Daily Papers

In this paper we investigate learning visual models for the steps of ordinary tasks using weak supervision via instructional narrations and an ordered list of steps instead of strong supervision via temporal annotations. At the heart of our approach is the observation that weakly supervised learning may be easier if a model shares components while learning different steps: `pour egg' should be trained jointly with other tasks involving `pour' and `egg'. We formalize this in a component model for recognizing steps and a weakly supervised learning framework that can learn this model under temporal constraints from narration and the list of steps. Past data does not permit systematic studying of sharing and so we also gather a new dataset, CrossTask, aimed at assessing cross-task sharing. Our experiments demonstrate that sharing across tasks improves performance, especially when done at the component level and that our component model can parse previously unseen tasks by virtue of its compositionality.

In this paper we present an approach for localizing steps of procedural activities in narrated how-to videos. To deal with the scarcity of labeled data at scale, we source the step descriptions from a language knowledge base (wikiHow) containing instructional articles for a large variety of procedural tasks. Without any form of manual supervision, our model learns to temporally ground the steps of procedural articles in how-to videos by matching three modalities: frames, narrations, and step descriptions. Specifically, our method aligns steps to video by fusing information from two distinct pathways: i) {\em direct} alignment of step descriptions to frames, ii) {\em indirect} alignment obtained by composing steps-to-narrations with narrations-to-video correspondences. Notably, our approach performs global temporal grounding of all steps in an article at once by exploiting order information, and is trained with step pseudo-labels which are iteratively refined and aggressively filtered. In order to validate our model we introduce a new evaluation benchmark -- HT-Step -- obtained by manually annotating a 124-hour subset of HowTo100MA test server is accessible at \url{https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/2082.} with steps sourced from wikiHow articles. Experiments on this benchmark as well as zero-shot evaluations on CrossTask demonstrate that our multi-modality alignment yields dramatic gains over several baselines and prior works. Finally, we show that our inner module for matching narration-to-video outperforms by a large margin the state of the art on the HTM-Align narration-video alignment benchmark.

The abundance of instructional videos and their narrations over the Internet offers an exciting avenue for understanding procedural activities. In this work, we propose to learn video representation that encodes both action steps and their temporal ordering, based on a large-scale dataset of web instructional videos and their narrations, without using human annotations. Our method jointly learns a video representation to encode individual step concepts, and a deep probabilistic model to capture both temporal dependencies and immense individual variations in the step ordering. We empirically demonstrate that learning temporal ordering not only enables new capabilities for procedure reasoning, but also reinforces the recognition of individual steps. Our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art results on step classification (+2.8% / +3.3% on COIN / EPIC-Kitchens) and step forecasting (+7.4% on COIN). Moreover, our model attains promising results in zero-shot inference for step classification and forecasting, as well as in predicting diverse and plausible steps for incomplete procedures. Our code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ProcedureVRL.

Comparing a user video to a reference how-to video is a key requirement for AR/VR technology delivering personalized assistance tailored to the user's progress. However, current approaches for language-based assistance can only answer questions about a single video. We propose an approach that first automatically generates large amounts of visual instruction tuning data involving pairs of videos from HowTo100M by leveraging existing step annotations and accompanying narrations, and then trains a video-conditioned language model to jointly reason across multiple raw videos. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance at identifying differences between video pairs and ranking videos based on the severity of these differences, and shows promising ability to perform general reasoning over multiple videos. Project page: https://github.com/facebookresearch/stepdiff

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for enhancing human productivity by assisting with computer tasks. Existing task formulations primarily focus on simple tasks that can be specified by a single, language-only instruction, such as "Insert a new slide." In this work, we introduce VideoGUI, a novel multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate GUI assistants on visual-centric GUI tasks. Sourced from high-quality web instructional videos, our benchmark focuses on tasks involving professional and novel software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop or Stable Diffusion WebUI) and complex activities (e.g., video editing). VideoGUI evaluates GUI assistants through a hierarchical process, allowing for identification of the specific levels at which they may fail: (i) high-level planning: reconstruct procedural subtasks from visual conditions without language descriptions; (ii) middle-level planning: generate sequences of precise action narrations based on visual state (i.e., screenshot) and goals; (iii) atomic action execution: perform specific actions such as accurately clicking designated elements. For each level, we design evaluation metrics across individual dimensions to provide clear signals, such as individual performance in clicking, dragging, typing, and scrolling for atomic action execution. Our evaluation on VideoGUI reveals that even the SoTA large multimodal model GPT4o performs poorly on visual-centric GUI tasks, especially for high-level planning.

Instructional videos are an excellent source for learning multimodal representations by leveraging video-subtitle pairs extracted with automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) from the audio signal in the videos. However, in contrast to human-annotated captions, both speech and subtitles naturally differ from the visual content of the videos and thus provide only noisy supervision for multimodal learning. As a result, large-scale annotation-free web video training data remains sub-optimal for training text-video models. In this work, we propose to leverage the capability of large language models (LLMs) to obtain fine-grained video descriptions aligned with videos. Specifically, we prompt an LLM to create plausible video descriptions based on ASR narrations of the video for a large-scale instructional video dataset. To this end, we introduce a prompting method that is able to take into account a longer text of subtitles, allowing us to capture context beyond a single sentence. To align the captions to the video temporally, we prompt the LLM to generate timestamps for each produced caption based on the subtitles. In this way, we obtain human-style video captions at scale without human supervision. We apply our method to the subtitles of the HowTo100M dataset, creating a new large-scale dataset, HowToCaption. Our evaluation shows that the resulting captions not only significantly improve the performance over many different benchmark datasets for text-video retrieval but also lead to a disentangling of textual narration from the audio, boosting performance in text-video-audio tasks.

This paper introduces MM-Instruct, a large-scale dataset of diverse and high-quality visual instruction data designed to enhance the instruction-following capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). While existing visual instruction datasets often focus on question-answering, they struggle to generalize to broader application scenarios such as creative writing, summarization, or image analysis. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach to constructing MM-Instruct that leverages the strong instruction-following capabilities of existing LLMs to generate novel visual instruction data from large-scale but conventional image captioning datasets. MM-Instruct first leverages ChatGPT to automatically generate diverse instructions from a small set of seed instructions through augmenting and summarization. It then matches these instructions with images and uses an open-sourced large language model (LLM) to generate coherent answers to the instruction-image pairs. The LLM is grounded by the detailed text descriptions of images in the whole answer generation process to guarantee the alignment of the instruction data. Moreover, we introduce a benchmark based on the generated instruction data to evaluate the instruction-following capabilities of existing LMMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-Instruct by training a LLaVA-1.5 model on the generated data, denoted as LLaVA-Instruct, which exhibits significant improvements in instruction-following capabilities compared to LLaVA-1.5 models. The MM-Instruct dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jihaonew/MM-Instruct.

Recent advances in text-to-audio (TTA) generation excel at synthesizing short audio clips but struggle with long-form narrative audio, which requires temporal coherence and compositional reasoning. To address this gap, we propose AudioStory, a unified framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with TTA systems to generate structured, long-form audio narratives. AudioStory possesses strong instruction-following reasoning generation capabilities. It employs LLMs to decompose complex narrative queries into temporally ordered sub-tasks with contextual cues, enabling coherent scene transitions and emotional tone consistency. AudioStory has two appealing features: (1) Decoupled bridging mechanism: AudioStory disentangles LLM-diffuser collaboration into two specialized components, i.e., a bridging query for intra-event semantic alignment and a residual query for cross-event coherence preservation. (2) End-to-end training: By unifying instruction comprehension and audio generation within a single end-to-end framework, AudioStory eliminates the need for modular training pipelines while enhancing synergy between components. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark AudioStory-10K, encompassing diverse domains such as animated soundscapes and natural sound narratives. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AudioStory on both single-audio generation and narrative audio generation, surpassing prior TTA baselines in both instruction-following ability and audio fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/AudioStory

Recent AIGC systems possess the capability to generate digital multimedia content based on human language instructions, such as text, image and video. However, when it comes to speech, existing methods related to human instruction-to-speech generation exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they require the division of inputs into content prompt (transcript) and description prompt (style and speaker), instead of directly supporting human instruction. This division is less natural in form and does not align with other AIGC models. Secondly, the practice of utilizing an independent description prompt to model speech style, without considering the transcript content, restricts the ability to control speech at a fine-grained level. To address these limitations, we propose VoxInstruct, a novel unified multilingual codec language modeling framework that extends traditional text-to-speech tasks into a general human instruction-to-speech task. Our approach enhances the expressiveness of human instruction-guided speech generation and aligns the speech generation paradigm with other modalities. To enable the model to automatically extract the content of synthesized speech from raw text instructions, we introduce speech semantic tokens as an intermediate representation for instruction-to-content guidance. We also incorporate multiple Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) strategies into our codec language model, which strengthens the generated speech following human instructions. Furthermore, our model architecture and training strategies allow for the simultaneous support of combining speech prompt and descriptive human instruction for expressive speech synthesis, which is a first-of-its-kind attempt. Codes, models and demos are at: https://github.com/thuhcsi/VoxInstruct.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in integrating diverse expert models to tackle intricate language and vision tasks. Despite their significance in advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), their potential in intelligent audio content creation remains unexplored. In this work, we tackle the problem of creating audio content with storylines encompassing speech, music, and sound effects, guided by text instructions. We present WavJourney, a system that leverages LLMs to connect various audio models for audio content generation. Given a text description of an auditory scene, WavJourney first prompts LLMs to generate a structured script dedicated to audio storytelling. The audio script incorporates diverse audio elements, organized based on their spatio-temporal relationships. As a conceptual representation of audio, the audio script provides an interactive and interpretable rationale for human engagement. Afterward, the audio script is fed into a script compiler, converting it into a computer program. Each line of the program calls a task-specific audio generation model or computational operation function (e.g., concatenate, mix). The computer program is then executed to obtain an explainable solution for audio generation. We demonstrate the practicality of WavJourney across diverse real-world scenarios, including science fiction, education, and radio play. The explainable and interactive design of WavJourney fosters human-machine co-creation in multi-round dialogues, enhancing creative control and adaptability in audio production. WavJourney audiolizes the human imagination, opening up new avenues for creativity in multimedia content creation.

Movie Audio Description (AD) aims to narrate visual content during dialogue-free segments, particularly benefiting blind and visually impaired (BVI) audiences. Compared with general video captioning, AD demands plot-relevant narration with explicit character name references, posing unique challenges in movie understanding.To identify active main characters and focus on storyline-relevant regions, we propose FocusedAD, a novel framework that delivers character-centric movie audio descriptions. It includes: (i) a Character Perception Module(CPM) for tracking character regions and linking them to names; (ii) a Dynamic Prior Module(DPM) that injects contextual cues from prior ADs and subtitles via learnable soft prompts; and (iii) a Focused Caption Module(FCM) that generates narrations enriched with plot-relevant details and named characters. To overcome limitations in character identification, we also introduce an automated pipeline for building character query banks. FocusedAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including strong zero-shot results on MAD-eval-Named and our newly proposed Cinepile-AD dataset. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/Thorin215/FocusedAD .

Large language models with instruction-following abilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. These models show exceptional generalizability to tackle various real-world tasks through their natural language interfaces. However, their performance heavily relies on high-quality exemplar data, which is often difficult to obtain. This challenge is further exacerbated when it comes to multimodal instruction following. We introduce TextBind, an almost annotation-free framework for empowering larger language models with the multi-turn interleaved multimodal instruction-following capabilities. Our approach requires only image-caption pairs and generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. We release our dataset, model, and demo to foster future research in the area of multimodal instruction following.

Extractive summarization can produce faithful summaries but often requires additional constraints such as a desired summary length. Traditional sentence compression models do not typically consider the constraints because of their restricted model abilities, which require model modifications for coping with them. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-based Compression (InstructCMP), an approach to the sentence compression task that can consider the length constraint through instructions by leveraging the zero-shot task-solving abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). For this purpose, we created new evaluation datasets by transforming traditional sentence compression datasets into an instruction format. By using the datasets, we first reveal that the current LLMs still face challenges in accurately controlling the length for a compressed text. To address this issue, we propose an approach named "length priming," that incorporates additional length information into the instructions without external resources. While the length priming effectively works in a zero-shot setting, a training dataset with the instructions would further improve the ability of length control. Thus, we additionally created a training dataset in an instruction format to fine-tune the model on it. Experimental results and analysis show that applying the length priming significantly improves performances of InstructCMP in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings without the need of any model modifications.

Despite the number of currently available datasets on video question answering, there still remains a need for a dataset involving multi-step and non-factoid answers. Moreover, relying on video transcripts remains an under-explored topic. To adequately address this, We propose a new question answering task on instructional videos, because of their verbose and narrative nature. While previous studies on video question answering have focused on generating a short text as an answer, given a question and video clip, our task aims to identify a span of a video segment as an answer which contains instructional details with various granularities. This work focuses on screencast tutorial videos pertaining to an image editing program. We introduce a dataset, TutorialVQA, consisting of about 6,000manually collected triples of (video, question, answer span). We also provide experimental results with several baselines algorithms using the video transcripts. The results indicate that the task is challenging and call for the investigation of new algorithms.

Instruct Text-to-Speech (InstructTTS) leverages natural language descriptions as style prompts to guide speech synthesis. However, existing InstructTTS methods mainly rely on a direct combination of audio-related labels or their diverse rephrasings, making it difficult to handle flexible, high-level instructions. Such rigid control is insufficient for users such as content creators who wish to steer generation with descriptive instructions. To address these constraints, we introduce OV-InstructTTS, a new paradigm for open-vocabulary InstructTTS. We propose a comprehensive solution comprising a newly curated dataset, OV-Speech, and a novel reasoning-driven framework. The OV-Speech dataset pairs speech with open-vocabulary instructions, each augmented with a reasoning process that connects high-level instructions to acoustic features. The reasoning-driven framework infers emotional, acoustic, and paralinguistic information from open-vocabulary instructions before synthesizing speech. Evaluations show that this reasoning-driven approach significantly improves instruction-following fidelity and speech expressiveness. We believe this work can inspire the next user-friendly InstructTTS systems with stronger generalization and real-world applicability. The dataset and demos are publicly available on our project page.

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do not always attend to these instructions reliably, and users lack simple mechanisms to emphasize their importance beyond modifying prompt wording or structure. To address this, we present an inference-time method that enables users to emphasize specific parts of their prompt by steering the model's attention toward them, aligning the model's perceived importance of different prompt tokens with user intent. Unlike prior approaches that are limited to static instructions, require significant offline profiling, or rely on fixed biases, we dynamically update the proportion of model attention given to the user-specified parts--ensuring improved instruction following without performance degradation. We demonstrate that our approach improves instruction following across a variety of tasks involving multiple instructions and generalizes across models of varying scales.

Learning text-video embeddings usually requires a dataset of video clips with manually provided captions. However, such datasets are expensive and time consuming to create and therefore difficult to obtain on a large scale. In this work, we propose instead to learn such embeddings from video data with readily available natural language annotations in the form of automatically transcribed narrations. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we introduce HowTo100M: a large-scale dataset of 136 million video clips sourced from 1.22M narrated instructional web videos depicting humans performing and describing over 23k different visual tasks. Our data collection procedure is fast, scalable and does not require any additional manual annotation. Second, we demonstrate that a text-video embedding trained on this data leads to state-of-the-art results for text-to-video retrieval and action localization on instructional video datasets such as YouCook2 or CrossTask. Finally, we show that this embedding transfers well to other domains: fine-tuning on generic Youtube videos (MSR-VTT dataset) and movies (LSMDC dataset) outperforms models trained on these datasets alone. Our dataset, code and models will be publicly available at: www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/howto100m/.

Audio Description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. In total the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) contains a parallel corpus of 118,114 sentences and video clips from 202 movies. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are indeed more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in a challenge organized in the context of the workshop "Describing and Understanding Video & The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)", at ICCV 2015.

In modern speech synthesis, paralinguistic information--such as a speaker's vocal timbre, emotional state, and dynamic prosody--plays a critical role in conveying nuance beyond mere semantics. Traditional Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems rely on fixed style labels or inserting a speech prompt to control these cues, which severely limits flexibility. Recent attempts seek to employ natural-language instructions to modulate paralinguistic features, substantially improving the generalization of instruction-driven TTS models. Although many TTS systems now support customized synthesis via textual description, their actual ability to interpret and execute complex instructions remains largely unexplored. In addition, there is still a shortage of high-quality benchmarks and automated evaluation metrics specifically designed for instruction-based TTS, which hinders accurate assessment and iterative optimization of these models. To address these limitations, we introduce InstructTTSEval, a benchmark for measuring the capability of complex natural-language style control. We introduce three tasks, namely Acoustic-Parameter Specification, Descriptive-Style Directive, and Role-Play, including English and Chinese subsets, each with 1k test cases (6k in total) paired with reference audio. We leverage Gemini as an automatic judge to assess their instruction-following abilities. Our evaluation of accessible instruction-following TTS systems highlights substantial room for further improvement. We anticipate that InstructTTSEval will drive progress toward more powerful, flexible, and accurate instruction-following TTS.

There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which provide us tutorials for completing various tasks. Existing instructional video datasets only focus on specific steps at the video level, lacking experiential guidelines at the task level, which can lead to beginners struggling to learn new tasks due to the lack of relevant experience. Moreover, the specific steps without guidelines are trivial and unsystematic, making it difficult to provide a clear tutorial. To address these problems, we present the GUIDE (Guideline-Guided) dataset, which contains 3.5K videos of 560 instructional tasks in 8 domains related to our daily life. Specifically, we annotate each instructional task with a guideline, representing a common pattern shared by all task-related videos. On this basis, we annotate systematic specific steps, including their associated guideline steps, specific step descriptions and timestamps. Our proposed benchmark consists of three sub-tasks to evaluate comprehension ability of models: (1) Step Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps from videos. (2) Guideline Summarization: models have to mine the common pattern in task-related videos and summarize a guideline from them. (3) Guideline-Guided Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps under the guide of guideline. We evaluate plenty of foundation models with GUIDE and perform in-depth analysis. Given the diversity and practicality of GUIDE, we believe that it can be used as a better benchmark for instructional video comprehension.

Audio language models can understand audio inputs and perform a range of audio-related tasks based on instructions, such as speech recognition and audio captioning, where the instructions are usually textual prompts. Audio language models are mostly initialized from pre-trained audio encoders and large language models (LLMs). Although these pre-trained components were developed to support multiple languages, audio-language models are trained predominantly on English data, which may limit their usability to only English instructions or English speech inputs. First, this paper examines the performance of existing audio language models in an underserved language using Thai as an example. This paper demonstrates that, despite being built on multilingual backbones, audio language models do not exhibit cross-lingual emergent abilities to low-resource languages. Second, this paper studies data mixture for developing audio language models that are optimized for a target language as well as English. In addition. this paper integrates audio comprehension and speech instruction-following capabilities into a single unified model. Our experiments provide insights into data mixture for enhancing instruction-following capabilities in both a low-resource language and English. Our model, Typhoon-Audio, outperforms existing open-source audio language models by a considerable margin, and it is comparable to state-of-the-art Gemini-1.5-Pro in both English and Thai languages.

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer the model, and most effective prompts have been handcrafted by humans. Inspired by classical program synthesis and the human approach to prompt engineering, we propose Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) for automatic instruction generation and selection. In our method, we treat the instruction as the "program," optimized by searching over a pool of instruction candidates proposed by an LLM in order to maximize a chosen score function. To evaluate the quality of the selected instruction, we evaluate the zero-shot performance of another LLM following the selected instruction. Experiments on 24 NLP tasks show that our automatically generated instructions outperform the prior LLM baseline by a large margin and achieve better or comparable performance to the instructions generated by human annotators on 19/24 tasks. We conduct extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses to explore the performance of APE. We show that APE-engineered prompts can be applied to steer models toward truthfulness and/or informativeness, as well as to improve few-shot learning performance by simply prepending them to standard in-context learning prompts. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer.

Large language models have unlocked strong multi-task capabilities from reading instructive prompts. However, recent studies have shown that existing large models still have difficulty with information extraction tasks. For example, gpt-3.5-turbo achieved an F1 score of 18.22 on the Ontonotes dataset, which is significantly lower than the state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we propose InstructUIE, a unified information extraction framework based on instruction tuning, which can uniformly model various information extraction tasks and capture the inter-task dependency. To validate the proposed method, we introduce IE INSTRUCTIONS, a benchmark of 32 diverse information extraction datasets in a unified text-to-text format with expert-written instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to Bert in supervised settings and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and gpt3.5 in zero-shot settings.

Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-to-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of task-specific examples. Two issues arise: first, collecting task-specific labeled examples does not apply to scenarios where tasks may be too complicated or costly to annotate, or the system is required to handle a new task immediately; second, this is not user-friendly since end-users are probably more willing to provide task description rather than a set of examples before using the system. Therefore, the community is paying increasing interest in a new supervision-seeking paradigm for NLP: learning from task instructions. Despite its impressive progress, there are some common issues that the community struggles with. This survey paper tries to summarize and provide insights into the current research on instruction learning, particularly by answering the following questions: (i) What is task instruction, and what instruction types exist? (ii) How to model instructions? (iii) What factors influence and explain the instructions' performance? (iv) What challenges remain in instruction learning? To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey about textual instructions.

Audio Descriptions (ADs) aim to provide a narration of a movie in text form, describing non-dialogue-related narratives, such as characters, actions, or scene establishment. Automatic generation of ADs remains challenging due to: i) the domain gap between movie-AD data and existing data used to train vision-language models, and ii) the issue of contextual redundancy arising from highly similar neighboring visual clips in a long movie. In this work, we propose DistinctAD, a novel two-stage framework for generating ADs that emphasize distinctiveness to produce better narratives. To address the domain gap, we introduce a CLIP-AD adaptation strategy that does not require additional AD corpora, enabling more effective alignment between movie and AD modalities at both global and fine-grained levels. In Stage-II, DistinctAD incorporates two key innovations: (i) a Contextual Expectation-Maximization Attention (EMA) module that reduces redundancy by extracting common bases from consecutive video clips, and (ii) an explicit distinctive word prediction loss that filters out repeated words in the context, ensuring the prediction of unique terms specific to the current AD. Comprehensive evaluations on MAD-Eval, CMD-AD, and TV-AD benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DistinctAD, with the model consistently outperforming baselines, particularly in Recall@k/N, highlighting its effectiveness in producing high-quality, distinctive ADs.

Automatic movie narration aims to generate video-aligned plot descriptions to assist visually impaired audiences. Unlike standard video captioning, it involves not only describing key visual details but also inferring plots that unfold across multiple movie shots, presenting distinct and complex challenges. To advance this field, we introduce Movie101v2, a large-scale, bilingual dataset with enhanced data quality specifically designed for movie narration. Revisiting the task, we propose breaking down the ultimate goal of automatic movie narration into three progressive stages, offering a clear roadmap with corresponding evaluation metrics. Based on our new benchmark, we baseline a range of large vision-language models, including GPT-4V, and conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenges in narration generation. Our findings highlight that achieving applicable movie narration generation is a fascinating goal that requires significant research.

Conventional dialogue summarization methods directly generate summaries and do not consider user's specific interests. This poses challenges in cases where the users are more focused on particular topics or aspects. With the advancement of instruction-finetuned language models, we introduce instruction-tuning to dialogues to expand the capability set of dialogue summarization models. To overcome the scarcity of instructive dialogue summarization data, we propose a three-step approach to synthesize high-quality query-based summarization triples. This process involves summary-anchored query generation, query filtering, and query-based summary generation. By training a unified model called InstructDS (Instructive Dialogue Summarization) on three summarization datasets with multi-purpose instructive triples, we expand the capability of dialogue summarization models. We evaluate our method on four datasets, including dialogue summarization and dialogue reading comprehension. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models and even models with larger sizes. Additionally, our model exhibits higher generalizability and faithfulness, as confirmed by human subjective evaluations.

Over the last decade, online lecture videos have become increasingly popular and have experienced a meteoric rise during the pandemic. However, video-language research has primarily focused on instructional videos or movies, and tools to help students navigate the growing online lectures are lacking. Our first contribution is to facilitate research in the educational domain, by introducing AVLectures, a large-scale dataset consisting of 86 courses with over 2,350 lectures covering various STEM subjects. Each course contains video lectures, transcripts, OCR outputs for lecture frames, and optionally lecture notes, slides, assignments, and related educational content that can inspire a variety of tasks. Our second contribution is introducing video lecture segmentation that splits lectures into bite-sized topics that show promise in improving learner engagement. We formulate lecture segmentation as an unsupervised task that leverages visual, textual, and OCR cues from the lecture, while clip representations are fine-tuned on a pretext self-supervised task of matching the narration with the temporally aligned visual content. We use these representations to generate segments using a temporally consistent 1-nearest neighbor algorithm, TW-FINCH. We evaluate our method on 15 courses and compare it against various visual and textual baselines, outperforming all of them. Our comprehensive ablation studies also identify the key factors driving the success of our approach.

We introduce QuerYD, a new large-scale dataset for retrieval and event localisation in video. A unique feature of our dataset is the availability of two audio tracks for each video: the original audio, and a high-quality spoken description of the visual content. The dataset is based on YouDescribe, a volunteer project that assists visually-impaired people by attaching voiced narrations to existing YouTube videos. This ever-growing collection of videos contains highly detailed, temporally aligned audio and text annotations. The content descriptions are more relevant than dialogue, and more detailed than previous description attempts, which can be observed to contain many superficial or uninformative descriptions. To demonstrate the utility of the QuerYD dataset, we show that it can be used to train and benchmark strong models for retrieval and event localisation. Data, code and models are made publicly available, and we hope that QuerYD inspires further research on video understanding with written and spoken natural language.

We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire vast knowledge during pre-training, they often lack domain-specific, new, or niche information. Continual pre-training (CPT) attempts to address this gap but suffers from catastrophic forgetting and inefficiencies in low-data regimes. We introduce Knowledge-Instruct, a novel approach to efficiently inject knowledge from limited corpora through pure instruction-tuning. By generating information-dense synthetic instruction data, it effectively integrates new knowledge while preserving general reasoning and instruction-following abilities. Knowledge-Instruct demonstrates superior factual memorization, minimizes catastrophic forgetting, and remains scalable by leveraging synthetic data from relatively small language models. Additionally, it enhances contextual understanding, including complex multi-hop reasoning, facilitating integration with retrieval systems. We validate its effectiveness across diverse benchmarks, including Companies, a new dataset that we release to measure knowledge injection capabilities.

What kinds of instructional prompts are easier to follow for Language Models (LMs)? We study this question by conducting extensive empirical analysis that shed light on important features of successful instructional prompts. Specifically, we study several classes of reframing techniques for manual reformulation of prompts into more effective ones. Some examples include decomposing a complex task instruction into multiple simpler tasks or itemizing instructions into sequential steps. Our experiments compare the zero-shot and few-shot performance of LMs prompted with reframed instructions on 12 NLP tasks across 6 categories. Compared with original instructions, our reframed instructions lead to significant improvements across LMs with different sizes. For example, the same reframed prompts boost few-shot performance of GPT3-series and GPT2-series by 12.5% and 6.7% respectively averaged over all tasks. Furthermore, reframed instructions reduce the number of examples required to prompt LMs in the few-shot setting. We hope these empirically-driven techniques will pave the way towards more effective future prompting algorithms.

In recent years, instruction tuning has gained increasing attention and emerged as a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To construct high-quality instruction datasets, many instruction processing approaches have been proposed, aiming to achieve a delicate balance between data quantity and data quality. Nevertheless, due to inconsistencies that persist among various instruction processing methods, there is no standard open-source instruction processing implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from further developing and advancing. To facilitate instruction processing research and development, we present EasyInstruct, an easy-to-use instruction processing framework for LLMs, which modularizes instruction generation, selection, and prompting, while also considering their combination and interaction. EasyInstruct is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyInstruct, along with a running demo App at https://huggingface.co/spaces/zjunlp/EasyInstruct for quick-start, calling for broader research centered on instruction data.

Text-to-audio generation (TTA) produces audio from a text description, learning from pairs of audio samples and hand-annotated text. However, commercializing audio generation is challenging as user-input prompts are often under-specified when compared to text descriptions used to train TTA models. In this work, we treat TTA models as a ``blackbox'' and address the user prompt challenge with two key insights: (1) User prompts are generally under-specified, leading to a large alignment gap between user prompts and training prompts. (2) There is a distribution of audio descriptions for which TTA models are better at generating higher quality audio, which we refer to as ``audionese''. To this end, we rewrite prompts with instruction-tuned models and propose utilizing text-audio alignment as feedback signals via margin ranking learning for audio improvements. On both objective and subjective human evaluations, we observed marked improvements in both text-audio alignment and music audio quality.

Learning specific hands-on skills such as cooking, car maintenance, and home repairs increasingly happens via instructional videos. The user experience with such videos is known to be improved by meta-information such as time-stamped annotations for the main steps involved. Generating such annotations automatically is challenging, and we describe here two relevant contributions. First, we construct and release a new dense video captioning dataset, Video Timeline Tags (ViTT), featuring a variety of instructional videos together with time-stamped annotations. Second, we explore several multimodal sequence-to-sequence pretraining strategies that leverage large unsupervised datasets of videos and caption-like texts. We pretrain and subsequently finetune dense video captioning models using both YouCook2 and ViTT. We show that such models generalize well and are robust over a wide variety of instructional videos.

This paper presents VoiceLDM, a model designed to produce audio that accurately follows two distinct natural language text prompts: the description prompt and the content prompt. The former provides information about the overall environmental context of the audio, while the latter conveys the linguistic content. To achieve this, we adopt a text-to-audio (TTA) model based on latent diffusion models and extend its functionality to incorporate an additional content prompt as a conditional input. By utilizing pretrained contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) and Whisper, VoiceLDM is trained on large amounts of real-world audio without manual annotations or transcriptions. Additionally, we employ dual classifier-free guidance to further enhance the controllability of VoiceLDM. Experimental results demonstrate that VoiceLDM is capable of generating plausible audio that aligns well with both input conditions, even surpassing the speech intelligibility of the ground truth audio on the AudioCaps test set. Furthermore, we explore the text-to-speech (TTS) and zero-shot text-to-audio capabilities of VoiceLDM and show that it achieves competitive results. Demos and code are available at https://voiceldm.github.io.

Audio Description (AD) is the task of generating descriptions of visual content, at suitable time intervals, for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. For movies, this presents notable challenges -- AD must occur only during existing pauses in dialogue, should refer to characters by name, and ought to aid understanding of the storyline as a whole. To this end, we develop a new model for automatically generating movie AD, given CLIP visual features of the frames, the cast list, and the temporal locations of the speech; addressing all three of the 'who', 'when', and 'what' questions: (i) who -- we introduce a character bank consisting of the character's name, the actor that played the part, and a CLIP feature of their face, for the principal cast of each movie, and demonstrate how this can be used to improve naming in the generated AD; (ii) when -- we investigate several models for determining whether an AD should be generated for a time interval or not, based on the visual content of the interval and its neighbours; and (iii) what -- we implement a new vision-language model for this task, that can ingest the proposals from the character bank, whilst conditioning on the visual features using cross-attention, and demonstrate how this improves over previous architectures for AD text generation in an apples-to-apples comparison.

Enabling engagement of manga by visually impaired individuals presents a significant challenge due to its inherently visual nature. With the goal of fostering accessibility, this paper aims to generate a dialogue transcript of a complete manga chapter, entirely automatically, with a particular emphasis on ensuring narrative consistency. This entails identifying (i) what is being said, i.e., detecting the texts on each page and classifying them into essential vs non-essential, and (ii) who is saying it, i.e., attributing each dialogue to its speaker, while ensuring the same characters are named consistently throughout the chapter. To this end, we introduce: (i) Magiv2, a model that is capable of generating high-quality chapter-wide manga transcripts with named characters and significantly higher precision in speaker diarisation over prior works; (ii) an extension of the PopManga evaluation dataset, which now includes annotations for speech-bubble tail boxes, associations of text to corresponding tails, classifications of text as essential or non-essential, and the identity for each character box; and (iii) a new character bank dataset, which comprises over 11K characters from 76 manga series, featuring 11.5K exemplar character images in total, as well as a list of chapters in which they appear. The code, trained model, and both datasets can be found at: https://github.com/ragavsachdeva/magi

Existing research on instruction following largely focuses on tasks with simple instructions and short responses. In this work, we explore multi-constraint instruction following for generating long-form text. We create Suri, a dataset with 20K human-written long-form texts paired with LLM-generated backtranslated instructions that contain multiple complex constraints. Because of prohibitive challenges associated with collecting human preference judgments on long-form texts, preference-tuning algorithms such as DPO are infeasible in our setting; thus, we propose Instructional ORPO (I-ORPO), an alignment method based on the ORPO algorithm. Instead of receiving negative feedback from dispreferred responses, I-ORPO obtains negative feedback from synthetically corrupted instructions generated by an LLM. Using Suri, we perform supervised and I-ORPO fine-tuning on Mistral-7b-Instruct-v0.2. The resulting models, Suri-SFT and Suri-I-ORPO, generate significantly longer texts (~5K tokens) than base models without significant quality deterioration. Our human evaluation shows that while both SFT and I-ORPO models satisfy most constraints, Suri-I-ORPO generations are generally preferred for their coherent and informative incorporation of the constraints. We release our code at https://github.com/chtmp223/suri.

The development of Audio Description (AD) has been a pivotal step forward in making video content more accessible and inclusive. Traditionally, AD production has demanded a considerable amount of skilled labor, while existing automated approaches still necessitate extensive training to integrate multimodal inputs and tailor the output from a captioning style to an AD style. In this paper, we introduce an automated AD generation pipeline that harnesses the potent multimodal and instruction-following capacities of GPT-4V(ision). Notably, our methodology employs readily available components, eliminating the need for additional training. It produces ADs that not only comply with established natural language AD production standards but also maintain contextually consistent character information across frames, courtesy of a tracking-based character recognition module. A thorough analysis on the MAD dataset reveals that our approach achieves a performance on par with learning-based methods in automated AD production, as substantiated by a CIDEr score of 20.5.

Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.

Instruction generation is a vital and multidisciplinary research area with broad applications. Existing instruction generation models are limited to generating instructions in a single style from a particular dataset, and the style and content of generated instructions cannot be controlled. Moreover, most existing instruction generation methods also disregard the spatial modeling of the navigation environment. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose C-Instructor, which utilizes the chain-of-thought-style prompt for style-controllable and content-controllable instruction generation. Firstly, we propose a Chain of Thought with Landmarks (CoTL) mechanism, which guides the LLM to identify key landmarks and then generate complete instructions. CoTL renders generated instructions more accessible to follow and offers greater controllability over the manipulation of landmark objects. Furthermore, we present a Spatial Topology Modeling Task to facilitate the understanding of the spatial structure of the environment. Finally, we introduce a Style-Mixed Training policy, harnessing the prior knowledge of LLMs to enable style control for instruction generation based on different prompts within a single model instance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that instructions generated by C-Instructor outperform those generated by previous methods in text metrics, navigation guidance evaluation, and user studies.

Instruction tuning is an emergent paradigm in NLP wherein natural language instructions are leveraged with language models to induce zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. Instructions have been shown to enable good performance on unseen tasks and datasets in both large and small language models. Dialogue is an especially interesting area to explore instruction tuning because dialogue systems perform multiple kinds of tasks related to language (e.g., natural language understanding and generation, domain-specific interaction), yet instruction tuning has not been systematically explored for dialogue-related tasks. We introduce InstructDial, an instruction tuning framework for dialogue, which consists of a repository of 48 diverse dialogue tasks in a unified text-to-text format created from 59 openly available dialogue datasets. Next, we explore cross-task generalization ability on models tuned on InstructDial across diverse dialogue tasks. Our analysis reveals that InstructDial enables good zero-shot performance on unseen datasets and tasks such as dialogue evaluation and intent detection, and even better performance in a few-shot setting. To ensure that models adhere to instructions, we introduce novel meta-tasks. We establish benchmark zero-shot and few-shot performance of models trained using the proposed framework on multiple dialogue tasks.

Instruction-tuned large language models have shown remarkable performance in aligning generated text with user intentions across various tasks. However, maintaining human-like discourse structure in the generated text remains a challenging research question. In this paper, we propose Instruct-SCTG, a flexible and effective sequential framework that harnesses instruction-tuned language models to generate structurally coherent text in both fine-tuned and zero-shot setups. Our framework generates articles in a section-by-section manner, aligned with the desired human structure using natural language instructions. Furthermore, we introduce a new automatic metric that measures discourse divergence in a fuzzy manner. Extensive experiments on three datasets from representative domains of news and recipes demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework in imposing discourse structure during text generation, as verified by both automatic and human evaluation. Our code will be available on Github.

This paper assesses the potential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as assistive tools in the creative writing process, by means of a single, in-depth case study. In the course of the study, we develop interactive and multi-voice prompting strategies that interleave background descriptions (scene setting, plot elements), instructions that guide composition, samples of text in the target style, and critical discussion of the given samples. We qualitatively evaluate the results from a literary critical perspective, as well as from the standpoint of computational creativity (a sub-field of artificial intelligence). Our findings lend support to the view that the sophistication of the results that can be achieved with an LLM mirrors the sophistication of the prompting.

Visual storytelling is an emerging field that combines images and narratives to create engaging and contextually rich stories. Despite its potential, generating coherent and emotionally resonant visual stories remains challenging due to the complexity of aligning visual and textual information. This paper presents a novel approach leveraging large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs) combined with instruction tuning to address these challenges. We introduce a new dataset comprising diverse visual stories, annotated with detailed captions and multimodal elements. Our method employs a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning to fine-tune the model, enhancing its narrative generation capabilities. Quantitative evaluations using GPT-4 and qualitative human assessments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing models, achieving higher scores in narrative coherence, relevance, emotional depth, and overall quality. The results underscore the effectiveness of instruction tuning and the potential of LLMs/LVLMs in advancing visual storytelling.

Multimedia content, such as advertisements and story videos, exhibit a rich blend of creativity and multiple modalities. They incorporate elements like text, visuals, audio, and storytelling techniques, employing devices like emotions, symbolism, and slogans to convey meaning. While previous research in multimedia understanding has focused mainly on videos with specific actions like cooking, there is a dearth of large annotated training datasets, hindering the development of supervised learning models with satisfactory performance for real-world applications. However, the rise of large language models (LLMs) has witnessed remarkable zero-shot performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as emotion classification, question-answering, and topic classification. To bridge this performance gap in multimedia understanding, we propose verbalizing story videos to generate their descriptions in natural language and then performing video-understanding tasks on the generated story as opposed to the original video. Through extensive experiments on five video-understanding tasks, we demonstrate that our method, despite being zero-shot, achieves significantly better results than supervised baselines for video understanding. Further, alleviating a lack of story understanding benchmarks, we publicly release the first dataset on a crucial task in computational social science, persuasion strategy identification.

We introduce the new task of generating Illustrated Instructions, i.e., visual instructions customized to a user's needs. We identify desiderata unique to this task, and formalize it through a suite of automatic and human evaluation metrics, designed to measure the validity, consistency, and efficacy of the generations. We combine the power of large language models (LLMs) together with strong text-to-image generation diffusion models to propose a simple approach called StackedDiffusion, which generates such illustrated instructions given text as input. The resulting model strongly outperforms baseline approaches and state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs; and in 30% of cases, users even prefer it to human-generated articles. Most notably, it enables various new and exciting applications far beyond what static articles on the web can provide, such as personalized instructions complete with intermediate steps and pictures in response to a user's individual situation.

The rapid growth of voice assistants powered by large language models (LLM) has highlighted a need for speech instruction data to train these systems. Despite the abundance of speech recognition data, there is a notable scarcity of speech instruction data, which is essential for fine-tuning models to understand and execute spoken commands. Generating high-quality synthetic speech requires a good text-to-speech (TTS) model, which may not be available to low resource languages. Our novel approach addresses this challenge by halting synthesis at the semantic representation level, bypassing the need for TTS. We achieve this by aligning synthetic semantic representations with the pre-trained Whisper encoder, enabling an LLM to be fine-tuned on text instructions while maintaining the ability to understand spoken instructions during inference. This simplified training process is a promising approach to building voice assistant for low-resource languages.

This work aims to build a text embedder that can capture characteristics of texts specified by user instructions. Despite its tremendous potential to deploy user-oriented embeddings, none of previous approaches provides a concrete solution for it. This paper offers a new viewpoint, which treats the instruction as a question about the input text and encodes the expected answers to obtain the representation accordingly. Intuitively, texts with the same (implicit) semantics would share similar answers following the instruction, thus leading to more similar embeddings. Specifically, we propose InBedder that instantiates this embed-via-answering idea by only fine-tuning language models on abstractive question answering tasks. InBedder demonstrates significantly improved instruction-following capabilities according to our proposed instruction awareness tests and instruction robustness tests, when applied to both large language models (LLMs) (e.g., llama-2-7b) and smaller encoder-based LMs (e.g., roberta-large). Additionally, our qualitative analysis of clustering outcomes, achieved by applying different instructions to the same corpus, demonstrates a high degree of interpretability.

Effective text generation and chat interfaces for low-resource languages (LRLs) remain a challenge for state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) to support. This is mainly due to the difficulty of curating high-quality instruction datasets for LRLs, a limitation prevalent in the languages spoken across the African continent and other regions. Current approaches, such as automated translation and synthetic data generation, frequently yield outputs that lack fluency or even orthographic consistency. In this paper, we introduce InstructLR, a novel framework designed to generate high-quality instruction datasets for LRLs. Our approach integrates LLM-driven text generation with a dual-layer quality filtering mechanism: an automated filtering layer based on retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG)-based n-shot prompting, and a human-in-the-loop validation layer. Drawing inspiration from benchmarks such as MMLU in task definition, InstructLR has facilitated the creation of three multi-domain instruction benchmarks: ZarmaInstruct-50k, BambaraInstruct-50k, and FulfuldeInstruct-50k.

Lecture slide presentations, a sequence of pages that contain text and figures accompanied by speech, are constructed and presented carefully in order to optimally transfer knowledge to students. Previous studies in multimedia and psychology attribute the effectiveness of lecture presentations to their multimodal nature. As a step toward developing AI to aid in student learning as intelligent teacher assistants, we introduce the Multimodal Lecture Presentations dataset as a large-scale benchmark testing the capabilities of machine learning models in multimodal understanding of educational content. Our dataset contains aligned slides and spoken language, for 180+ hours of video and 9000+ slides, with 10 lecturers from various subjects (e.g., computer science, dentistry, biology). We introduce two research tasks which are designed as stepping stones towards AI agents that can explain (automatically captioning a lecture presentation) and illustrate (synthesizing visual figures to accompany spoken explanations) educational content. We provide manual annotations to help implement these two research tasks and evaluate state-of-the-art models on them. Comparing baselines and human student performances, we find that current models struggle in (1) weak crossmodal alignment between slides and spoken text, (2) learning novel visual mediums, (3) technical language, and (4) long-range sequences. Towards addressing this issue, we also introduce PolyViLT, a multimodal transformer trained with a multi-instance learning loss that is more effective than current approaches. We conclude by shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in multimodal understanding of educational presentations.

Evaluating instruction following capabilities for multimodal, multi-turn dialogue is challenging. With potentially multiple instructions in the input model context, the task is time-consuming for human raters and we show LLM based judges are biased towards answers from the same model. We propose MMMT-IF, an image based multi-turn Q&A evaluation set with added global instructions between questions, constraining the answer format. This challenges models to retrieve instructions dispersed across long dialogues and reason under instruction constraints. All instructions are objectively verifiable through code execution. We introduce the Programmatic Instruction Following (PIF) metric to measure the fraction of the instructions that are correctly followed while performing a reasoning task. The PIF-N-K set of metrics further evaluates robustness by measuring the fraction of samples in a corpus where, for each sample, at least K out of N generated model responses achieve a PIF score of one. The PIF metric aligns with human instruction following ratings, showing 60 percent correlation. Experiments show Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, have a PIF metric that drops from 0.81 on average at turn 1 across the models, to 0.64 at turn 20. Across all turns, when each response is repeated 4 times (PIF-4-4), GPT-4o and Gemini successfully follow all instructions only 11% of the time. When all the instructions are also appended to the end of the model input context, the PIF metric improves by 22.3 points on average, showing that the challenge with the task lies not only in following the instructions, but also in retrieving the instructions spread out in the model context. We plan to open source the MMMT-IF dataset and metric computation code.

Videos serve as a powerful medium to convey ideas, tell stories, and provide detailed instructions, especially through long-format tutorials. Such tutorials are valuable for learning new skills at one's own pace, yet they can be overwhelming due to their length and dense content. Viewers often seek specific information, like precise measurements or step-by-step execution details, making it essential to extract and summarize key segments efficiently. An intelligent, time-sensitive video assistant capable of summarizing and detecting highlights in long videos is highly sought after. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models offer promising solutions to develop such an assistant. Our research explores the use of multimodal models to enhance video summarization and step-by-step instruction generation within specific domains. These models need to understand temporal events and relationships among actions across video frames. Our approach focuses on fine-tuning TimeChat to improve its performance in specific domains: cooking and medical procedures. By training the model on domain-specific datasets like Tasty for cooking and MedVidQA for medical procedures, we aim to enhance its ability to generate concise, accurate summaries of instructional videos. We curate and restructure these datasets to create high-quality video-centric instruction data. Our findings indicate that when finetuned on domain-specific procedural data, TimeChat can significantly improve the extraction and summarization of key instructional steps in long-format videos. This research demonstrates the potential of specialized multimodal models to assist with practical tasks by providing personalized, step-by-step guidance tailored to the unique aspects of each domain.

In this paper, we consider the problem of temporally aligning the video and texts from instructional videos, specifically, given a long-term video, and associated text sentences, our goal is to determine their corresponding timestamps in the video. To this end, we establish a simple, yet strong model that adopts a Transformer-based architecture with all texts as queries, iteratively attending to the visual features, to infer the optimal timestamp. We conduct thorough experiments to investigate: (i) the effect of upgrading ASR systems to reduce errors from speech recognition, (ii) the effect of various visual-textual backbones, ranging from CLIP to S3D, to the more recent InternVideo, (iii) the effect of transforming noisy ASR transcripts into descriptive steps by prompting a large language model (LLM), to summarize the core activities within the ASR transcript as a new training dataset. As a result, our proposed simple model demonstrates superior performance on both narration alignment and procedural step grounding tasks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on three public benchmarks, namely, 9.3% on HT-Step, 3.4% on HTM-Align and 4.7% on CrossTask. We believe the proposed model and dataset with descriptive steps can be treated as a strong baseline for future research in temporal video-text alignment. All codes, models, and the resulting dataset will be publicly released to the research community.

High-quality instruction-tuning data is critical to improving LLM capabilities. Existing data collection methods are limited by unrealistic manual labeling costs or by the hallucination of relying solely on LLM generation. To address the problems, this paper presents a scalable method to automatically collect high-quality instructional adaptation data by training language models to automatically design tasks based on human-written texts. Intuitively, human-written text helps to help the model attenuate illusions during the generation of tasks. Unlike instruction back-translation-based methods that directly take the given text as a response, we require the model to generate the instruction, input, and output simultaneously to filter the noise. The results of the automated and manual evaluation experiments demonstrate the quality of our dataset.

Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving domains, there is often need to fine-tune LLMs to improve either the kind of knowledge in their memory or their abilities to perform open ended reasoning in new domains. When human's learn new concepts, we often do so by linking the new material that we are studying to concepts we have already learned before. To that end, we ask, "can prompting help us teach LLMs how to learn". In this work, we study a novel generalization of instruction tuning, called contextual fine-tuning, to fine-tune LLMs. Our method leverages instructional prompts designed to mimic human cognitive strategies in learning and problem-solving to guide the learning process during training, aiming to improve the model's interpretation and understanding of domain-specific knowledge. We empirically demonstrate that this simple yet effective modification improves the ability of LLMs to be fine-tuned rapidly on new datasets both within the medical and financial domains.

Generating long-term texts such as novels using artificial intelligence has always been a challenge. A common approach is to use large language models (LLMs) to construct a hierarchical framework that first plans and then writes. Despite the fact that the generated novels reach a sufficient length, they exhibit poor logical coherence and appeal in their plots and deficiencies in character and event depiction, ultimately compromising the overall narrative quality. In this paper, we propose a method named Extracting Excelsior and Expanding. Ex3 initially extracts structure information from raw novel data. By combining this structure information with the novel data, an instruction-following dataset is meticulously crafted. This dataset is then utilized to fine-tune the LLM, aiming for excelsior generation performance. In the final stage, a tree-like expansion method is deployed to facilitate the generation of arbitrarily long novels. Evaluation against previous methods showcases Ex3's ability to produce higher-quality long-form novels.

Generative models have made significant progress in synthesizing high-fidelity audio from short textual descriptions. However, editing existing audio using natural language has remained largely underexplored. Current approaches either require the complete description of the edited audio or are constrained to predefined edit instructions that lack flexibility. In this work, we introduce SAO-Instruct, a model based on Stable Audio Open capable of editing audio clips using any free-form natural language instruction. To train our model, we create a dataset of audio editing triplets (input audio, edit instruction, output audio) using Prompt-to-Prompt, DDPM inversion, and a manual editing pipeline. Although partially trained on synthetic data, our model generalizes well to real in-the-wild audio clips and unseen edit instructions. We demonstrate that SAO-Instruct achieves competitive performance on objective metrics and outperforms other audio editing approaches in a subjective listening study. To encourage future research, we release our code and model weights.

Despite the critical need to align search targets with users' intention, retrievers often only prioritize query information without delving into the users' intended search context. Enhancing the capability of retrievers to understand intentions and preferences of users, akin to language model instructions, has the potential to yield more aligned search targets. Prior studies restrict the application of instructions in information retrieval to a task description format, neglecting the broader context of diverse and evolving search scenarios. Furthermore, the prevailing benchmarks utilized for evaluation lack explicit tailoring to assess instruction-following ability, thereby hindering progress in this field. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark,INSTRUCTIR, specifically designed to evaluate instruction-following ability in information retrieval tasks. Our approach focuses on user-aligned instructions tailored to each query instance, reflecting the diverse characteristics inherent in real-world search scenarios. Through experimental analysis, we observe that retrievers fine-tuned to follow task-style instructions, such as INSTRUCTOR, can underperform compared to their non-instruction-tuned counterparts. This underscores potential overfitting issues inherent in constructing retrievers trained on existing instruction-aware retrieval datasets.

Instruction tuning as an effective technique aligns the outputs of large language models (LLMs) with human preference. But how to generate the seasonal multi-turn dialogues from raw documents for instruction tuning still requires further exploration. In this paper, we present a novel framework named R2S that leverages the CoD-Chain of Dialogue logic to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating knowledge-intensive multi-turn dialogues for instruction tuning. By integrating raw documents from both open-source datasets and domain-specific web-crawled documents into a benchmark K-BENCH, we cover diverse areas such as Wikipedia (English), Science (Chinese), and Artifacts (Chinese). Our approach first decides the logic flow of the current dialogue and then prompts LLMs to produce key phrases for sourcing relevant response content. This methodology enables the creation of the G I NSTRUCT instruction dataset, retaining raw document knowledge within dialoguestyle interactions. Utilizing this dataset, we fine-tune GLLM, a model designed to transform raw documents into structured multi-turn dialogues, thereby injecting comprehensive domain knowledge into the SFT model for enhanced instruction tuning. This work signifies a stride towards refining the adaptability and effectiveness of LLMs in processing and generating more accurate, contextually nuanced responses across various fields.

High-quality, large-scale instructions are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs), however, there is a severe shortage of instruction in the field of natural language understanding (NLU). Previous works on constructing NLU instructions mainly focus on information extraction (IE), neglecting tasks such as machine reading comprehension, question answering, and text classification. Furthermore, the lack of diversity in the data has led to a decreased generalization ability of trained LLMs in other NLU tasks and a noticeable decline in the fundamental model's general capabilities. To address this issue, we propose Hum, a large-scale, high-quality synthetic instruction corpus for NLU tasks, designed to enhance the NLU capabilities of LLMs. Specifically, Hum includes IE (either close IE or open IE), machine reading comprehension, text classification, and instruction generalist tasks, thereby enriching task diversity. Additionally, we introduce a human-LLMs collaborative mechanism to synthesize instructions, which enriches instruction diversity by incorporating guidelines, preference rules, and format variants. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 NLU tasks and 28 general capability evaluation datasets for LLMs. Experimental results show that Hum enhances the NLU capabilities of six LLMs by an average of 3.1\%, with no significant decline observed in other general capabilities.

Distributional shift is a central challenge in the deployment of machine learning models as they can be ill-equipped for real-world data. This is particularly evident in text-to-audio generation where the encoded representations are easily undermined by unseen prompts, which leads to the degradation of generated audio -- the limited set of the text-audio pairs remains inadequate for conditional audio generation in the wild as user prompts are under-specified. In particular, we observe a consistent audio quality degradation in generated audio samples with user prompts, as opposed to training set prompts. To this end, we present a retrieval-based in-context prompt editing framework that leverages the training captions as demonstrative exemplars to revisit the user prompts. We show that the framework enhanced the audio quality across the set of collected user prompts, which were edited with reference to the training captions as exemplars.

Recent work in training large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions has opened up exciting opportunities for natural language interface design. Building on the prior success of LLMs in the realm of computer-assisted creativity, we aim to study if LLMs can improve the quality of user-generated content through collaboration. We present CoPoet, a collaborative poetry writing system. In contrast to auto-completing a user's text, CoPoet is controlled by user instructions that specify the attributes of the desired text, such as Write a sentence about `love' or Write a sentence ending in `fly'. The core component of our system is a language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of instructions for poetry writing. Our model is not only competitive with publicly available LLMs trained on instructions (InstructGPT), but is also capable of satisfying unseen compositional instructions. A study with 15 qualified crowdworkers shows that users successfully write poems with CoPoet on diverse topics ranging from Monarchy to Climate change. Further, the collaboratively written poems are preferred by third-party evaluators over those written without the system.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods face two limitations: (1) they only cover limited RAG scenarios. (2) They suffer from limited task diversity due to the lack of a general RAG dataset. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks. RAG-Instruct is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/RAG-Instruct.

Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories' complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an ``asking-why'' prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative's complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.

The ability of machines to grasp spatial understanding within narrative contexts is an intriguing aspect of reading comprehension that continues to be studied. Motivated by the goal to test the AI's competence in understanding the relationship between characters and their respective locations in narratives, we introduce two new datasets: Andersen and Persuasion. For the Andersen dataset, we selected fifteen children's stories from "Andersen's Fairy Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen and manually annotated the characters and their respective locations throughout each story. Similarly, for the Persuasion dataset, characters and their locations in the novel "Persuasion" by Jane Austen were also manually annotated. We used these datasets to prompt Large Language Models (LLMs). The prompts are created by extracting excerpts from the stories or the novel and combining them with a question asking the location of a character mentioned in that excerpt. Out of the five LLMs we tested, the best-performing one for the Andersen dataset accurately identified the location in 61.85% of the examples, while for the Persuasion dataset, the best-performing one did so in 56.06% of the cases.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible proficiency in performing tasks that require semantic understanding of natural language instructions. Recently, many works have further expanded this capability to perceive multimodal audio and text inputs, but their capabilities are often limited to specific fine-tuned tasks such as automatic speech recognition and translation. We therefore develop SpeechVerse, a robust multi-task training and curriculum learning framework that combines pre-trained speech and text foundation models via a small set of learnable parameters, while keeping the pre-trained models frozen during training. The models are instruction finetuned using continuous latent representations extracted from the speech foundation model to achieve optimal zero-shot performance on a diverse range of speech processing tasks using natural language instructions. We perform extensive benchmarking that includes comparing our model performance against traditional baselines across several datasets and tasks. Furthermore, we evaluate the model's capability for generalized instruction following by testing on out-of-domain datasets, novel prompts, and unseen tasks. Our empirical experiments reveal that our multi-task SpeechVerse model is even superior to conventional task-specific baselines on 9 out of the 11 tasks.

Preparing high-quality instructional materials remains a labor-intensive process that often requires extensive coordination among teaching faculty, instructional designers, and teaching assistants. In this work, we present Instructional Agents, a multi-agent large language model framework designed to automate end-to-end course material generation, including syllabi creation, LaTeX-based slides, lecture scripts, and assessments. Unlike prior tools focused on isolated tasks, Instructional Agents simulates role-based collaboration to ensure pedagogical coherence. The system operates in four modes: Autonomous, Catalog-Guided, Feedback-Guided, and Full Co-Pilot mode, enabling flexible control over the degree of human involvement. We evaluate Instructional Agents across five university-level courses and show that it produces high-quality instructional materials that are reviewed and refined by teaching faculty prior to use, while significantly reducing the time required to prepare classroom-ready content. By supporting institutions with limited instructional design capacity, Instructional Agents provides a scalable and cost-effective framework to democratize access to high-quality education, particularly in underserved or resource-constrained settings. The project website, including source code, is available at https://darl-genai.github. io/instructional_agents_homepage/

Crossword puzzles are popular linguistic games often used as tools to engage students in learning. Educational crosswords are characterized by less cryptic and more factual clues that distinguish them from traditional crossword puzzles. Despite there exist several publicly available clue-answer pair databases for traditional crosswords, educational clue-answer pairs datasets are missing. In this article, we propose a methodology to build educational clue generation datasets that can be used to instruct Large Language Models (LLMs). By gathering from Wikipedia pages informative content associated with relevant keywords, we use Large Language Models to automatically generate pedagogical clues related to the given input keyword and its context. With such an approach, we created clue-instruct, a dataset containing 44,075 unique examples with text-keyword pairs associated with three distinct crossword clues. We used clue-instruct to instruct different LLMs to generate educational clues from a given input content and keyword. Both human and automatic evaluations confirmed the quality of the generated clues, thus validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Despite widespread deployment of Large Language Models, systematic evaluation of instruction-following capabilities remains challenging. While comprehensive benchmarks exist, focused assessments that quickly diagnose specific instruction adherence patterns are valuable. As newer models may be trained on existing benchmarks, novel evaluation approaches are needed to assess genuine capabilities rather than memorized performance. This paper presents a streamlined evaluation framework using twenty carefully designed prompts to assess LLM instruction-following across diverse task categories. We demonstrate this framework through a large-scale empirical study conducted on October 14, 2025, testing 256 verified working models from 331 available via OpenRouter. To ensure methodological rigor and prevent selection bias, we first verified each model's basic functionality before inclusion. Unlike large-scale benchmarks requiring extensive computational resources, our approach offers a practical diagnostic tool researchers and practitioners can readily apply. Our methodology builds upon verifiable instructions while introducing a compact test suite balancing comprehensiveness with efficiency. Each prompt targets distinct aspects of instruction following, including format compliance, content constraints, logical sequencing, and multi-step task execution. We evaluate models from major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral) and emerging implementations (Qwen, DeepSeek, community models), providing comparative performance analysis. Our findings reveal consistent failure modes and identify specific instruction types posing particular challenges. This work contributes both a practical evaluation tool and one of the most comprehensive empirical analyses of instruction-following capabilities across the contemporary LLM landscape.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly common in educational applications, there is a growing need for evidence-based methods to design and evaluate LLM prompts that produce personalized and pedagogically aligned out-puts. This study presents a generalizable, systematic approach for evaluating prompts, demonstrated through an analysis of LLM-generated follow-up questions in a structured dialogue activity. Six prompt templates were designed and tested. The templates incorporated established prompt engineering patterns, with each prompt emphasizing distinct pedagogical strategies. The prompt templates were compared through a tournament-style evaluation framework that can be adapted for other educational applications. The tournament employed the Glicko2 rating system with eight judges evaluating question pairs across three dimensions: format, dialogue support, and appropriateness for learners. Data was sourced from 120 authentic user interactions across three distinct educational deployments. Results showed that a single prompt related to strategic reading out-performed other templates with win probabilities ranging from 81% to 100% in pairwise comparisons. This prompt combined persona and context manager pat-terns and was designed to support metacognitive learning strategies such as self-directed learning. The methodology showcases how educational technology re- searchers can systematically evaluate and improve prompt designs, moving beyond ad-hoc prompt engineering toward evidence-based prompt development for educational applications.

We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic narration of a single combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl, a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several LLMs and humans to write such a story and conduct a human evalution involving various criteria such as fluency, coherence, originality, humor, and style. Our results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our writers in most dimensions; whereas open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in creativity, while humor shows a binary divide between LLMs that can handle it comparably to humans and those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.

Recently, prompt-based methods have achieved significant performance in few-shot learning scenarios by bridging the gap between language model pre-training and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. However, existing prompt templates are mostly designed for sentence-level tasks and are inappropriate for sequence labeling objectives. To address the above issue, we propose a multi-task instruction-based generative framework, named InstructionNER, for low-resource named entity recognition. Specifically, we reformulate the NER task as a generation problem, which enriches source sentences with task-specific instructions and answer options, then inferences the entities and types in natural language. We further propose two auxiliary tasks, including entity extraction and entity typing, which enable the model to capture more boundary information of entities and deepen the understanding of entity type semantics, respectively. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines on five datasets in few-shot settings.

Despite progress in video large language models (Video-LLMs), research on instructional video understanding, crucial for enhancing access to instructional content, remains insufficient. To address this, we introduce InstructionBench, an Instructional video understanding Benchmark, which challenges models' advanced temporal reasoning within instructional videos characterized by their strict step-by-step flow. Employing GPT-4, we formulate Q\&A pairs in open-ended and multiple-choice formats to assess both Coarse-Grained event-level and Fine-Grained object-level reasoning. Our filtering strategies exclude questions answerable purely by common-sense knowledge, focusing on visual perception and analysis when evaluating Video-LLM models. The benchmark finally contains 5k questions across over 700 videos. We evaluate the latest Video-LLMs on our InstructionBench, finding that closed-source models outperform open-source ones. However, even the best model, GPT-4o, achieves only 53.42\% accuracy, indicating significant gaps in temporal reasoning. To advance the field, we also develop a comprehensive instructional video dataset with over 19k Q\&A pairs from nearly 2.5k videos, using an automated data generation framework, thereby enriching the community's research resources.

The ability to provide fine-grained control for generating and editing visual imagery has profound implications for computer vision and its applications. Previous works have explored extending controllability in two directions: instruction tuning with text-based prompts and multi-modal conditioning. However, these works make one or more unnatural assumptions on the number and/or type of modality inputs used to express controllability. We propose InstructAny2Pix, a flexible multi-modal instruction-following system that enables users to edit an input image using instructions involving audio, images, and text. InstructAny2Pix consists of three building blocks that facilitate this capability: a multi-modal encoder that encodes different modalities such as images and audio into a unified latent space, a diffusion model that learns to decode representations in this latent space into images, and a multi-modal LLM that can understand instructions involving multiple images and audio pieces and generate a conditional embedding of the desired output, which can be used by the diffusion decoder. Additionally, to facilitate training efficiency and improve generation quality, we include an additional refinement prior module that enhances the visual quality of LLM outputs. These designs are critical to the performance of our system. We demonstrate that our system can perform a series of novel instruction-guided editing tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/jacklishufan/InstructAny2Pix.git

Presentation slides have become a common addition to the teaching material. Emphasizing strong leading words in presentation slides can allow the audience to direct the eye to certain focal points instead of reading the entire slide, retaining the attention to the speaker during the presentation. Despite a large volume of studies on automatic slide generation, few studies have addressed the automation of design assistance during the creation process. Motivated by this demand, we study the problem of Emphasis Selection (ES) in presentation slides, i.e., choosing candidates for emphasis, by introducing a new dataset containing presentation slides with a wide variety of topics, each is annotated with emphasis words in a crowdsourced setting. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art models on this novel dataset by organizing a shared task and inviting multiple researchers to model emphasis in this new domain. We present the main findings and compare the results of these models, and by examining the challenges of the dataset, we provide different analysis components.

The globalization of education and rapid growth of online learning have made localizing educational content a critical challenge. Lecture materials are inherently multimodal, combining spoken audio with visual slides, which requires systems capable of processing multiple input modalities. To provide an accessible and complete learning experience, translations must preserve all modalities: text for reading, slides for visual understanding, and speech for auditory learning. We present BOOM, a multimodal multilingual lecture companion that jointly translates lecture audio and slides to produce synchronized outputs across three modalities: translated text, localized slides with preserved visual elements, and synthesized speech. This end-to-end approach enables students to access lectures in their native language while aiming to preserve the original content in its entirety. Our experiments demonstrate that slide-aware transcripts also yield cascading benefits for downstream tasks such as summarization and question answering. We release our Slide Translation code at https://github.com/saikoneru/image-translator and integrate it in Lecture Translator at https://gitlab.kit.edu/kit/isl-ai4lt/lt-middleware/ltpipeline}\footnote{All released code and models are licensed under the MIT License.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in educational technologies for a variety of tasks, from generating instructional materials and assisting with assessment design to tutoring. While prior work has investigated how models can be adapted or optimized for specific tasks, far less is known about how well LLMs perform at interpreting authentic educational scenarios without significant customization. As LLM-based systems become widely adopted by learners and educators in everyday academic contexts, understanding their out-of-the-box capabilities is increasingly important for setting expectations and benchmarking. We compared six LLMs to estimate their baseline performance on a simple but important task: classifying instructional moves in authentic classroom transcripts. We evaluated typical prompting methods: zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting. We found that while zero-shot performance was moderate, providing comprehensive examples (few-shot prompting) significantly improved performance for state-of-the-art models, with the strongest configuration reaching Cohen's Kappa = 0.58 against expert-coded annotations. At the same time, improvements were neither uniform nor complete: performance varied considerably by instructional move, and higher recall frequently came at the cost of increased false positives. Overall, these findings indicate that foundation models demonstrate meaningful yet limited capacity to interpret instructional discourse, with prompt design helping to surface capability but not eliminating fundamental reliability constraints.

User representation modeling has become increasingly crucial for personalized applications, yet existing approaches struggle with generalizability across domains and sensitivity to noisy behavioral signals. We present InstructUE, an instruction-aware user embedding foundation model that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate general and instruction-aware user representations. InstructUE introduces a multi-encoder architecture with a lightweight adapter that efficiently processes heterogeneous data from six different sources while preserving their structural characteristics. Additionally, it proposes a novel contrastive-autoregressive training framework that bridges language and representation spaces through a curated UserQA dataset. The contrastive-autoregressive training framework simultaneously leverages autoregressive learning to capture domain knowledge in language space and contrastive learning to align user-text embeddings in representation space, thereby enhancing the instruction-awareness and noise-robustness of user embeddings. Through extensive experiments on real-world applications, we demonstrate that InstructUE significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple domains including user prediction, marketing, and recommendation scenarios. Our results show that instruction-aware user modeling can effectively achieve instruction-guided denoising of user information in specific scenarios, paving the way for more generalizable and robust user representation learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. In this work, we propose search-augmented instruction learning (SAIL), which grounds the language generation and instruction following abilities on complex search results generated by in-house and external search engines. With an instruction tuning corpus, we collect search results for each training case from different search APIs and domains, and construct a new search-grounded training set containing (instruction, grounding information, response) triplets. We then fine-tune the LLaMA-7B model on the constructed training set. Since the collected results contain unrelated and disputing languages, the model needs to learn to ground on trustworthy search results, filter out distracting passages, and generate the target response. The search result-denoising process entails explicit trustworthy information selection and multi-hop reasoning, since the retrieved passages might be informative but not contain the instruction-following answer. Experiments show that the fine-tuned SAIL-7B model has a strong instruction-following ability, and it performs significantly better on transparency-sensitive tasks, including open-ended question answering and fact checking.

Using a text description as prompt to guide the generation of text or images (e.g., GPT-3 or DALLE-2) has drawn wide attention recently. Beyond text and image generation, in this work, we explore the possibility of utilizing text descriptions to guide speech synthesis. Thus, we develop a text-to-speech (TTS) system (dubbed as PromptTTS) that takes a prompt with both style and content descriptions as input to synthesize the corresponding speech. Specifically, PromptTTS consists of a style encoder and a content encoder to extract the corresponding representations from the prompt, and a speech decoder to synthesize speech according to the extracted style and content representations. Compared with previous works in controllable TTS that require users to have acoustic knowledge to understand style factors such as prosody and pitch, PromptTTS is more user-friendly since text descriptions are a more natural way to express speech style (e.g., ''A lady whispers to her friend slowly''). Given that there is no TTS dataset with prompts, to benchmark the task of PromptTTS, we construct and release a dataset containing prompts with style and content information and the corresponding speech. Experiments show that PromptTTS can generate speech with precise style control and high speech quality. Audio samples and our dataset are publicly available.

Recent advancements in speech large language models (SpeechLLMs) have attracted considerable attention. Nonetheless, current methods exhibit suboptimal performance in adhering to speech instructions. Notably, the intelligence of models significantly diminishes when processing speech-form input as compared to direct text-form input. Prior work has attempted to mitigate this semantic inconsistency between speech and text representations through techniques such as representation and behavior alignment, which involve the meticulous design of data pairs during the post-training phase. In this paper, we introduce a simple and scalable training method called InSerter, which stands for Interleaved Speech-Text Representation Pre-training. InSerter is designed to pre-train large-scale unsupervised speech-text sequences, where the speech is synthesized from randomly selected segments of an extensive text corpus using text-to-speech conversion. Consequently, the model acquires the ability to generate textual continuations corresponding to the provided speech segments, obviating the need for intensive data design endeavors. To systematically evaluate speech instruction-following capabilities, we introduce SpeechInstructBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for speech-oriented instruction-following tasks. Our proposed InSerter achieves SOTA performance in SpeechInstructBench and demonstrates superior or competitive results across diverse speech processing tasks.

Personalized text generation is an emerging research area that has attracted much attention in recent years. Most studies in this direction focus on a particular domain by designing bespoke features or models. In this work, we propose a general approach for personalized text generation using large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the practice of writing education, we develop a multistage and multitask framework to teach LLMs for personalized generation. In writing instruction, the task of writing from sources is often decomposed into multiple steps that involve finding, evaluating, summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating information. Analogously, our approach to personalized text generation consists of multiple stages: retrieval, ranking, summarization, synthesis, and generation. In addition, we introduce a multitask setting that helps the model improve its generation ability further, which is inspired by the observation in education that a student's reading proficiency and writing ability are often correlated. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, each of which covers a different and representative domain. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, yet their deployment in enterprise environments reveals a critical limitation: inconsistent adherence to custom instructions. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of 13 leading LLMs across instruction compliance, response accuracy, and performance metrics in realworld RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) scenarios. Through systematic testing with samples and enterprise-grade evaluation protocols, we demonstrate that instruction following varies dramatically across models, with Claude-Sonnet-4 and GPT-5 achieving the highest results. Our findings reveal the "instruction gap" - a fundamental challenge where models excel at general tasks but struggle with precise instruction adherence required for enterprise deployment. This work provides practical insights for organizations deploying LLM-powered solutions and establishes benchmarks for instruction-following capabilities across major model families.

Instruction-following is crucial for building AI agents with large language models (LLMs), as these models must adhere strictly to user-provided constraints and guidelines. However, LLMs often fail to follow even simple and clear instructions. To improve instruction-following behavior and prevent undesirable outputs, a deeper understanding of how LLMs' internal states relate to these outcomes is required. Our analysis of LLM internal states reveal a dimension in the input embedding space linked to successful instruction-following. We demonstrate that modifying representations along this dimension improves instruction-following success rates compared to random changes, without compromising response quality. Further investigation reveals that this dimension is more closely related to the phrasing of prompts rather than the inherent difficulty of the task or instructions. This discovery also suggests explanations for why LLMs sometimes fail to follow clear instructions and why prompt engineering is often effective, even when the content remains largely unchanged. This work provides insight into the internal workings of LLMs' instruction-following, paving the way for reliable LLM agents.

We introduce Instruct-SkillMix, an automated approach for creating diverse, high quality SFT data. The Instruct-SkillMix pipeline involves two stages, each leveraging an existing powerful LLM: (1) Skill extraction: uses the LLM to extract core "skills" for instruction-following, either from existing datasets, or by directly prompting the model; (2) Data generation: uses the powerful LLM to generate (instruction, response) data that exhibit a randomly chosen pair of these skills. Here, the use of random skill combinations promotes diversity and difficulty. Vanilla SFT (i.e., no PPO, DPO, or RL methods) on data generated from Instruct-SkillMix leads to strong gains on instruction following benchmarks such as AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench, and WildBench. With just 4K examples, LLaMA-3-8B-Base achieves 42.76% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0. To our knowledge, this achieves state-of-the-art performance among all models that have only undergone SFT (no RL methods) and competes with proprietary models such as Claude 3 Opus and LLaMA-3.1-405B-Instruct. Ablation studies also suggest plausible reasons for why creating open instruction-tuning datasets via naive crowd-sourcing has proved difficult. Introducing low quality answers ("shirkers") in 20% of Instruct-SkillMix examples causes performance to plummet, sometimes catastrophically. The Instruct-SkillMix pipeline is flexible and is adaptable to other settings.

Expository documents are vital resources for conveying complex information to readers. Despite their usefulness, writing expository text by hand is a challenging process that requires careful content planning, obtaining facts from multiple sources, and the ability to clearly synthesize these facts. To ease these burdens, we propose the task of expository text generation, which seeks to automatically generate an accurate and stylistically consistent expository text for a topic by intelligently searching a knowledge source. We solve our task by developing IRP, a framework that overcomes the limitations of retrieval-augmented models and iteratively performs content planning, fact retrieval, and rephrasing. Through experiments on three diverse, newly-collected datasets, we show that IRP produces factual and organized expository texts that accurately inform readers.

Recently, text-guided content generation has received extensive attention. In this work, we explore the possibility of text description-based speaker generation, i.e., using text prompts to control the speaker generation process. Specifically, we propose PromptSpeaker, a text-guided speaker generation system. PromptSpeaker consists of a prompt encoder, a zero-shot VITS, and a Glow model, where the prompt encoder predicts a prior distribution based on the text description and samples from this distribution to obtain a semantic representation. The Glow model subsequently converts the semantic representation into a speaker representation, and the zero-shot VITS finally synthesizes the speaker's voice based on the speaker representation. We verify that PromptSpeaker can generate speakers new from the training set by objective metrics, and the synthetic speaker voice has reasonable subjective matching quality with the speaker prompt.

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

Today's generative AI systems are tuned to present information by default rather than engage users in service of learning as a human tutor would. To address the wide range of potential education use cases for these systems, we reframe the challenge of injecting pedagogical behavior as one of pedagogical instruction following, where training and evaluation examples include system-level instructions describing the specific pedagogy attributes present or desired in subsequent model turns. This framing avoids committing our models to any particular definition of pedagogy, and instead allows teachers or developers to specify desired model behavior. It also clears a path to improving Gemini models for learning -- by enabling the addition of our pedagogical data to post-training mixtures -- alongside their rapidly expanding set of capabilities. Both represent important changes from our initial tech report. We show how training with pedagogical instruction following produces a LearnLM model (available on Google AI Studio) that is preferred substantially by expert raters across a diverse set of learning scenarios, with average preference strengths of 31\% over GPT-4o, 11\% over Claude 3.5, and 13\% over the Gemini 1.5 Pro model LearnLM was based on.

Readability metrics and standards such as Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) exist to guide teachers and educators to properly assess the complexity of educational materials before administering them for classroom use. In this study, we select a diverse set of open and closed-source instruction-tuned language models and investigate their performances in writing story completions and simplifying narratives--tasks that teachers perform--using standard-guided prompts controlling text readability. Our extensive findings provide empirical proof of how globally recognized models like ChatGPT may be considered less effective and may require more refined prompts for these generative tasks compared to other open-sourced models such as BLOOMZ and FlanT5--which have shown promising results.

Instruction tuning enables language models to generalize more effectively and better follow user intent. However, obtaining instruction data can be costly and challenging. Prior works employ methods such as expensive human annotation, crowd-sourced datasets with alignment issues, or generating noisy examples via LLMs. We introduce the LongForm dataset, which is created by leveraging English corpus examples with augmented instructions. We select a diverse set of human-written documents from existing corpora such as C4 and Wikipedia and generate instructions for the given documents via LLMs. This approach provides a cheaper and cleaner instruction-tuning dataset and one suitable for long text generation. We finetune T5, OPT, and LLaMA models on our dataset and show that even smaller LongForm models have good generalization capabilities for text generation. Our models outperform 10x larger language models without instruction tuning on various tasks such as story/recipe generation and long-form question answering. Moreover, LongForm models outperform prior instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 and Alpaca by a large margin. Finally, our models can effectively follow and answer multilingual instructions; we demonstrate this for news generation. We publicly release our data and models: https://github.com/akoksal/LongForm.

This paper introduces a novel dataset construction pipeline that samples pairs of frames from videos and uses multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate editing instructions for training instruction-based image manipulation models. Video frames inherently preserve the identity of subjects and scenes, ensuring consistent content preservation during editing. Additionally, video data captures diverse, natural dynamics-such as non-rigid subject motion and complex camera movements-that are difficult to model otherwise, making it an ideal source for scalable dataset construction. Using this approach, we create a new dataset to train InstructMove, a model capable of instruction-based complex manipulations that are difficult to achieve with synthetically generated datasets. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as adjusting subject poses, rearranging elements, and altering camera perspectives.

This paper aims to efficiently enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to use multimodal tools. Advanced proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have shown great potential for tool usage through sophisticated prompt engineering. Nevertheless, these models typically rely on prohibitive computational costs and publicly inaccessible data. To address these challenges, we propose the GPT4Tools based on self-instruct to enable open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and OPT, to use tools. It generates an instruction-following dataset by prompting an advanced teacher with various multi-modal contexts. By using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) optimization, our approach facilitates the open-source LLMs to solve a range of visual problems, including visual comprehension and image generation. Moreover, we provide a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLMs to use tools, which is performed in both zero-shot and fine-tuning ways. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various language models, which not only significantly improves the accuracy of invoking seen tools, but also enables the zero-shot capacity for unseen tools. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/GPT4Tools.

Turning static slides into engaging video lectures takes considerable time and effort, requiring presenters to record explanations and visually guide their audience through the material. We introduce an end-to-end system designed to automate this process entirely. Given a slide deck, this system synthesizes a video lecture featuring AI-generated narration synchronized precisely with dynamic visual highlights. These highlights automatically draw attention to the specific concept being discussed, much like an effective presenter would. The core technical contribution is a novel highlight alignment module. This module accurately maps spoken phrases to locations on a given slide using diverse strategies (e.g., Levenshtein distance, LLM-based semantic analysis) at selectable granularities (line or word level) and utilizes timestamp-providing Text-to-Speech (TTS) for timing synchronization. We demonstrate the system's effectiveness through a technical evaluation using a manually annotated slide dataset with 1000 samples, finding that LLM-based alignment achieves high location accuracy (F1 > 92%), significantly outperforming simpler methods, especially on complex, math-heavy content. Furthermore, the calculated generation cost averages under $1 per hour of video, offering potential savings of two orders of magnitude compared to conservative estimates of manual production costs. This combination of high accuracy and extremely low cost positions this approach as a practical and scalable tool for transforming static slides into effective, visually-guided video lectures.

This paper describes the challenges that deaf and hard of hearing people face with creating accessible multimedia content, such as portfolios, instructional videos and video presentations. Unlike content consumption, the process of content creation itself remains highly inaccessible, creating barriers to employment in all stages of recruiting, hiring, and carrying out assigned job duties. Overcoming these barriers incurs a "deaf content creation tax" that translates into requiring significant additional time and resources to produce content equivalent to what a non-disabled person would produce. We highlight this process and associated challenges through real-world examples experienced by the authors, and provide guidance and recommendations for addressing them.

Instruction tuning is vital for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intent, but current methods typically rely on costly human-annotated seed data or powerful external teacher models. While instruction back-translation techniques reduce this dependency, they remain fundamentally tethered to an initial seed set, which limits full automation, introduces biases, and can lead to inefficient use of unlabeled corpora. In this paper, we propose Cycle-Instruct, a novel framework that achieves fully seed-free instruction tuning. Inspired by cycle consistency, Cycle-Instruct employs a dual self-training loop where two models-an answer generator and a question generator-are bootstrapped solely from raw, unlabeled text. These models mutually supervise each other by reconstructing original text segments from their counterpart's generated pseudo-labels, effectively learning from the intrinsic structure of the data without any human-provided seeds. We demonstrate Cycle-Instruct's efficacy across four diverse data tracks, including general instruction-following, domain-specific tasks, dialogue logs, and plain text. Our extensive experiments show that Cycle-Instruct not only outperforms seed-driven back-translation baselines but also achieves performance comparable to strongly supervised methods.

Narrative videos, such as movies, pose significant challenges in video understanding due to their rich contexts (characters, dialogues, storylines) and diverse demands (identify who, relationship, and reason). In this paper, we introduce MovieSeq, a multimodal language model developed to address the wide range of challenges in understanding video contexts. Our core idea is to represent videos as interleaved multimodal sequences (including images, plots, videos, and subtitles), either by linking external knowledge databases or using offline models (such as whisper for subtitles). Through instruction-tuning, this approach empowers the language model to interact with videos using interleaved multimodal instructions. For example, instead of solely relying on video as input, we jointly provide character photos alongside their names and dialogues, allowing the model to associate these elements and generate more comprehensive responses. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we validate MovieSeq's performance on six datasets (LVU, MAD, Movienet, CMD, TVC, MovieQA) across five settings (video classification, audio description, video-text retrieval, video captioning, and video question-answering). The code will be public at https://github.com/showlab/MovieSeq.

Instruction tuning is an important step in making language models useful for direct user interaction. However, many legal tasks remain out of reach for most open LLMs and there do not yet exist any large scale instruction datasets for the domain. This critically limits research in this application area. In this work, we curate LawInstruct, a large legal instruction dataset, covering 17 jurisdictions, 24 languages and a total of 12M examples. We present evidence that domain-specific pretraining and instruction tuning improve performance on LegalBench, including improving Flan-T5 XL by 8 points or 16\% over the baseline. However, the effect does not generalize across all tasks, training regimes, model sizes, and other factors. LawInstruct is a resource for accelerating the development of models with stronger information processing and decision making capabilities in the legal domain.

Listeners of long-form talk-audio content, such as podcast episodes, often find it challenging to understand the overall structure and locate relevant sections. A practical solution is to divide episodes into chapters--semantically coherent segments labeled with titles and timestamps. Since most episodes on our platform at Spotify currently lack creator-provided chapters, automating the creation of chapters is essential. Scaling the chapterization of podcast episodes presents unique challenges. First, episodes tend to be less structured than written texts, featuring spontaneous discussions with nuanced transitions. Second, the transcripts are usually lengthy, averaging about 16,000 tokens, which necessitates efficient processing that can preserve context. To address these challenges, we introduce PODTILE, a fine-tuned encoder-decoder transformer to segment conversational data. The model simultaneously generates chapter transitions and titles for the input transcript. To preserve context, each input text is augmented with global context, including the episode's title, description, and previous chapter titles. In our intrinsic evaluation, PODTILE achieved an 11% improvement in ROUGE score over the strongest baseline. Additionally, we provide insights into the practical benefits of auto-generated chapters for listeners navigating episode content. Our findings indicate that auto-generated chapters serve as a useful tool for engaging with less popular podcasts. Finally, we present empirical evidence that using chapter titles can enhance effectiveness of sparse retrieval in search tasks.

Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) elicits instruction following capabilities and steers the behavior of large language models (LLMs) via supervised learning. However, existing models trained on open-source IFT datasets only have the ability to follow instructions from users, and often fail to follow complex role and rules specified by developers, a.k.a. system prompts. The ability to follow these roles and rules is essential for deployment, as it ensures that the model safely interacts with users within developer defined guidelines. To improve such role and rule following ability, we propose \model, an automated data generation pipeline that generates diverse roles and rules from existing IFT instructions, along with corresponding responses. This data can then be used to train models that follow complex system prompts. The models are evaluated on our newly created benchmarks for role and rule following ability, as well as standard instruction-following benchmarks and general NLP tasks. Our framework significantly improves role and rule following capability in LLMs, as evidenced by over 25% increase in pass-rate on rule adherence, i.e. following all requirements, in our experiments with the Alpaca and Ultrachat datasets. Moreover, our models achieves this increase without any regression on popular instruction following benchmarks.

Presenters commonly use slides as visual aids for informative talks. When presenters fail to verbally describe the content on their slides, blind and visually impaired audience members lose access to necessary content, making the presentation difficult to follow. Our analysis of 90 presentation videos revealed that 72% of 610 visual elements (e.g., images, text) were insufficiently described. To help presenters create accessible presentations, we introduce Presentation A11y, a system that provides real-time and post-presentation accessibility feedback. Our system analyzes visual elements on the slide and the transcript of the verbal presentation to provide element-level feedback on what visual content needs to be further described or even removed. Presenters using our system with their own slide-based presentations described more of the content on their slides, and identified 3.26 times more accessibility problems to fix after the talk than when using a traditional slide-based presentation interface. Integrating accessibility feedback into content creation tools will improve the accessibility of informational content for all.

Instruction-guided text-to-speech (ITTS) enables users to control speech generation through natural language prompts, offering a more intuitive interface than traditional TTS. However, the alignment between user style instructions and listener perception remains largely unexplored. This work first presents a perceptual analysis of ITTS controllability across two expressive dimensions (adverbs of degree and graded emotion intensity) and collects human ratings on speaker age and word-level emphasis attributes. To comprehensively reveal the instruction-perception gap, we provide a data collection with large-scale human evaluations, named Expressive VOice Control (E-VOC) corpus. Furthermore, we reveal that (1) gpt-4o-mini-tts is the most reliable ITTS model with great alignment between instruction and generated utterances across acoustic dimensions. (2) The 5 analyzed ITTS systems tend to generate Adult voices even when the instructions ask to use child or Elderly voices. (3) Fine-grained control remains a major challenge, indicating that most ITTS systems have substantial room for improvement in interpreting slightly different attribute instructions.

Most public instruction finetuning datasets are relatively small compared to the closed source datasets used to train industry models. To study questions about finetuning at scale, such as curricula and learning rate cooldown schedules, there is a need for industrial-scale datasets. However, this scale necessitates a data generation process that is almost entirely automated. In this work, we study methods for generating large instruction datasets from a single prompt. With little human oversight, we get LLMs to write diverse sets of instruction examples ranging from simple completion tasks to complex multi-turn dialogs across a variety of subject areas. When finetuning a Llama-3 8B base model, our dataset meets or exceeds both WizardLM and Ultrachat on both knowledge-intensive leaderboard tasks as well as conversational evaluations. We release our dataset, the "generator" prompts that created it, and our finetuned model checkpoints.

Large language models typically undergo two training stages, pretraining and finetuning. Despite that large-scale pretraining endows the model with strong capabilities to generate natural language responses, these pretrained models can still fail to understand human instructions at times. To enhance language models' ability of interpreting and responding to instructions, instruction finetuning has emerged as a critical method in this area. Recent studies found that large language models can be finetuned to perform well even with a small amount of high-quality instruction-following data. However, the selection of high-quality datasets for finetuning language models still lacks clear guidelines to follow. In this paper, we propose InstructMining, a linear rule for evaluating instruction-following data quality. We formulate InstructMining using specific natural language indicators. To investigate the relationship between data quality and these indicators, we further conduct extensive finetuning experiments. The experiment results are then applied to estimating parameters in InstructMining. To further investigate its performance, we use InstructMining to select high-quality data from unseen datasets. Results demonstrate that InstructMining can help select relatively high-quality samples from various instruction-following datasets. Compared to models finetuned on unfiltered datasets, models finetuned on InstructMining selected datasets perform better on 42.5% cases.

Are Large language models (LLMs) temporally grounded? Since LLMs cannot perceive and interact with the environment, it is impossible to answer this question directly. Instead, we provide LLMs with textual narratives and probe them with respect to their common-sense knowledge of the structure and duration of events, their ability to order events along a timeline, and self-consistency within their temporal model (e.g., temporal relations such as after and before are mutually exclusive for any pair of events). We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs (such as LLaMA 2 and GPT-4) on three tasks reflecting these abilities. Generally, we find that LLMs lag significantly behind both human performance as well as small-scale, specialised LMs. In-context learning, instruction tuning, and chain-of-thought prompting reduce this gap only to a limited degree. Crucially, LLMs struggle the most with self-consistency, displaying incoherent behaviour in at least 27.23% of their predictions. Contrary to expectations, we also find that scaling the model size does not guarantee positive gains in performance. To explain these results, we study the sources from which LLMs may gather temporal information: we find that sentence ordering in unlabelled texts, available during pre-training, is only weakly correlated with event ordering. Moreover, public instruction tuning mixtures contain few temporal tasks. Hence, we conclude that current LLMs lack a consistent temporal model of textual narratives. Code, datasets, and LLM outputs are available at https://github.com/yfqiu-nlp/temporal-llms.

Instructional videos provide detailed how-to guides for various tasks, with viewers often posing questions regarding the content. Addressing these questions is vital for comprehending the content, yet receiving immediate answers is difficult. While numerous computational models have been developed for Video Question Answering (Video QA) tasks, they are primarily trained on questions generated based on video content, aiming to produce answers from within the content. However, in real-world situations, users may pose questions that go beyond the video's informational boundaries, highlighting the necessity to determine if a video can provide the answer. Discerning whether a question can be answered by video content is challenging due to the multi-modal nature of videos, where visual and verbal information are intertwined. To bridge this gap, we present the YTCommentQA dataset, which contains naturally-generated questions from YouTube, categorized by their answerability and required modality to answer -- visual, script, or both. Experiments with answerability classification tasks demonstrate the complexity of YTCommentQA and emphasize the need to comprehend the combined role of visual and script information in video reasoning. The dataset is available at https://github.com/lgresearch/YTCommentQA.

We present Q-ViD, a simple approach for video question answering (video QA), that unlike prior methods, which are based on complex architectures, computationally expensive pipelines or use closed models like GPTs, Q-ViD relies on a single instruction-aware open vision-language model (InstructBLIP) to tackle videoQA using frame descriptions. Specifically, we create captioning instruction prompts that rely on the target questions about the videos and leverage InstructBLIP to obtain video frame captions that are useful to the task at hand. Subsequently, we form descriptions of the whole video using the question-dependent frame captions, and feed that information, along with a question-answering prompt, to a large language model (LLM). The LLM is our reasoning module, and performs the final step of multiple-choice QA. Our simple Q-ViD framework achieves competitive or even higher performances than current state of the art models on a diverse range of videoQA benchmarks, including NExT-QA, STAR, How2QA, TVQA and IntentQA.

The field of audio captioning has seen significant advancements in recent years, driven by the availability of large-scale audio datasets and advancements in deep learning techniques. In this technical report, we present our approach to audio captioning, focusing on the use of a pretrained speech-to-text Whisper model and pretraining on synthetic captions. We discuss our training procedures and present our experiments' results, which include model size variations, dataset mixtures, and other hyperparameters. Our findings demonstrate the impact of different training strategies on the performance of the audio captioning model. Our code and trained models are publicly available on GitHub and Hugging Face Hub.

This research introduces an innovative AI-driven multi-agent framework specifically designed for creating immersive audiobooks. Leveraging neural text-to-speech synthesis with FastSpeech 2 and VALL-E for expressive narration and character-specific voices, the framework employs advanced language models to automatically interpret textual narratives and generate realistic spatial audio effects. These sound effects are dynamically synchronized with the storyline through sophisticated temporal integration methods, including Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Diffusion-based generative models combined with higher-order ambisonics (HOA) and scattering delay networks (SDN) enable highly realistic 3D soundscapes, substantially enhancing listener immersion and narrative realism. This technology significantly advances audiobook applications, providing richer experiences for educational content, storytelling platforms, and accessibility solutions for visually impaired audiences. Future work will address personalization, ethical management of synthesized voices, and integration with multi-sensory platforms.

This work studies how to transform an album to vivid and coherent stories, a task we refer to as "album storytelling". While this task can help preserve memories and facilitate experience sharing, it remains an underexplored area in current literature. With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is now possible to generate lengthy, coherent text, opening up the opportunity to develop an AI assistant for album storytelling. One natural approach is to use caption models to describe each photo in the album, and then use LLMs to summarize and rewrite the generated captions into an engaging story. However, we find this often results in stories containing hallucinated information that contradicts the images, as each generated caption ("story-agnostic") is not always about the description related to the whole story or miss some necessary information. To address these limitations, we propose a new iterative album storytelling pipeline. Specifically, we start with an initial story and build a story-aware caption model to refine the captions using the whole story as guidance. The polished captions are then fed into the LLMs to generate a new refined story. This process is repeated iteratively until the story contains minimal factual errors while maintaining coherence. To evaluate our proposed pipeline, we introduce a new dataset of image collections from vlogs and a set of systematic evaluation metrics. Our results demonstrate that our method effectively generates more accurate and engaging stories for albums, with enhanced coherence and vividness.

Universal video understanding requires modeling fine-grained visual and audio information over time in diverse real-world scenarios. However, the performance of existing models is primarily constrained by video-instruction data that represents complex audiovisual content as single, incomplete descriptions, lacking fine-grained organization and reliable annotation. To address this, we introduce: (i) ASID-1M, an open-source collection of one million structured, fine-grained audiovisual instruction annotations with single- and multi-attribute supervision; (ii) ASID-Verify, a scalable data curation pipeline for annotation, with automatic verification and refinement that enforces semantic and temporal consistency between descriptions and the corresponding audiovisual content; and (iii) ASID-Captioner, a video understanding model trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on the ASID-1M. Experiments across seven benchmarks covering audiovisual captioning, attribute-wise captioning, caption-based QA, and caption-based temporal grounding show that ASID-Captioner improves fine-grained caption quality while reducing hallucinations and improving instruction following. It achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models and is competitive with Gemini-3-Pro.

Automated audio captioning (AAC) aims to generate informative descriptions for various sounds from nature and/or human activities. In recent years, AAC has quickly attracted research interest, with state-of-the-art systems now relying on a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) backbone powered by strong models such as Transformers. Following the macro-trend of applied machine learning research, in this work, we strive to improve the performance of seq2seq AAC models by extensively leveraging pretrained models and large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we utilize BEATs to extract fine-grained audio features. Then, we employ Instructor LLM to fetch text embeddings of captions, and infuse their language-modality knowledge into BEATs audio features via an auxiliary InfoNCE loss function. Moreover, we propose a novel data augmentation method that uses ChatGPT to produce caption mix-ups (i.e., grammatical and compact combinations of two captions) which, together with the corresponding audio mixtures, increase not only the amount but also the complexity and diversity of training data. During inference, we propose to employ nucleus sampling and a hybrid reranking algorithm, which has not been explored in AAC research. Combining our efforts, our model achieves a new state-of-the-art 32.6 SPIDEr-FL score on the Clotho evaluation split, and wins the 2023 DCASE AAC challenge.

We study multi-modal summarization for instructional videos, whose goal is to provide users an efficient way to learn skills in the form of text instructions and key video frames. We observe that existing benchmarks focus on generic semantic-level video summarization, and are not suitable for providing step-by-step executable instructions and illustrations, both of which are crucial for instructional videos. We propose a novel benchmark for user interface (UI) instructional video summarization to fill the gap. We collect a dataset of 2,413 UI instructional videos, which spans over 167 hours. These videos are manually annotated for video segmentation, text summarization, and video summarization, which enable the comprehensive evaluations for concise and executable video summarization. We conduct extensive experiments on our collected MS4UI dataset, which suggest that state-of-the-art multi-modal summarization methods struggle on UI video summarization, and highlight the importance of new methods for UI instructional video summarization.

It is imperative for Large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions with elaborate requirements (i.e. Complex Instructions Following). Yet, it remains under-explored how to enhance the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions with multiple constraints. To bridge the gap, we initially study what training data is effective in enhancing complex constraints following abilities. We found that training LLMs with instructions containing multiple constraints enhances their understanding of complex instructions, especially those with lower complexity levels. The improvement can even generalize to compositions of out-of-domain constraints. Additionally, we further propose methods addressing how to obtain and utilize the effective training data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness of our methods in terms of overall performance and training efficiency. We also demonstrate that our methods improve models' ability to follow instructions generally and generalize effectively across out-of-domain, in-domain, and adversarial settings, while maintaining general capabilities.

Diffusion models, which have emerged to become popular text-to-image generation models, can produce high-quality and content-rich images guided by textual prompts. However, there are limitations to semantic understanding and commonsense reasoning in existing models when the input prompts are concise narrative, resulting in low-quality image generation. To improve the capacities for narrative prompts, we propose a simple-yet-effective parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach called the Semantic Understanding and Reasoning adapter (SUR-adapter) for pre-trained diffusion models. To reach this goal, we first collect and annotate a new dataset SURD which consists of more than 57,000 semantically corrected multi-modal samples. Each sample contains a simple narrative prompt, a complex keyword-based prompt, and a high-quality image. Then, we align the semantic representation of narrative prompts to the complex prompts and transfer knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to our SUR-adapter via knowledge distillation so that it can acquire the powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities to build a high-quality textual semantic representation for text-to-image generation. We conduct experiments by integrating multiple LLMs and popular pre-trained diffusion models to show the effectiveness of our approach in enabling diffusion models to understand and reason concise natural language without image quality degradation. Our approach can make text-to-image diffusion models easier to use with better user experience, which demonstrates our approach has the potential for further advancing the development of user-friendly text-to-image generation models by bridging the semantic gap between simple narrative prompts and complex keyword-based prompts.

Large language models generate fluent texts and can follow natural language instructions to solve a wide range of tasks without task-specific training. Nevertheless, it is notoriously difficult to control their generation to satisfy the various constraints required by different applications. In this work, we present InstructCTG, a controlled text generation framework that incorporates different constraints by conditioning on natural language descriptions and demonstrations of the constraints. In particular, we first extract the underlying constraints of natural texts through a combination of off-the-shelf NLP tools and simple heuristics. We then verbalize the constraints into natural language instructions to form weakly supervised training data. By prepending natural language descriptions of the constraints and a few demonstrations, we fine-tune a pre-trained language model to incorporate various types of constraints. Compared to existing search-based or score-based methods, InstructCTG is more flexible to different constraint types and has a much smaller impact on the generation quality and speed because it does not modify the decoding procedure. Additionally, InstructCTG allows the model to adapt to new constraints without re-training through the use of few-shot task generalization and in-context learning abilities of instruction-tuned language models.

In this paper, we show that when spoken language models (SLMs) are instructed to speak in a specific speaking style at the beginning of a multi-turn conversation, they cannot maintain the required speaking styles after several turns of interaction; we refer to this as the style amnesia of SLMs. We focus on paralinguistic speaking styles, including emotion, accent, volume, and speaking speed. We evaluate three proprietary and two open-source SLMs, demonstrating that none of these models can maintain a consistent speaking style when instructed to do so. We further show that when SLMs are asked to recall the style instruction in later turns, they can recall the style instruction, but they fail to express it throughout the conversation. We also show that explicitly asking the model to recall the style instruction can partially mitigate style amnesia. In addition, we examine various prompting strategies and find that SLMs struggle to follow the required style when the instruction is placed in system messages rather than user messages, which contradicts the intended function of system prompts.

This paper presents instruct-imagen, a model that tackles heterogeneous image generation tasks and generalizes across unseen tasks. We introduce *multi-modal instruction* for image generation, a task representation articulating a range of generation intents with precision. It uses natural language to amalgamate disparate modalities (e.g., text, edge, style, subject, etc.), such that abundant generation intents can be standardized in a uniform format. We then build instruct-imagen by fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model with a two-stage framework. First, we adapt the model using the retrieval-augmented training, to enhance model's capabilities to ground its generation on external multimodal context. Subsequently, we fine-tune the adapted model on diverse image generation tasks that requires vision-language understanding (e.g., subject-driven generation, etc.), each paired with a multi-modal instruction encapsulating the task's essence. Human evaluation on various image generation datasets reveals that instruct-imagen matches or surpasses prior task-specific models in-domain and demonstrates promising generalization to unseen and more complex tasks.