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AnyMAL: An Efficient and Scalable Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (arxiv.org)
41 points by babakd on Sep 29, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 4 comments on HN

In plain words: It turns images, video, audio, and motion-sensor readings into text-like signals so a strong text-only language model can reason over them and reply in words. After training on hand-collected multimodal instructions, it beat the best prior systems on a range of multimodal tasks.

Abstract

We present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals (i.e. text, image, video, audio, IMU motion sensor), and generates textual responses. AnyMAL inherits the powerful text-based reasoning abilities of the state-of-the-art LLMs including LLaMA-2 (70B), and converts modality-specific signals to the joint textual space through a pre-trained aligner module. To further strengthen the multimodal LLM's capabilities, we fine-tune the model with a multimodal instruction set manually collected to cover diverse topics and tasks beyond simple QAs. We conduct comprehensive empirical analysis comprising both human and automatic evaluations, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal tasks.

Seungwhan Moon, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Tushar Nagarajan, Matt Smith, Shashank Jain, Chun-Fu Yeh, Prakash Murugesan, Peyman Heidari, Yue Liu, Kavya Srinet, Babak Damavandi, et al.
arXiv:2309.16058 · cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CV · submitted Sep 27, 2023
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Is this a joke, do they not know about ANYmal?

https://www.anybotics.com/robotics/anymal/

I was thinking the exact same thing - sadly ML folks stopped caring about existing acronyms a while ago - I've seen multiple papers in ML with the same acronym. People want something catchy for many reasons (to make it more popular and get more citations for the most part) and there are only so many catchy acronyms one can come up with.
Same thing with LoRa. Existing acronyms or not, it's all for grabs.
Yeah it really got my hopes up that the real anymal group was controlling quadrupeds with an LLM somehow.