arXiv subjects

Gee Wah Ng

Publications and source records attributed to Gee Wah Ng.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium Technical Report

We introduce Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium, a 123B-parameter natively multimodal and multilingual foundation model, adapted to regional languages and the Singapore context. Developed as a sovereign AI asset, it demonstrates that deep domain adaptation can be achieved with minimal degradation to broad-spectrum intelligence and alignment. Continued pretraining was performed on Mistral Medium 3.1 using a localized 1-trillion tokens multimodal corpus, followed by a 250-billion tokens long-context extension phase. Subsequent post-training incorporated a novel human-annotated Singapore multimodal dataset and curated textual corpus on Singapore culture, knowledge, and legislation, totaling 22-billion tokens. An additional 5 billion tokens of model alignment was performed through Online Direct Preference Optimization. Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium achieves state-of-the-art performance for its size on Singapore multimodal, legal, and government policy benchmarks while remaining globally competitive on general multimodal intelligence, multilingual, and STEM benchmarks. We also introduce a novel evaluation suite encompassing localized knowledge benchmarks and an institutionally aligned model behavior and safety framework. We report the data curation principles, training methodology, and highlight benchmark and inference performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, Achieving More

Activation steering has emerged as a cost-effective paradigm for modifying large language model (LLM) behaviors. Existing methods typically intervene at the block level, steering the bundled activations of selected attention heads, feedforward networks, or residual streams. However, we reveal that block-level activations are inherently heterogeneous, entangling beneficial, irrelevant, and harmful features, thereby rendering block-level steering coarse, inefficient, and intrusive. To investigate the root cause, we decompose block activations into fine-grained atomic unit (AU)-level activations, where each AU-level activation corresponds to a single dimension of the block activation, and each AU denotes a slice of the block weight matrix. Steering an AU-level activation is thus equivalent to steering its associated AU. Our theoretical and empirical analysis show that heterogeneity arises because different AUs or dimensions control distinct token distributions in LLM outputs. Hence, block-level steering inevitably moves helpful and harmful token directions together, which reduces efficiency. Restricting intervention to beneficial AUs yields more precise and effective steering. Building on this insight, we propose AUSteer, a simple and efficient method that operates at a finer granularity of the AU level. AUSteer first identifies discriminative AUs globally by computing activation momenta on contrastive samples. It then assigns adaptive steering strengths tailored to diverse inputs and selected AU activations. Comprehensive experiments on multiple LLMs and tasks show that AUSteer consistently surpasses advanced baselines while steering considerably fewer activations, demonstrating that steering less achieves more.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Prompt Optimizers: From Prompt Merits to Optimization

Prompt optimization (PO) provides a practical way to improve response quality when users lack the time or expertise to manually craft effective prompts. Existing methods typically rely on LLMs' self-generation ability to optimize prompts. However, due to limited downward compatibility, the instruction-heavy prompts generated by advanced LLMs can overwhelm lightweight inference models and degrade response quality, while also lacking interpretability due to implicit optimization. In this work, we rethink prompt optimization through the lens of explicit and interpretable design. We first identify a set of model-agnostic prompt quality merits and empirically validate their effectiveness in enhancing prompt and response quality. We then introduce MePO, a merit-guided, locally deployable prompt optimizer trained on our merit-guided prompt preference dataset generated by a lightweight LLM. MePO avoids online optimization, reduces privacy concerns, and, by learning clear, interpretable merits, generalizes effectively to both large-scale and lightweight inference models. Experiments demonstrate that MePO achieves better results across diverse tasks and model types, offering a scalable and robust solution for real-world deployment. The code, model and dataset can be found in https://github.com/MidiyaZhu/MePO

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

QMAVIS: Long Video-Audio Understanding using Fusion of Large Multimodal Models

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for video-audio understanding have traditionally been evaluated only on shorter videos of a few minutes long. In this paper, we introduce QMAVIS (Q Team-Multimodal Audio Video Intelligent Sensemaking), a novel long video-audio understanding pipeline built through a late fusion of LMMs, Large Language Models, and speech recognition models. QMAVIS addresses the gap in long-form video analytics, particularly for longer videos of a few minutes to beyond an hour long, opening up new potential applications in sensemaking, video content analysis, embodied AI, etc. Quantitative experiments using QMAVIS demonstrated a 38.75% improvement over state-of-the-art video-audio LMMs like VideoLlaMA2 and InternVL2 on the VideoMME (with subtitles) dataset, which comprises long videos with audio information. Evaluations on other challenging video understanding datasets like PerceptionTest and EgoSchema saw up to 2% improvement, indicating competitive performance. Qualitative experiments also showed that QMAVIS is able to extract the nuances of different scenes in a long video audio content while understanding the overarching narrative. Ablation studies were also conducted to ascertain the impact of each component in the fusion pipeline.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

QCaption: Video Captioning and Q&A through Fusion of Large Multimodal Models

This paper introduces QCaption, a novel video captioning and Q&A pipeline that enhances video analytics by fusing three models: key frame extraction, a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) for image-text analysis, and a Large Language Model (LLM) for text analysis. This approach enables integrated analysis of text, images, and video, achieving performance improvements over existing video captioning and Q&A models; all while remaining fully self-contained, adept for on-premises deployment. Experimental results using QCaption demonstrated up to 44.2% and 48.9% improvements in video captioning and Q&A tasks, respectively. Ablation studies were also performed to assess the role of LLM on the fusion on the results. Moreover, the paper proposes and evaluates additional video captioning approaches, benchmarking them against QCaption and existing methodologies. QCaption demonstrate the potential of adopting a model fusion approach in advancing video analytics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Restoring Pruned Large Language Models via Lost Component Compensation

Pruning is a widely used technique to reduce the size and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), but it often causes performance degradation. To mitigate this, existing restoration methods typically employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), such as LoRA, to recover the pruned model's performance. However, most PEFT methods are designed for dense models and overlook the distinct properties of pruned models, often resulting in suboptimal recovery. In this work, we propose a targeted restoration strategy for pruned models that restores performance while preserving their low cost and high efficiency. We observe that pruning-induced information loss is reflected in attention activations, and selectively reintroducing components of this information can significantly recover model performance. Based on this insight, we introduce RestoreLCC (Restoring Pruned LLMs via Lost Component Compensation), a plug-and-play method that contrastively probes critical attention heads via activation editing, extracts lost components from activation differences, and finally injects them back into the corresponding pruned heads for compensation and recovery. RestoreLCC is compatible with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured pruning schemes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RestoreLCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both general and task-specific performance recovery, without compromising the sparsity or inference efficiency of pruned models.

cs.LG↗