Daily Papers

Advancements in ultra-low-power tiny machine learning (TinyML) systems promise to unlock an entirely new class of smart applications. However, continued progress is limited by the lack of a widely accepted and easily reproducible benchmark for these systems. To meet this need, we present MLPerf Tiny, the first industry-standard benchmark suite for ultra-low-power tiny machine learning systems. The benchmark suite is the collaborative effort of more than 50 organizations from industry and academia and reflects the needs of the community. MLPerf Tiny measures the accuracy, latency, and energy of machine learning inference to properly evaluate the tradeoffs between systems. Additionally, MLPerf Tiny implements a modular design that enables benchmark submitters to show the benefits of their product, regardless of where it falls on the ML deployment stack, in a fair and reproducible manner. The suite features four benchmarks: keyword spotting, visual wake words, image classification, and anomaly detection.

Deploying DNNs on System-on-Chips (SoC) with multiple heterogeneous acceleration engines is challenging, and the majority of deployment frameworks cannot fully exploit heterogeneity. We present MATCHA, a unified DNN deployment framework that generates highly concurrent schedules for parallel, heterogeneous accelerators and uses constraint programming to optimize L3/L2 memory allocation and scheduling. Using pattern matching, tiling, and mapping across individual HW units enables parallel execution and high accelerator utilization. On the MLPerf Tiny benchmark, using a SoC with two heterogeneous accelerators, MATCHA improves accelerator utilization and reduces inference latency by up to 35% with respect to the the state-of-the-art MATCH compiler.

Tiny machine learning (TinyML) is a rapidly growing field aiming to democratize machine learning (ML) for resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). Given the pervasiveness of these tiny devices, it is inherent to ask whether TinyML applications can benefit from aggregating their knowledge. Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized agents to jointly learn a global model without sharing sensitive local data. However, a common global model may not work for all devices due to the complexity of the actual deployment environment and the heterogeneity of the data available on each device. In addition, the deployment of TinyML hardware has significant computational and communication constraints, which traditional ML fails to address. Considering these challenges, we propose TinyReptile, a simple but efficient algorithm inspired by meta-learning and online learning, to collaboratively learn a solid initialization for a neural network (NN) across tiny devices that can be quickly adapted to a new device with respect to its data. We demonstrate TinyReptile on Raspberry Pi 4 and Cortex-M4 MCU with only 256-KB RAM. The evaluations on various TinyML use cases confirm a resource reduction and training time saving by at least two factors compared with baseline algorithms with comparable performance.

Recent advances in Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) empower low-footprint embedded devices for real-time on-device Machine Learning. While many acknowledge the potential benefits of TinyML, its practical implementation presents unique challenges. This study aims to bridge the gap between prototyping single TinyML models and developing reliable TinyML systems in production: (1) Embedded devices operate in dynamically changing conditions. Existing TinyML solutions primarily focus on inference, with models trained offline on powerful machines and deployed as static objects. However, static models may underperform in the real world due to evolving input data distributions. We propose online learning to enable training on constrained devices, adapting local models towards the latest field conditions. (2) Nevertheless, current on-device learning methods struggle with heterogeneous deployment conditions and the scarcity of labeled data when applied across numerous devices. We introduce federated meta-learning incorporating online learning to enhance model generalization, facilitating rapid learning. This approach ensures optimal performance among distributed devices by knowledge sharing. (3) Moreover, TinyML's pivotal advantage is widespread adoption. Embedded devices and TinyML models prioritize extreme efficiency, leading to diverse characteristics ranging from memory and sensors to model architectures. Given their diversity and non-standardized representations, managing these resources becomes challenging as TinyML systems scale up. We present semantic management for the joint management of models and devices at scale. We demonstrate our methods through a basic regression example and then assess them in three real-world TinyML applications: handwritten character image classification, keyword audio classification, and smart building presence detection, confirming our approaches' effectiveness.

Pretraining strategies significantly impact the quality of language models, yet existing comparisons of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Whole Word Masking (WWM), and MacBERT-style replacement have focused primarily on base-scale models (>=110M parameters). This paper presents a controlled comparison of these three strategies on a tiny-scale Chinese BERT model (4 layers, 256 hidden dimensions, 8.7M parameters). Under identical architecture, corpus (1.29M sentences from Chinese Wikipedia), and hyperparameters, we train three models from scratch and evaluate them across five intrinsic dimensions: perplexity, MLM hit rate, semantic discrimination, grammatical judgment, and contextual sensitivity. At tiny scale, MLM achieves the best overall intrinsic performance (winning 3 of 5 dimensions), while WWM excels in both perplexity (1.27 vs. 2.10, a 39.5% improvement) and MLM hit rate (22% vs. 16%). Notably, MacBERT under a severely limited synonym dictionary (222 entries, 3.3% coverage) exhibits severe perplexity degradation (47.23, 22x higher than MLM), yielding a ranking (MLM > WWM >> MacBERT) that differs markedly from the established base-scale conclusion (MacBERT > WWM > MLM). We further identify a critical evaluation pitfall: MacBERT achieves the lowest training loss (2.17) yet the highest perplexity (47.23), revealing that training loss alone is unreliable under mixed replacement strategies. All models and corpus are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/eebyp.

Recently, there has been significant interest in enhancing the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process high-resolution images. Most existing methods focus on adopting a cropping strategy to improve the ability of multimodal large language models to understand image details. However, this cropping operation inevitably causes the segmentation of objects and connected areas, which impairs the MLLM's ability to recognize small or irregularly shaped objects or text. This issue is particularly evident in lightweight MLLMs. Addressing this issue, we propose Mini-Monkey, a lightweight MLLM that incorporates a plug-and-play method called multi-scale adaptive crop strategy (MSAC). Mini-Monkey adaptively generates multi-scale representations, allowing it to select non-segmented objects from various scales. To mitigate the computational overhead introduced by MSAC, we propose a Scale Compression Mechanism (SCM), which effectively compresses image tokens. Mini-Monkey achieves state-of-the-art performance among 2B-parameter MLLMs. It not only demonstrates leading performance on a variety of general multimodal understanding tasks but also shows consistent improvements in document understanding capabilities. On the OCRBench, Mini-Monkey achieves a score of 802, outperforming 8B-parameter state-of-the-art model InternVL2-8B. Besides, our model and training strategy are very efficient, which can be trained with only eight RTX 3090. The code is available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Monkey.

TinyML is a novel area of machine learning that gained huge momentum in the last few years thanks to the ability to execute machine learning algorithms on tiny devices (such as Internet-of-Things or embedded systems). Interestingly, research in this area focused on the efficient execution of the inference phase of TinyML models on tiny devices, while very few solutions for on-device learning of TinyML models are available in the literature due to the relevant overhead introduced by the learning algorithms. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new type of adaptive TinyML solution that can be used in tasks, such as the presented Tiny Speaker Verification (TinySV), that require to be tackled with an on-device learning algorithm. Achieving this goal required (i) reducing the memory and computational demand of TinyML learning algorithms, and (ii) designing a TinyML learning algorithm operating with few and possibly unlabelled training data. The proposed TinySV solution relies on a two-layer hierarchical TinyML solution comprising Keyword Spotting and Adaptive Speaker Verification module. We evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed TinySV solution on a dataset collected expressly for the task and tested the proposed solution on a real-world IoT device (Infineon PSoC 62S2 Wi-Fi BT Pioneer Kit).

Machine-learning (ML) hardware and software system demand is burgeoning. Driven by ML applications, the number of different ML inference systems has exploded. Over 100 organizations are building ML inference chips, and the systems that incorporate existing models span at least three orders of magnitude in power consumption and five orders of magnitude in performance; they range from embedded devices to data-center solutions. Fueling the hardware are a dozen or more software frameworks and libraries. The myriad combinations of ML hardware and ML software make assessing ML-system performance in an architecture-neutral, representative, and reproducible manner challenging. There is a clear need for industry-wide standard ML benchmarking and evaluation criteria. MLPerf Inference answers that call. In this paper, we present our benchmarking method for evaluating ML inference systems. Driven by more than 30 organizations as well as more than 200 ML engineers and practitioners, MLPerf prescribes a set of rules and best practices to ensure comparability across systems with wildly differing architectures. The first call for submissions garnered more than 600 reproducible inference-performance measurements from 14 organizations, representing over 30 systems that showcase a wide range of capabilities. The submissions attest to the benchmark's flexibility and adaptability.

Charts are important for presenting and explaining complex data relationships. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various chart understanding tasks. However, the sheer size of these models in terms of parameters and computational requirements limits their use in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we present TinyChart, an efficient MLLM for chart understanding with only 3B parameters. TinyChart overcomes two key challenges in efficient chart understanding: (1) reduce the burden of learning numerical computations through a Program-of-Thoughts (PoT) learning strategy, which trains the model to generate Python programs for numerical calculations, and (2) reduce lengthy vision feature sequences produced by the vision transformer for high-resolution images through a Vision Token Merging module, which gradually merges most similar vision tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 3B TinyChart achieves SOTA performance on a variety of chart understanding benchmarks including ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart-to-Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. It outperforms several chart understanding MLLM with up to 13B parameters such as ChartLlama and ChartAst, and close-sourced general-purpose MLLM GPT-4V on ChartQA. It also demonstrates its superior efficiency with higher throughput during inference due to a smaller model scale and more efficient vision encoding. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/TinyChart.

Mixture of Expert Tuning (MoE-Tuning) has effectively enhanced the performance of general MLLMs with fewer parameters, yet its application in resource-limited medical settings has not been fully explored. To address this gap, we developed MoE-TinyMed, a model tailored for medical applications that significantly lowers parameter demands. In evaluations on the VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and Path-VQA datasets, MoE-TinyMed outperformed LLaVA-Med in all Med-VQA closed settings with just 3.6B parameters. Additionally, a streamlined version with 2B parameters surpassed LLaVA-Med's performance in PathVQA, showcasing its effectiveness in resource-limited healthcare settings.

Named-entity recognition (NER) in low-resource languages is usually tackled by finetuning very large multilingual LMs, an option that is often infeasible in memory- or latency-constrained settings. We ask whether small decoder LMs can be pretrained so that they adapt quickly and transfer zero-shot to languages unseen during pretraining. To this end we replace part of the autoregressive objective with first-order model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). Tagalog and Cebuano are typologically similar yet structurally different in their actor/non-actor voice systems, and hence serve as a challenging test-bed. Across four model sizes (11 M - 570 M) MAML lifts zero-shot micro-F1 by 2-6 pp under head-only tuning and 1-3 pp after full tuning, while cutting convergence time by up to 8%. Gains are largest for single-token person entities that co-occur with Tagalog case particles si/ni, highlighting the importance of surface anchors.

The success of Large Language Models (LLM) has led researchers to explore Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) for unified visual and linguistic understanding. However, the increasing model size and computational complexity of MLLM limit their use in resource-constrained environments. Small-scale MLLM (s-MLLM) aims to retain the capabilities of the large-scale model (l-MLLM) while reducing computational demands, but resulting in a significant decline in performance. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a novel LLaVA-KD framework to transfer knowledge from l-MLLM to s-MLLM. Specifically, we introduce Multimodal Distillation (MDist) to minimize the divergence between the visual-textual output distributions of l-MLLM and s-MLLM, and Relation Distillation (RDist) to transfer l-MLLM's ability to model correlations between visual features. Additionally, we propose a three-stage training scheme to fully exploit the potential of s-MLLM: 1) Distilled Pre-Training to align visual-textual representations, 2) Supervised Fine-Tuning to equip the model with multimodal understanding, and 3) Distilled Fine-Tuning to further transfer l-MLLM capabilities. Our approach significantly improves performance without altering the small model's architecture. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each proposed component. Code will be available at https://github.com/caiyuxuan1120/LLaVA-KD.

Despite a big leap forward in capability, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) tend to behave like a sloth in practical use, i.e., slow response and large latency. Recent efforts are devoted to building tiny MLLMs for better efficiency, but the plethora of visual tokens still used limit their actual speedup. In this paper, we propose a powerful and fast tiny MLLM called FlashSloth. Different from previous efforts, FlashSloth focuses on improving the descriptive power of visual tokens in the process of compressing their redundant semantics. In particular, FlashSloth introduces embedded visual compression designs to capture both visually salient and instruction-related image information, so as to achieving superior multimodal performance with fewer visual tokens. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the proposed FlashSloth, and a bunch of tiny but strong MLLMs are also comprehensively compared, e.g., InternVL2, MiniCPM-V2 and Qwen2-VL. The experimental results show that compared with these advanced tiny MLLMs, our FlashSloth can greatly reduce the number of visual tokens, training memory and computation complexity while retaining high performance on various VL tasks.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in vision-language tasks across a broad spectrum of domains. However, the large model scale and associated high computational costs pose significant challenges for training and deploying MLLMs on consumer-grade GPUs or edge devices, thereby hindering their widespread application. In this work, we introduce Mini-InternVL, a series of MLLMs with parameters ranging from 1B to 4B, which achieves 90% of the performance with only 5% of the parameters. This significant improvement in efficiency and effectiveness makes our models more accessible and applicable in various real-world scenarios. To further promote the adoption of our models, we develop a unified adaptation framework for Mini-InternVL, which enables our models to transfer and outperform specialized models in downstream tasks, including autonomous driving, medical images, and remote sensing. We believe that our study can provide valuable insights and resources to advance the development of efficient and effective MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVL.

In the era of advanced multimodel learning, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4V have made remarkable strides towards bridging language and visual elements. However, the closed-source nature and considerable computational demand present notable challenges for universal usage and modifications. This is where open-source MLLMs like LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 come in, presenting groundbreaking achievements across tasks. Despite these accomplishments, computational efficiency remains an unresolved issue, as these models, like LLaVA-v1.5-13B, require substantial resources. Addressing these issues, we introduce TinyGPT-V, a new-wave model marrying impressive performance with commonplace computational capacity. It stands out by requiring merely a 24G GPU for training and an 8G GPU or CPU for inference. Built upon Phi-2, TinyGPT-V couples an effective language backbone with pre-trained vision modules from BLIP-2 or CLIP. TinyGPT-V's 2.8B parameters can undergo a unique quantisation process, suitable for local deployment and inference tasks on 8G various devices. Our work fosters further developments for designing cost-effective, efficient, and high-performing MLLMs, expanding their applicability in a broad array of real-world scenarios. Furthermore this paper proposed a new paradigm of Multimodal Large Language Model via small backbones. Our code and training weights are placed at: https://github.com/DLYuanGod/TinyGPT-V and https://huggingface.co/Tyrannosaurus/TinyGPT-V respectively.

We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training, a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide some initial parameter-scaling results with a 7B and 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small and phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75% and 78% on MMLU, and 8.7 and 8.9 on MT-bench).

Recent large language models (LLMs) have enabled the development of advanced agentic systems that can integrate various tools and APIs to fulfill user queries through function calling. However, the deployment of these LLMs on the edge has not been explored since they typically require cloud-based infrastructure due to their substantial model size and computational demands. To this end, we present TinyAgent, an end-to-end framework for training and deploying task-specific small language model agents capable of function calling for driving agentic systems at the edge. We first show how to enable accurate function calling for open-source models via the LLMCompiler framework. We then systematically curate a high-quality dataset for function calling, which we use to fine-tune two small language models, TinyAgent-1.1B and 7B. For efficient inference, we introduce a novel tool retrieval method to reduce the input prompt length and utilize quantization to further accelerate the inference speed. As a driving application, we demonstrate a local Siri-like system for Apple's MacBook that can execute user commands through text or voice input. Our results show that our models can achieve, and even surpass, the function-calling capabilities of larger models like GPT-4-Turbo, while being fully deployed at the edge. We open-source our dataset, models, and installable package and provide a demo video for our MacBook assistant agent.

A prominent achievement of natural language processing (NLP) is its ability to understand and generate meaningful human language. This capability relies on complex feedforward transformer block architectures pre-trained on large language models (LLMs). However, LLM pre-training is currently feasible only for a few dominant companies due to the immense computational resources required, limiting broader research participation. This creates a critical need for more accessible alternatives. In this study, we explore whether tiny language models (TLMs) exhibit the same key qualitative features of LLMs. We demonstrate that TLMs exhibit a clear performance gap between pre-trained and non-pre-trained models across classification tasks, indicating the effectiveness of pre-training, even at a tiny scale. The performance gap increases with the size of the pre-training dataset and with greater overlap between tokens in the pre-training and classification datasets. Furthermore, the classification accuracy achieved by a pre-trained deep TLM architecture can be replicated through a soft committee of multiple, independently pre-trained shallow architectures, enabling low-latency TLMs without affecting classification accuracy. Our results are based on pre-training BERT-6 and variants of BERT-1 on subsets of the Wikipedia dataset and evaluating their performance on FewRel, AGNews, and DBPedia classification tasks. Future research on TLM is expected to further illuminate the mechanisms underlying NLP, especially given that its biologically inspired models suggest that TLMs may be sufficient for children or adolescents to develop language. The data and code that support the findings of this study are openly available on https://github.com/Rg32601/Tiny-Language-Models .

We present TinyLlama, a compact 1.1B language model pretrained on around 1 trillion tokens for approximately 3 epochs. Building on the architecture and tokenizer of Llama 2, TinyLlama leverages various advances contributed by the open-source community (e.g., FlashAttention), achieving better computational efficiency. Despite its relatively small size, TinyLlama demonstrates remarkable performance in a series of downstream tasks. It significantly outperforms existing open-source language models with comparable sizes. Our model checkpoints and code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/jzhang38/TinyLlama.

Image classification usually requires connectivity and access to the cloud which is often limited in many parts of the world, including hard to reach rural areas. TinyML aims to solve this problem by hosting AI assistants on constrained devices, eliminating connectivity issues by processing data within the device itself, without internet or cloud access. This pilot study explores the use of tinyML to provide healthcare support with low spec devices in low connectivity environments, focusing on diagnosis of skin diseases and the ethical use of AI assistants in a healthcare setting. To investigate this, 10,000 images of skin lesions were used to train a model for classifying visually detectable diseases (VDDs). The model weights were then offloaded to a Raspberry Pi with a webcam attached, to be used for the classification of skin lesions without internet access. It was found that the developed prototype achieved a test accuracy of 78% and a test loss of 1.08.

The number of large language models (LLMs) with varying parameter scales and vocabularies is increasing. While they deliver powerful performance, they also face a set of common optimization needs to meet specific requirements or standards, such as instruction following or avoiding the output of sensitive information from the real world. However, how to reuse the fine-tuning outcomes of one model to other models to reduce training costs remains a challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-model Control (CMC), a method that improves multiple LLMs in one-time training with a portable tiny language model. Specifically, we have observed that the logit shift before and after fine-tuning is remarkably similar across different models. Based on this insight, we incorporate a tiny language model with a minimal number of parameters. By training alongside a frozen template LLM, the tiny model gains the capability to alter the logits output by the LLMs. To make this tiny language model applicable to models with different vocabularies, we propose a novel token mapping strategy named PM-MinED. We have conducted extensive experiments on instruction tuning and unlearning tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of CMC. Our code is available at https://github.com/wujwyi/CMC.

We present the TinyLLaVA framework that provides a unified perspective in designing and analyzing the small-scale Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We empirically study the effects of different vision encoders, connection modules, language models, training data and training recipes. Our extensive experiments showed that better quality of data combined with better training recipes, smaller LMMs can consistently achieve on-par performances compared to bigger LMMs. Under our framework, we train a family of small-scale LMMs. Our best model, TinyLLaVA-3.1B, achieves better overall performance against existing 7B models such as LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-VL. We hope our findings can serve as baselines for future research in terms of data scaling, training setups and model selections. Our model weights and codes will be made public.

The recent surge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of AI research and industry, shedding light on a promising path toward the next AI milestone. However, significant challenges remain preventing MLLMs from being practical in real-world applications. The most notable challenge comes from the huge cost of running an MLLM with a massive number of parameters and extensive computation. As a result, most MLLMs need to be deployed on high-performing cloud servers, which greatly limits their application scopes such as mobile, offline, energy-sensitive, and privacy-protective scenarios. In this work, we present MiniCPM-V, a series of efficient MLLMs deployable on end-side devices. By integrating the latest MLLM techniques in architecture, pretraining and alignment, the latest MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 has several notable features: (1) Strong performance, outperforming GPT-4V-1106, Gemini Pro and Claude 3 on OpenCompass, a comprehensive evaluation over 11 popular benchmarks, (2) strong OCR capability and 1.8M pixel high-resolution image perception at any aspect ratio, (3) trustworthy behavior with low hallucination rates, (4) multilingual support for 30+ languages, and (5) efficient deployment on mobile phones. More importantly, MiniCPM-V can be viewed as a representative example of a promising trend: The model sizes for achieving usable (e.g., GPT-4V) level performance are rapidly decreasing, along with the fast growth of end-side computation capacity. This jointly shows that GPT-4V level MLLMs deployed on end devices are becoming increasingly possible, unlocking a wider spectrum of real-world AI applications in the near future.

Small Language Models (SLMs) are generally considered to be more compact versions of large language models (LLMs), typically having fewer than 7 billion parameters. This study investigates the ability of small language models to learn, retain, and subsequently eliminate noise that is typically not found on the internet, where most pretraining datasets are sourced. For this, four pre-trained SLMs were utilized: Olmo 1B, Qwen1.5 1.8B, Gemma 2B, and Phi2 2.7B. The models were instruction-tuned without noise and tested for task execution with in-context learning. Afterward, noise patterns were introduced to evaluate the models' learning and unlearning capabilities. We evaluated the models' performance at various training levels. Phi consistently excelled with word-level noise but performed the worst with character-level noise. Despite being the smallest with approximately 1 billion parameters, Olmo performed consistently well on tasks.

Machine learning applications on extremely low-power devices, commonly referred to as tiny machine learning (TinyML), promises a smarter and more connected world. However, the advancement of current TinyML research is hindered by the limited size and quality of pertinent datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce Wake Vision, a large-scale, diverse dataset tailored for person detection -- the canonical task for TinyML visual sensing. Wake Vision comprises over 6 million images, which is a hundredfold increase compared to the previous standard, and has undergone thorough quality filtering. Using Wake Vision for training results in a 2.41\% increase in accuracy compared to the established benchmark. Alongside the dataset, we provide a collection of five detailed benchmark sets that assess model performance on specific segments of the test data, such as varying lighting conditions, distances from the camera, and demographic characteristics of subjects. These novel fine-grained benchmarks facilitate the evaluation of model quality in challenging real-world scenarios that are often ignored when focusing solely on overall accuracy. Through an evaluation of a MobileNetV2 TinyML model on the benchmarks, we show that the input resolution plays a more crucial role than the model width in detecting distant subjects and that the impact of quantization on model robustness is minimal, thanks to the dataset quality. These findings underscore the importance of a detailed evaluation to identify essential factors for model development. The dataset, benchmark suite, code, and models are publicly available under the CC-BY 4.0 license, enabling their use for commercial use cases.

We present TinyLLaVA Factory, an open-source modular codebase for small-scale large multimodal models (LMMs) with a focus on simplicity of code implementations, extensibility of new features, and reproducibility of training results. Following the design philosophy of the factory pattern in software engineering, TinyLLaVA Factory modularizes the entire system into interchangeable components, with each component integrating a suite of cutting-edge models and methods, meanwhile leaving room for extensions to more features. In addition to allowing users to customize their own LMMs, TinyLLaVA Factory provides popular training recipes to let users pretrain and finetune their models with less coding effort. Empirical experiments validate the effectiveness of our codebase. The goal of TinyLLaVA Factory is to assist researchers and practitioners in exploring the wide landscape of designing and training small-scale LMMs with affordable computational resources.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, they still face challenges such as high computational demands and privacy concerns. This paper focuses on developing efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) and Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) that retain competitive reasoning abilities. We introduce a novel training pipeline that enhances reasoning capabilities and facilitates deployment on edge devices, achieving state-of-the-art performance while minimizing development costs. \InfR~ aims to advance AI systems by improving reasoning, reducing adoption barriers, and addressing privacy concerns through smaller model sizes. Resources are available at https://github. com/Reallm-Labs/InfiR.

Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and fragility in real-world applications, and research is hindered by saturation across existing dataset benchmarks. In response, we present DataPerf, a community-led benchmark suite for evaluating ML datasets and data-centric algorithms. We aim to foster innovation in data-centric AI through competition, comparability, and reproducibility. We enable the ML community to iterate on datasets, instead of just architectures, and we provide an open, online platform with multiple rounds of challenges to support this iterative development. The first iteration of DataPerf contains five benchmarks covering a wide spectrum of data-centric techniques, tasks, and modalities in vision, speech, acquisition, debugging, and diffusion prompting, and we support hosting new contributed benchmarks from the community. The benchmarks, online evaluation platform, and baseline implementations are open source, and the MLCommons Association will maintain DataPerf to ensure long-term benefits to academia and industry.

Tiny Aya redefines what a small multilingual language model can achieve. Trained on 70 languages and refined through region-aware posttraining, it delivers state-of-the-art in translation quality, strong multilingual understanding, and high-quality target-language generation, all with just 3.35B parameters. The release includes a pretrained foundation model, a globally balanced instruction-tuned variant, and three region-specialized models targeting languages from Africa, South Asia, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and West Asia. This report details the training strategy, data composition, and comprehensive evaluation framework behind Tiny Aya, and presents an alternative scaling path for multilingual AI: one centered on efficiency, balanced performance across languages, and practical deployment.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as a promising paradigm for foundation models due to its efficient and powerful scalability. In this work, we present Sigma-MoE-Tiny, an MoE language model that achieves the highest sparsity compared to existing open-source models. Sigma-MoE-Tiny employs fine-grained expert segmentation with up to 96 experts per layer, while activating only one expert for each token, resulting in 20B total parameters with just 0.5B activated. The major challenge introduced by such extreme sparsity lies in expert load balancing. We find that the widely-used load balancing loss tends to become ineffective in the lower layers under this setting. To address this issue, we propose a progressive sparsification schedule aiming to balance expert utilization and training stability. Sigma-MoE-Tiny is pre-trained on a diverse and high-quality corpus, followed by post-training to further unlock its capabilities. The entire training process remains remarkably stable, with no occurrence of irrecoverable loss spikes. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that, despite activating only 0.5B parameters, Sigma-MoE-Tiny achieves top-tier performance among counterparts of comparable or significantly larger scale. In addition, we provide an in-depth discussion of load balancing in highly sparse MoE models, offering insights for advancing sparsity in future MoE architectures. Project page: https://qghuxmu.github.io/Sigma-MoE-Tiny Code: https://github.com/microsoft/ltp-megatron-lm

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to significant improvements in natural language processing but also poses challenges due to their high computational and energy demands. This paper introduces a series of research efforts focused on Super Tiny Language Models (STLMs), which aim to deliver high performance with significantly reduced parameter counts. We explore innovative techniques such as byte-level tokenization with a pooling mechanism, weight tying, and efficient training strategies. These methods collectively reduce the parameter count by 90% to 95% compared to traditional models while maintaining competitive performance. This series of papers will explore into various subproblems, including tokenizer-free models, self-play based training, and alternative training objectives, targeting models with 10M, 50M, and 100M parameters. Our ultimate goal is to make high-performance language models more accessible and practical for a wide range of applications.

We introduce Atla Selene Mini, a state-of-the-art small language model-as-a-judge (SLMJ). Selene Mini is a general-purpose evaluator that outperforms the best SLMJs and GPT-4o-mini on overall performance across 11 out-of-distribution benchmarks, spanning absolute scoring, classification, and pairwise preference tasks. It is the highest-scoring 8B generative model on RewardBench, surpassing strong baselines like GPT-4o and specialized judges. To achieve this, we develop a principled data curation strategy that augments public datasets with synthetically generated critiques and ensures high quality through filtering and dataset ablations. We train our model on a combined direct preference optimization (DPO) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) loss, and produce a highly promptable evaluator that excels in real-world scenarios. Selene Mini shows dramatically improved zero-shot agreement with human expert evaluations on financial and medical industry datasets. It is also robust to variations in prompt format. Preliminary results indicate that Selene Mini is the top-ranking evaluator in a live, community-driven Judge Arena. We release the model weights on HuggingFace (https://hf.co/AtlaAI/Selene-1-Mini-Llama-3.1-8B) and Ollama to encourage widespread community adoption.

Machine learning on tiny IoT devices based on microcontroller units (MCU) is appealing but challenging: the memory of microcontrollers is 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller even than mobile phones. We propose MCUNet, a framework that jointly designs the efficient neural architecture (TinyNAS) and the lightweight inference engine (TinyEngine), enabling ImageNet-scale inference on microcontrollers. TinyNAS adopts a two-stage neural architecture search approach that first optimizes the search space to fit the resource constraints, then specializes the network architecture in the optimized search space. TinyNAS can automatically handle diverse constraints (i.e.device, latency, energy, memory) under low search costs.TinyNAS is co-designed with TinyEngine, a memory-efficient inference library to expand the search space and fit a larger model. TinyEngine adapts the memory scheduling according to the overall network topology rather than layer-wise optimization, reducing the memory usage by 4.8x, and accelerating the inference by 1.7-3.3x compared to TF-Lite Micro and CMSIS-NN. MCUNet is the first to achieves >70% ImageNet top1 accuracy on an off-the-shelf commercial microcontroller, using 3.5x less SRAM and 5.7x less Flash compared to quantized MobileNetV2 and ResNet-18. On visual&audio wake words tasks, MCUNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and runs 2.4-3.4x faster than MobileNetV2 and ProxylessNAS-based solutions with 3.7-4.1x smaller peak SRAM. Our study suggests that the era of always-on tiny machine learning on IoT devices has arrived. Code and models can be found here: https://tinyml.mit.edu.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of small language models (SLMs) for agentic tasks (function/tool/API calling) with a focus on running agents on edge devices without reliance on cloud infrastructure. We evaluate SLMs using the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) framework and describe parameter-driven optimization strategies that include supervised fine-tuning (SFT), parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), reinforcement learning (RL)-based optimization, preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and hybrid methods. We report results for models including TinyAgent, TinyLlama, Qwen, and xLAM across BFCL categories (simple, multiple, parallel, parallel-multiple, and relevance detection), both in live and non-live settings, and in multi-turn evaluations. We additionally detail a DPO training pipeline constructed from AgentBank data (e.g., ALFRED), including our conversion of SFT data to chosen-rejected pairs using TinyLlama responses as rejected outputs and manual validation. Our results demonstrate clear accuracy differences across model scales where medium-sized models (1-3B parameters) significantly outperform ultra-compact models (<1B parameters), achieving up to 65.74% overall accuracy, and 55.62% multi-turn accuracy with hybrid optimization. This study highlights the importance of hybrid optimization strategies that enable small language models to deliver accurate, efficient, and stable agentic AI on edge devices, making privacy-preserving, low-latency autonomous agents practical beyond the cloud.