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SubscribeHuman-in-the-loop Embodied Intelligence with Interactive Simulation Environment for Surgical Robot Learning
Surgical robot automation has attracted increasing research interest over the past decade, expecting its potential to benefit surgeons, nurses and patients. Recently, the learning paradigm of embodied intelligence has demonstrated promising ability to learn good control policies for various complex tasks, where embodied AI simulators play an essential role to facilitate relevant research. However, existing open-sourced simulators for surgical robot are still not sufficiently supporting human interactions through physical input devices, which further limits effective investigations on how the human demonstrations would affect policy learning. In this work, we study human-in-the-loop embodied intelligence with a new interactive simulation platform for surgical robot learning. Specifically, we establish our platform based on our previously released SurRoL simulator with several new features co-developed to allow high-quality human interaction via an input device. We showcase the improvement of our simulation environment with the designed new features, and validate effectiveness of incorporating human factors in embodied intelligence through the use of human demonstrations and reinforcement learning as a representative example. Promising results are obtained in terms of learning efficiency. Lastly, five new surgical robot training tasks are developed and released, with which we hope to pave the way for future research on surgical embodied intelligence. Our learning platform is publicly released and will be continuously updated in the website: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL.
A Survey on Robotics with Foundation Models: toward Embodied AI
While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization capabilities, so that they can perform general-purpose tasks in open, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Recent advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and multi-modality learning have shown that the foundation models have superhuman capabilities for specific tasks. They not only provide a solid cornerstone for integrating basic modules into embodied AI systems but also shed light on how to scale up robot learning from a methodological perspective. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of foundation models in robotics, focusing on autonomous manipulation and encompassing high-level planning and low-level control. Moreover, we showcase their commonly used datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Importantly, we emphasize the critical challenges intrinsic to this field and delineate potential avenues for future research, contributing to advancing the frontier of academic and industrial discourse.
Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots
We present Habitat 3.0: a simulation platform for studying collaborative human-robot tasks in home environments. Habitat 3.0 offers contributions across three dimensions: (1) Accurate humanoid simulation: addressing challenges in modeling complex deformable bodies and diversity in appearance and motion, all while ensuring high simulation speed. (2) Human-in-the-loop infrastructure: enabling real human interaction with simulated robots via mouse/keyboard or a VR interface, facilitating evaluation of robot policies with human input. (3) Collaborative tasks: studying two collaborative tasks, Social Navigation and Social Rearrangement. Social Navigation investigates a robot's ability to locate and follow humanoid avatars in unseen environments, whereas Social Rearrangement addresses collaboration between a humanoid and robot while rearranging a scene. These contributions allow us to study end-to-end learned and heuristic baselines for human-robot collaboration in-depth, as well as evaluate them with humans in the loop. Our experiments demonstrate that learned robot policies lead to efficient task completion when collaborating with unseen humanoid agents and human partners that might exhibit behaviors that the robot has not seen before. Additionally, we observe emergent behaviors during collaborative task execution, such as the robot yielding space when obstructing a humanoid agent, thereby allowing the effective completion of the task by the humanoid agent. Furthermore, our experiments using the human-in-the-loop tool demonstrate that our automated evaluation with humanoids can provide an indication of the relative ordering of different policies when evaluated with real human collaborators. Habitat 3.0 unlocks interesting new features in simulators for Embodied AI, and we hope it paves the way for a new frontier of embodied human-AI interaction capabilities.
Learning to Fly -- a Gym Environment with PyBullet Physics for Reinforcement Learning of Multi-agent Quadcopter Control
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.
Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators
Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.
Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agents
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.
Building reliable sim driving agents by scaling self-play
Simulation agents are essential for designing and testing systems that interact with humans, such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). These agents serve various purposes, from benchmarking AV performance to stress-testing the system's limits, but all use cases share a key requirement: reliability. A simulation agent should behave as intended by the designer, minimizing unintended actions like collisions that can compromise the signal-to-noise ratio of analyses. As a foundation for reliable sim agents, we propose scaling self-play to thousands of scenarios on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset under semi-realistic limits on human perception and control. Training from scratch on a single GPU, our agents nearly solve the full training set within a day. They generalize effectively to unseen test scenes, achieving a 99.8% goal completion rate with less than 0.8% combined collision and off-road incidents across 10,000 held-out scenarios. Beyond in-distribution generalization, our agents show partial robustness to out-of-distribution scenes and can be fine-tuned in minutes to reach near-perfect performance in those cases. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at this link. We open-source both the pre-trained agents and the complete code base. Demonstrations of agent behaviors can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/reliable-sim-agents.
RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have largely been propelled by scaling. In Robotics, scaling is hindered by the lack of access to massive robot datasets. We advocate using realistic physical simulation as a means to scale environments, tasks, and datasets for robot learning methods. We present RoboCasa, a large-scale simulation framework for training generalist robots in everyday environments. RoboCasa features realistic and diverse scenes focusing on kitchen environments. We provide thousands of 3D assets across over 150 object categories and dozens of interactable furniture and appliances. We enrich the realism and diversity of our simulation with generative AI tools, such as object assets from text-to-3D models and environment textures from text-to-image models. We design a set of 100 tasks for systematic evaluation, including composite tasks generated by the guidance of large language models. To facilitate learning, we provide high-quality human demonstrations and integrate automated trajectory generation methods to substantially enlarge our datasets with minimal human burden. Our experiments show a clear scaling trend in using synthetically generated robot data for large-scale imitation learning and show great promise in harnessing simulation data in real-world tasks. Videos and open-source code are available at https://robocasa.ai/
Human-like Bots for Tactical Shooters Using Compute-Efficient Sensors
Artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled agents to master complex video games, from first-person shooters like Counter-Strike to real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II and racing games like Gran Turismo. While these achievements are notable, applying these AI methods in commercial video game production remains challenging due to computational constraints. In commercial scenarios, the majority of computational resources are allocated to 3D rendering, leaving limited capacity for AI methods, which often demand high computational power, particularly those relying on pixel-based sensors. Moreover, the gaming industry prioritizes creating human-like behavior in AI agents to enhance player experience, unlike academic models that focus on maximizing game performance. This paper introduces a novel methodology for training neural networks via imitation learning to play a complex, commercial-standard, VALORANT-like 2v2 tactical shooter game, requiring only modest CPU hardware during inference. Our approach leverages an innovative, pixel-free perception architecture using a small set of ray-cast sensors, which capture essential spatial information efficiently. These sensors allow AI to perform competently without the computational overhead of traditional methods. Models are trained to mimic human behavior using supervised learning on human trajectory data, resulting in realistic and engaging AI agents. Human evaluation tests confirm that our AI agents provide human-like gameplay experiences while operating efficiently under computational constraints. This offers a significant advancement in AI model development for tactical shooter games and possibly other genres.
DialSim: A Real-Time Simulator for Evaluating Long-Term Dialogue Understanding of Conversational Agents
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of conversational agents, making them applicable to various fields (e.g., education). Despite their progress, the evaluation of the agents often overlooks the complexities of real-world conversations, such as real-time interactions, multi-party dialogues, and extended contextual dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce DialSim, a real-time dialogue simulator. In this simulator, an agent is assigned the role of a character from popular TV shows, requiring it to respond to spontaneous questions using past dialogue information and to distinguish between known and unknown information. Key features of DialSim include evaluating the agent's ability to respond within a reasonable time limit, handling long-term multi-party dialogues, and managing adversarial settings (e.g., swap character names) to challenge the agent's reliance on pre-trained knowledge. We utilized this simulator to evaluate the latest conversational agents and analyze their limitations. Our experiments highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of these agents, providing valuable insights for future improvements in the field of conversational AI. DialSim is available at https://github.com/jiho283/Simulator.
EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment
Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.
Help, Anna! Visual Navigation with Natural Multimodal Assistance via Retrospective Curiosity-Encouraging Imitation Learning
Mobile agents that can leverage help from humans can potentially accomplish more complex tasks than they could entirely on their own. We develop "Help, Anna!" (HANNA), an interactive photo-realistic simulator in which an agent fulfills object-finding tasks by requesting and interpreting natural language-and-vision assistance. An agent solving tasks in a HANNA environment can leverage simulated human assistants, called ANNA (Automatic Natural Navigation Assistants), which, upon request, provide natural language and visual instructions to direct the agent towards the goals. To address the HANNA problem, we develop a memory-augmented neural agent that hierarchically models multiple levels of decision-making, and an imitation learning algorithm that teaches the agent to avoid repeating past mistakes while simultaneously predicting its own chances of making future progress. Empirically, our approach is able to ask for help more effectively than competitive baselines and, thus, attains higher task success rate on both previously seen and previously unseen environments. We publicly release code and data at https://github.com/khanhptnk/hanna . A video demo is available at https://youtu.be/18P94aaaLKg .
KAUCUS: Knowledge Augmented User Simulators for Training Language Model Assistants
An effective multi-turn instruction-following assistant can be developed by creating a simulator that can generate useful interaction data. Apart from relying on its intrinsic weights, an ideal user simulator should also be able to bootstrap external knowledge rapidly in its raw form to simulate the multifarious diversity of text available over the internet. Previous user simulators generally lacked diversity, were mostly closed domain, and necessitated rigid schema making them inefficient to rapidly scale to incorporate external knowledge. In this regard, we introduce, Kaucus, a Knowledge-Augmented User Simulator framework, to outline a process of creating diverse user simulators, that can seamlessly exploit external knowledge as well as benefit downstream assistant model training. Through two GPT-J based simulators viz., a Retrieval Augmented Simulator and a Summary Controlled Simulator we generate diverse simulator-assistant interactions. Through reward and preference model-based evaluations, we find that these interactions serve as useful training data and create more helpful downstream assistants. We also find that incorporating knowledge through retrieval augmentation or summary control helps create better assistants.
Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat
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.
An Interactive Agent Foundation Model
The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent Foundation Model that uses a novel multi-task agent training paradigm for training AI agents across a wide range of domains, datasets, and tasks. Our training paradigm unifies diverse pre-training strategies, including visual masked auto-encoders, language modeling, and next-action prediction, enabling a versatile and adaptable AI framework. We demonstrate the performance of our framework across three separate domains -- Robotics, Gaming AI, and Healthcare. Our model demonstrates its ability to generate meaningful and contextually relevant outputs in each area. The strength of our approach lies in its generality, leveraging a variety of data sources such as robotics sequences, gameplay data, large-scale video datasets, and textual information for effective multimodal and multi-task learning. Our approach provides a promising avenue for developing generalist, action-taking, multimodal systems.
Learning 3D Particle-based Simulators from RGB-D Videos
Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Traditional analytic simulators sometimes struggle to capture sufficiently realistic simulation which can lead to problems including the well known "sim-to-real" gap in robotics. Learned simulators have emerged as an alternative for better capturing real-world physical dynamics, but require access to privileged ground truth physics information such as precise object geometry or particle tracks. Here we propose a method for learning simulators directly from observations. Visual Particle Dynamics (VPD) jointly learns a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a neural simulator of the latent particle dynamics, and a renderer that can produce images of the scene from arbitrary views. VPD learns end to end from posed RGB-D videos and does not require access to privileged information. Unlike existing 2D video prediction models, we show that VPD's 3D structure enables scene editing and long-term predictions. These results pave the way for downstream applications ranging from video editing to robotic planning.
Preference-conditioned Pixel-based AI Agent For Game Testing
The game industry is challenged to cope with increasing growth in demand and game complexity while maintaining acceptable quality standards for released games. Classic approaches solely depending on human efforts for quality assurance and game testing do not scale effectively in terms of time and cost. Game-testing AI agents that learn by interaction with the environment have the potential to mitigate these challenges with good scalability properties on time and costs. However, most recent work in this direction depends on game state information for the agent's state representation, which limits generalization across different game scenarios. Moreover, game test engineers usually prefer exploring a game in a specific style, such as exploring the golden path. However, current game testing AI agents do not provide an explicit way to satisfy such a preference. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing an agent design that mainly depends on pixel-based state observations while exploring the environment conditioned on a user's preference specified by demonstration trajectories. In addition, we propose an imitation learning method that couples self-supervised and supervised learning objectives to enhance the quality of imitation behaviors. Our agent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art pixel-based game testing agents over exploration coverage and test execution quality when evaluated on a complex open-world environment resembling many aspects of real AAA games.
IRASim: Learning Interactive Real-Robot Action Simulators
Scalable robot learning in the real world is limited by the cost and safety issues of real robots. In addition, rolling out robot trajectories in the real world can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to learn an interactive real-robot action simulator as an alternative. We introduce a novel method, IRASim, which leverages the power of generative models to generate extremely realistic videos of a robot arm that executes a given action trajectory, starting from an initial given frame. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we create a new benchmark, IRASim Benchmark, based on three real-robot datasets and perform extensive experiments on the benchmark. Results show that IRASim outperforms all the baseline methods and is more preferable in human evaluations. We hope that IRASim can serve as an effective and scalable approach to enhance robot learning in the real world. To promote research for generative real-robot action simulators, we open-source code, benchmark, and checkpoints at https: //gen-irasim.github.io.
HAICOSYSTEM: An Ecosystem for Sandboxing Safety Risks in Human-AI Interactions
AI agents are increasingly autonomous in their interactions with human users and tools, leading to increased interactional safety risks. We present HAICOSYSTEM, a framework examining AI agent safety within diverse and complex social interactions. HAICOSYSTEM features a modular sandbox environment that simulates multi-turn interactions between human users and AI agents, where the AI agents are equipped with a variety of tools (e.g., patient management platforms) to navigate diverse scenarios (e.g., a user attempting to access other patients' profiles). To examine the safety of AI agents in these interactions, we develop a comprehensive multi-dimensional evaluation framework that uses metrics covering operational, content-related, societal, and legal risks. Through running 1840 simulations based on 92 scenarios across seven domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education), we demonstrate that HAICOSYSTEM can emulate realistic user-AI interactions and complex tool use by AI agents. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs, both proprietary and open-sourced, exhibit safety risks in over 50\% cases, with models generally showing higher risks when interacting with simulated malicious users. Our findings highlight the ongoing challenge of building agents that can safely navigate complex interactions, particularly when faced with malicious users. To foster the AI agent safety ecosystem, we release a code platform that allows practitioners to create custom scenarios, simulate interactions, and evaluate the safety and performance of their agents.
JaxLife: An Open-Ended Agentic Simulator
Human intelligence emerged through the process of natural selection and evolution on Earth. We investigate what it would take to re-create this process in silico. While past work has often focused on low-level processes (such as simulating physics or chemistry), we instead take a more targeted approach, aiming to evolve agents that can accumulate open-ended culture and technologies across generations. Towards this, we present JaxLife: an artificial life simulator in which embodied agents, parameterized by deep neural networks, must learn to survive in an expressive world containing programmable systems. First, we describe the environment and show that it can facilitate meaningful Turing-complete computation. We then analyze the evolved emergent agents' behavior, such as rudimentary communication protocols, agriculture, and tool use. Finally, we investigate how complexity scales with the amount of compute used. We believe JaxLife takes a step towards studying evolved behavior in more open-ended simulations. Our code is available at https://github.com/luchris429/JaxLife
Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human
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.
Waymax: An Accelerated, Data-Driven Simulator for Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Research
Simulation is an essential tool to develop and benchmark autonomous vehicle planning software in a safe and cost-effective manner. However, realistic simulation requires accurate modeling of nuanced and complex multi-agent interactive behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce Waymax, a new data-driven simulator for autonomous driving in multi-agent scenes, designed for large-scale simulation and testing. Waymax uses publicly-released, real-world driving data (e.g., the Waymo Open Motion Dataset) to initialize or play back a diverse set of multi-agent simulated scenarios. It runs entirely on hardware accelerators such as TPUs/GPUs and supports in-graph simulation for training, making it suitable for modern large-scale, distributed machine learning workflows. To support online training and evaluation, Waymax includes several learned and hard-coded behavior models that allow for realistic interaction within simulation. To supplement Waymax, we benchmark a suite of popular imitation and reinforcement learning algorithms with ablation studies on different design decisions, where we highlight the effectiveness of routes as guidance for planning agents and the ability of RL to overfit against simulated agents.
GenSim2: Scaling Robot Data Generation with Multi-modal and Reasoning LLMs
Robotic simulation today remains challenging to scale up due to the human efforts required to create diverse simulation tasks and scenes. Simulation-trained policies also face scalability issues as many sim-to-real methods focus on a single task. To address these challenges, this work proposes GenSim2, a scalable framework that leverages coding LLMs with multi-modal and reasoning capabilities for complex and realistic simulation task creation, including long-horizon tasks with articulated objects. To automatically generate demonstration data for these tasks at scale, we propose planning and RL solvers that generalize within object categories. The pipeline can generate data for up to 100 articulated tasks with 200 objects and reduce the required human efforts. To utilize such data, we propose an effective multi-task language-conditioned policy architecture, dubbed proprioceptive point-cloud transformer (PPT), that learns from the generated demonstrations and exhibits strong sim-to-real zero-shot transfer. Combining the proposed pipeline and the policy architecture, we show a promising usage of GenSim2 that the generated data can be used for zero-shot transfer or co-train with real-world collected data, which enhances the policy performance by 20% compared with training exclusively on limited real data.
WebGames: Challenging General-Purpose Web-Browsing AI Agents
We introduce WebGames, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate general-purpose web-browsing AI agents through a collection of 50+ interactive challenges. These challenges are specifically crafted to be straightforward for humans while systematically testing the limitations of current AI systems across fundamental browser interactions, advanced input processing, cognitive tasks, workflow automation, and interactive entertainment. Our framework eliminates external dependencies through a hermetic testing environment, ensuring reproducible evaluation with verifiable ground-truth solutions. We evaluate leading vision-language models including GPT-4o, Claude Computer-Use, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Qwen2-VL against human performance. Results reveal a substantial capability gap, with the best AI system achieving only 43.1% success rate compared to human performance of 95.7%, highlighting fundamental limitations in current AI systems' ability to handle common web interaction patterns that humans find intuitive. The benchmark is publicly available at webgames.convergence.ai, offering a lightweight, client-side implementation that facilitates rapid evaluation cycles. Through its modular architecture and standardized challenge specifications, WebGames provides a robust foundation for measuring progress in development of more capable web-browsing agents.
GenSim: Generating Robotic Simulation Tasks via Large Language Models
Collecting large amounts of real-world interaction data to train general robotic policies is often prohibitively expensive, thus motivating the use of simulation data. However, existing methods for data generation have generally focused on scene-level diversity (e.g., object instances and poses) rather than task-level diversity, due to the human effort required to come up with and verify novel tasks. This has made it challenging for policies trained on simulation data to demonstrate significant task-level generalization. In this paper, we propose to automatically generate rich simulation environments and expert demonstrations by exploiting a large language models' (LLM) grounding and coding ability. Our approach, dubbed GenSim, has two modes: goal-directed generation, wherein a target task is given to the LLM and the LLM proposes a task curriculum to solve the target task, and exploratory generation, wherein the LLM bootstraps from previous tasks and iteratively proposes novel tasks that would be helpful in solving more complex tasks. We use GPT4 to expand the existing benchmark by ten times to over 100 tasks, on which we conduct supervised finetuning and evaluate several LLMs including finetuned GPTs and Code Llama on code generation for robotic simulation tasks. Furthermore, we observe that LLMs-generated simulation programs can enhance task-level generalization significantly when used for multitask policy training. We further find that with minimal sim-to-real adaptation, the multitask policies pretrained on GPT4-generated simulation tasks exhibit stronger transfer to unseen long-horizon tasks in the real world and outperform baselines by 25%. See the project website (https://liruiw.github.io/gensim) for code, demos, and videos.
FactorSim: Generative Simulation via Factorized Representation
Generating simulations to train intelligent agents in game-playing and robotics from natural language input, from user input or task documentation, remains an open-ended challenge. Existing approaches focus on parts of this challenge, such as generating reward functions or task hyperparameters. Unlike previous work, we introduce FACTORSIM that generates full simulations in code from language input that can be used to train agents. Exploiting the structural modularity specific to coded simulations, we propose to use a factored partially observable Markov decision process representation that allows us to reduce context dependence during each step of the generation. For evaluation, we introduce a generative simulation benchmark that assesses the generated simulation code's accuracy and effectiveness in facilitating zero-shot transfers in reinforcement learning settings. We show that FACTORSIM outperforms existing methods in generating simulations regarding prompt alignment (e.g., accuracy), zero-shot transfer abilities, and human evaluation. We also demonstrate its effectiveness in generating robotic tasks.
QuadSwarm: A Modular Multi-Quadrotor Simulator for Deep Reinforcement Learning with Direct Thrust Control
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in creating robust policies for robotics tasks. However, contemporary RL algorithms are data-hungry, often requiring billions of environment transitions to train successful policies. This necessitates the use of fast and highly-parallelizable simulators. In addition to speed, such simulators need to model the physics of the robots and their interaction with the environment to a level acceptable for transferring policies learned in simulation to reality. We present QuadSwarm, a fast, reliable simulator for research in single and multi-robot RL for quadrotors that addresses both issues. QuadSwarm, with fast forward-dynamics propagation decoupled from rendering, is designed to be highly parallelizable such that throughput scales linearly with additional compute. It provides multiple components tailored toward multi-robot RL, including diverse training scenarios, and provides domain randomization to facilitate the development and sim2real transfer of multi-quadrotor control policies. Initial experiments suggest that QuadSwarm achieves over 48,500 simulation samples per second (SPS) on a single quadrotor and over 62,000 SPS on eight quadrotors on a 16-core CPU. The code can be found in https://github.com/Zhehui-Huang/quad-swarm-rl.
AlphaViT: A Flexible Game-Playing AI for Multiple Games and Variable Board Sizes
This paper presents novel game-playing AI agents based on the AlphaZero framework, enhanced with Vision Transformer (ViT): AlphaViT, AlphaViD, and AlphaVDA. These agents are designed to play multiple board games of various sizes using a single network with shared weights, thereby overcoming AlphaZero's limitation of fixed-board-size constraints. AlphaViT employs only a transformer encoder, whereas AlphaViD and AlphaVDA incorporate both transformer encoders and decoders. In AlphaViD, the decoder processes outputs from the encoder, whereas AlphaVDA uses a learnable embeddings as the decoder input. The additional decoder layers in AlphaViD and AlphaVDA provide flexibility to adapt to various action spaces and board sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed agents, trained on either individual games or multiple games simultaneously, consistently outperform traditional algorithms such as Minimax and Monte Carlo Tree Search and approach the performance of AlphaZero, despite using a single deep neural network (DNN) with shared weights. In particular, AlphaViT shows strong performance across all tested games. Furthermore, fine-tuning the DNN using pre-trained weights from small-board games accelerates convergence and improves performance, particularly in Gomoku. Interestingly, simultaneous training on multiple games yields performance comparable to, or even surpassing, single-game training. These results indicate the potential of transformer-based architectures to develop more flexible and robust game-playing AI agents that excel in multiple games and dynamic environments.
DreamGarden: A Designer Assistant for Growing Games from a Single Prompt
Coding assistants are increasingly leveraged in game design, both generating code and making high-level plans. To what degree can these tools align with developer workflows, and what new modes of human-computer interaction can emerge from their use? We present DreamGarden, an AI system capable of assisting with the development of diverse game environments in Unreal Engine. At the core of our method is an LLM-driven planner, capable of breaking down a single, high-level prompt -- a dream, memory, or imagined scenario provided by a human user -- into a hierarchical action plan, which is then distributed across specialized submodules facilitating concrete implementation. This system is presented to the user as a garden of plans and actions, both growing independently and responding to user intervention via seed prompts, pruning, and feedback. Through a user study, we explore design implications of this system, charting courses for future work in semi-autonomous assistants and open-ended simulation design.
Automated Creation of Digital Cousins for Robust Policy Learning
Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.
Language Conditioned Traffic Generation
Simulation forms the backbone of modern self-driving development. Simulators help develop, test, and improve driving systems without putting humans, vehicles, or their environment at risk. However, simulators face a major challenge: They rely on realistic, scalable, yet interesting content. While recent advances in rendering and scene reconstruction make great strides in creating static scene assets, modeling their layout, dynamics, and behaviors remains challenging. In this work, we turn to language as a source of supervision for dynamic traffic scene generation. Our model, LCTGen, combines a large language model with a transformer-based decoder architecture that selects likely map locations from a dataset of maps, and produces an initial traffic distribution, as well as the dynamics of each vehicle. LCTGen outperforms prior work in both unconditional and conditional traffic scene generation in terms of realism and fidelity. Code and video will be available at https://ariostgx.github.io/lctgen.
NeuroNCAP: Photorealistic Closed-loop Safety Testing for Autonomous Driving
We present a versatile NeRF-based simulator for testing autonomous driving (AD) software systems, designed with a focus on sensor-realistic closed-loop evaluation and the creation of safety-critical scenarios. The simulator learns from sequences of real-world driving sensor data and enables reconfigurations and renderings of new, unseen scenarios. In this work, we use our simulator to test the responses of AD models to safety-critical scenarios inspired by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). Our evaluation reveals that, while state-of-the-art end-to-end planners excel in nominal driving scenarios in an open-loop setting, they exhibit critical flaws when navigating our safety-critical scenarios in a closed-loop setting. This highlights the need for advancements in the safety and real-world usability of end-to-end planners. By publicly releasing our simulator and scenarios as an easy-to-run evaluation suite, we invite the research community to explore, refine, and validate their AD models in controlled, yet highly configurable and challenging sensor-realistic environments. Code and instructions can be found at https://github.com/atonderski/neuro-ncap
Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worlds
Building embodied AI systems that can follow arbitrary language instructions in any 3D environment is a key challenge for creating general AI. Accomplishing this goal requires learning to ground language in perception and embodied actions, in order to accomplish complex tasks. The Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent (SIMA) project tackles this by training agents to follow free-form instructions across a diverse range of virtual 3D environments, including curated research environments as well as open-ended, commercial video games. Our goal is to develop an instructable agent that can accomplish anything a human can do in any simulated 3D environment. Our approach focuses on language-driven generality while imposing minimal assumptions. Our agents interact with environments in real-time using a generic, human-like interface: the inputs are image observations and language instructions and the outputs are keyboard-and-mouse actions. This general approach is challenging, but it allows agents to ground language across many visually complex and semantically rich environments while also allowing us to readily run agents in new environments. In this paper we describe our motivation and goal, the initial progress we have made, and promising preliminary results on several diverse research environments and a variety of commercial video games.
AgentStudio: A Toolkit for Building General Virtual Agents
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.
How Far Are We from Believable AI Agents? A Framework for Evaluating the Believability of Human Behavior Simulation
Human behavior simulation of AI agents necessitates the agents to possess a quality of believability, which is crucial as it facilitates users in establishing trust toward the agents and streamlines the fulfillment of the agents' goal. While recent advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) based agents have improved human behavior simulation, challenges inherent to LLMs (e.g., long context modeling) can undermine their believability. Consequently, evaluating AI agent believability becomes imperative. Unfortunately, prior research often neglects the negative impacts of LLM deficiencies. To address these gaps, we introduce two metrics for assessing LLM-based agent believability: consistency, and robustness, together with a benchmark, SimulateBench, with which, we evaluate the consistency and robustness of agents implemented with popular LLMs. We find that agents (i) struggle to accurately depict character information when presented with lengthy profile inputs; (ii) exhibit vulnerability to profile perturbations; and (iii) are significantly affected by certain key factors that impact their overall believability. Code and SimulateBench are public at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/GPTMan.
Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand
We demonstrate that models trained only in simulation can be used to solve a manipulation problem of unprecedented complexity on a real robot. This is made possible by two key components: a novel algorithm, which we call automatic domain randomization (ADR) and a robot platform built for machine learning. ADR automatically generates a distribution over randomized environments of ever-increasing difficulty. Control policies and vision state estimators trained with ADR exhibit vastly improved sim2real transfer. For control policies, memory-augmented models trained on an ADR-generated distribution of environments show clear signs of emergent meta-learning at test time. The combination of ADR with our custom robot platform allows us to solve a Rubik's cube with a humanoid robot hand, which involves both control and state estimation problems. Videos summarizing our results are available: https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/
IntellAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Conversational AI Systems
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming artificial intelligence, evolving into task-oriented systems capable of autonomous planning and execution. One of the primary applications of LLMs is conversational AI systems, which must navigate multi-turn dialogues, integrate domain-specific APIs, and adhere to strict policy constraints. However, evaluating these agents remains a significant challenge, as traditional methods fail to capture the complexity and variability of real-world interactions. We introduce IntellAgent, a scalable, open-source multi-agent framework designed to evaluate conversational AI systems comprehensively. IntellAgent automates the creation of diverse, synthetic benchmarks by combining policy-driven graph modeling, realistic event generation, and interactive user-agent simulations. This innovative approach provides fine-grained diagnostics, addressing the limitations of static and manually curated benchmarks with coarse-grained metrics. IntellAgent represents a paradigm shift in evaluating conversational AI. By simulating realistic, multi-policy scenarios across varying levels of complexity, IntellAgent captures the nuanced interplay of agent capabilities and policy constraints. Unlike traditional methods, it employs a graph-based policy model to represent relationships, likelihoods, and complexities of policy interactions, enabling highly detailed diagnostics. IntellAgent also identifies critical performance gaps, offering actionable insights for targeted optimization. Its modular, open-source design supports seamless integration of new domains, policies, and APIs, fostering reproducibility and community collaboration. Our findings demonstrate that IntellAgent serves as an effective framework for advancing conversational AI by addressing challenges in bridging research and deployment. The framework is available at https://github.com/plurai-ai/intellagent
Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents
In this paper, we introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness. All patients, nurses, and doctors are autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Our central goal is to enable a doctor agent to learn how to treat illness within the simulacrum. To do so, we propose a method called MedAgent-Zero. As the simulacrum can simulate disease onset and progression based on knowledge bases and LLMs, doctor agents can keep accumulating experience from both successful and unsuccessful cases. Simulation experiments show that the treatment performance of doctor agents consistently improves on various tasks. More interestingly, the knowledge the doctor agents have acquired in Agent Hospital is applicable to real-world medicare benchmarks. After treating around ten thousand patients (real-world doctors may take over two years), the evolved doctor agent achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 93.06% on a subset of the MedQA dataset that covers major respiratory diseases. This work paves the way for advancing the applications of LLM-powered agent techniques in medical scenarios.
KING: Generating Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios for Robust Imitation via Kinematics Gradients
Simulators offer the possibility of safe, low-cost development of self-driving systems. However, current driving simulators exhibit na\"ive behavior models for background traffic. Hand-tuned scenarios are typically added during simulation to induce safety-critical situations. An alternative approach is to adversarially perturb the background traffic trajectories. In this paper, we study this approach to safety-critical driving scenario generation using the CARLA simulator. We use a kinematic bicycle model as a proxy to the simulator's true dynamics and observe that gradients through this proxy model are sufficient for optimizing the background traffic trajectories. Based on this finding, we propose KING, which generates safety-critical driving scenarios with a 20% higher success rate than black-box optimization. By solving the scenarios generated by KING using a privileged rule-based expert algorithm, we obtain training data for an imitation learning policy. After fine-tuning on this new data, we show that the policy becomes better at avoiding collisions. Importantly, our generated data leads to reduced collisions on both held-out scenarios generated via KING as well as traditional hand-crafted scenarios, demonstrating improved robustness.
Recurrent Environment Simulators
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.
The Matrix: Infinite-Horizon World Generation with Real-Time Moving Control
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.
AgentAvatar: Disentangling Planning, Driving and Rendering for Photorealistic Avatar Agents
In this study, our goal is to create interactive avatar agents that can autonomously plan and animate nuanced facial movements realistically, from both visual and behavioral perspectives. Given high-level inputs about the environment and agent profile, our framework harnesses LLMs to produce a series of detailed text descriptions of the avatar agents' facial motions. These descriptions are then processed by our task-agnostic driving engine into motion token sequences, which are subsequently converted into continuous motion embeddings that are further consumed by our standalone neural-based renderer to generate the final photorealistic avatar animations. These streamlined processes allow our framework to adapt to a variety of non-verbal avatar interactions, both monadic and dyadic. Our extensive study, which includes experiments on both newly compiled and existing datasets featuring two types of agents -- one capable of monadic interaction with the environment, and the other designed for dyadic conversation -- validates the effectiveness and versatility of our approach. To our knowledge, we advanced a leap step by combining LLMs and neural rendering for generalized non-verbal prediction and photo-realistic rendering of avatar agents.
Scalable AI Safety via Doubly-Efficient Debate
The emergence of pre-trained AI systems with powerful capabilities across a diverse and ever-increasing set of complex domains has raised a critical challenge for AI safety as tasks can become too complicated for humans to judge directly. Irving et al. [2018] proposed a debate method in this direction with the goal of pitting the power of such AI models against each other until the problem of identifying (mis)-alignment is broken down into a manageable subtask. While the promise of this approach is clear, the original framework was based on the assumption that the honest strategy is able to simulate deterministic AI systems for an exponential number of steps, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we show how to address these challenges by designing a new set of debate protocols where the honest strategy can always succeed using a simulation of a polynomial number of steps, whilst being able to verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even when the dishonest strategy is allowed to use exponentially many simulation steps.
ReALFRED: An Embodied Instruction Following Benchmark in Photo-Realistic Environments
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.
ACT-Bench: Towards Action Controllable World Models for Autonomous Driving
World models have emerged as promising neural simulators for autonomous driving, with the potential to supplement scarce real-world data and enable closed-loop evaluations. However, current research primarily evaluates these models based on visual realism or downstream task performance, with limited focus on fidelity to specific action instructions - a crucial property for generating targeted simulation scenes. Although some studies address action fidelity, their evaluations rely on closed-source mechanisms, limiting reproducibility. To address this gap, we develop an open-access evaluation framework, ACT-Bench, for quantifying action fidelity, along with a baseline world model, Terra. Our benchmarking framework includes a large-scale dataset pairing short context videos from nuScenes with corresponding future trajectory data, which provides conditional input for generating future video frames and enables evaluation of action fidelity for executed motions. Furthermore, Terra is trained on multiple large-scale trajectory-annotated datasets to enhance action fidelity. Leveraging this framework, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art model does not fully adhere to given instructions, while Terra achieves improved action fidelity. All components of our benchmark framework will be made publicly available to support future research.
Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments
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.
TextWorldExpress: Simulating Text Games at One Million Steps Per Second
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.
Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation
The ability to converse with humans and follow natural language commands is crucial for intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones). It can relieve people's burden of holding a controller all the time, allow multitasking, and make drone control more accessible for people with disabilities or with their hands occupied. To this end, we introduce Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN), to navigate a drone via natural language conversation. We build a drone simulator with a continuous photorealistic environment and collect a new AVDN dataset of over 3k recorded navigation trajectories with asynchronous human-human dialogs between commanders and followers. The commander provides initial navigation instruction and further guidance by request, while the follower navigates the drone in the simulator and asks questions when needed. During data collection, followers' attention on the drone's visual observation is also recorded. Based on the AVDN dataset, we study the tasks of aerial navigation from (full) dialog history and propose an effective Human Attention Aided Transformer model (HAA-Transformer), which learns to predict both navigation waypoints and human attention.
From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly boosted the rise of Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs), i.e., specialized AI systems designed to simulate assigned personas. By harnessing multiple advanced abilities of LLMs, including in-context learning, instruction following, and social intelligence, RPLAs achieve a remarkable sense of human likeness and vivid role-playing performance. RPLAs can mimic a wide range of personas, ranging from historical figures and fictional characters to real-life individuals. Consequently, they have catalyzed numerous AI applications, such as emotional companions, interactive video games, personalized assistants and copilots, and digital clones. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the evolution and recent progress in RPLAs integrating with cutting-edge LLM technologies. We categorize personas into three types: 1) Demographic Persona, which leverages statistical stereotypes; 2) Character Persona, focused on well-established figures; and 3) Individualized Persona, customized through ongoing user interactions for personalized services. We begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of current methodologies for RPLAs, followed by the details for each persona type, covering corresponding data sourcing, agent construction, and evaluation. Afterward, we discuss the fundamental risks, existing limitations, and future prospects of RPLAs. Additionally, we provide a brief review of RPLAs in AI applications, which reflects practical user demands that shape and drive RPLA research. Through this work, we aim to establish a clear taxonomy of RPLA research and applications, and facilitate future research in this critical and ever-evolving field, and pave the way for a future where humans and RPLAs coexist in harmony.
Dropout's Dream Land: Generalization from Learned Simulators to Reality
A World Model is a generative model used to simulate an environment. World Models have proven capable of learning spatial and temporal representations of Reinforcement Learning environments. In some cases, a World Model offers an agent the opportunity to learn entirely inside of its own dream environment. In this work we explore improving the generalization capabilities from dream environments to real environments (Dream2Real). We present a general approach to improve a controller's ability to transfer from a neural network dream environment to reality at little additional cost. These improvements are gained by drawing on inspiration from Domain Randomization, where the basic idea is to randomize as much of a simulator as possible without fundamentally changing the task at hand. Generally, Domain Randomization assumes access to a pre-built simulator with configurable parameters but oftentimes this is not available. By training the World Model using dropout, the dream environment is capable of creating a nearly infinite number of different dream environments. Previous use cases of dropout either do not use dropout at inference time or averages the predictions generated by multiple sampled masks (Monte-Carlo Dropout). Dropout's Dream Land leverages each unique mask to create a diverse set of dream environments. Our experimental results show that Dropout's Dream Land is an effective technique to bridge the reality gap between dream environments and reality. Furthermore, we additionally perform an extensive set of ablation studies.
AgentCourt: Simulating Court with Adversarial Evolvable Lawyer Agents
In this paper, we present a simulation system called AgentCourt that simulates the entire courtroom process. The judge, plaintiff's lawyer, defense lawyer, and other participants are autonomous agents driven by large language models (LLMs). Our core goal is to enable lawyer agents to learn how to argue a case, as well as improving their overall legal skills, through courtroom process simulation. To achieve this goal, we propose an adversarial evolutionary approach for the lawyer-agent. Since AgentCourt can simulate the occurrence and development of court hearings based on a knowledge base and LLM, the lawyer agents can continuously learn and accumulate experience from real court cases. The simulation experiments show that after two lawyer-agents have engaged in a thousand adversarial legal cases in AgentCourt (which can take a decade for real-world lawyers), compared to their pre-evolutionary state, the evolved lawyer agents exhibit consistent improvement in their ability to handle legal tasks. To enhance the credibility of our experimental results, we enlisted a panel of professional lawyers to evaluate our simulations. The evaluation indicates that the evolved lawyer agents exhibit notable advancements in responsiveness, as well as expertise and logical rigor. This work paves the way for advancing LLM-driven agent technology in legal scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/relic-yuexi/AgentCourt.
Situated Language Learning via Interactive Narratives
This paper provides a roadmap that explores the question of how to imbue learning agents with the ability to understand and generate contextually relevant natural language in service of achieving a goal. We hypothesize that two key components in creating such agents are interactivity and environment grounding, shown to be vital parts of language learning in humans, and posit that interactive narratives should be the environments of choice for such training these agents. These games are simulations in which an agent interacts with the world through natural language -- "perceiving", "acting upon", and "talking to" the world using textual descriptions, commands, and dialogue -- and as such exist at the intersection of natural language processing, storytelling, and sequential decision making. We discuss the unique challenges a text games' puzzle-like structure combined with natural language state-and-action spaces provides: knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, and exploration. Beyond the challenges described so far, progress in the realm of interactive narratives can be applied in adjacent problem domains. These applications provide interesting challenges of their own as well as extensions to those discussed so far. We describe three of them in detail: (1) evaluating AI system's commonsense understanding by automatically creating interactive narratives; (2) adapting abstract text-based policies to include other modalities such as vision; and (3) enabling multi-agent and human-AI collaboration in shared, situated worlds.
SGL: Symbolic Goal Learning in a Hybrid, Modular Framework for Human Instruction Following
This paper investigates robot manipulation based on human instruction with ambiguous requests. The intent is to compensate for imperfect natural language via visual observations. Early symbolic methods, based on manually defined symbols, built modular framework consist of semantic parsing and task planning for producing sequences of actions from natural language requests. Modern connectionist methods employ deep neural networks to automatically learn visual and linguistic features and map to a sequence of low-level actions, in an endto-end fashion. These two approaches are blended to create a hybrid, modular framework: it formulates instruction following as symbolic goal learning via deep neural networks followed by task planning via symbolic planners. Connectionist and symbolic modules are bridged with Planning Domain Definition Language. The vision-and-language learning network predicts its goal representation, which is sent to a planner for producing a task-completing action sequence. For improving the flexibility of natural language, we further incorporate implicit human intents with explicit human instructions. To learn generic features for vision and language, we propose to separately pretrain vision and language encoders on scene graph parsing and semantic textual similarity tasks. Benchmarking evaluates the impacts of different components of, or options for, the vision-and-language learning model and shows the effectiveness of pretraining strategies. Manipulation experiments conducted in the simulator AI2THOR show the robustness of the framework to novel scenarios.
TRANSIC: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer by Learning from Online Correction
Learning in simulation and transferring the learned policy to the real world has the potential to enable generalist robots. The key challenge of this approach is to address simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) gaps. Previous methods often require domain-specific knowledge a priori. We argue that a straightforward way to obtain such knowledge is by asking humans to observe and assist robot policy execution in the real world. The robots can then learn from humans to close various sim-to-real gaps. We propose TRANSIC, a data-driven approach to enable successful sim-to-real transfer based on a human-in-the-loop framework. TRANSIC allows humans to augment simulation policies to overcome various unmodeled sim-to-real gaps holistically through intervention and online correction. Residual policies can be learned from human corrections and integrated with simulation policies for autonomous execution. We show that our approach can achieve successful sim-to-real transfer in complex and contact-rich manipulation tasks such as furniture assembly. Through synergistic integration of policies learned in simulation and from humans, TRANSIC is effective as a holistic approach to addressing various, often coexisting sim-to-real gaps. It displays attractive properties such as scaling with human effort. Videos and code are available at https://transic-robot.github.io/
ASSERT: Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models
As large language models are integrated into society, robustness toward a suite of prompts is increasingly important to maintain reliability in a high-variance environment.Robustness evaluations must comprehensively encapsulate the various settings in which a user may invoke an intelligent system. This paper proposes ASSERT, Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming, consisting of three methods -- semantically aligned augmentation, target bootstrapping, and adversarial knowledge injection. For robust safety evaluation, we apply these methods in the critical domain of AI safety to algorithmically generate a test suite of prompts covering diverse robustness settings -- semantic equivalence, related scenarios, and adversarial. We partition our prompts into four safety domains for a fine-grained analysis of how the domain affects model performance. Despite dedicated safeguards in existing state-of-the-art models, we find statistically significant performance differences of up to 11% in absolute classification accuracy among semantically related scenarios and error rates of up to 19% absolute error in zero-shot adversarial settings, raising concerns for users' physical safety.
CGMI: Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction Framework
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.
UINav: A Practical Approach to Train On-Device Automation Agents
Automation systems that can autonomously drive application user interfaces to complete user tasks are of great benefit, especially when users are situationally or permanently impaired. Prior automation systems do not produce generalizable models while AI-based automation agents work reliably only in simple, hand-crafted applications or incur high computation costs. We propose UINav, a demonstration-based approach to train automation agents that fit mobile devices, yet achieving high success rates with modest numbers of demonstrations. To reduce the demonstration overhead, UINav uses a referee model that provides users with immediate feedback on tasks where the agent fails, and automatically augments human demonstrations to increase diversity in training data. Our evaluation shows that with only 10 demonstrations UINav can achieve 70% accuracy, and that with enough demonstrations it can surpass 90% accuracy.
AART: AI-Assisted Red-Teaming with Diverse Data Generation for New LLM-powered Applications
Adversarial testing of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their safe and responsible deployment. We introduce a novel approach for automated generation of adversarial evaluation datasets to test the safety of LLM generations on new downstream applications. We call it AI-assisted Red-Teaming (AART) - an automated alternative to current manual red-teaming efforts. AART offers a data generation and augmentation pipeline of reusable and customizable recipes that reduce human effort significantly and enable integration of adversarial testing earlier in new product development. AART generates evaluation datasets with high diversity of content characteristics critical for effective adversarial testing (e.g. sensitive and harmful concepts, specific to a wide range of cultural and geographic regions and application scenarios). The data generation is steered by AI-assisted recipes to define, scope and prioritize diversity within the application context. This feeds into a structured LLM-generation process that scales up evaluation priorities. Compared to some state-of-the-art tools, AART shows promising results in terms of concept coverage and data quality.
Counter-Strike Deathmatch with Large-Scale Behavioural Cloning
This paper describes an AI agent that plays the popular first-person-shooter (FPS) video game `Counter-Strike; Global Offensive' (CSGO) from pixel input. The agent, a deep neural network, matches the performance of the medium difficulty built-in AI on the deathmatch game mode, whilst adopting a humanlike play style. Unlike much prior work in games, no API is available for CSGO, so algorithms must train and run in real-time. This limits the quantity of on-policy data that can be generated, precluding many reinforcement learning algorithms. Our solution uses behavioural cloning - training on a large noisy dataset scraped from human play on online servers (4 million frames, comparable in size to ImageNet), and a smaller dataset of high-quality expert demonstrations. This scale is an order of magnitude larger than prior work on imitation learning in FPS games.
RealGen: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controllable Traffic Scenarios
Simulation plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to the potential risks associated with real-world testing. Although significant progress has been made in the visual aspects of simulators, generating complex behavior among agents remains a formidable challenge. It is not only imperative to ensure realism in the scenarios generated but also essential to incorporate preferences and conditions to facilitate controllable generation for AV training and evaluation. Traditional methods, mainly relying on memorizing the distribution of training datasets, often fall short in generating unseen scenarios. Inspired by the success of retrieval augmented generation in large language models, we present RealGen, a novel retrieval-based in-context learning framework for traffic scenario generation. RealGen synthesizes new scenarios by combining behaviors from multiple retrieved examples in a gradient-free way, which may originate from templates or tagged scenarios. This in-context learning framework endows versatile generative capabilities, including the ability to edit scenarios, compose various behaviors, and produce critical scenarios. Evaluations show that RealGen offers considerable flexibility and controllability, marking a new direction in the field of controllable traffic scenario generation. Check our project website for more information: https://realgen.github.io.
Re^3Sim: Generating High-Fidelity Simulation Data via 3D-Photorealistic Real-to-Sim for Robotic Manipulation
Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE^3SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE^3SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.
MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrations
Imitation learning from a large set of human demonstrations has proved to be an effective paradigm for building capable robot agents. However, the demonstrations can be extremely costly and time-consuming to collect. We introduce MimicGen, a system for automatically synthesizing large-scale, rich datasets from only a small number of human demonstrations by adapting them to new contexts. We use MimicGen to generate over 50K demonstrations across 18 tasks with diverse scene configurations, object instances, and robot arms from just ~200 human demonstrations. We show that robot agents can be effectively trained on this generated dataset by imitation learning to achieve strong performance in long-horizon and high-precision tasks, such as multi-part assembly and coffee preparation, across broad initial state distributions. We further demonstrate that the effectiveness and utility of MimicGen data compare favorably to collecting additional human demonstrations, making it a powerful and economical approach towards scaling up robot learning. Datasets, simulation environments, videos, and more at https://mimicgen.github.io .
MARS: An Instance-aware, Modular and Realistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving
Nowadays, autonomous cars can drive smoothly in ordinary cases, and it is widely recognized that realistic sensor simulation will play a critical role in solving remaining corner cases by simulating them. To this end, we propose an autonomous driving simulator based upon neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Compared with existing works, ours has three notable features: (1) Instance-aware. Our simulator models the foreground instances and background environments separately with independent networks so that the static (e.g., size and appearance) and dynamic (e.g., trajectory) properties of instances can be controlled separately. (2) Modular. Our simulator allows flexible switching between different modern NeRF-related backbones, sampling strategies, input modalities, etc. We expect this modular design to boost academic progress and industrial deployment of NeRF-based autonomous driving simulation. (3) Realistic. Our simulator set new state-of-the-art photo-realism results given the best module selection. Our simulator will be open-sourced while most of our counterparts are not. Project page: https://open-air-sun.github.io/mars/.
Natural Language Can Help Bridge the Sim2Real Gap
The main challenge in learning image-conditioned robotic policies is acquiring a visual representation conducive to low-level control. Due to the high dimensionality of the image space, learning a good visual representation requires a considerable amount of visual data. However, when learning in the real world, data is expensive. Sim2Real is a promising paradigm for overcoming data scarcity in the real-world target domain by using a simulator to collect large amounts of cheap data closely related to the target task. However, it is difficult to transfer an image-conditioned policy from sim to real when the domains are very visually dissimilar. To bridge the sim2real visual gap, we propose using natural language descriptions of images as a unifying signal across domains that captures the underlying task-relevant semantics. Our key insight is that if two image observations from different domains are labeled with similar language, the policy should predict similar action distributions for both images. We demonstrate that training the image encoder to predict the language description or the distance between descriptions of a sim or real image serves as a useful, data-efficient pretraining step that helps learn a domain-invariant image representation. We can then use this image encoder as the backbone of an IL policy trained simultaneously on a large amount of simulated and a handful of real demonstrations. Our approach outperforms widely used prior sim2real methods and strong vision-language pretraining baselines like CLIP and R3M by 25 to 40%.
GRUtopia: Dream General Robots in a City at Scale
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.
TEACh: Task-driven Embodied Agents that Chat
Robots operating in human spaces must be able to engage in natural language interaction with people, both understanding and executing instructions, and using conversation to resolve ambiguity and recover from mistakes. To study this, we introduce TEACh, a dataset of over 3,000 human--human, interactive dialogues to complete household tasks in simulation. A Commander with access to oracle information about a task communicates in natural language with a Follower. The Follower navigates through and interacts with the environment to complete tasks varying in complexity from "Make Coffee" to "Prepare Breakfast", asking questions and getting additional information from the Commander. We propose three benchmarks using TEACh to study embodied intelligence challenges, and we evaluate initial models' abilities in dialogue understanding, language grounding, and task execution.
MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge
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.
Scaling Face Interaction Graph Networks to Real World Scenes
Accurately simulating real world object dynamics is essential for various applications such as robotics, engineering, graphics, and design. To better capture complex real dynamics such as contact and friction, learned simulators based on graph networks have recently shown great promise. However, applying these learned simulators to real scenes comes with two major challenges: first, scaling learned simulators to handle the complexity of real world scenes which can involve hundreds of objects each with complicated 3D shapes, and second, handling inputs from perception rather than 3D state information. Here we introduce a method which substantially reduces the memory required to run graph-based learned simulators. Based on this memory-efficient simulation model, we then present a perceptual interface in the form of editable NeRFs which can convert real-world scenes into a structured representation that can be processed by graph network simulator. We show that our method uses substantially less memory than previous graph-based simulators while retaining their accuracy, and that the simulators learned in synthetic environments can be applied to real world scenes captured from multiple camera angles. This paves the way for expanding the application of learned simulators to settings where only perceptual information is available at inference time.
RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts
Frontier AI safety policies highlight automation of AI research and development (R&D) by AI agents as an important capability to anticipate. However, there exist few evaluations for AI R&D capabilities, and none that are highly realistic and have a direct comparison to human performance. We introduce RE-Bench (Research Engineering Benchmark, v1), which consists of 7 challenging, open-ended ML research engineering environments and data from 71 8-hour attempts by 61 distinct human experts. We confirm that our experts make progress in the environments given 8 hours, with 82% of expert attempts achieving a non-zero score and 24% matching or exceeding our strong reference solutions. We compare humans to several public frontier models through best-of-k with varying time budgets and agent designs, and find that the best AI agents achieve a score 4x higher than human experts when both are given a total time budget of 2 hours per environment. However, humans currently display better returns to increasing time budgets, narrowly exceeding the top AI agent scores given an 8-hour budget, and achieving 2x the score of the top AI agent when both are given 32 total hours (across different attempts). Qualitatively, we find that modern AI agents possess significant expertise in many ML topics -- e.g. an agent wrote a faster custom Triton kernel than any of our human experts' -- and can generate and test solutions over ten times faster than humans, at much lower cost. We open-source the evaluation environments, human expert data, analysis code and agent trajectories to facilitate future research.
STARLING: Self-supervised Training of Text-based Reinforcement Learning Agent with Large Language Models
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.
Synergistic Integration of Large Language Models and Cognitive Architectures for Robust AI: An Exploratory Analysis
This paper explores the integration of two AI subdisciplines employed in the development of artificial agents that exhibit intelligent behavior: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Cognitive Architectures (CAs). We present three integration approaches, each grounded in theoretical models and supported by preliminary empirical evidence. The modular approach, which introduces four models with varying degrees of integration, makes use of chain-of-thought prompting, and draws inspiration from augmented LLMs, the Common Model of Cognition, and the simulation theory of cognition. The agency approach, motivated by the Society of Mind theory and the LIDA cognitive architecture, proposes the formation of agent collections that interact at micro and macro cognitive levels, driven by either LLMs or symbolic components. The neuro-symbolic approach, which takes inspiration from the CLARION cognitive architecture, proposes a model where bottom-up learning extracts symbolic representations from an LLM layer and top-down guidance utilizes symbolic representations to direct prompt engineering in the LLM layer. These approaches aim to harness the strengths of both LLMs and CAs, while mitigating their weaknesses, thereby advancing the development of more robust AI systems. We discuss the tradeoffs and challenges associated with each approach.
Scalable Semantic Non-Markovian Simulation Proxy for Reinforcement Learning
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown much promise across a variety of applications. However, issues such as scalability, explainability, and Markovian assumptions limit its applicability in certain domains. We observe that many of these shortcomings emanate from the simulator as opposed to the RL training algorithms themselves. As such, we propose a semantic proxy for simulation based on a temporal extension to annotated logic. In comparison with two high-fidelity simulators, we show up to three orders of magnitude speed-up while preserving the quality of policy learned. In addition, we show the ability to model and leverage non-Markovian dynamics and instantaneous actions while providing an explainable trace describing the outcomes of the agent actions.
Learning to Fly in Seconds
Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been able to control complex systems with impressive fidelity and agility in simulation but the simulation-to-reality transfer often brings a hard-to-bridge reality gap. Moreover, RL is commonly plagued by prohibitively long training times. In this work, we propose a novel asymmetric actor-critic-based architecture coupled with a highly reliable RL-based training paradigm for end-to-end quadrotor control. We show how curriculum learning and a highly optimized simulator enhance sample complexity and lead to fast training times. To precisely discuss the challenges related to low-level/end-to-end multirotor control, we also introduce a taxonomy that classifies the existing levels of control abstractions as well as non-linearities and domain parameters. Our framework enables Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) transfer for direct RPM control after only 18 seconds of training on a consumer-grade laptop as well as its deployment on microcontrollers to control a multirotor under real-time guarantees. Finally, our solution exhibits competitive performance in trajectory tracking, as demonstrated through various experimental comparisons with existing state-of-the-art control solutions using a real Crazyflie nano quadrotor. We open source the code including a very fast multirotor dynamics simulator that can simulate about 5 months of flight per second on a laptop GPU. The fast training times and deployment to a cheap, off-the-shelf quadrotor lower the barriers to entry and help democratize the research and development of these systems.
MaestroMotif: Skill Design from Artificial Intelligence Feedback
Describing skills in natural language has the potential to provide an accessible way to inject human knowledge about decision-making into an AI system. We present MaestroMotif, a method for AI-assisted skill design, which yields high-performing and adaptable agents. MaestroMotif leverages the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively create and reuse skills. It first uses an LLM's feedback to automatically design rewards corresponding to each skill, starting from their natural language description. Then, it employs an LLM's code generation abilities, together with reinforcement learning, for training the skills and combining them to implement complex behaviors specified in language. We evaluate MaestroMotif using a suite of complex tasks in the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE), demonstrating that it surpasses existing approaches in both performance and usability.
On the Verge of Solving Rocket League using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Sim-to-sim Transfer
Autonomously trained agents that are supposed to play video games reasonably well rely either on fast simulation speeds or heavy parallelization across thousands of machines running concurrently. This work explores a third way that is established in robotics, namely sim-to-real transfer, or if the game is considered a simulation itself, sim-to-sim transfer. In the case of Rocket League, we demonstrate that single behaviors of goalies and strikers can be successfully learned using Deep Reinforcement Learning in the simulation environment and transferred back to the original game. Although the implemented training simulation is to some extent inaccurate, the goalkeeping agent saves nearly 100% of its faced shots once transferred, while the striking agent scores in about 75% of cases. Therefore, the trained agent is robust enough and able to generalize to the target domain of Rocket League.
WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents
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/.
StarCraftImage: A Dataset For Prototyping Spatial Reasoning Methods For Multi-Agent Environments
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
Alexa, play with robot: Introducing the First Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge on Embodied AI
The Alexa Prize program has empowered numerous university students to explore, experiment, and showcase their talents in building conversational agents through challenges like the SocialBot Grand Challenge and the TaskBot Challenge. As conversational agents increasingly appear in multimodal and embodied contexts, it is important to explore the affordances of conversational interaction augmented with computer vision and physical embodiment. This paper describes the SimBot Challenge, a new challenge in which university teams compete to build robot assistants that complete tasks in a simulated physical environment. This paper provides an overview of the SimBot Challenge, which included both online and offline challenge phases. We describe the infrastructure and support provided to the teams including Alexa Arena, the simulated environment, and the ML toolkit provided to teams to accelerate their building of vision and language models. We summarize the approaches the participating teams took to overcome research challenges and extract key lessons learned. Finally, we provide analysis of the performance of the competing SimBots during the competition.
Gen2Sim: Scaling up Robot Learning in Simulation with Generative Models
Generalist robot manipulators need to learn a wide variety of manipulation skills across diverse environments. Current robot training pipelines rely on humans to provide kinesthetic demonstrations or to program simulation environments and to code up reward functions for reinforcement learning. Such human involvement is an important bottleneck towards scaling up robot learning across diverse tasks and environments. We propose Generation to Simulation (Gen2Sim), a method for scaling up robot skill learning in simulation by automating generation of 3D assets, task descriptions, task decompositions and reward functions using large pre-trained generative models of language and vision. We generate 3D assets for simulation by lifting open-world 2D object-centric images to 3D using image diffusion models and querying LLMs to determine plausible physics parameters. Given URDF files of generated and human-developed assets, we chain-of-thought prompt LLMs to map these to relevant task descriptions, temporal decompositions, and corresponding python reward functions for reinforcement learning. We show Gen2Sim succeeds in learning policies for diverse long horizon tasks, where reinforcement learning with non temporally decomposed reward functions fails. Gen2Sim provides a viable path for scaling up reinforcement learning for robot manipulators in simulation, both by diversifying and expanding task and environment development, and by facilitating the discovery of reinforcement-learned behaviors through temporal task decomposition in RL. Our work contributes hundreds of simulated assets, tasks and demonstrations, taking a step towards fully autonomous robotic manipulation skill acquisition in simulation.
GPT4AIGChip: Towards Next-Generation AI Accelerator Design Automation via Large Language Models
The remarkable capabilities and intricate nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have dramatically escalated the imperative for specialized AI accelerators. Nonetheless, designing these accelerators for various AI workloads remains both labor- and time-intensive. While existing design exploration and automation tools can partially alleviate the need for extensive human involvement, they still demand substantial hardware expertise, posing a barrier to non-experts and stifling AI accelerator development. Motivated by the astonishing potential of large language models (LLMs) for generating high-quality content in response to human language instructions, we embark on this work to examine the possibility of harnessing LLMs to automate AI accelerator design. Through this endeavor, we develop GPT4AIGChip, a framework intended to democratize AI accelerator design by leveraging human natural languages instead of domain-specific languages. Specifically, we first perform an in-depth investigation into LLMs' limitations and capabilities for AI accelerator design, thus aiding our understanding of our current position and garnering insights into LLM-powered automated AI accelerator design. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from the above insights, we develop a framework called GPT4AIGChip, which features an automated demo-augmented prompt-generation pipeline utilizing in-context learning to guide LLMs towards creating high-quality AI accelerator design. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate an effective pipeline for LLM-powered automated AI accelerator generation. Accordingly, we anticipate that our insights and framework can serve as a catalyst for innovations in next-generation LLM-powered design automation tools.
GPUDrive: Data-driven, multi-agent driving simulation at 1 million FPS
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.
ArK: Augmented Reality with Knowledge Interactive Emergent Ability
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.
Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.
Unleashing Artificial Cognition: Integrating Multiple AI Systems
In this study, we present an innovative fusion of language models and query analysis techniques to unlock cognition in artificial intelligence. Our system seamlessly integrates a Chess engine with a language model, enabling it to predict moves and provide strategic explanations. Leveraging a vector database to achieve retrievable answer generation, our OpenSI AI system elucidates its decision-making process, bridging the gap between raw computation and human-like understanding. Our choice of Chess as the demonstration environment underscores the versatility of our approach. Beyond Chess, our system holds promise for diverse applications, from medical diagnostics to financial forecasting.
Safe Deep RL in 3D Environments using Human Feedback
Agents should avoid unsafe behaviour during both training and deployment. This typically requires a simulator and a procedural specification of unsafe behaviour. Unfortunately, a simulator is not always available, and procedurally specifying constraints can be difficult or impossible for many real-world tasks. A recently introduced technique, ReQueST, aims to solve this problem by learning a neural simulator of the environment from safe human trajectories, then using the learned simulator to efficiently learn a reward model from human feedback. However, it is yet unknown whether this approach is feasible in complex 3D environments with feedback obtained from real humans - whether sufficient pixel-based neural simulator quality can be achieved, and whether the human data requirements are viable in terms of both quantity and quality. In this paper we answer this question in the affirmative, using ReQueST to train an agent to perform a 3D first-person object collection task using data entirely from human contractors. We show that the resulting agent exhibits an order of magnitude reduction in unsafe behaviour compared to standard reinforcement learning.
AIDE: AI-Driven Exploration in the Space of Code
Machine learning, the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, has driven innovations that have fundamentally transformed the world. Yet, behind advancements lies a complex and often tedious process requiring labor and compute intensive iteration and experimentation. Engineers and scientists developing machine learning models spend much of their time on trial-and-error tasks instead of conceptualizing innovative solutions or research hypotheses. To address this challenge, we introduce AI-Driven Exploration (AIDE), a machine learning engineering agent powered by large language models (LLMs). AIDE frames machine learning engineering as a code optimization problem, and formulates trial-and-error as a tree search in the space of potential solutions. By strategically reusing and refining promising solutions, AIDE effectively trades computational resources for enhanced performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple machine learning engineering benchmarks, including our Kaggle evaluations, OpenAI MLE-Bench and METRs RE-Bench.
BEHAVIOR Vision Suite: Customizable Dataset Generation via Simulation
The systematic evaluation and understanding of computer vision models under varying conditions require large amounts of data with comprehensive and customized labels, which real-world vision datasets rarely satisfy. While current synthetic data generators offer a promising alternative, particularly for embodied AI tasks, they often fall short for computer vision tasks due to low asset and rendering quality, limited diversity, and unrealistic physical properties. We introduce the BEHAVIOR Vision Suite (BVS), a set of tools and assets to generate fully customized synthetic data for systematic evaluation of computer vision models, based on the newly developed embodied AI benchmark, BEHAVIOR-1K. BVS supports a large number of adjustable parameters at the scene level (e.g., lighting, object placement), the object level (e.g., joint configuration, attributes such as "filled" and "folded"), and the camera level (e.g., field of view, focal length). Researchers can arbitrarily vary these parameters during data generation to perform controlled experiments. We showcase three example application scenarios: systematically evaluating the robustness of models across different continuous axes of domain shift, evaluating scene understanding models on the same set of images, and training and evaluating simulation-to-real transfer for a novel vision task: unary and binary state prediction. Project website: https://behavior-vision-suite.github.io/
CAD2RL: Real Single-Image Flight without a Single Real Image
Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising and powerful technique for automatically acquiring control policies that can process raw sensory inputs, such as images, and perform complex behaviors. However, extending deep RL to real-world robotic tasks has proven challenging, particularly in safety-critical domains such as autonomous flight, where a trial-and-error learning process is often impractical. In this paper, we explore the following question: can we train vision-based navigation policies entirely in simulation, and then transfer them into the real world to achieve real-world flight without a single real training image? We propose a learning method that we call CAD^2RL, which can be used to perform collision-free indoor flight in the real world while being trained entirely on 3D CAD models. Our method uses single RGB images from a monocular camera, without needing to explicitly reconstruct the 3D geometry of the environment or perform explicit motion planning. Our learned collision avoidance policy is represented by a deep convolutional neural network that directly processes raw monocular images and outputs velocity commands. This policy is trained entirely on simulated images, with a Monte Carlo policy evaluation algorithm that directly optimizes the network's ability to produce collision-free flight. By highly randomizing the rendering settings for our simulated training set, we show that we can train a policy that generalizes to the real world, without requiring the simulator to be particularly realistic or high-fidelity. We evaluate our method by flying a real quadrotor through indoor environments, and further evaluate the design choices in our simulator through a series of ablation studies on depth prediction. For supplementary video see: https://youtu.be/nXBWmzFrj5s
AvalonBench: Evaluating LLMs Playing the Game of Avalon
In this paper, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) Agents in playing the strategic social deduction game, Resistance Avalon. Players in Avalon are challenged not only to make informed decisions based on dynamically evolving game phases, but also to engage in discussions where they must deceive, deduce, and negotiate with other players. These characteristics make Avalon a compelling test-bed to study the decision-making and language-processing capabilities of LLM Agents. To facilitate research in this line, we introduce AvalonBench - a comprehensive game environment tailored for evaluating multi-agent LLM Agents. This benchmark incorporates: (1) a game environment for Avalon, (2) rule-based bots as baseline opponents, and (3) ReAct-style LLM agents with tailored prompts for each role. Notably, our evaluations based on AvalonBench highlight a clear capability gap. For instance, models like ChatGPT playing good-role got a win rate of 22.2% against rule-based bots playing evil, while good-role bot achieves 38.2% win rate in the same setting. We envision AvalonBench could be a good test-bed for developing more advanced LLMs (with self-playing) and agent frameworks that can effectively model the layered complexities of such game environments.
TMGBench: A Systematic Game Benchmark for Evaluating Strategic Reasoning Abilities of LLMs
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated their application in reasoning, with strategic reasoning drawing increasing attention. To evaluate LLMs' strategic reasoning capabilities, game theory, with its concise structure, has become a preferred approach. However, current research focuses on a limited selection of games, resulting in low coverage. Classic game scenarios risk data leakage, and existing benchmarks often lack extensibility, making them inadequate for evaluating state-of-the-art models. To address these challenges, we propose TMGBench, a benchmark with comprehensive game type coverage, novel scenarios, and flexible organization. Specifically, we incorporate all 144 game types summarized by the Robinson-Goforth topology of 2x2 games, constructed as classic games. We also employ synthetic data generation to create diverse, higher-quality scenarios through topic guidance and human inspection, referred to as story-based games. Lastly, we provide a sustainable framework for increasingly powerful LLMs by treating these games as atomic units and organizing them into more complex forms via sequential, parallel, and nested structures. Our comprehensive evaluation of mainstream LLMs covers tests on rational reasoning, robustness, Theory-of-Mind (ToM), and reasoning in complex forms. Results reveal flaws in accuracy, consistency, and varying mastery of ToM. Additionally, o1-mini, OpenAI's latest reasoning model, achieved accuracy rates of 66.6%, 60.0%, and 70.0% on sequential, parallel, and nested games, highlighting TMGBench's challenges.
Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence Using Code-Generating Language Models
Recent progress in large-scale language models has enabled breakthroughs in previously intractable computer programming tasks. Prior work in meta-learning and neural architecture search has led to substantial successes across various task domains, spawning myriad approaches for algorithmically optimizing the design and learning dynamics of deep learning models. At the intersection of these research areas, we implement a code-generating language model with the ability to modify its own source code. Self-programming AI algorithms have been of interest since the dawn of AI itself. Although various theoretical formulations of generalized self-programming AI have been posed, no such system has been successfully implemented to date under real-world computational constraints. Applying AI-based code generation to AI itself, we develop and experimentally validate the first practical implementation of a self-programming AI system. We empirically show that a self-programming AI implemented using a code generation model can successfully modify its own source code to improve performance and program sub-models to perform auxiliary tasks. Our model can self-modify various properties including model architecture, computational capacity, and learning dynamics.
Fine-Tuning Language Models Using Formal Methods Feedback
Although pre-trained language models encode generic knowledge beneficial for planning and control, they may fail to generate appropriate control policies for domain-specific tasks. Existing fine-tuning methods use human feedback to address this limitation, however, sourcing human feedback is labor intensive and costly. We present a fully automated approach to fine-tune pre-trained language models for applications in autonomous systems, bridging the gap between generic knowledge and domain-specific requirements while reducing cost. The method synthesizes automaton-based controllers from pre-trained models guided by natural language task descriptions. These controllers are verifiable against independently provided specifications within a world model, which can be abstract or obtained from a high-fidelity simulator. Controllers with high compliance with the desired specifications receive higher ranks, guiding the iterative fine-tuning process. We provide quantitative evidences, primarily in autonomous driving, to demonstrate the method's effectiveness across multiple tasks. The results indicate an improvement in percentage of specifications satisfied by the controller from 60% to 90%.
USimAgent: Large Language Models for Simulating Search Users
Due to the advantages in the cost-efficiency and reproducibility, user simulation has become a promising solution to the user-centric evaluation of information retrieval systems. Nonetheless, accurately simulating user search behaviors has long been a challenge, because users' actions in search are highly complex and driven by intricate cognitive processes such as learning, reasoning, and planning. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarked potential in simulating human-level intelligence and have been used in building autonomous agents for various tasks. However, the potential of using LLMs in simulating search behaviors has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we introduce a LLM-based user search behavior simulator, USimAgent. The proposed simulator can simulate users' querying, clicking, and stopping behaviors during search, and thus, is capable of generating complete search sessions for specific search tasks. Empirical investigation on a real user behavior dataset shows that the proposed simulator outperforms existing methods in query generation and is comparable to traditional methods in predicting user clicks and stopping behaviors. These results not only validate the effectiveness of using LLMs for user simulation but also shed light on the development of a more robust and generic user simulators.
Improving Alignment and Robustness with Short Circuiting
AI systems can take harmful actions and are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We present an approach, inspired by recent advances in representation engineering, that "short-circuits" models as they respond with harmful outputs. Existing techniques aimed at improving alignment, such as refusal training, are often bypassed. Techniques such as adversarial training try to plug these holes by countering specific attacks. As an alternative to refusal training and adversarial training, short-circuiting directly controls the representations that are responsible for harmful outputs in the first place. Our technique can be applied to both text-only and multimodal language models to prevent the generation of harmful outputs without sacrificing utility -- even in the presence of powerful unseen attacks. Notably, while adversarial robustness in standalone image recognition remains an open challenge, short-circuiting allows the larger multimodal system to reliably withstand image "hijacks" that aim to produce harmful content. Finally, we extend our approach to AI agents, demonstrating considerable reductions in the rate of harmful actions when they are under attack. Our approach represents a significant step forward in the development of reliable safeguards to harmful behavior and adversarial attacks.
Articulate-Anything: Automatic Modeling of Articulated Objects via a Vision-Language Foundation Model
Interactive 3D simulated objects are crucial in AR/VR, animations, and robotics, driving immersive experiences and advanced automation. However, creating these articulated objects requires extensive human effort and expertise, limiting their broader applications. To overcome this challenge, we present Articulate-Anything, a system that automates the articulation of diverse, complex objects from many input modalities, including text, images, and videos. Articulate-Anything leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to generate code that can be compiled into an interactable digital twin for use in standard 3D simulators. Our system exploits existing 3D asset datasets via a mesh retrieval mechanism, along with an actor-critic system that iteratively proposes, evaluates, and refines solutions for articulating the objects, self-correcting errors to achieve a robust outcome. Qualitative evaluations demonstrate Articulate-Anything's capability to articulate complex and even ambiguous object affordances by leveraging rich grounded inputs. In extensive quantitative experiments on the standard PartNet-Mobility dataset, Articulate-Anything substantially outperforms prior work, increasing the success rate from 8.7-11.6% to 75% and setting a new bar for state-of-the-art performance. We further showcase the utility of our system by generating 3D assets from in-the-wild video inputs, which are then used to train robotic policies for fine-grained manipulation tasks in simulation that go beyond basic pick and place. These policies are then transferred to a real robotic system.
Neural MMO: A Massively Multiagent Game Environment for Training and Evaluating Intelligent Agents
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.
Diverse Controllable Diffusion Policy with Signal Temporal Logic
Generating realistic simulations is critical for autonomous system applications such as self-driving and human-robot interactions. However, driving simulators nowadays still have difficulty in generating controllable, diverse, and rule-compliant behaviors for road participants: Rule-based models cannot produce diverse behaviors and require careful tuning, whereas learning-based methods imitate the policy from data but are not designed to follow the rules explicitly. Besides, the real-world datasets are by nature "single-outcome", making the learning method hard to generate diverse behaviors. In this paper, we leverage Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and Diffusion Models to learn controllable, diverse, and rule-aware policy. We first calibrate the STL on the real-world data, then generate diverse synthetic data using trajectory optimization, and finally learn the rectified diffusion policy on the augmented dataset. We test on the NuScenes dataset and our approach can achieve the most diverse rule-compliant trajectories compared to other baselines, with a runtime 1/17X to the second-best approach. In the closed-loop testing, our approach reaches the highest diversity, rule satisfaction rate, and the least collision rate. Our method can generate varied characteristics conditional on different STL parameters in testing. A case study on human-robot encounter scenarios shows our approach can generate diverse and closed-to-oracle trajectories. The annotation tool, augmented dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/mengyuest/pSTL-diffusion-policy.
AI-Generated Images as Data Source: The Dawn of Synthetic Era
The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Evaluating Strategic Planning and Execution of LLM Agents in an Auction Arena
Can Large Language Models (LLMs) simulate human behavior in complex environments? LLMs have recently been shown to exhibit advanced reasoning skills but much of NLP evaluation still relies on static benchmarks. Answering this requires evaluation environments that probe strategic reasoning in competitive, dynamic scenarios that involve long-term planning. We introduce AucArena, a novel simulation environment for evaluating LLMs within auctions, a setting chosen for being highly unpredictable and involving many skills related to resource and risk management, while also being easy to evaluate. We conduct several controlled simulations using state-of-the-art LLMs as bidding agents. We find that through simple prompting, LLMs do indeed demonstrate many of the skills needed for effectively engaging in auctions (e.g., managing budget, adhering to long-term goals and priorities), skills that we find can be sharpened by explicitly encouraging models to be adaptive and observe strategies in past auctions. These results are significant as they show the potential of using LLM agents to model intricate social dynamics, especially in competitive settings. However, we also observe considerable variability in the capabilities of individual LLMs. Notably, even our most advanced models (GPT-4) are occasionally surpassed by heuristic baselines and human agents, highlighting the potential for further improvements in the design of LLM agents and the important role that our simulation environment can play in further testing and refining agent architectures.
o1-Coder: an o1 Replication for Coding
The technical report introduces O1-CODER, an attempt to replicate OpenAI's o1 model with a focus on coding tasks. It integrates reinforcement learning (RL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to enhance the model's System-2 thinking capabilities. The framework includes training a Test Case Generator (TCG) for standardized code testing, using MCTS to generate code data with reasoning processes, and iteratively fine-tuning the policy model to initially produce pseudocode, followed by the generation of the full code. The report also addresses the opportunities and challenges in deploying o1-like models in real-world applications, suggesting transitioning to the System-2 paradigm and highlighting the imperative for environment state updates. Updated model progress and experimental results will be reported in subsequent versions. All source code, curated datasets, as well as the derived models will be disclosed at https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/O1-CODER .
LogicGame: Benchmarking Rule-Based Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across various tasks, showcasing complex problem-solving abilities. Understanding and executing complex rules, along with multi-step planning, are fundamental to logical reasoning and critical for practical LLM agents and decision-making systems. However, evaluating LLMs as effective rule-based executors and planners remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LogicGame, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the comprehensive rule understanding, execution, and planning capabilities of LLMs. Unlike traditional benchmarks, LogicGame provides diverse games that contain a series of rules with an initial state, requiring models to comprehend and apply predefined regulations to solve problems. We create simulated scenarios in which models execute or plan operations to achieve specific outcomes. These game scenarios are specifically designed to distinguish logical reasoning from mere knowledge by relying exclusively on predefined rules. This separation allows for a pure assessment of rule-based reasoning capabilities. The evaluation considers not only final outcomes but also intermediate steps, providing a comprehensive assessment of model performance. Moreover, these intermediate steps are deterministic and can be automatically verified. LogicGame defines game scenarios with varying difficulty levels, from simple rule applications to complex reasoning chains, in order to offer a precise evaluation of model performance on rule understanding and multi-step execution. Utilizing LogicGame, we test various LLMs and identify notable shortcomings in their rule-based logical reasoning abilities.
Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games
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.
Programmable Motion Generation for Open-Set Motion Control Tasks
Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.
The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot
Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible. The treatment group, with access to the AI pair programmer, completed the task 55.8% faster than the control group. Observed heterogenous effects show promise for AI pair programmers to help people transition into software development careers.
Aligning Superhuman AI with Human Behavior: Chess as a Model System
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intelligent---in some cases, achieving superhuman performance---there is growing potential for humans to learn from and collaborate with algorithms. However, the ways in which AI systems approach problems are often different from the ways people do, and thus may be uninterpretable and hard to learn from. A crucial step in bridging this gap between human and artificial intelligence is modeling the granular actions that constitute human behavior, rather than simply matching aggregate human performance. We pursue this goal in a model system with a long history in artificial intelligence: chess. The aggregate performance of a chess player unfolds as they make decisions over the course of a game. The hundreds of millions of games played online by players at every skill level form a rich source of data in which these decisions, and their exact context, are recorded in minute detail. Applying existing chess engines to this data, including an open-source implementation of AlphaZero, we find that they do not predict human moves well. We develop and introduce Maia, a customized version of Alpha-Zero trained on human chess games, that predicts human moves at a much higher accuracy than existing engines, and can achieve maximum accuracy when predicting decisions made by players at a specific skill level in a tuneable way. For a dual task of predicting whether a human will make a large mistake on the next move, we develop a deep neural network that significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Taken together, our results suggest that there is substantial promise in designing artificial intelligence systems with human collaboration in mind by first accurately modeling granular human decision-making.
Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles
User simulators are crucial for replicating human interactions with dialogue systems, supporting both collaborative training and automatic evaluation, especially for large language models (LLMs). However, existing simulators often rely solely on text utterances, missing implicit user traits such as personality, speaking style, and goals. In contrast, persona-based methods lack generalizability, as they depend on predefined profiles of famous individuals or archetypes. To address these challenges, we propose User Simulator with implicit Profiles (USP), a framework that infers implicit user profiles from human-machine conversations and uses them to generate more personalized and realistic dialogues. We first develop an LLM-driven extractor with a comprehensive profile schema. Then, we refine the simulation through conditional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing it at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, we adopt a diverse profile sampler to capture the distribution of real-world user profiles. Experimental results demonstrate that USP outperforms strong baselines in terms of authenticity and diversity while achieving comparable performance in consistency. Furthermore, dynamic multi-turn evaluations based on USP strongly align with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.
DataEnvGym: Data Generation Agents in Teacher Environments with Student Feedback
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.
Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing
Large language models (LLMs) can be used to serve as agents to simulate human behaviors, given the powerful ability to understand human instructions and provide high-quality generated texts. Such ability stimulates us to wonder whether LLMs can simulate a person in a higher form than simple human behaviors. Therefore, we aim to train an agent with the profile, experience, and emotional states of a specific person instead of using limited prompts to instruct ChatGPT API. In this work, we introduce Character-LLM that teach LLMs to act as specific people such as Beethoven, Queen Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, etc. Our method focuses on editing profiles as experiences of a certain character and training models to be personal simulacra with these experiences. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we build a test playground that interviews trained agents and evaluates whether the agents memorize their characters and experiences. Experimental results show interesting observations that help build future simulacra of humankind.
BOLAA: Benchmarking and Orchestrating LLM-augmented Autonomous Agents
The massive successes of large language models (LLMs) encourage the emerging exploration of LLM-augmented Autonomous Agents (LAAs). An LAA is able to generate actions with its core LLM and interact with environments, which facilitates the ability to resolve complex tasks by conditioning on past interactions such as observations and actions. Since the investigation of LAA is still very recent, limited explorations are available. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive comparison of LAA in terms of both agent architectures and LLM backbones. Additionally, we propose a new strategy to orchestrate multiple LAAs such that each labor LAA focuses on one type of action, i.e. BOLAA, where a controller manages the communication among multiple agents. We conduct simulations on both decision-making and multi-step reasoning environments, which comprehensively justify the capacity of LAAs. Our performance results provide quantitative suggestions for designing LAA architectures and the optimal choice of LLMs, as well as the compatibility of both. We release our implementation code of LAAs to the public at https://github.com/salesforce/BOLAA.
Sim-to-Real Transfer for Mobile Robots with Reinforcement Learning: from NVIDIA Isaac Sim to Gazebo and Real ROS 2 Robots
Unprecedented agility and dexterous manipulation have been demonstrated with controllers based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), with a significant impact on legged and humanoid robots. Modern tooling and simulation platforms, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, have been enabling such advances. This article focuses on demonstrating the applications of Isaac in local planning and obstacle avoidance as one of the most fundamental ways in which a mobile robot interacts with its environments. Although there is extensive research on proprioception-based RL policies, the article highlights less standardized and reproducible approaches to exteroception. At the same time, the article aims to provide a base framework for end-to-end local navigation policies and how a custom robot can be trained in such simulation environment. We benchmark end-to-end policies with the state-of-the-art Nav2, navigation stack in Robot Operating System (ROS). We also cover the sim-to-real transfer process by demonstrating zero-shot transferability of policies trained in the Isaac simulator to real-world robots. This is further evidenced by the tests with different simulated robots, which show the generalization of the learned policy. Finally, the benchmarks demonstrate comparable performance to Nav2, opening the door to quick deployment of state-of-the-art end-to-end local planners for custom robot platforms, but importantly furthering the possibilities by expanding the state and action spaces or task definitions for more complex missions. Overall, with this article we introduce the most important steps, and aspects to consider, in deploying RL policies for local path planning and obstacle avoidance with Isaac Sim training, Gazebo testing, and ROS 2 for real-time inference in real robots. The code is available at https://github.com/sahars93/RL-Navigation.
Pangu-Agent: A Fine-Tunable Generalist Agent with Structured Reasoning
A key method for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents is Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, constructing a standalone RL policy that maps perception to action directly encounters severe problems, chief among them being its lack of generality across multiple tasks and the need for a large amount of training data. The leading cause is that it cannot effectively integrate prior information into the perception-action cycle when devising the policy. Large language models (LLMs) emerged as a fundamental way to incorporate cross-domain knowledge into AI agents but lack crucial learning and adaptation toward specific decision problems. This paper presents a general framework model for integrating and learning structured reasoning into AI agents' policies. Our methodology is motivated by the modularity found in the human brain. The framework utilises the construction of intrinsic and extrinsic functions to add previous understandings of reasoning structures. It also provides the adaptive ability to learn models inside every module or function, consistent with the modular structure of cognitive processes. We describe the framework in-depth and compare it with other AI pipelines and existing frameworks. The paper explores practical applications, covering experiments that show the effectiveness of our method. Our results indicate that AI agents perform and adapt far better when organised reasoning and prior knowledge are embedded. This opens the door to more resilient and general AI agent systems.
Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications
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.
Quad2Plane: An Intermediate Training Procedure for Online Exploration in Aerial Robotics via Receding Horizon Control
Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to learn useful policies for a given task. For many applications of field robotics online exploration is prohibitively expensive and dangerous, this is especially true in fixed-wing aerial robotics. To address these challenges we offer an intermediary solution for learning in field robotics. We investigate the use of dissimilar platform vehicle for learning and offer a procedure to mimic the behavior of one vehicle with another. We specifically consider the problem of training fixed-wing aircraft, an expensive and dangerous vehicle type, using a multi-rotor host platform. Using a Model Predictive Control approach, we design a controller capable of mimicking another vehicles behavior in both simulation and the real-world.
The Chess Transformer: Mastering Play using Generative Language Models
This work demonstrates that natural language transformers can support more generic strategic modeling, particularly for text-archived games. In addition to learning natural language skills, the abstract transformer architecture can generate meaningful moves on a chessboard. With further fine-tuning, the transformer learns complex gameplay by training on 2.8 million chess games in Portable Game Notation. After 30,000 training steps, OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-2) optimizes weights for 774 million parameters. This fine-tuned Chess Transformer generates plausible strategies and displays game formations identifiable as classic openings, such as English or the Slav Exchange. Finally, in live play, the novel model demonstrates a human-to-transformer interface that correctly filters illegal moves and provides a novel method to challenge the transformer's chess strategies. We anticipate future work will build on this transformer's promise, particularly in other strategy games where features can capture the underlying complex rule syntax from simple but expressive player annotations.
Comprehensive Cognitive LLM Agent for Smartphone GUI Automation
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as human-like autonomous language agents to interact with real-world environments, especially for graphical user interface (GUI) automation. However, those GUI agents require comprehensive cognition ability including exhaustive perception and reliable action response. We propose Comprehensive Cognitive LLM Agent, CoCo-Agent, with two novel approaches, comprehensive environment perception (CEP) and conditional action prediction (CAP), to systematically improve the GUI automation performance. First, CEP facilitates the GUI perception through different aspects and granularity, including screenshots and complementary detailed layouts for the visual channel and historical actions for the textual channel. Second, CAP decomposes the action prediction into sub-problems: action type prediction and action target conditioned on the action type. With our technical design, our agent achieves new state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks, showing promising abilities in realistic scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/xbmxb/AAgent.
MLGym: A New Framework and Benchmark for Advancing AI Research Agents
We introduce Meta MLGym and MLGym-Bench, a new framework and benchmark for evaluating and developing LLM agents on AI research tasks. This is the first Gym environment for machine learning (ML) tasks, enabling research on reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for training such agents. MLGym-bench consists of 13 diverse and open-ended AI research tasks from diverse domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and game theory. Solving these tasks requires real-world AI research skills such as generating new ideas and hypotheses, creating and processing data, implementing ML methods, training models, running experiments, analyzing the results, and iterating through this process to improve on a given task. We evaluate a number of frontier large language models (LLMs) on our benchmarks such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Llama-3.1 405B, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini-1.5 Pro. Our MLGym framework makes it easy to add new tasks, integrate and evaluate models or agents, generate synthetic data at scale, as well as develop new learning algorithms for training agents on AI research tasks. We find that current frontier models can improve on the given baselines, usually by finding better hyperparameters, but do not generate novel hypotheses, algorithms, architectures, or substantial improvements. We open-source our framework and benchmark to facilitate future research in advancing the AI research capabilities of LLM agents.
i-Code Studio: A Configurable and Composable Framework for Integrative AI
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires comprehensive understanding and generation capabilities for a variety of tasks spanning different modalities and functionalities. Integrative AI is one important direction to approach AGI, through combining multiple models to tackle complex multimodal tasks. However, there is a lack of a flexible and composable platform to facilitate efficient and effective model composition and coordination. In this paper, we propose the i-Code Studio, a configurable and composable framework for Integrative AI. The i-Code Studio orchestrates multiple pre-trained models in a finetuning-free fashion to conduct complex multimodal tasks. Instead of simple model composition, the i-Code Studio provides an integrative, flexible, and composable setting for developers to quickly and easily compose cutting-edge services and technologies tailored to their specific requirements. The i-Code Studio achieves impressive results on a variety of zero-shot multimodal tasks, such as video-to-text retrieval, speech-to-speech translation, and visual question answering. We also demonstrate how to quickly build a multimodal agent based on the i-Code Studio that can communicate and personalize for users.
V-IRL: Grounding Virtual Intelligence in Real Life
There is a sensory gulf between the Earth that humans inhabit and the digital realms in which modern AI agents are created. To develop AI agents that can sense, think, and act as flexibly as humans in real-world settings, it is imperative to bridge the realism gap between the digital and physical worlds. How can we embody agents in an environment as rich and diverse as the one we inhabit, without the constraints imposed by real hardware and control? Towards this end, we introduce V-IRL: a platform that enables agents to scalably interact with the real world in a virtual yet realistic environment. Our platform serves as a playground for developing agents that can accomplish various practical tasks and as a vast testbed for measuring progress in capabilities spanning perception, decision-making, and interaction with real-world data across the entire globe.
Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.
Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation
We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.
Dynamics as Prompts: In-Context Learning for Sim-to-Real System Identifications
Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in robotics due to the discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics. Traditional methods like Domain Randomization often fail to capture fine-grained dynamics, limiting their effectiveness for precise control tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach that dynamically adjusts simulation environment parameters online using in-context learning. By leveraging past interaction histories as context, our method adapts the simulation environment dynamics to real-world dynamics without requiring gradient updates, resulting in faster and more accurate alignment between simulated and real-world performance. We validate our approach across two tasks: object scooping and table air hockey. In the sim-to-sim evaluations, our method significantly outperforms the baselines on environment parameter estimation by 80% and 42% in the object scooping and table air hockey setups, respectively. Furthermore, our method achieves at least 70% success rate in sim-to-real transfer on object scooping across three different objects. By incorporating historical interaction data, our approach delivers efficient and smooth system identification, advancing the deployment of robots in dynamic real-world scenarios. Demos are available on our project page: https://sim2real-capture.github.io/
Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models
Sora is a text-to-video generative AI model, released by OpenAI in February 2024. The model is trained to generate videos of realistic or imaginative scenes from text instructions and show potential in simulating the physical world. Based on public technical reports and reverse engineering, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the model's background, related technologies, applications, remaining challenges, and future directions of text-to-video AI models. We first trace Sora's development and investigate the underlying technologies used to build this "world simulator". Then, we describe in detail the applications and potential impact of Sora in multiple industries ranging from film-making and education to marketing. We discuss the main challenges and limitations that need to be addressed to widely deploy Sora, such as ensuring safe and unbiased video generation. Lastly, we discuss the future development of Sora and video generation models in general, and how advancements in the field could enable new ways of human-AI interaction, boosting productivity and creativity of video generation.
UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator
Rigorously testing autonomy systems is essential for making safe self-driving vehicles (SDV) a reality. It requires one to generate safety critical scenarios beyond what can be collected safely in the world, as many scenarios happen rarely on public roads. To accurately evaluate performance, we need to test the SDV on these scenarios in closed-loop, where the SDV and other actors interact with each other at each timestep. Previously recorded driving logs provide a rich resource to build these new scenarios from, but for closed loop evaluation, we need to modify the sensor data based on the new scene configuration and the SDV's decisions, as actors might be added or removed and the trajectories of existing actors and the SDV will differ from the original log. In this paper, we present UniSim, a neural sensor simulator that takes a single recorded log captured by a sensor-equipped vehicle and converts it into a realistic closed-loop multi-sensor simulation. UniSim builds neural feature grids to reconstruct both the static background and dynamic actors in the scene, and composites them together to simulate LiDAR and camera data at new viewpoints, with actors added or removed and at new placements. To better handle extrapolated views, we incorporate learnable priors for dynamic objects, and leverage a convolutional network to complete unseen regions. Our experiments show UniSim can simulate realistic sensor data with small domain gap on downstream tasks. With UniSim, we demonstrate closed-loop evaluation of an autonomy system on safety-critical scenarios as if it were in the real world.
BeTAIL: Behavior Transformer Adversarial Imitation Learning from Human Racing Gameplay
Imitation learning learns a policy from demonstrations without requiring hand-designed reward functions. In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous racing, imitated policies must model complex environment dynamics and human decision-making. Sequence modeling is highly effective in capturing intricate patterns of motion sequences but struggles to adapt to new environments or distribution shifts that are common in real-world robotics tasks. In contrast, Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) can mitigate this effect, but struggles with sample inefficiency and handling complex motion patterns. Thus, we propose BeTAIL: Behavior Transformer Adversarial Imitation Learning, which combines a Behavior Transformer (BeT) policy from human demonstrations with online AIL. BeTAIL adds an AIL residual policy to the BeT policy to model the sequential decision-making process of human experts and correct for out-of-distribution states or shifts in environment dynamics. We test BeTAIL on three challenges with expert-level demonstrations of real human gameplay in Gran Turismo Sport. Our proposed residual BeTAIL reduces environment interactions and improves racing performance and stability, even when the BeT is pretrained on different tracks than downstream learning. Videos and code available at: https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/BeTAIL/home.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)-Native Wireless Systems: A Journey Beyond 6G
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.
AI-Driven Virtual Teacher for Enhanced Educational Efficiency: Leveraging Large Pretrain Models for Autonomous Error Analysis and Correction
Students frequently make mistakes while solving mathematical problems, and traditional error correction methods are both time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper introduces an innovative Virtual AI Teacher system designed to autonomously analyze and correct student Errors (VATE). Leveraging advanced large language models (LLMs), the system uses student drafts as a primary source for error analysis, which enhances understanding of the student's learning process. It incorporates sophisticated prompt engineering and maintains an error pool to reduce computational overhead. The AI-driven system also features a real-time dialogue component for efficient student interaction. Our approach demonstrates significant advantages over traditional and machine learning-based error correction methods, including reduced educational costs, high scalability, and superior generalizability. The system has been deployed on the Squirrel AI learning platform for elementary mathematics education, where it achieves 78.3\% accuracy in error analysis and shows a marked improvement in student learning efficiency. Satisfaction surveys indicate a strong positive reception, highlighting the system's potential to transform educational practices.
xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems
Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant research interest. However, the open-source community faces many challenges in developing specialized models for agent tasks, driven by the scarcity of high-quality agent datasets and the absence of standard protocols in this area. We introduce and publicly release xLAM, a series of large action models designed for AI agent tasks. The xLAM series includes five models with both dense and mixture-of-expert architectures, ranging from 1B to 8x22B parameters, trained using a scalable, flexible pipeline that unifies, augments, and synthesizes diverse datasets to enhance AI agents' generalizability and performance across varied environments. Our experimental results demonstrate that xLAM consistently delivers exceptional performance across multiple agent ability benchmarks, notably securing the 1st position on the Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard, outperforming GPT-4, Claude-3, and many other models in terms of tool use. By releasing the xLAM series, we aim to advance the performance of open-source LLMs for autonomous AI agents, potentially accelerating progress and democratizing access to high-performance models for agent tasks. Models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-models-65f00e2a0a63bbcd1c2dade4
Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games
In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. We introduce the first dataset specifically for Jubensha, including character scripts and game rules, to foster AI agent development in this complex narrative environment. Our work also presents a unique multi-agent interaction framework using LLMs, allowing AI agents to autonomously engage in this game. To evaluate the gaming performance of these AI agents, we developed novel methods measuring their mastery of case information and reasoning skills. Furthermore, we incorporated the latest advancements in in-context learning to improve the agents' performance in information gathering, murderer identification, and logical reasoning. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. This work aims to offer a novel perspective on understanding LLM capabilities and establish a new benchmark for evaluating large language model-based agents.
RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins (early version)
Effective collaboration of dual-arm robots and their tool use capabilities are increasingly important areas in the advancement of robotics. These skills play a significant role in expanding robots' ability to operate in diverse real-world environments. However, progress is impeded by the scarcity of specialized training data. This paper introduces RoboTwin, a novel benchmark dataset combining real-world teleoperated data with synthetic data from digital twins, designed for dual-arm robotic scenarios. Using the COBOT Magic platform, we have collected diverse data on tool usage and human-robot interaction. We present a innovative approach to creating digital twins using AI-generated content, transforming 2D images into detailed 3D models. Furthermore, we utilize large language models to generate expert-level training data and task-specific pose sequences oriented toward functionality. Our key contributions are: 1) the RoboTwin benchmark dataset, 2) an efficient real-to-simulation pipeline, and 3) the use of language models for automatic expert-level data generation. These advancements are designed to address the shortage of robotic training data, potentially accelerating the development of more capable and versatile robotic systems for a wide range of real-world applications. The project page is available at https://robotwin-benchmark.github.io/early-version/
DANLI: Deliberative Agent for Following Natural Language Instructions
Recent years have seen an increasing amount of work on embodied AI agents that can perform tasks by following human language instructions. However, most of these agents are reactive, meaning that they simply learn and imitate behaviors encountered in the training data. These reactive agents are insufficient for long-horizon complex tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic deliberative agent that, while following language instructions, proactively applies reasoning and planning based on its neural and symbolic representations acquired from past experience (e.g., natural language and egocentric vision). We show that our deliberative agent achieves greater than 70% improvement over reactive baselines on the challenging TEACh benchmark. Moreover, the underlying reasoning and planning processes, together with our modular framework, offer impressive transparency and explainability to the behaviors of the agent. This enables an in-depth understanding of the agent's capabilities, which shed light on challenges and opportunities for future embodied agents for instruction following. The code is available at https://github.com/sled-group/DANLI.
Coalitions of Large Language Models Increase the Robustness of AI Agents
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally altered the way we interact with digital systems and have led to the pursuit of LLM powered AI agents to assist in daily workflows. LLMs, whilst powerful and capable of demonstrating some emergent properties, are not logical reasoners and often struggle to perform well at all sub-tasks carried out by an AI agent to plan and execute a workflow. While existing studies tackle this lack of proficiency by generalised pretraining at a huge scale or by specialised fine-tuning for tool use, we assess if a system comprising of a coalition of pretrained LLMs, each exhibiting specialised performance at individual sub-tasks, can match the performance of single model agents. The coalition of models approach showcases its potential for building robustness and reducing the operational costs of these AI agents by leveraging traits exhibited by specific models. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuning can be mitigated by considering a coalition of pretrained models and believe that this approach can be applied to other non-agentic systems which utilise LLMs.
AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorials
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.
Jelly Bean World: A Testbed for Never-Ending Learning
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.
Smart Help: Strategic Opponent Modeling for Proactive and Adaptive Robot Assistance in Households
Despite the significant demand for assistive technology among vulnerable groups (e.g., the elderly, children, and the disabled) in daily tasks, research into advanced AI-driven assistive solutions that genuinely accommodate their diverse needs remains sparse. Traditional human-machine interaction tasks often require machines to simply help without nuanced consideration of human abilities and feelings, such as their opportunity for practice and learning, sense of self-improvement, and self-esteem. Addressing this gap, we define a pivotal and novel challenge Smart Help, which aims to provide proactive yet adaptive support to human agents with diverse disabilities and dynamic goals in various tasks and environments. To establish this challenge, we leverage AI2-THOR to build a new interactive 3D realistic household environment for the Smart Help task. We introduce an innovative opponent modeling module that provides a nuanced understanding of the main agent's capabilities and goals, in order to optimize the assisting agent's helping policy. Rigorous experiments validate the efficacy of our model components and show the superiority of our holistic approach against established baselines. Our findings illustrate the potential of AI-imbued assistive robots in improving the well-being of vulnerable groups.
Contrastive Sparse Autoencoders for Interpreting Planning of Chess-Playing Agents
AI led chess systems to a superhuman level, yet these systems heavily rely on black-box algorithms. This is unsustainable in ensuring transparency to the end-user, particularly when these systems are responsible for sensitive decision-making. Recent interpretability work has shown that the inner representations of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) were fathomable and contained human-understandable concepts. Yet, these methods are seldom contextualised and are often based on a single hidden state, which makes them unable to interpret multi-step reasoning, e.g. planning. In this respect, we propose contrastive sparse autoencoders (CSAE), a novel framework for studying pairs of game trajectories. Using CSAE, we are able to extract and interpret concepts that are meaningful to the chess-agent plans. We primarily focused on a qualitative analysis of the CSAE features before proposing an automated feature taxonomy. Furthermore, to evaluate the quality of our trained CSAE, we devise sanity checks to wave spurious correlations in our results.
Multi-Modal Experience Inspired AI Creation
AI creation, such as poem or lyrics generation, has attracted increasing attention from both industry and academic communities, with many promising models proposed in the past few years. Existing methods usually estimate the outputs based on single and independent visual or textual information. However, in reality, humans usually make creations according to their experiences, which may involve different modalities and be sequentially correlated. To model such human capabilities, in this paper, we define and solve a novel AI creation problem based on human experiences. More specifically, we study how to generate texts based on sequential multi-modal information. Compared with the previous works, this task is much more difficult because the designed model has to well understand and adapt the semantics among different modalities and effectively convert them into the output in a sequential manner. To alleviate these difficulties, we firstly design a multi-channel sequence-to-sequence architecture equipped with a multi-modal attention network. For more effective optimization, we then propose a curriculum negative sampling strategy tailored for the sequential inputs. To benchmark this problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we manually labeled a new multi-modal experience dataset. With this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments by comparing our model with a series of representative baselines, where we can demonstrate significant improvements in our model based on both automatic and human-centered metrics. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/MMTG.
OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement
Autonomous interaction with the computer has been a longstanding challenge with great potential, and the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has markedly accelerated progress in building digital agents. However, most of these agents are designed to interact with a narrow domain, such as a specific software or website. This narrow focus constrains their applicability for general computer tasks. To this end, we introduce OS-Copilot, a framework to build generalist agents capable of interfacing with comprehensive elements in an operating system (OS), including the web, code terminals, files, multimedia, and various third-party applications. We use OS-Copilot to create FRIDAY, a self-improving embodied agent for automating general computer tasks. On GAIA, a general AI assistants benchmark, FRIDAY outperforms previous methods by 35%, showcasing strong generalization to unseen applications via accumulated skills from previous tasks. We also present numerical and quantitative evidence that FRIDAY learns to control and self-improve on Excel and Powerpoint with minimal supervision. Our OS-Copilot framework and empirical findings provide infrastructure and insights for future research toward more capable and general-purpose computer agents.
CALM: Conditional Adversarial Latent Models for Directable Virtual Characters
In this work, we present Conditional Adversarial Latent Models (CALM), an approach for generating diverse and directable behaviors for user-controlled interactive virtual characters. Using imitation learning, CALM learns a representation of movement that captures the complexity and diversity of human motion, and enables direct control over character movements. The approach jointly learns a control policy and a motion encoder that reconstructs key characteristics of a given motion without merely replicating it. The results show that CALM learns a semantic motion representation, enabling control over the generated motions and style-conditioning for higher-level task training. Once trained, the character can be controlled using intuitive interfaces, akin to those found in video games.
Knowledge-based in silico models and dataset for the comparative evaluation of mammography AI for a range of breast characteristics, lesion conspicuities and doses
To generate evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled medical devices, AI models need to be evaluated on a diverse population of patient cases, some of which may not be readily available. We propose an evaluation approach for testing medical imaging AI models that relies on in silico imaging pipelines in which stochastic digital models of human anatomy (in object space) with and without pathology are imaged using a digital replica imaging acquisition system to generate realistic synthetic image datasets. Here, we release M-SYNTH, a dataset of cohorts with four breast fibroglandular density distributions imaged at different exposure levels using Monte Carlo x-ray simulations with the publicly available Virtual Imaging Clinical Trial for Regulatory Evaluation (VICTRE) toolkit. We utilize the synthetic dataset to analyze AI model performance and find that model performance decreases with increasing breast density and increases with higher mass density, as expected. As exposure levels decrease, AI model performance drops with the highest performance achieved at exposure levels lower than the nominal recommended dose for the breast type.
Generative AI for learning: Investigating the potential of synthetic learning videos
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have captured worldwide attention. Tools such as Dalle-2 and ChatGPT suggest that tasks previously thought to be beyond the capabilities of AI may now augment the productivity of creative media in various new ways, including through the generation of synthetic video. This research paper explores the utility of using AI-generated synthetic video to create viable educational content for online educational settings. To date, there is limited research investigating the real-world educational value of AI-generated synthetic media. To address this gap, we examined the impact of using AI-generated synthetic video in an online learning platform on both learners content acquisition and learning experience. We took a mixed-method approach, randomly assigning adult learners (n=83) into one of two micro-learning conditions, collecting pre- and post-learning assessments, and surveying participants on their learning experience. The control condition included a traditionally produced instructor video, while the experimental condition included a synthetic video with a realistic AI-generated character. The results show that learners in both conditions demonstrated significant improvement from pre- to post-learning (p<.001), with no significant differences in gains between the two conditions (p=.80). In addition, no differences were observed in how learners perceived the traditional and synthetic videos. These findings suggest that AI-generated synthetic learning videos have the potential to be a viable substitute for videos produced via traditional methods in online educational settings, making high quality educational content more accessible across the globe.
Experiments with Large Language Models on Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Closed-Source Simulation Software
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly helpful in text generation, even writing code in programming languages based on user prompts written in natural language. They are even applied to generate simulation models for multibody systems from natural language. Research results suggest that LLMs surpass the mere replication of existing code examples, where some LLMs have been trained on an open-source multibody simulation code. However, for closed-source simulation software, such results are not to be expected as their ideas and concepts might differ from other publicly available ones. LLMs can hallucinate for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as model creation, which can lead to wrong responses. This is especially the case for the LLM unknown closed-source simulation software. The same applies to other internal knowledge kept private to protect intellectual property or data privacy. The Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach might yield a solution for these knowledge-intensive tasks. This paper explores the application of RAG to closed-source simulation software and presents first experiments. After a brief introduction to LLMs, the RAG approach, and the simulation method applied by the close-source simulation software, several examples are provided to test LLMs' knowledge of the simulation software and the creation of simulation models using two RAG systems. The examples show promising results indicating the benefits of applying RAG systems to closed-source simulation software, helping to access their knowledge. Nevertheless, they also reveal gaps in the applied information and open questions for further research.
SAPIEN: Affective Virtual Agents Powered by Large Language Models
In this demo paper, we introduce SAPIEN, a platform for high-fidelity virtual agents driven by large language models that can hold open domain conversations with users in 13 different languages, and display emotions through facial expressions and voice. The platform allows users to customize their virtual agent's personality, background, and conversation premise, thus providing a rich, immersive interaction experience. Furthermore, after the virtual meeting, the user can choose to get the conversation analyzed and receive actionable feedback on their communication skills. This paper illustrates an overview of the platform and discusses the various application domains of this technology, ranging from entertainment to mental health, communication training, language learning, education, healthcare, and beyond. Additionally, we consider the ethical implications of such realistic virtual agent representations and the potential challenges in ensuring responsible use.
LLM-Powered Hierarchical Language Agent for Real-time Human-AI Coordination
AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances, enabling them to assist humans in diverse complex tasks and leading to a revolution in human-AI coordination. LLM-powered agents typically require invoking LLM APIs and employing artificially designed complex prompts, which results in high inference latency. While this paradigm works well in scenarios with minimal interactive demands, such as code generation, it is unsuitable for highly interactive and real-time applications, such as gaming. Traditional gaming AI often employs small models or reactive policies, enabling fast inference but offering limited task completion and interaction abilities. In this work, we consider Overcooked as our testbed where players could communicate with natural language and cooperate to serve orders. We propose a Hierarchical Language Agent (HLA) for human-AI coordination that provides both strong reasoning abilities while keeping real-time execution. In particular, HLA adopts a hierarchical framework and comprises three modules: a proficient LLM, referred to as Slow Mind, for intention reasoning and language interaction, a lightweight LLM, referred to as Fast Mind, for generating macro actions, and a reactive policy, referred to as Executor, for transforming macro actions into atomic actions. Human studies show that HLA outperforms other baseline agents, including slow-mind-only agents and fast-mind-only agents, with stronger cooperation abilities, faster responses, and more consistent language communications.
Can language agents be alternatives to PPO? A Preliminary Empirical Study On OpenAI Gym
The formidable capacity for zero- or few-shot decision-making in language agents encourages us to pose a compelling question: Can language agents be alternatives to PPO agents in traditional sequential decision-making tasks? To investigate this, we first take environments collected in OpenAI Gym as our testbeds and ground them to textual environments that construct the TextGym simulator. This allows for straightforward and efficient comparisons between PPO agents and language agents, given the widespread adoption of OpenAI Gym. To ensure a fair and effective benchmarking, we introduce 5 levels of scenario for accurate domain-knowledge controlling and a unified RL-inspired framework for language agents. Additionally, we propose an innovative explore-exploit-guided language (EXE) agent to solve tasks within TextGym. Through numerical experiments and ablation studies, we extract valuable insights into the decision-making capabilities of language agents and make a preliminary evaluation of their potential to be alternatives to PPO in classical sequential decision-making problems. This paper sheds light on the performance of language agents and paves the way for future research in this exciting domain. Our code is publicly available at~https://github.com/mail-ecnu/Text-Gym-Agents.
Chain of Thought Imitation with Procedure Cloning
Imitation learning aims to extract high-performance policies from logged demonstrations of expert behavior. It is common to frame imitation learning as a supervised learning problem in which one fits a function approximator to the input-output mapping exhibited by the logged demonstrations (input observations to output actions). While the framing of imitation learning as a supervised input-output learning problem allows for applicability in a wide variety of settings, it is also an overly simplistic view of the problem in situations where the expert demonstrations provide much richer insight into expert behavior. For example, applications such as path navigation, robot manipulation, and strategy games acquire expert demonstrations via planning, search, or some other multi-step algorithm, revealing not just the output action to be imitated but also the procedure for how to determine this action. While these intermediate computations may use tools not available to the agent during inference (e.g., environment simulators), they are nevertheless informative as a way to explain an expert's mapping of state to actions. To properly leverage expert procedure information without relying on the privileged tools the expert may have used to perform the procedure, we propose procedure cloning, which applies supervised sequence prediction to imitate the series of expert computations. This way, procedure cloning learns not only what to do (i.e., the output action), but how and why to do it (i.e., the procedure). Through empirical analysis on navigation, simulated robotic manipulation, and game-playing environments, we show that imitating the intermediate computations of an expert's behavior enables procedure cloning to learn policies exhibiting significant generalization to unseen environment configurations, including those configurations for which running the expert's procedure directly is infeasible.
ASID: Active Exploration for System Identification in Robotic Manipulation
Model-free control strategies such as reinforcement learning have shown the ability to learn control strategies without requiring an accurate model or simulator of the world. While this is appealing due to the lack of modeling requirements, such methods can be sample inefficient, making them impractical in many real-world domains. On the other hand, model-based control techniques leveraging accurate simulators can circumvent these challenges and use a large amount of cheap simulation data to learn controllers that can effectively transfer to the real world. The challenge with such model-based techniques is the requirement for an extremely accurate simulation, requiring both the specification of appropriate simulation assets and physical parameters. This requires considerable human effort to design for every environment being considered. In this work, we propose a learning system that can leverage a small amount of real-world data to autonomously refine a simulation model and then plan an accurate control strategy that can be deployed in the real world. Our approach critically relies on utilizing an initial (possibly inaccurate) simulator to design effective exploration policies that, when deployed in the real world, collect high-quality data. We demonstrate the efficacy of this paradigm in identifying articulation, mass, and other physical parameters in several challenging robotic manipulation tasks, and illustrate that only a small amount of real-world data can allow for effective sim-to-real transfer. Project website at https://weirdlabuw.github.io/asid
A Data Source for Reasoning Embodied Agents
Recent progress in using machine learning models for reasoning tasks has been driven by novel model architectures, large-scale pre-training protocols, and dedicated reasoning datasets for fine-tuning. In this work, to further pursue these advances, we introduce a new data generator for machine reasoning that integrates with an embodied agent. The generated data consists of templated text queries and answers, matched with world-states encoded into a database. The world-states are a result of both world dynamics and the actions of the agent. We show the results of several baseline models on instantiations of train sets. These include pre-trained language models fine-tuned on a text-formatted representation of the database, and graph-structured Transformers operating on a knowledge-graph representation of the database. We find that these models can answer some questions about the world-state, but struggle with others. These results hint at new research directions in designing neural reasoning models and database representations. Code to generate the data will be released at github.com/facebookresearch/neuralmemory
Game Theory with Simulation in the Presence of Unpredictable Randomisation
AI agents will be predictable in certain ways that traditional agents are not. Where and how can we leverage this predictability in order to improve social welfare? We study this question in a game-theoretic setting where one agent can pay a fixed cost to simulate the other in order to learn its mixed strategy. As a negative result, we prove that, in contrast to prior work on pure-strategy simulation, enabling mixed-strategy simulation may no longer lead to improved outcomes for both players in all so-called "generalised trust games". In fact, mixed-strategy simulation does not help in any game where the simulatee's action can depend on that of the simulator. We also show that, in general, deciding whether simulation introduces Pareto-improving Nash equilibria in a given game is NP-hard. As positive results, we establish that mixed-strategy simulation can improve social welfare if the simulator has the option to scale their level of trust, if the players face challenges with both trust and coordination, or if maintaining some level of privacy is essential for enabling cooperation.
IDAT: A Multi-Modal Dataset and Toolkit for Building and Evaluating Interactive Task-Solving Agents
Seamless interaction between AI agents and humans using natural language remains a key goal in AI research. This paper addresses the challenges of developing interactive agents capable of understanding and executing grounded natural language instructions through the IGLU competition at NeurIPS. Despite advancements, challenges such as a scarcity of appropriate datasets and the need for effective evaluation platforms persist. We introduce a scalable data collection tool for gathering interactive grounded language instructions within a Minecraft-like environment, resulting in a Multi-Modal dataset with around 9,000 utterances and over 1,000 clarification questions. Additionally, we present a Human-in-the-Loop interactive evaluation platform for qualitative analysis and comparison of agent performance through multi-turn communication with human annotators. We offer to the community these assets referred to as IDAT (IGLU Dataset And Toolkit) which aim to advance the development of intelligent, interactive AI agents and provide essential resources for further research.
Proactive Agents for Multi-Turn Text-to-Image Generation Under Uncertainty
User prompts for generative AI models are often underspecified, leading to sub-optimal responses. This problem is particularly evident in text-to-image (T2I) generation, where users commonly struggle to articulate their precise intent. This disconnect between the user's vision and the model's interpretation often forces users to painstakingly and repeatedly refine their prompts. To address this, we propose a design for proactive T2I agents equipped with an interface to (1) actively ask clarification questions when uncertain, and (2) present their understanding of user intent as an understandable belief graph that a user can edit. We build simple prototypes for such agents and verify their effectiveness through both human studies and automated evaluation. We observed that at least 90% of human subjects found these agents and their belief graphs helpful for their T2I workflow. Moreover, we develop a scalable automated evaluation approach using two agents, one with a ground truth image and the other tries to ask as few questions as possible to align with the ground truth. On DesignBench, a benchmark we created for artists and designers, the COCO dataset (Lin et al., 2014), and ImageInWords (Garg et al., 2024), we observed that these T2I agents were able to ask informative questions and elicit crucial information to achieve successful alignment with at least 2 times higher VQAScore (Lin et al., 2024) than the standard single-turn T2I generation. Demo: https://github.com/google-deepmind/proactive_t2i_agents.
Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination
Learned world models summarize an agent's experience to facilitate learning complex behaviors. While learning world models from high-dimensional sensory inputs is becoming feasible through deep learning, there are many potential ways for deriving behaviors from them. We present Dreamer, a reinforcement learning agent that solves long-horizon tasks from images purely by latent imagination. We efficiently learn behaviors by propagating analytic gradients of learned state values back through trajectories imagined in the compact state space of a learned world model. On 20 challenging visual control tasks, Dreamer exceeds existing approaches in data-efficiency, computation time, and final performance.
Genie: Generative Interactive Environments
We introduce Genie, the first generative interactive environment trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches. At 11B parameters, Genie can be considered a foundation world model. It is comprised of a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a simple and scalable latent action model. Genie enables users to act in the generated environments on a frame-by-frame basis despite training without any ground-truth action labels or other domain-specific requirements typically found in the world model literature. Further the resulting learned latent action space facilitates training agents to imitate behaviors from unseen videos, opening the path for training generalist agents of the future.
Human Action CLIPS: Detecting AI-generated Human Motion
Full-blown AI-generated video generation continues its journey through the uncanny valley to produce content that is perceptually indistinguishable from reality. Intermixed with many exciting and creative applications are malicious applications that harm individuals, organizations, and democracies. We describe an effective and robust technique for distinguishing real from AI-generated human motion. This technique leverages a multi-modal semantic embedding, making it robust to the types of laundering that typically confound more low- to mid-level approaches. This method is evaluated against a custom-built dataset of video clips with human actions generated by seven text-to-video AI models and matching real footage.
SimsChat: A Customisable Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent
Large Language Models (LLMs) possess the remarkable capability to understand human instructions and generate high-quality text, enabling them to act as agents that simulate human behaviours. This capability allows LLMs to emulate human beings in a more advanced manner, beyond merely replicating simple human behaviours. However, there is a lack of exploring into leveraging LLMs to craft characters from several aspects. In this work, we introduce the Customisable Conversation Agent Framework, which employs LLMs to simulate real-world characters that can be freely customised according to different user preferences. The customisable framework is helpful for designing customisable characters and role-playing agents according to human's preferences. We first propose the SimsConv dataset, which comprises 68 different customised characters, 1,360 multi-turn role-playing dialogues, and encompasses 13,971 interaction dialogues in total. The characters are created from several real-world elements, such as career, aspiration, trait, and skill. Building on these foundations, we present SimsChat, a freely customisable role-playing agent. It incorporates different real-world scenes and topic-specific character interaction dialogues, simulating characters' life experiences in various scenarios and topic-specific interactions with specific emotions. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves desirable performance and provides helpful guideline for building better simulacra of human beings in the future. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/SimsChat.
You Have Thirteen Hours in Which to Solve the Labyrinth: Enhancing AI Game Masters with Function Calling
Developing a consistent and reliable AI game master for text-based games is a challenging task due to the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the complexity of the game master's role. This paper presents a novel approach to enhance AI game masters by leveraging function calling in the context of the table-top role-playing game "Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Adventure Game." Our methodology involves integrating game-specific controls through functions, which we show improves the narrative quality and state update consistency of the AI game master. The experimental results, based on human evaluations and unit tests, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing gameplay experience and maintaining coherence with the game state. This work contributes to the advancement of game AI and interactive storytelling, offering insights into the design of more engaging and consistent AI-driven game masters.
EnvGen: Generating and Adapting Environments via LLMs for Training Embodied Agents
Recent SOTA approaches for embodied learning via interaction directly employ large language models (LLMs) as agents to determine the next steps in an environment. Due to their world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, LLM agents achieve stronger performance than previous smaller agents based on reinforcement learning (RL); however, frequently calling LLMs is slow and expensive. Instead of directly employing LLMs as agents, can we use LLMs' reasoning capabilities to adaptively create training environments to help smaller embodied RL agents learn useful skills that they are weak at? We propose EnvGen, a novel framework to address this question. First, we prompt an LLM to generate training environments that allow agents to quickly learn different tasks in parallel. Concretely, the LLM is given the task description and simulator objectives that the agents should learn and is then asked to generate a set of environment configurations (e.g., different terrains, items given to agents, etc.). Next, we train a small RL agent in a mixture of the original and LLM-generated environments. Then, we enable the LLM to continuously adapt the generated environments to progressively improve the skills that the agent is weak at, by providing feedback to the LLM in the form of the agent's performance. We demonstrate the usefulness of EnvGen with comprehensive experiments in Crafter and Heist environments. We find that a small RL agent trained with EnvGen can outperform SOTA methods, including a GPT-4 agent, and learns long-horizon tasks significantly faster. We show qualitatively how the LLM adapts training environments to help improve RL agents' weaker skills over time. Additionally, EnvGen is substantially more efficient as it only uses a small number of LLM calls (e.g., 4 in total), whereas LLM agents require thousands of LLM calls. Lastly, we present detailed ablation studies for our design choices.
WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators
Recent advancements in predictive models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in predicting the future state of objects and scenes. However, the lack of categorization based on inherent characteristics continues to hinder the progress of predictive model development. Additionally, existing benchmarks are unable to effectively evaluate higher-capability, highly embodied predictive models from an embodied perspective. In this work, we classify the functionalities of predictive models into a hierarchy and take the first step in evaluating World Simulators by proposing a dual evaluation framework called WorldSimBench. WorldSimBench includes Explicit Perceptual Evaluation and Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, encompassing human preference assessments from the visual perspective and action-level evaluations in embodied tasks, covering three representative embodied scenarios: Open-Ended Embodied Environment, Autonomous, Driving, and Robot Manipulation. In the Explicit Perceptual Evaluation, we introduce the HF-Embodied Dataset, a video assessment dataset based on fine-grained human feedback, which we use to train a Human Preference Evaluator that aligns with human perception and explicitly assesses the visual fidelity of World Simulators. In the Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, we assess the video-action consistency of World Simulators by evaluating whether the generated situation-aware video can be accurately translated into the correct control signals in dynamic environments. Our comprehensive evaluation offers key insights that can drive further innovation in video generation models, positioning World Simulators as a pivotal advancement toward embodied artificial intelligence.
Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents
As AI systems pervade human life, ensuring that large language models (LLMs) make safe decisions remains a significant challenge. We introduce the Governance of the Commons Simulation (GovSim), a generative simulation platform designed to study strategic interactions and cooperative decision-making in LLMs. In GovSim, a society of AI agents must collectively balance exploiting a common resource with sustaining it for future use. This environment enables the study of how ethical considerations, strategic planning, and negotiation skills impact cooperative outcomes. We develop an LLM-based agent architecture and test it with the leading open and closed LLMs. We find that all but the most powerful LLM agents fail to achieve a sustainable equilibrium in GovSim, with the highest survival rate below 54%. Ablations reveal that successful multi-agent communication between agents is critical for achieving cooperation in these cases. Furthermore, our analyses show that the failure to achieve sustainable cooperation in most LLMs stems from their inability to formulate and analyze hypotheses about the long-term effects of their actions on the equilibrium of the group. Finally, we show that agents that leverage "Universalization"-based reasoning, a theory of moral thinking, are able to achieve significantly better sustainability. Taken together, GovSim enables us to study the mechanisms that underlie sustainable self-government with specificity and scale. We open source the full suite of our research results, including the simulation environment, agent prompts, and a comprehensive web interface.
Playable Game Generation
In recent years, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has advanced from text-to-image generation to text-to-video and multimodal video synthesis. However, generating playable games presents significant challenges due to the stringent requirements for real-time interaction, high visual quality, and accurate simulation of game mechanics. Existing approaches often fall short, either lacking real-time capabilities or failing to accurately simulate interactive mechanics. To tackle the playability issue, we propose a novel method called PlayGen, which encompasses game data generation, an autoregressive DiT-based diffusion model, and a comprehensive playability-based evaluation framework. Validated on well-known 2D and 3D games, PlayGen achieves real-time interaction, ensures sufficient visual quality, and provides accurate interactive mechanics simulation. Notably, these results are sustained even after over 1000 frames of gameplay on an NVIDIA RTX 2060 GPU. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/GreatX3/Playable-Game-Generation. Our playable demo generated by AI is: http://124.156.151.207.
Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation
The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies broaden the spectrum of tasks they can perform. We identify control and visual disparities between real and simulated environments as key challenges for reliable simulated evaluation and propose approaches for mitigating these gaps without needing to craft full-fidelity digital twins of real-world environments. We then employ these approaches to create SIMPLER, a collection of simulated environments for manipulation policy evaluation on common real robot setups. Through paired sim-and-real evaluations of manipulation policies, we demonstrate strong correlation between policy performance in SIMPLER environments and in the real world. Additionally, we find that SIMPLER evaluations accurately reflect real-world policy behavior modes such as sensitivity to various distribution shifts. We open-source all SIMPLER environments along with our workflow for creating new environments at https://simpler-env.github.io to facilitate research on general-purpose manipulation policies and simulated evaluation frameworks.
Mini-BEHAVIOR: A Procedurally Generated Benchmark for Long-horizon Decision-Making in Embodied AI
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.
A Transfer Learning Method for Goal Recognition Exploiting Cross-Domain Spatial Features
The ability to infer the intentions of others, predict their goals, and deduce their plans are critical features for intelligent agents. For a long time, several approaches investigated the use of symbolic representations and inferences with limited success, principally because it is difficult to capture the cognitive knowledge behind human decisions explicitly. The trend, nowadays, is increasingly focusing on learning to infer intentions directly from data, using deep learning in particular. We are now observing interesting applications of intent classification in natural language processing, visual activity recognition, and emerging approaches in other domains. This paper discusses a novel approach combining few-shot and transfer learning with cross-domain features, to learn to infer the intent of an agent navigating in physical environments, executing arbitrary long sequences of actions to achieve their goals. Experiments in synthetic environments demonstrate improved performance in terms of learning from few samples and generalizing to unseen configurations, compared to a deep-learning baseline approach.
Pandora: Towards General World Model with Natural Language Actions and Video States
World models simulate future states of the world in response to different actions. They facilitate interactive content creation and provides a foundation for grounded, long-horizon reasoning. Current foundation models do not fully meet the capabilities of general world models: large language models (LLMs) are constrained by their reliance on language modality and their limited understanding of the physical world, while video models lack interactive action control over the world simulations. This paper makes a step towards building a general world model by introducing Pandora, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion model that simulates world states by generating videos and allows real-time control with free-text actions. Pandora achieves domain generality, video consistency, and controllability through large-scale pretraining and instruction tuning. Crucially, Pandora bypasses the cost of training-from-scratch by integrating a pretrained LLM (7B) and a pretrained video model, requiring only additional lightweight finetuning. We illustrate extensive outputs by Pandora across diverse domains (indoor/outdoor, natural/urban, human/robot, 2D/3D, etc.). The results indicate great potential of building stronger general world models with larger-scale training.
Neural MMO v1.3: A Massively Multiagent Game Environment for Training and Evaluating Neural Networks
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.
S^3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents
Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among others. In this work, we harness the formidable human-like capabilities exhibited by large language models (LLMs) in sensing, reasoning, and behaving, and utilize these qualities to construct the S^3 system (short for Social network Simulation System). Adhering to the widely employed agent-based simulation paradigm, we employ prompt engineering and prompt tuning techniques to ensure that the agent's behavior closely emulates that of a genuine human within the social network. Specifically, we simulate three pivotal aspects: emotion, attitude, and interaction behaviors. By endowing the agent in the system with the ability to perceive the informational environment and emulate human actions, we observe the emergence of population-level phenomena, including the propagation of information, attitudes, and emotions. We conduct an evaluation encompassing two levels of simulation, employing real-world social network data. Encouragingly, the results demonstrate promising accuracy. This work represents an initial step in the realm of social network simulation empowered by LLM-based agents. We anticipate that our endeavors will serve as a source of inspiration for the development of simulation systems within, but not limited to, social science.
Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Synthetic Data for Language Models
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
ChatGPT and Software Testing Education: Promises & Perils
Over the past decade, predictive language modeling for code has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling new forms of automation for developers. More recently, we have seen the advent of general purpose "large language models", based on neural transformer architectures, that have been trained on massive datasets of human written text spanning code and natural language. However, despite the demonstrated representational power of such models, interacting with them has historically been constrained to specific task settings, limiting their general applicability. Many of these limitations were recently overcome with the introduction of ChatGPT, a language model created by OpenAI and trained to operate as a conversational agent, enabling it to answer questions and respond to a wide variety of commands from end users. The introduction of models, such as ChatGPT, has already spurred fervent discussion from educators, ranging from fear that students could use these AI tools to circumvent learning, to excitement about the new types of learning opportunities that they might unlock. However, given the nascent nature of these tools, we currently lack fundamental knowledge related to how well they perform in different educational settings, and the potential promise (or danger) that they might pose to traditional forms of instruction. As such, in this paper, we examine how well ChatGPT performs when tasked with answering common questions in a popular software testing curriculum. Our findings indicate that ChatGPT can provide correct or partially correct answers in 55.6% of cases, provide correct or partially correct explanations of answers in 53.0% of cases, and that prompting the tool in a shared question context leads to a marginally higher rate of correct responses. Based on these findings, we discuss the potential promises and perils related to the use of ChatGPT by students and instructors.
A Bayesian Approach to Reinforcement Learning of Vision-Based Vehicular Control
In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method for autonomous driving. Our approach employs temporal difference learning in a Bayesian framework to learn vehicle control signals from sensor data. The agent has access to images from a forward facing camera, which are preprocessed to generate semantic segmentation maps. We trained our system using both ground truth and estimated semantic segmentation input. Based on our observations from a large set of experiments, we conclude that training the system on ground truth input data leads to better performance than training the system on estimated input even if estimated input is used for evaluation. The system is trained and evaluated in a realistic simulated urban environment using the CARLA simulator. The simulator also contains a benchmark that allows for comparing to other systems and methods. The required training time of the system is shown to be lower and the performance on the benchmark superior to competing approaches.
Exploring the Intersection of Large Language Models and Agent-Based Modeling via Prompt Engineering
The final frontier for simulation is the accurate representation of complex, real-world social systems. While agent-based modeling (ABM) seeks to study the behavior and interactions of agents within a larger system, it is unable to faithfully capture the full complexity of human-driven behavior. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have emerged as a potential solution to this bottleneck by enabling researchers to explore human-driven interactions in previously unimaginable ways. Our research investigates simulations of human interactions using LLMs. Through prompt engineering, inspired by Park et al. (2023), we present two simulations of believable proxies of human behavior: a two-agent negotiation and a six-agent murder mystery game.
Neurosymbolic AI -- Why, What, and How
Humans interact with the environment using a combination of perception - transforming sensory inputs from their environment into symbols, and cognition - mapping symbols to knowledge about the environment for supporting abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and long-term planning. Human perception-inspired machine perception, in the context of AI, refers to large-scale pattern recognition from raw data using neural networks trained using self-supervised learning objectives such as next-word prediction or object recognition. On the other hand, machine cognition encompasses more complex computations, such as using knowledge of the environment to guide reasoning, analogy, and long-term planning. Humans can also control and explain their cognitive functions. This seems to require the retention of symbolic mappings from perception outputs to knowledge about their environment. For example, humans can follow and explain the guidelines and safety constraints driving their decision-making in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, criminal justice, and autonomous driving. This article introduces the rapidly emerging paradigm of Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks and knowledge-guided symbolic approaches to create more capable and flexible AI systems. These systems have immense potential to advance both algorithm-level (e.g., abstraction, analogy, reasoning) and application-level (e.g., explainable and safety-constrained decision-making) capabilities of AI systems.
Game On: Towards Language Models as RL Experimenters
We propose an agent architecture that automates parts of the common reinforcement learning experiment workflow, to enable automated mastery of control domains for embodied agents. To do so, it leverages a VLM to perform some of the capabilities normally required of a human experimenter, including the monitoring and analysis of experiment progress, the proposition of new tasks based on past successes and failures of the agent, decomposing tasks into a sequence of subtasks (skills), and retrieval of the skill to execute - enabling our system to build automated curricula for learning. We believe this is one of the first proposals for a system that leverages a VLM throughout the full experiment cycle of reinforcement learning. We provide a first prototype of this system, and examine the feasibility of current models and techniques for the desired level of automation. For this, we use a standard Gemini model, without additional fine-tuning, to provide a curriculum of skills to a language-conditioned Actor-Critic algorithm, in order to steer data collection so as to aid learning new skills. Data collected in this way is shown to be useful for learning and iteratively improving control policies in a robotics domain. Additional examination of the ability of the system to build a growing library of skills, and to judge the progress of the training of those skills, also shows promising results, suggesting that the proposed architecture provides a potential recipe for fully automated mastery of tasks and domains for embodied agents.
Characterizing and Efficiently Accelerating Multimodal Generation Model Inference
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is revolutionizing the computing industry. Not only its applications have broadened to various sectors but also poses new system design and optimization opportunities. The technology is capable of understanding and responding in multiple modalities. However, the advanced capability currently comes with significant system resource demands. To sustainably scale generative AI capabilities to billions of users in the world, inference must be fast and efficient. This paper pinpoints key system design and optimization opportunities by characterizing a family of emerging multi-modal generation models on real systems. Auto-regressive token generation is a critical latency performance bottleneck, typically dominated by GPU idle time. In addition to memory-intensive attention across the generative AI models, linear operations constitute significant inference latency due to the feed forward networks in Transformer-based models. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art optimization levers, spanning from applications to system software and hardware, set a 3.88x better baseline.
Can You Follow Me? Testing Situational Understanding in ChatGPT
Understanding sentence meanings and updating information states appropriately across time -- what we call "situational understanding" (SU) -- is a critical ability for human-like AI agents. SU is essential in particular for chat models, such as ChatGPT, to enable consistent, coherent, and effective dialogue between humans and AI. Previous works have identified certain SU limitations in non-chatbot Large Language models (LLMs), but the extent and causes of these limitations are not well understood, and capabilities of current chat-based models in this domain have not been explored. In this work we tackle these questions, proposing a novel synthetic environment for SU testing which allows us to do controlled and systematic testing of SU in chat-oriented models, through assessment of models' ability to track and enumerate environment states. Our environment also allows for close analysis of dynamics of model performance, to better understand underlying causes for performance patterns. We apply our test to ChatGPT, the state-of-the-art chatbot, and find that despite the fundamental simplicity of the task, the model's performance reflects an inability to retain correct environment states across time. Our follow-up analyses suggest that performance degradation is largely because ChatGPT has non-persistent in-context memory (although it can access the full dialogue history) and it is susceptible to hallucinated updates -- including updates that artificially inflate accuracies. Our findings suggest overall that ChatGPT is not currently equipped for robust tracking of situation states, and that trust in the impressive dialogue performance of ChatGPT comes with risks. We release the codebase for reproducing our test environment, as well as all prompts and API responses from ChatGPT, at https://github.com/yangalan123/SituationalTesting.
Tulip Agent -- Enabling LLM-Based Agents to Solve Tasks Using Large Tool Libraries
We introduce tulip agent, an architecture for autonomous LLM-based agents with Create, Read, Update, and Delete access to a tool library containing a potentially large number of tools. In contrast to state-of-the-art implementations, tulip agent does not encode the descriptions of all available tools in the system prompt, which counts against the model's context window, or embed the entire prompt for retrieving suitable tools. Instead, the tulip agent can recursively search for suitable tools in its extensible tool library, implemented exemplarily as a vector store. The tulip agent architecture significantly reduces inference costs, allows using even large tool libraries, and enables the agent to adapt and extend its set of tools. We evaluate the architecture with several ablation studies in a mathematics context and demonstrate its generalizability with an application to robotics. A reference implementation and the benchmark are available at github.com/HRI-EU/tulip_agent.
Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agents
Contemporary evaluation techniques are inadequate for agentic systems. These approaches either focus exclusively on final outcomes -- ignoring the step-by-step nature of agentic systems, or require excessive manual labour. To address this, we introduce the Agent-as-a-Judge framework, wherein agentic systems are used to evaluate agentic systems. This is an organic extension of the LLM-as-a-Judge framework, incorporating agentic features that enable intermediate feedback for the entire task-solving process. We apply the Agent-as-a-Judge to the task of code generation. To overcome issues with existing benchmarks and provide a proof-of-concept testbed for Agent-as-a-Judge, we present DevAI, a new benchmark of 55 realistic automated AI development tasks. It includes rich manual annotations, like a total of 365 hierarchical user requirements. We benchmark three of the popular agentic systems using Agent-as-a-Judge and find it dramatically outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge and is as reliable as our human evaluation baseline. Altogether, we believe that Agent-as-a-Judge marks a concrete step forward for modern agentic systems -- by providing rich and reliable reward signals necessary for dynamic and scalable self-improvement.
Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model
Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods have enjoyed huge success in challenging domains, such as chess and Go, where a perfect simulator is available. However, in real-world problems the dynamics governing the environment are often complex and unknown. In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics. MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games - the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled - our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art. When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.
Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks
Modern AI agents, driven by advances in large foundation models, promise to enhance our productivity and transform our lives by augmenting our knowledge and capabilities. To achieve this vision, AI agents must effectively plan, perform multi-step reasoning and actions, respond to novel observations, and recover from errors, to successfully complete complex tasks across a wide range of scenarios. In this work, we introduce Magentic-One, a high-performing open-source agentic system for solving such tasks. Magentic-One uses a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors. Throughout task execution, the Orchestrator directs other specialized agents to perform tasks as needed, such as operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code. We show that Magentic-One achieves statistically competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on three diverse and challenging agentic benchmarks: GAIA, AssistantBench, and WebArena. Magentic-One achieves these results without modification to core agent capabilities or to how they collaborate, demonstrating progress towards generalist agentic systems. Moreover, Magentic-One's modular design allows agents to be added or removed from the team without additional prompt tuning or training, easing development and making it extensible to future scenarios. We provide an open-source implementation of Magentic-One, and we include AutoGenBench, a standalone tool for agentic evaluation. AutoGenBench provides built-in controls for repetition and isolation to run agentic benchmarks in a rigorous and contained manner -- which is important when agents' actions have side-effects. Magentic-One, AutoGenBench and detailed empirical performance evaluations of Magentic-One, including ablations and error analysis are available at https://aka.ms/magentic-one
Bel Esprit: Multi-Agent Framework for Building AI Model Pipelines
As the demand for artificial intelligence (AI) grows to address complex real-world tasks, single models are often insufficient, requiring the integration of multiple models into pipelines. This paper introduces Bel Esprit, a conversational agent designed to construct AI model pipelines based on user-defined requirements. Bel Esprit employs a multi-agent framework where subagents collaborate to clarify requirements, build, validate, and populate pipelines with appropriate models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in generating pipelines from ambiguous user queries, using both human-curated and synthetic data. A detailed error analysis highlights ongoing challenges in pipeline construction. Bel Esprit is available for a free trial at https://belesprit.aixplain.com.
FreeControl: Training-Free Spatial Control of Any Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Any Condition
Recent approaches such as ControlNet offer users fine-grained spatial control over text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. However, auxiliary modules have to be trained for each type of spatial condition, model architecture, and checkpoint, putting them at odds with the diverse intents and preferences a human designer would like to convey to the AI models during the content creation process. In this work, we present FreeControl, a training-free approach for controllable T2I generation that supports multiple conditions, architectures, and checkpoints simultaneously. FreeControl designs structure guidance to facilitate the structure alignment with a guidance image, and appearance guidance to enable the appearance sharing between images generated using the same seed. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of FreeControl across a variety of pre-trained T2I models. In particular, FreeControl facilitates convenient training-free control over many different architectures and checkpoints, allows the challenging input conditions on which most of the existing training-free methods fail, and achieves competitive synthesis quality with training-based approaches.