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RIO: A Benchmark for Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects in Open Environments

Neural Information Processing Systems

Intention-oriented object detection aims to detect desired objects based on specific intentions or requirements. For instance, when we desire to lie down and rest, we instinctively seek out a suitable option such as a bed or a sofa that can fulfill our needs. Previous work in this area is limited either by the number of intention descriptions or by the affordance vocabulary available for intention objects. These limitations make it challenging to handle intentions in open environments effectively. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive dataset called Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects (RIO). In particular, RIO is specifically designed to incorporate diverse real-world scenarios and a wide range of object categories. It offers the following key features: 1) intention descriptions in RIO are represented as natural sentences rather than a mere word or verb phrase, making them more practical and meaningful; 2) the intention descriptions are contextually relevant to the scene, enabling a broader range of potential functionalities associated with the objects; 3) the dataset comprises a total of 40,214 images and 130,585 intention-object pairs. With the proposed RIO, we evaluate the ability of some existing models to reason intention-oriented objects in open environments.


Anticipating Degradation: A Predictive Approach to Fault Tolerance in Robot Swarms

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--An active approach to fault tolerance is essential for robot swarms to achieve long-term autonomy. Previous e fforts have focused on responding to spontaneous electro-mechanical faults and failures. However, many faults occur gradually over time. This work argues that the principles of predictive maintenance, in which potential faults are resolved before they hinder the operation of the swarm, o ffer a promising means of achieving long-term fault tolerance. This is a novel approach to swarm fault tolerance, which is shown to give a comparable or improved performance when tested against a reactive approach in almost all cases tested. However, a significant barrier to the deployment of autonomous robots in many real-world applications is the risk of failure or loss of autonomous control in the field.



Beyond the Seen: Bounded Distribution Estimation for Open-Vocabulary Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Open-vocabulary learning requires modeling the data distribution in open environments, which consists of both seen-class and unseen-class data. Existing methods estimate the distribution in open environments using seen-class data, where the absence of unseen classes makes the estimation error inherently unidentifiable. Intuitively, learning beyond the seen classes is crucial for distribution estimation to bound the estimation error. We theoretically demonstrate that the distribution can be effectively estimated by generating unseen-class data, through which the estimation error is upper-bounded. Building on this theoretical insight, we propose a novel open-vocabulary learning method, which generates unseen-class data for estimating the distribution in open environments. The method consists of a class-domain-wise data generation pipeline and a distribution alignment algorithm. The data generation pipeline generates unseen-class data under the guidance of a hierarchical semantic tree and domain information inferred from the seen-class data, facilitating accurate distribution estimation. With the generated data, the distribution alignment algorithm estimates and maximizes the posterior probability to enhance generalization in open-vocabulary learning. Extensive experiments on $11$ datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches by up to $14\%$, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority.


Spore in the Wild: A Case Study of Spore.fun as an Open-Environment Evolution Experiment with Sovereign AI Agents on TEE-Secured Blockchains

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In Artificial Life (ALife) research, replicating Open-Ended Evolution (OEE)-the continuous emergence of novelty observed in biological life-has usually been pursued within isolated, closed system simulations, such as Tierra and Avida, which have typically plateaued after an initial burst of novelty, failing to achieve sustained OEE. Scholars suggest that OEE requires an open-environment system that continually exchanges information or energy with its environment. A recent technological innovation in Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN), which provides permissionless computational substrates, enables the deployment of Large Language Model-based AI agents on blockchains integrated with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This enables on-chain agents to operate autonomously "in the wild," achieving self-sovereignty without human oversight. These agents can control their own social media accounts and cryptocurrency wallets, allowing them to interact directly with blockchain-based financial networks and broader human social media. Building on this new paradigm of on-chain agents, Spore.fun is a recent real-world AI evolution experiment that enables autonomous breeding and evolution of new on-chain agents. This paper presents a detailed case study of Spore.fun, examining agent behaviors and their evolutionary trajectories through digital ethology. We aim to spark discussion about whether open-environment ALife systems "in the wild," based on permissionless computational substrates and driven by economic incentives to interact with their environment, could finally achieve the long-sought goal of OEE.


EANS: Reducing Energy Consumption for UAV with an Environmental Adaptive Navigation Strategy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS) are limited by the onboard energy. Refinement of the navigation strategy directly affects both the flight velocity and the trajectory based on the adjustment of key parameters in the UAVS pipeline, thus reducing energy consumption. However, existing techniques tend to adopt static and conservative strategies in dynamic scenarios, leading to inefficient energy reduction. Dynamically adjusting the navigation strategy requires overcoming the challenges including the task pipeline interdependencies, the environmental-strategy correlations, and the selecting parameters. To solve the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a method to dynamically adjust the navigation strategy of the UAVS by analyzing its dynamic characteristics and the temporal characteristics of the autonomous navigation pipeline, thereby reducing UAVS energy consumption in response to environmental changes. We compare our method with the baseline through hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation and real-world experiments, showing our method 3.2X and 2.6X improvements in mission time, 2.4X and 1.6X improvements in energy, respectively.


Realistic Evaluation of TabPFN v2 in Open Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tabular data, owing to its ubiquitous presence in real-world domains, has garnered significant attention in machine learning research. While tree-based models have long dominated tabular machine learning tasks, the recently proposed deep learning model TabPFN v2 has emerged, demonstrating unparalleled performance and scalability potential. Although extensive research has been conducted on TabPFN v2 to further improve performance, the majority of this research remains confined to closed environments, neglecting the challenges that frequently arise in open environments. This raises the question: Can TabPFN v2 maintain good performance in open environments? To this end, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of TabPFN v2's adaptability in open environments. We construct a unified evaluation framework covering various real-world challenges and assess the robustness of TabPFN v2 under open environments scenarios using this framework. Empirical results demonstrate that TabPFN v2 shows significant limitations in open environments but is suitable for small-scale, covariate-shifted, and class-balanced tasks. Tree-based models remain the optimal choice for general tabular tasks in open environments. To facilitate future research on open environments challenges, we advocate for open environments tabular benchmarks, multi-metric evaluation, and universal modules to strengthen model robustness. We publicly release our evaluation framework at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tabpfn-ood-4E65.


Understanding Dynamic Diffusion Process of LLM-based Agents under Information Asymmetry

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models have been used to simulate human society using multi-agent systems. Most current social simulation research emphasizes interactive behaviors in fixed environments, ignoring information opacity, relationship variability and diffusion diversity. In this paper, we study the dynamics of information diffusion in 12 asymmetric open environments defined by information content and distribution mechanisms. We first present a general framework to capture the features of information diffusion. Then, we designed a dynamic attention mechanism to help agents allocate attention to different information, addressing the limitations of LLM-based attention. Agents start by responding to external information stimuli within a five-agent group, increasing group size and forming information circles while developing relationships and sharing information. Additionally, we observe the emergence of information cocoons, the evolution of information gaps, and the accumulation of social capital, which are closely linked to psychological, sociological, and communication theories.


TabFSBench: Tabular Benchmark for Feature Shifts in Open Environment

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tabular data is widely utilized in various machine learning tasks. Current tabular learning research predominantly focuses on closed environments, while in real-world applications, open environments are often encountered, where distribution and feature shifts occur, leading to significant degradation in model performance. Previous research has primarily concentrated on mitigating distribution shifts, whereas feature shifts, a distinctive and unexplored challenge of tabular data, have garnered limited attention. To this end, this paper conducts the first comprehensive study on feature shifts in tabular data and introduces the first tabular feature-shift benchmark (TabFSBench). TabFSBench evaluates impacts of four distinct feature-shift scenarios on four tabular model categories across various datasets and assesses the performance of large language models (LLMs) and tabular LLMs in the tabular benchmark for the first time. Our study demonstrates three main observations: (1) most tabular models have the limited applicability in feature-shift scenarios; (2) the shifted feature set importance has a linear relationship with model performance degradation; (3) model performance in closed environments correlates with feature-shift performance. Future research direction is also explored for each observation. TabFSBench is released for public access by using a few lines of Python codes at https://github.com/LAMDASZ-ML/TabFSBench.