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Collaborating Authors

 Xu, Xinrun


Being-0: A Humanoid Robotic Agent with Vision-Language Models and Modular Skills

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Building autonomous robotic agents capable of achieving human-level performance in real-world embodied tasks is an ultimate goal in humanoid robot research. Recent advances have made significant progress in high-level cognition with Foundation Models (FMs) and low-level skill development for humanoid robots. However, directly combining these components often results in poor robustness and efficiency due to compounding errors in long-horizon tasks and the varied latency of different modules. We introduce Being-0, a hierarchical agent framework that integrates an FM with a modular skill library. The FM handles high-level cognitive tasks such as instruction understanding, task planning, and reasoning, while the skill library provides stable locomotion and dexterous manipulation for low-level control. To bridge the gap between these levels, we propose a novel Connector module, powered by a lightweight vision-language model (VLM). The Connector enhances the FM's embodied capabilities by translating language-based plans into actionable skill commands and dynamically coordinating locomotion and manipulation to improve task success. With all components, except the FM, deployable on low-cost onboard computation devices, Being-0 achieves efficient, real-time performance on a full-sized humanoid robot equipped with dexterous hands and active vision. Extensive experiments in large indoor environments demonstrate Being-0's effectiveness in solving complex, long-horizon tasks that require challenging navigation and manipulation subtasks. For further details and videos, visit https://beingbeyond.github.io/being-0.


Vulnerability of Text-to-Image Models to Prompt Template Stealing: A Differential Evolution Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Prompt trading has emerged as a significant intellectual property concern in recent years, where vendors entice users by showcasing sample images before selling prompt templates that can generate similar images. This work investigates a critical security vulnerability: attackers can steal prompt templates using only a limited number of sample images. To investigate this threat, we introduce Prism, a prompt-stealing benchmark consisting of 50 templates and 450 images, organized into Easy and Hard difficulty levels. To identify the vulnerabity of VLMs to prompt stealing, we propose EvoStealer, a novel template stealing method that operates without model fine-tuning by leveraging differential evolution algorithms. The system first initializes population sets using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) based on predefined patterns, then iteratively generates enhanced offspring through MLLMs. During evolution, EvoStealer identifies common features across offspring to derive generalized templates. Our comprehensive evaluation conducted across open-source (INTERNVL2-26B) and closed-source models (GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini) demonstrates that EvoStealer's stolen templates can reproduce images highly similar to originals and effectively generalize to other subjects, significantly outperforming baseline methods with an average improvement of over 10%. Moreover, our cost analysis reveals that EvoStealer achieves template stealing with negligible computational expenses. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/whitepagewu/evostealer.


Extract Information from Hybrid Long Documents Leveraging LLMs: A Framework and Dataset

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in textual understanding and tabular reasoning tasks. However, their ability to comprehend and analyze hybrid text, containing textual and tabular data, remains unexplored. The hybrid text often appears in the form of hybrid long documents (HLDs), which far exceed the token limit of LLMs. Consequently, we apply an Automated Information Extraction framework (AIE) to enable LLMs to process the HLDs and carry out experiments to analyse four important aspects of information extraction from HLDs. Given the findings: 1) The effective way to select and summarize the useful part of a HLD. 2) An easy table serialization way is enough for LLMs to understand tables. 3) The naive AIE has adaptability in many complex scenarios. 4) The useful prompt engineering to enhance LLMs on HLDs. To address the issue of dataset scarcity in HLDs and support future work, we also propose the Financial Reports Numerical Extraction (FINE) dataset. The dataset and code are publicly available in the attachments.


SELU: Self-Learning Embodied MLLMs in Unknown Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong visual understanding and decision-making capabilities, enabling the exploration of autonomously improving MLLMs in unknown environments. However, external feedback like human or environmental feedback is not always available. To address this challenge, existing methods primarily focus on enhancing the decision-making capabilities of MLLMs through voting and scoring mechanisms, while little effort has been paid to improving the environmental comprehension of MLLMs in unknown environments. To fully unleash the self-learning potential of MLLMs, we propose a novel actor-critic self-learning paradigm, dubbed SELU, inspired by the actor-critic paradigm in reinforcement learning. The critic employs self-asking and hindsight relabeling to extract knowledge from interaction trajectories collected by the actor, thereby augmenting its environmental comprehension. Simultaneously, the actor is improved by the self-feedback provided by the critic, enhancing its decision-making. We evaluate our method in the AI2-THOR and VirtualHome environments, and SELU achieves critic improvements of approximately 28% and 30%, and actor improvements of about 20% and 24% via self-learning. Thanks to their powerful capabilities, many works, e.g., Jarvis-1 (Wang et al., 2023b), STEVE-1 (Lifshitz et al., 2023), and Cradle (Tan et al., 2024b), directly utilize the pre-trained MLLMs to complete various decision-making tasks in different embodied environments. However, the generalization ability of existing pre-trained MLLMs cannot meet the needs of all environments. For some uncommon environments, embodied MLLMs often exhibit hallucinations and poor visual understanding (Huang et al., 2024; Jiang et al., 2024). In more detail, they cannot distinguish left from right and fail to recognize where objects are (Tan et al., 2024b). The reason is that MLLMs have not been further grounded with the environments (Su et al., 2022; Sun et al., 2024). Grounding can be realized by fine-tuning on the experiences from interacting with the environments.


Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite the success in specific scenarios, existing foundation agents still struggle to generalize across various virtual scenarios, mainly due to the dramatically different encapsulations of environments with manually designed observation and action spaces. To handle this issue, we propose the General Computer Control (GCC) setting to restrict foundation agents to interact with software through the most unified and standardized interface, i.e., using screenshots as input and keyboard and mouse actions as output. We introduce Cradle, a modular and flexible LMM-powered framework, as a preliminary attempt towards GCC. Enhanced by six key modules, Cradle can understand input screenshots and output executable code for low-level keyboard and mouse control after high-level planning, so that Cradle can interact with any software and complete long-horizon complex tasks without relying on any built-in APIs. Experimental results show that Cradle exhibits remarkable generalizability and impressive performance across four previously unexplored commercial video games, five software applications, and a comprehensive benchmark, OSWorld. Cradle is the first to enable foundation agents to follow the main storyline and complete 40-minute-long real missions in the complex AAA game Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2). Cradle can also create a city of a thousand people in Cities: Skylines, farm and harvest parsnips in Stardew Valley, and trade and bargain with a maximal weekly total profit of 87% in Dealer's Life 2. Cradle can not only operate daily software, like Chrome, Outlook, and Feishu, but also edit images and videos using Meitu and CapCut. Cradle greatly extends the reach of foundation agents by enabling the easy conversion of any software, especially complex games, into benchmarks to evaluate agents' various abilities and facilitate further data collection, thus paving the way for generalist agents.


A Clustering Method with Graph Maximum Decoding Information

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The clustering method based on graph models has garnered increased attention for its widespread applicability across various knowledge domains. Its adaptability to integrate seamlessly with other relevant applications endows the graph model-based clustering analysis with the ability to robustly extract "natural associations" or "graph structures" within datasets, facilitating the modelling of relationships between data points. Despite its efficacy, the current clustering method utilizing the graph-based model overlooks the uncertainty associated with random walk access between nodes and the embedded structural information in the data. To address this gap, we present a novel Clustering method for Maximizing Decoding Information within graph-based models, named CMDI. CMDI innovatively incorporates two-dimensional structural information theory into the clustering process, consisting of two phases: graph structure extraction and graph vertex partitioning. Within CMDI, graph partitioning is reformulated as an abstract clustering problem, leveraging maximum decoding information to minimize uncertainty associated with random visits to vertices. Empirical evaluations on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CMDI outperforms classical baseline methods, exhibiting a superior decoding information ratio (DI-R). Furthermore, CMDI showcases heightened efficiency, particularly when considering prior knowledge (PK). These findings underscore the effectiveness of CMDI in enhancing decoding information quality and computational efficiency, positioning it as a valuable tool in graph-based clustering analyses.


A Multi-constraint and Multi-objective Allocation Model for Emergency Rescue in IoT Environment

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Emergency relief operations are essential in disaster aftermaths, necessitating effective resource allocation to minimize negative impacts and maximize benefits. In prolonged crises or extensive disasters, a systematic, multi-cycle approach is key for timely and informed decision-making. Leveraging advancements in IoT and spatio-temporal data analytics, we've developed the Multi-Objective Shuffled Gray-Wolf Frog Leaping Model (MSGW-FLM). This multi-constraint, multi-objective resource allocation model has been rigorously tested against 28 diverse challenges, showing superior performance in comparison to established models such as NSGA-II, IBEA, and MOEA/D. MSGW-FLM's effectiveness is particularly notable in complex, multi-cycle emergency rescue scenarios, which involve numerous constraints and objectives. This model represents a significant step forward in optimizing resource distribution in emergency response situations.


A Survey on Game Playing Agents and Large Models: Methods, Applications, and Challenges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The swift evolution of Large-scale Models (LMs), either language-focused or multi-modal, has garnered extensive attention in both academy and industry. But despite the surge in interest in this rapidly evolving area, there are scarce systematic reviews on their capabilities and potential in distinct impactful scenarios. This paper endeavours to help bridge this gap, offering a thorough examination of the current landscape of LM usage in regards to complex game playing scenarios and the challenges still open. Here, we seek to systematically review the existing architectures of LM-based Agents (LMAs) for games and summarize their commonalities, challenges, and any other insights. Furthermore, we present our perspective on promising future research avenues for the advancement of LMs in games. We hope to assist researchers in gaining a clear understanding of the field and to generate more interest in this highly impactful research direction. A corresponding resource, continuously updated, can be found in our GitHub repository.


Can Large Language Models Recall Reference Location Like Humans?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

When completing knowledge-intensive tasks, humans sometimes need not just an answer but also a corresponding reference passage for auxiliary reading. Previous methods required obtaining pre-segmented article chunks through additional retrieval models. This paper explores leveraging the parameterized knowledge stored during the pre-training phase of large language models (LLMs) to independently recall reference passage from any starting position. We propose a two-stage framework that simulates the scenario of humans recalling easily forgotten references. Initially, the LLM is prompted to recall document title identifiers to obtain a coarse-grained document set. Then, based on the acquired coarse-grained document set, it recalls fine-grained passage. In the two-stage recall process, we use constrained decoding to ensure that content outside of the stored documents is not generated. To increase speed, we only recall a short prefix in the second stage, then locate its position to retrieve a complete passage. Experiments on KILT knowledge-sensitive tasks have verified that LLMs can independently recall reference passage location in various task forms, and the obtained reference significantly assist downstream tasks.


Text2Analysis: A Benchmark of Table Question Answering with Advanced Data Analysis and Unclear Queries

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tabular data analysis is crucial in various fields, and large language models show promise in this area. However, current research mostly focuses on rudimentary tasks like Text2SQL and TableQA, neglecting advanced analysis like forecasting and chart generation. To address this gap, we developed the Text2Analysis benchmark, incorporating advanced analysis tasks that go beyond the SQL-compatible operations and require more in-depth analysis. We also develop five innovative and effective annotation methods, harnessing the capabilities of large language models to enhance data quality and quantity. Additionally, we include unclear queries that resemble real-world user questions to test how well models can understand and tackle such challenges. Finally, we collect 2249 query-result pairs with 347 tables. We evaluate five state-of-the-art models using three different metrics and the results show that our benchmark presents introduces considerable challenge in the field of tabular data analysis, paving the way for more advanced research opportunities.