Wan-Cyuan Fan (@CyuanWan) header
Wan-Cyuan Fan (@CyuanWan) profile picture

CS PhD student @UBC // Research intern @Microsoft, Seattle // Beginner photographer w/ Canon 70D

Vancouver, British Columbia
Joined July 2019
Photo by Wan-Cyuan Fan (@CyuanWan)
🔬 ViT sink tokens aren't just attention "dumps", they're carrying critical visual information shaping LVLMs' reasoning capability. Glad to share our work: "To Sink or Not to Sink: Visual Information Pathways in Large Vision-Language Models" Check the thread for more detail!
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Contributions: ✅ The first analysis of how visual sink tokens propagate in LVLMs and what they mean ✅ A training-free method to reposition sinks in existing LVLMs to improve reasoning ✅ DIYSink: A new architecture with a Dual-MLP Projector that learns optimal sink management
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We trace the full path of ViT sink tokens into LLMs, revealing that they: - Act as meaningful visual summaries, not just noise. - Capture coarse-grained features that aid in global visual reasoning. - May hurt performance on tasks requiring fine-grained, localized detail.
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
VLA model developers like @LeRobotHF aren't concerned enough with robotic safety. They need some skin in the game. I would like to propose a new robotic competition format for ICRA 2026:
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
The “no-op” acts as an attention sink. It allows a head to not move anything if it doesn’t want to. The circuit works by attending strongly to a single spatial location and then moving a “nothing vector” in the value projection. Each head uses one or two of its QK pairwise detectors to attend to the no-op position. This is the threshold. If other QK matches want to count for anything in the softmax they have to exceed this threshold.
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
ChatGPT was just step 1. Google dropped a whitepaper on the next evolution of AI: Agents. Now, everyone—from Satya Nadella to Jensen Huang—is talking about them. Here’s why AI agents are the next big thing. Let's break it down. 🧵
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Build human-like memory for your Agents! Every agentic and RAG system struggles with real-time knowledge updates and fast data retrieval. Zep AI solves these issues with its continuously learning and temporally-aware Knowledge Graph—think of it as human memory for AI Agents. Like humans, Zep organizes an Agent's memories into episodes, extracts entities and their relationships from these episodes, and stores them in a knowledge graph: (refer the image below as you read) 1️⃣ Episode Subgraph: Captures raw data with timestamps, retaining every detail for easy historical lookup. 2️⃣ Semantic Entity Subgraph: Extracts entities (e.g., “Alice,” “Google”) and facts (“Alice works at Google”). Everything is versioned, so outdated info gets replaced. 3️⃣ Community Subgraph: Groups related entities into clusters, with summaries for faster retrieval. Zep delivers up to 18.5% higher accuracy with 90% lower latency when compared to tools like MemGPT. It's fully open-source. I've shared a detailed paper with more information and their GitHub repository in next tweet!
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Let’s fucking goo!! DeepSeek R1 1.5B running FULLY LOCALLY in your browser at 60 tok/ sec powered by WebGPU🔥 Intelligence truly is too cheap to meter! ⚡️
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browser-use agent is great you can also use it with an app like this pip install 'ai-gradio[browser]' import gradio as gr import ai_gradio gr.load( name='browser:gpt-4-turbo', src=ai_gradio.registry, ).launch()
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
NVIDIA just dropped MASSIVE AI announcements. This will change the way we use technology forever. Here're top 7 announcements from SIGGRAPH 2024 you don't want to miss:
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We just released our survey on "Model MoErging", But what is MoErging?🤔Read on! Imagine a world where fine-tuned models, each specialized in a specific domain, can collaborate and "compose/remix" their skills using some routing mechanism to tackle new tasks and queries! 🧵👇 co first-author @colinraffel 📰: arxiv.org/abs/2408.07057
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Our new work on extremely long context for vision language models! LongVILA pushes the boundaries of VILA - the best open source VLM. Code: github.com/NVlabs/LongVILA Check out VILA: github.com/NVlabs/VILA
LongVILA Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos discuss: huggingface.co/papers/2408.1… Long-context capability is critical for multi-modal foundation models. We introduce LongVILA, a full-stack solution for long-context vision-language models, including system, model training, and dataset development. On the system side, we introduce the first Multi-Modal Sequence Parallelism (MM-SP) system that enables long-context training and inference, enabling 2M context length training on 256 GPUs. MM-SP is also efficient, being 2.1x - 5.7x faster than Ring-Style Sequence Parallelism and 1.1x - 1.4x faster than Megatron-LM in text-only settings. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with Hugging Face Transformers. For model training, we propose a five-stage pipeline comprising alignment, pre-training, context extension, and long-short joint supervised fine-tuning. Regarding datasets, we meticulously construct large-scale visual language pre-training datasets and long video instruction-following datasets to support our multi-stage training process. The full-stack solution extends the feasible frame number of VILA by a factor of 128 (from 8 to 1024 frames) and improves long video captioning score from 2.00 to 3.26 (1.6x), achieving 99.5% accuracy in 1400-frames video (274k context length) needle in a haystack. LongVILA-8B also demonstrates a consistent improvement in performance on long videos within the VideoMME benchmark as the video frames increase.
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
Meta announces UniBench Visual Reasoning Requires Rethinking Vision-Language Beyond Scaling discuss: huggingface.co/papers/2408.0… Significant research efforts have been made to scale and improve vision-language model (VLM) training approaches. Yet, with an ever-growing number of benchmarks, researchers are tasked with the heavy burden of implementing each protocol, bearing a non-trivial computational cost, and making sense of how all these benchmarks translate into meaningful axes of progress. To facilitate a systematic evaluation of VLM progress, we introduce UniBench: a unified implementation of 50+ VLM benchmarks spanning a comprehensive range of carefully categorized capabilities from object recognition to spatial awareness, counting, and much more. We showcase the utility of UniBench for measuring progress by evaluating nearly 60 publicly available vision-language models, trained on scales of up to 12.8B samples. We find that while scaling training data or model size can boost many vision-language model capabilities, scaling offers little benefit for reasoning or relations. Surprisingly, we also discover today's best VLMs struggle on simple digit recognition and counting tasks, e.g. MNIST, which much simpler networks can solve. Where scale falls short, we find that more precise interventions, such as data quality or tailored-learning objectives offer more promise. For practitioners, we also offer guidance on selecting a suitable VLM for a given application. Finally, we release an easy-to-run UniBench code-base with the full set of 50+ benchmarks and comparisons across 59 models as well as a distilled, representative set of benchmarks that runs in 5 minutes on a single GPU.
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
Happy to announce that I'm joining as an Asst. Prof. in CS at UToronto @UofTCompSci+@VectorInst in Fall '25, working on #NLProc, Causality, and AI Safety! I want to sincerely thank my dear mentors, friends, collabs & many who mean a lot to me. Welcome #PhDs/Research MSc to apply!
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
Apple released Matryoshka Diffusion Models github: github.com/apple/ml-mdm Diffusion models are the de facto approach for generating high-quality images and videos, but learning high-dimensional models remains a formidable task due to computational and optimization challenges. Existing methods often resort to training cascaded models in pixel space or using a downsampled latent space of a separately trained auto-encoder. In this paper, we introduce Matryoshka Diffusion Models(MDM), an end-to-end framework for high-resolution image and video synthesis. We propose a diffusion process that denoises inputs at multiple resolutions jointly and uses a NestedUNet architecture where features and parameters for small-scale inputs are nested within those of large scales. In addition, MDM enables a progressive training schedule from lower to higher resolutions, which leads to significant improvements in optimization for high-resolution generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various benchmarks, including class-conditioned image generation, high-resolution text-to-image, and text-to-video applications. Remarkably, we can train a single pixel-space model at resolutions of up to 1024x1024 pixels, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization using the CC12M dataset, which contains only 12 million images.
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
MMIU Multimodal Multi-image Understanding for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models discuss: huggingface.co/papers/2408.0… The capability to process multiple images is crucial for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of a scene. Recent multi-image LVLMs have begun to address this need. However, their evaluation has not kept pace with their development. To fill this gap, we introduce the Multimodal Multi-image Understanding (MMIU) benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess LVLMs across a wide range of multi-image tasks. MMIU encompasses 7 types of multi-image relationships, 52 tasks, 77K images, and 11K meticulously curated multiple-choice questions, making it the most extensive benchmark of its kind. Our evaluation of 24 popular LVLMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, reveals significant challenges in multi-image comprehension, particularly in tasks involving spatial understanding. Even the most advanced models, such as GPT-4o, achieve only 55.7% accuracy on MMIU. Through multi-faceted analytical experiments, we identify key performance gaps and limitations, providing valuable insights for future model and data improvements. We aim for MMIU to advance the frontier of LVLM research and development, moving us toward achieving sophisticated multimodal multi-image user interactions.
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
OpenAI just dropped Advanced Voice Mode And people are going crazy over it. Here are 7 wild examples you don't want to miss:
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Wan-Cyuan Fan retweeted
READ: 130-page cheat sheet outlining key #MachineLearning concepts: bit.ly/130pgMLsheet
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Incredibly honored and humbled by the overwhelming response to my tutorial, and thank you everyone who attended in person. Truly heartwarming to hear how much you enjoyed it. Many have been asking for a recording, and I prepared one with my own subtitles youtu.be/yBL7J0kgldU
If you're attending ICML 2024, join my 2-hour tutorial on Monday July 22 to explore the Physics of Language Model - all 6 parts. Visit: physics.allen-zhu.com/ and it will be live-streamed on Zoom. BONUS: this is the premiere of Part 2.1 + 2.2, don't miss out! #ICML2024 #MetaAI
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