Ali Farhadi

• Islamic Azad University of Najafabad

When a human requests an LLM to complete a coding task using functionality from a large code repository, how do we provide context from the repo to the LLM? One approach is to add the entire repo to the LLM's context window. However, most tasks involve only fraction of symbols from a repo, longer contexts are detrimental to the LLM's reasoning abil...

We present OLMo 2, the next generation of our fully open language models. OLMo 2 includes dense autoregressive models with improved architecture and training recipe, pretraining data mixtures, and instruction tuning recipes. Our modified model architecture and training recipe achieve both better training stability and improved per-token efficiency....

Current image generation methods, such as latent diffusion and discrete token-based generation, depend on a two-stage training approach. In stage 1, an auto-encoder is trained to compress an image into a latent space; in stage 2, a generative model is trained to learn a distribution over that latent space. Most work focuses on maximizing stage 1 pe...

Modern robots vary significantly in shape, size, and sensor configurations used to perceive and interact with their environments. However, most navigation policies are embodiment-specific; a policy learned using one robot's configuration does not typically gracefully generalize to another. Even small changes in the body size or camera viewpoint may...

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However...

Our world is full of varied actions and moves across specialized domains that we, as humans, strive to identify and understand. Within any single domain, actions can often appear quite similar, making it challenging for deep models to distinguish them accurately. To evaluate the effectiveness of multimodal foundation models in helping us recognize...

Structural understanding of complex visual objects is an important unsolved component of artificial intelligence. To study this, we develop a new technique for the recently proposed Break-and-Make problem in LTRON where an agent must learn to build a previously unseen LEGO assembly using a single interactive session to gather information about its...

Today's most advanced multimodal models remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed models into open ones. As a result, the community is still missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch....

In recent years, the Robotics field has initiated several efforts toward building generalist robot policies through large-scale multi-task Behavior Cloning. However, direct deployments of these policies have led to unsatisfactory performance, where the policy struggles with unseen states and tasks. How can we break through the performance plateau o...

We introduce OLMoE, a fully open, state-of-the-art language model leveraging sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). OLMoE-1B-7B has 7 billion (B) parameters but uses only 1B per input token. We pretrain it on 5 trillion tokens and further adapt it to create OLMoE-1B-7B-Instruct. Our models outperform all available models with similar active parameters, e...

Benchmarks for large multimodal language models (MLMs) now serve to simultaneously assess the general capabilities of models instead of evaluating for a specific capability. As a result, when a developer wants to identify which models to use for their application, they are overwhelmed by the number of benchmarks and remain uncertain about which ben...

Many applications today provide users with multiple auto-complete drafts as they type, including GitHub's code completion, Gmail's smart compose, and Apple's messaging auto-suggestions. Under the hood, language models support this by running an autoregressive inference pass to provide a draft. Consequently, providing $k$ drafts to the user requires...

Pre-training has been widely adopted in deep learning to improve model performance, especially when the training data for a target task is limited. In our work, we seek to understand the implications of this training strategy on the generalization properties of downstream models. More specifically, we ask the following question: how do properties o...

Natural language processing and 2D vision models have attained remarkable proficiency on many tasks primarily by escalating the scale of training data. However, 3D vision tasks have not seen the same progress, in part due to the challenges of acquiring high-quality 3D data. In this work, we present Objaverse-XL, a dataset of over 10 million 3D obje...

We propose Neural Priming, a technique for adapting large pretrained models to distribution shifts and downstream tasks given few or no labeled examples. Presented with class names or unlabeled test samples, Neural Priming enables the model to recall and conditions its parameters on relevant data seen throughout pretraining, thereby priming it for...

Modern deep learning approaches usually transform inputs into a modality-specific form. For example, the most common deep learning approach to image classification involves decoding image file bytes into an RGB tensor which is passed into a neural network. Instead, we investigate performing classification directly on file bytes, without the need fo...

Web-scale search systems learn an encoder to embed a given query which is then hooked into an approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) pipeline to retrieve similar data points. To accurately capture tail queries and data points, learned representations typically are rigid, high-dimensional vectors that are generally used as-is in the entire ANNS...

Large multimodal datasets have been instrumental in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and GPT-4. At the same time, datasets rarely receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a benchmark where the training...

We introduce new methods for 1) accelerating and 2) stabilizing training for large language-vision models. 1) Towards accelerating training, we introduce SwitchBack, a linear layer for int8 quantized training which provides a speed-up of 13-25% while matching the performance of bfloat16 training within 0.1 percentage points for the 1B parameter CLI...

A common assumption when training embodied agents is that the impact of taking an action is stable; for instance, executing the "move ahead" action will always move the agent forward by a fixed distance, perhaps with some small amount of actuator-induced noise. This assumption is limiting; an agent may encounter settings that dramatically alter the...

We propose Dataset Reinforcement, a strategy to improve a dataset once such that the accuracy of any model architecture trained on the reinforced dataset is improved at no additional training cost for users. We propose a Dataset Reinforcement strategy based on data augmentation and knowledge distillation. Our generic strategy is designed based on e...

In many retrieval systems the original high dimensional data (e.g., images) is mapped to a lower dimensional feature through a learned embedding model. The task of retrieving the most similar data from a gallery set to a given query data is performed through a similarity comparison on features. When the embedding model is updated, it might produce...

Compositional representations of the world are a promising step towards enabling high-level scene understanding and efficient transfer to downstream tasks. Learning such representations for complex scenes and tasks remains an open challenge. Towards this goal, we introduce Neural Radiance Field Codebooks (NRC), a scalable method for learning object...

State-of-the-art automatic augmentation methods (e.g., AutoAugment and RandAugment) for visual recognition tasks diversify training data using a large set of augmentation operations. The range of magnitudes of many augmentation operations (e.g., brightness and contrast) is continuous. Therefore, to make search computationally tractable, these metho...

Massive data corpora like WebText, Wikipedia, Conceptual Captions, WebImageText, and LAION have propelled recent dramatic progress in AI. Large neural models trained on such datasets produce impressive results and top many of today's benchmarks. A notable omission within this family of large-scale datasets is 3D data. Despite considerable interest...

Changing how pre-trained models behave -- e.g., improving their performance on a downstream task or mitigating biases learned during pre-training -- is a common practice when developing machine learning systems. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for steering the behavior of neural networks, centered around \textit{task vectors}. A task vector...

Training embodied agents in simulation has become mainstream for the embodied AI community. However, these agents often struggle when deployed in the physical world due to their inability to generalize to real-world environments. In this paper, we present Phone2Proc, a method that uses a 10-minute phone scan and conditional procedural generation to...

A household robot should be able to navigate to target locations without requiring users to first annotate everything in their home. Current approaches to this object navigation challenge do not test on real robots and rely on expensive semantically labeled 3D meshes. In this work, our aim is an agent that builds self-supervised models of the world...

Object manipulation is a critical skill required for Embodied AI agents interacting with the world around them. Training agents to manipulate objects, poses many challenges. These include occlusion of the target object by the agent’s arm, noisy object detection and localization, and the target frequently going out of view as the agent moves around...

Visual understanding of geometric structures with complex spatial relationships is a fundamental component of human intelligence. As children, we learn how to reason about structure not only from observation, but also by interacting with the world around us – by taking things apart and putting them back together again. The ability to reason about s...

When fine-tuning large neural networks, it is common to use multiple nodes and to communicate gradients at each optimization step. By contrast, we investigate completely local fine-tuning, which we refer to as lo-fi. During lo-fi, each node is fine-tuned independently without any communication. Then, the weights are averaged across nodes at the con...

We present a retrospective on the state of Embodied AI research. Our analysis focuses on 13 challenges presented at the Embodied AI Workshop at CVPR. These challenges are grouped into three themes: (1) visual navigation, (2) rearrangement, and (3) embodied vision-and-language. We discuss the dominant datasets within each theme, evaluation metrics f...

The perception system in personalized mobile agents requires developing indoor scene understanding models, which can understand 3D geometries, capture objectiveness, analyze human behaviors, etc. Nonetheless, this direction has not been well-explored in comparison with models for outdoor environments (e.g., the autonomous driving system that includ...

Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work, we present an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that combines real-world reinforcement learning (RL), search-based online trajectory planning, and automatic emergency intervention, e.g. automatic emergency braking (AEB). The g...

Open vocabulary models are a promising new paradigm for image classification. Unlike traditional classification models, open vocabulary models classify among any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language during inference. This natural language, called "prompts", typically consists of a set of hand-written templates (e.g., "a photo...

Open-vocabulary models like CLIP achieve high accuracy across many image classification tasks. However, there are still settings where their zero-shot performance is far from optimal. We study model patching, where the goal is to improve accuracy on specific tasks without degrading accuracy on tasks where performance is already adequate. Towards th...

Visual understanding of geometric structures with complex spatial relationships is a fundamental component of human intelligence. As children, we learn how to reason about structure not only from observation, but also by interacting with the world around us -- by taking things apart and putting them back together again. The ability to reason about...

Massive datasets and high-capacity models have driven many recent advancements in computer vision and natural language understanding. This work presents a platform to enable similar success stories in Embodied AI. We propose ProcTHOR, a framework for procedural generation of Embodied AI environments. ProcTHOR enables us to sample arbitrarily large...

Learned representations are a central component in modern ML systems, serving a multitude of downstream tasks. When training such representations, it is often the case that computational and statistical constraints for each downstream task are unknown. In this context rigid, fixed capacity representations can be either over or under-accommodating t...

Object manipulation is a critical skill required for Embodied AI agents interacting with the world around them. Training agents to manipulate objects, poses many challenges. These include occlusion of the target object by the agent's arm, noisy object detection and localization, and the target frequently going out of view as the agent moves around...

The conventional recipe for maximizing model accuracy is to (1) train multiple models with various hyperparameters and (2) pick the individual model which performs best on a held-out validation set, discarding the remainder. In this paper, we revisit the second step of this procedure in the context of fine-tuning large pre-trained models, where fin...

As humans, we navigate the world through all our senses, using perceptual input from each one to correct the others. We introduce MERLOT Reserve, a model that represents videos jointly over time -- through a new training objective that learns from audio, subtitles, and video frames. Given a video, we replace snippets of text and audio with a MASK t...

The last few years have witnessed substantial progress in the field of embodied AI where artificial agents, mirroring biological counterparts, are now able to learn from interaction to accomplish complex tasks. Despite this success, biological organisms still hold one large advantage over these simulated agents: adaptation. While both living and si...

In visual retrieval systems, updating the embedding model requires recomputing features for every piece of data. This expensive process is referred to as backfilling. Recently, the idea of backward compatible training (BCT) was proposed. To avoid the cost of backfilling, BCT modifies training of the new model to make its representations compatible...

Communicating with humans is challenging for AIs because it requires a shared understanding of the world, complex semantics (e.g., metaphors or analogies), and at times multi-modal gestures (e.g., pointing with a finger, or an arrow in a diagram). We investigate these challenges in the context of Iconary, a collaborative game of drawing and guessin...

When deploying deep learning models to a device, it is traditionally assumed that available computational resources (compute, memory, and power) remain static. However, real-world computing systems do not always provide stable resource guarantees. Computational resources need to be conserved when load from other processes is high or battery power i...

Large pre-trained models such as CLIP offer consistent accuracy across a range of data distributions when performing zero-shot inference (i.e., without fine-tuning on a specific dataset). Although existing fine-tuning approaches substantially improve accuracy in-distribution, they also reduce out-of-distribution robustness. We address this tension...

To realize robots that can understand human instructions and perform meaningful tasks in the near future, it is important to develop learned models that can understand referential language to identify common objects in real-world 3D scenes. In this paper, we develop a spatial-language model for a 3D visual grounding problem. Specifically, given a r...

As humans, we understand events in the visual world contextually, performing multimodal reasoning across time to make inferences about the past, present, and future. We introduce MERLOT, a model that learns multimodal script knowledge by watching millions of YouTube videos with transcribed speech -- in an entirely label-free, self-supervised manner...

Learning binary representations of instances and classes is a classical problem with several high potential applications. In modern settings, the compression of high-dimensional neural representations to low-dimensional binary codes is a challenging task and often require large bit-codes to be accurate. In this work, we propose a novel method for L...

We propose PIGLeT: a model that learns physical commonsense knowledge through interaction, and then uses this knowledge to ground language. We factorize PIGLeT into a physical dynamics model, and a separate language model. Our dynamics model learns not just what objects are but also what they do: glass cups break when thrown, plastic ones don't. We...

We have observed significant progress in visual navigation for embodied agents. A common assumption in studying visual navigation is that the environments are static; this is a limiting assumption. Intelligent navigation may involve interacting with the environment beyond just moving forward/backward and turning left/right. Sometimes, the best way...

Recent observations have advanced our understanding of the neural network optimization landscape, revealing the existence of (1) paths of high accuracy containing diverse solutions and (2) wider minima offering improved performance. Previous methods observing diverse paths require multiple training runs. In contrast we aim to leverage both property...

We present an efficient method for compressing a trained neural network without using any data. Our data-free method requires 14x-450x fewer FLOPs than comparable state-of-the-art methods. We break the problem of data-free network compression into a number of independent layer-wise compressions. We show how to efficiently generate layer-wise traini...

In recent years we have seen a growing number of edge devices adopted by consumers, in their homes (e.g., smart cameras and doorbells), in their cars (e.g., driver assisted systems), and even on their persons (e.g., smart watches and rings). Similar growth is reported in industries including aerospace, agriculture, healthcare, transport, and manufa...

Autonomous agents must learn to collaborate. It is not scalable to develop a new centralized agent every time a task’s difficulty outpaces a single agent’s abilities. While multi-agent collaboration research has flourished in gridworld-like environments, relatively little work has considered visually rich domains. Addressing this, we introduce the...

We introduce Grounded Situation Recognition (GSR), a task that requires producing structured semantic summaries of images describing: the primary activity, entities engaged in the activity with their roles (e.g. agent, tool), and bounding-box groundings of entities. GSR presents important technical challenges: identifying semantic saliency, categor...

Learning effective representations of visual data that generalize to a variety of downstream tasks has been a long quest for computer vision. Most representation learning approaches rely solely on visual data such as images or videos. In this paper, we explore a novel approach, where we use human interaction and attention cues to investigate whethe...

Even from a single frame of a still image, people can reason about the dynamic story of the image before, after, and beyond the frame. For example, given an image of a man struggling to stay afloat in water, we can reason that the man fell into the water sometime in the past, the intent of that man at the moment is to stay alive, and he will need h...

Autonomous agents must learn to collaborate. It is not scalable to develop a new centralized agent every time a task's difficulty outpaces a single agent's abilities. While multi-agent collaboration research has flourished in gridworld-like environments, relatively little work has considered visually rich domains. Addressing this, we introduce the...

Enabling robust intelligence in the wild entails learning systems that offer uninterrupted inference while affording sustained training, with varying amounts of data & supervision. Such a pragmatic ML system should be able to cope with the openness & flexibility inherent in the real world. The machine learning community has organically broken down...

We present the Supermasks in Superposition (SupSup) model, capable of sequentially learning thousands of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Our approach uses a randomly initialized, fixed base network and for each task finds a subnetwork (supermask) that achieves good performance. If task identity is given at test time, the correct subnetwork c...

Vision, as a central component of human perception, plays a fundamental role in shaping natural language. To better understand how text models are connected to our visual perceptions, we propose a method for examining the similarities between neural representations extracted from words in text and objects in images. Our approach uses a lightweight...

Even from a single frame of a still image, people can reason about the dynamic story of the image before, after, and beyond the frame. For example, given an image of a man struggling to stay afloat in water, we can reason that the man fell into the water sometime in the past, the intent of that man at the moment is to stay alive, and he will need h...

Visual recognition ecosystems (e.g. ImageNet, Pascal, COCO) have undeniably played a prevailing role in the evolution of modern computer vision. We argue that interactive and embodied visual AI has reached a stage of development similar to visual recognition prior to the advent of these ecosystems. Recently, various synthetic environments have been...

There is a fundamental gap between how humans understand and use language -- in open-ended, real-world situations -- and today's NLP benchmarks for language understanding. To narrow this gap, we propose to evaluate machines by their success at real-world language use -- which greatly expands the scope of language tasks that can be measured and stud...

When we humans look at a video of human-object interaction, we can not only infer what is happening but we can even extract actionable information and imitate those interactions. On the other hand, current recognition or geometric approaches lack the physicality of action representation. In this paper, we take a step towards a more physical underst...

We introduce Grounded Situation Recognition (GSR), a task that requires producing structured semantic summaries of images describing: the primary activity, entities engaged in the activity with their roles (e.g. agent, tool), and bounding-box groundings of entities. GSR presents important technical challenges: identifying semantic saliency, categor...

Recent single image unsupervised representation learning techniques show remarkable success on a variety of tasks. The basic principle in these works is instance discrimination: learning to differentiate between two augmented versions of the same image and a large batch of unrelated images. Networks learn to ignore the augmentation noise and extrac...

Fine-tuning pretrained contextual word embedding models to supervised downstream tasks has become commonplace in natural language processing. This process, however, is often brittle: even with the same hyperparameter values, distinct random seeds can lead to substantially different results. To better understand this phenomenon, we experiment with f...

Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is studied extensively with the focus of maximizing prediction accuracy given an overall budget. Existing methods rely on uniform or heuristic non-uniform sparsity budgets which have sub-optimal layer-wise parameter allocation resulting in a) lower prediction accuracy or b) higher inference cost (FLOPs). This...

The ubiquity of embodied gameplay, observed in a wide variety of animal species including turtles and ravens, has led researchers to question what advantages play provides to the animals engaged in it. Mounting evidence suggests that play is critical in developing the neural flexibility for creative problem solving, socialization, and can improve t...

In this paper we address the problem of visual reaction: the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are not necessarily caused by the agents itself. Visual reaction entails predicting the future changes in a visual environment and planning accordingly. We study the problem of visual reaction in the contex...

Training a neural network is synonymous with learning the values of the weights. In contrast, we demonstrate that randomly weighted neural networks contain subnetworks which achieve impressive performance without ever training the weight values. Hidden in a randomly weighted Wide ResNet-50 we show that there is a subnetwork (with random weights) th...

Widespread adoption of self-driving cars will depend not only on their safety but largely on their ability to interact with human users. Just like human drivers, self-driving cars will be expected to understand and safely follow natural-language directions that suddenly alter the pre-planned route according to user's preference or in presence of am...

Existing open-domain question answering (QA) models are not suitable for real-time usage because they need to process several long documents on-demand for every input query. In this paper, we introduce the query-agnostic indexable representation of document phrases that can drastically speed up open-domain QA and also allows us to reach long-tail t...