Daily Papers

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has shown remarkable progress in generating realistic images. However, in this paper, we take a step "backward" and address AIGC for the most rudimentary visual modality of human sketches. Our objective is on the creative nature of sketches, and that creative sketching should take the form of an interactive process. We further enable text to drive the sketch ideation process, allowing creativity to be freely defined, while simultaneously tackling the challenge of "I can't sketch". We present a method to generate controlled sketches using a text-conditioned diffusion model trained on pixel representations of images. Our proposed approach, referred to as SketchDreamer, integrates a differentiable rasteriser of Bezier curves that optimises an initial input to distil abstract semantic knowledge from a pretrained diffusion model. We utilise Score Distillation Sampling to learn a sketch that aligns with a given caption, which importantly enable both text and sketch to interact with the ideation process. Our objective is to empower non-professional users to create sketches and, through a series of optimisation processes, transform a narrative into a storyboard by expanding the text prompt while making minor adjustments to the sketch input. Through this work, we hope to aspire the way we create visual content, democratise the creative process, and inspire further research in enhancing human creativity in AIGC. The code is available at https://github.com/WinKawaks/SketchDreamer.

Vision models often fail systematically on groups of data that share common semantic characteristics (e.g., rare objects or unusual scenes), but identifying these failure modes is a challenge. We introduce AdaVision, an interactive process for testing vision models which helps users identify and fix coherent failure modes. Given a natural language description of a coherent group, AdaVision retrieves relevant images from LAION-5B with CLIP. The user then labels a small amount of data for model correctness, which is used in successive retrieval rounds to hill-climb towards high-error regions, refining the group definition. Once a group is saturated, AdaVision uses GPT-3 to suggest new group descriptions for the user to explore. We demonstrate the usefulness and generality of AdaVision in user studies, where users find major bugs in state-of-the-art classification, object detection, and image captioning models. These user-discovered groups have failure rates 2-3x higher than those surfaced by automatic error clustering methods. Finally, finetuning on examples found with AdaVision fixes the discovered bugs when evaluated on unseen examples, without degrading in-distribution accuracy, and while also improving performance on out-of-distribution datasets.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.

Fine-grained capturing of 3D HOI boosts human activity understanding and facilitates downstream visual tasks, including action recognition, holistic scene reconstruction, and human motion synthesis. Despite its significance, existing works mostly assume that humans interact with rigid objects using only a few body parts, limiting their scope. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of f-AHOI, wherein the whole human bodies interact with articulated objects, whose parts are connected by movable joints. We present CHAIRS, a large-scale motion-captured f-AHOI dataset, consisting of 16.2 hours of versatile interactions between 46 participants and 81 articulated and rigid sittable objects. CHAIRS provides 3D meshes of both humans and articulated objects during the entire interactive process, as well as realistic and physically plausible full-body interactions. We show the value of CHAIRS with object pose estimation. By learning the geometrical relationships in HOI, we devise the very first model that leverage human pose estimation to tackle the estimation of articulated object poses and shapes during whole-body interactions. Given an image and an estimated human pose, our model first reconstructs the pose and shape of the object, then optimizes the reconstruction according to a learned interaction prior. Under both evaluation settings (e.g., with or without the knowledge of objects' geometries/structures), our model significantly outperforms baselines. We hope CHAIRS will promote the community towards finer-grained interaction understanding. We will make the data/code publicly available.

Recent advancements have highlighted that Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations when solving complex reasoning problems, leading to erroneous results. To tackle this issue, researchers incorporate Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs. However, existing methods face two limitations: 1) they typically assume that all answers to the questions are contained in KGs, neglecting the incompleteness issue of KGs, and 2) they treat the KG as a static repository and overlook the implicit logical reasoning structures inherent in KGs. In this paper, we introduce SymAgent, an innovative neural-symbolic agent framework that achieves collaborative augmentation between KGs and LLMs. We conceptualize KGs as dynamic environments and transform complex reasoning tasks into a multi-step interactive process, enabling KGs to participate deeply in the reasoning process. SymAgent consists of two modules: Agent-Planner and Agent-Executor. The Agent-Planner leverages LLM's inductive reasoning capability to extract symbolic rules from KGs, guiding efficient question decomposition. The Agent-Executor autonomously invokes predefined action tools to integrate information from KGs and external documents, addressing the issues of KG incompleteness. Furthermore, we design a self-learning framework comprising online exploration and offline iterative policy updating phases, enabling the agent to automatically synthesize reasoning trajectories and improve performance. Experimental results demonstrate that SymAgent with weak LLM backbones (i.e., 7B series) yields better or comparable performance compared to various strong baselines. Further analysis reveals that our agent can identify missing triples, facilitating automatic KG updates.

Recent studies have presented compelling evidence that large language models (LLMs) can equip embodied agents with the self-driven capability to interact with the world, which marks an initial step toward versatile robotics. However, these efforts tend to overlook the visual richness of open worlds, rendering the entire interactive process akin to "a blindfolded text-based game." Consequently, LLM-based agents frequently encounter challenges in intuitively comprehending their surroundings and producing responses that are easy to understand. In this paper, we propose Steve-Eye, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model designed to address this limitation. Steve-Eye integrates the LLM with a visual encoder which enables it to process visual-text inputs and generate multimodal feedback. In addition, we use a semi-automatic strategy to collect an extensive dataset comprising 850K open-world instruction pairs, empowering our model to encompass three essential functions for an agent: multimodal perception, foundational knowledge base, and skill prediction and planning. Lastly, we develop three open-world evaluation benchmarks, then carry out extensive experiments from a wide range of perspectives to validate our model's capability to strategically act and plan. Codes and datasets will be released.

Tuning language models for dialogue generation has been a prevalent paradigm for building capable dialogue agents. Yet, traditional tuning narrowly views dialogue generation as resembling other language generation tasks, ignoring the role disparities between two speakers and the multi-round interactive process that dialogues ought to be. Such a manner often leads to unsatisfactory chat consistency for the built agent. In this work, we emphasize the interactive, communicative nature of dialogue and argue that it is more feasible to model the speaker roles of agent and user separately, enabling the agent to adhere to its role consistently. With this in mind, we propose an efficient Multi-round Interactive Dialogue Tuning (Midi-Tuning) framework. It models the agent and user individually with two adapters built upon large language models. The adapters make use of respective utterances round by round in alternating order and they are tuned via a round-level memory caching mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, our framework performs superior to traditional fine-tuning and harbors the tremendous potential for improving dialogue consistency.

Neural end-to-end TTS can generate very high-quality synthesized speech, and even close to human recording within similar domain text. However, it performs unsatisfactory when scaling it to challenging test sets. One concern is that the encoder-decoder with attention-based network adopts autoregressive generative sequence model with the limitation of "exposure bias" To address this issue, we propose two novel methods, which learn to predict future by improving agreement between forward and backward decoding sequence. The first one is achieved by introducing divergence regularization terms into model training objective to reduce the mismatch between two directional models, namely L2R and R2L (which generates targets from left-to-right and right-to-left, respectively). While the second one operates on decoder-level and exploits the future information during decoding. In addition, we employ a joint training strategy to allow forward and backward decoding to improve each other in an interactive process. Experimental results show our proposed methods especially the second one (bidirectional decoder regularization), leads a significantly improvement on both robustness and overall naturalness, as outperforming baseline (the revised version of Tacotron2) with a MOS gap of 0.14 in a challenging test, and achieving close to human quality (4.42 vs. 4.49 in MOS) on general test.

We present IMTLab, an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation (IMT) system platform that enables researchers to quickly build IMT systems with state-of-the-art models, perform an end-to-end evaluation, and diagnose the weakness of systems. IMTLab treats the whole interactive translation process as a task-oriented dialogue with a human-in-the-loop setting, in which human interventions can be explicitly incorporated to produce high-quality, error-free translations. To this end, a general communication interface is designed to support the flexible IMT architectures and user policies. Based on the proposed design, we construct a simulated and real interactive environment to achieve end-to-end evaluation and leverage the framework to systematically evaluate previous IMT systems. Our simulated and manual experiments show that the prefix-constrained decoding approach still gains the lowest editing cost in the end-to-end evaluation, while BiTIIMT achieves comparable editing cost with a better interactive experience.

Many recent breakthroughs in machine learning have been enabled by the pre-trained foundation models. By scaling up model parameters, training data, and computation resources, foundation models have significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in many applications. However, it is still an open question of how to use these models to perform downstream tasks efficiently. Knowledge distillation (KD) has been explored to tackle this challenge. KD transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. While KD has been successful in improving student model performance, recent research has discovered that a powerful teacher does not necessarily lead to a powerful student, due to their huge capacity gap. In addition, the potential distribution shifts between the pre-training data and downstream tasks can make knowledge transfer in KD sub-optimal for improving downstream task performance. In this paper, we extend KD with an interactive communication process to help students of downstream tasks learn effectively from pre-trained foundation models. Our design is inspired by the way humans learn from teachers who can explain knowledge in a way that meets the students' needs. Specifically, we let each model (i.e., student and teacher) train two components: (1) an encoder encoding the model's hidden states to a message and (2) a decoder decoding any messages to its own hidden states. With encoder and decoder, not only can the teacher transfer rich information by encoding its hidden states, but also the student can send messages with information of downstream tasks to the teacher. Therefore, knowledge passing from teacher to student can be tailored to the student's capacity and downstream tasks' distributions. We conducted experiments on benchmark datasets to show that our communication mechanism outperforms state-of-the-art distillation techniques.

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for enabling them to tackle complex, multi-step problems. Multi-agent frameworks have shown great potential in enhancing LLMs' reasoning capabilities. However, the lack of effective cooperation between LLM agents hinders their performance, especially for multi-step reasoning tasks. This paper proposes a novel cooperative multi-agent reasoning framework (CoPlanner) by separating reasoning steps and assigning distinct duties to different agents. CoPlanner consists of two LLM agents: a planning agent and a reasoning agent. The planning agent provides high-level strategic hints, while the reasoning agent follows these hints and infers answers. By training the planning agent's policy through the interactive reasoning process via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), the LLaMA-3-8B-based CoPlanner outperforms the previous best method by 9.94\% on LogiQA and 3.09\% on BBH. Our results demonstrate that the guidance from the planning agent and the effective cooperation between the agents contribute to the superior performance of CoPlanner in tackling multi-step reasoning problems.

The interactive segmentation task consists in the creation of object segmentation masks based on user interactions. The most common way to guide a model towards producing a correct segmentation consists in clicks on the object and background. The recently published Segment Anything Model (SAM) supports a generalized version of the interactive segmentation problem and has been trained on an object segmentation dataset which contains 1.1B masks. Though being trained extensively and with the explicit purpose of serving as a foundation model, we show significant limitations of SAM when being applied for interactive segmentation on novel domains or object types. On the used datasets, SAM displays a failure rate FR_{30}@90 of up to 72.6 %. Since we still want such foundation models to be immediately applicable, we present a framework that can adapt SAM during immediate usage. For this we will leverage the user interactions and masks, which are constructed during the interactive segmentation process. We use this information to generate pseudo-labels, which we use to compute a loss function and optimize a part of the SAM model. The presented method causes a relative reduction of up to 48.1 % in the FR_{20}@85 and 46.6 % in the FR_{30}@90 metrics.

Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their significant potential to be applied for addressing various application tasks. However, traditional recommender systems continue to face great challenges such as poor interactivity and explainability, which actually also hinder their broad deployment in real-world systems. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel paradigm called Chat-Rec (ChatGPT Augmented Recommender System) that innovatively augments LLMs for building conversational recommender systems by converting user profiles and historical interactions into prompts. Chat-Rec is demonstrated to be effective in learning user preferences and establishing connections between users and products through in-context learning, which also makes the recommendation process more interactive and explainable. What's more, within the Chat-Rec framework, user's preferences can transfer to different products for cross-domain recommendations, and prompt-based injection of information into LLMs can also handle the cold-start scenarios with new items. In our experiments, Chat-Rec effectively improve the results of top-k recommendations and performs better in zero-shot rating prediction task. Chat-Rec offers a novel approach to improving recommender systems and presents new practical scenarios for the implementation of AIGC (AI generated content) in recommender system studies.

Navigating drones through natural language commands remains challenging due to the dearth of accessible multi-modal datasets and the stringent precision requirements for aligning visual and textual data. To address this pressing need, we introduce GeoText-1652, a new natural language-guided geo-localization benchmark. This dataset is systematically constructed through an interactive human-computer process leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) driven annotation techniques in conjunction with pre-trained vision models. GeoText-1652 extends the established University-1652 image dataset with spatial-aware text annotations, thereby establishing one-to-one correspondences between image, text, and bounding box elements. We further introduce a new optimization objective to leverage fine-grained spatial associations, called blending spatial matching, for region-level spatial relation matching. Extensive experiments reveal that our approach maintains a competitive recall rate comparing other prevailing cross-modality methods. This underscores the promising potential of our approach in elevating drone control and navigation through the seamless integration of natural language commands in real-world scenarios.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents exhibit significant potential across various domains, operating as interactive systems that process environmental observations to generate executable actions for target tasks. The effectiveness of these agents is significantly influenced by their memory mechanism, which records historical experiences as sequences of action-observation pairs. We categorize memory into two types: cross-trial memory, accumulated across multiple attempts, and in-trial memory (working memory), accumulated within a single attempt. While considerable research has optimized performance through cross-trial memory, the enhancement of agent performance through improved working memory utilization remains underexplored. Instead, existing approaches often involve directly inputting entire historical action-observation pairs into LLMs, leading to redundancy in long-horizon tasks. Inspired by human problem-solving strategies, this paper introduces HiAgent, a framework that leverages subgoals as memory chunks to manage the working memory of LLM-based agents hierarchically. Specifically, HiAgent prompts LLMs to formulate subgoals before generating executable actions and enables LLMs to decide proactively to replace previous subgoals with summarized observations, retaining only the action-observation pairs relevant to the current subgoal. Experimental results across five long-horizon tasks demonstrate that HiAgent achieves a twofold increase in success rate and reduces the average number of steps required by 3.8. Additionally, our analysis shows that HiAgent consistently improves performance across various steps, highlighting its robustness and generalizability. Project Page: https://github.com/HiAgent2024/HiAgent .

Image animation is a key task in computer vision which aims to generate dynamic visual content from static image. Recent image animation methods employ neural based rendering technique to generate realistic animations. Despite these advancements, achieving fine-grained and controllable image animation guided by text remains challenging, particularly for open-domain images captured in diverse real environments. In this paper, we introduce an open domain image animation method that leverages the motion prior of video diffusion model. Our approach introduces targeted motion area guidance and motion strength guidance, enabling precise control the movable area and its motion speed. This results in enhanced alignment between the animated visual elements and the prompting text, thereby facilitating a fine-grained and interactive animation generation process for intricate motion sequences. We validate the effectiveness of our method through rigorous experiments on an open-domain dataset, with the results showcasing its superior performance. Project page can be found at https://animationai.github.io/AnimateAnything.

Click-based interactive segmentation (IS) aims to extract the target objects under user interaction. For this task, most of the current deep learning (DL)-based methods mainly follow the general pipelines of semantic segmentation. Albeit achieving promising performance, they do not fully and explicitly utilize and propagate the click information, inevitably leading to unsatisfactory segmentation results, even at clicked points. Against this issue, in this paper, we propose to formulate the IS task as a Gaussian process (GP)-based pixel-wise binary classification model on each image. To solve this model, we utilize amortized variational inference to approximate the intractable GP posterior in a data-driven manner and then decouple the approximated GP posterior into double space forms for efficient sampling with linear complexity. Then, we correspondingly construct a GP classification framework, named GPCIS, which is integrated with the deep kernel learning mechanism for more flexibility. The main specificities of the proposed GPCIS lie in: 1) Under the explicit guidance of the derived GP posterior, the information contained in clicks can be finely propagated to the entire image and then boost the segmentation; 2) The accuracy of predictions at clicks has good theoretical support. These merits of GPCIS as well as its good generality and high efficiency are substantiated by comprehensive experiments on several benchmarks, as compared with representative methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Interactive image segmentation enables annotators to efficiently perform pixel-level annotation for segmentation tasks. However, the existing interactive segmentation pipeline suffers from inefficient computations of interactive models because of the following two issues. First, annotators' later click is based on models' feedback of annotators' former click. This serial interaction is unable to utilize model's parallelism capabilities. Second, in each interaction step, the model handles the invariant image along with the sparse variable clicks, resulting in a process that's highly repetitive and redundant. For efficient computations, we propose a method named InterFormer that follows a new pipeline to address these issues. InterFormer extracts and preprocesses the computationally time-consuming part i.e. image processing from the existing process. Specifically, InterFormer employs a large vision transformer (ViT) on high-performance devices to preprocess images in parallel, and then uses a lightweight module called interactive multi-head self attention (I-MSA) for interactive segmentation. Furthermore, the I-MSA module's deployment on low-power devices extends the practical application of interactive segmentation. The I-MSA module utilizes the preprocessed features to efficiently response to the annotator inputs in real-time. The experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InterFormer, which outperforms previous interactive segmentation models in terms of computational efficiency and segmentation quality, achieve real-time high-quality interactive segmentation on CPU-only devices. The code is available at https://github.com/YouHuang67/InterFormer.

3D Content Generation is at the heart of many computer graphics applications, including video gaming, film-making, virtual and augmented reality, etc. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning based approach for automatically generating interactive and playable 3D game scenes, all from the user's casual prompts such as a hand-drawn sketch. Sketch-based input offers a natural, and convenient way to convey the user's design intention in the content creation process. To circumvent the data-deficient challenge in learning (i.e. the lack of large training data of 3D scenes), our method leverages a pre-trained 2D denoising diffusion model to generate a 2D image of the scene as the conceptual guidance. In this process, we adopt the isometric projection mode to factor out unknown camera poses while obtaining the scene layout. From the generated isometric image, we use a pre-trained image understanding method to segment the image into meaningful parts, such as off-ground objects, trees, and buildings, and extract the 2D scene layout. These segments and layouts are subsequently fed into a procedural content generation (PCG) engine, such as a 3D video game engine like Unity or Unreal, to create the 3D scene. The resulting 3D scene can be seamlessly integrated into a game development environment and is readily playable. Extensive tests demonstrate that our method can efficiently generate high-quality and interactive 3D game scenes with layouts that closely follow the user's intention.

Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.

The process of quantifying and analyzing animal behavior involves translating the naturally occurring descriptive language of their actions into machine-readable code. Yet, codifying behavior analysis is often challenging without deep understanding of animal behavior and technical machine learning knowledge. To limit this gap, we introduce AmadeusGPT: a natural language interface that turns natural language descriptions of behaviors into machine-executable code. Large-language models (LLMs) such as GPT3.5 and GPT4 allow for interactive language-based queries that are potentially well suited for making interactive behavior analysis. However, the comprehension capability of these LLMs is limited by the context window size, which prevents it from remembering distant conversations. To overcome the context window limitation, we implement a novel dual-memory mechanism to allow communication between short-term and long-term memory using symbols as context pointers for retrieval and saving. Concretely, users directly use language-based definitions of behavior and our augmented GPT develops code based on the core AmadeusGPT API, which contains machine learning, computer vision, spatio-temporal reasoning, and visualization modules. Users then can interactively refine results, and seamlessly add new behavioral modules as needed. We benchmark AmadeusGPT and show we can produce state-of-the-art performance on the MABE 2022 behavior challenge tasks. Note, an end-user would not need to write any code to achieve this. Thus, collectively AmadeusGPT presents a novel way to merge deep biological knowledge, large-language models, and core computer vision modules into a more naturally intelligent system. Code and demos can be found at: https://github.com/AdaptiveMotorControlLab/AmadeusGPT.

Despite the growing adoption of mixed reality and interactive AI agents, it remains challenging for these systems to generate high quality 2D/3D scenes in unseen environments. The common practice requires deploying an AI agent to collect large amounts of data for model training for every new task. This process is costly, or even impossible, for many domains. In this study, we develop an infinite agent that learns to transfer knowledge memory from general foundation models (e.g. GPT4, DALLE) to novel domains or scenarios for scene understanding and generation in the physical or virtual world. The heart of our approach is an emerging mechanism, dubbed Augmented Reality with Knowledge Inference Interaction (ArK), which leverages knowledge-memory to generate scenes in unseen physical world and virtual reality environments. The knowledge interactive emergent ability (Figure 1) is demonstrated as the observation learns i) micro-action of cross-modality: in multi-modality models to collect a large amount of relevant knowledge memory data for each interaction task (e.g., unseen scene understanding) from the physical reality; and ii) macro-behavior of reality-agnostic: in mix-reality environments to improve interactions that tailor to different characterized roles, target variables, collaborative information, and so on. We validate the effectiveness of ArK on the scene generation and editing tasks. We show that our ArK approach, combined with large foundation models, significantly improves the quality of generated 2D/3D scenes, compared to baselines, demonstrating the potential benefit of incorporating ArK in generative AI for applications such as metaverse and gaming simulation.

Deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly adopted and deployed by analysts without formal training in NLP or machine learning (ML). However, the documentation intended to convey the model's details and appropriate use is tailored primarily to individuals with ML or NLP expertise. To address this gap, we conduct a design inquiry into interactive model cards, which augment traditionally static model cards with affordances for exploring model documentation and interacting with the models themselves. Our investigation consists of an initial conceptual study with experts in ML, NLP, and AI Ethics, followed by a separate evaluative study with non-expert analysts who use ML models in their work. Using a semi-structured interview format coupled with a think-aloud protocol, we collected feedback from a total of 30 participants who engaged with different versions of standard and interactive model cards. Through a thematic analysis of the collected data, we identified several conceptual dimensions that summarize the strengths and limitations of standard and interactive model cards, including: stakeholders; design; guidance; understandability & interpretability; sensemaking & skepticism; and trust & safety. Our findings demonstrate the importance of carefully considered design and interactivity for orienting and supporting non-expert analysts using deep learning models, along with a need for consideration of broader sociotechnical contexts and organizational dynamics. We have also identified design elements, such as language, visual cues, and warnings, among others, that support interactivity and make non-interactive content accessible. We summarize our findings as design guidelines and discuss their implications for a human-centered approach towards AI/ML documentation.

Humans learn social skills through both imitation and social interaction. This social learning process is largely understudied by existing research on building language agents. Motivated by this gap, we propose an interactive learning method, SOTOPIA-pi, improving the social intelligence of language agents. This method leverages behavior cloning and self-reinforcement training on filtered social interaction data according to large language model (LLM) ratings. We show that our training method allows a 7B LLM to reach the social goal completion ability of an expert model (GPT-4-based agent), while improving the safety of language agents and maintaining general QA ability on the MMLU benchmark. We also find that this training paradigm uncovers some difficulties in LLM-based evaluation of social intelligence: LLM-based evaluators overestimate the abilities of the language agents trained specifically for social interaction.

During interactive segmentation, a model and a user work together to delineate objects of interest in a 3D point cloud. In an iterative process, the model assigns each data point to an object (or the background), while the user corrects errors in the resulting segmentation and feeds them back into the model. The current best practice formulates the problem as binary classification and segments objects one at a time. The model expects the user to provide positive clicks to indicate regions wrongly assigned to the background and negative clicks on regions wrongly assigned to the object. Sequentially visiting objects is wasteful since it disregards synergies between objects: a positive click for a given object can, by definition, serve as a negative click for nearby objects. Moreover, a direct competition between adjacent objects can speed up the identification of their common boundary. We introduce AGILE3D, an efficient, attention-based model that (1) supports simultaneous segmentation of multiple 3D objects, (2) yields more accurate segmentation masks with fewer user clicks, and (3) offers faster inference. Our core idea is to encode user clicks as spatial-temporal queries and enable explicit interactions between click queries as well as between them and the 3D scene through a click attention module. Every time new clicks are added, we only need to run a lightweight decoder that produces updated segmentation masks. In experiments with four different 3D point cloud datasets, AGILE3D sets a new state-of-the-art. Moreover, we also verify its practicality in real-world setups with real user studies.

Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER3. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,125 lemmas, and 200,646 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3- 8B solves 17.39% (69 -> 81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75 -> 84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.

Structured Natural Language Processing (XNLP) is an important subset of NLP that entails understanding the underlying semantic or syntactic structure of texts, which serves as a foundational component for many downstream applications. Despite certain recent efforts to explore universal solutions for specific categories of XNLP tasks, a comprehensive and effective approach for unifying all XNLP tasks long remains underdeveloped. In the meanwhile, while XNLP demonstration systems are vital for researchers exploring various XNLP tasks, existing platforms can be limited to, e.g., supporting few XNLP tasks, lacking interactivity and universalness. To this end, we propose an advanced XNLP demonstration platform, where we propose leveraging LLM to achieve universal XNLP, with one model for all with high generalizability. Overall, our system advances in multiple aspects, including universal XNLP modeling, high performance, interpretability, scalability, and interactivity, providing a unified platform for exploring diverse XNLP tasks in the community. XNLP is online: https://xnlp.haofei.vip

We introduce GameGen-X, the first diffusion transformer model specifically designed for both generating and interactively controlling open-world game videos. This model facilitates high-quality, open-domain generation by simulating an extensive array of game engine features, such as innovative characters, dynamic environments, complex actions, and diverse events. Additionally, it provides interactive controllability, predicting and altering future content based on the current clip, thus allowing for gameplay simulation. To realize this vision, we first collected and built an Open-World Video Game Dataset from scratch. It is the first and largest dataset for open-world game video generation and control, which comprises over a million diverse gameplay video clips sampling from over 150 games with informative captions from GPT-4o. GameGen-X undergoes a two-stage training process, consisting of foundation model pre-training and instruction tuning. Firstly, the model was pre-trained via text-to-video generation and video continuation, endowing it with the capability for long-sequence, high-quality open-domain game video generation. Further, to achieve interactive controllability, we designed InstructNet to incorporate game-related multi-modal control signal experts. This allows the model to adjust latent representations based on user inputs, unifying character interaction and scene content control for the first time in video generation. During instruction tuning, only the InstructNet is updated while the pre-trained foundation model is frozen, enabling the integration of interactive controllability without loss of diversity and quality of generated video content.

Existing text-to-image models still struggle to generate images of multiple objects, especially in handling their spatial positions, relative sizes, overlapping, and attribute bindings. To efficiently address these challenges, we develop a training-free Multimodal-LLM agent (MuLan), as a human painter, that can progressively generate multi-object with intricate planning and feedback control. MuLan harnesses a large language model (LLM) to decompose a prompt to a sequence of sub-tasks, each generating only one object by stable diffusion, conditioned on previously generated objects. Unlike existing LLM-grounded methods, MuLan only produces a high-level plan at the beginning while the exact size and location of each object are determined upon each sub-task by an LLM and attention guidance. Moreover, MuLan adopts a vision-language model (VLM) to provide feedback to the image generated in each sub-task and control the diffusion model to re-generate the image if it violates the original prompt. Hence, each model in every step of MuLan only needs to address an easy sub-task it is specialized for. The multi-step process also allows human users to monitor the generation process and make preferred changes at any intermediate step via text prompts, thereby improving the human-AI collaboration experience. We collect 200 prompts containing multi-objects with spatial relationships and attribute bindings from different benchmarks to evaluate MuLan. The results demonstrate the superiority of MuLan in generating multiple objects over baselines and its creativity when collaborating with human users. The code is available at https://github.com/measure-infinity/mulan-code.

Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of commercial AI products based on generative, multi-purpose AI systems promising a unified approach to building machine learning (ML) models into technology. However, this ambition of "generality" comes at a steep cost to the environment, given the amount of energy these systems require and the amount of carbon that they emit. In this work, we propose the first systematic comparison of the ongoing inference cost of various categories of ML systems, covering both task-specific (i.e. finetuned models that carry out a single task) and `general-purpose' models, (i.e. those trained for multiple tasks). We measure deployment cost as the amount of energy and carbon required to perform 1,000 inferences on representative benchmark dataset using these models. We find that multi-purpose, generative architectures are orders of magnitude more expensive than task-specific systems for a variety of tasks, even when controlling for the number of model parameters. We conclude with a discussion around the current trend of deploying multi-purpose generative ML systems, and caution that their utility should be more intentionally weighed against increased costs in terms of energy and emissions. All the data from our study can be accessed via an interactive demo to carry out further exploration and analysis.

The integration of Computer-Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) with Large Language Models (LLMs) holds great potential in clinical applications, specifically in the roles of virtual family doctors and clinic assistants. However, current works in this field are plagued by limitations, specifically a restricted scope of applicable image domains and the provision of unreliable medical advice. This restricts their overall processing capabilities. Furthermore, the mismatch in writing style between LLMs and radiologists undermines their practical usefulness. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatCAD+, which is designed to be universal and reliable. It is capable of handling medical images from diverse domains and leveraging up-to-date information from reputable medical websites to provide reliable medical advice. Additionally, it incorporates a template retrieval system that improves report generation performance via exemplar reports. This approach ensures greater consistency with the expertise of human professionals. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhaozh10/ChatCAD.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential in clinical applications, providing valuable medical knowledge and advice. For example, a large dialog LLM like ChatGPT has successfully passed part of the US medical licensing exam. However, LLMs currently have difficulty processing images, making it challenging to interpret information from medical images, which are rich in information that supports clinical decisions. On the other hand, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) networks for medical images have seen significant success in the medical field by using advanced deep-learning algorithms to support clinical decision-making. This paper presents a method for integrating LLMs into medical-image CAD networks. The proposed framework uses LLMs to enhance the output of multiple CAD networks, such as diagnosis networks, lesion segmentation networks, and report generation networks, by summarizing and reorganizing the information presented in natural language text format. The goal is to merge the strengths of LLMs' medical domain knowledge and logical reasoning with the vision understanding capability of existing medical-image CAD models to create a more user-friendly and understandable system for patients compared to conventional CAD systems. In the future, LLM's medical knowledge can be also used to improve the performance of vision-based medical-image CAD models.

Menu system design is a challenging task involving many design options and various human factors. For example, one crucial factor that designers need to consider is the semantic and systematic relation of menu commands. However, capturing these relations can be challenging due to limited available resources. With the advancement of neural language models, large language models can utilize their vast pre-existing knowledge in designing and refining menu systems. In this paper, we propose MenuCraft, an AI-assisted designer for menu design that enables collaboration between the designer and a dialogue system to design menus. MenuCraft offers an interactive language-based menu design tool that simplifies the menu design process and enables easy customization of design options. MenuCraft supports a variety of interactions through dialog that allows performing few-shot learning.

Creating large-scale interactive 3D environments is essential for the development of Robotics and Embodied AI research. Current methods, including manual design, procedural generation, diffusion-based scene generation, and large language model (LLM) guided scene design, are hindered by limitations such as excessive human effort, reliance on predefined rules or training datasets, and limited 3D spatial reasoning ability. Since pre-trained 2D image generative models better capture scene and object configuration than LLMs, we address these challenges by introducing Architect, a generative framework that creates complex and realistic 3D embodied environments leveraging diffusion-based 2D image inpainting. In detail, we utilize foundation visual perception models to obtain each generated object from the image and leverage pre-trained depth estimation models to lift the generated 2D image to 3D space. Our pipeline is further extended to a hierarchical and iterative inpainting process to continuously generate placement of large furniture and small objects to enrich the scene. This iterative structure brings the flexibility for our method to generate or refine scenes from various starting points, such as text, floor plans, or pre-arranged environments.

3D content creation has long been a complex and time-consuming process, often requiring specialized skills and resources. While recent advancements have allowed for text-guided 3D object and scene generation, they still fall short of providing sufficient control over the generation process, leading to a gap between the user's creative vision and the generated results. In this paper, we present iControl3D, a novel interactive system that empowers users to generate and render customizable 3D scenes with precise control. To this end, a 3D creator interface has been developed to provide users with fine-grained control over the creation process. Technically, we leverage 3D meshes as an intermediary proxy to iteratively merge individual 2D diffusion-generated images into a cohesive and unified 3D scene representation. To ensure seamless integration of 3D meshes, we propose to perform boundary-aware depth alignment before fusing the newly generated mesh with the existing one in 3D space. Additionally, to effectively manage depth discrepancies between remote content and foreground, we propose to model remote content separately with an environment map instead of 3D meshes. Finally, our neural rendering interface enables users to build a radiance field of their scene online and navigate the entire scene. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system. The code will be made available at https://github.com/xingyi-li/iControl3D.

Text-to-texture synthesis has become a new frontier in 3D content creation thanks to the recent advances in text-to-image models. Existing methods primarily adopt a combination of pretrained depth-aware diffusion and inpainting models, yet they exhibit shortcomings such as 3D inconsistency and limited controllability. To address these challenges, we introduce InteX, a novel framework for interactive text-to-texture synthesis. 1) InteX includes a user-friendly interface that facilitates interaction and control throughout the synthesis process, enabling region-specific repainting and precise texture editing. 2) Additionally, we develop a unified depth-aware inpainting model that integrates depth information with inpainting cues, effectively mitigating 3D inconsistencies and improving generation speed. Through extensive experiments, our framework has proven to be both practical and effective in text-to-texture synthesis, paving the way for high-quality 3D content creation.

Most state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods rely on large amounts of pixel-precise ground-truth annotations for training, which are expensive to create. Interactive segmentation networks help generate such annotations based on an image and the corresponding user interactions such as clicks. Existing methods for this task can only process a single instance at a time and each user interaction requires a full forward pass through the entire deep network. We introduce a more efficient approach, called DynaMITe, in which we represent user interactions as spatio-temporal queries to a Transformer decoder with a potential to segment multiple object instances in a single iteration. Our architecture also alleviates any need to re-compute image features during refinement, and requires fewer interactions for segmenting multiple instances in a single image when compared to other methods. DynaMITe achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple existing interactive segmentation benchmarks, and also on the new multi-instance benchmark that we propose in this paper.

Autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world environments require accurate predictions of interactive behaviors between traffic participants. This paper tackles the interaction prediction problem by formulating it with hierarchical game theory and proposing the GameFormer model for its implementation. The model incorporates a Transformer encoder, which effectively models the relationships between scene elements, alongside a novel hierarchical Transformer decoder structure. At each decoding level, the decoder utilizes the prediction outcomes from the previous level, in addition to the shared environmental context, to iteratively refine the interaction process. Moreover, we propose a learning process that regulates an agent's behavior at the current level to respond to other agents' behaviors from the preceding level. Through comprehensive experiments on large-scale real-world driving datasets, we demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy of our model on the Waymo interaction prediction task. Additionally, we validate the model's capacity to jointly reason about the motion plan of the ego agent and the behaviors of multiple agents in both open-loop and closed-loop planning tests, outperforming various baseline methods. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficacy of our model on the nuPlan planning benchmark, where it achieves leading performance.

Creating relightable and animatable avatars from multi-view or monocular videos is a challenging task for digital human creation and virtual reality applications. Previous methods rely on neural radiance fields or ray tracing, resulting in slow training and rendering processes. By utilizing Gaussian Splatting, we propose a simple and efficient method to decouple body materials and lighting from sparse-view or monocular avatar videos, so that the avatar can be rendered simultaneously under novel viewpoints, poses, and lightings at interactive frame rates (6.9 fps). Specifically, we first obtain the canonical body mesh using a signed distance function and assign attributes to each mesh vertex. The Gaussians in the canonical space then interpolate from nearby body mesh vertices to obtain the attributes. We subsequently deform the Gaussians to the posed space using forward skinning, and combine the learnable environment light with the Gaussian attributes for shading computation. To achieve fast shadow modeling, we rasterize the posed body mesh from dense viewpoints to obtain the visibility. Our approach is not only simple but also fast enough to allow interactive rendering of avatar animation under environmental light changes. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to previous works, our method can render higher quality results at a faster speed on both synthetic and real datasets.

Recent work on image content manipulation based on vision-language pre-training models has been effectively extended to text-driven 3D scene editing. However, existing schemes for 3D scene editing still exhibit certain shortcomings, hindering their further interactive design. Such schemes typically adhere to fixed input patterns, limiting users' flexibility in text input. Moreover, their editing capabilities are constrained by a single or a few 2D visual models and require intricate pipeline design to integrate these models into 3D reconstruction processes. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a dialogue-based 3D scene editing approach, termed CE3D, which is centered around a large language model that allows for arbitrary textual input from users and interprets their intentions, subsequently facilitating the autonomous invocation of the corresponding visual expert models. Furthermore, we design a scheme utilizing Hash-Atlas to represent 3D scene views, which transfers the editing of 3D scenes onto 2D atlas images. This design achieves complete decoupling between the 2D editing and 3D reconstruction processes, enabling CE3D to flexibly integrate a wide range of existing 2D or 3D visual models without necessitating intricate fusion designs. Experimental results demonstrate that CE3D effectively integrates multiple visual models to achieve diverse editing visual effects, possessing strong scene comprehension and multi-round dialog capabilities. The code is available at https://sk-fun.fun/CE3D.

We introduce a novel diffusion transformer, LazyDiffusion, that generates partial image updates efficiently. Our approach targets interactive image editing applications in which, starting from a blank canvas or an image, a user specifies a sequence of localized image modifications using binary masks and text prompts. Our generator operates in two phases. First, a context encoder processes the current canvas and user mask to produce a compact global context tailored to the region to generate. Second, conditioned on this context, a diffusion-based transformer decoder synthesizes the masked pixels in a "lazy" fashion, i.e., it only generates the masked region. This contrasts with previous works that either regenerate the full canvas, wasting time and computation, or confine processing to a tight rectangular crop around the mask, ignoring the global image context altogether. Our decoder's runtime scales with the mask size, which is typically small, while our encoder introduces negligible overhead. We demonstrate that our approach is competitive with state-of-the-art inpainting methods in terms of quality and fidelity while providing a 10x speedup for typical user interactions, where the editing mask represents 10% of the image.

Communication via natural language is a crucial aspect of intelligence, and it requires computational models to learn and reason about world concepts, with varying levels of supervision. While there has been significant progress made on fully-supervised non-interactive tasks, such as question-answering and procedural text understanding, much of the community has turned to various sequential interactive tasks, as in semi-Markov text-based games, which have revealed limitations of existing approaches in terms of coherence, contextual awareness, and their ability to learn effectively from the environment. In this paper, we propose a framework for enabling improved functional grounding of agents in text-based games. Specifically, we consider two forms of domain knowledge that we inject into learning-based agents: memory of previous correct actions and affordances of relevant objects in the environment. Our framework supports three representative model classes: `pure' reinforcement learning (RL) agents, RL agents enhanced with knowledge graphs, and agents equipped with language models. Furthermore, we devise multiple injection strategies for the above domain knowledge types and agent architectures, including injection via knowledge graphs and augmentation of the existing input encoding strategies. We perform all experiments on the ScienceWorld text-based game environment, to illustrate the performance of various model configurations in challenging science-related instruction-following tasks. Our findings provide crucial insights on the development of effective natural language processing systems for interactive contexts.

We present the LM Transparency Tool (LM-TT), an open-source interactive toolkit for analyzing the internal workings of Transformer-based language models. Differently from previously existing tools that focus on isolated parts of the decision-making process, our framework is designed to make the entire prediction process transparent, and allows tracing back model behavior from the top-layer representation to very fine-grained parts of the model. Specifically, it (1) shows the important part of the whole input-to-output information flow, (2) allows attributing any changes done by a model block to individual attention heads and feed-forward neurons, (3) allows interpreting the functions of those heads or neurons. A crucial part of this pipeline is showing the importance of specific model components at each step. As a result, we are able to look at the roles of model components only in cases where they are important for a prediction. Since knowing which components should be inspected is key for analyzing large models where the number of these components is extremely high, we believe our tool will greatly support the interpretability community both in research settings and in practical applications.

Interactive digital agents (IDAs) leverage APIs of stateful digital environments to perform tasks in response to user requests. While IDAs powered by instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can react to feedback from interface invocations in multi-step exchanges, they have not been trained in their respective digital environments. Prior methods accomplish less than half of tasks in sophisticated benchmarks such as AppWorld. We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that trains IDAs directly in their target environments. We formalize this training as a partially observable Markov decision process and derive LOOP, a data- and memory-efficient variant of proximal policy optimization. LOOP uses no value network and maintains exactly one copy of the underlying LLM in memory, making its implementation straightforward and as memory-efficient as fine-tuning a single LLM. A 32-billion-parameter agent trained with LOOP in the AppWorld environment outperforms the much larger OpenAI o1 agent by 9 percentage points (15% relative). To our knowledge, this is the first reported application of RL to IDAs that interact with a stateful, multi-domain, multi-app environment via direct API calls. Our analysis sheds light on the effectiveness of RL in this area, showing that the agent learns to consult the API documentation, avoid unwarranted assumptions, minimize confabulation, and recover from setbacks.

Existing deepfake analysis methods are primarily based on discriminative models, which significantly limit their application scenarios. This paper aims to explore interactive deepfake analysis by performing instruction tuning on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). This will face challenges such as the lack of datasets and benchmarks, and low training efficiency. To address these issues, we introduce (1) a GPT-assisted data construction process resulting in an instruction-following dataset called DFA-Instruct, (2) a benchmark named DFA-Bench, designed to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs in deepfake detection, deepfake classification, and artifact description, and (3) construct an interactive deepfake analysis system called DFA-GPT, as a strong baseline for the community, with the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module. The dataset and code will be made available at https://github.com/lxq1000/DFA-Instruct to facilitate further research.

Agents, as user-centric tools, are increasingly deployed for human task delegation, assisting with a broad spectrum of requests by generating thoughts, engaging with user proxies, and producing action plans. However, agents based on large language models (LLMs) often face substantial planning latency due to two primary factors: the efficiency limitations of the underlying LLMs due to their large size and high demand, and the structural complexity of the agents due to the extensive generation of intermediate thoughts to produce the final output. Given that inefficiency in service provision can undermine the value of automation for users, this paper presents a human-centered efficient agent planning method -- Interactive Speculative Planning -- aiming at enhancing the efficiency of agent planning through both system design and human-AI interaction. Our approach advocates for the co-design of the agent system and user interface, underscoring the importance of an agent system that can fluidly manage user interactions and interruptions. By integrating human interruptions as a fundamental component of the system, we not only make it more user-centric but also expedite the entire process by leveraging human-in-the-loop interactions to provide accurate intermediate steps. Code and data will be released.

One of the primary driving forces contributing to the superior performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the extensive availability of human-annotated natural language data, which is used for alignment fine-tuning. This inspired researchers to investigate self-training methods to mitigate the extensive reliance on human annotations. However, the current success of self-training has been primarily observed in natural language scenarios, rather than in the increasingly important neural-symbolic scenarios. To this end, we propose an environment-guided neural-symbolic self-training framework named ENVISIONS. It aims to overcome two main challenges: (1) the scarcity of symbolic data, and (2) the limited proficiency of LLMs in processing symbolic language. Extensive evaluations conducted on three distinct domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Additionally, we have conducted a comprehensive analysis to uncover the factors contributing to ENVISIONS's success, thereby offering valuable insights for future research in this area. Code will be available at https://github.com/xufangzhi/ENVISIONS.

Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and generalization in general sequential decision-making problems. In this approach, goals and observations are represented as a sequence of embeddings, and a policy network initialized with a pre-trained LM predicts the next action. We demonstrate that this framework enables effective combinatorial generalization across different environments and supervisory modalities. We begin by assuming access to a set of expert demonstrations, and show that initializing policies with LMs and fine-tuning them via behavior cloning improves task completion rates by 43.6% in the VirtualHome environment. Next, we integrate an active data gathering procedure in which agents iteratively interact with the environment, relabel past "failed" experiences with new goals, and update their policies in a self-supervised loop. Active data gathering further improves combinatorial generalization, outperforming the best baseline by 25.1%. Finally, we explain these results by investigating three possible factors underlying the effectiveness of the LM-based policy. We find that sequential input representations (vs. fixed-dimensional feature vectors) and LM-based weight initialization are both important for generalization. Surprisingly, however, the format of the policy inputs encoding (e.g. as a natural language string vs. an arbitrary sequential encoding) has little influence. Together, these results suggest that language modeling induces representations that are useful for modeling not just language, but also goals and plans; these representations can aid learning and generalization even outside of language processing.

We propose Framer for interactive frame interpolation, which targets producing smoothly transitioning frames between two images as per user creativity. Concretely, besides taking the start and end frames as inputs, our approach supports customizing the transition process by tailoring the trajectory of some selected keypoints. Such a design enjoys two clear benefits. First, incorporating human interaction mitigates the issue arising from numerous possibilities of transforming one image to another, and in turn enables finer control of local motions. Second, as the most basic form of interaction, keypoints help establish the correspondence across frames, enhancing the model to handle challenging cases (e.g., objects on the start and end frames are of different shapes and styles). It is noteworthy that our system also offers an "autopilot" mode, where we introduce a module to estimate the keypoints and refine the trajectory automatically, to simplify the usage in practice. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance of Framer on various applications, such as image morphing, time-lapse video generation, cartoon interpolation, etc. The code, the model, and the interface will be released to facilitate further research.

We propose a diffusion-based approach for Text-to-Image (T2I) generation with interactive 3D layout control. Layout control has been widely studied to alleviate the shortcomings of T2I diffusion models in understanding objects' placement and relationships from text descriptions. Nevertheless, existing approaches for layout control are limited to 2D layouts, require the user to provide a static layout beforehand, and fail to preserve generated images under layout changes. This makes these approaches unsuitable for applications that require 3D object-wise control and iterative refinements, e.g., interior design and complex scene generation. To this end, we leverage the recent advancements in depth-conditioned T2I models and propose a novel approach for interactive 3D layout control. We replace the traditional 2D boxes used in layout control with 3D boxes. Furthermore, we revamp the T2I task as a multi-stage generation process, where at each stage, the user can insert, change, and move an object in 3D while preserving objects from earlier stages. We achieve this through our proposed Dynamic Self-Attention (DSA) module and the consistent 3D object translation strategy. Experiments show that our approach can generate complicated scenes based on 3D layouts, boosting the object generation success rate over the standard depth-conditioned T2I methods by 2x. Moreover, it outperforms other methods in comparison in preserving objects under layout changes. Project Page: https://abdo-eldesokey.github.io/build-a-scene/

We present a novel generative 3D modeling system, coined CraftsMan, which can generate high-fidelity 3D geometries with highly varied shapes, regular mesh topologies, and detailed surfaces, and, notably, allows for refining the geometry in an interactive manner. Despite the significant advancements in 3D generation, existing methods still struggle with lengthy optimization processes, irregular mesh topologies, noisy surfaces, and difficulties in accommodating user edits, consequently impeding their widespread adoption and implementation in 3D modeling software. Our work is inspired by the craftsman, who usually roughs out the holistic figure of the work first and elaborates the surface details subsequently. Specifically, we employ a 3D native diffusion model, which operates on latent space learned from latent set-based 3D representations, to generate coarse geometries with regular mesh topology in seconds. In particular, this process takes as input a text prompt or a reference image and leverages a powerful multi-view (MV) diffusion model to generate multiple views of the coarse geometry, which are fed into our MV-conditioned 3D diffusion model for generating the 3D geometry, significantly improving robustness and generalizability. Following that, a normal-based geometry refiner is used to significantly enhance the surface details. This refinement can be performed automatically, or interactively with user-supplied edits. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high efficacy in producing superior-quality 3D assets compared to existing methods. HomePage: https://craftsman3d.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/wyysf-98/CraftsMan

We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artistic-designed triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive artistic mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.

A critical factor in the success of decision support systems is the accurate modeling of user preferences. Psychology research has demonstrated that users often develop their preferences during the elicitation process, highlighting the pivotal role of system-user interaction in developing personalized systems. This paper introduces a novel approach, combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with Constraint Programming to facilitate interactive decision support. We study this hybrid framework through the lens of meeting scheduling, a time-consuming daily activity faced by a multitude of information workers. We conduct three studies to evaluate the novel framework, including a diary study (n=64) to characterize contextual scheduling preferences, a quantitative evaluation of the system's performance, and a user study (n=10) with a prototype system. Our work highlights the potential for a hybrid LLM and optimization approach for iterative preference elicitation and design considerations for building systems that support human-system collaborative decision-making processes.

We present Interactive Neural Video Editing (INVE), a real-time video editing solution, which can assist the video editing process by consistently propagating sparse frame edits to the entire video clip. Our method is inspired by the recent work on Layered Neural Atlas (LNA). LNA, however, suffers from two major drawbacks: (1) the method is too slow for interactive editing, and (2) it offers insufficient support for some editing use cases, including direct frame editing and rigid texture tracking. To address these challenges we leverage and adopt highly efficient network architectures, powered by hash-grids encoding, to substantially improve processing speed. In addition, we learn bi-directional functions between image-atlas and introduce vectorized editing, which collectively enables a much greater variety of edits in both the atlas and the frames directly. Compared to LNA, our INVE reduces the learning and inference time by a factor of 5, and supports various video editing operations that LNA cannot. We showcase the superiority of INVE over LNA in interactive video editing through a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, highlighting its numerous advantages and improved performance. For video results, please see https://gabriel-huang.github.io/inve/

Dialogue-based Role Playing Games (RPGs) require powerful storytelling. The narratives of these may take years to write and typically involve a large creative team. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of large generative text models to assist this process. GRIM, a prototype GRaph-based Interactive narrative visualization system for gaMes, generates a rich narrative graph with branching storylines that match a high-level narrative description and constraints provided by the designer. Game designers can interactively edit the graph by automatically generating new sub-graphs that fit the edits within the original narrative and constraints. We illustrate the use of GRIM in conjunction with GPT-4, generating branching narratives for four well-known stories with different contextual constraints.

Interactive segmentation of 3D Gaussians opens a great opportunity for real-time manipulation of 3D scenes thanks to the real-time rendering capability of 3D Gaussian Splatting. However, the current methods suffer from time-consuming post-processing to deal with noisy segmentation output. Also, they struggle to provide detailed segmentation, which is important for fine-grained manipulation of 3D scenes. In this study, we propose Click-Gaussian, which learns distinguishable feature fields of two-level granularity, facilitating segmentation without time-consuming post-processing. We delve into challenges stemming from inconsistently learned feature fields resulting from 2D segmentation obtained independently from a 3D scene. 3D segmentation accuracy deteriorates when 2D segmentation results across the views, primary cues for 3D segmentation, are in conflict. To overcome these issues, we propose Global Feature-guided Learning (GFL). GFL constructs the clusters of global feature candidates from noisy 2D segments across the views, which smooths out noises when training the features of 3D Gaussians. Our method runs in 10 ms per click, 15 to 130 times as fast as the previous methods, while also significantly improving segmentation accuracy. Our project page is available at https://seokhunchoi.github.io/Click-Gaussian

One tough problem of image inpainting is to restore complex structures in the corrupted regions. It motivates interactive image inpainting which leverages additional hints, e.g., sketches, to assist the inpainting process. Sketch is simple and intuitive to end users, but meanwhile has free forms with much randomness. Such randomness may confuse the inpainting models, and incur severe artifacts in completed images. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage image inpainting method termed SketchRefiner. In the first stage, we propose using a cross-correlation loss function to robustly calibrate and refine the user-provided sketches in a coarse-to-fine fashion. In the second stage, we learn to extract informative features from the abstracted sketches in the feature space and modulate the inpainting process. We also propose an algorithm to simulate real sketches automatically and build a test protocol with different applications. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that SketchRefiner effectively utilizes sketch information and eliminates the artifacts due to the free-form sketches. Our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ones both qualitatively and quantitatively, meanwhile revealing great potential in real-world applications. Our code and dataset are available.

Creating interactive scenes often involves complex programming tasks. Although large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate code from natural language, their output is often error-prone, particularly when scripting interactions among multiple elements. The linear conversational structure limits the editing of individual elements, and lacking graphical and precise control complicates visual integration. To address these issues, we integrate an element-level modularization technique that processes textual descriptions for individual elements through separate LLM modules, with a central module managing interactions among elements. This modular approach allows for refining each element independently. We design a graphical user interface, MoGraphGPT , which combines modular LLMs with enhanced graphical control to generate codes for 2D interactive scenes. It enables direct integration of graphical information and offers quick, precise control through automatically generated sliders. Our comparative evaluation against an AI coding tool, Cursor Composer, as the baseline system and a usability study show MoGraphGPT significantly improves easiness, controllability, and refinement in creating complex 2D interactive scenes with multiple visual elements in a coding-free manner.

The rapid evolution of cyber threats necessitates innovative solutions for detecting and analyzing malicious activity. Honeypots, which are decoy systems designed to lure and interact with attackers, have emerged as a critical component in cybersecurity. In this paper, we present a novel approach to creating realistic and interactive honeypot systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). By fine-tuning a pre-trained open-source language model on a diverse dataset of attacker-generated commands and responses, we developed a honeypot capable of sophisticated engagement with attackers. Our methodology involved several key steps: data collection and processing, prompt engineering, model selection, and supervised fine-tuning to optimize the model's performance. Evaluation through similarity metrics and live deployment demonstrated that our approach effectively generates accurate and informative responses. The results highlight the potential of LLMs to revolutionize honeypot technology, providing cybersecurity professionals with a powerful tool to detect and analyze malicious activity, thereby enhancing overall security infrastructure.

This work proposes an end-to-end neural interactive keypoint detection framework named Click-Pose, which can significantly reduce more than 10 times labeling costs of 2D keypoint annotation compared with manual-only annotation. Click-Pose explores how user feedback can cooperate with a neural keypoint detector to correct the predicted keypoints in an interactive way for a faster and more effective annotation process. Specifically, we design the pose error modeling strategy that inputs the ground truth pose combined with four typical pose errors into the decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the correct poses, which enhances the self-correction ability of the model. Then, we attach an interactive human-feedback loop that allows receiving users' clicks to correct one or several predicted keypoints and iteratively utilizes the decoder to update all other keypoints with a minimum number of clicks (NoC) for efficient annotation. We validate Click-Pose in in-domain, out-of-domain scenes, and a new task of keypoint adaptation. For annotation, Click-Pose only needs 1.97 and 6.45 NoC@95 (at precision 95%) on COCO and Human-Art, reducing 31.4% and 36.3% efforts than the SOTA model (ViTPose) with manual correction, respectively. Besides, without user clicks, Click-Pose surpasses the previous end-to-end model by 1.4 AP on COCO and 3.0 AP on Human-Art. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Click-Pose.

Image editing involves a variety of complex tasks and requires efficient and precise manipulation techniques. In this paper, we present MagicQuill, an integrated image editing system that enables swift actualization of creative ideas. Our system features a streamlined yet functionally robust interface, allowing for the articulation of editing operations (e.g., inserting elements, erasing objects, altering color) with minimal input. These interactions are monitored by a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to anticipate editing intentions in real time, bypassing the need for explicit prompt entry. Finally, we apply a powerful diffusion prior, enhanced by a carefully learned two-branch plug-in module, to process editing requests with precise control. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicQuill in achieving high-quality image edits. Please visit https://magic-quill.github.io to try out our system.

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.

As large language models gain widespread adoption, running them efficiently becomes crucial. Recent works on LLM inference use speculative decoding to achieve extreme speedups. However, most of these works implicitly design their algorithms for high-end datacenter hardware. In this work, we ask the opposite question: how fast can we run LLMs on consumer machines? Consumer GPUs can no longer fit the largest available models (50B+ parameters) and must offload them to RAM or SSD. When running with offloaded parameters, the inference engine can process batches of hundreds or thousands of tokens at the same time as just one token, making it a natural fit for speculative decoding. We propose SpecExec (Speculative Execution), a simple parallel decoding method that can generate up to 20 tokens per target model iteration for popular LLM families. It utilizes the high spikiness of the token probabilities distribution in modern LLMs and a high degree of alignment between model output probabilities. SpecExec takes the most probable tokens continuation from the draft model to build a "cache" tree for the target model, which then gets validated in a single pass. Using SpecExec, we demonstrate inference of 50B+ parameter LLMs on consumer GPUs with RAM offloading at 4-6 tokens per second with 4-bit quantization or 2-3 tokens per second with 16-bit weights.

Humans write code in a fundamentally interactive manner and rely on constant execution feedback to correct errors, resolve ambiguities, and decompose tasks. While LLMs have recently exhibited promising coding capabilities, current coding benchmarks mostly consider a static instruction-to-code sequence transduction process, which has the potential for error propagation and a disconnect between the generated code and its final execution environment. To address this gap, we introduce InterCode, a lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use framework of interactive coding as a standard reinforcement learning (RL) environment, with code as actions and execution feedback as observations. Our framework is language and platform agnostic, uses self-contained Docker environments to provide safe and reproducible execution, and is compatible out-of-the-box with traditional seq2seq coding methods, while enabling the development of new methods for interactive code generation. We use InterCode to create two interactive code environments with Bash and SQL as action spaces, leveraging data from the static Spider and NL2Bash datasets. We demonstrate InterCode's viability as a testbed by evaluating multiple state-of-the-art LLMs configured with different prompting strategies such as ReAct and Plan & Solve. Our results showcase the benefits of interactive code generation and demonstrate that InterCode can serve as a challenging benchmark for advancing code understanding and generation capabilities. InterCode is designed to be easily extensible and can even be used to incorporate new tasks such as Capture the Flag, a popular coding puzzle that is inherently multi-step and involves multiple programming languages. Project site with code and data: https://intercode-benchmark.github.io

The remarkable multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o underscore their necessity in practical applications, yet open-source models rarely excel in both areas. In this paper, we introduce VITA, the first-ever open-source Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at simultaneous processing and analysis of Video, Image, Text, and Audio modalities, and meanwhile has an advanced multimodal interactive experience. Starting from Mixtral 8x7B as a language foundation, we expand its Chinese vocabulary followed by bilingual instruction tuning. We further endow the language model with visual and audio capabilities through two-stage multi-task learning of multimodal alignment and instruction tuning. VITA demonstrates robust foundational capabilities of multilingual, vision, and audio understanding, as evidenced by its strong performance across a range of both unimodal and multimodal benchmarks. Beyond foundational capabilities, we have made considerable progress in enhancing the natural multimodal human-computer interaction experience. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to exploit non-awakening interaction and audio interrupt in MLLM. VITA is the first step for the open-source community to explore the seamless integration of multimodal understanding and interaction. While there is still lots of work to be done on VITA to get close to close-source counterparts, we hope that its role as a pioneer can serve as a cornerstone for subsequent research. Project Page: https://vita-home.github.io.

Creating high-quality and interactive virtual environments, such as games and simulators, often involves complex and costly manual modeling processes. In this paper, we present Video2Game, a novel approach that automatically converts videos of real-world scenes into realistic and interactive game environments. At the heart of our system are three core components:(i) a neural radiance fields (NeRF) module that effectively captures the geometry and visual appearance of the scene; (ii) a mesh module that distills the knowledge from NeRF for faster rendering; and (iii) a physics module that models the interactions and physical dynamics among the objects. By following the carefully designed pipeline, one can construct an interactable and actionable digital replica of the real world. We benchmark our system on both indoor and large-scale outdoor scenes. We show that we can not only produce highly-realistic renderings in real-time, but also build interactive games on top.

With the popularity of implicit neural representations, or neural radiance fields (NeRF), there is a pressing need for editing methods to interact with the implicit 3D models for tasks like post-processing reconstructed scenes and 3D content creation. While previous works have explored NeRF editing from various perspectives, they are restricted in editing flexibility, quality, and speed, failing to offer direct editing response and instant preview. The key challenge is to conceive a locally editable neural representation that can directly reflect the editing instructions and update instantly. To bridge the gap, we propose a new interactive editing method and system for implicit representations, called Seal-3D, which allows users to edit NeRF models in a pixel-level and free manner with a wide range of NeRF-like backbone and preview the editing effects instantly. To achieve the effects, the challenges are addressed by our proposed proxy function mapping the editing instructions to the original space of NeRF models and a teacher-student training strategy with local pretraining and global finetuning. A NeRF editing system is built to showcase various editing types. Our system can achieve compelling editing effects with an interactive speed of about 1 second.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have significantly advanced in recent years. However, effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation, hindering a dynamic and iterative creation process. Recent attempts have tried to equip Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with T2I models to bring the user's natural language instructions into reality. Hence, the output modality of MLLMs is extended, and the multi-turn generation quality of T2I models is enhanced thanks to the strong multi-modal comprehension ability of MLLMs. However, many of these works face challenges in identifying correct output modalities and generating coherent images accordingly as the number of output modalities increases and the conversations go deeper. Therefore, we propose DialogGen, an effective pipeline to align off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System (MIDS) for multi-turn Text-to-Image generation. It is composed of drawing prompt alignment, careful training data curation, and error correction. Moreover, as the field of MIDS flourishes, comprehensive benchmarks are urgently needed to evaluate MIDS fairly in terms of output modality correctness and multi-modal output coherence. To address this issue, we introduce the Multi-modal Dialogue Benchmark (DialogBen), a comprehensive bilingual benchmark designed to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate accurate and coherent multi-modal content that supports image editing. It contains two evaluation metrics to measure the model's ability to switch modalities and the coherence of the output images. Our extensive experiments on DialogBen and user study demonstrate the effectiveness of DialogGen compared with other State-of-the-Art models.

Depression poses significant challenges to patients and healthcare organizations, necessitating efficient assessment methods. Existing paradigms typically focus on a patient-doctor way that overlooks multi-role interactions, such as family involvement in the evaluation and caregiving process. Moreover, current automatic depression detection (ADD) methods usually model depression detection as a classification or regression task, lacking interpretability for the decision-making process. To address these issues, we developed InterMind, a doctor-patient-family interactive depression assessment system empowered by large language models (LLMs). Our system enables patients and families to contribute descriptions, generates assistive diagnostic reports for doctors, and provides actionable insights, improving diagnostic precision and efficiency. To enhance LLMs' performance in psychological counseling and diagnostic interpretability, we integrate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and chain-of-thoughts (CoT) techniques for data augmentation, which mitigates the hallucination issue of LLMs in specific scenarios after instruction fine-tuning. Quantitative experiments and professional assessments by clinicians validate the effectiveness of our system.

Formulating effective search queries remains a challenging task, particularly when users lack expertise in a specific domain or are not proficient in the language of the content. Providing example documents of interest might be easier for a user. However, such query-by-example scenarios are prone to concept drift, and the retrieval effectiveness is highly sensitive to the query generation method, without a clear way to incorporate user feedback. To enable exploration and to support Human-In-The-Loop experiments we propose QueryExplorer -- an interactive query generation, reformulation, and retrieval interface with support for HuggingFace generation models and PyTerrier's retrieval pipelines and datasets, and extensive logging of human feedback. To allow users to create and modify effective queries, our demo supports complementary approaches of using LLMs interactively, assisting the user with edits and feedback at multiple stages of the query formulation process. With support for recording fine-grained interactions and user annotations, QueryExplorer can serve as a valuable experimental and research platform for annotation, qualitative evaluation, and conducting Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) experiments for complex search tasks where users struggle to formulate queries.

Educational crosswords offer numerous benefits for students, including increased engagement, improved understanding, critical thinking, and memory retention. Creating high-quality educational crosswords can be challenging, but recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning have made it possible to use language models to generate nice wordplays. The exploitation of cutting-edge language models like GPT3-DaVinci, GPT3-Curie, GPT3-Babbage, GPT3-Ada, and BERT-uncased has led to the development of a comprehensive system for generating and verifying crossword clues. A large dataset of clue-answer pairs was compiled to fine-tune the models in a supervised manner to generate original and challenging clues from a given keyword. On the other hand, for generating crossword clues from a given text, Zero/Few-shot learning techniques were used to extract clues from the input text, adding variety and creativity to the puzzles. We employed the fine-tuned model to generate data and labeled the acceptability of clue-answer parts with human supervision. To ensure quality, we developed a classifier by fine-tuning existing language models on the labeled dataset. Conversely, to assess the quality of clues generated from the given text using zero/few-shot learning, we employed a zero-shot learning approach to check the quality of generated clues. The results of the evaluation have been very promising, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in creating high-standard educational crosswords that offer students engaging and rewarding learning experiences.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced in large strides due to the effectiveness of the self-attention mechanism that processes and compares all tokens at once. However, this mechanism comes with a fundamental issue -- the predetermined context window is bound to be limited. Despite attempts to extend the context window through methods like extrapolating the positional embedding, using recurrence, or selectively retrieving essential parts of the long sequence, long-text understanding continues to be a challenge. We propose an alternative approach which instead treats the LLM as an interactive agent, allowing it to decide how to read the text via iterative prompting. We introduce MemWalker, a method that first processes the long context into a tree of summary nodes. Upon receiving a query, the model navigates this tree in search of relevant information, and responds once it gathers sufficient information. On long-text question answering tasks our method outperforms baseline approaches that use long context windows, recurrence, and retrieval. We show that, beyond effective reading, MemWalker enhances explainability by highlighting the reasoning steps as it interactively reads the text; pinpointing the relevant text segments related to the query.

Programming robot behavior in a complex world faces challenges on multiple levels, from dextrous low-level skills to high-level planning and reasoning. Recent pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning ability in few-shot robotic planning. However, it remains challenging to ground LLMs in multimodal sensory input and continuous action output, while enabling a robot to interact with its environment and acquire novel information as its policies unfold. We develop a robot interaction scenario with a partially observable state, which necessitates a robot to decide on a range of epistemic actions in order to sample sensory information among multiple modalities, before being able to execute the task correctly. An interactive perception framework is therefore proposed with an LLM as its backbone, whose ability is exploited to instruct epistemic actions and to reason over the resulting multimodal sensations (vision, sound, haptics, proprioception), as well as to plan an entire task execution based on the interactively acquired information. Our study demonstrates that LLMs can provide high-level planning and reasoning skills and control interactive robot behavior in a multimodal environment, while multimodal modules with the context of the environmental state help ground the LLMs and extend their processing ability. The project website can be found at https://matcha-model.github.io{blue{https://matcha-model.github.io/}}.

We introduce SwiftSage, a novel agent framework inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, designed to excel in action planning for complex interactive reasoning tasks. SwiftSage integrates the strengths of behavior cloning and prompting large language models (LLMs) to enhance task completion performance. The framework comprises two primary modules: the Swift module, representing fast and intuitive thinking, and the Sage module, emulating deliberate thought processes. The Swift module is a small encoder-decoder LM fine-tuned on the oracle agent's action trajectories, while the Sage module employs LLMs such as GPT-4 for subgoal planning and grounding. We develop a heuristic method to harmoniously integrate the two modules, resulting in a more efficient and robust problem-solving process. In 30 tasks from the ScienceWorld benchmark, SwiftSage significantly outperforms other methods such as SayCan, ReAct, and Reflexion, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving complex real-world tasks.

Recent success in deep learning has generated immense interest among practitioners and students, inspiring many to learn about this new technology. While visual and interactive approaches have been successfully developed to help people more easily learn deep learning, most existing tools focus on simpler models. In this work, we present GAN Lab, the first interactive visualization tool designed for non-experts to learn and experiment with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a popular class of complex deep learning models. With GAN Lab, users can interactively train generative models and visualize the dynamic training process's intermediate results. GAN Lab tightly integrates an model overview graph that summarizes GAN's structure, and a layered distributions view that helps users interpret the interplay between submodels. GAN Lab introduces new interactive experimentation features for learning complex deep learning models, such as step-by-step training at multiple levels of abstraction for understanding intricate training dynamics. Implemented using TensorFlow.js, GAN Lab is accessible to anyone via modern web browsers, without the need for installation or specialized hardware, overcoming a major practical challenge in deploying interactive tools for deep learning.

This paper introduces a Scandinavian benchmarking platform, ScandEval, which can benchmark any pretrained model on four different tasks in the Scandinavian languages. The datasets used in two of the tasks, linguistic acceptability and question answering, are new. We develop and release a Python package and command-line interface, scandeval, which can benchmark any model that has been uploaded to the Hugging Face Hub, with reproducible results. Using this package, we benchmark more than 100 Scandinavian or multilingual models and present the results of these in an interactive online leaderboard, as well as provide an analysis of the results. The analysis shows that there is substantial cross-lingual transfer among the Mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian), with limited cross-lingual transfer between the group of Mainland Scandinavian languages and the group of Insular Scandinavian languages (Icelandic and Faroese). The benchmarking results also show that the investment in language technology in Norway, Sweden and Denmark has led to language models that outperform massively multilingual models such as XLM-RoBERTa and mDeBERTaV3. We release the source code for both the package and leaderboard.

Human beings perceive the real world through a spectrum of sensory modalities, encompassing auditory, visual, and linguistic faculties. The journey towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) necessitates the development of models that can emulate these multifaceted perceptual capabilities and comprehensively understand these diversified data. To this end, we introduce Nexus-O, an industry-level omni-perceptive and -interactive model capable of efficiently processing Audio, Image, Video, and Text data in any combination and output audio/text in an end-to-end way. We systematically investigate Nexus-O by addressing three key research questions: First, how can models be efficiently designed and trained to achieve tri-modal alignment, understanding and reasoning capabilities across multiple modalities? Second, what approaches can be implemented to evaluate tri-modal model robustness, ensuring reliable performance and applicability in real-world scenarios? Third, what strategies can be employed to curate and obtain high-quality, real-life scenario speech datasets? For the first question, we design and pre-train Nexus-O based on the vision-language model, rather than the language model. By pre-training the model over high-quality synthetic audio data, our model is capable of tri-modal perception and interaction. For the second question, we introduce a new audio testbed, Nexus-O-audio, comprising diverse Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) samples, spanning various real-world scenarios, such as corporate meetings and live stream. For the third question, we design the speech data synthesis pipeline to obtain high-quality speech training datasets, covering various real-world scenarios. Comprehensive experimentation and an in-depth analysis of tri-modal alignment over latent space demonstrate the advantages of our model on downstream tasks.

This paper provides a roadmap that explores the question of how to imbue learning agents with the ability to understand and generate contextually relevant natural language in service of achieving a goal. We hypothesize that two key components in creating such agents are interactivity and environment grounding, shown to be vital parts of language learning in humans, and posit that interactive narratives should be the environments of choice for such training these agents. These games are simulations in which an agent interacts with the world through natural language -- "perceiving", "acting upon", and "talking to" the world using textual descriptions, commands, and dialogue -- and as such exist at the intersection of natural language processing, storytelling, and sequential decision making. We discuss the unique challenges a text games' puzzle-like structure combined with natural language state-and-action spaces provides: knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, and exploration. Beyond the challenges described so far, progress in the realm of interactive narratives can be applied in adjacent problem domains. These applications provide interesting challenges of their own as well as extensions to those discussed so far. We describe three of them in detail: (1) evaluating AI system's commonsense understanding by automatically creating interactive narratives; (2) adapting abstract text-based policies to include other modalities such as vision; and (3) enabling multi-agent and human-AI collaboration in shared, situated worlds.

Large language model agents have exhibited exceptional performance across a range of complex interactive tasks. Recent approaches have utilized tuning with expert trajectories to enhance agent performance, yet they primarily concentrate on outcome rewards, which may lead to errors or suboptimal actions due to the absence of process supervision signals. In this paper, we introduce the Iterative step-level Process Refinement (IPR) framework, which provides detailed step-by-step guidance to enhance agent training. Specifically, we adopt the Monte Carlo method to estimate step-level rewards. During each iteration, the agent explores along the expert trajectory and generates new actions. These actions are then evaluated against the corresponding step of expert trajectory using step-level rewards. Such comparison helps identify discrepancies, yielding contrastive action pairs that serve as training data for the agent. Our experiments on three complex agent tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms a variety of strong baselines. Moreover, our analytical findings highlight the effectiveness of IPR in augmenting action efficiency and its applicability to diverse models.

We introduce StreamDiffusion, a real-time diffusion pipeline designed for interactive image generation. Existing diffusion models are adept at creating images from text or image prompts, yet they often fall short in real-time interaction. This limitation becomes particularly evident in scenarios involving continuous input, such as Metaverse, live video streaming, and broadcasting, where high throughput is imperative. To address this, we present a novel approach that transforms the original sequential denoising into the batching denoising process. Stream Batch eliminates the conventional wait-and-interact approach and enables fluid and high throughput streams. To handle the frequency disparity between data input and model throughput, we design a novel input-output queue for parallelizing the streaming process. Moreover, the existing diffusion pipeline uses classifier-free guidance(CFG), which requires additional U-Net computation. To mitigate the redundant computations, we propose a novel residual classifier-free guidance (RCFG) algorithm that reduces the number of negative conditional denoising steps to only one or even zero. Besides, we introduce a stochastic similarity filter(SSF) to optimize power consumption. Our Stream Batch achieves around 1.5x speedup compared to the sequential denoising method at different denoising levels. The proposed RCFG leads to speeds up to 2.05x higher than the conventional CFG. Combining the proposed strategies and existing mature acceleration tools makes the image-to-image generation achieve up-to 91.07fps on one RTX4090, improving the throughputs of AutoPipline developed by Diffusers over 59.56x. Furthermore, our proposed StreamDiffusion also significantly reduces the energy consumption by 2.39x on one RTX3060 and 1.99x on one RTX4090, respectively.

Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have been impressive. However, these models sometimes show inconsistencies and problematic behavior, such as hallucinating facts, generating flawed code, or creating offensive and toxic content. Unlike these models, humans typically utilize external tools to cross-check and refine their initial content, like using a search engine for fact-checking, or a code interpreter for debugging. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a framework called CRITIC that allows LLMs, which are essentially "black boxes" to validate and progressively amend their own outputs in a manner similar to human interaction with tools. More specifically, starting with an initial output, CRITIC interacts with appropriate tools to evaluate certain aspects of the text, and then revises the output based on the feedback obtained during this validation process. Comprehensive evaluations involving free-form question answering, mathematical program synthesis, and toxicity reduction demonstrate that CRITIC consistently enhances the performance of LLMs. Meanwhile, our research highlights the crucial importance of external feedback in promoting the ongoing self-improvement of LLMs.

LLM-based agents have made significant advancements in interactive environments, such as mobile operations and web browsing, and other domains beyond computer using. Current multi-agent systems universally excel in performance, compared to single agents, but struggle with generalization across environments due to predefined roles and inadequate strategies for generalizing language agents. The challenge of achieving both strong performance and good generalization has hindered the progress of multi-agent systems for interactive environments. To address these issues, we propose CollabUIAgents, a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with a novel multi-agent credit re-assignment (CR) strategy, assigning process rewards with LLMs rather than environment-specific rewards and learning with synthesized preference data, in order to foster generalizable, collaborative behaviors among the role-free agents' policies. Empirical results show that our framework improves both performance and cross-environment generalizability of multi-agent systems. Moreover, our 7B-parameter system achieves results on par with or exceed strong closed-source models, and the LLM that guides the CR. We also provide insights in using granular CR rewards effectively for environment generalization, and accommodating trained LLMs in multi-agent systems.

The traditional process of building interactive machine learning systems can be viewed as a teacher-learner interaction scenario where the machine-learners are trained by one or more human-teachers. In this work, we explore the idea of using a conversational interface to investigate the interaction between human-teachers and interactive machine-learners. Specifically, we examine whether teachable AI agents can reliably learn from human-teachers through conversational interactions, and how this learning compare with traditional supervised learning algorithms. Results validate the concept of teachable conversational agents and highlight the factors relevant for the development of machine learning systems that intend to learn from conversational interactions.

Recently, the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks has attracted an increasing number of attempts to apply LLMs in drug discovery. However, molecule optimization, a critical task in the drug discovery pipeline, is currently an area that has seen little involvement from LLMs. Most of existing approaches focus solely on capturing the underlying patterns in chemical structures provided by the data, without taking advantage of expert feedback. These non-interactive approaches overlook the fact that the drug discovery process is actually one that requires the integration of expert experience and iterative refinement. To address this gap, we propose DrugAssist, an interactive molecule optimization model which performs optimization through human-machine dialogue by leveraging LLM's strong interactivity and generalizability. DrugAssist has achieved leading results in both single and multiple property optimization, simultaneously showcasing immense potential in transferability and iterative optimization. In addition, we publicly release a large instruction-based dataset called MolOpt-Instructions for fine-tuning language models on molecule optimization tasks. We have made our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/blazerye/DrugAssist, which we hope to pave the way for future research in LLMs' application for drug discovery.

For monitoring crises, political events are extracted from the news. The large amount of unstructured full-text event descriptions makes a case-by-case analysis unmanageable, particularly for low-resource humanitarian aid organizations. This creates a demand to classify events into event types, a task referred to as event coding. Typically, domain experts craft an event type ontology, annotators label a large dataset and technical experts develop a supervised coding system. In this work, we propose PR-ENT, a new event coding approach that is more flexible and resource-efficient, while maintaining competitive accuracy: first, we extend an event description such as "Military injured two civilians'' by a template, e.g. "People were [Z]" and prompt a pre-trained (cloze) language model to fill the slot Z. Second, we select answer candidates Z* = {"injured'', "hurt"...} by treating the event description as premise and the filled templates as hypothesis in a textual entailment task. This allows domain experts to draft the codebook directly as labeled prompts and interpretable answer candidates. This human-in-the-loop process is guided by our interactive codebook design tool. We evaluate PR-ENT in several robustness checks: perturbing the event description and prompt template, restricting the vocabulary and removing contextual information.

An accurate differential diagnosis (DDx) is a cornerstone of medical care, often reached through an iterative process of interpretation that combines clinical history, physical examination, investigations and procedures. Interactive interfaces powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to both assist and automate aspects of this process. In this study, we introduce an LLM optimized for diagnostic reasoning, and evaluate its ability to generate a DDx alone or as an aid to clinicians. 20 clinicians evaluated 302 challenging, real-world medical cases sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) case reports. Each case report was read by two clinicians, who were randomized to one of two assistive conditions: either assistance from search engines and standard medical resources, or LLM assistance in addition to these tools. All clinicians provided a baseline, unassisted DDx prior to using the respective assistive tools. Our LLM for DDx exhibited standalone performance that exceeded that of unassisted clinicians (top-10 accuracy 59.1% vs 33.6%, [p = 0.04]). Comparing the two assisted study arms, the DDx quality score was higher for clinicians assisted by our LLM (top-10 accuracy 51.7%) compared to clinicians without its assistance (36.1%) (McNemar's Test: 45.7, p < 0.01) and clinicians with search (44.4%) (4.75, p = 0.03). Further, clinicians assisted by our LLM arrived at more comprehensive differential lists than those without its assistance. Our study suggests that our LLM for DDx has potential to improve clinicians' diagnostic reasoning and accuracy in challenging cases, meriting further real-world evaluation for its ability to empower physicians and widen patients' access to specialist-level expertise.

As one promising way to inquire about any particular information through a dialog with the bot, question answering dialog systems have gained increasing research interests recently. Designing interactive QA systems has always been a challenging task in natural language processing and used as a benchmark to evaluate a machine's ability of natural language understanding. However, such systems often struggle when the question answering is carried out in multiple turns by the users to seek more information based on what they have already learned, thus, giving rise to another complicated form called Conversational Question Answering (CQA). CQA systems are often criticized for not understanding or utilizing the previous context of the conversation when answering the questions. To address the research gap, in this paper, we explore how to integrate conversational history into the neural machine comprehension system. On one hand, we introduce a framework based on a publically available pre-trained language model called BERT for incorporating history turns into the system. On the other hand, we propose a history selection mechanism that selects the turns that are relevant and contributes the most to answer the current question. Experimentation results revealed that our framework is comparable in performance with the state-of-the-art models on the QuAC leader board. We also conduct a number of experiments to show the side effects of using entire context information which brings unnecessary information and noise signals resulting in a decline in the model's performance.

Storytelling is an integral part of human culture and significantly impacts cognitive and socio-emotional development and connection. Despite the importance of interactive visual storytelling, the process of creating such content requires specialized skills and is labor-intensive. This paper introduces ID.8, an open-source system designed for the co-creation of visual stories with generative AI. We focus on enabling an inclusive storytelling experience by simplifying the content creation process and allowing for customization. Our user evaluation confirms a generally positive user experience in domains such as enjoyment and exploration, while highlighting areas for improvement, particularly in immersiveness, alignment, and partnership between the user and the AI system. Overall, our findings indicate promising possibilities for empowering people to create visual stories with generative AI. This work contributes a novel content authoring system, ID.8, and insights into the challenges and potential of using generative AI for multimedia content creation.

Contextual Text Block Detection (CTBD) is the task of identifying coherent text blocks within the complexity of natural scenes. Previous methodologies have treated CTBD as either a visual relation extraction challenge within computer vision or as a sequence modeling problem from the perspective of natural language processing. We introduce a new framework that frames CTBD as a graph generation problem. This methodology consists of two essential procedures: identifying individual text units as graph nodes and discerning the sequential reading order relationships among these units as graph edges. Leveraging the cutting-edge capabilities of DQ-DETR for node detection, our framework innovates further by integrating a novel mechanism, a Dynamic Relation Transformer (DRFormer), dedicated to edge generation. DRFormer incorporates a dual interactive transformer decoder that deftly manages a dynamic graph structure refinement process. Through this iterative process, the model systematically enhances the graph's fidelity, ultimately resulting in improved precision in detecting contextual text blocks. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on both SCUT-CTW-Context and ReCTS-Context datasets substantiate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, underscoring the effectiveness and potential of our graph generation framework in advancing the field of CTBD.

Long-form video understanding represents a significant challenge within computer vision, demanding a model capable of reasoning over long multi-modal sequences. Motivated by the human cognitive process for long-form video understanding, we emphasize interactive reasoning and planning over the ability to process lengthy visual inputs. We introduce a novel agent-based system, VideoAgent, that employs a large language model as a central agent to iteratively identify and compile crucial information to answer a question, with vision-language foundation models serving as tools to translate and retrieve visual information. Evaluated on the challenging EgoSchema and NExT-QA benchmarks, VideoAgent achieves 54.1% and 71.3% zero-shot accuracy with only 8.4 and 8.2 frames used on average. These results demonstrate superior effectiveness and efficiency of our method over the current state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the potential of agent-based approaches in advancing long-form video understanding.

In volume rendering, transfer functions are used to classify structures of interest, and to assign optical properties such as color and opacity. They are commonly defined as 1D or 2D functions that map simple features to these optical properties. As the process of designing a transfer function is typically tedious and unintuitive, several approaches have been proposed for their interactive specification. In this paper, we present a novel method to define transfer functions for volume rendering by leveraging the feature extraction capabilities of self-supervised pre-trained vision transformers. To design a transfer function, users simply select the structures of interest in a slice viewer, and our method automatically selects similar structures based on the high-level features extracted by the neural network. Contrary to previous learning-based transfer function approaches, our method does not require training of models and allows for quick inference, enabling an interactive exploration of the volume data. Our approach reduces the amount of necessary annotations by interactively informing the user about the current classification, so they can focus on annotating the structures of interest that still require annotation. In practice, this allows users to design transfer functions within seconds, instead of minutes. We compare our method to existing learning-based approaches in terms of annotation and compute time, as well as with respect to segmentation accuracy. Our accompanying video showcases the interactivity and effectiveness of our method.

Reliable forecasting of the future behavior of road agents is a critical component to safe planning in autonomous vehicles. Here, we represent continuous trajectories as sequences of discrete motion tokens and cast multi-agent motion prediction as a language modeling task over this domain. Our model, MotionLM, provides several advantages: First, it does not require anchors or explicit latent variable optimization to learn multimodal distributions. Instead, we leverage a single standard language modeling objective, maximizing the average log probability over sequence tokens. Second, our approach bypasses post-hoc interaction heuristics where individual agent trajectory generation is conducted prior to interactive scoring. Instead, MotionLM produces joint distributions over interactive agent futures in a single autoregressive decoding process. In addition, the model's sequential factorization enables temporally causal conditional rollouts. The proposed approach establishes new state-of-the-art performance for multi-agent motion prediction on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, ranking 1st on the interactive challenge leaderboard.

Reverse engineering in the realm of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) has been a longstanding aspiration, though not yet entirely realized. Its primary aim is to uncover the CAD process behind a physical object given its 3D scan. We propose CAD-SIGNet, an end-to-end trainable and auto-regressive architecture to recover the design history of a CAD model represented as a sequence of sketch-and-extrusion from an input point cloud. Our model learns visual-language representations by layer-wise cross-attention between point cloud and CAD language embedding. In particular, a new Sketch instance Guided Attention (SGA) module is proposed in order to reconstruct the fine-grained details of the sketches. Thanks to its auto-regressive nature, CAD-SIGNet not only reconstructs a unique full design history of the corresponding CAD model given an input point cloud but also provides multiple plausible design choices. This allows for an interactive reverse engineering scenario by providing designers with multiple next-step choices along with the design process. Extensive experiments on publicly available CAD datasets showcase the effectiveness of our approach against existing baseline models in two settings, namely, full design history recovery and conditional auto-completion from point clouds.

This paper presents a web-based tool that facilitates the production of tailored summaries for online sharing on social media. Through an interactive user interface, it supports a ``one-click'' video summarization process. Based on the integrated AI models for video summarization and aspect ratio transformation, it facilitates the generation of multiple summaries of a full-length video according to the needs of target platforms with regard to the video's length and aspect ratio.

Sampling from diffusion models involves a slow iterative process that hinders their practical deployment, especially for interactive applications. To accelerate generation speed, recent approaches distill a multi-step diffusion model into a single-step student generator via variational score distillation, which matches the distribution of samples generated by the student to the teacher's distribution. However, these approaches use the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for distribution matching which is known to be mode seeking. In this paper, we generalize the distribution matching approach using a novel f-divergence minimization framework, termed f-distill, that covers different divergences with different trade-offs in terms of mode coverage and training variance. We derive the gradient of the f-divergence between the teacher and student distributions and show that it is expressed as the product of their score differences and a weighting function determined by their density ratio. This weighting function naturally emphasizes samples with higher density in the teacher distribution, when using a less mode-seeking divergence. We observe that the popular variational score distillation approach using the reverse-KL divergence is a special case within our framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that alternative f-divergences, such as forward-KL and Jensen-Shannon divergences, outperform the current best variational score distillation methods across image generation tasks. In particular, when using Jensen-Shannon divergence, f-distill achieves current state-of-the-art one-step generation performance on ImageNet64 and zero-shot text-to-image generation on MS-COCO. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/f-distill

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a revolutionary approach for rendering scenes by sampling a single ray per pixel and it has demonstrated impressive capabilities in novel-view synthesis from static scene images. However, in practice, we usually need to recover NeRF from unconstrained image collections, which poses two challenges: 1) the images often have dynamic changes in appearance because of different capturing time and camera settings; 2) the images may contain transient objects such as humans and cars, leading to occlusion and ghosting artifacts. Conventional approaches seek to address these challenges by locally utilizing a single ray to synthesize a color of a pixel. In contrast, humans typically perceive appearance and objects by globally utilizing information across multiple pixels. To mimic the perception process of humans, in this paper, we propose Cross-Ray NeRF (CR-NeRF) that leverages interactive information across multiple rays to synthesize occlusion-free novel views with the same appearances as the images. Specifically, to model varying appearances, we first propose to represent multiple rays with a novel cross-ray feature and then recover the appearance by fusing global statistics, i.e., feature covariance of the rays and the image appearance. Moreover, to avoid occlusion introduced by transient objects, we propose a transient objects handler and introduce a grid sampling strategy for masking out the transient objects. We theoretically find that leveraging correlation across multiple rays promotes capturing more global information. Moreover, extensive experimental results on large real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of CR-NeRF.

In this paper, we introduce a novel low-latency inference framework for large language models (LLMs) inference which enables LLMs to perform inferences with incomplete prompts. By reallocating computational processes to prompt input phase, we achieve a substantial reduction in latency, thereby significantly enhancing the interactive experience for users of LLMs. The framework adeptly manages the visibility of the streaming prompt to the model, allowing it to infer from incomplete prompts or await additional prompts. Compared with traditional inference methods that utilize complete prompts, our approach demonstrates an average reduction of 59% in response latency on the MMLU-Pro dataset, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Additionally, our framework facilitates collaborative inference and output across different models. By employing an LLM for inference and a small language model (SLM) for output, we achieve an average 68% reduction in response latency, alongside a 5.5% improvement in accuracy on the MMLU-Pro dataset compared with the SLM baseline. For long prompts exceeding 20 sentences, the response latency can be reduced by up to 93%.

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized audio-driven talking head synthesis. Beyond precise lip synchronization, diffusion-based methods excel in generating subtle expressions and natural head movements that are well-aligned with the audio signal. However, these methods are confronted by slow inference speed, insufficient fine-grained control over facial motions, and occasional visual artifacts largely due to an implicit latent space derived from Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), which prevent their adoption in realtime interaction applications. To address these issues, we introduce Ditto, a diffusion-based framework that enables controllable realtime talking head synthesis. Our key innovation lies in bridging motion generation and photorealistic neural rendering through an explicit identity-agnostic motion space, replacing conventional VAE representations. This design substantially reduces the complexity of diffusion learning while enabling precise control over the synthesized talking heads. We further propose an inference strategy that jointly optimizes three key components: audio feature extraction, motion generation, and video synthesis. This optimization enables streaming processing, realtime inference, and low first-frame delay, which are the functionalities crucial for interactive applications such as AI assistants. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Ditto generates compelling talking head videos and substantially outperforms existing methods in both motion control and realtime performance.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the current state-of-the-art for digital analysis of histopathological images. The large size of whole-slide microscopy images (WSIs) requires advanced memory handling to read, display and process these images. There are several open-source platforms for working with WSIs, but few support deployment of CNN models. These applications use third-party solutions for inference, making them less user-friendly and unsuitable for high-performance image analysis. To make deployment of CNNs user-friendly and feasible on low-end machines, we have developed a new platform, FastPathology, using the FAST framework and C++. It minimizes memory usage for reading and processing WSIs, deployment of CNN models, and real-time interactive visualization of results. Runtime experiments were conducted on four different use cases, using different architectures, inference engines, hardware configurations and operating systems. Memory usage for reading, visualizing, zooming and panning a WSI were measured, using FastPathology and three existing platforms. FastPathology performed similarly in terms of memory to the other C++ based application, while using considerably less than the two Java-based platforms. The choice of neural network model, inference engine, hardware and processors influenced runtime considerably. Thus, FastPathology includes all steps needed for efficient visualization and processing of WSIs in a single application, including inference of CNNs with real-time display of the results. Source code, binary releases and test data can be found online on GitHub at https://github.com/SINTEFMedtek/FAST-Pathology/.

In role-playing games a Game Master (GM) is the player in charge of the game, who must design the challenges the players face and narrate the outcomes of their actions. In this work we discuss some challenges to model GMs from an Interactive Storytelling and Natural Language Processing perspective. Following those challenges we propose three test categories to evaluate such dialogue systems, and we use them to test ChatGPT, Bard and OpenAssistant as out-of-the-box GMs.

Comprehending how humans process visual information in dynamic settings is crucial for psychology and designing user-centered interactions. While mobile eye-tracking systems combining egocentric video and gaze signals can offer valuable insights, manual analysis of these recordings is time-intensive. In this work, we present a novel human-centered learning algorithm designed for automated object recognition within mobile eye-tracking settings. Our approach seamlessly integrates an object detector with a spatial relation-aware inductive message-passing network (I-MPN), harnessing node profile information and capturing object correlations. Such mechanisms enable us to learn embedding functions capable of generalizing to new object angle views, facilitating rapid adaptation and efficient reasoning in dynamic contexts as users navigate their environment. Through experiments conducted on three distinct video sequences, our interactive-based method showcases significant performance improvements over fixed training/testing algorithms, even when trained on considerably smaller annotated samples collected through user feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate exceptional efficiency in data annotation processes and surpass prior interactive methods that use complete object detectors, combine detectors with convolutional networks, or employ interactive video segmentation.

Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interface, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user study. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.

Representation learning approaches for robotic manipulation have boomed in recent years. Due to the scarcity of in-domain robot data, prevailing methodologies tend to leverage large-scale human video datasets to extract generalizable features for visuomotor policy learning. Despite the progress achieved, prior endeavors disregard the interactive dynamics that capture behavior patterns and physical interaction during the manipulation process, resulting in an inadequate understanding of the relationship between objects and the environment. To this end, we propose a general pre-training pipeline that learns Manipulation by Predicting the Interaction (MPI) and enhances the visual representation.Given a pair of keyframes representing the initial and final states, along with language instructions, our algorithm predicts the transition frame and detects the interaction object, respectively. These two learning objectives achieve superior comprehension towards "how-to-interact" and "where-to-interact". We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several challenging robotic tasks.The experimental results demonstrate that MPI exhibits remarkable improvement by 10% to 64% compared with previous state-of-the-art in real-world robot platforms as well as simulation environments. Code and checkpoints are publicly shared at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/MPI.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in mainstream academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. However, human knowledge encompasses over 200 specialized disciplines, far exceeding the scope of existing benchmarks. The capabilities of LLMs in many of these specialized fields-particularly in light industry, agriculture, and service-oriented disciplines-remain inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we present SuperGPQA, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates graduate-level knowledge and reasoning capabilities across 285 disciplines. Our benchmark employs a novel Human-LLM collaborative filtering mechanism to eliminate trivial or ambiguous questions through iterative refinement based on both LLM responses and expert feedback. Our experimental results reveal significant room for improvement in the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse knowledge domains (e.g., the reasoning-focused model DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest accuracy of 61.82% on SuperGPQA), highlighting the considerable gap between current model capabilities and artificial general intelligence. Additionally, we present comprehensive insights from our management of a large-scale annotation process, involving over 80 expert annotators and an interactive Human-LLM collaborative system, offering valuable methodological guidance for future research initiatives of comparable scope.

Automatic 3D content creation has gained increasing attention recently, due to its potential in various applications such as video games, film industry, and AR/VR. Recent advancements in diffusion models and multimodal models have notably improved the quality and efficiency of 3D object generation given a single RGB image. However, 3D objects generated even by state-of-the-art methods are still unsatisfactory compared to human-created assets. Considering only textures instead of materials makes these methods encounter challenges in photo-realistic rendering, relighting, and flexible appearance editing. And they also suffer from severe misalignment between geometry and high-frequency texture details. In this work, we propose a novel approach to boost the quality of generated 3D objects from the perspective of Physics-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. By analyzing the components of PBR materials, we choose to consider albedo, roughness, metalness, and bump maps. For albedo and bump maps, we leverage Stable Diffusion fine-tuned on synthetic data to extract these values, with novel usages of these fine-tuned models to obtain 3D consistent albedo UV and bump UV for generated objects. In terms of roughness and metalness maps, we adopt a semi-automatic process to provide room for interactive adjustment, which we believe is more practical. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is generally beneficial for various state-of-the-art generation methods, significantly boosting the quality and realism of their generated 3D objects, with natural relighting effects and substantially improved geometry.

In this paper, we introduce Writing in the Margins (WiM), a new inference pattern for Large Language Models designed to optimize the handling of long input sequences in retrieval-oriented tasks. This approach leverages the chunked prefill of the key-value cache to perform segment-wise inference, which enables efficient processing of extensive contexts along with the generation and classification of intermediate information ("margins") that guide the model towards specific tasks. This method increases computational overhead marginally while significantly enhancing the performance of off-the-shelf models without the need for fine-tuning. Specifically, we observe that WiM provides an average enhancement of 7.5% in accuracy for reasoning skills (HotpotQA, MultiHop-RAG) and more than a 30.0% increase in the F1-score for aggregation tasks (CWE). Additionally, we show how the proposed pattern fits into an interactive retrieval design that provides end-users with ongoing updates about the progress of context processing, and pinpoints the integration of relevant information into the final response. We release our implementation of WiM using Hugging Face Transformers library at https://github.com/writer/writing-in-the-margins.

Recent prevailing works on graph machine learning typically follow a similar methodology that involves designing advanced variants of graph neural networks (GNNs) to maintain the superior performance of GNNs on different graphs. In this paper, we aim to streamline the GNN design process and leverage the advantages of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the performance of GNNs on downstream tasks. We formulate a new paradigm, coined "LLMs-as-Consultants," which integrates LLMs with GNNs in an interactive manner. A framework named LOGIN (LLM Consulted GNN training) is instantiated, empowering the interactive utilization of LLMs within the GNN training process. First, we attentively craft concise prompts for spotted nodes, carrying comprehensive semantic and topological information, and serving as input to LLMs. Second, we refine GNNs by devising a complementary coping mechanism that utilizes the responses from LLMs, depending on their correctness. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of LOGIN on node classification tasks across both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. The results illustrate that even basic GNN architectures, when employed within the proposed LLMs-as-Consultants paradigm, can achieve comparable performance to advanced GNNs with intricate designs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/QiaoYRan/LOGIN.

Grounded situation recognition is the task of predicting the main activity, entities playing certain roles within the activity, and bounding-box groundings of the entities in the given image. To effectively deal with this challenging task, we introduce a novel approach where the two processes for activity classification and entity estimation are interactive and complementary. To implement this idea, we propose Collaborative Glance-Gaze TransFormer (CoFormer) that consists of two modules: Glance transformer for activity classification and Gaze transformer for entity estimation. Glance transformer predicts the main activity with the help of Gaze transformer that analyzes entities and their relations, while Gaze transformer estimates the grounded entities by focusing only on the entities relevant to the activity predicted by Glance transformer. Our CoFormer achieves the state of the art in all evaluation metrics on the SWiG dataset. Training code and model weights are available at https://github.com/jhcho99/CoFormer.

We present InstructDiffusion, a unifying and generic framework for aligning computer vision tasks with human instructions. Unlike existing approaches that integrate prior knowledge and pre-define the output space (e.g., categories and coordinates) for each vision task, we cast diverse vision tasks into a human-intuitive image-manipulating process whose output space is a flexible and interactive pixel space. Concretely, the model is built upon the diffusion process and is trained to predict pixels according to user instructions, such as encircling the man's left shoulder in red or applying a blue mask to the left car. InstructDiffusion could handle a variety of vision tasks, including understanding tasks (such as segmentation and keypoint detection) and generative tasks (such as editing and enhancement). It even exhibits the ability to handle unseen tasks and outperforms prior methods on novel datasets. This represents a significant step towards a generalist modeling interface for vision tasks, advancing artificial general intelligence in the field of computer vision.

Generating a long story of several thousand words with narrative coherence using Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a challenging task. Previous research has addressed this challenge by proposing different frameworks that create a story plan and generate a long story based on that plan. However, these frameworks have been mainly focusing on maintaining narrative coherence in stories, often overlooking creativity in story planning and the expressiveness of the stories generated from those plans, which are desirable properties to captivate readers' interest. In this paper, we propose Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation framework (CritiCS), which is composed of plan refining stage (CrPlan) and story generation stage (CrText), to integrate a collective revision mechanism that promotes those properties into long-form story generation process. Specifically, in each stage, a group of LLM critics and one leader collaborate to incrementally refine drafts of plan and story throughout multiple rounds. Extensive human evaluation shows that the CritiCS can significantly enhance story creativity and reader engagement, while also maintaining narrative coherence. Furthermore, the design of the framework allows active participation from human writers in any role within the critique process, enabling interactive human-machine collaboration in story writing.

The development of AI-driven generative audio mirrors broader AI trends, often prioritizing immediate accessibility at the expense of explainability. Consequently, integrating such tools into sustained artistic practice remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we explore several paths to improve explainability, drawing primarily from our research-creation practice in training and implementing generative audio models. As practical provisions for improved explainability, we highlight human agency over training materials, the viability of small-scale datasets, the facilitation of the iterative creative process, and the integration of interactive machine learning as a mapping tool. Importantly, these steps aim to enhance human agency over generative AI systems not only during model inference, but also when curating and preprocessing training data as well as during the training phase of models.

Training learnable metrics using modern language models has recently emerged as a promising method for the automatic evaluation of machine translation. However, existing human evaluation datasets for text simplification have limited annotations that are based on unitary or outdated models, making them unsuitable for this approach. To address these issues, we introduce the SimpEval corpus that contains: SimpEval_past, comprising 12K human ratings on 2.4K simplifications of 24 past systems, and SimpEval_2022, a challenging simplification benchmark consisting of over 1K human ratings of 360 simplifications including GPT-3.5 generated text. Training on SimpEval, we present LENS, a Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification. Extensive empirical results show that LENS correlates much better with human judgment than existing metrics, paving the way for future progress in the evaluation of text simplification. We also introduce Rank and Rate, a human evaluation framework that rates simplifications from several models in a list-wise manner using an interactive interface, which ensures both consistency and accuracy in the evaluation process and is used to create the SimpEval datasets.

We introduce WebGames, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate general-purpose web-browsing AI agents through a collection of 50+ interactive challenges. These challenges are specifically crafted to be straightforward for humans while systematically testing the limitations of current AI systems across fundamental browser interactions, advanced input processing, cognitive tasks, workflow automation, and interactive entertainment. Our framework eliminates external dependencies through a hermetic testing environment, ensuring reproducible evaluation with verifiable ground-truth solutions. We evaluate leading vision-language models including GPT-4o, Claude Computer-Use, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Qwen2-VL against human performance. Results reveal a substantial capability gap, with the best AI system achieving only 43.1% success rate compared to human performance of 95.7%, highlighting fundamental limitations in current AI systems' ability to handle common web interaction patterns that humans find intuitive. The benchmark is publicly available at webgames.convergence.ai, offering a lightweight, client-side implementation that facilitates rapid evaluation cycles. Through its modular architecture and standardized challenge specifications, WebGames provides a robust foundation for measuring progress in development of more capable web-browsing agents.

In the proposed demo, we will present a new software - Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System - LiFE (https://github.com/kmi-linguistics/life) - an open-source, web-based linguistic data management and analysis application that allows for systematic storage, management, sharing and usage of linguistic data collected from the field. The application allows users to store lexical items, sentences, paragraphs, audio-visual content with rich glossing / annotation; generate interactive and print dictionaries; and also train and use natural language processing tools and models for various purposes using this data. Since its a web-based application, it also allows for seamless collaboration among multiple persons and sharing the data, models, etc with each other. The system uses the Python-based Flask framework and MongoDB in the backend and HTML, CSS and Javascript at the frontend. The interface allows creation of multiple projects that could be shared with the other users. At the backend, the application stores the data in RDF format so as to allow its release as Linked Data over the web using semantic web technologies - as of now it makes use of the OntoLex-Lemon for storing the lexical data and Ligt for storing the interlinear glossed text and then internally linking it to the other linked lexicons and databases such as DBpedia and WordNet. Furthermore it provides support for training the NLP systems using scikit-learn and HuggingFace Transformers libraries as well as make use of any model trained using these libraries - while the user interface itself provides limited options for tuning the system, an externally-trained model could be easily incorporated within the application; similarly the dataset itself could be easily exported into a standard machine-readable format like JSON or CSV that could be consumed by other programs and pipelines.

The salient multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o highlight its critical role in practical applications, yet it lacks a high-performing open-source counterpart. In this paper, we introduce Baichuan-Omni, the first open-source 7B Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at concurrently processing and analyzing modalities of image, video, audio, and text, while delivering an advanced multimodal interactive experience and strong performance. We propose an effective multimodal training schema starting with 7B model and proceeding through two stages of multimodal alignment and multitask fine-tuning across audio, image, video, and text modal. This approach equips the language model with the ability to handle visual and audio data effectively. Demonstrating strong performance across various omni-modal and multimodal benchmarks, we aim for this contribution to serve as a competitive baseline for the open-source community in advancing multimodal understanding and real-time interaction.

We introduce InteractiveVideo, a user-centric framework for video generation. Different from traditional generative approaches that operate based on user-provided images or text, our framework is designed for dynamic interaction, allowing users to instruct the generative model through various intuitive mechanisms during the whole generation process, e.g. text and image prompts, painting, drag-and-drop, etc. We propose a Synergistic Multimodal Instruction mechanism, designed to seamlessly integrate users' multimodal instructions into generative models, thus facilitating a cooperative and responsive interaction between user inputs and the generative process. This approach enables iterative and fine-grained refinement of the generation result through precise and effective user instructions. With InteractiveVideo, users are given the flexibility to meticulously tailor key aspects of a video. They can paint the reference image, edit semantics, and adjust video motions until their requirements are fully met. Code, models, and demo are available at https://github.com/invictus717/InteractiveVideo

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy userleftrightarrowagent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.

We introduce DrawTalking, a prototype system enabling an approach that empowers users to build interactive worlds by sketching and speaking. The approach emphasizes user control and flexibility, and gives programming-like capability without requiring code. An early open-ended study shows the mechanics resonate and are applicable to many creative-exploratory use cases, with the potential to inspire and inform research in future natural interfaces for creative exploration and authoring.

Performing simple household tasks based on language directives is very natural to humans, yet it remains an open challenge for AI agents. The 'interactive instruction following' task attempts to make progress towards building agents that jointly navigate, interact, and reason in the environment at every step. To address the multifaceted problem, we propose a model that factorizes the task into interactive perception and action policy streams with enhanced components and name it as MOCA, a Modular Object-Centric Approach. We empirically validate that MOCA outperforms prior arts by significant margins on the ALFRED benchmark with improved generalization.

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.

Human-AI interactivity is a critical aspect that reflects the usability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing end-to-end MLLMs only allow users to interact with them through language instructions, leading to the limitation of the interactive accuracy and efficiency. In this study, we present precise referring instructions that utilize diverse reference representations such as points and boxes as referring prompts to refer to the special region. This enables MLLMs to focus on the region of interest and achieve finer-grained interaction. Based on precise referring instruction, we propose ChatSpot, a unified end-to-end multimodal large language model that supports diverse forms of interactivity including mouse clicks, drag-and-drop, and drawing boxes, which provides a more flexible and seamless interactive experience. We also construct a multi-grained vision-language instruction-following dataset based on existing datasets and GPT-4 generating. Furthermore, we design a series of evaluation tasks to assess the effectiveness of region recognition and interaction. Experimental results showcase ChatSpot's promising performance.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced highly capable and controllable systems. This creates unprecedented opportunities for structured reasoning as well as collaboration among multiple AI systems and humans. To fully realize this potential, it is essential to develop a principled way of designing and studying such structured interactions. For this purpose, we introduce the conceptual framework of Flows: a systematic approach to modeling complex interactions. Flows are self-contained building blocks of computation, with an isolated state, communicating through a standardized message-based interface. This modular design allows Flows to be recursively composed into arbitrarily nested interactions, with a substantial reduction of complexity. Crucially, any interaction can be implemented using this framework, including prior work on AI--AI and human--AI interactions, prompt engineering schemes, and tool augmentation. We demonstrate the potential of Flows on the task of competitive coding, a challenging task on which even GPT-4 struggles. Our results suggest that structured reasoning and collaboration substantially improve generalization, with AI-only Flows adding +21 and human--AI Flows adding +54 absolute points in terms of solve rate. To support rapid and rigorous research, we introduce the aiFlows library. The library comes with a repository of Flows that can be easily used, extended, and composed into novel, more complex Flows. The aiFlows library is available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/aiflows. Data and Flows for reproducing our experiments are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/cc_flows.

LLaVA-Interactive is a research prototype for multimodal human-AI interaction. The system can have multi-turn dialogues with human users by taking multimodal user inputs and generating multimodal responses. Importantly, LLaVA-Interactive goes beyond language prompt, where visual prompt is enabled to align human intents in the interaction. The development of LLaVA-Interactive is extremely cost-efficient as the system combines three multimodal skills of pre-built AI models without additional model training: visual chat of LLaVA, image segmentation from SEEM, as well as image generation and editing from GLIGEN. A diverse set of application scenarios is presented to demonstrate the promises of LLaVA-Interactive and to inspire future research in multimodal interactive systems.

We propose an intuitive LLM prompting framework (AgentKit) for multifunctional agents. AgentKit offers a unified framework for explicitly constructing a complex "thought process" from simple natural language prompts. The basic building block in AgentKit is a node, containing a natural language prompt for a specific subtask. The user then puts together chains of nodes, like stacking LEGO pieces. The chains of nodes can be designed to explicitly enforce a naturally structured "thought process". For example, for the task of writing a paper, one may start with the thought process of 1) identify a core message, 2) identify prior research gaps, etc. The nodes in AgentKit can be designed and combined in different ways to implement multiple advanced capabilities including on-the-fly hierarchical planning, reflection, and learning from interactions. In addition, due to the modular nature and the intuitive design to simulate explicit human thought process, a basic agent could be implemented as simple as a list of prompts for the subtasks and therefore could be designed and tuned by someone without any programming experience. Quantitatively, we show that agents designed through AgentKit achieve SOTA performance on WebShop and Crafter. These advances underscore AgentKit's potential in making LLM agents effective and accessible for a wider range of applications. https://github.com/holmeswww/AgentKit

We present Speakerly, a new real-time voice-based writing assistance system that helps users with text composition across various use cases such as emails, instant messages, and notes. The user can interact with the system through instructions or dictation, and the system generates a well-formatted and coherent document. We describe the system architecture and detail how we address the various challenges while building and deploying such a system at scale. More specifically, our system uses a combination of small, task-specific models as well as pre-trained language models for fast and effective text composition while supporting a variety of input modes for better usability.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at answering questions but remain passive learners--absorbing static data without the ability to question and refine knowledge. This paper explores how LLMs can transition to interactive, question-driven learning through student-teacher dialogues. We introduce INTERACT (INTEReractive Learning for Adaptive Concept Transfer), a framework in which a "student" LLM engages a "teacher" LLM through iterative inquiries to acquire knowledge across 1,347 contexts, including song lyrics, news articles, movie plots, academic papers, and images. Our experiments show that across a wide range of scenarios and LLM architectures, interactive learning consistently enhances performance, achieving up to a 25% improvement, with 'cold-start' student models matching static learning baselines in as few as five dialogue turns. Interactive setups can also mitigate the disadvantages of weaker teachers, showcasing the robustness of question-driven learning.

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have showcased incredible capabilities in generating coherent images based on textual descriptions, enabling vast applications in content generation. While recent advancements have introduced control over factors such as object localization, posture, and image contours, a crucial gap remains in our ability to control the interactions between objects in the generated content. Well-controlling interactions in generated images could yield meaningful applications, such as creating realistic scenes with interacting characters. In this work, we study the problems of conditioning T2I diffusion models with Human-Object Interaction (HOI) information, consisting of a triplet label (person, action, object) and corresponding bounding boxes. We propose a pluggable interaction control model, called InteractDiffusion that extends existing pre-trained T2I diffusion models to enable them being better conditioned on interactions. Specifically, we tokenize the HOI information and learn their relationships via interaction embeddings. A conditioning self-attention layer is trained to map HOI tokens to visual tokens, thereby conditioning the visual tokens better in existing T2I diffusion models. Our model attains the ability to control the interaction and location on existing T2I diffusion models, which outperforms existing baselines by a large margin in HOI detection score, as well as fidelity in FID and KID. Project page: https://jiuntian.github.io/interactdiffusion.

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to improve organizational activities and their outcomes by managing the underlying processes. To achieve this, it is often necessary to consider information from various sources, including unstructured textual documents. Therefore, researchers have developed several BPM-specific solutions that extract information from textual documents using Natural Language Processing techniques. These solutions are specific to their respective tasks and cannot accomplish multiple process-related problems as a general-purpose instrument. However, in light of the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with remarkable reasoning capabilities, such a general-purpose instrument with multiple applications now appears attainable. In this paper, we illustrate how LLMs can accomplish text-related BPM tasks by applying a specific LLM to three exemplary tasks: mining imperative process models from textual descriptions, mining declarative process models from textual descriptions, and assessing the suitability of process tasks from textual descriptions for robotic process automation. We show that, without extensive configuration or prompt engineering, LLMs perform comparably to or better than existing solutions and discuss implications for future BPM research as well as practical usage.

This research paper delves into the integration of OpenAI's ChatGPT into embodied agent systems, evaluating its influence on interactive decision-making benchmark. Drawing a parallel to the concept of people assuming roles according to their unique strengths, we introduce InterAct. In this approach, we feed ChatGPT with varied prompts, assigning it a numerous roles like a checker and a sorter, then integrating them with the original language model. Our research shows a remarkable success rate of 98% in AlfWorld, which consists of 6 different tasks in a simulated household environment, emphasizing the significance of proficient prompt engineering. The results highlight ChatGPT's competence in comprehending and performing intricate tasks effectively in real-world settings, thus paving the way for further advancements in task planning.

Large language models (LLMs) are shaping a new user interface (UI) paradigm in writing tools by enabling users to generate text through prompts. This paradigm shifts some creative control from the user to the system, thereby diminishing the user's authorship and autonomy in the writing process. To restore autonomy, we introduce Textfocals, a UI prototype designed to investigate a human-centered approach that emphasizes the user's role in writing. Textfocals supports the writing process by providing LLM-generated summaries, questions, and advice (i.e., LLM views) in a sidebar of a text editor, encouraging reflection and self-driven revision in writing without direct text generation. Textfocals' UI affordances, including contextually adaptive views and scaffolding for prompt selection and customization, offer a novel way to interact with LLMs where users maintain full authorship of their writing. A formative user study with Textfocals showed promising evidence that this approach might help users develop underdeveloped ideas, cater to the rhetorical audience, and clarify their writing. However, the study also showed interaction design challenges related to document navigation and scoping, prompt engineering, and context management. Our work highlights the breadth of the design space of writing support interfaces powered by generative AI that maintain authorship integrity.

A prevailing paradigm in neural text generation is one-shot generation, where text is produced in a single step. The one-shot setting is inadequate, however, when the constraints the user wishes to impose on the generated text are dynamic, especially when authoring longer documents. We address this limitation with an interactive text generation setting in which the user interacts with the system by issuing commands to edit existing text. To this end, we propose a novel text editing task, and introduce WikiDocEdits, a dataset of single-sentence edits crawled from Wikipedia. We show that our Interactive Editor, a transformer-based model trained on this dataset, outperforms baselines and obtains positive results in both automatic and human evaluations. We present empirical and qualitative analyses of this model's performance.

Current language model-driven agents often lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. Although adept at devising strategies and performing tasks, these agents struggle with seeking clarification and grasping precise user intentions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Intention-in-Interaction (IN3), a novel benchmark designed to inspect users' implicit intentions through explicit queries. Next, we propose the incorporation of model experts as the upstream in agent designs to enhance user-agent interaction. Employing IN3, we empirically train Mistral-Interact, a powerful model that proactively assesses task vagueness, inquires user intentions, and refines them into actionable goals before starting downstream agent task execution. Integrating it into the XAgent framework, we comprehensively evaluate the enhanced agent system regarding user instruction understanding and execution, revealing that our approach notably excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. All the data and codes are released.

Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adapted for interactive decision-making tasks like web navigation. While achieving decent performance, previous methods implicitly assume a forward-only execution mode for the model, where they only provide oracle trajectories as in-context examples to teach the model how to reason in the interactive environment. Consequently, the model could not handle more challenging scenarios not covered in the in-context examples, e.g., mistakes, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to model the interactive task as state space exploration, where the LLM agent transitions among a pre-defined set of states by performing actions to complete the task. This formulation enables flexible back-tracking, allowing the model to easily recover from errors. We evaluate our proposed LLM Agent with State-Space ExploRation (LASER) on the WebShop task. Experimental results show that our LASER agent significantly outperforms previous methods and closes the gap with human performance on the web navigation task.

In today's business marketplace, many high-tech Internet enterprises constantly explore innovative ways to provide optimal online user experiences for gaining competitive advantages. The great needs of developing intelligent interactive recommendation systems are indicated, which could sequentially suggest users the most proper items by accurately predicting their preferences, while receiving the up-to-date feedback to refine the recommendation results, continuously. Multi-armed bandit algorithms, which have been widely applied into various online systems, are quite capable of delivering such efficient recommendation services. However, few existing bandit models are able to adapt to new changes introduced by the modern recommender systems.

This paper assesses the potential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as assistive tools in the creative writing process, by means of a single, in-depth case study. In the course of the study, we develop interactive and multi-voice prompting strategies that interleave background descriptions (scene setting, plot elements), instructions that guide composition, samples of text in the target style, and critical discussion of the given samples. We qualitatively evaluate the results from a literary critical perspective, as well as from the standpoint of computational creativity (a sub-field of artificial intelligence). Our findings lend support to the view that the sophistication of the results that can be achieved with an LLM mirrors the sophistication of the prompting.

It is a notable trend to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, e.g., tasks that require a sequence of actions and dynamic interaction with tools and external environments. In this paper, we propose StateFlow, a novel LLM-based task-solving paradigm that conceptualizes complex task-solving processes as state machines. In StateFlow, we distinguish between "process grounding" (via state and state transitions) and "sub-task solving" (through actions within a state), enhancing control and interpretability of the task-solving procedure. A state represents the status of a running process. The transitions between states are controlled by heuristic rules or decisions made by the LLM, allowing for a dynamic and adaptive progression. Upon entering a state, a series of actions is executed, involving not only calling LLMs guided by different prompts, but also the utilization of external tools as needed. Our results show that StateFlow significantly enhances LLMs' efficiency. For instance, StateFlow achieves 13% and 28% higher success rates compared to ReAct in InterCode SQL and ALFWorld benchmark, with 5x and 3x less cost respectively. We also show that StateFlow can be combined with iterative refining methods like Reflexion to further improve performance.

In proactive dialogue, the challenge lies not just in generating responses but in steering conversations toward predetermined goals, a task where Large Language Models (LLMs) typically struggle due to their reactive nature. Traditional approaches to enhance dialogue planning in LLMs, ranging from elaborate prompt engineering to the integration of policy networks, either face efficiency issues or deliver suboptimal performance. Inspired by the dualprocess theory in psychology, which identifies two distinct modes of thinking - intuitive (fast) and analytical (slow), we propose the Dual-Process Dialogue Planning (DPDP) framework. DPDP embodies this theory through two complementary planning systems: an instinctive policy model for familiar contexts and a deliberative Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) mechanism for complex, novel scenarios. This dual strategy is further coupled with a novel two-stage training regimen: offline Reinforcement Learning for robust initial policy model formation followed by MCTS-enhanced on-the-fly learning, which ensures a dynamic balance between efficiency and strategic depth. Our empirical evaluations across diverse dialogue tasks affirm DPDP's superiority in achieving both high-quality dialogues and operational efficiency, outpacing existing methods.

Communicating science and technology is essential for the public to understand and engage in a rapidly changing world. Tweetorials are an emerging phenomenon where experts explain STEM topics on social media in creative and engaging ways. However, STEM experts struggle to write an engaging "hook" in the first tweet that captures the reader's attention. We propose methods to use large language models (LLMs) to help users scaffold their process of writing a relatable hook for complex scientific topics. We demonstrate that LLMs can help writers find everyday experiences that are relatable and interesting to the public, avoid jargon, and spark curiosity. Our evaluation shows that the system reduces cognitive load and helps people write better hooks. Lastly, we discuss the importance of interactivity with LLMs to preserve the correctness, effectiveness, and authenticity of the writing.

Information graphics are pivotal in effective information dissemination and storytelling. However, creating such graphics is extremely challenging for non-professionals, since the design process requires multifaceted skills and comprehensive knowledge. Thus, despite the many available authoring tools, a significant gap remains in enabling non-experts to produce compelling information graphics seamlessly, especially from scratch. Recent breakthroughs show that Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when tool-augmented, can autonomously engage with external tools, making them promising candidates for enabling innovative graphic design applications. In this work, we propose a LLM-centric interface with the agent GraphiMind for automatic generation, recommendation, and composition of information graphics design resources, based on user intent expressed through natural language. Our GraphiMind integrates a Textual Conversational Interface, powered by tool-augmented LLM, with a traditional Graphical Manipulation Interface, streamlining the entire design process from raw resource curation to composition and refinement. Extensive evaluations highlight our tool's proficiency in simplifying the design process, opening avenues for its use by non-professional users. Moreover, we spotlight the potential of LLMs in reshaping the domain of information graphics design, offering a blend of automation, versatility, and user-centric interactivity.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for enhancing human productivity by assisting with computer tasks. Existing task formulations primarily focus on simple tasks that can be specified by a single, language-only instruction, such as "Insert a new slide." In this work, we introduce VideoGUI, a novel multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate GUI assistants on visual-centric GUI tasks. Sourced from high-quality web instructional videos, our benchmark focuses on tasks involving professional and novel software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop or Stable Diffusion WebUI) and complex activities (e.g., video editing). VideoGUI evaluates GUI assistants through a hierarchical process, allowing for identification of the specific levels at which they may fail: (i) high-level planning: reconstruct procedural subtasks from visual conditions without language descriptions; (ii) middle-level planning: generate sequences of precise action narrations based on visual state (i.e., screenshot) and goals; (iii) atomic action execution: perform specific actions such as accurately clicking designated elements. For each level, we design evaluation metrics across individual dimensions to provide clear signals, such as individual performance in clicking, dragging, typing, and scrolling for atomic action execution. Our evaluation on VideoGUI reveals that even the SoTA large multimodal model GPT4o performs poorly on visual-centric GUI tasks, especially for high-level planning.

Training a Large Visual Language Model (LVLM) from scratch, like GPT-4, is resource-intensive. Our paper presents a play-and-plug module for Large Language Models (LLMs), namely Interactive Perception Network (IPN), aiming to achieve a LVLM by incorporating the image understanding capability into LLMs. Previous methods incorporate visual information into LLMs with a simple visual mapping network, where the image feature is projected into the embedding space of LLMs via a linear layer. Such mapping network projects the image feature once yet does not consider the interaction between the image and the human input query. Hence, the obtained visual information with no connections with human intention may be inadequate for LLMs to make intention-following responses, which we term as static visual information. IPN addresses this issue by allowing the LLM to request the desired visual information aligned with various human instructions, which we term as the dynamic interaction between the LLM and visual information. Specifically, IPN consists of a simple visual mapping network to provide the basic perception of an image for LLMs. It also contains additional modules responsible for acquiring requests from LLMs, performing request-based visual information interaction, and transmitting the resulting interacted visual information to LLMs, respectively. In this way, LLMs act to understand the human query, deliver the corresponding request to the request-based visual information interaction module, and generate the response based on the interleaved multimodal information. We evaluate IPN through extensive experiments on multimodal question answering, reasoning, and so on, demonstrating that it significantly improves the zero-shot performance of LVLMs on various multimodal tasks compared to previous methods.

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: user-friendly interaction, controllable generation, and wide applicability. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this framework, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. The code, prompts, and experimental details are available at https://github.com/moymix/TaskMatrix/tree/main/LowCodeLLM. A system demonstration video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2C1vaeO3E.

The applications of generative AI have become extremely impressive, and the interplay between users and AI is even more so. Current human-AI interaction literature has taken a broad look at how humans interact with generative AI, but it lacks specificity regarding the user interface designs and patterns used to create these applications. Therefore, we present a survey that comprehensively presents taxonomies of how a human interacts with AI and the user interaction patterns designed to meet the needs of a variety of relevant use cases. We focus primarily on user-guided interactions, surveying interactions that are initiated by the user and do not include any implicit signals given by the user. With this survey, we aim to create a compendium of different user-interaction patterns that can be used as a reference for designers and developers alike. In doing so, we also strive to lower the entry barrier for those attempting to learn more about the design of generative AI applications.

The growing digital landscape of fashion e-commerce calls for interactive and user-friendly interfaces for virtually trying on clothes. Traditional try-on methods grapple with challenges in adapting to diverse backgrounds, poses, and subjects. While newer methods, utilizing the recent advances of diffusion models, have achieved higher-quality image generation, the human-centered dimensions of mobile interface delivery and privacy concerns remain largely unexplored. We present Mobile Fitting Room, the first on-device diffusion-based virtual try-on system. To address multiple inter-related technical challenges such as high-quality garment placement and model compression for mobile devices, we present a novel technical pipeline and an interface design that enables privacy preservation and user customization. A usage scenario highlights how our tool can provide a seamless, interactive virtual try-on experience for customers and provide a valuable service for fashion e-commerce businesses.

The practical use of text-to-image generation has evolved from simple, monolithic models to complex workflows that combine multiple specialized components. While workflow-based approaches can lead to improved image quality, crafting effective workflows requires significant expertise, owing to the large number of available components, their complex inter-dependence, and their dependence on the generation prompt. Here, we introduce the novel task of prompt-adaptive workflow generation, where the goal is to automatically tailor a workflow to each user prompt. We propose two LLM-based approaches to tackle this task: a tuning-based method that learns from user-preference data, and a training-free method that uses the LLM to select existing flows. Both approaches lead to improved image quality when compared to monolithic models or generic, prompt-independent workflows. Our work shows that prompt-dependent flow prediction offers a new pathway to improving text-to-image generation quality, complementing existing research directions in the field.

Via thousands of papers in Explainable AI (XAI), attention maps vaswani2017attention and feature attribution maps bansal2020sam have been established as a common means for explaining the input features that are important to AI's decisions. It is an interesting but unexplored question whether allowing users to edit the importance scores of input features at test time would improve the human-AI team's accuracy on downstream tasks. In this paper, we address this question by taking CHM-Corr, a state-of-the-art, ante-hoc explanation method taesiri2022visual that first predicts patch-wise correspondences between the input and the training-set images, and then uses them to make classification decisions. We build an interactive interface on top of CHM-Corr, enabling users to directly edit the initial feature attribution map provided by CHM-Corr. Via our CHM-Corr++ interface, users gain insights into if, when, and how the model changes its outputs, enhancing understanding beyond static explanations. Our user study with 18 machine learning researchers who performed sim1,400 decisions shows that our interactive approach does not improve user accuracy on CUB-200 bird image classification over static explanations. This challenges the belief that interactivity inherently boosts XAI effectiveness~sokol2020one,sun2022exploring,shen2024towards,singh2024rethinking,mindlin2024beyond,lakkaraju2022rethinking,cheng2019explaining,liu2021understanding and raises needs for future research. Our work contributes to the field by open-sourcing an interactive tool for manipulating model attention, and it lays the groundwork for future research to enable effective human-AI interaction in computer vision. We release code and data on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CHMCorrPlusPlus/{github}. Our interface are available http://137.184.82.109:7080/{here}.

Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.

We introduce anticipation: a method for constructing a controllable generative model of a temporal point process (the event process) conditioned asynchronously on realizations of a second, correlated process (the control process). We achieve this by interleaving sequences of events and controls, such that controls appear following stopping times in the event sequence. This work is motivated by problems arising in the control of symbolic music generation. We focus on infilling control tasks, whereby the controls are a subset of the events themselves, and conditional generation completes a sequence of events given the fixed control events. We train anticipatory infilling models using the large and diverse Lakh MIDI music dataset. These models match the performance of autoregressive models for prompted music generation, with the additional capability to perform infilling control tasks, including accompaniment. Human evaluators report that an anticipatory model produces accompaniments with similar musicality to even music composed by humans over a 20-second clip.

Autonomous agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer enormous potential for automation. Early proof of this technology can be found in various demonstrations of agents solving complex tasks, interacting with external systems to augment their knowledge, and triggering actions. In particular, workflows involving multiple agents solving complex tasks in a collaborative fashion exemplify their capacity to operate in less strict and less well-defined environments. Thus, a multi-agent approach has great potential for serving as a backbone in many industrial applications, ranging from complex knowledge retrieval systems to next generation robotic process automation. Given the reasoning abilities within the current generation of LLMs, complex processes require a multi-step approach that includes a plan of well-defined and modular tasks. Depending on the level of complexity, these tasks can be executed either by a single agent or a group of agents. In this work, we focus on designing a flexible agent engineering framework with careful attention to planning and execution, capable of handling complex use case applications across various domains. The proposed framework provides reliability in industrial applications and presents techniques to ensure a scalable, flexible, and collaborative workflow for multiple autonomous agents working together towards solving tasks.

We present an interactive visual framework named InternChat, or iChat for short. The framework integrates chatbots that have planning and reasoning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, with non-verbal instructions like pointing movements that enable users to directly manipulate images or videos on the screen. Pointing (including gestures, cursors, etc.) movements can provide more flexibility and precision in performing vision-centric tasks that require fine-grained control, editing, and generation of visual content. The name InternChat stands for interaction, nonverbal, and chatbots. Different from existing interactive systems that rely on pure language, by incorporating pointing instructions, the proposed iChat significantly improves the efficiency of communication between users and chatbots, as well as the accuracy of chatbots in vision-centric tasks, especially in complicated visual scenarios where the number of objects is greater than 2. Additionally, in iChat, an auxiliary control mechanism is used to improve the control capability of LLM, and a large vision-language model termed Husky is fine-tuned for high-quality multi-modal dialogue (impressing ChatGPT-3.5-turbo with 93.89% GPT-4 Quality). We hope this work can spark new ideas and directions for future interactive visual systems. Welcome to watch the code at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternChat.

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

Recommender models excel at providing domain-specific item recommendations by leveraging extensive user behavior data. Despite their ability to act as lightweight domain experts, they struggle to perform versatile tasks such as providing explanations and engaging in conversations. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) represent a significant step towards artificial general intelligence, showcasing remarkable capabilities in instruction comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and human interaction. However, LLMs lack the knowledge of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, particularly in areas that diverge from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. Finetuning LLMs for each domain is neither economic nor efficient. In this paper, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create a versatile and interactive recommender system. We introduce an efficient framework called InteRecAgent, which employs LLMs as the brain and recommender models as tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. We then propose an efficient workflow within InteRecAgent for task execution, incorporating key components such as a memory bus, dynamic demonstration-augmented task planning, and reflection. InteRecAgent enables traditional recommender systems, such as those ID-based matrix factorization models, to become interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results on several public datasets show that InteRecAgent achieves satisfying performance as a conversational recommender system, outperforming general-purpose LLMs.

An interactive robot framework accomplishes long-horizon task planning and can easily generalize to new goals or distinct tasks, even during execution. However, most traditional methods require predefined module design, which makes it hard to generalize to different goals. Recent large language model based approaches can allow for more open-ended planning but often require heavy prompt engineering or domain-specific pretrained models. To tackle this, we propose a simple framework that achieves interactive task planning with language models. Our system incorporates both high-level planning and low-level function execution via language. We verify the robustness of our system in generating novel high-level instructions for unseen objectives and its ease of adaptation to different tasks by merely substituting the task guidelines, without the need for additional complex prompt engineering. Furthermore, when the user sends a new request, our system is able to replan accordingly with precision based on the new request, task guidelines and previously executed steps. Please check more details on our https://wuphilipp.github.io/itp_site and https://youtu.be/TrKLuyv26_g.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, powered by Large Foundation Models, have emerged as a transformative approach to automating human-computer interaction. These agents autonomously interact with digital systems or software applications via GUIs, emulating human actions such as clicking, typing, and navigating visual elements across diverse platforms. Motivated by the growing interest and fundamental importance of GUI agents, we provide a comprehensive survey that categorizes their benchmarks, evaluation metrics, architectures, and training methods. We propose a unified framework that delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. Furthermore, we identify important open challenges and discuss key future directions. Finally, this work serves as a basis for practitioners and researchers to gain an intuitive understanding of current progress, techniques, benchmarks, and critical open problems that remain to be addressed.

Text-to-image generation models have grown in popularity due to their ability to produce high-quality images from a text prompt. One use for this technology is to enable the creation of more accessible art creation software. In this paper, we document the development of an alternative user interface that reduces the typing effort needed to enter image prompts by providing suggestions from a large language model, developed through iterative design and testing within the project team. The results of this testing demonstrate how generative text models can support the accessibility of text-to-image models, enabling users with a range of abilities to create visual art.

As AI systems enter into a growing number of societal domains, these systems increasingly shape and are shaped by user preferences, opinions, and behaviors. However, the design of AI systems rarely accounts for how AI and users shape one another. In this position paper, we argue for the development of formal interaction models which mathematically specify how AI and users shape one another. Formal interaction models can be leveraged to (1) specify interactions for implementation, (2) monitor interactions through empirical analysis, (3) anticipate societal impacts via counterfactual analysis, and (4) control societal impacts via interventions. The design space of formal interaction models is vast, and model design requires careful consideration of factors such as style, granularity, mathematical complexity, and measurability. Using content recommender systems as a case study, we critically examine the nascent literature of formal interaction models with respect to these use-cases and design axes. More broadly, we call for the community to leverage formal interaction models when designing, evaluating, or auditing any AI system which interacts with users.

The process mining community has recently recognized the potential of large language models (LLMs) for tackling various process mining tasks. Initial studies report the capability of LLMs to support process analysis and even, to some extent, that they are able to reason about how processes work. This latter property suggests that LLMs could also be used to tackle process mining tasks that benefit from an understanding of process behavior. Examples of such tasks include (semantic) anomaly detection and next activity prediction, which both involve considerations of the meaning of activities and their inter-relations. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of LLMs to tackle such semantics-aware process mining tasks. Furthermore, whereas most works on the intersection of LLMs and process mining only focus on testing these models out of the box, we provide a more principled investigation of the utility of LLMs for process mining, including their ability to obtain process mining knowledge post-hoc by means of in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Concretely, we define three process mining tasks that benefit from an understanding of process semantics and provide extensive benchmarking datasets for each of them. Our evaluation experiments reveal that (1) LLMs fail to solve challenging process mining tasks out of the box and when provided only a handful of in-context examples, (2) but they yield strong performance when fine-tuned for these tasks, consistently surpassing smaller, encoder-based language models.

Active Real-time interaction with video LLMs introduces a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, where the model not only understands user intent but also responds while continuously processing streaming video on the fly. Unlike offline video LLMs, which analyze the entire video before answering questions, active real-time interaction requires three capabilities: 1) Perception: real-time video monitoring and interaction capturing. 2) Decision: raising proactive interaction in proper situations, 3) Reaction: continuous interaction with users. However, inherent conflicts exist among the desired capabilities. The Decision and Reaction require a contrary Perception scale and grain, and the autoregressive decoding blocks the real-time Perception and Decision during the Reaction. To unify the conflicted capabilities within a harmonious system, we present Dispider, a system that disentangles Perception, Decision, and Reaction. Dispider features a lightweight proactive streaming video processing module that tracks the video stream and identifies optimal moments for interaction. Once the interaction is triggered, an asynchronous interaction module provides detailed responses, while the processing module continues to monitor the video in the meantime. Our disentangled and asynchronous design ensures timely, contextually accurate, and computationally efficient responses, making Dispider ideal for active real-time interaction for long-duration video streams. Experiments show that Dispider not only maintains strong performance in conventional video QA tasks, but also significantly surpasses previous online models in streaming scenario responses, thereby validating the effectiveness of our architecture. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Mark12Ding/Dispider.

Crafting effective prompts for code generation or editing with Large Language Models (LLMs) is not an easy task. Particularly, the absence of immediate, stable feedback during prompt crafting hinders effective interaction, as users are left to mentally imagine possible outcomes until the code is generated. In response, we introduce Language-Oriented Code Sketching, an interactive approach that provides instant, incremental feedback in the form of code sketches (i.e., incomplete code outlines) during prompt crafting. This approach converts a prompt into a code sketch by leveraging the inherent linguistic structures within the prompt and applying classic natural language processing techniques. The sketch then serves as an intermediate placeholder that not only previews the intended code structure but also guides the LLM towards the desired code, thereby enhancing human-LLM interaction. We conclude by discussing the approach's applicability and future plans.

Seamless interaction between AI agents and humans using natural language remains a key goal in AI research. This paper addresses the challenges of developing interactive agents capable of understanding and executing grounded natural language instructions through the IGLU competition at NeurIPS. Despite advancements, challenges such as a scarcity of appropriate datasets and the need for effective evaluation platforms persist. We introduce a scalable data collection tool for gathering interactive grounded language instructions within a Minecraft-like environment, resulting in a Multi-Modal dataset with around 9,000 utterances and over 1,000 clarification questions. Additionally, we present a Human-in-the-Loop interactive evaluation platform for qualitative analysis and comparison of agent performance through multi-turn communication with human annotators. We offer to the community these assets referred to as IDAT (IGLU Dataset And Toolkit) which aim to advance the development of intelligent, interactive AI agents and provide essential resources for further research.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have undergone significant transformation in recent years, moving from traditional code-based development to more user-friendly approaches leveraging widgets and, most recently, harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for automated IVR flow creation. This paper explores the evolution of IVR building techniques, highlighting the industry's revolution and shaping the future of IVR systems. The authors delve into the historical context, current trends, and future prospects of IVR development, elucidating the impact of AI on simplifying IVR creation processes and enhancing customer experiences.

Online medical consultation (OMC) restricts doctors to gathering patient information solely through inquiries, making the already complex sequential decision-making process of diagnosis even more challenging. Recently, the rapid advancement of large language models has demonstrated a significant potential to transform OMC. However, most studies have primarily focused on improving diagnostic accuracy under conditions of relatively sufficient information, while paying limited attention to the "inquiry" phase of the consultation process. This lack of focus has left the relationship between "inquiry" and "diagnosis" insufficiently explored. In this paper, we first extract real patient interaction strategies from authentic doctor-patient conversations and use these strategies to guide the training of a patient simulator that closely mirrors real-world behavior. By inputting medical records into our patient simulator to simulate patient responses, we conduct extensive experiments to explore the relationship between "inquiry" and "diagnosis" in the consultation process. Experimental results demonstrate that inquiry and diagnosis adhere to the Liebig's law: poor inquiry quality limits the effectiveness of diagnosis, regardless of diagnostic capability, and vice versa. Furthermore, the experiments reveal significant differences in the inquiry performance of various models. To investigate this phenomenon, we categorize the inquiry process into four types: (1) chief complaint inquiry; (2) specification of known symptoms; (3) inquiry about accompanying symptoms; and (4) gathering family or medical history. We analyze the distribution of inquiries across the four types for different models to explore the reasons behind their significant performance differences. We plan to open-source the weights and related code of our patient simulator at https://github.com/LIO-H-ZEN/PatientSimulator.

Recently, researchers have proposed powerful systems for generating and manipulating images using natural language instructions. However, it is difficult to precisely specify many common classes of image transformations with text alone. For example, a user may wish to change the location and breed of a particular dog in an image with several similar dogs. This task is quite difficult with natural language alone, and would require a user to write a laboriously complex prompt that both disambiguates the target dog and describes the destination. We propose ClickDiffusion, a system for precise image manipulation and generation that combines natural language instructions with visual feedback provided by the user through a direct manipulation interface. We demonstrate that by serializing both an image and a multi-modal instruction into a textual representation it is possible to leverage LLMs to perform precise transformations of the layout and appearance of an image. Code available at https://github.com/poloclub/ClickDiffusion.

Existing embodied instance goal navigation tasks, driven by natural language, assume human users to provide complete and nuanced instance descriptions prior to the navigation, which can be impractical in the real world as human instructions might be brief and ambiguous. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task, Collaborative Instance Navigation (CoIN), with dynamic agent-human interaction during navigation to actively resolve uncertainties about the target instance in natural, template-free, open-ended dialogues. To address CoIN, we propose a novel method, Agent-user Interaction with UncerTainty Awareness (AIUTA), leveraging the perception capability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) and the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). First, upon object detection, a Self-Questioner model initiates a self-dialogue to obtain a complete and accurate observation description, while a novel uncertainty estimation technique mitigates inaccurate VLM perception. Then, an Interaction Trigger module determines whether to ask a question to the user, continue or halt navigation, minimizing user input. For evaluation, we introduce CoIN-Bench, a benchmark supporting both real and simulated humans. AIUTA achieves competitive performance in instance navigation against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating great flexibility in handling user inputs.

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently received a lot of interest for their astonishing ability to produce high-fidelity images from text only. However, achieving one-shot generation that aligns with the user's intent is nearly impossible, yet small changes to the input prompt often result in very different images. This leaves the user with little semantic control. To put the user in control, we show how to interact with the diffusion process to flexibly steer it along semantic directions. This semantic guidance (SEGA) allows for subtle and extensive edits, changes in composition and style, as well as optimizing the overall artistic conception. We demonstrate SEGA's effectiveness on a variety of tasks and provide evidence for its versatility and flexibility.

Recently, tool-augmented LLMs have gained increasing attention. Given an instruction, tool-augmented LLMs can interact with various external tools in multiple rounds and provide a final answer. However, previous LLMs were trained on overly detailed instructions, which included API names or parameters, while real users would not explicitly mention these API details. This leads to a gap between trained LLMs and real-world scenarios. In addition, most works ignore whether the interaction process follows the instruction. To address these issues, we constructed a training dataset called MGToolBench, which contains statement and category-level instructions to better reflect real-world scenarios. In addition, we propose ToolPlanner, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that utilizes path planning and two feedback mechanisms to enhance the LLM's task completion and instruction-following capabilities. Experimental results show that ToolPlanner significantly improves the Match Rate, Pass Rate and Win Rate by 26.8%, 20.2%, and 5.6% compared to the SOTA model. Human evaluation verifies that the multi-granularity instructions can better align with users' usage habits. Our data and code will be released upon acceptance.

From ancient water wheels to robotic process automation (RPA), automation technology has evolved throughout history to liberate human beings from arduous tasks. Yet, RPA struggles with tasks needing human-like intelligence, especially in elaborate design of workflow construction and dynamic decision-making in workflow execution. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged human-like intelligence, this paper introduces Agentic Process Automation (APA), a groundbreaking automation paradigm using LLM-based agents for advanced automation by offloading the human labor to agents associated with construction and execution. We then instantiate ProAgent, an LLM-based agent designed to craft workflows from human instructions and make intricate decisions by coordinating specialized agents. Empirical experiments are conducted to detail its construction and execution procedure of workflow, showcasing the feasibility of APA, unveiling the possibility of a new paradigm of automation driven by agents. Our code is public at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ProAgent.

Goal-directed dialogue systems aim to proactively reach a pre-determined target through multi-turn conversations. The key to achieving this task lies in planning dialogue paths that smoothly and coherently direct conversations towards the target. However, this is a challenging and under-explored task. In this work, we propose a coherent dialogue planning approach that uses a stochastic process to model the temporal dynamics of dialogue paths. We define a latent space that captures the coherence of goal-directed behavior using a Brownian bridge process, which allows us to incorporate user feedback flexibly in dialogue planning. Based on the derived latent trajectories, we generate dialogue paths explicitly using pre-trained language models. We finally employ these paths as natural language prompts to guide dialogue generation. Our experiments show that our approach generates more coherent utterances and achieves the goal with a higher success rate.

Sketching serves as a versatile tool for externalizing ideas, enabling rapid exploration and visual communication that spans various disciplines. While artificial systems have driven substantial advances in content creation and human-computer interaction, capturing the dynamic and abstract nature of human sketching remains challenging. In this work, we introduce SketchAgent, a language-driven, sequential sketch generation method that enables users to create, modify, and refine sketches through dynamic, conversational interactions. Our approach requires no training or fine-tuning. Instead, we leverage the sequential nature and rich prior knowledge of off-the-shelf multimodal large language models (LLMs). We present an intuitive sketching language, introduced to the model through in-context examples, enabling it to "draw" using string-based actions. These are processed into vector graphics and then rendered to create a sketch on a pixel canvas, which can be accessed again for further tasks. By drawing stroke by stroke, our agent captures the evolving, dynamic qualities intrinsic to sketching. We demonstrate that SketchAgent can generate sketches from diverse prompts, engage in dialogue-driven drawing, and collaborate meaningfully with human users.

Despite seemingly performant web agents on the task-completion benchmarks, most existing methods evaluate the agents based on a presupposition: the web navigation task consists of linear sequence of actions with an end state that marks task completion. In contrast, our work focuses on web navigation for information aggregation, wherein the agent must explore different websites to gather information for a complex query. We consider web information aggregation from two different perspectives: (i) Direct API-driven Access relies on a text-only view of the Web, leveraging external tools such as Google Search API to navigate the web and a scraper to extract website contents. (ii) Interactive Visual Access uses screenshots of the webpages and requires interaction with the browser to navigate and access information. Motivated by these diverse information access settings, we introduce Infogent, a novel modular framework for web information aggregation involving three distinct components: Navigator, Extractor and Aggregator. Experiments on different information access settings demonstrate Infogent beats an existing SOTA multi-agent search framework by 7% under Direct API-Driven Access on FRAMES, and improves over an existing information-seeking web agent by 4.3% under Interactive Visual Access on AssistantBench.

In this work, we focus on the task of procedure planning from instructional videos with text supervision, where a model aims to predict an action sequence to transform the initial visual state into the goal visual state. A critical challenge of this task is the large semantic gap between observed visual states and unobserved intermediate actions, which is ignored by previous works. Specifically, this semantic gap refers to that the contents in the observed visual states are semantically different from the elements of some action text labels in a procedure. To bridge this semantic gap, we propose a novel event-guided paradigm, which first infers events from the observed states and then plans out actions based on both the states and predicted events. Our inspiration comes from that planning a procedure from an instructional video is to complete a specific event and a specific event usually involves specific actions. Based on the proposed paradigm, we contribute an Event-guided Prompting-based Procedure Planning (E3P) model, which encodes event information into the sequential modeling process to support procedure planning. To further consider the strong action associations within each event, our E3P adopts a mask-and-predict approach for relation mining, incorporating a probabilistic masking scheme for regularization. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based storytelling and reading technologies. As these technologies become increasingly ubiquitous in preschoolers' lives, questions arise regarding how they function in practical storytelling and reading scenarios and, how parents, the most critical stakeholders, experience and perceive these technologies. This paper investigates these questions through a qualitative study with 17 parents of children aged 3-6. Our findings suggest that even though AI-based storytelling and reading technologies provide more immersive and engaging interaction, they still cannot meet parents' expectations due to a series of interactive and algorithmic challenges. We elaborate on these challenges and discuss the possible implications of future AI-based interactive storytelling technologies for preschoolers.

This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help

Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models usually struggle in interpreting complex prompts, especially those with quantity, object-attribute binding, and multi-subject descriptions. In this work, we introduce a semantic panel as the middleware in decoding texts to images, supporting the generator to better follow instructions. The panel is obtained through arranging the visual concepts parsed from the input text by the aid of large language models, and then injected into the denoising network as a detailed control signal to complement the text condition. To facilitate text-to-panel learning, we come up with a carefully designed semantic formatting protocol, accompanied by a fully-automatic data preparation pipeline. Thanks to such a design, our approach, which we call Ranni, manages to enhance a pre-trained T2I generator regarding its textual controllability. More importantly, the introduction of the generative middleware brings a more convenient form of interaction (i.e., directly adjusting the elements in the panel or using language instructions) and further allows users to finely customize their generation, based on which we develop a practical system and showcase its potential in continuous generation and chatting-based editing. Our project page is at https://ranni-t2i.github.io/Ranni.

Most existing GUI agents typically depend on non-vision inputs like HTML source code or accessibility trees, limiting their flexibility across diverse software environments and platforms. Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which excel at using vision to ground real-world objects, offer a potential alternative. However, they often struggle with accurately localizing GUI elements -- a critical requirement for effective GUI automation -- due to the semantic gap between real-world objects and GUI elements. In this work, we introduce Ponder & Press, a divide-and-conquer framework for general computer control using only visual input. Our approach combines an general-purpose MLLM as an 'interpreter', responsible for translating high-level user instructions into detailed action descriptions, with a GUI-specific MLLM as a 'locator' that precisely locates GUI elements for action placement. By leveraging a purely visual input, our agent offers a versatile, human-like interaction paradigm applicable to a wide range of applications. Ponder & Press locator outperforms existing models by +22.5% on the ScreenSpot GUI grounding benchmark. Both offline and interactive agent benchmarks across various GUI environments -- including web pages, desktop software, and mobile UIs -- demonstrate that Ponder & Press framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the potential of visual GUI agents. Refer to the project homepage https://invinciblewyq.github.io/ponder-press-page/

Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling certain goals from the system side. It is empowered by advanced techniques to progress to more complicated tasks that require strategical and motivational interactions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the prominent problems and advanced designs for conversational agent's proactivity in different types of dialogues. Furthermore, we discuss challenges that meet the real-world application needs but require a greater research focus in the future. We hope that this first survey of proactive dialogue systems can provide the community with a quick access and an overall picture to this practical problem, and stimulate more progresses on conversational AI to the next level.

Existing Large Language Models (LLM) can invoke a variety of tools and APIs to complete complex tasks. The computer, as the most powerful and universal tool, could potentially be controlled directly by a trained LLM agent. Powered by the computer, we can hopefully build a more generalized agent to assist humans in various daily digital works. In this paper, we construct an environment for a Vision Language Model (VLM) agent to interact with a real computer screen. Within this environment, the agent can observe screenshots and manipulate the Graphics User Interface (GUI) by outputting mouse and keyboard actions. We also design an automated control pipeline that includes planning, acting, and reflecting phases, guiding the agent to continuously interact with the environment and complete multi-step tasks. Additionally, we construct the ScreenAgent Dataset, which collects screenshots and action sequences when completing a variety of daily computer tasks. Finally, we trained a model, ScreenAgent, which achieved computer control capabilities comparable to GPT-4V and demonstrated more precise UI positioning capabilities. Our attempts could inspire further research on building a generalist LLM agent. The code is available at https://github.com/niuzaisheng/ScreenAgent.

Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.

Textual content is often the output of a collaborative writing process: We start with an initial draft, ask for suggestions, and repeatedly make changes. Agnostic of this process, today's language models are trained to generate only the final result. As a consequence, they lack several abilities crucial for collaborative writing: They are unable to update existing texts, difficult to control and incapable of verbally planning or explaining their actions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce PEER, a collaborative language model that is trained to imitate the entire writing process itself: PEER can write drafts, add suggestions, propose edits and provide explanations for its actions. Crucially, we train multiple instances of PEER able to infill various parts of the writing process, enabling the use of self-training techniques for increasing the quality, amount and diversity of training data. This unlocks PEER's full potential by making it applicable in domains for which no edit histories are available and improving its ability to follow instructions, to write useful comments, and to explain its actions. We show that PEER achieves strong performance across various domains and editing tasks.

How do we communicate with others to achieve our goals? We use our prior experience or advice from others, or construct a candidate utterance by predicting how it will be received. However, our experiences are limited and biased, and reasoning about potential outcomes can be difficult and cognitively challenging. In this paper, we explore how we can leverage Large Language Model (LLM) simulations to help us communicate better. We propose the Explore-Generate-Simulate (EGS) framework, which takes as input any scenario where an individual is communicating to an audience with a goal they want to achieve. EGS (1) explores the solution space by producing a diverse set of advice relevant to the scenario, (2) generates communication candidates conditioned on subsets of the advice, and (3) simulates the reactions from various audiences to determine both the best candidate and advice to use. We evaluate the framework on eight scenarios spanning the ten fundamental processes of interpersonal communication. For each scenario, we collect a dataset of human evaluations across candidates and baselines, and showcase that our framework's chosen candidate is preferred over popular generation mechanisms including Chain-of-Thought. We also find that audience simulations achieve reasonably high agreement with human raters across 5 of the 8 scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of our framework by applying it to real-world scenarios described by users on web forums. Through evaluations and demonstrations, we show that EGS enhances the effectiveness and outcomes of goal-oriented communication across a variety of situations, thus opening up new possibilities for the application of large language models in revolutionizing communication and decision-making processes.

We introduce Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata (CA). In Biomaker CA, morphogenesis is a first class citizen and small seeds need to grow into plant-like organisms to survive in a nutrient starved environment and eventually reproduce with variation so that a biome survives for long timelines. We simulate complex biomes by means of CA rules in 2D grids and parallelize all of its computation on GPUs through the Python JAX framework. We show how this project allows for several different kinds of environments and laws of 'physics', alongside different model architectures and mutation strategies. We further analyze some configurations to show how plant agents can grow, survive, reproduce, and evolve, forming stable and unstable biomes. We then demonstrate how one can meta-evolve models to survive in a harsh environment either through end-to-end meta-evolution or by a more surgical and efficient approach, called Petri dish meta-evolution. Finally, we show how to perform interactive evolution, where the user decides how to evolve a plant model interactively and then deploys it in a larger environment. We open source Biomaker CA at: https://tinyurl.com/2x8yu34s .

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful and general solutions to many natural language tasks. However, many of the most important applications of language generation are interactive, where an agent has to talk to a person to reach a desired outcome. For example, a teacher might try to understand their student's current comprehension level to tailor their instruction accordingly, and a travel agent might ask questions of their customer to understand their preferences in order to recommend activities they might enjoy. LLMs trained with supervised fine-tuning or "single-step" RL, as with standard RLHF, might struggle which tasks that require such goal-directed behavior, since they are not trained to optimize for overall conversational outcomes after multiple turns of interaction. In this work, we explore a new method for adapting LLMs with RL for such goal-directed dialogue. Our key insight is that, though LLMs might not effectively solve goal-directed dialogue tasks out of the box, they can provide useful data for solving such tasks by simulating suboptimal but human-like behaviors. Given a textual description of a goal-directed dialogue task, we leverage LLMs to sample diverse synthetic rollouts of hypothetical in-domain human-human interactions. Our algorithm then utilizes this dataset with offline reinforcement learning to train an interactive conversational agent that can optimize goal-directed objectives over multiple turns. In effect, the LLM produces examples of possible interactions, and RL then processes these examples to learn to perform more optimal interactions. Empirically, we show that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in various goal-directed dialogue tasks that include teaching and preference elicitation.

Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs' reasoning, such as supervised fine-tuning and distillation, often depend on costly external signals, resulting in SLMs being overly confident with limited supervision signals, thus limiting their abilities. Therefore, this study enables SLMs to learn to reason from self-iterative feedback. By combining odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), we fine-tune and align SLMs using positive and negative signals generated by themselves. Additionally, we introduce process supervision for rewards in preference alignment by sampling-based inference simulation and process reward models. Compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), our method improves the performance of Gemma-2B by 12.43 (Acc) on GSM8K and 3.95 (Pass@1) on MBPP. Furthermore, the proposed method also demonstrated superior out-of-domain generalization capabilities on MMLU_Math and HumanEval.

Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning in few- and zero-shot settings by generating intermediate chain of thought (CoT) reasoning steps. Further, each reasoning step can rely on external tools to support computation beyond the core LLM capabilities (e.g. search/running code). Prior work on CoT prompting and tool use typically requires hand-crafting task-specific demonstrations and carefully scripted interleaving of model generations with tool use. We introduce Automatic Reasoning and Tool-use (ART), a framework that uses frozen LLMs to automatically generate intermediate reasoning steps as a program. Given a new task to solve, ART selects demonstrations of multi-step reasoning and tool use from a task library. At test time, ART seamlessly pauses generation whenever external tools are called, and integrates their output before resuming generation. ART achieves a substantial improvement over few-shot prompting and automatic CoT on unseen tasks in the BigBench and MMLU benchmarks, and matches performance of hand-crafted CoT prompts on a majority of these tasks. ART is also extensible, and makes it easy for humans to improve performance by correcting errors in task-specific programs or incorporating new tools, which we demonstrate by drastically improving performance on select tasks with minimal human intervention.

We study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which aims to make a goal-oriented sequence of action steps given partial visual state observations. The motivation of this problem is to learn a structured and plannable state and action space. Recent works succeeded in sequence modeling of steps with only sequence-level annotations accessible during training, which overlooked the roles of states in the procedures. In this work, we point out that State CHangEs MAtter (SCHEMA) for procedure planning in instructional videos. We aim to establish a more structured state space by investigating the causal relations between steps and states in procedures. Specifically, we explicitly represent each step as state changes and track the state changes in procedures. For step representation, we leveraged the commonsense knowledge in large language models (LLMs) to describe the state changes of steps via our designed chain-of-thought prompting. For state change tracking, we align visual state observations with language state descriptions via cross-modal contrastive learning, and explicitly model the intermediate states of the procedure using LLM-generated state descriptions. Experiments on CrossTask, COIN, and NIV benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed SCHEMA model achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains explainable visualizations.

Imagine a world where AI can handle your work while you sleep - organizing your research materials, drafting a report, or creating a presentation you need for tomorrow. However, while current digital agents can perform simple tasks, they are far from capable of handling the complex real-world work that humans routinely perform. We present PC Agent, an AI system that demonstrates a crucial step toward this vision through human cognition transfer. Our key insight is that the path from executing simple "tasks" to handling complex "work" lies in efficiently capturing and learning from human cognitive processes during computer use. To validate this hypothesis, we introduce three key innovations: (1) PC Tracker, a lightweight infrastructure that efficiently collects high-quality human-computer interaction trajectories with complete cognitive context; (2) a two-stage cognition completion pipeline that transforms raw interaction data into rich cognitive trajectories by completing action semantics and thought processes; and (3) a multi-agent system combining a planning agent for decision-making with a grounding agent for robust visual grounding. Our preliminary experiments in PowerPoint presentation creation reveal that complex digital work capabilities can be achieved with a small amount of high-quality cognitive data - PC Agent, trained on just 133 cognitive trajectories, can handle sophisticated work scenarios involving up to 50 steps across multiple applications. This demonstrates the data efficiency of our approach, highlighting that the key to training capable digital agents lies in collecting human cognitive data. By open-sourcing our complete framework, including the data collection infrastructure and cognition completion methods, we aim to lower the barriers for the research community to develop truly capable digital agents.

This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with limited bandwidth. Therefore, in this challenge, we provide a common evaluation framework to evaluate mixed-initiative conversations. Participants are asked to rank clarifying questions in an information-seeking conversations. The challenge is organized in two stages where in Stage 1 we evaluate the submissions in an offline setting and single-turn conversations. Top participants of Stage 1 get the chance to have their model tested by human annotators.

Procedures are inherently hierarchical. To "make videos", one may need to "purchase a camera", which in turn may require one to "set a budget". While such hierarchical knowledge is critical for reasoning about complex procedures, most existing work has treated procedures as shallow structures without modeling the parent-child relation. In this work, we attempt to construct an open-domain hierarchical knowledge-base (KB) of procedures based on wikiHow, a website containing more than 110k instructional articles, each documenting the steps to carry out a complex procedure. To this end, we develop a simple and efficient method that links steps (e.g., "purchase a camera") in an article to other articles with similar goals (e.g., "how to choose a camera"), recursively constructing the KB. Our method significantly outperforms several strong baselines according to automatic evaluation, human judgment, and application to downstream tasks such as instructional video retrieval. A demo with partial data can be found at https://wikihow-hierarchy.github.io. The code and the data are at https://github.com/shuyanzhou/wikihow_hierarchy.

Knot diagrams are among the most common visual tools in topology. Computer programs now make it possible to draw, manipulate and render them digitally, which proves to be useful in knot theory teaching and research. Still, an openly available tool to manipulate knot diagrams in a real-time, interactive way is yet to be developed. We introduce a method of operating on the geometry of the knot diagram itself without any underlying three-dimensional structure that can underpin such an application. This allows us to directly interact with vector graphics knot diagrams while at the same time computing knot invariants in ways proposed by previous work. An implementation of this method is provided.

Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), human-computer interaction has evolved towards natural language, offering unprecedented flexibility. Despite this, LLMs are heavily reliant on well-structured prompts to function efficiently within the realm of In-Context Learning. Vanilla In-Context Learning relies on human-provided contexts, such as labeled examples, explicit instructions, or other guiding mechanisms that shape the model's outputs. To address this challenge, our study presents a universal framework named Automatic In-Context Learning. Upon receiving a user's request, we ask the model to independently generate examples, including labels, instructions, or reasoning pathways. The model then leverages this self-produced context to tackle the given problem. Our approach is universally adaptable and can be implemented in any setting where vanilla In-Context Learning is applicable. We demonstrate that our method yields strong performance across a range of tasks, standing up well when compared to existing methods.

While much work on web agents emphasizes the promise of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of users, in reality, agents often fall short on complex tasks in real-world contexts and modeling user preference. This presents an opportunity for humans to collaborate with the agent and leverage the agent's capabilities effectively. We propose CowPilot, a framework supporting autonomous as well as human-agent collaborative web navigation, and evaluation across task success and task efficiency. CowPilot reduces the number of steps humans need to perform by allowing agents to propose next steps, while users are able to pause, reject, or take alternative actions. During execution, users can interleave their actions with the agent by overriding suggestions or resuming agent control when needed. We conducted case studies on five common websites and found that the human-agent collaborative mode achieves the highest success rate of 95% while requiring humans to perform only 15.2% of the total steps. Even with human interventions during task execution, the agent successfully drives up to half of task success on its own. CowPilot can serve as a useful tool for data collection and agent evaluation across websites, which we believe will enable research in how users and agents can work together. Video demonstrations are available at https://oaishi.github.io/cowpilot.html

While LLMs can effectively help prototype single ML functionalities, many real-world applications involve complex tasks that cannot be easily handled via a single run of an LLM. Recent work has found that chaining multiple LLM runs together (with the output of one step being the input to the next) can help users accomplish these more complex tasks, and in a way that is perceived to be more transparent and controllable. However, it remains unknown what users need when authoring their own LLM chains -- a key step for lowering the barriers for non-AI-experts to prototype AI-infused applications. In this work, we explore the LLM chain authoring process. We conclude from pilot studies find that chaining requires careful scaffolding for transforming intermediate node outputs, as well as debugging the chain at multiple granularities; to help with these needs, we designed PromptChainer, an interactive interface for visually programming chains. Through case studies with four people, we show that PromptChainer supports building prototypes for a range of applications, and conclude with open questions on scaling chains to complex tasks, and supporting low-fi chain prototyping.

Much of the previous work towards digital agents for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) has relied on text-based representations (derived from HTML or other structured data sources), which are not always readily available. These input representations have been often coupled with custom, task-specific action spaces. This paper focuses on creating agents that interact with the digital world using the same conceptual interface that humans commonly use -- via pixel-based screenshots and a generic action space corresponding to keyboard and mouse actions. Building upon recent progress in pixel-based pretraining, we show, for the first time, that it is possible for such agents to outperform human crowdworkers on the MiniWob++ benchmark of GUI-based instruction following tasks.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers a valuable solution for efficiently automating tasks on the graphical user interface (GUI), by emulating human interactions, without modifying existing code. However, its broader adoption is constrained by the need for expertise in both scripting languages and workflow design. To address this challenge, we present PromptRPA, a system designed to comprehend various task-related textual prompts (e.g., goals, procedures), thereby generating and performing corresponding RPA tasks. PromptRPA incorporates a suite of intelligent agents that mimic human cognitive functions, specializing in interpreting user intent, managing external information for RPA generation, and executing operations on smartphones. The agents can learn from user feedback and continuously improve their performance based on the accumulated knowledge. Experimental results indicated a performance jump from a 22.28% success rate in the baseline to 95.21% with PromptRPA, requiring an average of 1.66 user interventions for each new task. PromptRPA presents promising applications in fields such as tutorial creation, smart assistance, and customer service.

The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building - all proceeding concurrently in mutually-reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from about two hundred users, totaling over 280 terabytes of web archives.

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive potential on simple tasks, their breadth of scope, lack of transparency, and insufficient controllability can make them less effective when assisting humans on more complex tasks. In response, we introduce the concept of Chaining LLM steps together, where the output of one step becomes the input for the next, thus aggregating the gains per step. We first define a set of LLM primitive operations useful for Chain construction, then present an interactive system where users can modify these Chains, along with their intermediate results, in a modular way. In a 20-person user study, we found that Chaining not only improved the quality of task outcomes, but also significantly enhanced system transparency, controllability, and sense of collaboration. Additionally, we saw that users developed new ways of interacting with LLMs through Chains: they leveraged sub-tasks to calibrate model expectations, compared and contrasted alternative strategies by observing parallel downstream effects, and debugged unexpected model outputs by "unit-testing" sub-components of a Chain. In two case studies, we further explore how LLM Chains may be used in future applications

Artificial intelligence (AI) enables machines to learn from human experience, adjust to new inputs, and perform human-like tasks. AI is progressing rapidly and is transforming the way businesses operate, from process automation to cognitive augmentation of tasks and intelligent process/data analytics. However, the main challenge for human users would be to understand and appropriately trust the result of AI algorithms and methods. In this paper, to address this challenge, we study and analyze the recent work done in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods and tools. We introduce a novel XAI process, which facilitates producing explainable models while maintaining a high level of learning performance. We present an interactive evidence-based approach to assist human users in comprehending and trusting the results and output created by AI-enabled algorithms. We adopt a typical scenario in the Banking domain for analyzing customer transactions. We develop a digital dashboard to facilitate interacting with the algorithm results and discuss how the proposed XAI method can significantly improve the confidence of data scientists in understanding the result of AI-enabled algorithms.

In today's fast-paced world, effective presentations have become an essential tool for communication in both online and offline meetings. The crafting of a compelling presentation requires significant time and effort, from gathering key insights to designing slides that convey information clearly and concisely. However, despite the wealth of resources available, people often find themselves manually extracting crucial points, analyzing data, and organizing content in a way that ensures clarity and impact. Furthermore, a successful presentation goes beyond just the slides; it demands rehearsal and the ability to weave a captivating narrative to fully engage the audience. Although there has been some exploration of automating document-to-slide generation, existing research is largely centered on converting research papers. In addition, automation of the delivery of these presentations has yet to be addressed. We introduce PASS, a pipeline used to generate slides from general Word documents, going beyond just research papers, which also automates the oral delivery of the generated slides. PASS analyzes user documents to create a dynamic, engaging presentation with an AI-generated voice. Additionally, we developed an LLM-based evaluation metric to assess our pipeline across three critical dimensions of presentations: relevance, coherence, and redundancy. The data and codes are available at https://github.com/AggarwalTushar/PASS.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems face challenges in handling complex processes and diverse screen layouts that require advanced human-like decision-making capabilities. These systems typically rely on pixel-level encoding through drag-and-drop or automation frameworks such as Selenium to create navigation workflows, rather than visual understanding of screen elements. In this context, we present SmartFlow, an AI-based RPA system that uses pre-trained large language models (LLMs) coupled with deep-learning based image understanding. Our system can adapt to new scenarios, including changes in the user interface and variations in input data, without the need for human intervention. SmartFlow uses computer vision and natural language processing to perceive visible elements on the graphical user interface (GUI) and convert them into a textual representation. This information is then utilized by LLMs to generate a sequence of actions that are executed by a scripting engine to complete an assigned task. To assess the effectiveness of SmartFlow, we have developed a dataset that includes a set of generic enterprise applications with diverse layouts, which we are releasing for research use. Our evaluations on this dataset demonstrate that SmartFlow exhibits robustness across different layouts and applications. SmartFlow can automate a wide range of business processes such as form filling, customer service, invoice processing, and back-office operations. SmartFlow can thus assist organizations in enhancing productivity by automating an even larger fraction of screen-based workflows. The demo-video and dataset are available at https://smartflow-4c5a0a.webflow.io/.

Prompt engineering is critical for the development of LLM-based applications. However, it is usually done manually in a "trial and error" fashion. This manual procedure can be time consuming, ineffective, and the generated prompts are, in a lot of cases, sub-optimal. Even for the prompts which seemingly work well, there is always a lingering question: can the prompts be made better with further modifications? To address these questions, in this paper, we investigate prompt engineering automation. We consider a specific use case scenario in which developers/users have drafted initial prompts, but lack the time/expertise to optimize them. We propose PRewrite, an automated tool to rewrite these drafts and to generate highly effective new prompts. PRewrite is based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework which allows for end-to-end optimization and our design allows the RL search to happen in a large action space. The automated tool leverages manually crafted prompts as starting points which makes the rewriting procedure more guided and efficient. The generated prompts are human readable, and self-explanatory, unlike some of those in previous works. We conducted extensive experiments on diverse datasets and found that the prompts generated with this new method not only outperform professionally crafted prompts, but also prompts generated with other previously proposed methods.

Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction with people, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and recover from mistakes. To study this, we introduce TEACh, a dataset of over 3,000 human--human, interactive dialogues to complete household tasks in simulation. A Commander with access to oracle information about a task communicates in natural language with a Follower. The Follower navigates through and interacts with the environment to complete tasks varying in complexity from "Make Coffee" to "Prepare Breakfast", asking questions and getting additional information from the Commander. We propose three benchmarks using TEACh to study embodied intelligence challenges, and we evaluate initial models' abilities in dialogue understanding, language grounding, and task execution.

In task-oriented dialogue, a system often needs to follow a sequence of actions, called a workflow, that complies with a set of guidelines in order to complete a task. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of multi-step workflow action prediction, in which the system predicts multiple future workflow actions. Accurate prediction of multiple steps allows for multi-turn automation, which can free up time to focus on more complex tasks. We propose three modeling approaches that are simple to implement yet lead to more action automation: 1) fine-tuning on a training dataset, 2) few-shot in-context learning leveraging retrieval and large language model prompting, and 3) zero-shot graph traversal, which aggregates historical action sequences into a graph for prediction. We show that multi-step action prediction produces features that improve accuracy on downstream dialogue tasks like predicting task success, and can increase automation of steps by 20% without requiring as much feedback from a human overseeing the system.

Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform target tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts for can be challenging--especially in tasks that involve unusual edge cases, demand precise articulation of nebulous preferences, or require an accurate mental model of LM behavior. We propose to use *LMs themselves* to guide the task specification process. In this paper, we introduce **Generative Active Task Elicitation (GATE)**: a learning framework in which models elicit and infer intended behavior through free-form, language-based interaction with users. We study GATE in three domains: email validation, content recommendation, and moral reasoning. In preregistered experiments, we show that LMs prompted to perform GATE (e.g., by generating open-ended questions or synthesizing informative edge cases) elicit responses that are often more informative than user-written prompts or labels. Users report that interactive task elicitation requires less effort than prompting or example labeling and surfaces novel considerations not initially anticipated by users. Our findings suggest that LM-driven elicitation can be a powerful tool for aligning models to complex human preferences and values.

Agents built on large language models (LLMs) have excelled in turn-by-turn human-AI collaboration but struggle with simultaneous tasks requiring real-time interaction. Latency issues and the challenge of inferring variable human strategies hinder their ability to make autonomous decisions without explicit instructions. Through experiments with current independent System 1 and System 2 methods, we validate the necessity of using Dual Process Theory (DPT) in real-time tasks. We propose DPT-Agent, a novel language agent framework that integrates System 1 and System 2 for efficient real-time simultaneous human-AI collaboration. DPT-Agent's System 1 uses a Finite-state Machine (FSM) and code-as-policy for fast, intuitive, and controllable decision-making. DPT-Agent's System 2 integrates Theory of Mind (ToM) and asynchronous reflection to infer human intentions and perform reasoning-based autonomous decisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DPT-Agent through further experiments with rule-based agents and human collaborators, showing significant improvements over mainstream LLM-based frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, DPT-Agent is the first language agent framework that achieves successful real-time simultaneous human-AI collaboration autonomously. Code of DPT-Agent can be found in https://github.com/sjtu-marl/DPT-Agent.

The widespread consumer-grade 3D printers and learning resources online enable novices to self-train in remote settings. While troubleshooting plays an essential part of 3D printing, the process remains challenging for many remote novices even with the help of well-developed online sources, such as online troubleshooting archives and online community help. We conducted a formative study with 76 active 3D printing users to learn how remote novices leverage online resources in troubleshooting and their challenges. We found that remote novices cannot fully utilize online resources. For example, the online archives statically provide general information, making it hard to search and relate their unique cases with existing descriptions. Online communities can potentially ease their struggles by providing more targeted suggestions, but a helper who can provide custom help is rather scarce, making it hard to obtain timely assistance. We propose 3DPFIX, an interactive 3D troubleshooting system powered by the pipeline to facilitate Human-AI Collaboration, designed to improve novices' 3D printing experiences and thus help them easily accumulate their domain knowledge. We built 3DPFIX that supports automated diagnosis and solution-seeking. 3DPFIX was built upon shared dialogues about failure cases from Q&A discourses accumulated in online communities. We leverage social annotations (i.e., comments) to build an annotated failure image dataset for AI classifiers and extract a solution pool. Our summative study revealed that using 3DPFIX helped participants spend significantly less effort in diagnosing failures and finding a more accurate solution than relying on their common practice. We also found that 3DPFIX users learn about 3D printing domain-specific knowledge. We discuss the implications of leveraging community-driven data in developing future Human-AI Collaboration designs.

Recent advances in foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), facilitate intelligent agents being capable of performing complex tasks. By leveraging the ability of (M)LLMs to process and interpret Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), these agents can autonomously execute user instructions by simulating human-like interactions such as clicking and typing. This survey consolidates recent research on (M)LLM-based GUI agents, highlighting key innovations in data, frameworks, and applications. We begin by discussing representative datasets and benchmarks. Next, we summarize a unified framework that captures the essential components used in prior research, accompanied by a taxonomy. Additionally, we explore commercial applications of (M)LLM-based GUI agents. Drawing from existing work, we identify several key challenges and propose future research directions. We hope this paper will inspire further developments in the field of (M)LLM-based GUI agents.

This paper presents Dynamic Context Prompting/Programming (DCP/P), a novel framework for interacting with LLMs to generate graph-based content with a dynamic context window history. While there is an existing study utilizing LLMs to generate a visual novel game, the previous study involved a manual process of output extraction and did not provide flexibility in generating a longer, coherent story. We evaluate DCP/P against our baseline, which does not provide context history to an LLM and only relies on the initial story data. Through objective evaluation, we show that simply providing the LLM with a summary leads to a subpar story compared to additionally providing the LLM with the proper context of the story. We also provide an extensive qualitative analysis and discussion. We qualitatively examine the quality of the objectively best-performing generated game from each approach. In addition, we examine biases in word choices and word sentiment of the generated content. We find a consistent observation with previous studies that LLMs are biased towards certain words, even with a different LLM family. Finally, we provide a comprehensive discussion on opportunities for future studies.

Large-scale language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are becoming increasingly sophisticated and exhibit human-like capabilities, playing an essential role in assisting humans in a variety of everyday tasks. An important application of AI is interactive recommendation systems that respond to human inquiries and make recommendations tailored to the user. In most conventional interactive recommendation systems, the language model is used only as a dialogue model, and there is a separate recommendation system. This is due to the fact that the language model used as a dialogue system does not have the capability to serve as a recommendation system. Therefore, we will realize the construction of a dialogue system with recommendation capability by using OpenAI's Chat-GPT, which has a very high inference capability as a dialogue system and the ability to generate high-quality sentences, and verify the effectiveness of the system.

Video has become a popular media form for information sharing and consumption. However, taking notes while watching a video requires significant time and effort. To address this, we propose a novel interactive system, NoTeeline, for taking real-time, personalized notes. NoTeeline lets users quickly jot down keypoints (micronotes), which are automatically expanded into full-fledged notes that capture the content of the user's micronotes and are consistent with the user's writing style. In a within-subjects study (N=12), we found that NoTeeline helps users create high-quality notes that capture the essence of their micronotes with a higher factual correctness (93.2%) while accurately reflecting their writing style. While using NoTeeline, participants experienced significantly reduced mental effort, captured satisfactory notes while writing 47% less text, and completed notetaking with 43.9% less time compared to a manual notetaking baseline.

This report presents a framework called Segment And Track Anything (SAMTrack) that allows users to precisely and effectively segment and track any object in a video. Additionally, SAM-Track employs multimodal interaction methods that enable users to select multiple objects in videos for tracking, corresponding to their specific requirements. These interaction methods comprise click, stroke, and text, each possessing unique benefits and capable of being employed in combination. As a result, SAM-Track can be used across an array of fields, ranging from drone technology, autonomous driving, medical imaging, augmented reality, to biological analysis. SAM-Track amalgamates Segment Anything Model (SAM), an interactive key-frame segmentation model, with our proposed AOT-based tracking model (DeAOT), which secured 1st place in four tracks of the VOT 2022 challenge, to facilitate object tracking in video. In addition, SAM-Track incorporates Grounding-DINO, which enables the framework to support text-based interaction. We have demonstrated the remarkable capabilities of SAM-Track on DAVIS-2016 Val (92.0%), DAVIS-2017 Test (79.2%)and its practicability in diverse applications. The project page is available at: https://github.com/z-x-yang/Segment-and-Track-Anything.

Existing benchmarks do not test Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on their interactive intelligence with human users which is vital for developing general-purpose AI assistants. We design InterFeedback, an interactive framework, which can be applied to any LMM and dataset to assess this ability autonomously. On top of this, we introduce InterFeedback-Bench which evaluates interactive intelligence using two representative datasets, MMMU-Pro and MathVerse, to test 10 different open-source LMMs. Additionally, we present InterFeedback-Human, a newly collected dataset of 120 cases designed for manually testing interactive performance in leading models such as OpenAI-o1 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Our evaluation results show that even state-of-the-art LMM (like OpenAI-o1) can correct their results through human feedback less than 50%. Our findings point to the need for methods that can enhance the LMMs' capability to interpret and benefit from feedback.

Text-to-image generation has seen an explosion of interest since 2021. Today, beautiful and intriguing digital images and artworks can be synthesized from textual inputs ("prompts") with deep generative models. Online communities around text-to-image generation and AI generated art have quickly emerged. This paper identifies six types of prompt modifiers used by practitioners in the online community based on a 3-month ethnographic study. The novel taxonomy of prompt modifiers provides researchers a conceptual starting point for investigating the practice of text-to-image generation, but may also help practitioners of AI generated art improve their images. We further outline how prompt modifiers are applied in the practice of "prompt engineering." We discuss research opportunities of this novel creative practice in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The paper concludes with a discussion of broader implications of prompt engineering from the perspective of Human-AI Interaction (HAI) in future applications beyond the use case of text-to-image generation and AI generated art.

Language agents have become a promising solution to complex interactive tasks. One of the key ingredients to the success of language agents is the reward model on the trajectory of the agentic workflow, which provides valuable guidance during training or inference. However, due to the lack of annotations of intermediate interactions, most existing works use an outcome reward model to optimize policies across entire trajectories. This may lead to sub-optimal policies and hinder the overall performance. To address this, we propose QLASS (Q-guided Language Agent Stepwise Search), to automatically generate annotations by estimating Q-values in a stepwise manner for open language agents. By introducing a reasoning tree and performing process reward modeling, QLASS provides effective intermediate guidance for each step. With the stepwise guidance, we propose a Q-guided generation strategy to enable language agents to better adapt to long-term value, resulting in significant performance improvement during model inference on complex interactive agent tasks. Notably, even with almost half the annotated data, QLASS retains strong performance, demonstrating its efficiency in handling limited supervision. We also empirically demonstrate that QLASS can lead to more effective decision making through qualitative analysis. We will release our code and data.

Creating a system that can have meaningful conversations with humans to help accomplish tasks is one of the ultimate goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has defined the meaning of AI since the beginning. A lot has been accomplished in this area recently, with voice assistant products entering our daily lives and chat bot systems becoming commonplace in customer service. At first glance there seems to be no shortage of options for dialogue systems. However, the frequently deployed dialogue systems today seem to all struggle with a critical weakness - they are hard to build and harder to maintain. At the core of the struggle is the need to script every single turn of interactions between the bot and the human user. This makes the dialogue systems more difficult to maintain as the tasks become more complex and more tasks are added to the system. In this paper, we propose Converse, a flexible tree-based modular task-oriented dialogue system. Converse uses an and-or tree structure to represent tasks and offers powerful multi-task dialogue management. Converse supports task dependency and task switching, which are unique features compared to other open-source dialogue frameworks. At the same time, Converse aims to make the bot building process easy and simple, for both professional and non-professional software developers. The code is available at https://github.com/salesforce/Converse.

Story visualization, the task of generating coherent images based on a narrative, has seen significant advancements with the emergence of text-to-image models, particularly diffusion models. However, maintaining semantic consistency, generating high-quality fine-grained interactions, and ensuring computational feasibility remain challenging, especially in long story visualization (i.e., up to 100 frames). In this work, we propose a training-free and computationally efficient framework, termed Story-Adapter, to enhance the generative capability of long stories. Specifically, we propose an iterative paradigm to refine each generated image, leveraging both the text prompt and all generated images from the previous iteration. Central to our framework is a training-free global reference cross-attention module, which aggregates all generated images from the previous iteration to preserve semantic consistency across the entire story, while minimizing computational costs with global embeddings. This iterative process progressively optimizes image generation by repeatedly incorporating text constraints, resulting in more precise and fine-grained interactions. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Story-Adapter in improving both semantic consistency and generative capability for fine-grained interactions, particularly in long story scenarios. The project page and associated code can be accessed via https://jwmao1.github.io/storyadapter .

How can we design Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that learn from human feedback? There is a growing research body of Human-in-the-loop (HITL) NLP frameworks that continuously integrate human feedback to improve the model itself. HITL NLP research is nascent but multifarious -- solving various NLP problems, collecting diverse feedback from different people, and applying different methods to learn from collected feedback. We present a survey of HITL NLP work from both Machine Learning (ML) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities that highlights its short yet inspiring history, and thoroughly summarize recent frameworks focusing on their tasks, goals, human interactions, and feedback learning methods. Finally, we discuss future directions for integrating human feedback in the NLP development loop.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a fundamental topic of geometric computer vision and a core technique for many downstream applications. Recently, several methods reframe the MDE as a classification-regression problem where a linear combination of probabilistic distribution and bin centers is used to predict depth. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of iterative elastic bins (IEBins) for the classification-regression-based MDE. The proposed IEBins aims to search for high-quality depth by progressively optimizing the search range, which involves multiple stages and each stage performs a finer-grained depth search in the target bin on top of its previous stage. To alleviate the possible error accumulation during the iterative process, we utilize a novel elastic target bin to replace the original target bin, the width of which is adjusted elastically based on the depth uncertainty. Furthermore, we develop a dedicated framework composed of a feature extractor and an iterative optimizer that has powerful temporal context modeling capabilities benefiting from the GRU-based architecture. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, NYU-Depth-v2 and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses prior state-of-the-art competitors. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShuweiShao/IEBins.

Large language models have shown surprising performances in understanding instructions and performing natural language tasks. In this paper, we propose iterative translation refinement to leverage the power of large language models for more natural translation and post-editing. We show that by simply involving a large language model in an iterative process, the output quality improves beyond mere translation. Extensive test scenarios with GPT-3.5 reveal that although iterations reduce string-based metric scores, neural metrics indicate comparable if not improved translation quality. Further, human evaluations demonstrate that our method effectively reduces translationese compared to initial GPT translations and even human references, especially for into-English directions. Ablation studies underscore the importance of anchoring the refinement process to the source input and a reasonable initial translation.

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs' performance, which is constrained by the upper limit of human performance. Therefore, Self-Rewarding method has been proposed, where LLMs generate training data by rewarding their own outputs. However, the existing self-rewarding paradigm is not effective in mathematical reasoning scenarios and may even lead to a decline in performance. In this work, we propose the Process-based Self-Rewarding pipeline for language models, which introduces long-thought reasoning, step-wise LLM-as-a-Judge, and step-wise preference optimization within the self-rewarding paradigm. Our new paradigm successfully enhances the performance of LLMs on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks through iterative Process-based Self-Rewarding, demonstrating the immense potential of self-rewarding to achieve LLM reasoning that may surpass human capabilities.

Handling long input contexts remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices. Our work aims to address this limitation by introducing InfiniPot, a novel KV cache control framework designed to enable pre-trained LLMs to manage extensive sequences within fixed memory constraints efficiently, without requiring additional training. InfiniPot leverages Continual Context Distillation (CCD), an iterative process that compresses and retains essential information through novel importance metrics, effectively maintaining critical data even without access to future context. Our comprehensive evaluations indicate that InfiniPot significantly outperforms models trained for long contexts in various NLP tasks, establishing its efficacy and versatility. This work represents a substantial advancement toward making LLMs applicable to a broader range of real-world scenarios.

Language models can generate harmful and biased outputs and exhibit undesirable behavior according to a given cultural context. We propose a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, an iterative process to significantly change model behavior by crafting and fine-tuning on a dataset that reflects a predetermined set of target values. We evaluate our process using three metrics: quantitative metrics with human evaluations that score output adherence to a target value, toxicity scoring on outputs; and qualitative metrics analyzing the most common word associated with a given social category. Through each iteration, we add additional training dataset examples based on observed shortcomings from evaluations. PALMS performs significantly better on all metrics compared to baseline and control models for a broad range of GPT-3 language model sizes without compromising capability integrity. We find that the effectiveness of PALMS increases with model size. We show that significantly adjusting language model behavior is feasible with a small, hand-curated dataset.

The chain-of-though (CoT) prompting methods were successful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks thanks to their ability to unveil the underlying complex reasoning processes. Such reasoning processes typically exhibit implicitly structured steps. Recent efforts also started investigating methods to encourage more explicitly structured reasoning procedures to be captured. In this work, we propose Tab-CoT, a novel tabular-format CoT prompting method, which allows the complex reasoning process to be explicitly modelled in a highly structured manner. Despite its simplicity, we show that our approach is capable of performing reasoning across multiple dimensions (i.e., both rows and columns). We demonstrate our approach's strong zero-shot and few-shot capabilities through extensive experiments on a range of reasoning tasks.

Task planning can require defining myriad domain knowledge about the world in which a robot needs to act. To ameliorate that effort, large language models (LLMs) can be used to score potential next actions during task planning, and even generate action sequences directly, given an instruction in natural language with no additional domain information. However, such methods either require enumerating all possible next steps for scoring, or generate free-form text that may contain actions not possible on a given robot in its current context. We present a programmatic LLM prompt structure that enables plan generation functional across situated environments, robot capabilities, and tasks. Our key insight is to prompt the LLM with program-like specifications of the available actions and objects in an environment, as well as with example programs that can be executed. We make concrete recommendations about prompt structure and generation constraints through ablation experiments, demonstrate state of the art success rates in VirtualHome household tasks, and deploy our method on a physical robot arm for tabletop tasks. Website at progprompt.github.io

Existing text summarization systems have made significant progress in recent years but typically generates summaries in a single step. The one-shot summarization setting is sometimes inadequate, however, as the generated summary may contain hallucinations or overlook important details related to the reader's interests. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing SummIt, an iterative text summarization framework based on large language models like ChatGPT. Our framework enables the model to refine the generated summary iteratively through self-evaluation and feedback, closely resembling the iterative process humans undertake when drafting and revising summaries. We also explore using in-context learning to guide the rationale generation and summary refinement. Furthermore, we explore the potential benefits of integrating knowledge and topic extractors into the framework to enhance summary faithfulness and controllability. We evaluate the performance of our framework on three benchmark summarization datasets through empirical and qualitative analyses. We also conduct a human evaluation to validate the effectiveness of the model's refinements and find a potential issue of over-correction. Our code is available at https://github.com/hpzhang94/summ_it.

Humanoid robots have shown success in locomotion and manipulation. Despite these basic abilities, humanoids are still required to quickly understand human instructions and react based on human interaction signals to become valuable assistants in human daily life. Unfortunately, most existing works only focus on multi-stage interactions, treating each task separately, and neglecting real-time feedback. In this work, we aim to empower humanoid robots with real-time reaction abilities to achieve various tasks, allowing human to interrupt robots at any time, and making robots respond to humans immediately. To support such abilities, we propose a general humanoid-human-object interaction framework, named RHINO, i.e., Real-time Humanoid-human Interaction and Object manipulation. RHINO provides a unified view of reactive motion, instruction-based manipulation, and safety concerns, over multiple human signal modalities, such as languages, images, and motions. RHINO is a hierarchical learning framework, enabling humanoids to learn reaction skills from human-human-object demonstrations and teleoperation data. In particular, it decouples the interaction process into two levels: 1) a high-level planner inferring human intentions from real-time human behaviors; and 2) a low-level controller achieving reactive motion behaviors and object manipulation skills based on the predicted intentions. We evaluate the proposed framework on a real humanoid robot and demonstrate its effectiveness, flexibility, and safety in various scenarios.

Hand-object interaction understanding and the barely addressed novel view synthesis are highly desired in the immersive communication, whereas it is challenging due to the high deformation of hand and heavy occlusions between hand and object. In this paper, we propose a neural rendering and pose estimation system for hand-object interaction from sparse views, which can also enable 3D hand-object interaction editing. We share the inspiration from recent scene understanding work that shows a scene specific model built beforehand can significantly improve and unblock vision tasks especially when inputs are sparse, and extend it to the dynamic hand-object interaction scenario and propose to solve the problem in two stages. We first learn the shape and appearance prior knowledge of hands and objects separately with the neural representation at the offline stage. During the online stage, we design a rendering-based joint model fitting framework to understand the dynamic hand-object interaction with the pre-built hand and object models as well as interaction priors, which thereby overcomes penetration and separation issues between hand and object and also enables novel view synthesis. In order to get stable contact during the hand-object interaction process in a sequence, we propose a stable contact loss to make the contact region to be consistent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset are available in project webpage https://iscas3dv.github.io/HO-NeRF.

Writing is, by nature, a strategic, adaptive, and more importantly, an iterative process. A crucial part of writing is editing and revising the text. Previous works on text revision have focused on defining edit intention taxonomies within a single domain or developing computational models with a single level of edit granularity, such as sentence-level edits, which differ from human's revision cycles. This work describes IteraTeR: the first large-scale, multi-domain, edit-intention annotated corpus of iteratively revised text. In particular, IteraTeR is collected based on a new framework to comprehensively model the iterative text revisions that generalize to various domains of formal writing, edit intentions, revision depths, and granularities. When we incorporate our annotated edit intentions, both generative and edit-based text revision models significantly improve automatic evaluations. Through our work, we better understand the text revision process, making vital connections between edit intentions and writing quality, enabling the creation of diverse corpora to support computational modeling of iterative text revisions.

With the growing reliance on digital devices equipped with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as computers and smartphones, the need for effective automation tools has become increasingly important. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V excel at tasks such as drafting emails, they struggle with GUI interactions, which limits their effectiveness in automating everyday tasks. In this paper, we introduce ClickAgent, a novel framework for building autonomous agents. In ClickAgent, the MLLM handles reasoning and action planning, while a separate UI location model (e.g., SeeClick) identifies the relevant UI elements on the screen. This approach addresses a key limitation of current-generation MLLMs: their difficulty in accurately locating UI elements. ClickAgent significantly outperforms other prompt-based autonomous agents (such as CogAgent, AppAgent, and Auto-UI) on the AITW benchmark. Our evaluation was conducted on both an Android smartphone emulator and an actual Android smartphone, using the task success rate as the key metric for measuring agent performance.

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) brings about tremendous opportunities for innovation but also looming risks for individuals and society at large. We have reached a pivotal moment for ensuring that LLMs and LLM-infused applications are developed and deployed responsibly. However, a central pillar of responsible AI -- transparency -- is largely missing from the current discourse around LLMs. It is paramount to pursue new approaches to provide transparency for LLMs, and years of research at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction (HCI) highlight that we must do so with a human-centered perspective: Transparency is fundamentally about supporting appropriate human understanding, and this understanding is sought by different stakeholders with different goals in different contexts. In this new era of LLMs, we must develop and design approaches to transparency by considering the needs of stakeholders in the emerging LLM ecosystem, the novel types of LLM-infused applications being built, and the new usage patterns and challenges around LLMs, all while building on lessons learned about how people process, interact with, and make use of information. We reflect on the unique challenges that arise in providing transparency for LLMs, along with lessons learned from HCI and responsible AI research that has taken a human-centered perspective on AI transparency. We then lay out four common approaches that the community has taken to achieve transparency -- model reporting, publishing evaluation results, providing explanations, and communicating uncertainty -- and call out open questions around how these approaches may or may not be applied to LLMs. We hope this provides a starting point for discussion and a useful roadmap for future research.

Code generation techniques generate code snippets automatically based on the problem requirements in natural language. Recently, large language models (LLMs) achieve the SOTA performance on code generation. However, LLMs still struggle at times to generate accurate code, which diminishes their promised efficiency as developers must spend significant effort evaluating and debugging the generated code. To improve the reliability and quality of the generated codes, researchers propose to leverage Consistency to obtain a better code based on generating and ranking multiple candidates. The existing approach is problematic as Consistency thinks a code is better when (1) the code pass more tests (inter-consistency) (2) more codes share the same behavior (intra-consistency). However, because the tests are also generated by LLMs, they could be wrong as well. As a result, majority voting based on testing results is unreliable. Relying solely on consistency is insufficient to address this issue; integrating user feedback is essential for effectively guiding consistency. We show that with minimal human effort, performance can be significantly enhanced. We propose Consistency-Augmented Iterative Interaction Framework to Enhance the Reliability of Code Generation, ConAIR, which is an approach that aims to improve the performance of a code generator through two distinctive ingredients, i.e., (1) lightweight user effort for validating the correctness of selected tests; and (2) a dynamic strategy for ranking, localizing and correcting multiple tests and codes. Overall, we propose a lightweight interaction framework that incorporates user feedback to correct identified tests and guide the iterative process. The iteration rounds are only 4 in average with the help of consistency. With only lightweight human efforts, we can achieve an improvement of 33% towards the base model.

Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based models of discourse such as SDRT asher-lascarides:2003a, in which utterances attach to an evolving discourse structure and the associated knowledge graph of speaker commitments serves as an interface to real-world reasoning and conversational strategy. As first steps towards implementing the approach, we describe a simple dialogue system in a referential communication domain that accumulates constraints across discourse, interprets them using a learned probabilistic model, and plans clarification using reinforcement learning.

With the spread of the use of Text2Img diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion, one challenge that artists face is selecting the right prompts to achieve the desired artistic output. We present techniques for measuring the effect that specific words and phrases in prompts have, and (in the Appendix) present guidance on the selection of prompts to produce desired effects.

This paper delves into the pivotal role of prompt engineering in unleashing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prompt engineering is the process of structuring input text for LLMs and is a technique integral to optimizing the efficacy of LLMs. This survey elucidates foundational principles of prompt engineering, such as role-prompting, one-shot, and few-shot prompting, as well as more advanced methodologies such as the chain-of-thought and tree-of-thoughts prompting. The paper sheds light on how external assistance in the form of plugins can assist in this task, and reduce machine hallucination by retrieving external knowledge. We subsequently delineate prospective directions in prompt engineering research, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of structures and the role of agents in Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) tools. We discuss how to assess the efficacy of prompt methods from different perspectives and using different methods. Finally, we gather information about the application of prompt engineering in such fields as education and programming, showing its transformative potential. This comprehensive survey aims to serve as a friendly guide for anyone venturing through the big world of LLMs and prompt engineering.

Revision is an essential part of the human writing process. It tends to be strategic, adaptive, and, more importantly, iterative in nature. Despite the success of large language models on text revision tasks, they are limited to non-iterative, one-shot revisions. Examining and evaluating the capability of large language models for making continuous revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step towards building effective writing assistants. In this work, we present a human-in-the-loop iterative text revision system, Read, Revise, Repeat (R3), which aims at achieving high quality text revisions with minimal human efforts by reading model-generated revisions and user feedbacks, revising documents, and repeating human-machine interactions. In R3, a text revision model provides text editing suggestions for human writers, who can accept or reject the suggested edits. The accepted edits are then incorporated into the model for the next iteration of document revision. Writers can therefore revise documents iteratively by interacting with the system and simply accepting/rejecting its suggested edits until the text revision model stops making further revisions or reaches a predefined maximum number of revisions. Empirical experiments show that R3 can generate revisions with comparable acceptance rate to human writers at early revision depths, and the human-machine interaction can get higher quality revisions with fewer iterations and edits. The collected human-model interaction dataset and system code are available at https://github.com/vipulraheja/IteraTeR. Our system demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/lK08tIpEoaE.

We present DialogPaint, an innovative framework that employs an interactive conversational approach for image editing. The framework comprises a pretrained dialogue model (Blenderbot) and a diffusion model (Stable Diffusion). The dialogue model engages in conversation with users to understand their requirements and generates concise instructions based on the dialogue. Subsequently, the Stable Diffusion model employs these instructions, along with the input image, to produce the desired output. Due to the difficulty of acquiring fine-tuning data for such models, we leverage multiple large-scale models to generate simulated dialogues and corresponding image pairs. After fine-tuning our framework with the synthesized data, we evaluate its performance in real application scenes. The results demonstrate that DialogPaint excels in both objective and subjective evaluation metrics effectively handling ambiguous instructions and performing tasks such as object replacement, style transfer, color modification. Moreover, our framework supports multi-round editing, allowing for the completion of complicated editing tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to impact a wide range of creative domains, but the application of LLMs to animation is underexplored and presents novel challenges such as how users might effectively describe motion in natural language. In this paper, we present Keyframer, a design tool for animating static images (SVGs) with natural language. Informed by interviews with professional animation designers and engineers, Keyframer supports exploration and refinement of animations through the combination of prompting and direct editing of generated output. The system also enables users to request design variants, supporting comparison and ideation. Through a user study with 13 participants, we contribute a characterization of user prompting strategies, including a taxonomy of semantic prompt types for describing motion and a 'decomposed' prompting style where users continually adapt their goals in response to generated output.We share how direct editing along with prompting enables iteration beyond one-shot prompting interfaces common in generative tools today. Through this work, we propose how LLMs might empower a range of audiences to engage with animation creation.

In recent years, large language models have greatly improved in their ability to perform complex multi-step reasoning. However, even state-of-the-art models still regularly produce logical mistakes. To train more reliable models, we can turn either to outcome supervision, which provides feedback for a final result, or process supervision, which provides feedback for each intermediate reasoning step. Given the importance of training reliable models, and given the high cost of human feedback, it is important to carefully compare the both methods. Recent work has already begun this comparison, but many questions still remain. We conduct our own investigation, finding that process supervision significantly outperforms outcome supervision for training models to solve problems from the challenging MATH dataset. Our process-supervised model solves 78% of problems from a representative subset of the MATH test set. Additionally, we show that active learning significantly improves the efficacy of process supervision. To support related research, we also release PRM800K, the complete dataset of 800,000 step-level human feedback labels used to train our best reward model.

In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requires precise and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of the tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider the proximity to the current agent when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient. To this end, we propose "Describe, Explain, Plan and Select" (DEPS), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach helps with better error correction from the feedback during the long-haul planning, while also bringing the sense of proximity via goal Selector, a learnable module that ranks parallel sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion and improves the original plan accordingly. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly doubles the overall performances. Finally, the ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the ObtainDiamond grand challenge with our approach. The code is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MC-Planner.

The recently released model, Claude 3.5 Computer Use, stands out as the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta as a graphical user interface (GUI) agent. As an early beta, its capability in the real-world complex environment remains unknown. In this case study to explore Claude 3.5 Computer Use, we curate and organize a collection of carefully designed tasks spanning a variety of domains and software. Observations from these cases demonstrate Claude 3.5 Computer Use's unprecedented ability in end-to-end language to desktop actions. Along with this study, we provide an out-of-the-box agent framework for deploying API-based GUI automation models with easy implementation. Our case studies aim to showcase a groundwork of capabilities and limitations of Claude 3.5 Computer Use with detailed analyses and bring to the fore questions about planning, action, and critic, which must be considered for future improvement. We hope this preliminary exploration will inspire future research into the GUI agent community. All the test cases in the paper can be tried through the project: https://github.com/showlab/computer_use_ootb.

Creative coding tasks are often exploratory in nature. When producing digital artwork, artists usually begin with a high-level semantic construct such as a "stained glass filter" and programmatically implement it by varying code parameters such as shape, color, lines, and opacity to produce visually appealing results. Based on interviews with artists, it can be effortful to translate semantic constructs to program syntax, and current programming tools don't lend well to rapid creative exploration. To address these challenges, we introduce Spellburst, a large language model (LLM) powered creative-coding environment. Spellburst provides (1) a node-based interface that allows artists to create generative art and explore variations through branching and merging operations, (2) expressive prompt-based interactions to engage in semantic programming, and (3) dynamic prompt-driven interfaces and direct code editing to seamlessly switch between semantic and syntactic exploration. Our evaluation with artists demonstrates Spellburst's potential to enhance creative coding practices and inform the design of computational creativity tools that bridge semantic and syntactic spaces.

The rapidly evolving field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has made significant strides in automating repetitive processes, yet its effectiveness diminishes in scenarios requiring spontaneous or unpredictable tasks demanded by users. This paper introduces a novel approach, FlowMind, leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT), to address this limitation and create an automatic workflow generation system. In FlowMind, we propose a generic prompt recipe for a lecture that helps ground LLM reasoning with reliable Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). With this, FlowMind not only mitigates the common issue of hallucinations in LLMs, but also eliminates direct interaction between LLMs and proprietary data or code, thus ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of information - a cornerstone in financial services. FlowMind further simplifies user interaction by presenting high-level descriptions of auto-generated workflows, enabling users to inspect and provide feedback effectively. We also introduce NCEN-QA, a new dataset in finance for benchmarking question-answering tasks from N-CEN reports on funds. We used NCEN-QA to evaluate the performance of workflows generated by FlowMind against baseline and ablation variants of FlowMind. We demonstrate the success of FlowMind, the importance of each component in the proposed lecture recipe, and the effectiveness of user interaction and feedback in FlowMind.

Traditional animation generation methods depend on training generative models with human-labelled data, entailing a sophisticated multi-stage pipeline that demands substantial human effort and incurs high training costs. Due to limited prompting plans, these methods typically produce brief, information-poor, and context-incoherent animations. To overcome these limitations and automate the animation process, we pioneer the introduction of large multimodal models (LMMs) as the core processor to build an autonomous animation-making agent, named Anim-Director. This agent mainly harnesses the advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities of LMMs and generative AI tools to create animated videos from concise narratives or simple instructions. Specifically, it operates in three main stages: Firstly, the Anim-Director generates a coherent storyline from user inputs, followed by a detailed director's script that encompasses settings of character profiles and interior/exterior descriptions, and context-coherent scene descriptions that include appearing characters, interiors or exteriors, and scene events. Secondly, we employ LMMs with the image generation tool to produce visual images of settings and scenes. These images are designed to maintain visual consistency across different scenes using a visual-language prompting method that combines scene descriptions and images of the appearing character and setting. Thirdly, scene images serve as the foundation for producing animated videos, with LMMs generating prompts to guide this process. The whole process is notably autonomous without manual intervention, as the LMMs interact seamlessly with generative tools to generate prompts, evaluate visual quality, and select the best one to optimize the final output.

Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a "bridging" utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we call OTTers. We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data.

Researchers have long recognized the socio-technical gaps in personal tracking research, where machines can never fully model the complexity of human behavior, making it only able to produce basic rule-based outputs or "black-box" results that lack clear explanations. Real-world deployments rely on experts for this complex translation from sparse data to meaningful insights. In this study, we consider this translation process from data to insights by experts as "sensemaking" and explore how HCI researchers can support it through Vital Insight, an evidence-based 'sensemaking' system that combines direct representation and indirect inference through visualization and Large Language Models. We evaluate Vital Insight in user testing sessions with 14 experts in multi-modal tracking, synthesize design implications, and develop an expert sensemaking model where they iteratively move between direct data representations and AI-supported inferences to explore, retrieve, question, and validate insights.

Data science workers increasingly collaborate on large-scale projects before communicating insights to a broader audience in the form of visualization. While prior work has modeled how data science teams, oftentimes with distinct roles and work processes, communicate knowledge to outside stakeholders, we have little knowledge of how data science workers communicate intermediately before delivering the final products. In this work, we contribute a nuanced description of the intermediate communication process within data science teams. By analyzing interview data with 8 self-identified data science workers, we characterized the data science intermediate communication process with four factors, including the types of audience, communication goals, shared artifacts, and mode of communication. We also identified overarching challenges in the current communication process. We also discussed design implications that might inform better tools that facilitate intermediate communication within data science teams.

Though LLMs are capable of generating plausible programs, it's challenging to interact with the LLMs further to revise the program, especially if the user's specific requirements are different from the initial proposal. In this paper, we introduce ANPL, an interactive programming system that ensures users can always refine the generated code towards their specific programmatic intents via structured decompositions. Borrowing the paradigm of sketching from program synthesis, an ANPL program consists of a set of input-outputs that it must satisfy, a ``sketch'' -- control/data flow expressed in precise code (e.g. Python), and ``holes'' -- sub-modules to be implemented by the LLM specified with natural language. The user revises an ANPL program by either modifying the sketch, changing the language used to describe the holes, or providing additional input-outputs to a particular hole, turning it into a sub-ANPL program that can be solved recursively. This workflow allows the users to offload programming burdens to the LLM as much as possible while retaining the ability to pinpoint and resolve bugs locally, without exposing the rest of the program to the LLM. We deploy ANPL on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a set of unique tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art AI systems, showing it outperforms baseline programming systems that (a) without the ability to decompose tasks interactively and (b) without the guarantee that the modules can be correctly composed together. Additional evaluations on APPS, HumanEval, and real-world programming tasks have validated that the ANPL framework is applicable to multiple programming domains. We release the ANPL solutions to the ARC tasks as a dataset, providing insights into how humans decompose novel tasks programmatically. See our code at https://iprc-dip.github.io/ANPL/.

In psychotherapy, therapeutic outcome assessment, or treatment outcome evaluation, is essential for enhancing mental health care by systematically evaluating therapeutic processes and outcomes. Existing large language model approaches often focus on therapist-centered, single-session evaluations, neglecting the client's subjective experience and longitudinal progress across multiple sessions. To address these limitations, we propose IPAEval, a client-Informed Psychological Assessment-based Evaluation framework that automates treatment outcome evaluations from the client's perspective using clinical interviews. IPAEval integrates cross-session client-contextual assessment and session-focused client-dynamics assessment to provide a comprehensive understanding of therapeutic progress. Experiments on our newly developed TheraPhase dataset demonstrate that IPAEval effectively tracks symptom severity and treatment outcomes over multiple sessions, outperforming previous single-session models and validating the benefits of items-aware reasoning mechanisms.

The final frontier for simulation is the accurate representation of complex, real-world social systems. While agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to study the behavior and interactions of agents within a larger system, it is unable to faithfully capture the full complexity of human-driven behavior. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have emerged as a potential solution to this bottleneck by enabling researchers to explore human-driven interactions in previously unimaginable ways. Our research investigates simulations of human interactions using LLMs. Through prompt engineering, inspired by Park et al. (2023), we present two simulations of believable proxies of human behavior: a two-agent negotiation and a six-agent murder mystery game.

Large Language Models(LLMs) have dramatically revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing(NLP), offering remarkable capabilities that have garnered widespread usage. However, existing interaction paradigms between LLMs and users are constrained by either inflexibility, limitations in customization, or a lack of persistent learning. This inflexibility is particularly evident as users, especially those without programming skills, have restricted avenues to enhance or personalize the model. Existing frameworks further complicate the model training and deployment process due to their computational inefficiencies and lack of user-friendly interfaces. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel interaction paradigm-'Online Training using External Interactions'-that merges the benefits of persistent, real-time model updates with the flexibility for individual customization through external interactions such as AI agents or online/offline knowledge bases.

We consider the problem of designing an artificial agent capable of interacting with humans in collaborative dialogue to produce creative, engaging narratives. In this task, the goal is to establish universe details, and to collaborate on an interesting story in that universe, through a series of natural dialogue exchanges. Our model can augment any probabilistic conversational agent by allowing it to reason about universe information established and what potential next utterances might reveal. Ideally, with each utterance, agents would reveal just enough information to add specificity and reduce ambiguity without limiting the conversation. We empirically show that our model allows control over the rate at which the agent reveals information and that doing so significantly improves accuracy in predicting the next line of dialogues from movies. We close with a case-study with four professional theatre performers, who preferred interactions with our model-augmented agent over an unaugmented agent.

We present Multi-expert Prompting, a novel enhancement of ExpertPrompting (Xu et al., 2023), designed to improve the large language model (LLM) generation. Specifically, it guides an LLM to fulfill an input instruction by simulating multiple experts, aggregating their responses, and selecting the best among individual and aggregated responses. This process is performed in a single chain of thoughts through our seven carefully designed subtasks derived from the Nominal Group Technique (Ven and Delbecq, 1974), a well-established decision-making framework. Our evaluations demonstrate that Multi-expert Prompting significantly outperforms ExpertPrompting and comparable baselines in enhancing the truthfulness, factuality, informativeness, and usefulness of responses while reducing toxicity and hurtfulness. It further achieves state-of-the-art truthfulness by outperforming the best baseline by 8.69% with ChatGPT. Multi-expert Prompting is efficient, explainable, and highly adaptable to diverse scenarios, eliminating the need for manual prompt construction.