The Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team at Meta has announced five projects advancing the company’s pursuit of advanced machine intelligence (AMI). The latest releases from Meta focus heavily on enhancing AI perception – the ability for machines to process and interpret sensory information – alongside advancements in language modelling, robotics, and collaborative AI agents. Meta stated its goal involves creating machines “that are able to acquire, process, and interpret sensory information about the world around us and are able to use this information to make decisions with human-like intelligence and speed.” The five new releases represent diverse but interconnected efforts towards achieving this ambitious goal. Central to the new releases is the Perception Encoder, described as a large-scale vision encoder designed to excel across various image and video tasks. Vision encoders function as the “eyes” for AI systems, allowing them to understand visual data. Meta highlights the increasing challenge of building encoders that meet the demands of advanced AI, requiring capabilities that bridge vision and language, handle both images and videos effectively, and remain robust under challenging conditions, including potential adversarial attacks. The ideal encoder, according to Meta, should recognise a wide array of concepts while distinguishing subtle details—citing examples like spotting “a stingray burrowed under the sea floor, identifying a tiny goldfinch in the background of an image, or catching a scampering agouti on a night vision wildlife camera.” Meta claims the Perception Encoder achieves “exceptional performance on image and video zero-shot classification and retrieval, surpassing all existing open source and proprietary models for such tasks.” Furthermore, its perceptual strengths reportedly translate well to language tasks.  When aligned with a large language model (LLM), the encoder is said to outperform other vision encoders in areas like visual question answering (VQA), captioning, document understanding, and grounding (linking text to specific image regions). It also reportedly boosts performance on tasks traditionally difficult for LLMs, such as understanding spatial relationships (e.g., “if one object is behind another”) or camera movement relative to an object. “As Perception Encoder begins to be integrated into new applications, we’re excited to see how its advanced vision capabilities will enable even more capable AI systems,” Meta said. Perception Language Model (PLM): Open research in vision-language Complementing the encoder is the Perception Language Model (PLM), an open and reproducible vision-language model aimed at complex visual recognition tasks.  PLM was trained using large-scale synthetic data combined with open vision-language datasets, explicitly without distilling knowledge from external proprietary models. Recognising gaps in existing video understanding data, the FAIR team collected 2.5 million new, human-labelled samples focused on fine-grained video question answering and spatio-temporal captioning. Meta claims this forms the “largest dataset of its kind to date.” PLM is offered in 1, 3, and 8 billion parameter versions, catering to academic research needs requiring transparency. Alongside the models, Meta is releasing PLM-VideoBench, a new benchmark specifically designed to test capabilities often missed by existing benchmarks, namely “fine-grained activity understanding and spatiotemporally grounded reasoning.” Meta hopes the combination of open models, the large dataset, and the challenging benchmark will empower the open-source community. Bridging the gap between language commands and physical action is Meta Locate 3D. This end-to-end model aims to allow robots to accurately localise objects in a 3D environment based on open-vocabulary natural language queries. Meta Locate 3D processes 3D point clouds directly from RGB-D sensors (like those found on some robots or depth-sensing cameras). Given a textual prompt, such as “flower vase near TV console,” the system considers spatial relationships and context to pinpoint the correct object instance, distinguishing it from, say, a “vase on the table.” The system comprises three main parts: a preprocessing step converting 2D features to 3D featurised point clouds; the 3D-JEPA encoder (a pretrained model creating a contextualised 3D world representation); and the Locate 3D decoder, which takes the 3D representation and the language query to output bounding boxes and masks for the specified objects. Alongside the model, Meta is releasing a substantial new dataset for object localisation based on referring expressions. It includes 130,000 language annotations across 1,346 scenes from the ARKitScenes, ScanNet, and ScanNet++ datasets, effectively doubling existing annotated data in this area. Meta sees this technology as crucial for developing more capable robotic systems, including its own PARTNR robot project, enabling more natural human-robot interaction and collaboration. Dynamic Byte Latent Transformer: Efficient and robust language modelling Following research published in late 2024, Meta is now releasing the model weights for its 8-billion parameter Dynamic Byte Latent Transformer. This architecture represents a shift away from traditional tokenisation-based language models, operating instead at the byte level. Meta claims this approach achieves comparable performance at scale while offering significant improvements in inference efficiency and robustness. Traditional LLMs break text into ‘tokens’, which can struggle with misspellings, novel words, or adversarial inputs. Byte-level models process raw bytes, potentially offering greater resilience. Meta reports that the Dynamic Byte Latent Transformer “outperforms tokeniser-based models across various tasks, with an average robustness advantage of +7 points (on perturbed HellaSwag), and reaching as high as +55 points on tasks from the CUTE token-understanding benchmark.” By releasing the weights alongside the previously shared codebase, Meta encourages the research community to explore this alternative approach to language modelling. The final release, Collaborative Reasoner, tackles the complex challenge of creating AI agents that can effectively collaborate with humans or other AIs. Meta notes that human collaboration often yields superior results, and aims to imbue AI with similar capabilities for tasks like helping with homework or job interview preparation. Such collaboration requires not just problem-solving but also social skills like communication, empathy, providing feedback, and understanding others’ mental states (theory-of-mind), often unfolding over multiple conversational turns. Current LLM training and evaluation methods often neglect these social and collaborative aspects. Furthermore, collecting relevant conversational data is expensive and difficult. Collaborative Reasoner provides a framework to evaluate and enhance these skills. It includes goal-oriented tasks requiring multi-step reasoning achieved through conversation between two agents. The framework tests abilities like disagreeing constructively, persuading a partner, and reaching a shared best solution. Meta’s evaluations revealed that current models struggle to consistently leverage collaboration for better outcomes. To address this, they propose a self-improvement technique using synthetic interaction data where an LLM agent collaborates with itself. Generating this data at scale is enabled by a new high-performance model serving engine called Matrix. Using this approach on maths, scientific, and social reasoning tasks reportedly yielded improvements of up to 29.4% compared to the standard ‘chain-of-thought’ performance of a single LLM. By open-sourcing the data generation and modelling pipeline, Meta aims to foster further research into creating truly “social agents that can partner with humans and other agents.” These five releases collectively underscore Meta’s continued heavy investment in fundamental AI research, particularly focusing on building blocks for machines that can perceive, understand, and interact with the world in more human-like ways.  See also: Meta will train AI models using EU user data Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. 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