Daily Papers

Today's video-conferencing tools support a rich range of professional and social activities, but their generic, grid-based environments cannot be easily adapted to meet the varying needs of distributed collaborators. To enable end-user customization, we developed BlendScape, a system for meeting participants to compose video-conferencing environments tailored to their collaboration context by leveraging AI image generation techniques. BlendScape supports flexible representations of task spaces by blending users' physical or virtual backgrounds into unified environments and implements multimodal interaction techniques to steer the generation. Through an evaluation with 15 end-users, we investigated their customization preferences for work and social scenarios. Participants could rapidly express their design intentions with BlendScape and envisioned using the system to structure collaboration in future meetings, but experienced challenges with preventing distracting elements. We implement scenarios to demonstrate BlendScape's expressiveness in supporting distributed collaboration techniques from prior work and propose composition techniques to improve the quality of environments.

With the flourishing development of intelligent warehousing systems, the technology of Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) has experienced rapid growth. Within intelligent warehousing environments, AGV is required to safely and rapidly plan an optimal path in complex and dynamic environments. Most research has studied deep reinforcement learning to address this challenge. However, in the environments with sparse extrinsic rewards, these algorithms often converge slowly, learn inefficiently or fail to reach the target. Random Network Distillation (RND), as an exploration enhancement, can effectively improve the performance of proximal policy optimization, especially enhancing the additional intrinsic rewards of the AGV agent which is in sparse reward environments. Moreover, most of the current research continues to use 2D grid mazes as experimental environments. These environments have insufficient complexity and limited action sets. To solve this limitation, we present simulation environments of AGV path planning with continuous actions and positions for AGVs, so that it can be close to realistic physical scenarios. Based on our experiments and comprehensive analysis of the proposed method, the results demonstrate that our proposed method enables AGV to more rapidly complete path planning tasks with continuous actions in our environments. A video of part of our experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/lwrY9YesGmw.

This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially in cluttered environments.

When studying unconstrained behaviour and allowing mice to leave their cage to navigate a complex labyrinth, the mice exhibit foraging behaviour in the labyrinth searching for rewards, returning to their home cage now and then, e.g. to drink. Surprisingly, when executing such a ``home run'', the mice do not follow the exact reverse path, in fact, the entry path and home path have very little overlap. Recent work proposed a hierarchical active inference model for navigation, where the low level model makes inferences about hidden states and poses that explain sensory inputs, whereas the high level model makes inferences about moving between locations, effectively building a map of the environment. However, using this ``map'' for planning, only allows the agent to find trajectories that it previously explored, far from the observed mice's behaviour. In this paper, we explore ways of incorporating before-unvisited paths in the planning algorithm, by using the low level generative model to imagine potential, yet undiscovered paths. We demonstrate a proof of concept in a grid-world environment, showing how an agent can accurately predict a new, shorter path in the map leading to its starting point, using a generative model learnt from pixel-based observations.

We present XLand-MiniGrid, a suite of tools and grid-world environments for meta-reinforcement learning research inspired by the diversity and depth of XLand and the simplicity and minimalism of MiniGrid. XLand-Minigrid is written in JAX, designed to be highly scalable, and can potentially run on GPU or TPU accelerators, democratizing large-scale experimentation with limited resources. To demonstrate the generality of our library, we have implemented some well-known single-task environments as well as new meta-learning environments capable of generating 10^8 distinct tasks. We have empirically shown that the proposed environments can scale up to 2^{13} parallel instances on the GPU, reaching tens of millions of steps per second.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables the agent to navigate to a remote location following the natural language instruction in 3D environments. To represent the previously visited environment, most approaches for VLN implement memory using recurrent states, topological maps, or top-down semantic maps. In contrast to these approaches, we build the top-down egocentric and dynamically growing Grid Memory Map (i.e., GridMM) to structure the visited environment. From a global perspective, historical observations are projected into a unified grid map in a top-down view, which can better represent the spatial relations of the environment. From a local perspective, we further propose an instruction relevance aggregation method to capture fine-grained visual clues in each grid region. Extensive experiments are conducted on both the REVERIE, R2R, SOON datasets in the discrete environments, and the R2R-CE dataset in the continuous environments, showing the superiority of our proposed method.

Large language models (LLMs) encode a vast amount of world knowledge acquired from massive text datasets. Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can assist an embodied agent in solving complex sequential decision making tasks by providing high-level instructions. However, interactions with LLMs can be time-consuming. In many practical scenarios, they require a significant amount of storage space that can only be deployed on remote cloud server nodes. Additionally, using commercial LLMs can be costly since they may charge based on usage frequency. In this paper, we explore how to enable intelligent cost-effective interactions between the agent and an LLM. We propose When2Ask, a reinforcement learning based approach that learns when it is necessary to query LLMs for high-level instructions to accomplish a target task. Experiments on MiniGrid and Habitat environments that entail planning sub-goals demonstrate that When2Ask learns to solve target tasks with only a few necessary interactions with an LLM, and significantly reduces interaction costs in testing environments compared with baseline methods. Experiment results also suggest that by learning a mediator model to interact with the LLM, the agent's performance becomes more robust against partial observability of the environment. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/LLM4RL.

Following the success of the in-context learning paradigm in large-scale language and computer vision models, the recently emerging field of in-context reinforcement learning is experiencing a rapid growth. However, its development has been held back by the lack of challenging benchmarks, as all the experiments have been carried out in simple environments and on small-scale datasets. We present XLand-100B, a large-scale dataset for in-context reinforcement learning based on the XLand-MiniGrid environment, as a first step to alleviate this problem. It contains complete learning histories for nearly 30,000 different tasks, covering 100B transitions and 2.5B episodes. It took 50,000 GPU hours to collect the dataset, which is beyond the reach of most academic labs. Along with the dataset, we provide the utilities to reproduce or expand it even further. With this substantial effort, we aim to democratize research in the rapidly growing field of in-context reinforcement learning and provide a solid foundation for further scaling. The code is open-source and available under Apache 2.0 licence at https://github.com/dunno-lab/xland-minigrid-datasets.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) can be dramatically accelerated by spatial grid representations. However, they do not explicitly reason about scale and so introduce aliasing artifacts when reconstructing scenes captured at different camera distances. Mip-NeRF and its extensions propose scale-aware renderers that project volumetric frustums rather than point samples but such approaches rely on positional encodings that are not readily compatible with grid methods. We propose a simple modification to grid-based models by training model heads at different spatial grid resolutions. At render time, we simply use coarser grids to render samples that cover larger volumes. Our method can be easily applied to existing accelerated NeRF methods and significantly improves rendering quality (reducing error rates by 20-90% across synthetic and unbounded real-world scenes) while incurring minimal performance overhead (as each model head is quick to evaluate). Compared to Mip-NeRF, we reduce error rates by 20% while training over 60x faster.

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a model to learn a new task by observing a few exemplars in its context. While prevalent in NLP, this capability has recently also been observed in Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings. Prior in-context RL methods, however, require entire episodes in the agent's context. Given that complex environments typically lead to long episodes with sparse rewards, these methods are constrained to simple environments with short episodes. To address these challenges, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Decision Transformer (RA-DT). RA-DT employs an external memory mechanism to store past experiences from which it retrieves only sub-trajectories relevant for the current situation. The retrieval component in RA-DT does not require training and can be entirely domain-agnostic. We evaluate the capabilities of RA-DT on grid-world environments, robotics simulations, and procedurally-generated video games. On grid-worlds, RA-DT outperforms baselines, while using only a fraction of their context length. Furthermore, we illuminate the limitations of current in-context RL methods on complex environments and discuss future directions. To facilitate future research, we release datasets for four of the considered environments.

The Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model (LLM) framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.

Autonomous agents' interactions with humans are increasingly focused on adapting to their changing preferences in order to improve assistance in real-world tasks. Effective agents must learn to accurately infer human goals, which are often hidden, to collaborate well. However, existing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) environments lack the necessary attributes required to rigorously evaluate these agents' learning capabilities. To this end, we introduce ColorGrid, a novel MARL environment with customizable non-stationarity, asymmetry, and reward structure. We investigate the performance of Independent Proximal Policy Optimization (IPPO), a state-of-the-art (SOTA) MARL algorithm, in ColorGrid and find through extensive ablations that, particularly with simultaneous non-stationary and asymmetric goals between a ``leader'' agent representing a human and a ``follower'' assistant agent, ColorGrid is unsolved by IPPO. To support benchmarking future MARL algorithms, we release our environment code, model checkpoints, and trajectory visualizations at https://github.com/andreyrisukhin/ColorGrid.

Modern deep learning applications require increasingly more compute to train state-of-the-art models. To address this demand, large corporations and institutions use dedicated High-Performance Computing clusters, whose construction and maintenance are both environmentally costly and well beyond the budget of most organizations. As a result, some research directions become the exclusive domain of a few large industrial and even fewer academic actors. To alleviate this disparity, smaller groups may pool their computational resources and run collaborative experiments that benefit all participants. This paradigm, known as grid- or volunteer computing, has seen successful applications in numerous scientific areas. However, using this approach for machine learning is difficult due to high latency, asymmetric bandwidth, and several challenges unique to volunteer computing. In this work, we carefully analyze these constraints and propose a novel algorithmic framework designed specifically for collaborative training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for SwAV and ALBERT pretraining in realistic conditions and achieve performance comparable to traditional setups at a fraction of the cost. Finally, we provide a detailed report of successful collaborative language model pretraining with 40 participants.

Grid-based structures are commonly used to encode explicit features for graphics primitives such as images, signed distance functions (SDF), and neural radiance fields (NeRF) due to their simple implementation. However, in n-dimensional space, calculating the value of a sampled point requires interpolating the values of its 2^n neighboring vertices. The exponential scaling with dimension leads to significant computational overheads. To address this issue, we propose a simplex-based approach for encoding graphics primitives. The number of vertices in a simplex-based structure increases linearly with dimension, making it a more efficient and generalizable alternative to grid-based representations. Using the non-axis-aligned simplicial structure property, we derive and prove a coordinate transformation, simplicial subdivision, and barycentric interpolation scheme for efficient sampling, which resembles transformation procedures in the simplex noise algorithm. Finally, we use hash tables to store multiresolution features of all interest points in the simplicial grid, which are passed into a tiny fully connected neural network to parameterize graphics primitives. We implemented a detailed simplex-based structure encoding algorithm in C++ and CUDA using the methods outlined in our approach. In the 2D image fitting task, the proposed method is capable of fitting a giga-pixel image with 9.4% less time compared to the baseline method proposed by instant-ngp, while maintaining the same quality and compression rate. In the volumetric rendering setup, we observe a maximum 41.2% speedup when the samples are dense enough.

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.

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 .

Go-Explore is a powerful family of algorithms designed to solve hard-exploration problems, built on the principle of archiving discovered states, and iteratively returning to and exploring from the most promising states. This approach has led to superhuman performance across a wide variety of challenging problems including Atari games and robotic control, but requires manually designing heuristics to guide exploration, which is time-consuming and infeasible in general. To resolve this, we propose Intelligent Go-Explore (IGE) which greatly extends the scope of the original Go-Explore by replacing these heuristics with the intelligence and internalized human notions of interestingness captured by giant foundation models (FMs). This provides IGE with a human-like ability to instinctively identify how interesting or promising any new state is (e.g. discovering new objects, locations, or behaviors), even in complex environments where heuristics are hard to define. Moreover, IGE offers the exciting and previously impossible opportunity to recognize and capitalize on serendipitous discoveries that cannot be predicted ahead of time. We evaluate IGE on a range of language-based tasks that require search and exploration. In Game of 24, a multistep mathematical reasoning problem, IGE reaches 100% success rate 70.8% faster than the best classic graph search baseline. Next, in BabyAI-Text, a challenging partially observable gridworld, IGE exceeds the previous SOTA with orders of magnitude fewer online samples. Finally, in TextWorld, we show the unique ability of IGE to succeed in settings requiring long-horizon exploration where prior SOTA FM agents like Reflexion completely fail. Overall, IGE combines the tremendous strengths of FMs and the powerful Go-Explore algorithm, opening up a new frontier of research into creating more generally capable agents with impressive exploration capabilities.

We present an approach for agents to learn representations of a global map from sensor data, to aid their exploration in new environments. To achieve this, we embed procedures mimicking that of traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) into the soft attention based addressing of external memory architectures, in which the external memory acts as an internal representation of the environment. This structure encourages the evolution of SLAM-like behaviors inside a completely differentiable deep neural network. We show that this approach can help reinforcement learning agents to successfully explore new environments where long-term memory is essential. We validate our approach in both challenging grid-world environments and preliminary Gazebo experiments. A video of our experiments can be found at: https://goo.gl/G2Vu5y.

Open-source reinforcement learning (RL) environments have played a crucial role in driving progress in the development of AI algorithms. In modern RL research, there is a need for simulated environments that are performant, scalable, and modular to enable their utilization in a wider range of potential real-world applications. Therefore, we present Jumanji, a suite of diverse RL environments specifically designed to be fast, flexible, and scalable. Jumanji provides a suite of environments focusing on combinatorial problems frequently encountered in industry, as well as challenging general decision-making tasks. By leveraging the efficiency of JAX and hardware accelerators like GPUs and TPUs, Jumanji enables rapid iteration of research ideas and large-scale experimentation, ultimately empowering more capable agents. Unlike existing RL environment suites, Jumanji is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor the initial state distribution and problem complexity to their needs. Furthermore, we provide actor-critic baselines for each environment, accompanied by preliminary findings on scaling and generalization scenarios. Jumanji aims to set a new standard for speed, adaptability, and scalability of RL environments.

We present Mini-BEHAVIOR, a novel benchmark for embodied AI that challenges agents to use reasoning and decision-making skills to solve complex activities that resemble everyday human challenges. The Mini-BEHAVIOR environment is a fast, realistic Gridworld environment that offers the benefits of rapid prototyping and ease of use while preserving a symbolic level of physical realism and complexity found in complex embodied AI benchmarks. We introduce key features such as procedural generation, to enable the creation of countless task variations and support open-ended learning. Mini-BEHAVIOR provides implementations of various household tasks from the original BEHAVIOR benchmark, along with starter code for data collection and reinforcement learning agent training. In essence, Mini-BEHAVIOR offers a fast, open-ended benchmark for evaluating decision-making and planning solutions in embodied AI. It serves as a user-friendly entry point for research and facilitates the evaluation and development of solutions, simplifying their assessment and development while advancing the field of embodied AI. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/StanfordVL/mini_behavior.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been driven by the presence of increasingly realistic and complex simulated environments. However, many of the existing environments provide either unrealistic visuals, inaccurate physics, low task complexity, restricted agent perspective, or a limited capacity for interaction among artificial agents. Furthermore, many platforms lack the ability to flexibly configure the simulation, making the simulated environment a black-box from the perspective of the learning system. In this work, we propose a novel taxonomy of existing simulation platforms and discuss the highest level class of general platforms which enable the development of learning environments that are rich in visual, physical, task, and social complexity. We argue that modern game engines are uniquely suited to act as general platforms and as a case study examine the Unity engine and open source Unity ML-Agents Toolkit. We then survey the research enabled by Unity and the Unity ML-Agents Toolkit, discussing the kinds of research a flexible, interactive and easily configurable general platform can facilitate.

The emergence of complex life on Earth is often attributed to the arms race that ensued from a huge number of organisms all competing for finite resources. We present an artificial intelligence research environment, inspired by the human game genre of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, a.k.a. MMOs), that aims to simulate this setting in microcosm. As with MMORPGs and the real world alike, our environment is persistent and supports a large and variable number of agents. Our environment is well suited to the study of large-scale multiagent interaction: it requires that agents learn robust combat and navigation policies in the presence of large populations attempting to do the same. Baseline experiments reveal that population size magnifies and incentivizes the development of skillful behaviors and results in agents that outcompete agents trained in smaller populations. We further show that the policies of agents with unshared weights naturally diverge to fill different niches in order to avoid competition.

Before deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need to be confident they will perform safely in novel situations. Ideally, we would expose agents to a very wide range of situations during training, allowing them to learn about every possible danger, but this is often impractical. This paper investigates safety and generalization from a limited number of training environments in deep reinforcement learning (RL). We find RL algorithms can fail dangerously on unseen test environments even when performing perfectly on training environments. Firstly, in a gridworld setting, we show that catastrophes can be significantly reduced with simple modifications, including ensemble model averaging and the use of a blocking classifier. In the more challenging CoinRun environment we find similar methods do not significantly reduce catastrophes. However, we do find that the uncertainty information from the ensemble is useful for predicting whether a catastrophe will occur within a few steps and hence whether human intervention should be requested.

3D simulated environments play a critical role in Embodied AI, but their creation requires expertise and extensive manual effort, restricting their diversity and scope. To mitigate this limitation, we present Holodeck, a system that generates 3D environments to match a user-supplied prompt fully automatedly. Holodeck can generate diverse scenes, e.g., arcades, spas, and museums, adjust the designs for styles, and can capture the semantics of complex queries such as "apartment for a researcher with a cat" and "office of a professor who is a fan of Star Wars". Holodeck leverages a large language model (GPT-4) for common sense knowledge about what the scene might look like and uses a large collection of 3D assets from Objaverse to populate the scene with diverse objects. To address the challenge of positioning objects correctly, we prompt GPT-4 to generate spatial relational constraints between objects and then optimize the layout to satisfy those constraints. Our large-scale human evaluation shows that annotators prefer Holodeck over manually designed procedural baselines in residential scenes and that Holodeck can produce high-quality outputs for diverse scene types. We also demonstrate an exciting application of Holodeck in Embodied AI, training agents to navigate in novel scenes like music rooms and daycares without human-constructed data, which is a significant step forward in developing general-purpose embodied agents.

Neural Radiance Field training can be accelerated through the use of grid-based representations in NeRF's learned mapping from spatial coordinates to colors and volumetric density. However, these grid-based approaches lack an explicit understanding of scale and therefore often introduce aliasing, usually in the form of jaggies or missing scene content. Anti-aliasing has previously been addressed by mip-NeRF 360, which reasons about sub-volumes along a cone rather than points along a ray, but this approach is not natively compatible with current grid-based techniques. We show how ideas from rendering and signal processing can be used to construct a technique that combines mip-NeRF 360 and grid-based models such as Instant NGP to yield error rates that are 8% - 77% lower than either prior technique, and that trains 24x faster than mip-NeRF 360.

With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.

Spatial computing is a technological advancement that facilitates the seamless integration of devices into the physical environment, resulting in a more natural and intuitive digital world user experience. Spatial computing has the potential to become a significant advancement in the field of computing. From GPS and location-based services to healthcare, spatial computing technologies have influenced and improved our interactions with the digital world. The use of spatial computing in creating interactive digital environments has become increasingly popular and effective. This is explained by its increasing significance among researchers and industrial organisations, which motivated us to conduct this review. This review provides a detailed overview of spatial computing, including its enabling technologies and its impact on various applications. Projects related to spatial computing are also discussed. In this review, we also explored the potential challenges and limitations of spatial computing. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions and future directions. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of spatial computing, its enabling technologies, their impact on various applications, emerging challenges, and potential solutions.

There is increased interest in using generative AI to create 3D spaces for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, today's models produce artificial environments, falling short of supporting collaborative tasks that benefit from incorporating the user's physical context. To generate environments that support VR telepresence, we introduce SpaceBlender, a novel pipeline that utilizes generative AI techniques to blend users' physical surroundings into unified virtual spaces. This pipeline transforms user-provided 2D images into context-rich 3D environments through an iterative process consisting of depth estimation, mesh alignment, and diffusion-based space completion guided by geometric priors and adaptive text prompts. In a preliminary within-subjects study, where 20 participants performed a collaborative VR affinity diagramming task in pairs, we compared SpaceBlender with a generic virtual environment and a state-of-the-art scene generation framework, evaluating its ability to create virtual spaces suitable for collaboration. Participants appreciated the enhanced familiarity and context provided by SpaceBlender but also noted complexities in the generative environments that could detract from task focus. Drawing on participant feedback, we propose directions for improving the pipeline and discuss the value and design of blended spaces for different scenarios.

We describe MGARD, a software providing MultiGrid Adaptive Reduction for floating-point scientific data on structured and unstructured grids. With exceptional data compression capability and precise error control, MGARD addresses a wide range of requirements, including storage reduction, high-performance I/O, and in-situ data analysis. It features a unified application programming interface (API) that seamlessly operates across diverse computing architectures. MGARD has been optimized with highly-tuned GPU kernels and efficient memory and device management mechanisms, ensuring scalable and rapid operations.

We tackle real-world problems with complex structures beyond the pixel-based game or simulator. We formulate it as a few-shot reinforcement learning problem where a task is characterized by a subtask graph that defines a set of subtasks and their dependencies that are unknown to the agent. Different from the previous meta-rl methods trying to directly infer the unstructured task embedding, our multi-task subtask graph inferencer (MTSGI) first infers the common high-level task structure in terms of the subtask graph from the training tasks, and use it as a prior to improve the task inference in testing. Our experiment results on 2D grid-world and complex web navigation domains show that the proposed method can learn and leverage the common underlying structure of the tasks for faster adaptation to the unseen tasks than various existing algorithms such as meta reinforcement learning, hierarchical reinforcement learning, and other heuristic agents.

Simulated virtual environments have been widely used to learn robotic agents that perform daily household tasks. These environments encourage research progress by far, but often provide limited object interactability, visual appearance different from real-world environments, or relatively smaller environment sizes. This prevents the learned models in the virtual scenes from being readily deployable. To bridge the gap between these learning environments and deploying (i.e., real) environments, we propose the ReALFRED benchmark that employs real-world scenes, objects, and room layouts to learn agents to complete household tasks by understanding free-form language instructions and interacting with objects in large, multi-room and 3D-captured scenes. Specifically, we extend the ALFRED benchmark with updates for larger environmental spaces with smaller visual domain gaps. With ReALFRED, we analyze previously crafted methods for the ALFRED benchmark and observe that they consistently yield lower performance in all metrics, encouraging the community to develop methods in more realistic environments. Our code and data are publicly available.

We present X^3 (pronounced XCube), a novel generative model for high-resolution sparse 3D voxel grids with arbitrary attributes. Our model can generate millions of voxels with a finest effective resolution of up to 1024^3 in a feed-forward fashion without time-consuming test-time optimization. To achieve this, we employ a hierarchical voxel latent diffusion model which generates progressively higher resolution grids in a coarse-to-fine manner using a custom framework built on the highly efficient VDB data structure. Apart from generating high-resolution objects, we demonstrate the effectiveness of XCube on large outdoor scenes at scales of 100mtimes100m with a voxel size as small as 10cm. We observe clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over past approaches. In addition to unconditional generation, we show that our model can be used to solve a variety of tasks such as user-guided editing, scene completion from a single scan, and text-to-3D. More results and details can be found at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/xcube/.

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.

Leveraging large language models (LLMs), autonomous agents have significantly improved, gaining the ability to handle a variety of tasks. In open-ended settings, optimizing collaboration for efficiency and effectiveness demands flexible adjustments. Despite this, current research mainly emphasizes fixed, task-oriented workflows and overlooks agent-centric organizational structures. Drawing inspiration from human organizational behavior, we introduce a self-organizing agent system (S-Agents) with a "tree of agents" structure for dynamic workflow, an "hourglass agent architecture" for balancing information priorities, and a "non-obstructive collaboration" method to allow asynchronous task execution among agents. This structure can autonomously coordinate a group of agents, efficiently addressing the challenges of an open and dynamic environment without human intervention. Our experiments demonstrate that S-Agents proficiently execute collaborative building tasks and resource collection in the Minecraft environment, validating their effectiveness.

Machine learning has shown growing success in recent years. However, current machine learning systems are highly specialized, trained for particular problems or domains, and typically on a single narrow dataset. Human learning, on the other hand, is highly general and adaptable. Never-ending learning is a machine learning paradigm that aims to bridge this gap, with the goal of encouraging researchers to design machine learning systems that can learn to perform a wider variety of inter-related tasks in more complex environments. To date, there is no environment or testbed to facilitate the development and evaluation of never-ending learning systems. To this end, we propose the Jelly Bean World testbed. The Jelly Bean World allows experimentation over two-dimensional grid worlds which are filled with items and in which agents can navigate. This testbed provides environments that are sufficiently complex and where more generally intelligent algorithms ought to perform better than current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches. It does so by producing non-stationary environments and facilitating experimentation with multi-task, multi-agent, multi-modal, and curriculum learning settings. We hope that this new freely-available software will prompt new research and interest in the development and evaluation of never-ending learning systems and more broadly, general intelligence systems.

We present WonderWorld, a novel framework for interactive 3D scene generation that enables users to interactively specify scene contents and layout and see the created scenes in low latency. The major challenge lies in achieving fast generation of 3D scenes. Existing scene generation approaches fall short of speed as they often require (1) progressively generating many views and depth maps, and (2) time-consuming optimization of the scene geometry representations. We introduce the Fast Layered Gaussian Surfels (FLAGS) as our scene representation and an algorithm to generate it from a single view. Our approach does not need multiple views, and it leverages a geometry-based initialization that significantly reduces optimization time. Another challenge is generating coherent geometry that allows all scenes to be connected. We introduce the guided depth diffusion that allows partial conditioning of depth estimation. WonderWorld generates connected and diverse 3D scenes in less than 10 seconds on a single A6000 GPU, enabling real-time user interaction and exploration. We demonstrate the potential of WonderWorld for user-driven content creation and exploration in virtual environments. We will release full code and software for reproducibility. Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderWorld/.

Benchmarks play an important role in the development of machine learning algorithms. For example, research in reinforcement learning (RL) has been heavily influenced by available environments and benchmarks. However, RL environments are traditionally run on the CPU, limiting their scalability with typical academic compute. Recent advancements in JAX have enabled the wider use of hardware acceleration to overcome these computational hurdles, enabling massively parallel RL training pipelines and environments. This is particularly useful for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) research. First of all, multiple agents must be considered at each environment step, adding computational burden, and secondly, the sample complexity is increased due to non-stationarity, decentralised partial observability, or other MARL challenges. In this paper, we present JaxMARL, the first open-source code base that combines ease-of-use with GPU enabled efficiency, and supports a large number of commonly used MARL environments as well as popular baseline algorithms. When considering wall clock time, our experiments show that per-run our JAX-based training pipeline is up to 12500x faster than existing approaches. This enables efficient and thorough evaluations, with the potential to alleviate the evaluation crisis of the field. We also introduce and benchmark SMAX, a vectorised, simplified version of the popular StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge, which removes the need to run the StarCraft II game engine. This not only enables GPU acceleration, but also provides a more flexible MARL environment, unlocking the potential for self-play, meta-learning, and other future applications in MARL. We provide code at https://github.com/flairox/jaxmarl.

Agent-based modeling has been around for decades, and applied widely across the social and natural sciences. The scope of this research method is now poised to grow dramatically as it absorbs the new affordances provided by Large Language Models (LLM)s. Generative Agent-Based Models (GABM) are not just classic Agent-Based Models (ABM)s where the agents talk to one another. Rather, GABMs are constructed using an LLM to apply common sense to situations, act "reasonably", recall common semantic knowledge, produce API calls to control digital technologies like apps, and communicate both within the simulation and to researchers viewing it from the outside. Here we present Concordia, a library to facilitate constructing and working with GABMs. Concordia makes it easy to construct language-mediated simulations of physically- or digitally-grounded environments. Concordia agents produce their behavior using a flexible component system which mediates between two fundamental operations: LLM calls and associative memory retrieval. A special agent called the Game Master (GM), which was inspired by tabletop role-playing games, is responsible for simulating the environment where the agents interact. Agents take actions by describing what they want to do in natural language. The GM then translates their actions into appropriate implementations. In a simulated physical world, the GM checks the physical plausibility of agent actions and describes their effects. In digital environments simulating technologies such as apps and services, the GM may handle API calls to integrate with external tools such as general AI assistants (e.g., Bard, ChatGPT), and digital apps (e.g., Calendar, Email, Search, etc.). Concordia was designed to support a wide array of applications both in scientific research and for evaluating performance of real digital services by simulating users and/or generating synthetic data.

Manually creating 3D environments for AR/VR applications is a complex process requiring expert knowledge in 3D modeling software. Pioneering works facilitate this process by generating room meshes conditioned on textual style descriptions. Yet, many of these automatically generated 3D meshes do not adhere to typical room layouts, compromising their plausibility, e.g., by placing several beds in one bedroom. To address these challenges, we present ControlRoom3D, a novel method to generate high-quality room meshes. Central to our approach is a user-defined 3D semantic proxy room that outlines a rough room layout based on semantic bounding boxes and a textual description of the overall room style. Our key insight is that when rendered to 2D, this 3D representation provides valuable geometric and semantic information to control powerful 2D models to generate 3D consistent textures and geometry that aligns well with the proxy room. Backed up by an extensive study including quantitative metrics and qualitative user evaluations, our method generates diverse and globally plausible 3D room meshes, thus empowering users to design 3D rooms effortlessly without specialized knowledge.

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable potential to act as computer agents, enhancing human productivity and software accessibility in multi-modal tasks that require planning and reasoning. However, measuring agent performance in realistic environments remains a challenge since: (i) most benchmarks are limited to specific modalities or domains (e.g. text-only, web navigation, Q&A, coding) and (ii) full benchmark evaluations are slow (on order of magnitude of days) given the multi-step sequential nature of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the Windows Agent Arena: a reproducible, general environment focusing exclusively on the Windows operating system (OS) where agents can operate freely within a real Windows OS and use the same wide range of applications, tools, and web browsers available to human users when solving tasks. We adapt the OSWorld framework (Xie et al., 2024) to create 150+ diverse Windows tasks across representative domains that require agent abilities in planning, screen understanding, and tool usage. Our benchmark is scalable and can be seamlessly parallelized in Azure for a full benchmark evaluation in as little as 20 minutes. To demonstrate Windows Agent Arena's capabilities, we also introduce a new multi-modal agent, Navi. Our agent achieves a success rate of 19.5% in the Windows domain, compared to 74.5% performance of an unassisted human. Navi also demonstrates strong performance on another popular web-based benchmark, Mind2Web. We offer extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of Navi's performance, and provide insights into the opportunities for future research in agent development and data generation using Windows Agent Arena. Webpage: https://microsoft.github.io/WindowsAgentArena Code: https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAgentArena

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as a highly promising technique for modeling of static 3D scenes. In contrast to Neural Radiance Fields, it utilizes efficient rasterization allowing for very fast rendering at high-quality. However, the storage size is significantly higher, which hinders practical deployment, e.g.~on resource constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a compact scene representation organizing the parameters of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into a 2D grid with local homogeneity, ensuring a drastic reduction in storage requirements without compromising visual quality during rendering. Central to our idea is the explicit exploitation of perceptual redundancies present in natural scenes. In essence, the inherent nature of a scene allows for numerous permutations of Gaussian parameters to equivalently represent it. To this end, we propose a novel highly parallel algorithm that regularly arranges the high-dimensional Gaussian parameters into a 2D grid while preserving their neighborhood structure. During training, we further enforce local smoothness between the sorted parameters in the grid. The uncompressed Gaussians use the same structure as 3DGS, ensuring a seamless integration with established renderers. Our method achieves a reduction factor of 8x to 26x in size for complex scenes with no increase in training time, marking a substantial leap forward in the domain of 3D scene distribution and consumption. Additional information can be found on our project page: https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/Self-Organizing-Gaussians/

The generation of 3D scenes from user-specified conditions offers a promising avenue for alleviating the production burden in 3D applications. Previous studies required significant effort to realize the desired scene, owing to limited control conditions. We propose a method for controlling and generating 3D scenes under multimodal conditions using partial images, layout information represented in the top view, and text prompts. Combining these conditions to generate a 3D scene involves the following significant difficulties: (1) the creation of large datasets, (2) reflection on the interaction of multimodal conditions, and (3) domain dependence of the layout conditions. We decompose the process of 3D scene generation into 2D image generation from the given conditions and 3D scene generation from 2D images. 2D image generation is achieved by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-image model with a small artificial dataset of partial images and layouts, and 3D scene generation is achieved by layout-conditioned depth estimation and neural radiance fields (NeRF), thereby avoiding the creation of large datasets. The use of a common representation of spatial information using 360-degree images allows for the consideration of multimodal condition interactions and reduces the domain dependence of the layout control. The experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated that the proposed method can generate 3D scenes in diverse domains, from indoor to outdoor, according to multimodal conditions.

In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and demonstrate the ability to train agents that are generally capable across this vast space and beyond. The environment is natively multi-agent, spanning the continuum of competitive, cooperative, and independent games, which are situated within procedurally generated physical 3D worlds. The resulting space is exceptionally diverse in terms of the challenges posed to agents, and as such, even measuring the learning progress of an agent is an open research problem. We propose an iterative notion of improvement between successive generations of agents, rather than seeking to maximise a singular objective, allowing us to quantify progress despite tasks being incomparable in terms of achievable rewards. We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap finetuning.

We introduce Habitat 2.0 (H2.0), a simulation platform for training virtual robots in interactive 3D environments and complex physics-enabled scenarios. We make comprehensive contributions to all levels of the embodied AI stack - data, simulation, and benchmark tasks. Specifically, we present: (i) ReplicaCAD: an artist-authored, annotated, reconfigurable 3D dataset of apartments (matching real spaces) with articulated objects (e.g. cabinets and drawers that can open/close); (ii) H2.0: a high-performance physics-enabled 3D simulator with speeds exceeding 25,000 simulation steps per second (850x real-time) on an 8-GPU node, representing 100x speed-ups over prior work; and, (iii) Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB): a suite of common tasks for assistive robots (tidy the house, prepare groceries, set the table) that test a range of mobile manipulation capabilities. These large-scale engineering contributions allow us to systematically compare deep reinforcement learning (RL) at scale and classical sense-plan-act (SPA) pipelines in long-horizon structured tasks, with an emphasis on generalization to new objects, receptacles, and layouts. We find that (1) flat RL policies struggle on HAB compared to hierarchical ones; (2) a hierarchy with independent skills suffers from 'hand-off problems', and (3) SPA pipelines are more brittle than RL policies.

The recent advances in reinforcement learning have led to effective methods able to obtain above human-level performances in very complex environments. However, once solved, these environments become less valuable, and new challenges with different or more complex scenarios are needed to support research advances. This work presents DIAMBRA Arena, a new platform for reinforcement learning research and experimentation, featuring a collection of high-quality environments exposing a Python API fully compliant with OpenAI Gym standard. They are episodic tasks with discrete actions and observations composed by raw pixels plus additional numerical values, all supporting both single player and two players mode, allowing to work on standard reinforcement learning, competitive multi-agent, human-agent competition, self-play, human-in-the-loop training and imitation learning. Software capabilities are demonstrated by successfully training multiple deep reinforcement learning agents with proximal policy optimization obtaining human-like behavior. Results confirm the utility of DIAMBRA Arena as a reinforcement learning research tool, providing environments designed to study some of the most challenging topics in the field.

Models that can simulate how environments change in response to actions can be used by agents to plan and act efficiently. We improve on previous environment simulators from high-dimensional pixel observations by introducing recurrent neural networks that are able to make temporally and spatially coherent predictions for hundreds of time-steps into the future. We present an in-depth analysis of the factors affecting performance, providing the most extensive attempt to advance the understanding of the properties of these models. We address the issue of computationally inefficiency with a model that does not need to generate a high-dimensional image at each time-step. We show that our approach can be used to improve exploration and is adaptable to many diverse environments, namely 10 Atari games, a 3D car racing environment, and complex 3D mazes.

Voronoi diagrams are essential geometrical structures with numerous applications, particularly astrophysics-driven finite volume methods. While serial algorithms for constructing these entities are well-established, parallel construction remains challenging. This is especially true in distributed memory systems, where each host manages only a subset of the input points. This process requires redistributing points across hosts and accurately computing the corresponding Voronoi cells. In this paper, we introduce a new distributed construction algorithm, which is implemented in our open-source C++ 3-dimensional Voronoi construction framework. Our approach leverages Delaunay triangulation as an intermediate step, which is then transformed into a Voronoi diagram. We introduce the algorithms we implemented for the precise construction and our load-balancing approach and compare the running time with other state-of-the-art frameworks. MadVoro is a versatile tool that can be applied in various scientific domains, such as mesh decomposition, computational physics, chemistry, and machine learning.

Benchmarks play a crucial role in the development and analysis of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We identify that existing benchmarks used for research into open-ended learning fall into one of two categories. Either they are too slow for meaningful research to be performed without enormous computational resources, like Crafter, NetHack and Minecraft, or they are not complex enough to pose a significant challenge, like Minigrid and Procgen. To remedy this, we first present Craftax-Classic: a ground-up rewrite of Crafter in JAX that runs up to 250x faster than the Python-native original. A run of PPO using 1 billion environment interactions finishes in under an hour using only a single GPU and averages 90% of the optimal reward. To provide a more compelling challenge we present the main Craftax benchmark, a significant extension of the Crafter mechanics with elements inspired from NetHack. Solving Craftax requires deep exploration, long term planning and memory, as well as continual adaptation to novel situations as more of the world is discovered. We show that existing methods including global and episodic exploration, as well as unsupervised environment design fail to make material progress on the benchmark. We believe that Craftax can for the first time allow researchers to experiment in a complex, open-ended environment with limited computational resources.

One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the contexts are the same for the whole episode or assume the context variables are Markovian. However, in many real-world applications, the environment context usually stays stable for a stochastic period and then changes in an abrupt and unpredictable manner within an episode, resulting in a segment structure, which existing works fail to address. To leverage the segment structure of piecewise stable context in real-world applications, in this paper, we propose a \textbf{Segmented Context Belief Augmented Deep~(SeCBAD)} RL method. Our method can jointly infer the belief distribution over latent context with the posterior over segment length and perform more accurate belief context inference with observed data within the current context segment. The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context. We demonstrate empirically that SeCBAD can infer context segment length accurately and outperform existing methods on a toy grid world environment and Mujuco tasks with piecewise-stable context.

We propose a new representation for encoding 3D shapes as neural fields. The representation is designed to be compatible with the transformer architecture and to benefit both shape reconstruction and shape generation. Existing works on neural fields are grid-based representations with latents defined on a regular grid. In contrast, we define latents on irregular grids, enabling our representation to be sparse and adaptive. In the context of shape reconstruction from point clouds, our shape representation built on irregular grids improves upon grid-based methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy. For shape generation, our representation promotes high-quality shape generation using auto-regressive probabilistic models. We show different applications that improve over the current state of the art. First, we show results for probabilistic shape reconstruction from a single higher resolution image. Second, we train a probabilistic model conditioned on very low resolution images. Third, we apply our model to category-conditioned generation. All probabilistic experiments confirm that we are able to generate detailed and high quality shapes to yield the new state of the art in generative 3D shape modeling.

Rendering and inverse-rendering algorithms that drive conventional computer graphics have recently been superseded by neural representations (NR). NRs have recently been used to learn the geometric and the material properties of the scenes and use the information to synthesize photorealistic imagery, thereby promising a replacement for traditional rendering algorithms with scalable quality and predictable performance. In this work we ask the question: Does neural graphics (NG) need hardware support? We studied representative NG applications showing that, if we want to render 4k res. at 60FPS there is a gap of 1.5X-55X in the desired performance on current GPUs. For AR/VR applications, there is an even larger gap of 2-4 OOM between the desired performance and the required system power. We identify that the input encoding and the MLP kernels are the performance bottlenecks, consuming 72%,60% and 59% of application time for multi res. hashgrid, multi res. densegrid and low res. densegrid encodings, respectively. We propose a NG processing cluster, a scalable and flexible hardware architecture that directly accelerates the input encoding and MLP kernels through dedicated engines and supports a wide range of NG applications. We also accelerate the rest of the kernels by fusing them together in Vulkan, which leads to 9.94X kernel-level performance improvement compared to un-fused implementation of the pre-processing and the post-processing kernels. Our results show that, NGPC gives up to 58X end-to-end application-level performance improvement, for multi res. hashgrid encoding on average across the four NG applications, the performance benefits are 12X,20X,33X and 39X for the scaling factor of 8,16,32 and 64, respectively. Our results show that with multi res. hashgrid encoding, NGPC enables the rendering of 4k res. at 30FPS for NeRF and 8k res. at 120FPS for all our other NG applications.

Implicit neural networks have emerged as a crucial technology in 3D surface reconstruction. To reconstruct continuous surfaces from discrete point clouds, encoding the input points into regular grid features (plane or volume) has been commonly employed in existing approaches. However, these methods typically use the grid as an index for uniformly scattering point features. Compared with the irregular point features, the regular grid features may sacrifice some reconstruction details but improve efficiency. To take full advantage of these two types of features, we introduce a novel and high-efficiency attention mechanism between the grid and point features named Point-Grid Transformer (GridFormer). This mechanism treats the grid as a transfer point connecting the space and point cloud. Our method maximizes the spatial expressiveness of grid features and maintains computational efficiency. Furthermore, optimizing predictions over the entire space could potentially result in blurred boundaries. To address this issue, we further propose a boundary optimization strategy incorporating margin binary cross-entropy loss and boundary sampling. This approach enables us to achieve a more precise representation of the object structure. Our experiments validate that our method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under widely used benchmarks by producing more precise geometry reconstructions. The code is available at https://github.com/list17/GridFormer.

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.

We present a novel type of neural fields that uses general radial bases for signal representation. State-of-the-art neural fields typically rely on grid-based representations for storing local neural features and N-dimensional linear kernels for interpolating features at continuous query points. The spatial positions of their neural features are fixed on grid nodes and cannot well adapt to target signals. Our method instead builds upon general radial bases with flexible kernel position and shape, which have higher spatial adaptivity and can more closely fit target signals. To further improve the channel-wise capacity of radial basis functions, we propose to compose them with multi-frequency sinusoid functions. This technique extends a radial basis to multiple Fourier radial bases of different frequency bands without requiring extra parameters, facilitating the representation of details. Moreover, by marrying adaptive radial bases with grid-based ones, our hybrid combination inherits both adaptivity and interpolation smoothness. We carefully designed weighting schemes to let radial bases adapt to different types of signals effectively. Our experiments on 2D image and 3D signed distance field representation demonstrate the higher accuracy and compactness of our method than prior arts. When applied to neural radiance field reconstruction, our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, with small model size and comparable training speed.

Sparse reward environments in reinforcement learning (RL) pose significant challenges for exploration, often leading to inefficient or incomplete learning processes. To tackle this issue, this work proposes a teacher-student RL framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as "teachers" to guide the agent's learning process by decomposing complex tasks into subgoals. Due to their inherent capability to understand RL environments based on a textual description of structure and purpose, LLMs can provide subgoals to accomplish the task defined for the environment in a similar fashion to how a human would do. In doing so, three types of subgoals are proposed: positional targets relative to the agent, object representations, and language-based instructions generated directly by the LLM. More importantly, we show that it is possible to query the LLM only during the training phase, enabling agents to operate within the environment without any LLM intervention. We assess the performance of this proposed framework by evaluating three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen) eliciting subgoals across various procedurally generated environment of the MiniGrid benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that this curriculum-based approach accelerates learning and enhances exploration in complex tasks, achieving up to 30 to 200 times faster convergence in training steps compared to recent baselines designed for sparse reward environments.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, centralized workflow orchestration, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions among agents. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

Creating autonomous virtual agents capable of using arbitrary software on any digital device remains a major challenge for artificial intelligence. Two key obstacles hinder progress: insufficient infrastructure for building virtual agents in real-world environments, and the need for in-the-wild evaluation of fundamental agent abilities. To address this, we introduce AgentStudio, an online, realistic, and multimodal toolkit that covers the entire lifecycle of agent development. This includes environment setups, data collection, agent evaluation, and visualization. The observation and action spaces are highly generic, supporting both function calling and human-computer interfaces. This versatility is further enhanced by AgentStudio's graphical user interfaces, which allow efficient development of datasets and benchmarks in real-world settings. To illustrate, we introduce a visual grounding dataset and a real-world benchmark suite, both created with our graphical interfaces. Furthermore, we present several actionable insights derived from AgentStudio, e.g., general visual grounding, open-ended tool creation, learning from videos, etc. We have open-sourced the environments, datasets, benchmarks, and interfaces to promote research towards developing general virtual agents for the future.

Data sharding, a technique for partitioning and distributing data among multiple servers or nodes, offers enhancements in the scalability, performance, and fault tolerance of extensive distributed systems. Nonetheless, this strategy introduces novel challenges, including load balancing among shards, management of node failures and data loss, and adaptation to evolving data and workload patterns. This paper proposes an innovative approach to tackle these challenges by empowering self-healing nodes with adaptive data sharding. Leveraging concepts such as self-replication, fractal regeneration, sentient data sharding, and symbiotic node clusters, our approach establishes a dynamic and resilient data sharding scheme capable of addressing diverse scenarios and meeting varied requirements. Implementation and evaluation of our approach involve a prototype system simulating a large-scale distributed database across various data sharding scenarios. Comparative analyses against existing data sharding techniques highlight the superior scalability, performance, fault tolerance, and adaptability of our approach. Additionally, the paper delves into potential applications and limitations, providing insights into the future research directions that can further advance this innovative approach.

We present BricksRL, a platform designed to democratize access to robotics for reinforcement learning research and education. BricksRL facilitates the creation, design, and training of custom LEGO robots in the real world by interfacing them with the TorchRL library for reinforcement learning agents. The integration of TorchRL with the LEGO hubs, via Bluetooth bidirectional communication, enables state-of-the-art reinforcement learning training on GPUs for a wide variety of LEGO builds. This offers a flexible and cost-efficient approach for scaling and also provides a robust infrastructure for robot-environment-algorithm communication. We present various experiments across tasks and robot configurations, providing built plans and training results. Furthermore, we demonstrate that inexpensive LEGO robots can be trained end-to-end in the real world to achieve simple tasks, with training times typically under 120 minutes on a normal laptop. Moreover, we show how users can extend the capabilities, exemplified by the successful integration of non-LEGO sensors. By enhancing accessibility to both robotics and reinforcement learning, BricksRL establishes a strong foundation for democratized robotic learning in research and educational settings.

Digital agents for automating tasks across different platforms by directly manipulating the GUIs are increasingly important. For these agents, grounding from language instructions to target elements remains a significant challenge due to reliance on HTML or AXTree inputs. In this paper, we introduce Aria-UI, a large multimodal model specifically designed for GUI grounding. Aria-UI adopts a pure-vision approach, eschewing reliance on auxiliary inputs. To adapt to heterogeneous planning instructions, we propose a scalable data pipeline that synthesizes diverse and high-quality instruction samples for grounding. To handle dynamic contexts in task performing, Aria-UI incorporates textual and text-image interleaved action histories, enabling robust context-aware reasoning for grounding. Aria-UI sets new state-of-the-art results across offline and online agent benchmarks, outperforming both vision-only and AXTree-reliant baselines. We release all training data and model checkpoints to foster further research at https://ariaui.github.io.

In mixed reality (MR) environments, understanding space and creating virtual objects is crucial to providing an intuitive and rich user experience. This paper introduces sMoRe (Spatial Mapping and Object Rendering Environment), an MR application that combines Generative AI (GenAI) with large language models (LLMs) to assist users in creating, placing, and managing virtual objects within physical spaces. sMoRe allows users to use voice or typed text commands to create and place virtual objects using GenAI while specifying spatial constraints. The system leverages LLMs to interpret users' commands, analyze the current scene, and identify optimal locations. Additionally, sMoRe integrates text-to-3D generative AI to dynamically create 3D objects based on users' descriptions. Our user study demonstrates the effectiveness of sMoRe in enhancing user comprehension, interaction, and organization of the MR environment.

Attaining a high degree of user controllability in visual generation often requires intricate, fine-grained inputs like layouts. However, such inputs impose a substantial burden on users when compared to simple text inputs. To address the issue, we study how Large Language Models (LLMs) can serve as visual planners by generating layouts from text conditions, and thus collaborate with visual generative models. We propose LayoutGPT, a method to compose in-context visual demonstrations in style sheet language to enhance the visual planning skills of LLMs. LayoutGPT can generate plausible layouts in multiple domains, ranging from 2D images to 3D indoor scenes. LayoutGPT also shows superior performance in converting challenging language concepts like numerical and spatial relations to layout arrangements for faithful text-to-image generation. When combined with a downstream image generation model, LayoutGPT outperforms text-to-image models/systems by 20-40% and achieves comparable performance as human users in designing visual layouts for numerical and spatial correctness. Lastly, LayoutGPT achieves comparable performance to supervised methods in 3D indoor scene synthesis, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential in multiple visual domains.

Recently, it has been shown that transformers pre-trained on diverse datasets with multi-episode contexts can generalize to new reinforcement learning tasks in-context. A key limitation of previously proposed models is their reliance on a predefined action space size and structure. The introduction of a new action space often requires data re-collection and model re-training, which can be costly for some applications. In our work, we show that it is possible to mitigate this issue by proposing the Headless-AD model that, despite being trained only once, is capable of generalizing to discrete action spaces of variable size, semantic content and order. By experimenting with Bernoulli and contextual bandits, as well as a gridworld environment, we show that Headless-AD exhibits significant capability to generalize to action spaces it has never encountered, even outperforming specialized models trained for a specific set of actions on several environment configurations.

The process of creating training data to teach models is currently driven by humans, who manually analyze model weaknesses and plan how to create data that improves a student model. Recent approaches using LLMs as annotators reduce human effort, but still require humans to interpret feedback from evaluations and control the LLM to produce data the student needs. Automating this labor-intensive process by creating autonomous data generation agents - or teachers - is desirable, but requires environments that can simulate the feedback-driven, iterative, closed loop of data creation. To enable rapid and scalable testing for such agents and their modules, we introduce DataEnvGym, a testbed of teacher environments for data generation agents. DataEnvGym frames data generation as a sequential decision-making task, involving an agent consisting of a data generation policy (which generates a plan for creating training data) and a data generation engine (which transforms the plan into data), inside an environment that provides student feedback. The agent's goal is to improve student performance. Students are iteratively trained and evaluated on generated data, with their feedback (in the form of errors or weak skills) being reported to the agent after each iteration. DataEnvGym includes multiple teacher environment instantiations across 3 levels of structure in the state representation and action space. More structured environments are based on inferred skills and offer more interpretability and curriculum control. We support 3 diverse tasks (math, code, and VQA) and test multiple students and teachers. Example agents in our teaching environments can iteratively improve students across tasks and settings. Moreover, we show that environments teach different skill levels and test variants of key modules, pointing to future work in improving data generation agents, engines, and feedback mechanisms.

Since the introduction of DQN, a vast majority of reinforcement learning research has focused on reinforcement learning with deep neural networks as function approximators. New methods are typically evaluated on a set of environments that have now become standard, such as Atari 2600 games. While these benchmarks help standardize evaluation, their computational cost has the unfortunate side effect of widening the gap between those with ample access to computational resources, and those without. In this work we argue that, despite the community's emphasis on large-scale environments, the traditional small-scale environments can still yield valuable scientific insights and can help reduce the barriers to entry for underprivileged communities. To substantiate our claims, we empirically revisit the paper which introduced the Rainbow algorithm [Hessel et al., 2018] and present some new insights into the algorithms used by Rainbow.

This paper aims to tackle the challenge of dynamic view synthesis from multi-view videos. The key observation is that while previous grid-based methods offer consistent rendering, they fall short in capturing appearance details of a complex dynamic scene, a domain where multi-view image-based rendering methods demonstrate the opposite properties. To combine the best of two worlds, we introduce Im4D, a hybrid scene representation that consists of a grid-based geometry representation and a multi-view image-based appearance representation. Specifically, the dynamic geometry is encoded as a 4D density function composed of spatiotemporal feature planes and a small MLP network, which globally models the scene structure and facilitates the rendering consistency. We represent the scene appearance by the original multi-view videos and a network that learns to predict the color of a 3D point from image features, instead of memorizing detailed appearance totally with networks, thereby naturally making the learning of networks easier. Our method is evaluated on five dynamic view synthesis datasets including DyNeRF, ZJU-MoCap, NHR, DNA-Rendering and ENeRF-Outdoor datasets. The results show that Im4D exhibits state-of-the-art performance in rendering quality and can be trained efficiently, while realizing real-time rendering with a speed of 79.8 FPS for 512x512 images, on a single RTX 3090 GPU.

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.

Buildings are primary components of cities, often featuring repeated elements such as windows and doors. Traditional 3D building asset creation is labor-intensive and requires specialized skills to develop design rules. Recent generative models for building creation often overlook these patterns, leading to low visual fidelity and limited scalability. Drawing inspiration from procedural modeling techniques used in the gaming and visual effects industry, our method, Proc-GS, integrates procedural code into the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) framework, leveraging their advantages in high-fidelity rendering and efficient asset management from both worlds. By manipulating procedural code, we can streamline this process and generate an infinite variety of buildings. This integration significantly reduces model size by utilizing shared foundational assets, enabling scalable generation with precise control over building assembly. We showcase the potential for expansive cityscape generation while maintaining high rendering fidelity and precise control on both real and synthetic cases.

With the advent of specialized hardware such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), large scale image localization, classification and retrieval have seen increased prevalence. Designing scalable software architecture that co-evolves with such specialized hardware is a challenge in the commercial setting. In this paper, we describe one such architecture (Cortexica) that leverages scalability of GPUs and sandboxing offered by docker containers. This allows for the flexibility of mixing different computer architectures as well as computational algorithms with the security of a trusted environment. We illustrate the utility of this framework in a commercial setting i.e., searching for multiple products in an image by combining image localisation and retrieval.

Neural MMO is a computationally accessible research platform that combines large agent populations, long time horizons, open-ended tasks, and modular game systems. Existing environments feature subsets of these properties, but Neural MMO is the first to combine them all. We present Neural MMO as free and open source software with active support, ongoing development, documentation, and additional training, logging, and visualization tools to help users adapt to this new setting. Initial baselines on the platform demonstrate that agents trained in large populations explore more and learn a progression of skills. We raise other more difficult problems such as many-team cooperation as open research questions which Neural MMO is well-suited to answer. Finally, we discuss current limitations of the platform, potential mitigations, and plans for continued development.

We present Plancraft, a multi-modal evaluation dataset for LLM agents. Plancraft has both a text-only and multi-modal interface, based on the Minecraft crafting GUI. We include the Minecraft Wiki to evaluate tool use and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), as well as an oracle planner and oracle RAG information extractor, to ablate the different components of a modern agent architecture. To evaluate decision-making, Plancraft also includes a subset of examples that are intentionally unsolvable, providing a realistic challenge that requires the agent not only to complete tasks but also to decide whether they are solvable at all. We benchmark both open-source and closed-source LLMs and strategies on our task and compare their performance to a handcrafted planner. We find that LLMs and VLMs struggle with the planning problems that Plancraft introduces, and we offer suggestions on how to improve their capabilities.

Inspired by cognitive theories, we introduce AnyHome, a framework that translates any text into well-structured and textured indoor scenes at a house-scale. By prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) with designed templates, our approach converts provided textual narratives into amodal structured representations. These representations guarantee consistent and realistic spatial layouts by directing the synthesis of a geometry mesh within defined constraints. A Score Distillation Sampling process is then employed to refine the geometry, followed by an egocentric inpainting process that adds lifelike textures to it. AnyHome stands out with its editability, customizability, diversity, and realism. The structured representations for scenes allow for extensive editing at varying levels of granularity. Capable of interpreting texts ranging from simple labels to detailed narratives, AnyHome generates detailed geometries and textures that outperform existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative measures.

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.

Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable success via large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Nevertheless, there is no paradigm for scaling up the methodology to urban scale. Urban scenes, characterized by numerous elements, intricate arrangement relationships, and vast scale, present a formidable barrier to the interpretability of ambiguous textual descriptions for effective model optimization. In this work, we surmount the limitations by introducing a compositional 3D layout representation into text-to-3D paradigm, serving as an additional prior. It comprises a set of semantic primitives with simple geometric structures and explicit arrangement relationships, complementing textual descriptions and enabling steerable generation. Upon this, we propose two modifications -- (1) We introduce Layout-Guided Variational Score Distillation to address model optimization inadequacies. It conditions the score distillation sampling process with geometric and semantic constraints of 3D layouts. (2) To handle the unbounded nature of urban scenes, we represent 3D scene with a Scalable Hash Grid structure, incrementally adapting to the growing scale of urban scenes. Extensive experiments substantiate the capability of our framework to scale text-to-3D generation to large-scale urban scenes that cover over 1000m driving distance for the first time. We also present various scene editing demonstrations, showing the powers of steerable urban scene generation. Website: https://urbanarchitect.github.io.

Toward infinite-scale 3D city synthesis, we propose a novel framework, InfiniCity, which constructs and renders an unconstrainedly large and 3D-grounded environment from random noises. InfiniCity decomposes the seemingly impractical task into three feasible modules, taking advantage of both 2D and 3D data. First, an infinite-pixel image synthesis module generates arbitrary-scale 2D maps from the bird's-eye view. Next, an octree-based voxel completion module lifts the generated 2D map to 3D octrees. Finally, a voxel-based neural rendering module texturizes the voxels and renders 2D images. InfiniCity can thus synthesize arbitrary-scale and traversable 3D city environments, and allow flexible and interactive editing from users. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework. Project page: https://hubert0527.github.io/infinicity/

Modern techniques for physical simulations rely on numerical schemes and mesh-refinement methods to address trade-offs between precision and complexity, but these handcrafted solutions are tedious and require high computational power. Data-driven methods based on large-scale machine learning promise high adaptivity by integrating long-range dependencies more directly and efficiently. In this work, we focus on fluid dynamics and address the shortcomings of a large part of the literature, which are based on fixed support for computations and predictions in the form of regular or irregular grids. We propose a novel setup to perform predictions in a continuous spatial and temporal domain while being trained on sparse observations. We formulate the task as a double observation problem and propose a solution with two interlinked dynamical systems defined on, respectively, the sparse positions and the continuous domain, which allows to forecast and interpolate a solution from the initial condition. Our practical implementation involves recurrent GNNs and a spatio-temporal attention observer capable of interpolating the solution at arbitrary locations. Our model not only generalizes to new initial conditions (as standard auto-regressive models do) but also performs evaluation at arbitrary space and time locations. We evaluate on three standard datasets in fluid dynamics and compare to strong baselines, which are outperformed both in classical settings and in the extended new task requiring continuous predictions.

We present ScienceWorld, a benchmark to test agents' scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum. Despite the transformer-based progress seen in question-answering and scientific text processing, we find that current models cannot reason about or explain learned science concepts in novel contexts. For instance, models can easily answer what the conductivity of a known material is but struggle when asked how they would conduct an experiment in a grounded environment to find the conductivity of an unknown material. This begs the question of whether current models are simply retrieving answers by way of seeing a large number of similar examples or if they have learned to reason about concepts in a reusable manner. We hypothesize that agents need to be grounded in interactive environments to achieve such reasoning capabilities. Our experiments provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis -- showing that a 1.5 million parameter agent trained interactively for 100k steps outperforms a 11 billion parameter model statically trained for scientific question-answering and reasoning from millions of expert demonstrations.

Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com

Robotic simulators are crucial for academic research and education as well as the development of safety-critical applications. Reinforcement learning environments -- simple simulations coupled with a problem specification in the form of a reward function -- are also important to standardize the development (and benchmarking) of learning algorithms. Yet, full-scale simulators typically lack portability and parallelizability. Vice versa, many reinforcement learning environments trade-off realism for high sample throughputs in toy-like problems. While public data sets have greatly benefited deep learning and computer vision, we still lack the software tools to simultaneously develop -- and fairly compare -- control theory and reinforcement learning approaches. In this paper, we propose an open-source OpenAI Gym-like environment for multiple quadcopters based on the Bullet physics engine. Its multi-agent and vision based reinforcement learning interfaces, as well as the support of realistic collisions and aerodynamic effects, make it, to the best of our knowledge, a first of its kind. We demonstrate its use through several examples, either for control (trajectory tracking with PID control, multi-robot flight with downwash, etc.) or reinforcement learning (single and multi-agent stabilization tasks), hoping to inspire future research that combines control theory and machine learning.

Due to the dynamic and unpredictable open-world setting, navigating complex environments in Minecraft poses significant challenges for multi-agent systems. Agents must interact with the environment and coordinate their actions with other agents to achieve common objectives. However, traditional approaches often struggle to efficiently manage inter-agent communication and task distribution, crucial for effective multi-agent navigation. Furthermore, processing and integrating multi-modal information (such as visual, textual, and auditory data) is essential for agents to comprehend their goals and navigate the environment successfully and fully. To address this issue, we design the HAS framework to auto-organize groups of LLM-based agents to complete navigation tasks. In our approach, we devise a hierarchical auto-organizing navigation system, which is characterized by 1) a hierarchical system for multi-agent organization, ensuring centralized planning and decentralized execution; 2) an auto-organizing and intra-communication mechanism, enabling dynamic group adjustment under subtasks; 3) a multi-modal information platform, facilitating multi-modal perception to perform the three navigation tasks with one system. To assess organizational behavior, we design a series of navigation tasks in the Minecraft environment, which includes searching and exploring. We aim to develop embodied organizations that push the boundaries of embodied AI, moving it towards a more human-like organizational structure.

The planning and control of a robot swarm in a complex environment have attracted increasing attention. To this end, the idea of virtual tubes has been taken up in our previous work. Specifically, a virtual tube with varying widths has been planned to avoid collisions with obstacles in a complex environment. Based on the planned virtual tube for a large number of speed-constrained robots, the average forward speed and density along the virtual tube are further planned in this paper to ensure safety and improve efficiency. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed method is based on global information and can be applied to traversing narrow spaces for speed-constrained robot swarms. Numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to show that the safety and efficiency of the passing-through process are improved. A video about simulations and experiments is available on https://youtu.be/lJHdMQMqSpc.

The creation of photorealistic virtual worlds requires the accurate modeling of 3D surface geometry for a wide range of objects. For this, meshes are appealing since they 1) enable fast physics-based rendering with realistic material and lighting, 2) support physical simulation, and 3) are memory-efficient for modern graphics pipelines. Recent work on reconstructing and statistically modeling 3D shape, however, has critiqued meshes as being topologically inflexible. To capture a wide range of object shapes, any 3D representation must be able to model solid, watertight, shapes as well as thin, open, surfaces. Recent work has focused on the former, and methods for reconstructing open surfaces do not support fast reconstruction with material and lighting or unconditional generative modelling. Inspired by the observation that open surfaces can be seen as islands floating on watertight surfaces, we parameterize open surfaces by defining a manifold signed distance field on watertight templates. With this parameterization, we further develop a grid-based and differentiable representation that parameterizes both watertight and non-watertight meshes of arbitrary topology. Our new representation, called Ghost-on-the-Shell (G-Shell), enables two important applications: differentiable rasterization-based reconstruction from multiview images and generative modelling of non-watertight meshes. We empirically demonstrate that G-Shell achieves state-of-the-art performance on non-watertight mesh reconstruction and generation tasks, while also performing effectively for watertight meshes.

Crafting a rich and unique environment is crucial for fictional world-building, but can be difficult to achieve since illustrating a world from scratch requires time and significant skill. We investigate the use of recent multi-modal image generation systems to enable users iteratively visualize and modify elements of their fictional world using a combination of text input, sketching, and region-based filling. WorldSmith enables novice world builders to quickly visualize a fictional world with layered edits and hierarchical compositions. Through a formative study (4 participants) and first-use study (13 participants) we demonstrate that WorldSmith offers more expressive interactions with prompt-based models. With this work, we explore how creatives can be empowered to leverage prompt-based generative AI as a tool in their creative process, beyond current "click-once" prompting UI paradigms.

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis. Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent, goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts. Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our code, dataset, and models will be released at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/.

We present a system for generating indoor scenes in response to text prompts. The prompts are not limited to a fixed vocabulary of scene descriptions, and the objects in generated scenes are not restricted to a fixed set of object categories -- we call this setting indoor scene generation. Unlike most prior work on indoor scene generation, our system does not require a large training dataset of existing 3D scenes. Instead, it leverages the world knowledge encoded in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to synthesize programs in a domain-specific layout language that describe objects and spatial relations between them. Executing such a program produces a specification of a constraint satisfaction problem, which the system solves using a gradient-based optimization scheme to produce object positions and orientations. To produce object geometry, the system retrieves 3D meshes from a database. Unlike prior work which uses databases of category-annotated, mutually-aligned meshes, we develop a pipeline using vision-language models (VLMs) to retrieve meshes from massive databases of un-annotated, inconsistently-aligned meshes. Experimental evaluations show that our system outperforms generative models trained on 3D data for traditional, closed-universe scene generation tasks; it also outperforms a recent LLM-based layout generation method on open-universe scene generation.

Solving long-horizon, temporally-extended tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging, compounded by the common practice of learning without prior knowledge (or tabula rasa learning). Humans can generate and execute plans with temporally-extended actions and quickly learn to perform new tasks because we almost never solve problems from scratch. We want autonomous agents to have this same ability. Recently, LLMs have been shown to encode a tremendous amount of knowledge about the world and to perform impressive in-context learning and reasoning. However, using LLMs to solve real world problems is hard because they are not grounded in the current task. In this paper we exploit the planning capabilities of LLMs while using RL to provide learning from the environment, resulting in a hierarchical agent that uses LLMs to solve long-horizon tasks. Instead of completely relying on LLMs, they guide a high-level policy, making learning significantly more sample efficient. This approach is evaluated in simulation environments such as MiniGrid, SkillHack, and Crafter, and on a real robot arm in block manipulation tasks. We show that agents trained using our approach outperform other baselines methods and, once trained, don't need access to LLMs during deployment.

Diffusion-based methods have achieved prominent success in generating 2D media. However, accomplishing similar proficiencies for scene-level mesh texturing in 3D spatial applications, e.g., XR/VR, remains constrained, primarily due to the intricate nature of 3D geometry and the necessity for immersive free-viewpoint rendering. In this paper, we propose a novel indoor scene texturing framework, which delivers text-driven texture generation with enchanting details and authentic spatial coherence. The key insight is to first imagine a stylized 360{\deg} panoramic texture from the central viewpoint of the scene, and then propagate it to the rest areas with inpainting and imitating techniques. To ensure meaningful and aligned textures to the scene, we develop a novel coarse-to-fine panoramic texture generation approach with dual texture alignment, which both considers the geometry and texture cues of the captured scenes. To survive from cluttered geometries during texture propagation, we design a separated strategy, which conducts texture inpainting in confidential regions and then learns an implicit imitating network to synthesize textures in occluded and tiny structural areas. Extensive experiments and the immersive VR application on real-world indoor scenes demonstrate the high quality of the generated textures and the engaging experience on VR headsets. Project webpage: https://ybbbbt.com/publication/dreamspace

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are critical to human-computer interaction, yet automating GUI tasks remains challenging due to the complexity and variability of visual environments. Existing approaches often rely on textual representations of GUIs, which introduce limitations in generalization, efficiency, and scalability. In this paper, we introduce Aguvis, a unified pure vision-based framework for autonomous GUI agents that operates across various platforms. Our approach leverages image-based observations, and grounding instructions in natural language to visual elements, and employs a consistent action space to ensure cross-platform generalization. To address the limitations of previous work, we integrate explicit planning and reasoning within the model, enhancing its ability to autonomously navigate and interact with complex digital environments. We construct a large-scale dataset of GUI agent trajectories, incorporating multimodal reasoning and grounding, and employ a two-stage training pipeline that first focuses on general GUI grounding, followed by planning and reasoning. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that Aguvis surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in both offline and real-world online scenarios, achieving, to our knowledge, the first fully autonomous pure vision GUI agent capable of performing tasks independently without collaboration with external closed-source models. We open-sourced all datasets, models, and training recipes to facilitate future research at https://aguvis-project.github.io/.

Text-based games offer a challenging test bed to evaluate virtual agents at language understanding, multi-step problem-solving, and common-sense reasoning. However, speed is a major limitation of current text-based games, capping at 300 steps per second, mainly due to the use of legacy tooling. In this work we present TextWorldExpress, a high-performance simulator that includes implementations of three common text game benchmarks that increases simulation throughput by approximately three orders of magnitude, reaching over one million steps per second on common desktop hardware. This significantly reduces experiment runtime, enabling billion-step-scale experiments in about one day.

With ChatGPT-like large language models (LLM) prevailing in the community, how to evaluate the ability of LLMs is an open question. Existing evaluation methods suffer from following shortcomings: (1) constrained evaluation abilities, (2) vulnerable benchmarks, (3) unobjective metrics. We suggest that task-based evaluation, where LLM agents complete tasks in a simulated environment, is a one-for-all solution to solve above problems. We present AgentSims, an easy-to-use infrastructure for researchers from all disciplines to test the specific capacities they are interested in. Researchers can build their evaluation tasks by adding agents and buildings on an interactive GUI or deploy and test new support mechanisms, i.e. memory, planning and tool-use systems, by a few lines of codes. Our demo is available at https://agentsims.com .

Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on different aspects of ToM and are prone to shortcuts and data leakage. In this position paper, we seek to answer two road-blocking questions: (1) How can we taxonomize a holistic landscape of machine ToM? (2) What is a more effective evaluation protocol for machine ToM? Following psychological studies, we taxonomize machine ToM into 7 mental state categories and delineate existing benchmarks to identify under-explored aspects of ToM. We argue for a holistic and situated evaluation of ToM to break ToM into individual components and treat LLMs as an agent who is physically situated in environments and socially situated in interactions with humans. Such situated evaluation provides a more comprehensive assessment of mental states and potentially mitigates the risk of shortcuts and data leakage. We further present a pilot study in a grid world setup as a proof of concept. We hope this position paper can facilitate future research to integrate ToM with LLMs and offer an intuitive means for researchers to better position their work in the landscape of ToM. Project page: https://github.com/Mars-tin/awesome-theory-of-mind

This paper presents three open-source reinforcement learning environments developed on the MuJoCo physics engine with the Franka Emika Panda arm in MuJoCo Menagerie. Three representative tasks, push, slide, and pick-and-place, are implemented through the Gymnasium Robotics API, which inherits from the core of Gymnasium. Both the sparse binary and dense rewards are supported, and the observation space contains the keys of desired and achieved goals to follow the Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning framework. Three different off-policy algorithms are used to validate the simulation attributes to ensure the fidelity of all tasks, and benchmark results are also given. Each environment and task are defined in a clean way, and the main parameters for modifying the environment are preserved to reflect the main difference. The repository, including all environments, is available at https://github.com/zichunxx/panda_mujoco_gym.

Interactive fiction games have emerged as an important application to improve the generalization capabilities of language-based reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Existing environments for interactive fiction games are domain-specific or time-consuming to generate and do not train the RL agents to master a specific set of skills. In this work, we introduce an interactive environment for self-supervised RL, STARLING, for text-based games that bootstraps the text-based RL agents with automatically generated games (based on the seed set of game ideas) to boost the performance and generalization capabilities to reach a goal of the target environment. These games let the agent hone their skills on a predefined set of tasks. We create and test an environment with 100 games, generated using this automated framework that uses large language models (GPT-3) and an interactive fiction game engine (based on Inform7) to provide the user with the ability to generate more games under minimal human supervision. Experimental results based on both the human participants and baseline text-based RL agents reveal that current state-of-the-art text-based RL agents cannot use previously learned skills in new situations at the level humans can. These results enforce STARLING's potential to serve as a sandbox environment for further research in self-supervised text-based RL.

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of large language models (LLMs), agents based on LLMs have shown the potential to address domain-specific tasks and emulate human behaviors. However, the content generated by these agents remains somewhat superficial, owing to their limited domain expertise and the absence of an effective cognitive architecture. To address this, we present the Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction (CGMI) framework, designed to replicate human interactions in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we propose a tree-structured methodology for the assignment, detection, and maintenance of agent personality. Additionally, we designed a cognitive architecture equipped with a skill library based on the ACT* model, which contains memory, reflection, and planning modules. We have also integrated general agents to augment the virtual environment's realism. Using the CGMI framework, we simulated numerous classroom interactions between teacher and students. The experiments indicate that aspects such as the teaching methodology, curriculum, and student performance closely mirror real classroom settings. We will open source our work.

In this paper, we present a novel framework for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by leveraging the power of multi-agent systems. Our framework introduces a collaborative environment where multiple intelligent agent components, each with distinctive attributes and roles, work together to handle complex tasks more efficiently and effectively. We demonstrate the practicality and versatility of our framework through case studies in artificial general intelligence (AGI), specifically focusing on the Auto-GPT and BabyAGI models. We also examine the "Gorilla" model, which integrates external APIs into the LLM. Our framework addresses limitations and challenges such as looping issues, security risks, scalability, system evaluation, and ethical considerations. By modeling various domains such as courtroom simulations and software development scenarios, we showcase the potential applications and benefits of our proposed multi-agent system. Our framework provides an avenue for advancing the capabilities and performance of LLMs through collaboration and knowledge exchange among intelligent agents.

This Perspective explores the transformative potential of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) in the geosciences. Users of geoscientific data repositories face challenges due to the complexity and diversity of data formats, inconsistent metadata practices, and a considerable number of unprocessed datasets. MAS possesses transformative potential for improving scientists' interaction with geoscientific data by enabling intelligent data processing, natural language interfaces, and collaborative problem-solving capabilities. We illustrate this approach with "PANGAEA GPT", a specialized MAS pipeline integrated with the diverse PANGAEA database for Earth and Environmental Science, demonstrating how MAS-driven workflows can effectively manage complex datasets and accelerate scientific discovery. We discuss how MAS can address current data challenges in geosciences, highlight advancements in other scientific fields, and propose future directions for integrating MAS into geoscientific data processing pipelines. In this Perspective, we show how MAS can fundamentally improve data accessibility, promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, and accelerate geoscientific discoveries.

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

Multi-agent learning algorithms have been successful at generating superhuman planning in a wide variety of games but have had little impact on the design of deployed multi-agent planners. A key bottleneck in applying these techniques to multi-agent planning is that they require billions of steps of experience. To enable the study of multi-agent planning at this scale, we present GPUDrive, a GPU-accelerated, multi-agent simulator built on top of the Madrona Game Engine that can generate over a million steps of experience per second. Observation, reward, and dynamics functions are written directly in C++, allowing users to define complex, heterogeneous agent behaviors that are lowered to high-performance CUDA. We show that using GPUDrive we are able to effectively train reinforcement learning agents over many scenes in the Waymo Motion dataset, yielding highly effective goal-reaching agents in minutes for individual scenes and generally capable agents in a few hours. We ship these trained agents as part of the code base at https://github.com/Emerge-Lab/gpudrive.

Recent advancements in 3D content generation from text or a single image struggle with limited high-quality 3D datasets and inconsistency from 2D multi-view generation. We introduce DiffSplat, a novel 3D generative framework that natively generates 3D Gaussian splats by taming large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. It differs from previous 3D generative models by effectively utilizing web-scale 2D priors while maintaining 3D consistency in a unified model. To bootstrap the training, a lightweight reconstruction model is proposed to instantly produce multi-view Gaussian splat grids for scalable dataset curation. In conjunction with the regular diffusion loss on these grids, a 3D rendering loss is introduced to facilitate 3D coherence across arbitrary views. The compatibility with image diffusion models enables seamless adaptions of numerous techniques for image generation to the 3D realm. Extensive experiments reveal the superiority of DiffSplat in text- and image-conditioned generation tasks and downstream applications. Thorough ablation studies validate the efficacy of each critical design choice and provide insights into the underlying mechanism.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) tasks are vital for automating workflows such as software testing, user interface navigation. For users, the GUI is the most intuitive platform for interacting with a computer. Previous work identified a key challenge in developing visual GUI agents: GUI grounding - the ability to accurately locate screen elements based on instructions. However, most existing GUI agents rely on structured data formats like DOM or HTML files in training or inferencing, which are inaccessible across all applications, particular in a general desktop environments such as Windows OS. To address this, we introduce WinClick, a novel visual GUI agent developed in Windows platform. WinClick leverages screenshots to detect actionable regions. To overcome the challenge of GUI grounding, we enhance WinClick with GUI grounding pre-training and propose an LLM-based method for aligning GUI grounding data. Additionally, we introduce WinSpot, the first comprehensive benchmark for GUI grounding on Windows. Our experiments demonstrate that WinClick, combined with GUI grounding pre-training, significantly outperforms existing baselines, offering a scalable solution for GUI automation in desktop environments. WinSpot is publicly available at https://github.com/zackhuiiiii/WinSpot.

Although polygon meshes have been a standard representation in geometry processing, their irregular and combinatorial nature hinders their suitability for learning-based applications. In this work, we introduce a novel learnable mesh representation through a set of local 3D sample Points and their associated Normals and Quadric error metrics (QEM) w.r.t. the underlying shape, which we denote PoNQ. A global mesh is directly derived from PoNQ by efficiently leveraging the knowledge of the local quadric errors. Besides marking the first use of QEM within a neural shape representation, our contribution guarantees both topological and geometrical properties by ensuring that a PoNQ mesh does not self-intersect and is always the boundary of a volume. Notably, our representation does not rely on a regular grid, is supervised directly by the target surface alone, and also handles open surfaces with boundaries and/or sharp features. We demonstrate the efficacy of PoNQ through a learning-based mesh prediction from SDF grids and show that our method surpasses recent state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both surface and edge-based metrics.

There has been a surge of interest in language model agents that can navigate virtual environments such as the web or desktop. To navigate such environments, agents benefit from information on the various elements (e.g., buttons, text, or images) present. It remains unclear which element attributes have the greatest impact on agent performance, especially in environments that only provide a graphical representation (i.e., pixels). Here we find that the ordering in which elements are presented to the language model is surprisingly impactful--randomizing element ordering in a webpage degrades agent performance comparably to removing all visible text from an agent's state representation. While a webpage provides a hierarchical ordering of elements, there is no such ordering when parsing elements directly from pixels. Moreover, as tasks become more challenging and models more sophisticated, our experiments suggest that the impact of ordering increases. Finding an effective ordering is non-trivial. We investigate the impact of various element ordering methods in web and desktop environments. We find that dimensionality reduction provides a viable ordering for pixel-only environments. We train a UI element detection model to derive elements from pixels and apply our findings to an agent benchmark--OmniACT--where we only have access to pixels. Our method completes more than two times as many tasks on average relative to the previous state-of-the-art.

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.

Recent advances in 3D X-ray Computed Tomographic (CT) sensors have stimulated research efforts to unveil the extremely complex micro-scale processes that control the activity of soil microorganisms. Voxel-based description (up to hundreds millions voxels) of the pore space can be extracted, from grey level 3D CT scanner images, by means of simple image processing tools. Classical methods for numerical simulation of biological dynamics using mesh of voxels, such as Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM), are too much time consuming. Thus, the use of more compact and reliable geometrical representations of pore space can drastically decrease the computational cost of the simulations. Several recent works propose basic analytic volume primitives (e.g. spheres, generalized cylinders, ellipsoids) to define a piece-wise approximation of pore space for numerical simulation of draining, diffusion and microbial decomposition. Such approaches work well but the drawback is that it generates approximation errors. In the present work, we study another alternative where pore space is described by means of geometrically relevant connected subsets of voxels (regions) computed from the curvilinear skeleton. Indeed, many works use the curvilinear skeleton (3D medial axis) for analyzing and partitioning 3D shapes within various domains (medicine, material sciences, petroleum engineering, etc.) but only a few ones in soil sciences. Within the context of soil sciences, most studies dealing with 3D medial axis focus on the determination of pore throats. Here, we segment pore space using curvilinear skeleton in order to achieve numerical simulation of microbial decomposition (including diffusion processes). We validate simulation outputs by comparison with other methods using different pore space geometrical representations (balls, voxels).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity of performing complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate these agents into completing sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration. However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community has insufficient benchmarks towards building general multi-agents collaboration infrastructure that encompass both LLM and human-NPCs collaborations. In this work, we propose a novel infrastructure - MindAgent - to evaluate planning and coordination emergent capabilities for gaming interaction. In particular, our infrastructure leverages existing gaming framework, to i) require understanding of the coordinator for a multi-agent system, ii) collaborate with human players via un-finetuned proper instructions, and iii) establish an in-context learning on few-shot prompt with feedback. Furthermore, we introduce CUISINEWORLD, a new gaming scenario and related benchmark that dispatch a multi-agent collaboration efficiency and supervise multiple agents playing the game simultaneously. We conduct comprehensive evaluations with new auto-metric CoS for calculating the collaboration efficiency. Finally, our infrastructure can be deployed into real-world gaming scenarios in a customized VR version of CUISINEWORLD and adapted in existing broader Minecraft gaming domain. We hope our findings on LLMs and the new infrastructure for general-purpose scheduling and coordination can help shed light on how such skills can be obtained by learning from large language corpora.

Open-ended and AI-generating algorithms aim to continuously generate and solve increasingly complex tasks indefinitely, offering a promising path toward more general intelligence. To accomplish this grand vision, learning must occur within a vast array of potential tasks. Existing approaches to automatically generating environments are constrained within manually predefined, often narrow distributions of environment, limiting their ability to create any learning environment. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework, OMNI-EPIC, that augments previous work in Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI) with Environments Programmed in Code (EPIC). OMNI-EPIC leverages foundation models to autonomously generate code specifying the next learnable (i.e., not too easy or difficult for the agent's current skill set) and interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel) tasks. OMNI-EPIC generates both environments (e.g., an obstacle course) and reward functions (e.g., progress through the obstacle course quickly without touching red objects), enabling it, in principle, to create any simulatable learning task. We showcase the explosive creativity of OMNI-EPIC, which continuously innovates to suggest new, interesting learning challenges. We also highlight how OMNI-EPIC can adapt to reinforcement learning agents' learning progress, generating tasks that are of suitable difficulty. Overall, OMNI-EPIC can endlessly create learnable and interesting environments, further propelling the development of self-improving AI systems and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website with videos: https://dub.sh/omniepic

Designing high-quality indoor 3D scenes is important in many practical applications, such as room planning or game development. Conventionally, this has been a time-consuming process which requires both artistic skill and familiarity with professional software, making it hardly accessible for layman users. However, recent advances in generative AI have established solid foundation for democratizing 3D design. In this paper, we propose a pioneering approach for text-based 3D room design. Given a prompt in natural language describing the object placement in the room, our method produces a high-quality 3D scene corresponding to it. With an additional text prompt the users can change the appearance of the entire scene or of individual objects in it. Built using in-context learning, CAD model retrieval and 3D-Gaussian-Splatting-based stylization, our turnkey pipeline produces state-of-the-art 3D scenes, while being easy to use even for novices. Our project page is available at https://sceneteller.github.io/.

We present The Matrix, the first foundational realistic world simulator capable of generating continuous 720p high-fidelity real-scene video streams with real-time, responsive control in both first- and third-person perspectives, enabling immersive exploration of richly dynamic environments. Trained on limited supervised data from AAA games like Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, complemented by large-scale unsupervised footage from real-world settings like Tokyo streets, The Matrix allows users to traverse diverse terrains -- deserts, grasslands, water bodies, and urban landscapes -- in continuous, uncut hour-long sequences. Operating at 16 FPS, the system supports real-time interactivity and demonstrates zero-shot generalization, translating virtual game environments to real-world contexts where collecting continuous movement data is often infeasible. For example, The Matrix can simulate a BMW X3 driving through an office setting--an environment present in neither gaming data nor real-world sources. This approach showcases the potential of AAA game data to advance robust world models, bridging the gap between simulations and real-world applications in scenarios with limited data.

Visual environments are structured, consisting of distinct objects or entities. These entities have properties -- both visible and latent -- that determine the manner in which they interact with one another. To partition images into entities, deep-learning researchers have proposed structural inductive biases such as slot-based architectures. To model interactions among entities, equivariant graph neural nets (GNNs) are used, but these are not particularly well suited to the task for two reasons. First, GNNs do not predispose interactions to be sparse, as relationships among independent entities are likely to be. Second, GNNs do not factorize knowledge about interactions in an entity-conditional manner. As an alternative, we take inspiration from cognitive science and resurrect a classic approach, production systems, which consist of a set of rule templates that are applied by binding placeholder variables in the rules to specific entities. Rules are scored on their match to entities, and the best fitting rules are applied to update entity properties. In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that this architecture achieves a flexible, dynamic flow of control and serves to factorize entity-specific and rule-based information. This disentangling of knowledge achieves robust future-state prediction in rich visual environments, outperforming state-of-the-art methods using GNNs, and allows for the extrapolation from simple (few object) environments to more complex environments.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct complex multi-agent systems to perform tasks such as compiling literature reviews, drafting consumer reports, and planning vacations. Many tools and libraries exist for helping create such systems, however none support recursive multi-agent systems -- where the models themselves flexibly decide when to delegate tasks and how to organize their delegation structure. In this work, we introduce ReDel: a toolkit for recursive multi-agent systems that supports custom tool-use, delegation schemes, event-based logging, and interactive replay in an easy-to-use web interface. We show that, using ReDel, we are able to achieve significant performance gains on agentic benchmarks and easily identify potential areas of improvements through the visualization and debugging tools. Our code, documentation, and PyPI package are open-source and free to use under the MIT license.

Diffusion-based image generation models such as DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion-XL demonstrate remarkable capabilities in generating images with realistic and unique compositions. Yet, these models are not robust in precisely reasoning about physical and spatial configurations of objects, especially when instructed with unconventional, thereby out-of-distribution descriptions, such as "a chair with five legs". In this paper, we propose a language agent with chain-of-3D-thoughts (L3GO), an inference-time approach that can reason about part-based 3D mesh generation of unconventional objects that current data-driven diffusion models struggle with. More concretely, we use large language models as agents to compose a desired object via trial-and-error within the 3D simulation environment. To facilitate our investigation, we develop a new benchmark, Unconventionally Feasible Objects (UFO), as well as SimpleBlenv, a wrapper environment built on top of Blender where language agents can build and compose atomic building blocks via API calls. Human and automatic GPT-4V evaluations show that our approach surpasses the standard GPT-4 and other language agents (e.g., ReAct and Reflexion) for 3D mesh generation on ShapeNet. Moreover, when tested on our UFO benchmark, our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art text-to-2D image and text-to-3D models based on human evaluation.

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.

Autonomous agents have made great strides in specialist domains like Atari games and Go. However, they typically learn tabula rasa in isolated environments with limited and manually conceived objectives, thus failing to generalize across a wide spectrum of tasks and capabilities. Inspired by how humans continually learn and adapt in the open world, we advocate a trinity of ingredients for building generalist agents: 1) an environment that supports a multitude of tasks and goals, 2) a large-scale database of multimodal knowledge, and 3) a flexible and scalable agent architecture. We introduce MineDojo, a new framework built on the popular Minecraft game that features a simulation suite with thousands of diverse open-ended tasks and an internet-scale knowledge base with Minecraft videos, tutorials, wiki pages, and forum discussions. Using MineDojo's data, we propose a novel agent learning algorithm that leverages large pre-trained video-language models as a learned reward function. Our agent is able to solve a variety of open-ended tasks specified in free-form language without any manually designed dense shaping reward. We open-source the simulation suite, knowledge bases, algorithm implementation, and pretrained models (https://minedojo.org) to promote research towards the goal of generally capable embodied agents.

Neural graphics primitives are faster and achieve higher quality when their neural networks are augmented by spatial data structures that hold trainable features arranged in a grid. However, existing feature grids either come with a large memory footprint (dense or factorized grids, trees, and hash tables) or slow performance (index learning and vector quantization). In this paper, we show that a hash table with learned probes has neither disadvantage, resulting in a favorable combination of size and speed. Inference is faster than unprobed hash tables at equal quality while training is only 1.2-2.6x slower, significantly outperforming prior index learning approaches. We arrive at this formulation by casting all feature grids into a common framework: they each correspond to a lookup function that indexes into a table of feature vectors. In this framework, the lookup functions of existing data structures can be combined by simple arithmetic combinations of their indices, resulting in Pareto optimal compression and speed.

Temporal interpolation often plays a crucial role to learn meaningful representations in dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel method to train spatiotemporal neural radiance fields of dynamic scenes based on temporal interpolation of feature vectors. Two feature interpolation methods are suggested depending on underlying representations, neural networks or grids. In the neural representation, we extract features from space-time inputs via multiple neural network modules and interpolate them based on time frames. The proposed multi-level feature interpolation network effectively captures features of both short-term and long-term time ranges. In the grid representation, space-time features are learned via four-dimensional hash grids, which remarkably reduces training time. The grid representation shows more than 100 times faster training speed than the previous neural-net-based methods while maintaining the rendering quality. Concatenating static and dynamic features and adding a simple smoothness term further improve the performance of our proposed models. Despite the simplicity of the model architectures, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance both in rendering quality for the neural representation and in training speed for the grid representation.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) action grounding is a critical step in GUI automation that maps language instructions to actionable elements on GUI screens. Most recent works of GUI action grounding leverage large GUI datasets to fine-tune MLLMs. However, the fine-tuning data always covers limited GUI environments, and we find the performance of the resulting model deteriorates in novel environments. We argue that the GUI grounding models should be further aligned to the novel environments to reveal their full potential, when the inference is known to involve novel environments, i.e., environments not used during the previous fine-tuning. To realize this, we first propose GUI-Bee, an MLLM-based autonomous agent, to collect high-quality, environment-specific data through exploration and then continuously fine-tune GUI grounding models with the collected data. Our agent leverages a novel Q-value-Incentive In-Context Reinforcement Learning (Q-ICRL) method to optimize exploration efficiency and data quality. Additionally, we introduce NovelScreenSpot, a benchmark for testing how well the data can help align GUI action grounding models to novel environments and demonstrate the effectiveness of data collected by GUI-Bee in the experiments. Furthermore, we conduct an ablation study to validate the Q-ICRL method in enhancing the efficiency of GUI-Bee. Project page: https://gui-bee.github.io

Despite the impressive feats demonstrated by Reinforcement Learning (RL), these algorithms have seen little adoption in high-risk, real-world applications due to current difficulties in explaining RL agent actions and building user trust. We present Counterfactual Demonstrations for Explanation (CODEX), a method that incorporates semantic clustering, which can effectively summarize RL agent behavior in the state-action space. Experimentation on the MiniGrid and StarCraft II gaming environments reveals the semantic clusters retain temporal as well as entity information, which is reflected in the constructed summary of agent behavior. Furthermore, clustering the discrete+continuous game-state latent representations identifies the most crucial episodic events, demonstrating a relationship between the latent and semantic spaces. This work contributes to the growing body of work that strives to unlock the power of RL for widespread use by leveraging and extending techniques from Natural Language Processing.

This work studies a central extremal graph theory problem inspired by a 1975 conjecture of Erdos, which aims to find graphs with a given size (number of nodes) that maximize the number of edges without having 3- or 4-cycles. We formulate this problem as a sequential decision-making problem and compare AlphaZero, a neural network-guided tree search, with tabu search, a heuristic local search method. Using either method, by introducing a curriculum -- jump-starting the search for larger graphs using good graphs found at smaller sizes -- we improve the state-of-the-art lower bounds for several sizes. We also propose a flexible graph-generation environment and a permutation-invariant network architecture for learning to search in the space of graphs.

Progress in multiagent intelligence research is fundamentally limited by the number and quality of environments available for study. In recent years, simulated games have become a dominant research platform within reinforcement learning, in part due to their accessibility and interpretability. Previous works have targeted and demonstrated success on arcade, first person shooter (FPS), real-time strategy (RTS), and massive online battle arena (MOBA) games. Our work considers massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs or MMOs), which capture several complexities of real-world learning that are not well modeled by any other game genre. We present Neural MMO, a massively multiagent game environment inspired by MMOs and discuss our progress on two more general challenges in multiagent systems engineering for AI research: distributed infrastructure and game IO. We further demonstrate that standard policy gradient methods and simple baseline models can learn interesting emergent exploration and specialization behaviors in this setting.

Autonomous agents that accomplish complex computer tasks with minimal human interventions have the potential to transform human-computer interaction, significantly enhancing accessibility and productivity. However, existing benchmarks either lack an interactive environment or are limited to environments specific to certain applications or domains, failing to reflect the diverse and complex nature of real-world computer use, thereby limiting the scope of tasks and agent scalability. To address this issue, we introduce OSWorld, the first-of-its-kind scalable, real computer environment for multimodal agents, supporting task setup, execution-based evaluation, and interactive learning across various operating systems such as Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS. OSWorld can serve as a unified, integrated computer environment for assessing open-ended computer tasks that involve arbitrary applications. Building upon OSWorld, we create a benchmark of 369 computer tasks involving real web and desktop apps in open domains, OS file I/O, and workflows spanning multiple applications. Each task example is derived from real-world computer use cases and includes a detailed initial state setup configuration and a custom execution-based evaluation script for reliable, reproducible evaluation. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents on OSWorld reveals significant deficiencies in their ability to serve as computer assistants. While humans can accomplish over 72.36% of the tasks, the best model achieves only 12.24% success, primarily struggling with GUI grounding and operational knowledge. Comprehensive analysis using OSWorld provides valuable insights for developing multimodal generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Our code, environment, baseline models, and data are publicly available at https://os-world.github.io.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are transforming the capabilities of graphical user interface (GUI) agents, facilitating their transition from controlled simulations to complex, real-world applications across various platforms. However, the effectiveness of these agents hinges on the robustness of their grounding capability. Current GUI agents predominantly utilize text-based representations such as HTML or accessibility trees, which, despite their utility, often introduce noise, incompleteness, and increased computational overhead. In this paper, we advocate a human-like embodiment for GUI agents that perceive the environment entirely visually and directly take pixel-level operations on the GUI. The key is visual grounding models that can accurately map diverse referring expressions of GUI elements to their coordinates on the GUI across different platforms. We show that a simple recipe, which includes web-based synthetic data and slight adaptation of the LLaVA architecture, is surprisingly effective for training such visual grounding models. We collect the largest dataset for GUI visual grounding so far, containing 10M GUI elements and their referring expressions over 1.3M screenshots, and use it to train UGround, a strong universal visual grounding model for GUI agents. Empirical results on six benchmarks spanning three categories (grounding, offline agent, and online agent) show that 1) UGround substantially outperforms existing visual grounding models for GUI agents, by up to 20% absolute, and 2) agents with UGround outperform state-of-the-art agents, despite the fact that existing agents use additional text-based input while ours only uses visual perception. These results provide strong support for the feasibility and promises of GUI agents that navigate the digital world as humans do.

The creation of complex 3D scenes tailored to user specifications has been a tedious and challenging task with traditional 3D modeling tools. Although some pioneering methods have achieved automatic text-to-3D generation, they are generally limited to small-scale scenes with restricted control over the shape and texture. We introduce SceneCraft, a novel method for generating detailed indoor scenes that adhere to textual descriptions and spatial layout preferences provided by users. Central to our method is a rendering-based technique, which converts 3D semantic layouts into multi-view 2D proxy maps. Furthermore, we design a semantic and depth conditioned diffusion model to generate multi-view images, which are used to learn a neural radiance field (NeRF) as the final scene representation. Without the constraints of panorama image generation, we surpass previous methods in supporting complicated indoor space generation beyond a single room, even as complicated as a whole multi-bedroom apartment with irregular shapes and layouts. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in complex indoor scene generation with diverse textures, consistent geometry, and realistic visual quality. Code and more results are available at: https://orangesodahub.github.io/SceneCraft

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.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents are designed to automate complex tasks on digital devices, such as smartphones and desktops. Most existing GUI agents interact with the environment through extracted structured data, which can be notably lengthy (e.g., HTML) and occasionally inaccessible (e.g., on desktops). To alleviate this issue, we propose a visual GUI agent -- SeeClick, which only relies on screenshots for task automation. In our preliminary study, we have discovered a key challenge in developing visual GUI agents: GUI grounding -- the capacity to accurately locate screen elements based on instructions. To tackle this challenge, we propose to enhance SeeClick with GUI grounding pre-training and devise a method to automate the curation of GUI grounding data. Along with the efforts above, we have also created ScreenSpot, the first realistic GUI grounding dataset that encompasses mobile, desktop, and web environments. After pre-training, SeeClick demonstrates significant improvement in ScreenSpot over various baselines. Moreover, comprehensive evaluations on three widely used benchmarks consistently support our finding that advancements in GUI grounding directly correlate with enhanced performance in downstream GUI agent tasks. The model, data and code are available at https://github.com/njucckevin/SeeClick.

Generating photorealistic images with controllable camera pose and scene contents is essential for many applications including AR/VR and simulation. Despite the fact that rapid progress has been made in 3D-aware generative models, most existing methods focus on object-centric images and are not applicable to generating urban scenes for free camera viewpoint control and scene editing. To address this challenging task, we propose UrbanGIRAFFE, which uses a coarse 3D panoptic prior, including the layout distribution of uncountable stuff and countable objects, to guide a 3D-aware generative model. Our model is compositional and controllable as it breaks down the scene into stuff, objects, and sky. Using stuff prior in the form of semantic voxel grids, we build a conditioned stuff generator that effectively incorporates the coarse semantic and geometry information. The object layout prior further allows us to learn an object generator from cluttered scenes. With proper loss functions, our approach facilitates photorealistic 3D-aware image synthesis with diverse controllability, including large camera movement, stuff editing, and object manipulation. We validate the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including the challenging KITTI-360 dataset.

The next generation of AI applications will continuously interact with the environment and learn from these interactions. These applications impose new and demanding systems requirements, both in terms of performance and flexibility. In this paper, we consider these requirements and present Ray---a distributed system to address them. Ray implements a unified interface that can express both task-parallel and actor-based computations, supported by a single dynamic execution engine. To meet the performance requirements, Ray employs a distributed scheduler and a distributed and fault-tolerant store to manage the system's control state. In our experiments, we demonstrate scaling beyond 1.8 million tasks per second and better performance than existing specialized systems for several challenging reinforcement learning applications.

In this paper, we present the results of the NeurIPS-2022 Neural MMO Challenge, which attracted 500 participants and received over 1,600 submissions. Like the previous IJCAI-2022 Neural MMO Challenge, it involved agents from 16 populations surviving in procedurally generated worlds by collecting resources and defeating opponents. This year's competition runs on the latest v1.6 Neural MMO, which introduces new equipment, combat, trading, and a better scoring system. These elements combine to pose additional robustness and generalization challenges not present in previous competitions. This paper summarizes the design and results of the challenge, explores the potential of this environment as a benchmark for learning methods, and presents some practical reinforcement learning training approaches for complex tasks with sparse rewards. Additionally, we have open-sourced our baselines, including environment wrappers, benchmarks, and visualization tools for future research.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

Increasing the scale of reinforcement learning experiments has allowed researchers to achieve unprecedented results in both training sophisticated agents for video games, and in sim-to-real transfer for robotics. Typically such experiments rely on large distributed systems and require expensive hardware setups, limiting wider access to this exciting area of research. In this work we aim to solve this problem by optimizing the efficiency and resource utilization of reinforcement learning algorithms instead of relying on distributed computation. We present the "Sample Factory", a high-throughput training system optimized for a single-machine setting. Our architecture combines a highly efficient, asynchronous, GPU-based sampler with off-policy correction techniques, allowing us to achieve throughput higher than 10^5 environment frames/second on non-trivial control problems in 3D without sacrificing sample efficiency. We extend Sample Factory to support self-play and population-based training and apply these techniques to train highly capable agents for a multiplayer first-person shooter game. The source code is available at https://github.com/alex-petrenko/sample-factory

We present Agent S, an open agentic framework that enables autonomous interaction with computers through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), aimed at transforming human-computer interaction by automating complex, multi-step tasks. Agent S aims to address three key challenges in automating computer tasks: acquiring domain-specific knowledge, planning over long task horizons, and handling dynamic, non-uniform interfaces. To this end, Agent S introduces experience-augmented hierarchical planning, which learns from external knowledge search and internal experience retrieval at multiple levels, facilitating efficient task planning and subtask execution. In addition, it employs an Agent-Computer Interface (ACI) to better elicit the reasoning and control capabilities of GUI agents based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark shows that Agent S outperforms the baseline by 9.37% on success rate (an 83.6% relative improvement) and achieves a new state-of-the-art. Comprehensive analysis highlights the effectiveness of individual components and provides insights for future improvements. Furthermore, Agent S demonstrates broad generalizability to different operating systems on a newly-released WindowsAgentArena benchmark. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

We present APT, an advanced Large Language Model (LLM)-driven framework that enables autonomous agents to construct complex and creative structures within the Minecraft environment. Unlike previous approaches that primarily concentrate on skill-based open-world tasks or rely on image-based diffusion models for generating voxel-based structures, our method leverages the intrinsic spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By employing chain-of-thought decomposition along with multimodal inputs, the framework generates detailed architectural layouts and blueprints that the agent can execute under zero-shot or few-shot learning scenarios. Our agent incorporates both memory and reflection modules to facilitate lifelong learning, adaptive refinement, and error correction throughout the building process. To rigorously evaluate the agent's performance in this emerging research area, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark consisting of diverse construction tasks designed to test creativity, spatial reasoning, adherence to in-game rules, and the effective integration of multimodal instructions. Experimental results using various GPT-based LLM backends and agent configurations demonstrate the agent's capacity to accurately interpret extensive instructions involving numerous items, their positions, and orientations. The agent successfully produces complex structures complete with internal functionalities such as Redstone-powered systems. A/B testing indicates that the inclusion of a memory module leads to a significant increase in performance, emphasizing its role in enabling continuous learning and the reuse of accumulated experience. Additionally, the agent's unexpected emergence of scaffolding behavior highlights the potential of future LLM-driven agents to utilize subroutine planning and leverage the emergence ability of LLMs to autonomously develop human-like problem-solving techniques.

Generating bitmap graphics from text has gained considerable attention, yet for scientific figures, vector graphics are often preferred. Given that vector graphics are typically encoded using low-level graphics primitives, generating them directly is difficult. To address this, we propose the use of TikZ, a well-known abstract graphics language that can be compiled to vector graphics, as an intermediate representation of scientific figures. TikZ offers human-oriented, high-level commands, thereby facilitating conditional language modeling with any large language model. To this end, we introduce DaTikZ the first large-scale TikZ dataset, consisting of 120k TikZ drawings aligned with captions. We fine-tune LLaMA on DaTikZ, as well as our new model CLiMA, which augments LLaMA with multimodal CLIP embeddings. In both human and automatic evaluation, CLiMA and LLaMA outperform commercial GPT-4 and Claude 2 in terms of similarity to human-created figures, with CLiMA additionally improving text-image alignment. Our detailed analysis shows that all models generalize well and are not susceptible to memorization. GPT-4 and Claude 2, however, tend to generate more simplistic figures compared to both humans and our models. We make our framework, AutomaTikZ, along with model weights and datasets, publicly available.

The remarkable progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) opens up new avenues for addressing planning and decision-making problems in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, as the number of agents increases, the issues of hallucination in LLMs and coordination in MAS have become increasingly prominent. Additionally, the efficient utilization of tokens emerges as a critical consideration when employing LLMs to facilitate the interactions among a substantial number of agents. In this paper, we develop a modular framework called LLaMAC to mitigate these challenges. LLaMAC implements a value distribution encoding similar to that found in the human brain, utilizing internal and external feedback mechanisms to facilitate collaboration and iterative reasoning among its modules. Through evaluations involving system resource allocation and robot grid transportation, we demonstrate the considerable advantages afforded by our proposed approach.

Recent works have been exploring the scaling laws in the field of Embodied AI. Given the prohibitive costs of collecting real-world data, we believe the Simulation-to-Real (Sim2Real) paradigm is a crucial step for scaling the learning of embodied models. This paper introduces project GRUtopia, the first simulated interactive 3D society designed for various robots. It features several advancements: (a) The scene dataset, GRScenes, includes 100k interactive, finely annotated scenes, which can be freely combined into city-scale environments. In contrast to previous works mainly focusing on home, GRScenes covers 89 diverse scene categories, bridging the gap of service-oriented environments where general robots would be initially deployed. (b) GRResidents, a Large Language Model (LLM) driven Non-Player Character (NPC) system that is responsible for social interaction, task generation, and task assignment, thus simulating social scenarios for embodied AI applications. (c) The benchmark, GRBench, supports various robots but focuses on legged robots as primary agents and poses moderately challenging tasks involving Object Loco-Navigation, Social Loco-Navigation, and Loco-Manipulation. We hope that this work can alleviate the scarcity of high-quality data in this field and provide a more comprehensive assessment of Embodied AI research. The project is available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/GRUtopia.

We study the problem of visualizing large-scale and high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional (typically 2D or 3D) space. Much success has been reported recently by techniques that first compute a similarity structure of the data points and then project them into a low-dimensional space with the structure preserved. These two steps suffer from considerable computational costs, preventing the state-of-the-art methods such as the t-SNE from scaling to large-scale and high-dimensional data (e.g., millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions). We propose the LargeVis, a technique that first constructs an accurately approximated K-nearest neighbor graph from the data and then layouts the graph in the low-dimensional space. Comparing to t-SNE, LargeVis significantly reduces the computational cost of the graph construction step and employs a principled probabilistic model for the visualization step, the objective of which can be effectively optimized through asynchronous stochastic gradient descent with a linear time complexity. The whole procedure thus easily scales to millions of high-dimensional data points. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate that the LargeVis outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. The hyper-parameters of LargeVis are also much more stable over different data sets.

Training competitive deep video models is an order of magnitude slower than training their counterpart image models. Slow training causes long research cycles, which hinders progress in video understanding research. Following standard practice for training image models, video model training assumes a fixed mini-batch shape: a specific number of clips, frames, and spatial size. However, what is the optimal shape? High resolution models perform well, but train slowly. Low resolution models train faster, but they are inaccurate. Inspired by multigrid methods in numerical optimization, we propose to use variable mini-batch shapes with different spatial-temporal resolutions that are varied according to a schedule. The different shapes arise from resampling the training data on multiple sampling grids. Training is accelerated by scaling up the mini-batch size and learning rate when shrinking the other dimensions. We empirically demonstrate a general and robust grid schedule that yields a significant out-of-the-box training speedup without a loss in accuracy for different models (I3D, non-local, SlowFast), datasets (Kinetics, Something-Something, Charades), and training settings (with and without pre-training, 128 GPUs or 1 GPU). As an illustrative example, the proposed multigrid method trains a ResNet-50 SlowFast network 4.5x faster (wall-clock time, same hardware) while also improving accuracy (+0.8% absolute) on Kinetics-400 compared to the baseline training method. Code is available online.

The development of autonomous agents increasingly relies on Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) to perform tasks described in natural language with GUI environments, such as websites, desktop computers, or mobile phones. Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexities of constructing tasks and evaluators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Crab, the first agent benchmark framework designed to support cross-environment tasks, incorporating a graph-based fine-grained evaluation method and an efficient mechanism for task and evaluator construction. Our framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. Leveraging Crab, we developed a cross-platform Crab Benchmark-v0 comprising 100 tasks in computer desktop and mobile phone environments. We evaluated four advanced MLMs using different single and multi-agent system configurations on this benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the single agent with GPT-4o achieves the best completion ratio of 35.26%. All framework code, agent code, and task datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/camel-ai/crab.

This paper aims to generate materials for 3D meshes from text descriptions. Unlike existing methods that synthesize texture maps, we propose to generate segment-wise procedural material graphs as the appearance representation, which supports high-quality rendering and provides substantial flexibility in editing. Instead of relying on extensive paired data, i.e., 3D meshes with material graphs and corresponding text descriptions, to train a material graph generative model, we propose to leverage the pre-trained 2D diffusion model as a bridge to connect the text and material graphs. Specifically, our approach decomposes a shape into a set of segments and designs a segment-controlled diffusion model to synthesize 2D images that are aligned with mesh parts. Based on generated images, we initialize parameters of material graphs and fine-tune them through the differentiable rendering module to produce materials in accordance with the textual description. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in photorealism, resolution, and editability over existing methods. Project page: https://zhanghe3z.github.io/MaPa/

The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated interest among researchers and industry professionals, particularly in their application to tasks concerning mobile user interfaces (UIs). This position paper investigates the use of LLMs for UI layout generation. Central to our exploration is the introduction of UI grammar -- a novel approach we proposed to represent the hierarchical structure inherent in UI screens. The aim of this approach is to guide the generative capacities of LLMs more effectively and improve the explainability and controllability of the process. Initial experiments conducted with GPT-4 showed the promising capability of LLMs to produce high-quality user interfaces via in-context learning. Furthermore, our preliminary comparative study suggested the potential of the grammar-based approach in improving the quality of generative results in specific aspects.

We present MatAtlas, a method for consistent text-guided 3D model texturing. Following recent progress we leverage a large scale text-to-image generation model (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as a prior to texture a 3D model. We carefully design an RGB texturing pipeline that leverages a grid pattern diffusion, driven by depth and edges. By proposing a multi-step texture refinement process, we significantly improve the quality and 3D consistency of the texturing output. To further address the problem of baked-in lighting, we move beyond RGB colors and pursue assigning parametric materials to the assets. Given the high-quality initial RGB texture, we propose a novel material retrieval method capitalized on Large Language Models (LLM), enabling editabiliy and relightability. We evaluate our method on a wide variety of geometries and show that our method significantly outperform prior arts. We also analyze the role of each component through a detailed ablation study.

Text-driven 3D indoor scene generation could be useful for gaming, film industry, and AR/VR applications. However, existing methods cannot faithfully capture the room layout, nor do they allow flexible editing of individual objects in the room. To address these problems, we present Ctrl-Room, which is able to generate convincing 3D rooms with designer-style layouts and high-fidelity textures from just a text prompt. Moreover, Ctrl-Room enables versatile interactive editing operations such as resizing or moving individual furniture items. Our key insight is to separate the modeling of layouts and appearance. %how to model the room that takes into account both scene texture and geometry at the same time. To this end, Our proposed method consists of two stages, a `Layout Generation Stage' and an `Appearance Generation Stage'. The `Layout Generation Stage' trains a text-conditional diffusion model to learn the layout distribution with our holistic scene code parameterization. Next, the `Appearance Generation Stage' employs a fine-tuned ControlNet to produce a vivid panoramic image of the room guided by the 3D scene layout and text prompt. In this way, we achieve a high-quality 3D room with convincing layouts and lively textures. Benefiting from the scene code parameterization, we can easily edit the generated room model through our mask-guided editing module, without expensive editing-specific training. Extensive experiments on the Structured3D dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in producing more reasonable, view-consistent, and editable 3D rooms from natural language prompts.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents' performance in complex tasks. However, these agents often suffer from high latency and low reliability due to the extensive sequential UI interactions. To address this issue, we propose AXIS, a novel LLM-based agents framework prioritize actions through application programming interfaces (APIs) over UI actions. This framework also facilitates the creation and expansion of APIs through automated exploration of applications. Our experiments on Office Word demonstrate that AXIS reduces task completion time by 65%-70% and cognitive workload by 38%-53%, while maintaining accuracy of 97%-98% compare to humans. Our work contributes to a new human-agent-computer interaction (HACI) framework and a fresh UI design principle for application providers in the era of LLMs. It also explores the possibility of turning every applications into agents, paving the way towards an agent-centric operating system (Agent OS).

Learning implicit representations has been a widely used solution for surface reconstruction from 3D point clouds. The latest methods infer a distance or occupancy field by overfitting a neural network on a single point cloud. However, these methods suffer from a slow inference due to the slow convergence of neural networks and the extensive calculation of distances to surface points, which limits them to small scale points. To resolve the scalability issue in surface reconstruction, we propose GridPull to improve the efficiency of learning implicit representations from large scale point clouds. Our novelty lies in the fast inference of a discrete distance field defined on grids without using any neural components. To remedy the lack of continuousness brought by neural networks, we introduce a loss function to encourage continuous distances and consistent gradients in the field during pulling queries onto the surface in grids near to the surface. We use uniform grids for a fast grid search to localize sampled queries, and organize surface points in a tree structure to speed up the calculation of distances to the surface. We do not rely on learning priors or normal supervision during optimization, and achieve superiority over the latest methods in terms of complexity and accuracy. We evaluate our method on shape and scene benchmarks, and report numerical and visual comparisons with the latest methods to justify our effectiveness and superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchao15/GridPull.

We introduce controlgym, a library of thirty-six safety-critical industrial control settings, and ten infinite-dimensional partial differential equation (PDE)-based control problems. Integrated within the OpenAI Gym/Gymnasium (Gym) framework, controlgym allows direct applications of standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms like stable-baselines3. Our control environments complement those in Gym with continuous, unbounded action and observation spaces, motivated by real-world control applications. Moreover, the PDE control environments uniquely allow the users to extend the state dimensionality of the system to infinity while preserving the intrinsic dynamics. This feature is crucial for evaluating the scalability of RL algorithms for control. This project serves the learning for dynamics & control (L4DC) community, aiming to explore key questions: the convergence of RL algorithms in learning control policies; the stability and robustness issues of learning-based controllers; and the scalability of RL algorithms to high- and potentially infinite-dimensional systems. We open-source the controlgym project at https://github.com/xiangyuan-zhang/controlgym.

With the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), LLM-driven visual agents are increasingly impacting software interfaces, particularly those with graphical user interfaces. This work introduces a novel LLM-based multimodal agent framework for mobile devices. This framework, capable of navigating mobile devices, emulates human-like interactions. Our agent constructs a flexible action space that enhances adaptability across various applications including parser, text and vision descriptions. The agent operates through two main phases: exploration and deployment. During the exploration phase, functionalities of user interface elements are documented either through agent-driven or manual explorations into a customized structured knowledge base. In the deployment phase, RAG technology enables efficient retrieval and update from this knowledge base, thereby empowering the agent to perform tasks effectively and accurately. This includes performing complex, multi-step operations across various applications, thereby demonstrating the framework's adaptability and precision in handling customized task workflows. Our experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate the framework's superior performance, confirming its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Our code will be open source soon.

Autonomous agents operating on the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of various applications hold immense practical value. Unlike the large language model (LLM)-based methods which rely on structured texts and customized backends, the approaches using large vision-language models (LVLMs) are more intuitive and adaptable as they can visually perceive and directly interact with screens, making them indispensable in general scenarios without text metadata and tailored backends. Given the lack of high-quality training data for GUI-related tasks in existing work, this paper aims to enhance the GUI understanding and interacting capabilities of LVLMs through a data-driven approach. We propose EDGE, a general data synthesis framework that automatically generates large-scale, multi-granularity training data from webpages across the Web. Evaluation results on various GUI and agent benchmarks demonstrate that the model trained with the dataset generated through EDGE exhibits superior webpage understanding capabilities, which can then be easily transferred to previously unseen desktop and mobile environments. Our approach significantly reduces the dependence on manual annotations, empowering researchers to harness the vast public resources available on the Web to advance their work. Our source code, the dataset and the model are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EDGE-1CDB.

We present Godot Reinforcement Learning (RL) Agents, an open-source interface for developing environments and agents in the Godot Game Engine. The Godot RL Agents interface allows the design, creation and learning of agent behaviors in challenging 2D and 3D environments with various on-policy and off-policy Deep RL algorithms. We provide a standard Gym interface, with wrappers for learning in the Ray RLlib and Stable Baselines RL frameworks. This allows users access to over 20 state of the art on-policy, off-policy and multi-agent RL algorithms. The framework is a versatile tool that allows researchers and game designers the ability to create environments with discrete, continuous and mixed action spaces. The interface is relatively performant, with 12k interactions per second on a high end laptop computer, when parallized on 4 CPU cores. An overview video is available here: https://youtu.be/g1MlZSFqIj4

Memory Gym presents a suite of 2D partially observable environments, namely Mortar Mayhem, Mystery Path, and Searing Spotlights, designed to benchmark memory capabilities in decision-making agents. These environments, originally with finite tasks, are expanded into innovative, endless formats, mirroring the escalating challenges of cumulative memory games such as ``I packed my bag''. This progression in task design shifts the focus from merely assessing sample efficiency to also probing the levels of memory effectiveness in dynamic, prolonged scenarios. To address the gap in available memory-based Deep Reinforcement Learning baselines, we introduce an implementation that integrates Transformer-XL (TrXL) with Proximal Policy Optimization. This approach utilizes TrXL as a form of episodic memory, employing a sliding window technique. Our comparative study between the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and TrXL reveals varied performances across different settings. TrXL, on the finite environments, demonstrates superior sample efficiency in Mystery Path and outperforms in Mortar Mayhem. However, GRU is more efficient on Searing Spotlights. Most notably, in all endless tasks, GRU makes a remarkable resurgence, consistently outperforming TrXL by significant margins. Website and Source Code: https://github.com/MarcoMeter/endless-memory-gym/

Bimanual manipulation is critical to many robotics applications. In contrast to single-arm manipulation, bimanual manipulation tasks are challenging due to higher-dimensional action spaces. Prior works leverage large amounts of data and primitive actions to address this problem, but may suffer from sample inefficiency and limited generalization across various tasks. To this end, we propose VoxAct-B, a language-conditioned, voxel-based method that leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) to prioritize key regions within the scene and reconstruct a voxel grid. We provide this voxel grid to our bimanual manipulation policy to learn acting and stabilizing actions. This approach enables more efficient policy learning from voxels and is generalizable to different tasks. In simulation, we show that VoxAct-B outperforms strong baselines on fine-grained bimanual manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate VoxAct-B on real-world Open Drawer and Open Jar tasks using two UR5s. Code, data, and videos are available at https://voxact-b.github.io.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results in developing generalist planning agents for diverse tasks. However, grounding these plans in expansive, multi-floor, and multi-room environments presents a significant challenge for robotics. We introduce SayPlan, a scalable approach to LLM-based, large-scale task planning for robotics using 3D scene graph (3DSG) representations. To ensure the scalability of our approach, we: (1) exploit the hierarchical nature of 3DSGs to allow LLMs to conduct a semantic search for task-relevant subgraphs from a smaller, collapsed representation of the full graph; (2) reduce the planning horizon for the LLM by integrating a classical path planner and (3) introduce an iterative replanning pipeline that refines the initial plan using feedback from a scene graph simulator, correcting infeasible actions and avoiding planning failures. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale environments spanning up to 3 floors, 36 rooms and 140 objects, and show that our approach is capable of grounding large-scale, long-horizon task plans from abstract, and natural language instruction for a mobile manipulator robot to execute.

Building future wireless systems that support services like digital twins (DTs) is challenging to achieve through advances to conventional technologies like meta-surfaces. While artificial intelligence (AI)-native networks promise to overcome some limitations of wireless technologies, developments still rely on AI tools like neural networks. Such tools struggle to cope with the non-trivial challenges of the network environment and the growing demands of emerging use cases. In this paper, we revisit the concept of AI-native wireless systems, equipping them with the common sense necessary to transform them into artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native systems. These systems acquire common sense by exploiting different cognitive abilities such as perception, analogy, and reasoning, that enable them to generalize and deal with unforeseen scenarios. Towards developing the components of such a system, we start by showing how the perception module can be built through abstracting real-world elements into generalizable representations. These representations are then used to create a world model, founded on principles of causality and hyper-dimensional (HD) computing, that aligns with intuitive physics and enables analogical reasoning, that define common sense. Then, we explain how methods such as integrated information theory play a role in the proposed intent-driven and objective-driven planning methods that maneuver the AGI-native network to take actions. Next, we discuss how an AGI-native network can enable use cases related to human and autonomous agents: a) analogical reasoning for next-generation DTs, b) synchronized and resilient experiences for cognitive avatars, and c) brain-level metaverse experiences like holographic teleportation. Finally, we conclude with a set of recommendations to build AGI-native systems. Ultimately, we envision this paper as a roadmap for the beyond 6G era.

In stark contrast to the case of images, finding a concise, learnable discrete representation of 3D surfaces remains a challenge. In particular, while polygon meshes are arguably the most common surface representation used in geometry processing, their irregular and combinatorial structure often make them unsuitable for learning-based applications. In this work, we present VoroMesh, a novel and differentiable Voronoi-based representation of watertight 3D shape surfaces. From a set of 3D points (called generators) and their associated occupancy, we define our boundary representation through the Voronoi diagram of the generators as the subset of Voronoi faces whose two associated (equidistant) generators are of opposite occupancy: the resulting polygon mesh forms a watertight approximation of the target shape's boundary. To learn the position of the generators, we propose a novel loss function, dubbed VoroLoss, that minimizes the distance from ground truth surface samples to the closest faces of the Voronoi diagram which does not require an explicit construction of the entire Voronoi diagram. A direct optimization of the Voroloss to obtain generators on the Thingi32 dataset demonstrates the geometric efficiency of our representation compared to axiomatic meshing algorithms and recent learning-based mesh representations. We further use VoroMesh in a learning-based mesh prediction task from input SDF grids on the ABC dataset, and show comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while guaranteeing closed output surfaces free of self-intersections.

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9\% of the last 10K utterances.

Recent advances in high-fidelity virtual environments serve as one of the major driving forces for building intelligent embodied agents to perceive, reason and interact with the physical world. Typically, these environments remain unchanged unless agents interact with them. However, in real-world scenarios, agents might also face dynamically changing environments characterized by unexpected events and need to rapidly take action accordingly. To remedy this gap, we propose a new simulated embodied benchmark, called HAZARD, specifically designed to assess the decision-making abilities of embodied agents in dynamic situations. HAZARD consists of three unexpected disaster scenarios, including fire, flood, and wind, and specifically supports the utilization of large language models (LLMs) to assist common sense reasoning and decision-making. This benchmark enables us to evaluate autonomous agents' decision-making capabilities across various pipelines, including reinforcement learning (RL), rule-based, and search-based methods in dynamically changing environments. As a first step toward addressing this challenge using large language models, we further develop an LLM-based agent and perform an in-depth analysis of its promise and challenge of solving these challenging tasks. HAZARD is available at https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/hazard/.

This paper introduces SceneCraft, a Large Language Model (LLM) Agent converting text descriptions into Blender-executable Python scripts which render complex scenes with up to a hundred 3D assets. This process requires complex spatial planning and arrangement. We tackle these challenges through a combination of advanced abstraction, strategic planning, and library learning. SceneCraft first models a scene graph as a blueprint, detailing the spatial relationships among assets in the scene. SceneCraft then writes Python scripts based on this graph, translating relationships into numerical constraints for asset layout. Next, SceneCraft leverages the perceptual strengths of vision-language foundation models like GPT-V to analyze rendered images and iteratively refine the scene. On top of this process, SceneCraft features a library learning mechanism that compiles common script functions into a reusable library, facilitating continuous self-improvement without expensive LLM parameter tuning. Our evaluation demonstrates that SceneCraft surpasses existing LLM-based agents in rendering complex scenes, as shown by its adherence to constraints and favorable human assessments. We also showcase the broader application potential of SceneCraft by reconstructing detailed 3D scenes from the Sintel movie and guiding a video generative model with generated scenes as intermediary control signal.

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.

Designing 3D indoor layouts is a crucial task with significant applications in virtual reality, interior design, and automated space planning. Existing methods for 3D layout design either rely on diffusion models, which utilize spatial relationship priors, or heavily leverage the inferential capabilities of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), which require extensive prompt engineering and in-context exemplars via black-box trials. These methods often face limitations in generalization and dynamic scene editing. In this paper, we introduce LLplace, a novel 3D indoor scene layout designer based on lightweight fine-tuned open-source LLM Llama3. LLplace circumvents the need for spatial relationship priors and in-context exemplars, enabling efficient and credible room layout generation based solely on user inputs specifying the room type and desired objects. We curated a new dialogue dataset based on the 3D-Front dataset, expanding the original data volume and incorporating dialogue data for adding and removing objects. This dataset can enhance the LLM's spatial understanding. Furthermore, through dialogue, LLplace activates the LLM's capability to understand 3D layouts and perform dynamic scene editing, enabling the addition and removal of objects. Our approach demonstrates that LLplace can effectively generate and edit 3D indoor layouts interactively and outperform existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions. Code and dataset will be released.

We introduce WonderJourney, a modularized framework for perpetual 3D scene generation. Unlike prior work on view generation that focuses on a single type of scenes, we start at any user-provided location (by a text description or an image) and generate a journey through a long sequence of diverse yet coherently connected 3D scenes. We leverage an LLM to generate textual descriptions of the scenes in this journey, a text-driven point cloud generation pipeline to make a compelling and coherent sequence of 3D scenes, and a large VLM to verify the generated scenes. We show compelling, diverse visual results across various scene types and styles, forming imaginary "wonderjourneys". Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderJourney/

A comprehensive semantic understanding of a scene is important for many applications - but in what space should diverse semantic information (e.g., objects, scene categories, material types, texture, etc.) be grounded and what should be its structure? Aspiring to have one unified structure that hosts diverse types of semantics, we follow the Scene Graph paradigm in 3D, generating a 3D Scene Graph. Given a 3D mesh and registered panoramic images, we construct a graph that spans the entire building and includes semantics on objects (e.g., class, material, and other attributes), rooms (e.g., scene category, volume, etc.) and cameras (e.g., location, etc.), as well as the relationships among these entities. However, this process is prohibitively labor heavy if done manually. To alleviate this we devise a semi-automatic framework that employs existing detection methods and enhances them using two main constraints: I. framing of query images sampled on panoramas to maximize the performance of 2D detectors, and II. multi-view consistency enforcement across 2D detections that originate in different camera locations.

In NeRF, a critical problem is to effectively estimate the occupancy to guide empty-space skipping and point sampling. Grid-based methods work well for small-scale scenes. However, on large-scale scenes, they are limited by predefined bounding boxes, grid resolutions, and high memory usage for grid updates, and thus struggle to speed up training for large-scale, irregularly bounded and complex urban scenes without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we propose to learn a continuous and compact large-scale occupancy network, which can classify 3D points as occupied or unoccupied points. We train this occupancy network end-to-end together with the radiance field in a self-supervised manner by three designs. First, we propose a novel imbalanced occupancy loss to regularize the occupancy network. It makes the occupancy network effectively control the ratio of unoccupied and occupied points, motivated by the prior that most of 3D scene points are unoccupied. Second, we design an imbalanced architecture containing a large scene network and a small empty space network to separately encode occupied and unoccupied points classified by the occupancy network. This imbalanced structure can effectively model the imbalanced nature of occupied and unoccupied regions. Third, we design an explicit density loss to guide the occupancy network, making the density of unoccupied points smaller. As far as we know, we are the first to learn a continuous and compact occupancy of large-scale NeRF by a network. In our experiments, our occupancy network can quickly learn more compact, accurate and smooth occupancy compared to the occupancy grid. With our learned occupancy as guidance for empty space skipping on challenging large-scale benchmarks, our method consistently obtains higher accuracy compared to the occupancy grid, and our method can speed up state-of-the-art NeRF methods without sacrificing accuracy.

In the pursuit of efficient automated content creation, procedural generation, leveraging modifiable parameters and rule-based systems, emerges as a promising approach. Nonetheless, it could be a demanding endeavor, given its intricate nature necessitating a deep understanding of rules, algorithms, and parameters. To reduce workload, we introduce 3D-GPT, a framework utilizing large language models~(LLMs) for instruction-driven 3D modeling. 3D-GPT positions LLMs as proficient problem solvers, dissecting the procedural 3D modeling tasks into accessible segments and appointing the apt agent for each task. 3D-GPT integrates three core agents: the task dispatch agent, the conceptualization agent, and the modeling agent. They collaboratively achieve two objectives. First, it enhances concise initial scene descriptions, evolving them into detailed forms while dynamically adapting the text based on subsequent instructions. Second, it integrates procedural generation, extracting parameter values from enriched text to effortlessly interface with 3D software for asset creation. Our empirical investigations confirm that 3D-GPT not only interprets and executes instructions, delivering reliable results but also collaborates effectively with human designers. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with Blender, unlocking expanded manipulation possibilities. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs in 3D modeling, offering a basic framework for future advancements in scene generation and animation.

Building 3D scene graphs has recently emerged as a topic in scene representation for several embodied AI applications to represent the world in a structured and rich manner. With their increased use in solving downstream tasks (eg, navigation and room rearrangement), can we leverage and recycle them for creating 3D maps of environments, a pivotal step in agent operation? We focus on the fundamental problem of aligning pairs of 3D scene graphs whose overlap can range from zero to partial and can contain arbitrary changes. We propose SGAligner, the first method for aligning pairs of 3D scene graphs that is robust to in-the-wild scenarios (ie, unknown overlap -- if any -- and changes in the environment). We get inspired by multi-modality knowledge graphs and use contrastive learning to learn a joint, multi-modal embedding space. We evaluate on the 3RScan dataset and further showcase that our method can be used for estimating the transformation between pairs of 3D scenes. Since benchmarks for these tasks are missing, we create them on this dataset. The code, benchmark, and trained models are available on the project website.

Diffusion models have shown remarkable results in generating 2D images and small-scale 3D objects. However, their application to the synthesis of large-scale 3D scenes has been rarely explored. This is mainly due to the inherent complexity and bulky size of 3D scenery data, particularly outdoor scenes, and the limited availability of comprehensive real-world datasets, which makes training a stable scene diffusion model challenging. In this work, we explore how to effectively generate large-scale 3D scenes using the coarse-to-fine paradigm. We introduce a framework, the Pyramid Discrete Diffusion model (PDD), which employs scale-varied diffusion models to progressively generate high-quality outdoor scenes. Experimental results of PDD demonstrate our successful exploration in generating 3D scenes both unconditionally and conditionally. We further showcase the data compatibility of the PDD model, due to its multi-scale architecture: a PDD model trained on one dataset can be easily fine-tuned with another dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhengliu02/pyramid-discrete-diffusion.

We present AutoGLM, a new series in the ChatGLM family, designed to serve as foundation agents for autonomous control of digital devices through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). While foundation models excel at acquiring human knowledge, they often struggle with decision-making in dynamic real-world environments, limiting their progress toward artificial general intelligence. This limitation underscores the importance of developing foundation agents capable of learning through autonomous environmental interactions by reinforcing existing models. Focusing on Web Browser and Phone as representative GUI scenarios, we have developed AutoGLM as a practical foundation agent system for real-world GUI interactions. Our approach integrates a comprehensive suite of techniques and infrastructures to create deployable agent systems suitable for user delivery. Through this development, we have derived two key insights: First, the design of an appropriate "intermediate interface" for GUI control is crucial, enabling the separation of planning and grounding behaviors, which require distinct optimization for flexibility and accuracy respectively. Second, we have developed a novel progressive training framework that enables self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning for AutoGLM. Our evaluations demonstrate AutoGLM's effectiveness across multiple domains. For web browsing, AutoGLM achieves a 55.2% success rate on VAB-WebArena-Lite (improving to 59.1% with a second attempt) and 96.2% on OpenTable evaluation tasks. In Android device control, AutoGLM attains a 36.2% success rate on AndroidLab (VAB-Mobile) and 89.7% on common tasks in popular Chinese APPs.

Planning in textual environments have been shown to be a long-standing challenge even for current models. A recent, promising line of work uses LLMs to generate a formal representation of the environment that can be solved by a symbolic planner. However, existing methods rely on a fully-observed environment where all entity states are initially known, so a one-off representation can be constructed, leading to a complete plan. In contrast, we tackle partially-observed environments where there is initially no sufficient information to plan for the end-goal. We propose PDDLEGO that iteratively construct a planning representation that can lead to a partial plan for a given sub-goal. By accomplishing the sub-goal, more information is acquired to augment the representation, eventually achieving the end-goal. We show that plans produced by few-shot PDDLEGO are 43% more efficient than generating plans end-to-end on the Coin Collector simulation, with strong performance (98%) on the more complex Cooking World simulation where end-to-end LLMs fail to generate coherent plans (4%).

Solving complex real-world tasks requires cycles of actions and observations. This is particularly true in science, where tasks require many cycles of analysis, tool use, and experimentation. Language agents are promising for automating intellectual tasks in science because they can interact with tools via natural language or code. Yet their flexibility creates conceptual and practical challenges for software implementations, since agents may comprise non-standard components such as internal reasoning, planning, tool usage, as well as the inherent stochasticity of temperature-sampled language models. Here, we introduce Aviary, an extensible gymnasium for language agents. We formalize agents as policies solving language-grounded partially observable Markov decision processes, which we term language decision processes. We then implement five environments, including three challenging scientific environments: (1) manipulating DNA constructs for molecular cloning, (2) answering research questions by accessing scientific literature, and (3) engineering protein stability. These environments were selected for their focus on multi-step reasoning and their relevance to contemporary biology research. Finally, with online training and scaling inference-time compute, we show that language agents backed by open-source, non-frontier LLMs can match and exceed both frontier LLM agents and human experts on multiple tasks at up to 100x lower inference cost.

The exponential growth of academic publications poses challenges for the research process, such as literature review and procedural planning. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful AI tools, especially when combined with additional tools and resources. Recent LLM-powered frameworks offer promising solutions for handling complex domain-specific tasks, yet their domain-specific implementation limits broader applicability. This highlights the need for LLM-integrated systems that can assist in cross-disciplinary tasks, such as streamlining the research process across science and engineering disciplines. To address this need, we introduce Artificial Research Innovator Assistant (ARIA), a four-agent, multi-LLM framework. By emulating a team of expert assistants, ARIA systematically replicates the human research workflow to autonomously search, retrieve, and filter hundreds of papers, subsequently synthesizing relevant literature into actionable research procedures. In a case study on dropwise condensation enhancement, ARIA demonstrates its capability to streamline research tasks within an hour, maintaining user oversight during execution and ultimately liberating researchers from time-intensive tasks.

Recent approaches representing 3D objects and scenes using Gaussian splats show increased rendering speed across a variety of platforms and devices. While rendering such representations is indeed extremely efficient, storing and transmitting them is often prohibitively expensive. To represent large-scale scenes, one often needs to store millions of 3D Gaussians, occupying gigabytes of disk space. This poses a very practical limitation, prohibiting widespread adoption.Several solutions have been proposed to strike a balance between disk size and rendering quality, noticeably reducing the visual quality. In this work, we propose a new representation that dramatically reduces the hard drive footprint while featuring similar or improved quality when compared to the standard 3D Gaussian splats. When compared to other compact solutions, ours offers higher quality renderings with significantly reduced storage, being able to efficiently run on a mobile device in real-time. Our key observation is that nearby points in the scene can share similar representations. Hence, only a small ratio of 3D points needs to be stored. We introduce an approach to identify such points which are called parent points. The discarded points called children points along with attributes can be efficiently predicted by tiny MLPs.

Understanding how machine learning models respond to distributional shifts is a key research challenge. Mazes serve as an excellent testbed due to varied generation algorithms offering a nuanced platform to simulate both subtle and pronounced distributional shifts. To enable systematic investigations of model behavior on out-of-distribution data, we present maze-dataset, a comprehensive library for generating, processing, and visualizing datasets consisting of maze-solving tasks. With this library, researchers can easily create datasets, having extensive control over the generation algorithm used, the parameters fed to the algorithm of choice, and the filters that generated mazes must satisfy. Furthermore, it supports multiple output formats, including rasterized and text-based, catering to convolutional neural networks and autoregressive transformer models. These formats, along with tools for visualizing and converting between them, ensure versatility and adaptability in research applications.

Multi-robot systems have increasingly become instrumental in tackling search and coverage problems. However, the challenge of optimizing task efficiency without compromising task success still persists, particularly in expansive, unstructured environments with dense obstacles. This paper presents an innovative, decentralized Voronoi-based approach for search and coverage to reactively navigate these complexities while maintaining safety. This approach leverages the active sensing capabilities of multi-robot systems to supplement GIS (Geographic Information System), offering a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of the environment. Based on point cloud data, which is inherently non-convex and unstructured, this method efficiently generates collision-free Voronoi regions using only local sensing information through spatial decomposition and spherical mirroring techniques. Then, deadlock-aware guided map integrated with a gradient-optimized, centroid Voronoi-based coverage control policy, is constructed to improve efficiency by avoiding exhaustive searches and local sensing pitfalls. The effectiveness of our algorithm has been validated through extensive numerical simulations in high-fidelity environments, demonstrating significant improvements in both task success rate, coverage ratio, and task execution time compared with others.

We propose DOME, a diffusion-based world model that predicts future occupancy frames based on past occupancy observations. The ability of this world model to capture the evolution of the environment is crucial for planning in autonomous driving. Compared to 2D video-based world models, the occupancy world model utilizes a native 3D representation, which features easily obtainable annotations and is modality-agnostic. This flexibility has the potential to facilitate the development of more advanced world models. Existing occupancy world models either suffer from detail loss due to discrete tokenization or rely on simplistic diffusion architectures, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in predicting future occupancy with controllability. Our DOME exhibits two key features:(1) High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Generation. We adopt a spatial-temporal diffusion transformer to predict future occupancy frames based on historical context. This architecture efficiently captures spatial-temporal information, enabling high-fidelity details and the ability to generate predictions over long durations. (2)Fine-grained Controllability. We address the challenge of controllability in predictions by introducing a trajectory resampling method, which significantly enhances the model's ability to generate controlled predictions. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes. Specifically, our approach surpasses the baseline by 10.5% in mIoU and 21.2% in IoU for occupancy reconstruction and by 36.0% in mIoU and 24.6% in IoU for 4D occupancy forecasting.

This paper introduces a novel hierarchical autoencoder that maps 3D models into a highly compressed latent space. The hierarchical autoencoder is specifically designed to tackle the challenges arising from large-scale datasets and generative modeling using diffusion. Different from previous approaches that only work on a regular image or volume grid, our hierarchical autoencoder operates on unordered sets of vectors. Each level of the autoencoder controls different geometric levels of detail. We show that the model can be used to represent a wide range of 3D models while faithfully representing high-resolution geometry details. The training of the new architecture takes 0.70x time and 0.58x memory compared to the baseline. We also explore how the new representation can be used for generative modeling. Specifically, we propose a cascaded diffusion framework where each stage is conditioned on the previous stage. Our design extends existing cascaded designs for image and volume grids to vector sets.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have increased the demand for comprehensive benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities as human-like agents. Existing benchmarks, while useful, often focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. This lack of granularity makes it difficult to deeply discern where failures stem from. Additionally, setting up these environments requires considerable effort, and issues of unreliability and reproducibility sometimes arise, especially in interactive tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce the Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark, featuring comprehensive offline tasks that eliminate the need for complex environment setups. It evaluates models across five domains, including teal{Tool-use}, teal{Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA}, teal{Data Science and Machine Learning coding}, teal{Contest-level programming} and teal{Mathematics}, and covers five essential capabilities: orange{Understanding}, orange{Reasoning}, orange{Planning}, orange{Problem-solving}, and orange{Self-correction}. With a total of 20 meticulously designed tasks encompassing over 3K distinct prompts, MMAU provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating the strengths and limitations of LLM agents. By testing 18 representative models on MMAU, we provide deep and insightful analyses. Ultimately, MMAU not only sheds light on the capabilities and limitations of LLM agents but also enhances the interpretability of their performance. Datasets and evaluation scripts of MMAU are released at https://github.com/apple/axlearn/docs/research/mmau.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) algorithms provide a technique to generate complex and diverse environments in an automated way. However, while generating content with PCG methods is often straightforward, generating meaningful content that reflects specific intentions and constraints remains challenging. Furthermore, many PCG algorithms lack the ability to generate content in an open-ended manner. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be incredibly effective in many diverse domains. These trained LLMs can be fine-tuned, re-using information and accelerating training for new tasks. In this work, we introduce MarioGPT, a fine-tuned GPT2 model trained to generate tile-based game levels, in our case Super Mario Bros levels. We show that MarioGPT can not only generate diverse levels, but can be text-prompted for controllable level generation, addressing one of the key challenges of current PCG techniques. As far as we know, MarioGPT is the first text-to-level model. We also combine MarioGPT with novelty search, enabling it to generate diverse levels with varying play-style dynamics (i.e. player paths). This combination allows for the open-ended generation of an increasingly diverse range of content.

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically learn tabula rasa, without prior knowledge of the world. However, if initialized with knowledge of high-level subgoals and transitions between subgoals, RL agents could utilize this Abstract World Model (AWM) for planning and exploration. We propose using few-shot large language models (LLMs) to hypothesize an AWM, that will be verified through world experience, to improve sample efficiency of RL agents. Our DECKARD agent applies LLM-guided exploration to item crafting in Minecraft in two phases: (1) the Dream phase where the agent uses an LLM to decompose a task into a sequence of subgoals, the hypothesized AWM; and (2) the Wake phase where the agent learns a modular policy for each subgoal and verifies or corrects the hypothesized AWM. Our method of hypothesizing an AWM with LLMs and then verifying the AWM based on agent experience not only increases sample efficiency over contemporary methods by an order of magnitude but is also robust to and corrects errors in the LLM, successfully blending noisy internet-scale information from LLMs with knowledge grounded in environment dynamics.

Lattice-based planning techniques simplify the motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles by limiting available motions to a pre-computed set of primitives. These primitives are then combined online to generate more complex maneuvers. A set of motion primitives t-span a lattice if, given a real number t at least 1, any configuration in the lattice can be reached via a sequence of motion primitives whose cost is no more than a factor of t from optimal. Computing a minimal t-spanning set balances a trade-off between computed motion quality and motion planning performance. In this work, we formulate this problem for an arbitrary lattice as a mixed integer linear program. We also propose an A*-based algorithm to solve the motion planning problem using these primitives. Finally, we present an algorithm that removes the excessive oscillations from planned motions -- a common problem in lattice-based planning. Our method is validated for autonomous driving in both parking lot and highway scenarios.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents hold great potential for automating complex tasks across diverse digital environments, from web applications to desktop software. However, the development of such agents is hindered by the lack of high-quality, multi-step trajectory data required for effective training. Existing approaches rely on expensive and labor-intensive human annotation, making them unsustainable at scale. To address this challenge, we propose AgentTrek, a scalable data synthesis pipeline that generates high-quality GUI agent trajectories by leveraging web tutorials. Our method automatically gathers tutorial-like texts from the internet, transforms them into task goals with step-by-step instructions, and employs a visual-language model agent to simulate their execution in a real digital environment. A VLM-based evaluator ensures the correctness of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with these synthesized trajectories significantly improves their grounding and planning performance over the current models. Moreover, our approach is more cost-efficient compared to traditional human annotation methods. This work underscores the potential of guided replay with web tutorials as a viable strategy for large-scale GUI agent training, paving the way for more capable and autonomous digital agents.

One key challenge in Augmented Reality is the placement of virtual content in natural locations. Most existing automated techniques can only work with a closed-vocabulary, fixed set of objects. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate several methods for automatic object placement using recent advances in open-vocabulary vision-language models. Through a multifaceted evaluation, we identify a new state-of-the-art method, OCTO+. We also introduce a benchmark for automatically evaluating the placement of virtual objects in augmented reality, alleviating the need for costly user studies. Through this, in addition to human evaluations, we find that OCTO+ places objects in a valid region over 70% of the time, outperforming other methods on a range of metrics.

In the field of graphic design, automating the integration of design elements into a cohesive multi-layered artwork not only boosts productivity but also paves the way for the democratization of graphic design. One existing practice is Graphic Layout Generation (GLG), which aims to layout sequential design elements. It has been constrained by the necessity for a predefined correct sequence of layers, thus limiting creative potential and increasing user workload. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Layout Generation (HLG) as a more flexible and pragmatic setup, which creates graphic composition from unordered sets of design elements. To tackle the HLG task, we introduce Graphist, the first layout generation model based on large multimodal models. Graphist efficiently reframes the HLG as a sequence generation problem, utilizing RGB-A images as input, outputs a JSON draft protocol, indicating the coordinates, size, and order of each element. We develop new evaluation metrics for HLG. Graphist outperforms prior arts and establishes a strong baseline for this field. Project homepage: https://github.com/graphic-design-ai/graphist

How can we better organize code in computational notebooks? Notebooks have become a popular tool among data scientists, as they seamlessly weave text and code together, supporting users to rapidly iterate and document code experiments. However, it is often challenging to organize code in notebooks, partially because there is a mismatch between the linear presentation of code and the non-linear process of exploratory data analysis. We present StickyLand, a notebook extension for empowering users to freely organize their code in non-linear ways. With sticky cells that are always shown on the screen, users can quickly access their notes, instantly observe experiment results, and easily build interactive dashboards that support complex visual analytics. Case studies highlight how our tool can enhance notebook users's productivity and identify opportunities for future notebook designs. StickyLand is available at https://github.com/xiaohk/stickyland.