arXiv subjects

Tong Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Tong Sun.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

MDocAgent: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding

Document Question Answering (DocQA) is a very common task. Existing methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) often prioritize information from a single modal, failing to effectively integrate textual and visual cues. These approaches struggle with complex multi-modal reasoning, limiting their performance on real-world documents. We present MDocAgent (A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding), a novel RAG and multi-agent framework that leverages both text and image. Our system employs five specialized agents: a general agent, a critical agent, a text agent, an image agent and a summarizing agent. These agents engage in multi-modal context retrieval, combining their individual insights to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the document's content. This collaborative approach enables the system to synthesize information from both textual and visual components, leading to improved accuracy in question answering. Preliminary experiments on five benchmarks like MMLongBench, LongDocURL demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDocAgent, achieve an average improvement of 12.1% compared to current state-of-the-art method. This work contributes to the development of more robust and comprehensive DocQA systems capable of handling the complexities of real-world documents containing rich textual and visual information. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/MDocAgent.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SV-RAG: LoRA-Contextualizing Adaptation of MLLMs for Long Document Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown great progress in text-rich image understanding, yet they still struggle with complex, multi-page visually-rich documents. Traditional methods using document parsers for retrieval-augmented generation suffer from performance and efficiency limitations, while directly presenting all pages to MLLMs leads to inefficiencies, especially with lengthy ones. In this work, we present a novel framework named **S**elf-**V**isual **R**etrieval-**A**ugmented **G**eneration (SV-RAG), which can broaden horizons of any MLLM to support long-document understanding. We demonstrate that **MLLMs themselves can be an effective multimodal retriever** to fetch relevant pages and then answer user questions based on these pages. SV-RAG is implemented with two specific MLLM adapters, one for evidence page retrieval and the other for question answering. Empirical results show state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of SV-RAG.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MODS: Moderating a Mixture of Document Speakers to Summarize Debatable Queries in Document Collections

Query-focused summarization (QFS) gives a summary of documents to answer a query. Past QFS work assumes queries have one answer, ignoring debatable ones (Is law school worth it?). We introduce Debatable QFS (DQFS), a task to create summaries that answer debatable queries via documents with opposing perspectives; summaries must comprehensively cover all sources and balance perspectives, favoring no side. These goals elude LLM QFS systems, which: 1) lack structured content plans, failing to guide LLMs to write balanced summaries, and 2) use the same query to retrieve contexts across documents, failing to cover all perspectives specific to each document's content. To overcome this, we design MODS, a multi-LLM framework mirroring human panel discussions. MODS treats documents as individual Speaker LLMs and has a Moderator LLM that picks speakers to respond to tailored queries for planned topics. Speakers use tailored queries to retrieve relevant contexts from their documents and supply perspectives, which are tracked in a rich outline, yielding a content plan to guide the final summary. Experiments on ConflictingQA with controversial web queries and DebateQFS, our new dataset of debate queries from Debatepedia, show MODS beats SOTA by 38-59% in topic paragraph coverage and balance, based on new citation metrics. Users also find MODS's summaries to be readable and more balanced.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Persona-SQ: A Personalized Suggested Question Generation Framework For Real-world Documents

Suggested questions (SQs) provide an effective initial interface for users to engage with their documents in AI-powered reading applications. In practical reading sessions, users have diverse backgrounds and reading goals, yet current SQ features typically ignore such user information, resulting in homogeneous or ineffective questions. We introduce a pipeline that generates personalized SQs by incorporating reader profiles (professions and reading goals) and demonstrate its utility in two ways: 1) as an improved SQ generation pipeline that produces higher quality and more diverse questions compared to current baselines, and 2) as a data generator to fine-tune extremely small models that perform competitively with much larger models on SQ generation. Our approach can not only serve as a drop-in replacement in current SQ systems to immediately improve their performance but also help develop on-device SQ models that can run locally to deliver fast and private SQ experience.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Numerical Pruning for Efficient Autoregressive Models

Transformers have emerged as the leading architecture in deep learning, proving to be versatile and highly effective across diverse domains beyond language and image processing. However, their impressive performance often incurs high computational costs due to their substantial model size. This paper focuses on compressing decoder-only transformer-based autoregressive models through structural weight pruning to improve the model efficiency while preserving performance for both language and image generation tasks. Specifically, we propose a training-free pruning method that calculates a numerical score with Newton's method for the Attention and MLP modules, respectively. Besides, we further propose another compensation algorithm to recover the pruned model for better performance. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we provide both theoretical support and extensive experiments. Our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced memory usage and faster generation speeds on GPUs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SUGAR: Subject-Driven Video Customization in a Zero-Shot Manner

We present SUGAR, a zero-shot method for subject-driven video customization. Given an input image, SUGAR is capable of generating videos for the subject contained in the image and aligning the generation with arbitrary visual attributes such as style and motion specified by user-input text. Unlike previous methods, which require test-time fine-tuning or fail to generate text-aligned videos, SUGAR achieves superior results without the need for extra cost at test-time. To enable zero-shot capability, we introduce a scalable pipeline to construct synthetic dataset which is specifically designed for subject-driven customization, leading to 2.5 millions of image-video-text triplets. Additionally, we propose several methods to enhance our model, including special attention designs, improved training strategies, and a refined sampling algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted. Compared to previous methods, SUGAR achieves state-of-the-art results in identity preservation, video dynamics, and video-text alignment for subject-driven video customization, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DarkSHINE Baseline Design Report: Physics Prospects and Detector Technologies

DarkSHINE is a newly proposed fixed-target experiment initiative to search for the invisible decay of Dark Photon via missing energy/momentum signatures, based on the high repetition rate electron beam to be deployed/delivered by the Shanghai High repetition rate XFEL and Extreme light facility (SHINE). This report elaborates the baseline design of DarkSHINE experiment by introducing the physics goals, experimental setups, details of each sub-detector system technical designs, signal and backgground modelings, expected search sensitivities and future prospects, which mark an important step towards the further prototyping and technical demonstrations.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2024

ARTIST: Improving the Generation of Text-rich Images with Disentangled Diffusion Models and Large Language Models

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating a broad spectrum of visual content, yet their proficiency in rendering text is still limited: they often generate inaccurate characters or words that fail to blend well with the underlying image. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel framework named, ARTIST, which incorporates a dedicated textual diffusion model to focus on the learning of text structures specifically. Initially, we pretrain this textual model to capture the intricacies of text representation. Subsequently, we finetune a visual diffusion model, enabling it to assimilate textual structure information from the pretrained textual model. This disentangled architecture design and training strategy significantly enhance the text rendering ability of the diffusion models for text-rich image generation. Additionally, we leverage the capabilities of pretrained large language models to interpret user intentions better, contributing to improved generation quality. Empirical results on the MARIO-Eval benchmark underscore the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing an improvement of up to 15% in various metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Design of a LYSO Crystal Electromagnetic Calorimeter for DarkSHINE Experiment

This paper presents the design and optimization of a LYSO crystal electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) for the DarkSHINE experiment, which aims to search for dark photons as potential mediators of dark forces. The ECAL design was evaluated through comprehensive simulations, focusing on optimizing dimensions, material selection, energy distribution, and energy resolution. The ECAL configuration consists of 21$\times$21$\times$11 LYSO crystals, each measuring 2.5$\times$2.5$\times$4 cm$^3$, arranged in a staggered layout to improve signal detection efficiency. A 4 GeV energy dynamic range was established to ensure accurate energy measurements without saturation, which is essential for background rejection and signal identification. A detailed digitization model was developed to simulate the scintillation, SiPM, and ADC behaviors, providing a more realistic representation of detector performance. Additionally, the study assessed radiation damage in the ECAL region, highlighting the necessity of radiation-resistant scintillators and silicon sensors.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2024

A Design of Hadronic Calorimeter for DarkSHINE Experiment

The sensitivity of the dark photon search through invisible decay final states in low background experiments significantly relies on the neutron and muon veto efficiency, which depends on the amount of material used and the design of detector geometry. This paper presents an optimized design of a hadronic calorimeter (HCAL) used for the DarkSHINE experiment, which is studied using a GEANT4-based simulation framework. The geometry is optimized by comparing a traditional design with uniform absorbers to one that uses different thicknesses at different locations of the detector, which enhances the efficiency of vetoing low-energy neutrons at the sub-GeV level. The overall size and total amount of material used in HCAL are optimized to be lower due to the load and budget requirements, while the overall performance is studied to meet the physical objectives.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2024

Toffee: Efficient Million-Scale Dataset Construction for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

In subject-driven text-to-image generation, recent works have achieved superior performance by training the model on synthetic datasets containing numerous image pairs. Trained on these datasets, generative models can produce text-aligned images for specific subject from arbitrary testing image in a zero-shot manner. They even outperform methods which require additional fine-tuning on testing images. However, the cost of creating such datasets is prohibitive for most researchers. To generate a single training pair, current methods fine-tune a pre-trained text-to-image model on the subject image to capture fine-grained details, then use the fine-tuned model to create images for the same subject based on creative text prompts. Consequently, constructing a large-scale dataset with millions of subjects can require hundreds of thousands of GPU hours. To tackle this problem, we propose Toffee, an efficient method to construct datasets for subject-driven editing and generation. Specifically, our dataset construction does not need any subject-level fine-tuning. After pre-training two generative models, we are able to generate infinite number of high-quality samples. We construct the first large-scale dataset for subject-driven image editing and generation, which contains 5 million image pairs, text prompts, and masks. Our dataset is 5 times the size of previous largest dataset, yet our cost is tens of thousands of GPU hours lower. To test the proposed dataset, we also propose a model which is capable of both subject-driven image editing and generation. By simply training the model on our proposed dataset, it obtains competitive results, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset construction framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LLaVA-Read: Enhancing Reading Ability of Multimodal Language Models

Large multimodal language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding and manipulating images. However, many of these models struggle with comprehending intensive textual contents embedded within the images, primarily due to the limited text recognition and layout understanding ability. To understand the sources of these limitations, we perform an exploratory analysis showing the drawbacks of classical visual encoders on visual text understanding. Hence, we present LLaVA-Read, a multimodal large language model that utilizes dual visual encoders along with a visual text encoder. Our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art models in various text-rich image understanding tasks, showcasing enhanced comprehension of textual content within images. Together, our research suggests visual text understanding remains an open challenge and an efficient visual text encoder is crucial for future successful multimodal systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DocSynthv2: A Practical Autoregressive Modeling for Document Generation

While the generation of document layouts has been extensively explored, comprehensive document generation encompassing both layout and content presents a more complex challenge. This paper delves into this advanced domain, proposing a novel approach called DocSynthv2 through the development of a simple yet effective autoregressive structured model. Our model, distinct in its integration of both layout and textual cues, marks a step beyond existing layout-generation approaches. By focusing on the relationship between the structural elements and the textual content within documents, we aim to generate cohesive and contextually relevant documents without any reliance on visual components. Through experimental studies on our curated benchmark for the new task, we demonstrate the ability of our model combining layout and textual information in enhancing the generation quality and relevance of documents, opening new pathways for research in document creation and automated design. Our findings emphasize the effectiveness of autoregressive models in handling complex document generation tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

TRINS: Towards Multimodal Language Models that Can Read

Large multimodal language models have shown remarkable proficiency in understanding and editing images. However, a majority of these visually-tuned models struggle to comprehend the textual content embedded in images, primarily due to the limitation of training data. In this work, we introduce TRINS: a Text-Rich image INStruction dataset, with the objective of enhancing the reading ability of the multimodal large language model. TRINS is built upon LAION using hybrid data annotation strategies that include machine-assisted and human-assisted annotation processes. It contains 39,153 text-rich images, captions, and 102,437 questions. Specifically, we show that the number of words per annotation in TRINS is significantly longer than that of related datasets, providing new challenges. Furthermore, we introduce a simple and effective architecture, called a Language-vision Reading Assistant (LaRA), which is good at understanding textual content within images. LaRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art multimodal large language models on the TRINS dataset, as well as other classical benchmarks. Lastly, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation with TRINS on various text-rich image understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Customization Assistant for Text-to-image Generation

Customizing pre-trained text-to-image generation model has attracted massive research interest recently, due to its huge potential in real-world applications. Although existing methods are able to generate creative content for a novel concept contained in single user-input image, their capability are still far from perfection. Specifically, most existing methods require fine-tuning the generative model on testing images. Some existing methods do not require fine-tuning, while their performance are unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the interaction between users and models are still limited to directive and descriptive prompts such as instructions and captions. In this work, we build a customization assistant based on pre-trained large language model and diffusion model, which can not only perform customized generation in a tuning-free manner, but also enable more user-friendly interactions: users can chat with the assistant and input either ambiguous text or clear instruction. Specifically, we propose a new framework consists of a new model design and a novel training strategy. The resulting assistant can perform customized generation in 2-5 seconds without any test time fine-tuning. Extensive experiments are conducted, competitive results have been obtained across different domains, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Improve Temporal Awareness of LLMs for Sequential Recommendation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities in solving a wide range of general-purpose tasks. However, it is empirically found that LLMs fall short in recognizing and utilizing temporal information, rendering poor performance in tasks that require an understanding of sequential data, such as sequential recommendation. In this paper, we aim to improve temporal awareness of LLMs by designing a principled prompting framework inspired by human cognitive processes. Specifically, we propose three prompting strategies to exploit temporal information within historical interactions for LLM-based sequential recommendation. Besides, we emulate divergent thinking by aggregating LLM ranking results derived from these strategies. Evaluations on MovieLens-1M and Amazon Review datasets indicate that our proposed method significantly enhances the zero-shot capabilities of LLMs in sequential recommendation tasks.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Supporting Business Document Workflows via Collection-Centric Information Foraging with Large Language Models

Knowledge workers often need to extract and analyze information from a collection of documents to solve complex information tasks in the workplace, e.g., hiring managers reviewing resumes or analysts assessing risk in contracts. However, foraging for relevant information can become tedious and repetitive over many documents and criteria of interest. We introduce Marco, a mixed-initiative workspace supporting sensemaking over diverse business document collections. Through collection-centric assistance, Marco reduces the cognitive costs of extracting and structuring information, allowing users to prioritize comparative synthesis and decision making processes. Users interactively communicate their information needs to an AI assistant using natural language and compose schemas that provide an overview of a document collection. Findings from a usability study (n=16) demonstrate that when using Marco, users complete sensemaking tasks 16% more quickly, with less effort, and without diminishing accuracy. A design probe with seven domain experts identifies how Marco can benefit various real-world workflows.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Automatic Layout Planning for Visually-Rich Documents with Instruction-Following Models

Recent advancements in instruction-following models have made user interactions with models more user-friendly and efficient, broadening their applicability. In graphic design, non-professional users often struggle to create visually appealing layouts due to limited skills and resources. In this work, we introduce a novel multimodal instruction-following framework for layout planning, allowing users to easily arrange visual elements into tailored layouts by specifying canvas size and design purpose, such as for book covers, posters, brochures, or menus. We developed three layout reasoning tasks to train the model in understanding and executing layout instructions. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our method not only simplifies the design process for non-professionals but also surpasses the performance of few-shot GPT-4V models, with mIoU higher by 12% on Crello. This progress highlights the potential of multimodal instruction-following models to automate and simplify the design process, providing an approachable solution for a wide range of design tasks on visually-rich documents.

cs.CV↗