Kimi-Audio 🚀🎧 an OPEN audio foundation model released by Moonshot AI moonshotai/Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct ✨ 7B ✨ 13M+ hours of pretraining data ✨ Novel hybrid input architecture ✨ Universal audio capabilities (ASR, AQA, AAC, SER, SEC/ASC, end-to-end conversation)
Meta dropped swiss army knives for vision with A2.0 license 👏 > image/video encoders for vision language modelling and spatial understanding (object detection etc) 👏 > The vision LM outperforms InternVL3 and Qwen2.5VL 👏 > They also release gigantic video and image datasets
The authors attempt to come up with single versatile vision encoder to align on diverse set of tasks.
They trained Perception Encoder (PE) Core: a new state-of-the-art family of vision encoders that can be aligned for both vision-language and spatial tasks. For zero-shot image tasks, it outperforms latest sota SigLIP2 👏
> Among fine-tuned ones, first one is PE-Spatial. It's a model to detect bounding boxes, segmentation, depth estimation and it outperforms all other models 😮
> Second one is PLM, Perception Language Model, where they combine PE-Core with Qwen2.5 LM 7B. it outperforms all other models (including InternVL3 which was trained with Qwen2.5LM too!)
The authors release the following checkpoints in sizes base, large and giant:
Authors release following datasets 📑 > PE Video: Gigantic video datasete of 1M videos with 120k expert annotations ⏯️ > PLM-Video and PLM-Image: Human and auto-annotated image and video datasets on region-based tasks > PLM-VideoBench: New video benchmark on MCQA
Most of the vision LMs focus on image as a whole, lacking localized references in captions, and not taking in visual prompts (points, boxes, drawings around objects)
DAM addresses this on two levels: new vision backbone that takes in focal crops and the image itself, and a large scale dataset 👀
They generate a dataset by extending existing segmentation and referring expression generation datasets like REFCOCO, by passing in the images and classes to VLMs and generating captions.
Lastly, they also release a new benchmark again with self-supervision, they use an LLM to evaluate the detailed captions focusing on localization 👏
The dataset distils reasoning chains from arXiv research papers in biology and economics. Some nice features of the dataset:
- Extracts both the logical structure AND researcher intuition from academic papers - Adopts the persona of researchers "before experiments" to capture exploratory thinking - Provides multi-short and single-long reasoning formats with token budgets - Shows 7.2% improvement on MMLU-Pro Economics when fine-tuning a 3B model
It's created using the Curator framework with plans to scale across more scientific domains and incorporate multi-modal reasoning with charts and mathematics.
I personally am very excited about datasets like this, which involve creativity in their creation and don't just rely on $$$ to produce a big dataset with little novelty.