMs may still ignore the relationships between UI pages, neglect the roles of elements in page transitions and lack inter-UI understanding. To address issues, we propose a VLM called MobileVLM, which includes two additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. We defined four UI-based pre-training tasks, enabling the model to better perceive fine-grained elements and capture page transition actions. To address the lack of mobile pre-training data, we built a large Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M from scratch, which contains 3 million UI pages, and real-world transition actions, forming a directed graph structure. Experimental results show MobileVLM excels on both our test set and public mobile benchmarks, outperforming existing VLMs.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and perform complex tasks from multimodal input. Although recent work explores using reinforcement learning (RL) to automate the laborious data collection process in scaling supervised fine-tuning (SFT), applying large-scale RL to flow-based VLAs (e.g., pi_0, pi_{0.5}) remains challenging due to intractable action log-likelihoods from iterative denoising. We address this challenge with pi_{RL}, an open-source framework for training flow-based VLAs in parallel simulation. pi_{RL} implements two RL algorithms: (1) {Flow-Noise} models the denoising process as a discrete-time MDP with a learnable noise network for exact log-likelihood computation. (2) {Flow-SDE} integrates denoising with agent-environment interaction, formulating a two-layer MDP that employs ODE-to-SDE conversion for efficient RL exploration. We evaluate pi_{RL} on LIBERO and ManiSkill benchmarks. On LIBERO, pi_{RL} boosts few-shot SFT models pi_0 and pi_{0.5} from 57.6% to 97.6% and from 77.1% to 98.3%, respectively. In ManiSkill, we train pi_{RL} in 320 parallel environments, improving pi_0 from 41.6% to 85.7% and pi_{0.5} from 40.0% to 84.8% across 4352 pick-and-place tasks, demonstrating scalable multitask RL under heterogeneous simulation. Overall, pi_{RL} achieves significant performance gains and stronger generalization over SFT-models, validating the effectiveness of online RL for flow-based VLAs.

Transfer learning via fine-tuning pre-trained transformer models has gained significant success in delivering state-of-the-art results across various NLP tasks. In the absence of centralized data, Federated Learning (FL) can benefit from distributed and private data of the FL edge clients for fine-tuning. However, due to the limited communication, computation, and storage capabilities of edge devices and the huge sizes of popular transformer models, efficient fine-tuning is crucial to make federated training feasible. This work explores the opportunities and challenges associated with applying parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods in different FL settings for language tasks. Specifically, our investigation reveals that as the data across users becomes more diverse, the gap between fully fine-tuning the model and employing PEFT methods widens. To bridge this performance gap, we propose a method called SLoRA, which overcomes the key limitations of LoRA in high heterogeneous data scenarios through a novel data-driven initialization technique. Our experimental results demonstrate that SLoRA achieves performance comparable to full fine-tuning, with significant sparse updates with approximately sim 1% density while reducing training time by up to 90%.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in industry is accelerating the shift from traditional automation to intelligent systems with perception and cognition. Vision language-action (VLA) models have been a key paradigm in AI to unify perception, reasoning, and control. Has the performance of the VLA models met the industrial requirements? In this paper, from the perspective of industrial deployment, we compare the performance of existing state-of-the-art VLA models in industrial scenarios and analyze the limitations of VLA models for real-world industrial deployment from the perspectives of data collection and model architecture. The results show that the VLA models retain their ability to perform simple grasping tasks even in industrial settings after fine-tuning. However, there is much room for performance improvement in complex industrial environments, diverse object categories, and high precision placing tasks. Our findings provide practical insight into the adaptability of VLA models for industrial use and highlight the need for task-specific enhancements to improve their robustness, generalization, and precision.

Fine-tuning the entire set of parameters of a large pretrained model has become the mainstream approach for transfer learning. To increase its efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting and interference, techniques like adapters and sparse fine-tuning have been developed. Adapters are modular, as they can be combined to adapt a model towards different facets of knowledge (e.g., dedicated language and/or task adapters). Sparse fine-tuning is expressive, as it controls the behavior of all model components. In this work, we introduce a new fine-tuning method with both these desirable properties. In particular, we learn sparse, real-valued masks based on a simple variant of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. Task-specific masks are obtained from annotated data in a source language, and language-specific masks from masked language modeling in a target language. Both these masks can then be composed with the pretrained model. Unlike adapter-based fine-tuning, this method neither increases the number of parameters at inference time nor alters the original model architecture. Most importantly, it outperforms adapters in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by a large margin in a series of multilingual benchmarks, including Universal Dependencies, MasakhaNER, and AmericasNLI. Based on an in-depth analysis, we additionally find that sparsity is crucial to prevent both 1) interference between the fine-tunings to be composed and 2) overfitting. We release the code and models at https://github.com/cambridgeltl/composable-sft.

Achieving truly adaptive embodied intelligence requires agents that learn not just by imitating static demonstrations, but by continuously improving through environmental interaction, which is akin to how humans master skills through practice. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging large language models, yet remain fundamentally limited by Supervised Finetuning (SFT): requiring hundreds of demonstrations per task, rigidly memorizing trajectories, and failing to adapt when deployment conditions deviate from training. We introduce EVOLVE-VLA, a test-time training framework enabling VLAs to continuously adapt through environment interaction with minimal or zero task-specific demonstrations. The key technical challenge is replacing oracle reward signals (unavailable at test time) with autonomous feedback. We address this through a learned progress estimator providing dense feedback, and critically, we design our framework to ``tame'' this inherently noisy signal via two mechanisms: (1) an accumulative progress estimation mechanism smoothing noisy point-wise estimates, and (2) a progressive horizon extension strategy enabling gradual policy evolution. EVOLVE-VLA achieves substantial gains: +8.6\% on long-horizon tasks, +22.0\% in 1-shot learning, and enables cross-task generalization -- achieving 20.8\% success on unseen tasks without task-specific demonstrations training (vs. 0\% for pure SFT). Qualitative analysis reveals emergent capabilities absent in demonstrations, including error recovery and novel strategies. This work represents a critical step toward VLAs that truly learn and adapt, moving beyond static imitation toward continuous self-improvements.

Recent advancements indicate that scaling up Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) effectively enhances performance on downstream multimodal tasks. The prevailing MLLM paradigm, e.g., LLaVA, transforms visual features into text-like tokens using a static vision-language mapper, thereby enabling static LLMs to develop the capability to comprehend visual information through visual instruction tuning. Although promising, the static tuning strategy~The static tuning refers to the trained model with static parameters. that shares the same parameters may constrain performance across different downstream multimodal tasks. In light of this, we introduce HyperLLaVA, which involves adaptive tuning of the projector and LLM parameters, in conjunction with a dynamic visual expert and language expert, respectively. These experts are derived from HyperNetworks, which generates adaptive parameter shifts through visual and language guidance, enabling dynamic projector and LLM modeling in two-stage training. Our experiments demonstrate that our solution significantly surpasses LLaVA on existing MLLM benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, SEED-Bench, and LLaVA-Bench. ~Our project is available on the link https://github.com/DCDmllm/HyperLLaVA.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel in general multimodal tasks, they lack the domain-specific knowledge for industrial vibration signal analysis. This paper introduces VSLLaVA, a comprehensive pipeline that utilizes expert knowledge-guided instruction tuning and evaluation to create an end-to-end LMM for signal analysis. To achieve this, we construct a novel Signal-Question-Answer (SQA) dataset using an expert rule-based signal generator. This dataset facilitates a two-stage learning procedure. The first step is efficient instruction fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which imparts specialized signal identification capabilities. Subsequently, we designed a tailored Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to refine the reasoning capabilities and enhance classification robustness. Then, a dual-mode evaluation framework is proposed, combining an LLM referee with expert rules for semantic assessment using quantitative metrics for numerical and textual accuracy, which reveals that VSLLaVA significantly improves performance in signal type identification and parameter analysis, and makes progress in the identification and parameter analysis of fault-related signals. This research demonstrates a viable approach for developing specialized foundational models for complex industrial applications and marks a transition from conventional task-specific systems to a cohesive, interactive foundational model.

The growing success of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models stems from the promise that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can endow agents with transferable world knowledge and vision-language (VL) grounding, laying a foundation for action models with broader generalization. Yet when these VLMs are adapted to the action modality, it remains unclear to what extent their original VL representations and knowledge are preserved. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of representation retention during VLA fine-tuning, showing that naive action fine-tuning leads to degradation of visual representations. To characterize and measure these effects, we probe VLA's hidden representations and analyze attention maps, further, we design a set of targeted tasks and methods that contrast VLA models with their counterpart VLMs, isolating changes in VL capabilities induced by action fine-tuning. We further evaluate a range of strategies for aligning visual representations and introduce a simple yet effective method that mitigates degradation and yields improved generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Taken together, our analysis clarifies the trade-off between action fine-tuning and the degradation of VL representations and highlights practical approaches to recover inherited VL capabilities. Code is publicly available: https://blind-vla-paper.github.io

Recently, the release of INSTRUCTEVAL has provided valuable insights into the performance of large language models (LLMs) that utilize encoder-decoder or decoder-only architecture. Interestingly, despite being introduced four years ago, T5-based LLMs, such as FLAN-T5, continue to outperform the latest decoder-based LLMs, such as LLAMA and VICUNA, on tasks that require general problem-solving skills. This performance discrepancy can be attributed to three key factors: (1) Pre-training data, (2) Backbone architecture, and (3) Instruction dataset. In this technical report, our main focus is on investigating the impact of the third factor by leveraging VICUNA, a large language model based on LLAMA, which has undergone fine-tuning on ChatGPT conversations. To achieve this objective, we fine-tuned VICUNA using a customized instruction dataset collection called FLANMINI. This collection includes a subset of the large-scale instruction dataset known as FLAN, as well as various code-related datasets and conversational datasets derived from ChatGPT/GPT-4. This dataset comprises a large number of tasks that demand problem-solving skills. Our experimental findings strongly indicate that the enhanced problem-solving abilities of our model, FLACUNA, are obtained through fine-tuning VICUNA on the FLAN dataset, leading to significant improvements across numerous benchmark datasets in INSTRUCTEVAL. FLACUNA is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/declare-lab/flacuna-13b-v1.0.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are highly effective but often underperform on specialized tasks; for example, Llava-1.5 struggles with chart and diagram understanding due to scarce task-specific training data. Existing training data, sourced from general-purpose datasets, fails to capture the nuanced details needed for these tasks. We introduce MM-Gen, a scalable method that generates task-specific, high-quality synthetic text for candidate images by leveraging stronger models. MM-Gen employs a three-stage targeted process: partitioning data into subgroups, generating targeted text based on task descriptions, and filtering out redundant and outlier data. Fine-tuning VLMs with data generated by MM-Gen leads to significant performance gains, including 29% on spatial reasoning and 15% on diagram understanding for Llava-1.5 (7B). Compared to human-curated caption data, MM-Gen achieves up to 1.6x better improvements for the original models, proving its effectiveness in enhancing task-specific VLM performance and bridging the gap between general-purpose datasets and specialized requirements. Code available at https://github.com/sjoshi804/MM-Gen.

Code LLMs have emerged as a specialized research field, with remarkable studies dedicated to enhancing model's coding capabilities through fine-tuning on pre-trained models. Previous fine-tuning approaches were typically tailored to specific downstream tasks or scenarios, which meant separate fine-tuning for each task, requiring extensive training resources and posing challenges in terms of deployment and maintenance. Furthermore, these approaches failed to leverage the inherent interconnectedness among different code-related tasks. To overcome these limitations, we present a multi-task fine-tuning framework, MFTcoder, that enables simultaneous and parallel fine-tuning on multiple tasks. By incorporating various loss functions, we effectively address common challenges in multi-task learning, such as data imbalance, varying difficulty levels, and inconsistent convergence speeds. Extensive experiments have conclusively demonstrated that our multi-task fine-tuning approach outperforms both individual fine-tuning on single tasks and fine-tuning on a mixed ensemble of tasks. Moreover, MFTcoder offers efficient training capabilities, including efficient data tokenization modes and PEFT fine-tuning, resulting in significantly improved speed compared to traditional fine-tuning methods. MFTcoder seamlessly integrates with several mainstream open-source LLMs, such as CodeLLama and Qwen. Leveraging the CodeLLama foundation, our MFTcoder fine-tuned model, CodeFuse-CodeLLama-34B, achieves an impressive pass@1 score of 74.4\% on the HumaneEval benchmark, surpassing GPT-4 performance (67\%, zero-shot). MFTCoder is open-sourced at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/MFTCOder

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, trained via flow-matching or diffusion objectives, excel at learning complex behaviors from large-scale, multi-modal datasets (e.g., human teleoperation, scripted policies). However, since VLAs incorporate diverse data modes in the pre-training stage, and the finetuning dataset often contains demonstration data collected in a kinematically suboptimal or undesirable way, it exists redundant action modes that are irrelevant to the success action modes of the downstream task. Specifically, we observe a critical inference-time fragility among various sampled noises after supervised finetuning of pre-trained VLAs. In this paper, we attribute this instability to the distribution shift between the VLA policy and the policy induced by stable success modes of the downstream task dataset. Thus, we propose TACO, a test-time-scaling (TTS) framework that applies a lightweight pseudo-count estimator as a high-fidelity verifier of action chunks. The VLA models integrated with TACO can execute the actions with maximum pseudo-count from all sampled action chunks, thereby preventing distribution shifts while preserving the generalization ability of VLAs since the constraint is applied only during inference. Our method resembles the classical anti-exploration principle in offline reinforcement learning (RL), and being gradient-free, it incurs significant computational benefits compared to RL update, especially for flow or diffusion-based VLAs which are difficult to perform RL update due to denoising process. Extensive experiments across four simulation benchmarks (RoboTwin2.0, Robotwin, LIBERO, SimplerEnv) and a dual-arm platform demonstrate that our method significantly improves the inference stability and success rates in downstream-task adaptations.

Fine-tuning, a foundational method for adapting large language models, has long been considered ineffective for model editing. Here, we challenge this belief, arguing that the reported failure arises not from the inherent limitation of fine-tuning itself, but from adapting it to the sequential nature of the editing task, a single-pass depth-first pipeline that optimizes each sample to convergence before moving on. While intuitive, this depth-first pipeline coupled with sample-wise updating over-optimizes each edit and induces interference across edits. Our controlled experiments reveal that simply restoring fine-tuning to the standard breadth-first (i.e., epoch-based) pipeline with mini-batch optimization substantially improves its effectiveness for model editing. Moreover, fine-tuning in editing also suffers from suboptimal tuning parameter locations inherited from prior methods. Through systematic analysis of tuning locations, we derive LocFT-BF, a simple and effective localized editing method built on the restored fine-tuning framework. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs and datasets demonstrate that LocFT-BF outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins. Notably, to our knowledge, it is the first to sustain 100K edits and 72B-parameter models,10 x beyond prior practice, without sacrificing general capabilities. By clarifying a long-standing misconception and introducing a principled localized tuning strategy, we advance fine-tuning from an underestimated baseline to a leading method for model editing, establishing a solid foundation for future research.

Fine-tuning is the most effective way of adapting pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to downstream applications. With the fast growth of LLM-enabled AI applications and democratization of open-souced LLMs, fine-tuning has become possible for non-expert individuals, but intensively performed LLM fine-tuning worldwide could result in significantly high energy consumption and carbon footprint, which may bring large environmental impact. Mitigating such environmental impact towards Green AI directly correlates to reducing the FLOPs of fine-tuning, but existing techniques on efficient LLM fine-tuning can only achieve limited reduction of such FLOPs, due to their ignorance of the backpropagation cost in fine-tuning. To address this limitation, in this paper we present GreenTrainer, a new LLM fine-tuning technique that adaptively evaluates different tensors' backpropagation costs and contributions to the fine-tuned model accuracy, to minimize the fine-tuning cost by selecting the most appropriate set of tensors in training. Such selection in GreenTrainer is made based on a given objective of FLOPs reduction, which can flexibly adapt to the carbon footprint in energy supply and the need in Green AI. Experiment results over multiple open-sourced LLM models and abstractive summarization datasets show that, compared to fine-tuning the whole LLM model, GreenTrainer can save up to 64% FLOPs in fine-tuning without any noticeable model accuracy loss. Compared to the existing fine-tuning techniques such as LoRa, GreenTrainer can achieve up to 4% improvement on model accuracy with on-par FLOPs reduction.

Foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained using large-scale open-domain images and text pairs have recently been adapted to develop Vision-Language Segmentation Models (VLSMs) that allow providing text prompts during inference to guide image segmentation. If robust and powerful VLSMs can be built for medical images, it could aid medical professionals in many clinical tasks where they must spend substantial time delineating the target structure of interest. VLSMs for medical images resort to fine-tuning base VLM or VLSM pretrained on open-domain natural image datasets due to fewer annotated medical image datasets; this fine-tuning is resource-consuming and expensive as it usually requires updating all or a significant fraction of the pretrained parameters. Recently, lightweight blocks called adapters have been proposed in VLMs that keep the pretrained model frozen and only train adapters during fine-tuning, substantially reducing the computing resources required. We introduce a novel adapter, VLSM-Adapter, that can fine-tune pretrained vision-language segmentation models using transformer encoders. Our experiments in widely used CLIP-based segmentation models show that with only 3 million trainable parameters, the VLSM-Adapter outperforms state-of-the-art and is comparable to the upper bound end-to-end fine-tuning. The source code is available at: https://github.com/naamiinepal/vlsm-adapter.

Full fine-tuning is a popular approach to adapt Transformer-based pre-trained large language models to a specific downstream task. However, the substantial requirements for computational power and storage have discouraged its widespread use. Moreover, increasing evidence of catastrophic forgetting and overparameterization in the Transformer architecture has motivated researchers to seek more efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. Commonly known parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like LoRA and BitFit are typically applied across all layers of the model. We propose a PEFT method, called Stratified Progressive Adaptation Fine-tuning (SPAFIT), based on the localization of different types of linguistic knowledge to specific layers of the model. Our experiments, conducted on nine tasks from the GLUE benchmark, show that our proposed SPAFIT method outperforms other PEFT methods while fine-tuning only a fraction of the parameters adjusted by other methods.

Pretrained on large-scale and diverse datasets, VLA models demonstrate strong generalization and adaptability as general-purpose robotic policies. However, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which serves as the primary mechanism for adapting VLAs to downstream domains, requires substantial amounts of task-specific data and is prone to catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose LifeLong-RFT, a simple yet effective Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) strategy for VLA models independent of online environmental feedback and pre-trained reward models. By integrating chunking-level on-policy reinforcement learning with the proposed Multi-Dimensional Process Reward (MDPR) mechanism, LifeLong-RFT quantifies the heterogeneous contributions of intermediate action chunks across three dimensions to facilitate policy optimization. Specifically, (1) the Quantized Action Consistency Reward (QACR) ensures accurate action prediction within the discrete action space; (2) the Continuous Trajectory Alignment Reward (CTAR) aligns decoded continuous action chunks with reference trajectories to ensure precise control; (3) the Format Compliance Reward (FCR) guarantees the structural validity of outputs. Comprehensive experiments across SimplerEnv, LIBERO, and real-world tasks demonstrate that LifeLong-RFT exhibits strong performance in multi-task learning. Furthermore, for continual learning on the LIBERO benchmark, our method achieves a 22% gain in average success rate over SFT, while effectively adapting to new tasks using only 20% of the training data. Overall, our method provides a promising post-training paradigm for VLAs.

The advent of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly transformed Continual Learning (CL), mainly due to their zero-shot classification abilities. Such proficiency makes VLMs well-suited for real-world applications, enabling robust performance on novel unseen classes without requiring adaptation. However, fine-tuning remains essential when downstream tasks deviate significantly from the pre-training domain. Prior CL approaches primarily focus on preserving the zero-shot capabilities of VLMs during incremental fine-tuning on a downstream task. We take a step further by devising an approach that transforms preservation into enhancement of the zero-shot capabilities of VLMs. Our approach, named MoDular Embedding Recomposition (MoDER), introduces a modular framework that trains multiple textual experts, each specialized in a single seen class, and stores them in a foundational hub. At inference time, for each unseen class, we query the hub and compose the retrieved experts to synthesize a refined prototype that improves classification. We show the effectiveness of our method across two popular zero-shot incremental protocols, Class-IL and MTIL, comprising a total of 14 datasets. The codebase is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/mammoth.

Visual instruction tuning has become the predominant technology in eliciting the multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite the success, as visual instructions require images as the input, it would leave the gap in inheriting the task-solving capabilities from the backbone LLMs, and make it costly to collect a large-scale dataset. To address it, we propose ViFT, a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for LVLMs. In ViFT, we only require the text-only instructions and image caption data during training, to separately learn the task-solving and visual perception abilities. During inference, we extract and combine the representations of the text and image inputs, for fusing the two abilities to fulfill multimodal tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ViFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several visual reasoning and visual instruction following benchmarks, with rather less training data. Our code and data will be publicly released.

As the model size of pre-trained language models (PLMs) grows rapidly, full fine-tuning becomes prohibitively expensive for model training and storage. In vision-and-language (VL), parameter-efficient tuning (PET) techniques are proposed to integrate modular modifications (e.g., Adapter and LoRA) into encoder-decoder PLMs. By tuning a small set of trainable parameters, these techniques perform on par with full fine-tuning. However, excessive modular modifications and neglecting the functionality gap between the encoders and decoders can lead to performance degradation, while existing PET techniques (e.g., VL-Adapter) overlook these critical issues. In this paper, we propose a Vision-and-Language Parameter-Efficient Tuning (VL-PET) framework to impose effective control over modular modifications via a novel granularity-controlled mechanism. Considering different granularity-controlled matrices generated by this mechanism, a variety of model-agnostic VL-PET modules can be instantiated from our framework for better efficiency and effectiveness trade-offs. We further propose lightweight PET module designs to enhance VL alignment and modeling for the encoders and maintain text generation for the decoders. Extensive experiments conducted on four image-text tasks and four video-text tasks demonstrate the efficiency, effectiveness and transferability of our VL-PET framework. In particular, our VL-PET-large with lightweight PET module designs significantly outperforms VL-Adapter by 2.92% (3.41%) and LoRA by 3.37% (7.03%) with BART-base (T5-base) on image-text tasks. Furthermore, we validate the enhanced effect of employing our VL-PET designs on existing PET techniques, enabling them to achieve significant performance improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/HenryHZY/VL-PET.

Full parameter fine tuning is a key technique for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but it incurs substantial memory overhead due to the need to cache extensive intermediate activations for backpropagation. This bottleneck makes full fine tuning of contemporary large scale LLMs challenging in practice. Existing distributed training frameworks such as DeepSpeed alleviate this issue using techniques like ZeRO and FSDP, which rely on multi GPU memory or CPU offloading, but often require additional hardware resources and reduce training speed. We introduce RevFFN, a memory efficient fine tuning paradigm for mixture of experts (MoE) LLMs. RevFFN employs carefully designed reversible Transformer blocks that allow reconstruction of layer input activations from outputs during backpropagation, eliminating the need to store most intermediate activations in memory. While preserving the expressive capacity of MoE architectures, this approach significantly reduces peak memory consumption for full parameter fine tuning. As a result, RevFFN enables efficient full fine tuning on a single consumer grade or server grade GPU.

As the adoption of large language models increases and the need for per-user or per-task model customization grows, the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, incur substantial storage and transmission costs. To further reduce stored parameters, we introduce a "divide-and-share" paradigm that breaks the barriers of low-rank decomposition across matrix dimensions, modules and layers by sharing parameters globally via a vector bank. As an instantiation of the paradigm to LoRA, our proposed VB-LoRA composites all the low-rank matrices of LoRA from a shared vector bank with a differentiable top-k admixture module. VB-LoRA achieves extreme parameter efficiency while maintaining comparable or better performance compared to state-of-the-art PEFT methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VB-LoRA on natural language understanding, natural language generation, and instruction tuning tasks. When fine-tuning the Llama2-13B model, VB-LoRA only uses 0.4% of LoRA's stored parameters, yet achieves superior results. Our source code is available at https://github.com/leo-yangli/VB-LoRA.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. Despite substantial progress enabled by large-scale pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models face two fundamental challenges: (i) the scarcity and high cost of large-scale human-operated robotic trajectories required for SFT scaling, and (ii) limited generalization to tasks involving distribution shift. Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can dramatically enhance step-by-step reasoning capabilities, raising a natural question: Can RL similarly improve the long-horizon step-by-step action planning of VLA? In this work, we introduce SimpleVLA-RL, an efficient RL framework tailored for VLA models. Building upon veRL, we introduce VLA-specific trajectory sampling, scalable parallelization, multi-environment rendering, and optimized loss computation. When applied to OpenVLA-OFT, SimpleVLA-RL achieves SoTA performance on LIBERO and even outperforms pi_0 on RoboTwin 1.0\&2.0 with the exploration-enhancing strategies we introduce. SimpleVLA-RL not only reduces dependence on large-scale data and enables robust generalization, but also remarkably surpasses SFT in real-world tasks. Moreover, we identify a novel phenomenon ``pushcut'' during RL training, wherein the policy discovers previously unseen patterns beyond those seen in the previous training process. Github: https://github.com/PRIME-RL/SimpleVLA-RL

The common modus operandi of fine-tuning large pre-trained Transformer models entails the adaptation of all their parameters (i.e., full fine-tuning). While achieving striking results on multiple tasks, this approach becomes unfeasible as the model size and the number of downstream tasks increase. In natural language processing and computer vision, parameter-efficient approaches like prompt-tuning and adapters have emerged as solid alternatives by fine-tuning only a small number of extra parameters, without sacrificing performance accuracy. Specifically, adapters, due to their flexibility, have recently garnered significant attention, leading to several variants. For audio classification tasks, the Audio Spectrogram Transformer model shows impressive results. However, surprisingly, how to efficiently adapt it to several downstream tasks has not been tackled before. In this paper, we bridge this gap and present a detailed investigation of common parameter-efficient methods, revealing that adapters consistently outperform the other methods across four benchmarks. This trend is also confirmed in few-shot learning settings and when the total number of trainable parameters increases, demonstrating adapters superior scalability. We finally study the best adapter configuration, as well as the role of residual connections in the learning process. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umbertocappellazzo/PETL AST.

The pretrain+fine-tune paradigm is foundational in deploying large language models (LLMs) across a diverse range of downstream applications. Among these, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out for its parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), producing numerous off-the-shelf task-specific LoRA adapters. However, this approach requires explicit task intention selection, posing challenges for automatic task sensing and switching during inference with multiple existing LoRA adapters embedded in a single LLM. In this work, we introduce MeteoRA (Multiple-Tasks embedded LoRA), a scalable multi-knowledge LoRA fusion framework designed for LLMs. MeteoRA integrates various LoRA adapters in a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) style into the base LLM, enabling the model to automatically select the most pertinent adapter based on the task input. This advancement significantly enhances the LLM's capability to handle composite tasks that require different adapters to solve various components of the problem. Our evaluations, featuring the LlaMA2-13B and LlaMA3-8B base models equipped with off-the-shelf 28 LoRA adapters through MeteoRA, demonstrate equivalent performance with the individual adapters. Furthermore, both base models equipped with MeteoRA achieve superior performance in sequentially solving composite tasks with ten problems in only a single inference process, highlighting the ability of timely intention switching in MeteoRA embedded LLMs.

Existing fine-tuning methods either tune all parameters of the pre-trained model (full fine-tuning), which is not efficient, or only tune the last linear layer (linear probing), which suffers a significant accuracy drop compared to the full fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a new parameter-efficient fine-tuning method termed as SSF, representing that researchers only need to Scale and Shift the deep Features extracted by a pre-trained model to catch up with the performance of full fine-tuning. In this way, SSF also surprisingly outperforms other parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches even with a smaller number of tunable parameters. Furthermore, different from some existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (e.g., Adapter or VPT) that introduce the extra parameters and computational cost in the training and inference stages, SSF only adds learnable parameters during the training stage, and these additional parameters can be merged into the original pre-trained model weights via re-parameterization in the inference phase. With the proposed SSF, our model obtains 2.46% (90.72% vs. 88.54%) and 11.48% (73.10% vs. 65.57%) performance improvement on FGVC and VTAB-1k in terms of Top-1 accuracy compared to the full fine-tuning but only fine-tuning about 0.3M parameters. We also conduct amounts of experiments in various model families (CNNs, Transformers, and MLPs) and datasets. Results on 26 image classification datasets in total and 3 robustness & out-of-distribution datasets show the effectiveness of SSF. Code is available at https://github.com/dongzelian/SSF.

Recent studies have shown that Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) tend to neglect image content and over-rely on language-model priors, resulting in errors in visually grounded tasks and hallucinations. We hypothesize that this issue arises because existing VLMs are not explicitly trained to generate texts that are accurately grounded in fine-grained image details. To enhance visual feedback during VLM training, we propose S-VCO (Symmetrical Visual Contrastive Optimization), a novel finetuning objective that steers the model toward capturing important visual details and aligning them with corresponding text tokens. To further facilitate this detailed alignment, we introduce MVC, a paired image-text dataset built by automatically filtering and augmenting visual counterfactual data to challenge the model with hard contrastive cases involving Minimal Visual Contrasts. Experiments show that our method consistently improves VLM performance across diverse benchmarks covering various abilities and domains, achieving up to a 22% reduction in hallucinations, and significant gains in vision-centric and general tasks. Notably, these improvements become increasingly pronounced in benchmarks with higher visual dependency. In short, S-VCO offers a significant enhancement of VLM's visually-dependent task performance while retaining or even improving the model's general abilities. We opensource our code at https://s-vco.github.io/

While Foundation Models provide a general tool for rapid content creation, they regularly require task-specific adaptation. Traditionally, this exercise involves careful curation of datasets and repeated fine-tuning of the underlying model. Fine-tuning techniques enable practitioners to adapt foundation models for many new applications but require expensive and lengthy training while being notably sensitive to hyperparameter choices. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Text-to-LoRA (T2L), a model capable of adapting large language models (LLMs) on the fly solely based on a natural language description of the target task. T2L is a hypernetwork trained to construct LoRAs in a single inexpensive forward pass. After training T2L on a suite of 9 pre-trained LoRA adapters (GSM8K, Arc, etc.), we show that the ad-hoc reconstructed LoRA instances match the performance of task-specific adapters across the corresponding test sets. Furthermore, T2L can compress hundreds of LoRA instances and zero-shot generalize to entirely unseen tasks. This approach provides a significant step towards democratizing the specialization of foundation models and enables language-based adaptation with minimal compute requirements. Our code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/text-to-lora

General-purpose large language models (LLMs), despite their broad capabilities accrued from open-world data, frequently exhibit suboptimal performance when confronted with the nuanced and specialized demands inherent in real-time telecommunications applications. This investigation addresses this critical limitation through the meticulous fine-tuning of TSLAM-Mini developed by NetoAI, a compact (3.8-billion parameter) causal language model architecturally derived from Phi-4 Mini Instruct 4B. The fine-tuning regimen leverages a bespoke dataset comprising 100,000 samples, strategically engineered to address 20 pivotal telecommunications use-cases, encompassing domains such as Network Fundamentals, IP Routing, MPLS, Network Security, Automation, OSS/BSS, RAN, Mobile Core, Satellite Communications, and Ethical AI. This dataset was curated utilizing NetoAI's DigiTwin platform, enriched with granular insights from venerated network Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and authoritative RFC documents, thereby capturing high-fidelity representations of real-world network dynamics through simulations inspired by digital twin paradigms. Employing Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA), a state-of-the-art Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) technique, we achieved substantial training efficiency and enabled prospective deployment on resource-constrained hardware. A novel evaluation framework, predicated on a high-capacity LLM (Qwen3-235B-A22B) functioning as an automated adjudicator, was instituted to rigorously assess instruction-following fidelity and response quality across the specified telecom use-cases. Empirical results unequivocally demonstrate TSLAM-Mini's superior aptitude in telecom-centric applications, underscoring the profound efficacy of domain-specific datasets and PEFT methodologies for advancing intelligent network management.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently shown promising advancements in sequential decision-making tasks through task-specific fine-tuning. However, common fine-tuning methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), present notable limitations: SFT assumes Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) data, while PPO focuses on maximizing cumulative rewards. These limitations often restrict solution diversity and hinder generalization in multi-step reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, GFlowVLM, a framework that fine-tune VLMs using Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to promote generation of diverse solutions for complex reasoning tasks. GFlowVLM models the environment as a non-Markovian decision process, allowing it to capture long-term dependencies essential for real-world applications. It takes observations and task descriptions as inputs to prompt chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning which subsequently guides action selection. We use task based rewards to fine-tune VLM with GFlowNets. This approach enables VLMs to outperform prior fine-tuning methods, including SFT and RL. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of GFlowVLM on complex tasks such as card games (NumberLine, BlackJack) and embodied planning tasks (ALFWorld), showing enhanced training efficiency, solution diversity, and stronger generalization capabilities across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.

Fine-tuning is a crucial paradigm for adapting pre-trained large language models to downstream tasks. Recently, methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) have been shown to match the performance of fully fine-tuned models on various tasks with an extreme reduction in the number of trainable parameters. Even in settings where both methods learn similarly accurate models, are their learned solutions really equivalent? We study how different fine-tuning methods change pre-trained models by analyzing the model's weight matrices through the lens of their spectral properties. We find that full fine-tuning and LoRA yield weight matrices whose singular value decompositions exhibit very different structure; moreover, the fine-tuned models themselves show distinct generalization behaviors when tested outside the adaptation task's distribution. More specifically, we first show that the weight matrices trained with LoRA have new, high-ranking singular vectors, which we call intruder dimensions. Intruder dimensions do not appear during full fine-tuning. Second, we show that LoRA models with intruder dimensions, despite achieving similar performance to full fine-tuning on the target task, become worse models of the pre-training distribution and adapt less robustly to multiple tasks sequentially. Higher-rank, rank-stabilized LoRA models closely mirror full fine-tuning, even when performing on par with lower-rank LoRA models on the same tasks. These results suggest that models updated with LoRA and full fine-tuning access different parts of parameter space, even when they perform equally on the fine-tuned distribution. We conclude by examining why intruder dimensions appear in LoRA fine-tuned models, why they are undesirable, and how their effects can be minimized.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks can greatly improve model quality, however serving many different fine-tuned LLMs concurrently for users in multi-tenant environments is challenging. Dedicating GPU memory for each model is prohibitively expensive and naively swapping large model weights in and out of GPU memory is slow. Our key insight is that fine-tuned models can be quickly swapped in and out of GPU memory by extracting and compressing the delta between each model and its pre-trained base model. We propose DeltaZip, an LLM serving system that efficiently serves multiple full-parameter fine-tuned models concurrently by aggressively compressing model deltas by a factor of 6times to 8times while maintaining high model quality. DeltaZip increases serving throughput by 1.5times to 3times and improves SLO attainment compared to a vanilla HuggingFace serving system.

Recent advancements in fine-tuning Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLMs) have garnered significant attention for their effectiveness in downstream few-shot learning tasks.While these recent approaches exhibits some performance improvements, they often suffer from excessive training parameters and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Block matrix-based low-rank adaptation framework, called Block-LoRA, for fine-tuning VLMs on downstream few-shot tasks. Inspired by recent work on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Block-LoRA partitions the original low-rank decomposition matrix of LoRA into a series of sub-matrices while sharing all down-projection sub-matrices. This structure not only reduces the number of training parameters, but also transforms certain complex matrix multiplication operations into simpler matrix addition, significantly lowering the computational cost of fine-tuning. Notably, Block-LoRA enables fine-tuning CLIP on the ImageNet few-shot benchmark using a single 24GB GPU. We also show that Block-LoRA has the more tighter bound of generalization error than vanilla LoRA. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments demonstrate that Block-LoRA achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art CLIP-based few-shot methods, while maintaining a low training parameters count and reduced computational overhead.

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but remain coarse-grained, exhibit visual biases, and miss subtle visual details. Existing training corpora reinforce this limitation by emphasizing general recognition ("Is it a cat or a dog?") over fine-grained perception. To address this, we introduce a new training corpus and task designed to enhance the perceptual abilities of VLMs. TWIN is a large-scale dataset of 561,000 image-pair queries that task models to determine whether two visually similar images depict the same object, encouraging attention to nuanced visual cues. The dataset spans a diverse range of everyday objects across contexts, viewpoints, and appearances. Fine-tuning VLMs on TWIN yields notable gains in fine-grained recognition, even on unseen domains such as art, animals, plants, and landmarks. To quantify these gains, we introduce FGVQA, a benchmark suite of 12,000 queries that repurposes fine-grained recognition and retrieval datasets from multiple domains. While existing VLMs struggle on FGVQA, when fine-tuned on TWIN they improve by up to 19.3%, without compromising performance on general VQA benchmarks. Finally, our TWIN dataset scales favorably with object annotations, and our analysis shows that scale is key to performance. We envision TWIN as a drop-in addition to open-source VLM training corpora, advancing perceptual precision of future models. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/twin/

In this work, we develop a specialized dataset aimed at enhancing the evaluation and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) specifically for wireless communication applications. The dataset includes a diverse set of multi-hop questions, including true/false and multiple-choice types, spanning varying difficulty levels from easy to hard. By utilizing advanced language models for entity extraction and question generation, rigorous data curation processes are employed to maintain high quality and relevance. Additionally, we introduce a Pointwise V-Information (PVI) based fine-tuning method, providing a detailed theoretical analysis and justification for its use in quantifying the information content of training data with 2.24\% and 1.31\% performance boost for different models compared to baselines, respectively. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the fine-tuned models with the proposed methodologies on practical tasks, we also consider different tasks, including summarizing optimization problems from technical papers and solving the mathematical problems related to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which are generated by using the proposed multi-agent framework. Simulation results show significant performance gain in summarization tasks with 20.9\% in the ROUGE-L metrics. We also study the scaling laws of fine-tuning LLMs and the challenges LLMs face in the field of wireless communications, offering insights into their adaptation to wireless communication tasks. This dataset and fine-tuning methodology aim to enhance the training and evaluation of LLMs, contributing to advancements in LLMs for wireless communication research and applications.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in applying them to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tasks, particularly Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation. While several RTL datasets have been introduced, most focus on syntactic validity rather than functional validation with tests, leading to training examples that compile but may not implement the intended behavior. We present VERICODER, a model for RTL code generation fine-tuned on a dataset validated for functional correctness. This fine-tuning dataset is constructed using a novel methodology that combines unit test generation with feedback-directed refinement. Given a natural language specification and an initial RTL design, we prompt a teacher model (GPT-4o-mini) to generate unit tests and iteratively revise the RTL design based on its simulation results using the generated tests. If necessary, the teacher model also updates the tests to ensure they comply with the natural language specification. As a result of this process, every example in our dataset is functionally validated, consisting of a natural language description, an RTL implementation, and passing tests. Fine-tuned on this dataset of over 125,000 examples, VERICODER achieves state-of-the-art metrics in functional correctness on VerilogEval and RTLLM, with relative gains of up to 71.7% and 27.4% respectively. An ablation study further shows that models trained on our functionally validated dataset outperform those trained on functionally non-validated datasets, underscoring the importance of high-quality datasets in RTL code generation.

Fine-tuning large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) has emerged as a prevalent paradigm for downstream adaptation, yet it faces a critical trade-off between domain specificity and domain generalization (DG) ability. Current methods typically fine-tune a universal model on the entire dataset, which potentially compromises the ability to generalize to unseen domains. To fill this gap, we provide a theoretical understanding of the generalization ability for VLM fine-tuning, which reveals that training multiple parameter-efficient expert models on partitioned source domains leads to better generalization than fine-tuning a universal model. Inspired by this finding, we propose a two-step domain-expert-Guided DG (GuiDG) framework. GuiDG first employs prompt tuning to obtain source domain experts, then introduces a Cross-Modal Attention module to guide the fine-tuning of the vision encoder via adaptive expert integration. To better evaluate few-shot DG, we construct ImageNet-DG from ImageNet and its variants. Extensive experiments on standard DG benchmarks and ImageNet-DG demonstrate that GuiDG improves upon state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods while maintaining efficiency.

Finetuning is a critical step for adapting large language models (LLMs) to domain-specific downstream tasks. To mitigate the substantial computational and memory costs of full-model fine-tuning, Parameter-Efficient Finetuning (PEFT) methods have been proposed to update only a small subset of model parameters. However, performance gaps between PEFT approaches and full-model fine-tuning still exist. In this work, we present DiaBlo, a simple yet effective PEFT approach that updates only the diagonal blocks of selected model weight matrices. Unlike Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, DiaBlo eliminates the need for low rank matrix products, thereby avoiding the reliance on auxiliary initialization schemes or customized optimization strategies to improve convergence. This design leads to stable and robust convergence while maintaining comparable memory efficiency and training speed to LoRA. We conduct extensive experiments across a range of tasks, including commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, code generation, and safety alignment, to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of DiaBlo. Across these benchmarks, DiaBlo demonstrates strong and consistent performance while maintaining high memory efficiency and fast finetuning speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/ziyangjoy/DiaBlo.