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SubscribeDivide and Conquer for Large Language Models Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in various reasoning benchmarks with the emergence of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and its derivative methods, particularly in tasks involving multi-choice questions (MCQs). However, current works all process data uniformly without considering the problem-solving difficulty, which means an excessive focus on simple questions while insufficient to intricate ones. To address this challenge, we inspired by humans using heuristic strategies to categorize tasks and handle them individually, propose to apply the Divide and Conquer to LLMs reasoning. First, we divide questions into different subsets based on the statistical confidence score (CS), then fix nearly resolved sets and conquer demanding nuanced process ones with elaborately designed methods, including Prior Knowledge based Reasoning (PKR) and Filter Choices based Reasoning (FCR), as well as their integration variants. Our experiments demonstrate that this proposed strategy significantly boosts the models' reasoning abilities across nine datasets involving arithmetic, commonsense, and logic tasks. For instance, compared to baseline, we make a striking improvement on low confidence subsets of 8.72\% for AQuA, 15.07\% for ARC Challenge and 7.71\% for RiddleSense. In addition, through extensive analysis on length of rationale and number of options, we verify that longer reasoning paths in PKR could prevent models from referring infer-harmful shortcuts, and also find that removing irrelevant choices in FCR would substantially avoid models' confusion. The code is at https://github.com/AiMijie/Divide-and-Conquer
Divide and Conquer: 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation With Point-Wise Binarization
Instance segmentation on point clouds is crucially important for 3D scene understanding. Most SOTAs adopt distance clustering, which is typically effective but does not perform well in segmenting adjacent objects with the same semantic label (especially when they share neighboring points). Due to the uneven distribution of offset points, these existing methods can hardly cluster all instance points. To this end, we design a novel divide-and-conquer strategy named PBNet that binarizes each point and clusters them separately to segment instances. Our binary clustering divides offset instance points into two categories: high and low density points (HPs vs. LPs). Adjacent objects can be clearly separated by removing LPs, and then be completed and refined by assigning LPs via a neighbor voting method. To suppress potential over-segmentation, we propose to construct local scenes with the weight mask for each instance. As a plug-in, the proposed binary clustering can replace the traditional distance clustering and lead to consistent performance gains on many mainstream baselines. A series of experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets indicate the superiority of our model. In particular, PBNet ranks first on the ScanNetV2 official benchmark challenge, achieving the highest mAP.
Divide-and-Conquer Meets Consensus: Unleashing the Power of Functions in Code Generation
Despite recent progress made by large language models in code generation, they still struggle with programs that meet complex requirements. Recent work utilizes plan-and-solve decomposition to decrease the complexity and leverage self-tests to refine the generated program. Yet, planning deep-inside requirements in advance can be challenging, and the tests need to be accurate to accomplish self-improvement. To this end, we propose FunCoder, a code generation framework incorporating the divide-and-conquer strategy with functional consensus. Specifically, FunCoder recursively branches off sub-functions as smaller goals during code generation, represented by a tree hierarchy. These sub-functions are then composited to attain more complex objectives. Additionally, we designate functions via a consensus formed by identifying similarities in program behavior, mitigating error propagation. FunCoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods by +9.8% on average in HumanEval, MBPP, xCodeEval and MATH with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, our method demonstrates superiority on smaller models: With FunCoder, StableCode-3b surpasses GPT-3.5 by +18.6% and achieves 97.7% of GPT-4's performance on HumanEval. Further analysis reveals that our proposed dynamic function decomposition is capable of handling complex requirements, and the functional consensus prevails over self-testing in correctness evaluation.
MicroCinema: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Text-to-Video Generation
We present MicroCinema, a straightforward yet effective framework for high-quality and coherent text-to-video generation. Unlike existing approaches that align text prompts with video directly, MicroCinema introduces a Divide-and-Conquer strategy which divides the text-to-video into a two-stage process: text-to-image generation and image\&text-to-video generation. This strategy offers two significant advantages. a) It allows us to take full advantage of the recent advances in text-to-image models, such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALLE, to generate photorealistic and highly detailed images. b) Leveraging the generated image, the model can allocate less focus to fine-grained appearance details, prioritizing the efficient learning of motion dynamics. To implement this strategy effectively, we introduce two core designs. First, we propose the Appearance Injection Network, enhancing the preservation of the appearance of the given image. Second, we introduce the Appearance Noise Prior, a novel mechanism aimed at maintaining the capabilities of pre-trained 2D diffusion models. These design elements empower MicroCinema to generate high-quality videos with precise motion, guided by the provided text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework. Concretely, MicroCinema achieves SOTA zero-shot FVD of 342.86 on UCF-101 and 377.40 on MSR-VTT. See https://wangyanhui666.github.io/MicroCinema.github.io/ for video samples.
Generalizable 3D Scene Reconstruction via Divide and Conquer from a Single View
Single-view 3D reconstruction is currently approached from two dominant perspectives: reconstruction of scenes with limited diversity using 3D data supervision or reconstruction of diverse singular objects using large image priors. However, real-world scenarios are far more complex and exceed the capabilities of these methods. We therefore propose a hybrid method following a divide-and-conquer strategy. We first process the scene holistically, extracting depth and semantic information, and then leverage a single-shot object-level method for the detailed reconstruction of individual components. By following a compositional processing approach, the overall framework achieves full reconstruction of complex 3D scenes from a single image. We purposely design our pipeline to be highly modular by carefully integrating specific procedures for each processing step, without requiring an end-to-end training of the whole system. This enables the pipeline to naturally improve as future methods can replace the individual modules. We demonstrate the reconstruction performance of our approach on both synthetic and real-world scenes, comparing favorable against prior works. Project page: https://andreeadogaru.github.io/Gen3DSR.
Control Large Language Models via Divide and Conquer
This paper investigates controllable generation for large language models (LLMs) with prompt-based control, focusing on Lexically Constrained Generation (LCG). We systematically evaluate the performance of LLMs on satisfying lexical constraints with prompt-based control, as well as their efficacy in downstream applications. We conclude that LLMs face significant challenges in consistently satisfying lexical constraints with prompt-based control. We identified three key limitations of LLMs for LCG, including (1) position bias, where LLMs tend to satisfy constraints that appear in specific positions within the input; (2) low responsiveness to decoding parameters, which render minimal impact on control of LLMs; and (3) struggle with handling the inherent complexity of certain constraints (e.g., compound words). To address these issues, we introduce a Divide and Conquer Generation strategy, effective for both white-box and black-box LLMs, to enhance LLMs performance in LCG tasks, which demonstrates over 90% improvement on success rate in the most challenging LCG task. Our analysis provides valuable insights into the performance of LLMs in LCG with prompt-based control, and our proposed strategy offers a pathway to more sophisticated and customized text generation applications.
Multimodal Multi-Hop Question Answering Through a Conversation Between Tools and Efficiently Finetuned Large Language Models
We employ a tool-interacting divide-and-conquer strategy enabling large language models (LLMs) to answer complex multimodal multi-hop questions. In particular, we harness the power of large language models to divide a given multimodal multi-hop question into unimodal single-hop sub-questions to be answered by the appropriate tool from a predefined set of tools. After all corresponding tools provide the LLM with their answers, the LLM generates the next relevant unimodal single-hop question. To increase the reasoning ability of LLMs, we prompt chatGPT to generate a tool-interacting divide-and-conquer dataset. This dataset is then used to efficiently finetune the corresponding LLM. To assess the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct an evaluation on two recently introduced complex question-answering datasets. The experimental analysis demonstrate substantial improvements over existing state-of-the-art solutions, indicating the efficacy and generality of our strategy
Hyper-Bagel: A Unified Acceleration Framework for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Unified multimodal models have recently attracted considerable attention for their remarkable abilities in jointly understanding and generating diverse content. However, as contexts integrate increasingly numerous interleaved multimodal tokens, the iterative processes of diffusion denoising and autoregressive decoding impose significant computational overhead. To address this, we propose Hyper-Bagel, a unified acceleration framework designed to simultaneously speed up both multimodal understanding and generation tasks. Our approach uses a divide-and-conquer strategy, employing speculative decoding for next-token prediction and a multi-stage distillation process for diffusion denoising. The framework delivers substantial performance gains, achieving over a 2x speedup in multimodal understanding. For generative tasks, our resulting lossless 6-NFE model yields a 16.67x speedup in text-to-image generation and a 22x speedup in image editing, all while preserving the high-quality output of the original model. We further develop a highly efficient 1-NFE model that enables near real-time interactive editing and generation. By combining advanced adversarial distillation with human feedback learning, this model achieves ultimate cost-effectiveness and responsiveness, making complex multimodal interactions seamless and instantaneous.
Multi-Object Sketch Animation by Scene Decomposition and Motion Planning
Sketch animation, which brings static sketches to life by generating dynamic video sequences, has found widespread applications in GIF design, cartoon production, and daily entertainment. While current methods for sketch animation perform well in single-object sketch animation, they struggle in multi-object scenarios. By analyzing their failures, we identify two major challenges of transitioning from single-object to multi-object sketch animation: object-aware motion modeling and complex motion optimization. For multi-object sketch animation, we propose MoSketch based on iterative optimization through Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and thus animating a multi-object sketch in a training-data free manner. To tackle the two challenges in a divide-and-conquer strategy, MoSketch has four novel modules, i.e., LLM-based scene decomposition, LLM-based motion planning, multi-grained motion refinement, and compositional SDS. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing sketch animation approaches. MoSketch takes a pioneering step towards multi-object sketch animation, opening new avenues for future research and applications.
LightSpeed: Light and Fast Neural Light Fields on Mobile Devices
Real-time novel-view image synthesis on mobile devices is prohibitive due to the limited computational power and storage. Using volumetric rendering methods, such as NeRF and its derivatives, on mobile devices is not suitable due to the high computational cost of volumetric rendering. On the other hand, recent advances in neural light field representations have shown promising real-time view synthesis results on mobile devices. Neural light field methods learn a direct mapping from a ray representation to the pixel color. The current choice of ray representation is either stratified ray sampling or Pl\"{u}cker coordinates, overlooking the classic light slab (two-plane) representation, the preferred representation to interpolate between light field views. In this work, we find that using the light slab representation is an efficient representation for learning a neural light field. More importantly, it is a lower-dimensional ray representation enabling us to learn the 4D ray space using feature grids which are significantly faster to train and render. Although mostly designed for frontal views, we show that the light-slab representation can be further extended to non-frontal scenes using a divide-and-conquer strategy. Our method offers superior rendering quality compared to previous light field methods and achieves a significantly improved trade-off between rendering quality and speed.
AuroraCap: Efficient, Performant Video Detailed Captioning and a New Benchmark
Video detailed captioning is a key task which aims to generate comprehensive and coherent textual descriptions of video content, benefiting both video understanding and generation. In this paper, we propose AuroraCap, a video captioner based on a large multimodal model. We follow the simplest architecture design without additional parameters for temporal modeling. To address the overhead caused by lengthy video sequences, we implement the token merging strategy, reducing the number of input visual tokens. Surprisingly, we found that this strategy results in little performance loss. AuroraCap shows superior performance on various video and image captioning benchmarks, for example, obtaining a CIDEr of 88.9 on Flickr30k, beating GPT-4V (55.3) and Gemini-1.5 Pro (82.2). However, existing video caption benchmarks only include simple descriptions, consisting of a few dozen words, which limits research in this field. Therefore, we develop VDC, a video detailed captioning benchmark with over one thousand carefully annotated structured captions. In addition, we propose a new LLM-assisted metric VDCscore for bettering evaluation, which adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy to transform long caption evaluation into multiple short question-answer pairs. With the help of human Elo ranking, our experiments show that this benchmark better correlates with human judgments of video detailed captioning quality.
PanoOcc: Unified Occupancy Representation for Camera-based 3D Panoptic Segmentation
Comprehensive modeling of the surrounding 3D world is key to the success of autonomous driving. However, existing perception tasks like object detection, road structure segmentation, depth & elevation estimation, and open-set object localization each only focus on a small facet of the holistic 3D scene understanding task. This divide-and-conquer strategy simplifies the algorithm development procedure at the cost of losing an end-to-end unified solution to the problem. In this work, we address this limitation by studying camera-based 3D panoptic segmentation, aiming to achieve a unified occupancy representation for camera-only 3D scene understanding. To achieve this, we introduce a novel method called PanoOcc, which utilizes voxel queries to aggregate spatiotemporal information from multi-frame and multi-view images in a coarse-to-fine scheme, integrating feature learning and scene representation into a unified occupancy representation. We have conducted extensive ablation studies to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results for camera-based semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation on the nuScenes dataset. Furthermore, our method can be easily extended to dense occupancy prediction and has shown promising performance on the Occ3D benchmark. The code will be released at https://github.com/Robertwyq/PanoOcc.
UnSAMv2: Self-Supervised Learning Enables Segment Anything at Any Granularity
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) family has become a widely adopted vision foundation model, but its ability to control segmentation granularity remains limited. Users often need to refine results manually - by adding more prompts or selecting from pre-generated masks - to achieve the desired level of detail. This process can be ambiguous, as the same prompt may correspond to several plausible masks, and collecting dense annotations across all granularities is prohibitively expensive, making supervised solutions infeasible. To address this limitation, we introduce UnSAMv2, which enables segment anything at any granularity without human annotations. UnSAMv2 extends the divide-and-conquer strategy of UnSAM by discovering abundant mask-granularity pairs and introducing a novel granularity control embedding that enables precise, continuous control over segmentation scale. Remarkably, with only 6K unlabeled images and 0.02% additional parameters, UnSAMv2 substantially enhances SAM-2, achieving segment anything at any granularity across interactive, whole-image, and video segmentation tasks. Evaluated on over 11 benchmarks, UnSAMv2 improves NoC_{90} (5.69 rightarrow 4.75), 1-IoU (58.0 rightarrow 73.1), and AR_{1000} (49.6 rightarrow 68.3), showing that small amounts of unlabeled data with a granularity-aware self-supervised learning method can unlock the potential of vision foundation models.
Generating Fine-Grained Human Motions Using ChatGPT-Refined Descriptions
Recently, significant progress has been made in text-based motion generation, enabling the generation of diverse and high-quality human motions that conform to textual descriptions. However, it remains challenging to generate fine-grained or stylized motions due to the lack of datasets annotated with detailed textual descriptions. By adopting a divide-and-conquer strategy, we propose a new framework named Fine-Grained Human Motion Diffusion Model (FG-MDM) for human motion generation. Specifically, we first parse previous vague textual annotation into fine-grained description of different body parts by leveraging a large language model (GPT-3.5). We then use these fine-grained descriptions to guide a transformer-based diffusion model. FG-MDM can generate fine-grained and stylized motions even outside of the distribution of the training data. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of FG-MDM over previous methods, especially the strong generalization capability. We will release our fine-grained textual annotations for HumanML3D and KIT.
LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they still struggle with generating factually incorrect content (i.e., hallucinations). A promising approach to mitigate this issue is enabling models to express uncertainty when unsure. Previous research on uncertainty modeling has primarily focused on short-form QA, but realworld applications often require much longer responses. In this work, we introduce the task of Long-form Generation with Uncertainty(LoGU). We identify two key challenges: Uncertainty Suppression, where models hesitate to express uncertainty, and Uncertainty Misalignment, where models convey uncertainty inaccurately. To tackle these challenges, we propose a refinement-based data collection framework and a two-stage training pipeline. Our framework adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy, refining uncertainty based on atomic claims. The collected data are then used in training through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) to enhance uncertainty expression. Extensive experiments on three long-form instruction following datasets show that our method significantly improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations, and maintains the comprehensiveness of responses.
Segment Anything without Supervision
The Segmentation Anything Model (SAM) requires labor-intensive data labeling. We present Unsupervised SAM (UnSAM) for promptable and automatic whole-image segmentation that does not require human annotations. UnSAM utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy to "discover" the hierarchical structure of visual scenes. We first leverage top-down clustering methods to partition an unlabeled image into instance/semantic level segments. For all pixels within a segment, a bottom-up clustering method is employed to iteratively merge them into larger groups, thereby forming a hierarchical structure. These unsupervised multi-granular masks are then utilized to supervise model training. Evaluated across seven popular datasets, UnSAM achieves competitive results with the supervised counterpart SAM, and surpasses the previous state-of-the-art in unsupervised segmentation by 11% in terms of AR. Moreover, we show that supervised SAM can also benefit from our self-supervised labels. By integrating our unsupervised pseudo masks into SA-1B's ground-truth masks and training UnSAM with only 1% of SA-1B, a lightly semi-supervised UnSAM can often segment entities overlooked by supervised SAM, exceeding SAM's AR by over 6.7% and AP by 3.9% on SA-1B.
Formal that "Floats" High: Formal Verification of Floating Point Arithmetic
Formal verification of floating-point arithmetic remains challenging due to non-linear arithmetic behavior and the tight coupling between control and datapath logic. Existing approaches often rely on high-level C models for equivalence checking against Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs, but this introduces abstraction gaps, translation overhead, and limits scalability at the RTL level. To address these challenges, this paper presents a scalable methodology for verifying floating-point arithmetic using direct RTL-to-RTL model checking against a golden reference model. The approach adopts a divide-and conquer strategy that decomposes verification into modular stages, each captured by helper assertions and lemmas that collectively prove a main correctness theorem. Counterexample (CEX)-guided refinement is used to iteratively localize and resolve implementation defects, while targeted fault injection validates the robustness of the verification process against precision-critical datapath errors. To assess scalability and practicality, the methodology is extended with agentic AI-based formal property generation, integrating large language model (LLM)-driven automation with Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) refinement. Coverage analysis evaluates the effectiveness of the approach by comparing handwritten and AI-generated properties in both RTL-to-RTL model checking and standalone RTL verification settings. Results show that direct RTL-to-RTL model checking achieves higher coverage efficiency and requires fewer assertions than standalone verification, especially when combined with AI-generated properties refined through HITL guidance.
FrankenBot: Brain-Morphic Modular Orchestration for Robotic Manipulation with Vision-Language Models
Developing a general robot manipulation system capable of performing a wide range of tasks in complex, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments has long been a challenging task. It is widely recognized that achieving human-like efficiency and robustness manipulation requires the robotic brain to integrate a comprehensive set of functions, such as task planning, policy generation, anomaly monitoring and handling, and long-term memory, achieving high-efficiency operation across all functions. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), pretrained on massive multimodal data, have acquired rich world knowledge, exhibiting exceptional scene understanding and multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, existing methods typically focus on realizing only a single function or a subset of functions within the robotic brain, without integrating them into a unified cognitive architecture. Inspired by a divide-and-conquer strategy and the architecture of the human brain, we propose FrankenBot, a VLM-driven, brain-morphic robotic manipulation framework that achieves both comprehensive functionality and high operational efficiency. Our framework includes a suite of components, decoupling a part of key functions from frequent VLM calls, striking an optimal balance between functional completeness and system efficiency. Specifically, we map task planning, policy generation, memory management, and low-level interfacing to the cortex, cerebellum, temporal lobe-hippocampus complex, and brainstem, respectively, and design efficient coordination mechanisms for the modules. We conducted comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic environments, demonstrating that our method offers significant advantages in anomaly detection and handling, long-term memory, operational efficiency, and stability -- all without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.
DiTAR: Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling for Speech Generation
Several recent studies have attempted to autoregressively generate continuous speech representations without discrete speech tokens by combining diffusion and autoregressive models, yet they often face challenges with excessive computational loads or suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling (DiTAR), a patch-based autoregressive framework combining a language model with a diffusion transformer. This approach significantly enhances the efficacy of autoregressive models for continuous tokens and reduces computational demands. DiTAR utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy for patch generation, where the language model processes aggregated patch embeddings and the diffusion transformer subsequently generates the next patch based on the output of the language model. For inference, we propose defining temperature as the time point of introducing noise during the reverse diffusion ODE to balance diversity and determinism. We also show in the extensive scaling analysis that DiTAR has superb scalability. In zero-shot speech generation, DiTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in robustness, speaker similarity, and naturalness.
KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs
NeRF synthesizes novel views of a scene with unprecedented quality by fitting a neural radiance field to RGB images. However, NeRF requires querying a deep Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) millions of times, leading to slow rendering times, even on modern GPUs. In this paper, we demonstrate that real-time rendering is possible by utilizing thousands of tiny MLPs instead of one single large MLP. In our setting, each individual MLP only needs to represent parts of the scene, thus smaller and faster-to-evaluate MLPs can be used. By combining this divide-and-conquer strategy with further optimizations, rendering is accelerated by three orders of magnitude compared to the original NeRF model without incurring high storage costs. Further, using teacher-student distillation for training, we show that this speed-up can be achieved without sacrificing visual quality.
MIGC++: Advanced Multi-Instance Generation Controller for Image Synthesis
We introduce the Multi-Instance Generation (MIG) task, which focuses on generating multiple instances within a single image, each accurately placed at predefined positions with attributes such as category, color, and shape, strictly following user specifications. MIG faces three main challenges: avoiding attribute leakage between instances, supporting diverse instance descriptions, and maintaining consistency in iterative generation. To address attribute leakage, we propose the Multi-Instance Generation Controller (MIGC). MIGC generates multiple instances through a divide-and-conquer strategy, breaking down multi-instance shading into single-instance tasks with singular attributes, later integrated. To provide more types of instance descriptions, we developed MIGC++. MIGC++ allows attribute control through text \& images and position control through boxes \& masks. Lastly, we introduced the Consistent-MIG algorithm to enhance the iterative MIG ability of MIGC and MIGC++. This algorithm ensures consistency in unmodified regions during the addition, deletion, or modification of instances, and preserves the identity of instances when their attributes are changed. We introduce the COCO-MIG and Multimodal-MIG benchmarks to evaluate these methods. Extensive experiments on these benchmarks, along with the COCO-Position benchmark and DrawBench, demonstrate that our methods substantially outperform existing techniques, maintaining precise control over aspects including position, attribute, and quantity. Project page: https://github.com/limuloo/MIGC.
Flash Sculptor: Modular 3D Worlds from Objects
Existing text-to-3D and image-to-3D models often struggle with complex scenes involving multiple objects and intricate interactions. Although some recent attempts have explored such compositional scenarios, they still require an extensive process of optimizing the entire layout, which is highly cumbersome if not infeasible at all. To overcome these challenges, we propose Flash Sculptor in this paper, a simple yet effective framework for compositional 3D scene/object reconstruction from a single image. At the heart of Flash Sculptor lies a divide-and-conquer strategy, which decouples compositional scene reconstruction into a sequence of sub-tasks, including handling the appearance, rotation, scale, and translation of each individual instance. Specifically, for rotation, we introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme that brings the best of both worlds--efficiency and accuracy--while for translation, we develop an outlier-removal-based algorithm that ensures robust and precise parameters in a single step, without any iterative optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flash Sculptor achieves at least a 3 times speedup over existing compositional 3D methods, while setting new benchmarks in compositional 3D reconstruction performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/YujiaHu1109/Flash-Sculptor.
Deep Model Assembling
Large deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in many scenarios. However, training large models is usually challenging, e.g., due to the high computational cost, the unstable and painfully slow optimization procedure, and the vulnerability to overfitting. To alleviate these problems, this work studies a divide-and-conquer strategy, i.e., dividing a large model into smaller modules, training them independently, and reassembling the trained modules to obtain the target model. This approach is promising since it avoids directly training large models from scratch. Nevertheless, implementing this idea is non-trivial, as it is difficult to ensure the compatibility of the independently trained modules. In this paper, we present an elegant solution to address this issue, i.e., we introduce a global, shared meta model to implicitly link all the modules together. This enables us to train highly compatible modules that collaborate effectively when they are assembled together. We further propose a module incubation mechanism that enables the meta model to be designed as an extremely shallow network. As a result, the additional overhead introduced by the meta model is minimalized. Though conceptually simple, our method significantly outperforms end-to-end (E2E) training in terms of both final accuracy and training efficiency. For example, on top of ViT-Huge, it improves the accuracy by 2.7% compared to the E2E baseline on ImageNet-1K, while saving the training cost by 43% in the meantime. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Model-Assembling.
HyperTree Planning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Hierarchical Thinking
Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in tackling complex reasoning tasks, achieving notable success in domains like mathematical and logical reasoning. However, these methods encounter challenges with complex planning tasks, primarily due to extended reasoning steps, diverse constraints, and the challenge of handling multiple distinct sub-tasks. To address these challenges, we propose HyperTree Planning (HTP), a novel reasoning paradigm that constructs hypertree-structured planning outlines for effective planning. The hypertree structure enables LLMs to engage in hierarchical thinking by flexibly employing the divide-and-conquer strategy, effectively breaking down intricate reasoning steps, accommodating diverse constraints, and managing multiple distinct sub-tasks in a well-organized manner. We further introduce an autonomous planning framework that completes the planning process by iteratively refining and expanding the hypertree-structured planning outlines. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HTP, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on the TravelPlanner benchmark with Gemini-1.5-Pro, resulting in a 3.6 times performance improvement over o1-preview.
LLM$\times$MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models
Enlarging the context window of large language models (LLMs) has become a crucial research area, particularly for applications involving extremely long texts. In this work, we propose a novel training-free framework for processing long texts, utilizing a divide-and-conquer strategy to achieve comprehensive document understanding. The proposed LLMtimesMapReduce framework splits the entire document into several chunks for LLMs to read and then aggregates the intermediate answers to produce the final output. The main challenge for divide-and-conquer long text processing frameworks lies in the risk of losing essential long-range information when splitting the document, which can lead the model to produce incomplete or incorrect answers based on the segmented texts. Disrupted long-range information can be classified into two categories: inter-chunk dependency and inter-chunk conflict. We design a structured information protocol to better cope with inter-chunk dependency and an in-context confidence calibration mechanism to resolve inter-chunk conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMtimesMapReduce can outperform representative open-source and commercial long-context LLMs, and is applicable to several different models.
RoLA: A Real-Time Online Lightweight Anomaly Detection System for Multivariate Time Series
A multivariate time series refers to observations of two or more variables taken from a device or a system simultaneously over time. There is an increasing need to monitor multivariate time series and detect anomalies in real time to ensure proper system operation and good service quality. It is also highly desirable to have a lightweight anomaly detection system that considers correlations between different variables, adapts to changes in the pattern of the multivariate time series, offers immediate responses, and provides supportive information regarding detection results based on unsupervised learning and online model training. In the past decade, many multivariate time series anomaly detection approaches have been introduced. However, they are unable to offer all the above-mentioned features. In this paper, we propose RoLA, a real-time online lightweight anomaly detection system for multivariate time series based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, parallel processing, and the majority rule. RoLA employs multiple lightweight anomaly detectors to monitor multivariate time series in parallel, determine the correlations between variables dynamically on the fly, and then jointly detect anomalies based on the majority rule in real time. To demonstrate the performance of RoLA, we conducted an experiment based on a public dataset provided by the FerryBox of the One Ocean Expedition. The results show that RoLA provides satisfactory detection accuracy and lightweight performance.
AlignHuman: Improving Motion and Fidelity via Timestep-Segment Preference Optimization for Audio-Driven Human Animation
Recent advancements in human video generation and animation tasks, driven by diffusion models, have achieved significant progress. However, expressive and realistic human animation remains challenging due to the trade-off between motion naturalness and visual fidelity. To address this, we propose AlignHuman, a framework that combines Preference Optimization as a post-training technique with a divide-and-conquer training strategy to jointly optimize these competing objectives. Our key insight stems from an analysis of the denoising process across timesteps: (1) early denoising timesteps primarily control motion dynamics, while (2) fidelity and human structure can be effectively managed by later timesteps, even if early steps are skipped. Building on this observation, we propose timestep-segment preference optimization (TPO) and introduce two specialized LoRAs as expert alignment modules, each targeting a specific dimension in its corresponding timestep interval. The LoRAs are trained using their respective preference data and activated in the corresponding intervals during inference to enhance motion naturalness and fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignHuman improves strong baselines and reduces NFEs during inference, achieving a 3.3times speedup (from 100 NFEs to 30 NFEs) with minimal impact on generation quality. Homepage: https://alignhuman.github.io/{https://alignhuman.github.io/}
Fast-FoundationStereo: Real-Time Zero-Shot Stereo Matching
Stereo foundation models achieve strong zero-shot generalization but remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Efficient stereo architectures, on the other hand, sacrifice robustness for speed and require costly per-domain fine-tuning. To bridge this gap, we present Fast-FoundationStereo, a family of architectures that achieve, for the first time, strong zero-shot generalization at real-time frame rate. We employ a divide-and-conquer acceleration strategy with three components: (1) knowledge distillation to compress the hybrid backbone into a single efficient student; (2) blockwise neural architecture search for automatically discovering optimal cost filtering designs under latency budgets, reducing search complexity exponentially; and (3) structured pruning for eliminating redundancy in the iterative refinement module. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic pseudo-labeling pipeline used to curate 1.4M in-the-wild stereo pairs to supplement synthetic training data and facilitate knowledge distillation. The resulting model can run over 10x faster than FoundationStereo while closely matching its zero-shot accuracy, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art among real-time methods. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/Fast-FoundationStereo/
Adaptive Training Meets Progressive Scaling: Elevating Efficiency in Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in various generative tasks with the predictive prowess of denoising model. Currently, diffusion models employ a uniform denoising model across all timesteps. However, the inherent variations in data distributions at different timesteps lead to conflicts during training, constraining the potential of diffusion models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel two-stage divide-and-conquer training strategy termed TDC Training. It groups timesteps based on task similarity and difficulty, assigning highly customized denoising models to each group, thereby enhancing the performance of diffusion models. While two-stage training avoids the need to train each model separately, the total training cost is even lower than training a single unified denoising model. Additionally, we introduce Proxy-based Pruning to further customize the denoising models. This method transforms the pruning problem of diffusion models into a multi-round decision-making problem, enabling precise pruning of diffusion models. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of TDC Training, demonstrating improvements in FID of 1.5 on ImageNet64 compared to original IDDPM, while saving about 20\% of computational resources.
Swift4D:Adaptive divide-and-conquer Gaussian Splatting for compact and efficient reconstruction of dynamic scene
Novel view synthesis has long been a practical but challenging task, although the introduction of numerous methods to solve this problem, even combining advanced representations like 3D Gaussian Splatting, they still struggle to recover high-quality results and often consume too much storage memory and training time. In this paper we propose Swift4D, a divide-and-conquer 3D Gaussian Splatting method that can handle static and dynamic primitives separately, achieving a good trade-off between rendering quality and efficiency, motivated by the fact that most of the scene is the static primitive and does not require additional dynamic properties. Concretely, we focus on modeling dynamic transformations only for the dynamic primitives which benefits both efficiency and quality. We first employ a learnable decomposition strategy to separate the primitives, which relies on an additional parameter to classify primitives as static or dynamic. For the dynamic primitives, we employ a compact multi-resolution 4D Hash mapper to transform these primitives from canonical space into deformation space at each timestamp, and then mix the static and dynamic primitives to produce the final output. This divide-and-conquer method facilitates efficient training and reduces storage redundancy. Our method not only achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while being 20X faster in training than previous SOTA methods with a minimum storage requirement of only 30MB on real-world datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/WuJH2001/swift4d.
CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians
The advancement of real-time 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis has been significantly propelled by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). However, effectively training large-scale 3DGS and rendering it in real-time across various scales remains challenging. This paper introduces CityGaussian (CityGS), which employs a novel divide-and-conquer training approach and Level-of-Detail (LoD) strategy for efficient large-scale 3DGS training and rendering. Specifically, the global scene prior and adaptive training data selection enables efficient training and seamless fusion. Based on fused Gaussian primitives, we generate different detail levels through compression, and realize fast rendering across various scales through the proposed block-wise detail levels selection and aggregation strategy. Extensive experimental results on large-scale scenes demonstrate that our approach attains state-of-theart rendering quality, enabling consistent real-time rendering of largescale scenes across vastly different scales. Our project page is available at https://dekuliutesla.github.io/citygs/.
Fast Full-frame Video Stabilization with Iterative Optimization
Video stabilization refers to the problem of transforming a shaky video into a visually pleasing one. The question of how to strike a good trade-off between visual quality and computational speed has remained one of the open challenges in video stabilization. Inspired by the analogy between wobbly frames and jigsaw puzzles, we propose an iterative optimization-based learning approach using synthetic datasets for video stabilization, which consists of two interacting submodules: motion trajectory smoothing and full-frame outpainting. First, we develop a two-level (coarse-to-fine) stabilizing algorithm based on the probabilistic flow field. The confidence map associated with the estimated optical flow is exploited to guide the search for shared regions through backpropagation. Second, we take a divide-and-conquer approach and propose a novel multiframe fusion strategy to render full-frame stabilized views. An important new insight brought about by our iterative optimization approach is that the target video can be interpreted as the fixed point of nonlinear mapping for video stabilization. We formulate video stabilization as a problem of minimizing the amount of jerkiness in motion trajectories, which guarantees convergence with the help of fixed-point theory. Extensive experimental results are reported to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of computational speed and visual quality. The code will be available on GitHub.
Divide-or-Conquer? Which Part Should You Distill Your LLM?
Recent methods have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning tasks better when they are encouraged to solve subtasks of the main task first. In this paper we devise a similar strategy that breaks down reasoning tasks into a problem decomposition phase and a problem solving phase and show that the strategy is able to outperform a single stage solution. Further, we hypothesize that the decomposition should be easier to distill into a smaller model compared to the problem solving because the latter requires large amounts of domain knowledge while the former only requires learning general problem solving strategies. We propose methods to distill these two capabilities and evaluate their impact on reasoning outcomes and inference cost. We find that we can distill the problem decomposition phase and at the same time achieve good generalization across tasks, datasets, and models. However, it is harder to distill the problem solving capability without losing performance and the resulting distilled model struggles with generalization. These results indicate that by using smaller, distilled problem decomposition models in combination with problem solving LLMs we can achieve reasoning with cost-efficient inference and local adaptation.
UDC: A Unified Neural Divide-and-Conquer Framework for Large-Scale Combinatorial Optimization Problems
Single-stage neural combinatorial optimization solvers have achieved near-optimal results on various small-scale combinatorial optimization (CO) problems without requiring expert knowledge. However, these solvers exhibit significant performance degradation when applied to large-scale CO problems. Recently, two-stage neural methods motivated by divide-and-conquer strategies have shown efficiency in addressing large-scale CO problems. Nevertheless, the performance of these methods highly relies on problem-specific heuristics in either the dividing or the conquering procedure, which limits their applicability to general CO problems. Moreover, these methods employ separate training schemes and ignore the interdependencies between the dividing and conquering strategies, often leading to sub-optimal solutions. To tackle these drawbacks, this article develops a unified neural divide-and-conquer framework (i.e., UDC) for solving general large-scale CO problems. UDC offers a Divide-Conquer-Reunion (DCR) training method to eliminate the negative impact of a sub-optimal dividing policy. Employing a high-efficiency Graph Neural Network (GNN) for global instance dividing and a fixed-length sub-path solver for conquering divided sub-problems, the proposed UDC framework demonstrates extensive applicability, achieving superior performance in 10 representative large-scale CO problems. The code is available at https://github.com/CIAM-Group/NCO_code/tree/main/single_objective/UDC-Large-scale-CO-master.
AWESOME: GPU Memory-constrained Long Document Summarization using Memory Mechanism and Global Salient Content
Long document summarization systems are critical for domains with lengthy and jargonladen text, yet they present significant challenges to researchers and developers with limited computing resources. Existing solutions mainly focus on efficient attentions or divide-and-conquer strategies. The former reduces theoretical time complexity, but is still memory-heavy. The latter methods sacrifice global context, leading to uninformative and incoherent summaries. This work aims to leverage the memory-efficient nature of divide-and-conquer methods while preserving global context. Concretely, our framework AWESOME uses two novel mechanisms: (1) External memory mechanisms track previously encoded document segments and their corresponding summaries, to enhance global document understanding and summary coherence. (2) Global salient content is further identified beforehand to augment each document segment to support its summarization. Extensive experiments on diverse genres of text, including government reports, transcripts, scientific papers, and novels, show that AWESOME produces summaries with improved informativeness, faithfulness, and coherence than competitive baselines on longer documents, while having a similar or smaller GPU memory footprint.
DesignRepair: Dual-Stream Design Guideline-Aware Frontend Repair with Large Language Models
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined frontend interface creation through tools like Vercel's V0, yet surfaced challenges in design quality (e.g., accessibility, and usability). Current solutions, often limited by their focus, generalisability, or data dependency, fall short in addressing these complexities. Moreover, none of them examine the quality of LLM-generated UI design. In this work, we introduce DesignRepair, a novel dual-stream design guideline-aware system to examine and repair the UI design quality issues from both code aspect and rendered page aspect. We utilised the mature and popular Material Design as our knowledge base to guide this process. Specifically, we first constructed a comprehensive knowledge base encoding Google's Material Design principles into low-level component knowledge base and high-level system design knowledge base. After that, DesignRepair employs a LLM for the extraction of key components and utilizes the Playwright tool for precise page analysis, aligning these with the established knowledge bases. Finally, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation with state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 to holistically refine and repair frontend code through a strategic divide and conquer approach. Our extensive evaluations validated the efficacy and utility of our approach, demonstrating significant enhancements in adherence to design guidelines, accessibility, and user experience metrics.
