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Abstract Large multimodal language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4V and GPT-4o have achieved remarkable advancements in understanding and generating multimodal content, showcasing superior quality and capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their deployment faces significant challenges, including slow inference, high computational cost, and impracticality for on-device applications. In contrast, the emergence of small MLLMs, exemplified by the LLava-series models and Phi-3-Vision, offers promising alternatives with faster inference, reduced deployment costs, and the ability to handle domain-specific scenarios. Despite their growing presence, the capability boundaries between large and small MLLMs remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive evaluation to benchmark both small and large MLLMs, spanning general capabilities such as object recognition, temporal reasoning, and multimodal comprehension, as well as real-world applications in domains like industry and automotive. Our evaluation reveals that small MLLMs can achieve comparable performance to large models in specific scenarios but lag significantly in complex tasks requiring deeper reasoning or nuanced understanding. Furthermore, we identify common failure cases in both small and large MLLMs, highlighting domains where even state-of-the-art models struggle. We hope our findings will guide the research community in pushing the quality boundaries of MLLMs, advancing their usability and effectiveness across diverse applications. 

Language-guided human motion synthesis has been a challenging task due to the inherent complexity and diversity of human behaviors. Previous methods face limitations in generalization to novel actions, often resulting in unrealistic or incoherent motion sequences. In this paper, we propose ATOM (ATomic mOtion Modeling) to mitigate this problem, by decomposing actions into atomic actions, and employing a curriculum learning strategy to learn atomic action composition. First, we disentangle complex human motions into a set of atomic actions during learning, and then assemble novel actions using the learned atomic actions, which offers better adaptability to new actions. Moreover, we introduce a curriculum learning training strategy that leverages masked motion modeling with a gradual increase in the mask ratio, and thus facilitates atomic action assembly. This approach mitigates the overfitting problem commonly encountered in previous methods while enforcing the model to learn better motion representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ATOM through extensive experiments, including text-to-motion and action-to-motion synthesis tasks. We further illustrate its superiority in synthesizing plausible and coherent text-guided human motion sequences.