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May 19

AutoMoT: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model with Asynchronous Mixture-of-Transformers for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Integrating vision-language models (VLMs) into end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving (AD) systems has shown promise in improving scene understanding. However, existing integration strategies suffer from several limitations: they either struggle to resolve distribution misalignment between reasoning and action spaces, underexploit the general reasoning capabilities of pretrained VLMs, or incur substantial inference latency during action policy generation, which degrades driving performance. To address these challenges, we propose \OURS in this work, an end-to-end AD framework that unifies reasoning and action generation within a single vision-language-action (VLA) model. Our approach leverages a mixture-of-transformer (MoT) architecture with joint attention sharing, which preserves the general reasoning capabilities of pre-trained VLMs while enabling efficient fast-slow inference through asynchronous execution at different task frequencies. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, under both open- and closed-loop settings, demonstrate that \OURS achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. We further investigate the functional boundary of pre-trained VLMs in AD, examining when AD-tailored fine-tuning is necessary. Our results show that pre-trained VLMs can achieve competitive multi-task scene understanding performance through semantic prompting alone, while fine-tuning remains essential for action-level tasks such as decision-making and trajectory planning. We refer to https://automot-website.github.io/{Project Page} for the demonstration videos and qualitative results.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 17

ALOE: Action-Level Off-Policy Evaluation for Vision-Language-Action Model Post-Training

We study how to improve large foundation vision-language-action (VLA) systems through online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world settings. Central to this process is the value function, which provides learning signals to guide VLA learning from experience. In practice, the value function is estimated from trajectory fragments collected from different data sources, including historical policies and intermittent human interventions. Estimating the value function of current behavior quality from the mixture data is inherently an off-policy evaluation problem. However, prior work often adopts conservative on-policy estimation for stability, which avoids direct evaluation of the current high-capacity policy and limits learning effectiveness. In this paper, we propose ALOE, an action-level off-policy evaluation framework for VLA post-training. ALOE applies chunking-based temporal-difference bootstrapping to evaluate individual action sequences instead of predicting final task outcomes. This design improves effective credit assignment to critical action chunks under sparse rewards and supports stable policy improvement. We evaluate our method on three real-world manipulation tasks, including smartphone packing as a high-precision task, laundry folding as a long-horizon deformable-object task, and bimanual pick-and-place involving multi-object perception. Across all tasks, ALOE improves learning efficiency without compromising execution speed, showing that off-policy RL can be reintroduced in a reliable manner for real-world VLA post-training. Videos and additional materials are available at our project website.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 13

ProSkill: Segment-Level Skill Assessment in Procedural Videos

Skill assessment in procedural videos is crucial for the objective evaluation of human performance in settings such as manufacturing and procedural daily tasks. Current research on skill assessment has predominantly focused on sports and lacks large-scale datasets for complex procedural activities. Existing studies typically involve only a limited number of actions, focus on either pairwise assessments (e.g., A is better than B) or on binary labels (e.g., good execution vs needs improvement). In response to these shortcomings, we introduce ProSkill, the first benchmark dataset for action-level skill assessment in procedural tasks. ProSkill provides absolute skill assessment annotations, along with pairwise ones. This is enabled by a novel and scalable annotation protocol that allows for the creation of an absolute skill assessment ranking starting from pairwise assessments. This protocol leverages a Swiss Tournament scheme for efficient pairwise comparisons, which are then aggregated into consistent, continuous global scores using an ELO-based rating system. We use our dataset to benchmark the main state-of-the-art skill assessment algorithms, including both ranking-based and pairwise paradigms. The suboptimal results achieved by the current state-of-the-art highlight the challenges and thus the value of ProSkill in the context of skill assessment for procedural videos. All data and code are available at https://fpv-iplab.github.io/ProSkill/

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 28

RT-H: Action Hierarchies Using Language

Language provides a way to break down complex concepts into digestible pieces. Recent works in robot imitation learning use language-conditioned policies that predict actions given visual observations and the high-level task specified in language. These methods leverage the structure of natural language to share data between semantically similar tasks (e.g., "pick coke can" and "pick an apple") in multi-task datasets. However, as tasks become more semantically diverse (e.g., "pick coke can" and "pour cup"), sharing data between tasks becomes harder, so learning to map high-level tasks to actions requires much more demonstration data. To bridge tasks and actions, our insight is to teach the robot the language of actions, describing low-level motions with more fine-grained phrases like "move arm forward". Predicting these language motions as an intermediate step between tasks and actions forces the policy to learn the shared structure of low-level motions across seemingly disparate tasks. Furthermore, a policy that is conditioned on language motions can easily be corrected during execution through human-specified language motions. This enables a new paradigm for flexible policies that can learn from human intervention in language. Our method RT-H builds an action hierarchy using language motions: it first learns to predict language motions, and conditioned on this and the high-level task, it predicts actions, using visual context at all stages. We show that RT-H leverages this language-action hierarchy to learn policies that are more robust and flexible by effectively tapping into multi-task datasets. We show that these policies not only allow for responding to language interventions, but can also learn from such interventions and outperform methods that learn from teleoperated interventions. Our website and videos are found at https://rt-hierarchy.github.io.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024 1

GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents

Existing efforts in building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents largely rely on the training paradigm of supervised fine-tuning on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, this approach not only demands extensive amounts of training data but also struggles to effectively understand GUI screenshots and generalize to unseen interfaces. The issue significantly limits its application in real-world scenarios, especially for high-level tasks. Inspired by Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in large reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1), which efficiently enhances the problem-solving capabilities of large language models in real-world settings, we propose \name, the first reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the GUI capabilities of LVLMs in high-level real-world task scenarios, through unified action space rule modeling. By leveraging a small amount of carefully curated high-quality data across multiple platforms (including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and Web) and employing policy optimization algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to update the model, \name achieves superior performance using only 0.02\% of the data (3K vs. 13M) compared to previous state-of-the-art methods like OS-Atlas across eight benchmarks spanning three different platforms (mobile, desktop, and web). These results demonstrate the immense potential of reinforcement learning based on unified action space rule modeling in improving the execution capabilities of LVLMs for real-world GUI agent tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

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.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024 2

SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results

The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.

  • 102 authors
·
Sep 12, 2023

Plan Then Action:High-Level Planning Guidance Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities in complex tasks, often relying on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, due to their autoregressive token-level generation, the reasoning process is largely constrained to local decision-making and lacks global planning. This limitation frequently results in redundant, incoherent, or inaccurate reasoning, which significantly degrades overall performance. Existing approaches, such as tree-based algorithms and reinforcement learning (RL), attempt to address this issue but suffer from high computational costs and often fail to produce optimal reasoning trajectories. To tackle this challenge, we propose Plan-Then-Action Enhanced Reasoning with Group Relative Policy Optimization PTA-GRPO, a two-stage framework designed to improve both high-level planning and fine-grained CoT reasoning. In the first stage, we leverage advanced LLMs to distill CoT into compact high-level guidance, which is then used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In the second stage, we introduce a guidance-aware RL method that jointly optimizes the final output and the quality of high-level guidance, thereby enhancing reasoning effectiveness. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including MATH, AIME2024, AIME2025, and AMC, across diverse base models such as Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-14B, and LLaMA3.2-3B. Experimental results demonstrate that PTA-GRPO consistently achieves stable and significant improvements across different models and tasks, validating its effectiveness and generalization.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025 1

Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks

Smartphones have become indispensable in modern life, yet navigating complex tasks on mobile devices often remains frustrating. Recent advancements in large multimodal model (LMM)-based mobile agents have demonstrated the ability to perceive and act in mobile environments. However, current approaches face significant limitations: they fall short in addressing real-world human needs, struggle with reasoning-intensive and long-horizon tasks, and lack mechanisms to learn and improve from prior experiences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-E, a hierarchical multi-agent framework capable of self-evolution through past experience. By hierarchical, we mean an explicit separation of high-level planning and low-level action execution. The framework comprises a Manager, responsible for devising overall plans by breaking down complex tasks into subgoals, and four subordinate agents--Perceptor, Operator, Action Reflector, and Notetaker--which handle fine-grained visual perception, immediate action execution, error verification, and information aggregation, respectively. Mobile-Agent-E also features a novel self-evolution module which maintains a persistent long-term memory comprising Tips and Shortcuts. Tips are general guidance and lessons learned from prior tasks on how to effectively interact with the environment. Shortcuts are reusable, executable sequences of atomic operations tailored for specific subroutines. The inclusion of Tips and Shortcuts facilitates continuous refinement in performance and efficiency. Alongside this framework, we introduce Mobile-Eval-E, a new benchmark featuring complex mobile tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-app interactions. Empirical results show that Mobile-Agent-E achieves a 22% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches across three foundation model backbones. Project page: https://x-plug.github.io/MobileAgent.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 20, 2025 2

M2T2: Multi-Task Masked Transformer for Object-centric Pick and Place

With the advent of large language models and large-scale robotic datasets, there has been tremendous progress in high-level decision-making for object manipulation. These generic models are able to interpret complex tasks using language commands, but they often have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution objects due to the inability of low-level action primitives. In contrast, existing task-specific models excel in low-level manipulation of unknown objects, but only work for a single type of action. To bridge this gap, we present M2T2, a single model that supplies different types of low-level actions that work robustly on arbitrary objects in cluttered scenes. M2T2 is a transformer model which reasons about contact points and predicts valid gripper poses for different action modes given a raw point cloud of the scene. Trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset with 128K scenes, M2T2 achieves zero-shot sim2real transfer on the real robot, outperforming the baseline system with state-of-the-art task-specific models by about 19% in overall performance and 37.5% in challenging scenes where the object needs to be re-oriented for collision-free placement. M2T2 also achieves state-of-the-art results on a subset of language conditioned tasks in RLBench. Videos of robot experiments on unseen objects in both real world and simulation are available on our project website https://m2-t2.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 1, 2023

Accurately and Efficiently Interpreting Human-Robot Instructions of Varying Granularities

Humans can ground natural language commands to tasks at both abstract and fine-grained levels of specificity. For instance, a human forklift operator can be instructed to perform a high-level action, like "grab a pallet" or a low-level action like "tilt back a little bit." While robots are also capable of grounding language commands to tasks, previous methods implicitly assume that all commands and tasks reside at a single, fixed level of abstraction. Additionally, methods that do not use multiple levels of abstraction encounter inefficient planning and execution times as they solve tasks at a single level of abstraction with large, intractable state-action spaces closely resembling real world complexity. In this work, by grounding commands to all the tasks or subtasks available in a hierarchical planning framework, we arrive at a model capable of interpreting language at multiple levels of specificity ranging from coarse to more granular. We show that the accuracy of the grounding procedure is improved when simultaneously inferring the degree of abstraction in language used to communicate the task. Leveraging hierarchy also improves efficiency: our proposed approach enables a robot to respond to a command within one second on 90% of our tasks, while baselines take over twenty seconds on half the tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that a real, physical robot can ground commands at multiple levels of abstraction allowing it to efficiently plan different subtasks within the same planning hierarchy.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 21, 2017

Hi-Agent: Hierarchical Vision-Language Agents for Mobile Device Control

Building agents that autonomously operate mobile devices has attracted increasing attention. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise, most existing approaches rely on direct state-to-action mappings, which lack structured reasoning and planning, and thus generalize poorly to novel tasks or unseen UI layouts. We introduce Hi-Agent, a trainable hierarchical vision-language agent for mobile control, featuring a high-level reasoning model and a low-level action model that are jointly optimized. For efficient training, we reformulate multi-step decision-making as a sequence of single-step subgoals and propose a foresight advantage function, which leverages execution feedback from the low-level model to guide high-level optimization. This design alleviates the path explosion issue encountered by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in long-horizon tasks and enables stable, critic-free joint training. Hi-Agent achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) 87.9% task success rate on the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods across three paradigms: prompt-based (AppAgent: 17.7%), supervised (Filtered BC: 54.5%), and reinforcement learning-based (DigiRL: 71.9%). It also demonstrates competitive zero-shot generalization on the ScreenSpot-v2 benchmark. On the more challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, Hi-Agent also scales effectively with larger backbones, showing strong adaptability in high-complexity mobile control scenarios.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025

iFlyBot-VLA Technical Report

We introduce iFlyBot-VLA, a large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model trained under a novel framework. The main contributions are listed as follows: (1) a latent action model thoroughly trained on large-scale human and robotic manipulation videos; (2) a dual-level action representation framework that jointly supervises both the Vision-Language Model (VLM) and the action expert during training; (3) a mixed training strategy that combines robot trajectory data with general QA and spatial QA datasets, effectively enhancing the 3D perceptual and reasoning capabilities of the VLM backbone. Specifically, the VLM is trained to predict two complementary forms of actions: latent actions, derived from our latent action model pretrained on cross-embodiment manipulation data, which capture implicit high-level intentions; and structured discrete action tokens, obtained through frequency-domain transformations of continuous control signals, which encode explicit low-level dynamics. This dual supervision aligns the representation spaces of language, vision, and action, enabling the VLM to directly contribute to action generation. Experimental results on the LIBERO Franka benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our frame-work, while real-world evaluations further show that iFlyBot-VLA achieves competitive success rates across diverse and challenging manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we plan to open-source a portion of our self-constructed dataset to support future research in the community

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 1, 2025 1

LoHoVLA: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model for Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks

Real-world embodied agents face long-horizon tasks, characterized by high-level goals demanding multi-step solutions beyond single actions. Successfully navigating these requires both high-level task planning (i.e., decomposing goals into sub-tasks) and low-level motion control (i.e., generating precise robot actions). While existing vision language action (VLA) models and hierarchical architectures offer potential in embodied tasks, the former often falter in planning, and the latter can suffer from coordination issues, both hampering performance. We introduce a new unified VLA framework for long-horizon tasks, dubbed LoHoVLA, to overcome these limitations. LoHoVLA leverages a large pretrained vision language model (VLM) as the backbone to jointly generate language and action tokens for sub-task generation and robot action prediction, respectively. This shared representation promotes better generalization across tasks. Additionally, LoHoVLA embraces a hierarchical closed-loop control mechanism to mitigate errors originating from both high-level planning and low-level control. To train LoHoVLA, we introduce LoHoSet, a dataset built on the Ravens simulator, containing 20 long-horizon tasks, each with 1,000 expert demonstrations composed of visual observations, linguistic goals, sub-tasks, and robot actions. Experimental results show that LoHoVLA significantly surpasses both hierarchical and standard VLA approaches on long-horizon embodied tasks in the Ravens simulator. These findings underscore the promise of unified architectures for advancing generalizable embodied intelligence.

  • 5 authors
·
May 31, 2025 3

Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

Large Language Models face challenges in long-horizon agentic tasks as their constrained memory is easily overwhelmed by distracting or irrelevant context. Existing working memory methods typically rely on external, heuristic mechanisms that are decoupled from the agent's core policy. In this work, we reframe working memory management as a learnable, intrinsic capability. We propose a novel framework, Memory-as-Action, where an agent actively manages its working memory by executing explicit editing operations as part of a unified policy. This formulation allows an agent, trained via reinforcement learning, to balance memory curation against long-term task objectives under given resource constraints. However, such memory editing actions break the standard assumption of a continuously growing prefix in LLM interactions, leading to what we call trajectory fractures. These non-prefix changes disrupt the causal continuity required by standard policy gradient methods, making those methods inapplicable. To address this, we propose a new algorithm, Dynamic Context Policy Optimization, which enables stable end-to-end reinforcement learning by segmenting trajectories at memory action points and applying trajectory-level advantages to the resulting action segments. Our results demonstrate that jointly optimizing for task reasoning and memory management in an end-to-end fashion not only reduces overall computational consumption but also improves task performance, driven by adaptive context curation strategies tailored to the model's intrinsic capabilities.

VLA-Pruner: Temporal-Aware Dual-Level Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Inference

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown great promise for embodied AI, yet the heavy computational cost of processing continuous visual streams severely limits their real-time deployment. Token pruning (keeping salient visual tokens and dropping redundant ones) has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating Vision-Language Models (VLMs), offering a solution for efficient VLA. However, these VLM-specific token pruning methods select tokens based solely on semantic salience metrics (e.g., prefill attention), while overlooking the VLA's intrinsic dual-system nature of high-level semantic understanding and low-level action execution. Consequently, these methods bias token retention toward semantic cues, discard critical information for action generation, and significantly degrade VLA performance. To bridge this gap, we propose VLA-Pruner, a versatile plug-and-play VLA-specific token prune method that aligns with the dual-system nature of VLA models and exploits the temporal continuity in robot manipulation. Specifically, VLA-Pruner adopts a dual-level importance criterion for visual token retention: vision-language prefill attention for semantic-level relevance and action decode attention, estimated via temporal smoothing, for action-level importance. Based on this criterion, VLA-Pruner proposes a novel dual-level token selection strategy that adaptively preserves a compact, informative set of visual tokens for both semantic understanding and action execution under given compute budget. Experiments show that VLA-Pruner achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple VLA architectures and diverse robotic tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 20, 2025

ReCode: Unify Plan and Action for Universal Granularity Control

Real-world tasks require decisions at varying granularities, and humans excel at this by leveraging a unified cognitive representation where planning is fundamentally understood as a high-level form of action. However, current Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents lack this crucial capability to operate fluidly across decision granularities. This limitation stems from existing paradigms that enforce a rigid separation between high-level planning and low-level action, which impairs dynamic adaptability and limits generalization. We propose ReCode (Recursive Code Generation), a novel paradigm that addresses this limitation by unifying planning and action within a single code representation. In this representation, ReCode treats high-level plans as abstract placeholder functions, which the agent then recursively decomposes into finer-grained sub-functions until reaching primitive actions. This recursive approach dissolves the rigid boundary between plan and action, enabling the agent to dynamically control its decision granularity. Furthermore, the recursive structure inherently generates rich, multi-granularity training data, enabling models to learn hierarchical decision-making processes. Extensive experiments show ReCode significantly surpasses advanced baselines in inference performance and demonstrates exceptional data efficiency in training, validating our core insight that unifying planning and action through recursive code generation is a powerful and effective approach to achieving universal granularity control. The code is available at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/ReCode.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 27, 2025 1

A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI

Embodied AI is widely recognized as a key element of artificial general intelligence because it involves controlling embodied agents to perform tasks in the physical world. Building on the success of large language models and vision-language models, a new category of multimodal models -- referred to as vision-language-action models (VLAs) -- has emerged to address language-conditioned robotic tasks in embodied AI by leveraging their distinct ability to generate actions. In recent years, a myriad of VLAs have been developed, making it imperative to capture the rapidly evolving landscape through a comprehensive survey. To this end, we present the first survey on VLAs for embodied AI. This work provides a detailed taxonomy of VLAs, organized into three major lines of research. The first line focuses on individual components of VLAs. The second line is dedicated to developing control policies adept at predicting low-level actions. The third line comprises high-level task planners capable of decomposing long-horizon tasks into a sequence of subtasks, thereby guiding VLAs to follow more general user instructions. Furthermore, we provide an extensive summary of relevant resources, including datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced by VLAs and outline promising future directions in embodied AI. We have created a project associated with this survey, which is available at https://github.com/yueen-ma/Awesome-VLA.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2024

V-CAGE: Context-Aware Generation and Verification for Scalable Long-Horizon Embodied Tasks

Learning long-horizon embodied behaviors from synthetic data remains challenging because generated scenes are often physically implausible, language-driven programs frequently "succeed" without satisfying task semantics, and high-level instructions require grounding into executable action sequences. To address these limitations, we introduce V-CAGE, a closed-loop framework for generating robust, semantically aligned manipulation datasets at scale. First, we propose a context-aware instantiation mechanism that enforces geometric consistency during scene synthesis. By dynamically maintaining a map of prohibited spatial areas as objects are placed, our system prevents interpenetration and ensures reachable, conflict-free configurations in cluttered environments. Second, to bridge the gap between abstract intent and low-level control, we employ a hierarchical instruction decomposition module. This decomposes high-level goals (e.g., "get ready for work") into compositional action primitives, facilitating coherent long-horizon planning. Crucially, we enforce semantic correctness through a VLM-based verification loop. Acting as a visual critic, the VLM performs rigorous rejection sampling after each subtask, filtering out "silent failures" where code executes but fails to achieve the visual goal. Experiments demonstrate that V-CAGE yields datasets with superior physical and semantic fidelity, significantly boosting the success rate and generalization of downstream policies compared to non-verified baselines.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 20

SAFE: Multitask Failure Detection for Vision-Language-Action Models

While vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown promising robotic behaviors across a diverse set of manipulation tasks, they achieve limited success rates when deployed on novel tasks out-of-the-box. To allow these policies to safely interact with their environments, we need a failure detector that gives a timely alert such that the robot can stop, backtrack, or ask for help. However, existing failure detectors are trained and tested only on one or a few specific tasks, while VLAs require the detector to generalize and detect failures also in unseen tasks and novel environments. In this paper, we introduce the multitask failure detection problem and propose SAFE, a failure detector for generalist robot policies such as VLAs. We analyze the VLA feature space and find that VLAs have sufficient high-level knowledge about task success and failure, which is generic across different tasks. Based on this insight, we design SAFE to learn from VLA internal features and predict a single scalar indicating the likelihood of task failure. SAFE is trained on both successful and failed rollouts, and is evaluated on unseen tasks. SAFE is compatible with different policy architectures. We test it on OpenVLA, pi_0, and pi_0-FAST in both simulated and real-world environments extensively. We compare SAFE with diverse baselines and show that SAFE achieves state-of-the-art failure detection performance and the best trade-off between accuracy and detection time using conformal prediction. More qualitative results can be found at https://vla-safe.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025 2

WorldPrediction: A Benchmark for High-level World Modeling and Long-horizon Procedural Planning

Humans are known to have an internal "world model" that enables us to carry out action planning based on world states. AI agents need to have such a world model for action planning as well. It is not clear how current AI models, especially generative models, are able to learn such world models and carry out procedural planning in diverse environments. We introduce WorldPrediction, a video-based benchmark for evaluating world modeling and procedural planning capabilities of different AI models. In contrast to prior benchmarks that focus primarily on low-level world modeling and robotic motion planning, WorldPrediction is the first benchmark that emphasizes actions with temporal and semantic abstraction. Given initial and final world states, the task is to distinguish the proper action (WorldPrediction-WM) or the properly ordered sequence of actions (WorldPrediction-PP) from a set of counterfactual distractors. This discriminative task setup enable us to evaluate different types of world models and planners and realize a thorough comparison across different hypothesis. The benchmark represents states and actions using visual observations. In order to prevent models from exploiting low-level continuity cues in background scenes, we provide "action equivalents" - identical actions observed in different contexts - as candidates for selection. This benchmark is grounded in a formal framework of partially observable semi-MDP, ensuring better reliability and robustness of the evaluation. We conduct extensive human filtering and validation on our benchmark and show that current frontier models barely achieve 57% accuracy on WorldPrediction-WM and 38% on WorldPrediction-PP whereas humans are able to solve both tasks perfectly.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

Enhancing Decision-Making for LLM Agents via Step-Level Q-Value Models

Agents significantly enhance the capabilities of standalone Large Language Models (LLMs) by perceiving environments, making decisions, and executing actions. However, LLM agents still face challenges in tasks that require multiple decision-making steps. Estimating the value of actions in specific tasks is difficult when intermediate actions are neither appropriately rewarded nor penalized. In this paper, we propose leveraging a task-relevant Q-value model to guide action selection. Specifically, we first collect decision-making trajectories annotated with step-level Q values via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and construct preference data. We then use another LLM to fit these preferences through step-level Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which serves as the Q-value model. During inference, at each decision-making step, LLM agents select the action with the highest Q value before interacting with the environment. We apply our method to various open-source and API-based LLM agents, demonstrating that Q-value models significantly improve their performance. Notably, the performance of the agent built with Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct improved by 103% on WebShop and 75% on HotPotQA when enhanced with Q-value models, even surpassing GPT-4o-mini. Additionally, Q-value models offer several advantages, such as generalization to different LLM agents and seamless integration with existing prompting strategies.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024

CPL: Critical Plan Step Learning Boosts LLM Generalization in Reasoning Tasks

Post-training, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) using self-play-generated data, has become a new learning paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, scaling RL to develop a general reasoner remains a research challenge, as existing methods focus on task-specific reasoning without adequately addressing generalization across a broader range of tasks. Moreover, unlike traditional RL with limited action space, LLMs operate in an infinite space, making it crucial to search for valuable and diverse strategies to solve problems effectively. To address this, we propose searching within the action space on high-level abstract plans to enhance model generalization and introduce Critical Plan Step Learning (CPL), comprising: 1) searching on plan, using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore diverse plan steps in multi-step reasoning tasks, and 2) learning critical plan steps through Step-level Advantage Preference Optimization (Step-APO), which integrates advantage estimates for step preference obtained via MCTS into Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This combination helps the model effectively learn critical plan steps, enhancing both reasoning capabilities and generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method, trained exclusively on GSM8K and MATH, not only significantly improves performance on GSM8K (+10.5%) and MATH (+6.5%), but also enhances out-of-domain reasoning benchmarks, such as HumanEval (+12.2%), GPQA (+8.6%), ARC-C (+4.0%), MMLU-STEM (+2.2%), and BBH (+1.8%).

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 13, 2024

EmbodiedMidtrain: Bridging the Gap between Vision-Language Models and Vision-Language-Action Models via Mid-training

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) inherit their visual and linguistic capabilities from Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet most VLAs are built from off-the-shelf VLMs that are not adapted to the embodied domain, limiting their downstream performance. In this work, we propose EmbodiedMidtrain to bridge the gap between VLMs and VLAs. We first characterize the data distribution gap between them, showing that VLA data occupy compact regions that are largely separated from the broader VLM distribution, while the degree of alignment varies substantially both across and within VLM data sources. Then, we build a mid-training data engine that leverages a lightweight learnable proximity estimator to select the most VLA-aligned candidates from a large VLM pool, and mid-trains the VLM on this curated mixture before downstream VLA fine-tuning. Experiments on three robot manipulation benchmarks show that mid-training consistently improves performance across different VLM backbones, achieving results competitive with expert VLAs and off-the-shelf VLMs trained with larger model scale and training budgets. Further analysis reveals that mid-training provides a stronger initialization for VLA fine-tuning, with gains emerging from the earliest steps and widening throughout training. Moreover, the data engine captures both dataset-level and sample-level alignment signals, favoring spatial reasoning over text-centric tasks while preserving the diversity of the VLM data. We will release all code, data and models for future research.

CaMeLs Can Use Computers Too: System-level Security for Computer Use Agents

AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious content hijacks agent behavior to steal credentials or cause financial loss. The only known robust defense is architectural isolation that strictly separates trusted task planning from untrusted environment observations. However, applying this design to Computer Use Agents (CUAs) -- systems that automate tasks by viewing screens and executing actions -- presents a fundamental challenge: current agents require continuous observation of UI state to determine each action, conflicting with the isolation required for security. We resolve this tension by demonstrating that UI workflows, while dynamic, are structurally predictable. We introduce Single-Shot Planning for CUAs, where a trusted planner generates a complete execution graph with conditional branches before any observation of potentially malicious content, providing provable control flow integrity guarantees against arbitrary instruction injections. Although this architectural isolation successfully prevents instruction injections, we show that additional measures are needed to prevent Branch Steering attacks, which manipulate UI elements to trigger unintended valid paths within the plan. We evaluate our design on OSWorld, and retain up to 57% of the performance of frontier models while improving performance for smaller open-source models by up to 19%, demonstrating that rigorous security and utility can coexist in CUAs.

  • 9 authors
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Jan 14 2

ST4VLA: Spatially Guided Training for Vision-Language-Action Models

Large vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding but fall short when extended to embodied tasks, where instructions must be transformed into low-level motor actions. We introduce ST4VLA, a dual-system Vision-Language-Action framework that leverages Spatial Guided Training to align action learning with spatial priors in VLMs. ST4VLA includes two stages: (i) spatial grounding pre-training, which equips the VLM with transferable priors via scalable point, box, and trajectory prediction from both web-scale and robot-specific data, and (ii) spatially guided action post-training, which encourages the model to produce richer spatial priors to guide action generation via spatial prompting. This design preserves spatial grounding during policy learning and promotes consistent optimization across spatial and action objectives. Empirically, ST4VLA achieves substantial improvements over vanilla VLA, with performance increasing from 66.1 -> 84.6 on Google Robot and from 54.7 -> 73.2 on WidowX Robot, establishing new state-of-the-art results on SimplerEnv. It also demonstrates stronger generalization to unseen objects and paraphrased instructions, as well as robustness to long-horizon perturbations in real-world settings. These results highlight scalable spatially guided training as a promising direction for robust, generalizable robot learning. Source code, data and models are released at https://internrobotics.github.io/internvla-m1.github.io/

  • 12 authors
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Feb 9

VLA^2: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Models with an Agentic Framework for Unseen Concept Manipulation

Current vision-language-action (VLA) models, pre-trained on large-scale robotic data, exhibit strong multi-task capabilities and generalize well to variations in visual and language instructions for manipulation. However, their success rate drops significantly when faced with object concepts outside the training data, such as unseen object descriptions and textures in the dataset. To address this, we propose a novel agentic framework, VLA^2, which leverages OpenVLA as the execution backbone and effectively leverages external modules such as web retrieval and object detection to provide visual and textual knowledge about target objects to the VLA. This approach mitigates generalization failure when handling out-of-distribution objects. Based on the LIBERO simulation environment, we introduced novel objects and object descriptions to construct a new evaluation benchmark with three difficulty levels to test the effectiveness of our method. Our framework successfully outperformed the current state-of-the-art models on our designed hard-level generalization benchmark. Compared to the standalone OpenVLA baseline, VLA^2 achieves a 44.2% improvement in the success rate in the hard-level benchmark and an average improvement of 20.2% in all customized environments without any performance degradation on in-domain tasks. Project website: https://vla-2.github.io.

Westlake-University Westlake University
·
Oct 16, 2025 2

EgoPlan-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Human-Level Planning

The pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been accelerated by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which exhibit superior reasoning, generalization capabilities, and proficiency in processing multimodal inputs. A crucial milestone in the evolution of AGI is the attainment of human-level planning, a fundamental ability for making informed decisions in complex environments, and solving a wide range of real-world problems. Despite the impressive advancements in MLLMs, a question remains: How far are current MLLMs from achieving human-level planning? To shed light on this question, we introduce EgoPlan-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the planning abilities of MLLMs in real-world scenarios from an egocentric perspective, mirroring human perception. EgoPlan-Bench emphasizes the evaluation of planning capabilities of MLLMs, featuring realistic tasks, diverse action plans, and intricate visual observations. Our rigorous evaluation of a wide range of MLLMs reveals that EgoPlan-Bench poses significant challenges, highlighting a substantial scope for improvement in MLLMs to achieve human-level task planning. To facilitate this advancement, we further present EgoPlan-IT, a specialized instruction-tuning dataset that effectively enhances model performance on EgoPlan-Bench. We have made all codes, data, and a maintained benchmark leaderboard available to advance future research.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 10, 2023

UltraCUA: A Foundation Model for Computer Use Agents with Hybrid Action

Multimodal agents for computer use rely exclusively on primitive actions (click, type, scroll) that require accurate visual grounding and lengthy execution chains, leading to cascading failures and performance bottlenecks. While other agents leverage rich programmatic interfaces (APIs, MCP servers, tools), computer-use agents (CUAs) remain isolated from these capabilities. We present UltraCUA, a foundation model that bridges this gap through hybrid action -- seamlessly integrating GUI primitives with high-level programmatic tool calls. To achieve this, our approach comprises four key components: (1) an automated pipeline that scales programmatic tools from software documentation, open-source repositories, and code generation; (2) a synthetic data engine producing over 17,000 verifiable tasks spanning real-world computer-use scenarios; (3) a large-scale high-quality hybrid action trajectory collection with both low-level GUI actions and high-level programmatic tool calls; and (4) a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning with online reinforcement learning, enabling strategic alternation between low-level and high-level actions. Experiments with our 7B and 32B models demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art agents. On OSWorld, UltraCUA models achieve an average 22% relative improvement over base models, while being 11% faster in terms of steps. Out-of-domain evaluation on WindowsAgentArena shows our model reaches 21.7% success rate, outperforming baselines trained on Windows data. The hybrid action mechanism proves critical, reducing error propagation while maintaining execution efficiency.

apple Apple
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Oct 20, 2025 3

Scaling World Model for Hierarchical Manipulation Policies

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are promising for generalist robot manipulation but remain brittle in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, especially with limited real-robot data. To resolve the generalization bottleneck, we introduce a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action framework that leverages the generalization of large-scale pre-trained world model for robust and generalizable VIsual Subgoal TAsk decomposition VISTA. Our hierarchical framework consists of a world model as the high-level planner and a VLA as the low-level executor. The high-level world model first divides manipulation tasks into subtask sequences with goal images, and the low-level policy follows the textual and visual guidance to generate action sequences. Compared to raw textual goal specification, these synthesized goal images provide visually and physically grounded details for low-level policies, making it feasible to generalize across unseen objects and novel scenarios. We validate both visual goal synthesis and our hierarchical VLA policies in massive out-of-distribution scenarios, and the performance of the same-structured VLA in novel scenarios could boost from 14% to 69% with the guidance generated by the world model. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous baselines with a clear margin, particularly in out-of-distribution scenarios. Project page: https://vista-wm.github.io/{https://vista-wm.github.io}

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 11

OpenHA: A Series of Open-Source Hierarchical Agentic Models in Minecraft

The choice of action spaces is a critical yet unresolved challenge in developing capable, end-to-end trainable agents. This paper first presents a large-scale, systematic comparison of prominent abstracted action spaces and tokenizers for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) or hierarchical agent models in the open-ended Minecraft. Our analysis reveals that no single action space is universally optimal; instead, the most effective abstraction is highly task-dependent, creating a dilemma for building generalist agents. To resolve this, we introduce Chain of Action (CoA), a novel framework that unifies high-level planning and low-level control within a single, monolithic VLA model. CoA treats an abstracted action not as a command for a separate policy, but as an intermediate reasoning step--akin to a chain of thought--that guides the generation of the final, executable action. Furthermore, we demonstrate that an All-in-One agent trained on a diverse mixture of action spaces using the CoA paradigm learns a more robust and generalizable policy. This unified agent achieves a new state-of-the-art, improving the overall task success rate over strong, specialized baselines. To foster reproducible research, we release the OpenHA (Open Hierarchical Agents) suite, which includes our comprehensive benchmark of over 800 distinct tasks, curated datasets, source code, and all pretrained model checkpoints at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/OpenHA

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025 1

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

  • 3 authors
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Sep 14, 2024

SurgTEMP: Temporal-Aware Surgical Video Question Answering with Text-guided Visual Memory for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to navigate evolving intraoperative scenes. Computer-assisted systems such as surgical visual question answering (VQA) offer promises for education and intraoperative support. Current surgical VQA research largely focuses on static frame analysis, overlooking rich temporal semantics. Surgical video question answering is further challenged by low visual contrast, its highly knowledge-driven nature, diverse analytical needs spanning scattered temporal windows, and the hierarchy from basic perception to high-level intraoperative assessment. To address these challenges, we propose SurgTEMP, a multimodal LLM framework featuring (i) a query-guided token selection module that builds hierarchical visual memory (spatial and temporal memory banks) and (ii) a Surgical Competency Progression (SCP) training scheme. Together, they enable effective modeling of variable-length surgical videos while preserving procedure-relevant cues and temporal coherence, and better support diverse downstream assessment tasks. To support model development, we introduce CholeVidQA-32K, a surgical video question answering dataset comprising 32K open-ended QA pairs and 3,855 video segments (approximately 128 h total) from laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The dataset is organized into a three-level hierarchy -- Perception, Assessment, and Reasoning -- spanning 11 tasks from instrument/action/anatomy perception to Critical View of Safety (CVS), intraoperative difficulty, skill proficiency, and adverse event assessment. In comprehensive evaluations against state-of-the-art open-source multimodal and video LLMs (fine-tuned and zero-shot), SurgTEMP achieves substantial performance improvements, advancing the state of video-based surgical VQA. The project page is available at: https://camma-public.github.io/SurgTEMP/

  • 9 authors
·
May 3

ENACT: Evaluating Embodied Cognition with World Modeling of Egocentric Interaction

Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from sensorimotor interaction rather than passive observation. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? We introduce ENACT, a benchmark that casts evaluation of embodied cognition as world modeling from egocentric interaction in a visual question answering (VQA) format. Framed as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) whose actions are scene graph changes, ENACT comprises two complementary sequence reordering tasks: forward world modeling (reorder shuffled observations given actions) and inverse world modeling (reorder shuffled actions given observations). While conceptually simple, solving these tasks implicitly demands capabilities central to embodied cognition-affordance recognition, action-effect reasoning, embodied awareness, and interactive, long-horizon memory from partially observable egocentric input, while avoiding low-level image synthesis that could confound the evaluation. We provide a scalable pipeline that synthesizes QA pairs from robotics simulation (BEHAVIOR) and evaluates models on 8,972 QA pairs spanning long-horizon home-scale activities. Experiments reveal a performance gap between frontier VLMs and humans that widens with interaction horizon. Models consistently perform better on the inverse task than the forward one and exhibit anthropocentric biases, including a preference for right-handed actions and degradation when camera intrinsics or viewpoints deviate from human vision. Website at https://enact-embodied-cognition.github.io/.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025 2

WebPilot: A Versatile and Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Web Task Execution with Strategic Exploration

LLM-based autonomous agents often fail to execute complex web tasks that require dynamic interaction due to the inherent uncertainty and complexity of these environments. Existing LLM-based web agents typically rely on rigid, expert-designed policies specific to certain states and actions, which lack the flexibility and generalizability needed to adapt to unseen tasks. In contrast, humans excel by exploring unknowns, continuously adapting strategies, and resolving ambiguities through exploration. To emulate human-like adaptability, web agents need strategic exploration and complex decision-making. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is well-suited for this, but classical MCTS struggles with vast action spaces, unpredictable state transitions, and incomplete information in web tasks. In light of this, we develop WebPilot, a multi-agent system with a dual optimization strategy that improves MCTS to better handle complex web environments. Specifically, the Global Optimization phase involves generating a high-level plan by breaking down tasks into manageable subtasks and continuously refining this plan, thereby focusing the search process and mitigating the challenges posed by vast action spaces in classical MCTS. Subsequently, the Local Optimization phase executes each subtask using a tailored MCTS designed for complex environments, effectively addressing uncertainties and managing incomplete information. Experimental results on WebArena and MiniWoB++ demonstrate the effectiveness of WebPilot. Notably, on WebArena, WebPilot achieves SOTA performance with GPT-4, achieving a 93% relative increase in success rate over the concurrent tree search-based method. WebPilot marks a significant advancement in general autonomous agent capabilities, paving the way for more advanced and reliable decision-making in practical environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024

Multi-Stage Cable Routing through Hierarchical Imitation Learning

We study the problem of learning to perform multi-stage robotic manipulation tasks, with applications to cable routing, where the robot must route a cable through a series of clips. This setting presents challenges representative of complex multi-stage robotic manipulation scenarios: handling deformable objects, closing the loop on visual perception, and handling extended behaviors consisting of multiple steps that must be executed successfully to complete the entire task. In such settings, learning individual primitives for each stage that succeed with a high enough rate to perform a complete temporally extended task is impractical: if each stage must be completed successfully and has a non-negligible probability of failure, the likelihood of successful completion of the entire task becomes negligible. Therefore, successful controllers for such multi-stage tasks must be able to recover from failure and compensate for imperfections in low-level controllers by smartly choosing which controllers to trigger at any given time, retrying, or taking corrective action as needed. To this end, we describe an imitation learning system that uses vision-based policies trained from demonstrations at both the lower (motor control) and the upper (sequencing) level, present a system for instantiating this method to learn the cable routing task, and perform evaluations showing great performance in generalizing to very challenging clip placement variations. Supplementary videos, datasets, and code can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/cablerouting.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 17, 2023

GUIrilla: A Scalable Framework for Automated Desktop UI Exploration

Autonomous agents capable of operating complex graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have the potential to transform desktop automation. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved UI understanding, navigating full-window, multi-application desktop environments remains a major challenge. Data availability is limited by costly manual annotation, closed-source datasets and surface-level synthetic pipelines. We introduce GUIrilla, an automated scalable framework that systematically explores applications via native accessibility APIs to address the critical data collection challenge in GUI automation. Our framework focuses on macOS - an ecosystem with limited representation in current UI datasets - though many of its components are designed for broader cross-platform applicability. GUIrilla organizes discovered interface elements and crawler actions into hierarchical GUI graphs and employs specialized interaction handlers to achieve comprehensive application coverage. Using the application graphs from GUIrilla crawler, we construct and release GUIrilla-Task, a large-scale dataset of 27,171 functionally grounded tasks across 1,108 macOS applications, each annotated with full-desktop and window-level screenshots, accessibility metadata, and semantic action traces. Empirical results show that tuning LLM-based agents on GUIrilla-Task significantly improves performance on downstream UI tasks, outperforming synthetic baselines on the ScreenSpot Pro benchmark while using 97% less data. We also release macapptree, an open-source library for reproducible collection of structured accessibility metadata, along with the full GUIrilla-Task dataset, the manually verified GUIrilla-Gold benchmark, and the framework code to support open research in desktop autonomy.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025

Beyond Training: Enabling Self-Evolution of Agents with MOBIMEM

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex workflows in mobile and desktop environments. However, current model-centric agent architectures struggle to self-evolve post-deployment: improving personalization, capability, and efficiency typically requires continuous model retraining/fine-tuning, which incurs prohibitive computational overheads and suffers from an inherent trade-off between model accuracy and inference efficiency. To enable iterative self-evolution without model retraining, we propose MOBIMEM, a memory-centric agent system. MOBIMEM first introduces three specialized memory primitives to decouple agent evolution from model weights: (1) Profile Memory uses a lightweight distance-graph (DisGraph) structure to align with user preferences, resolving the accuracy-latency trade-off in user profile retrieval; (2) Experience Memory employs multi-level templates to instantiate execution logic for new tasks, ensuring capability generalization; and (3) Action Memory records fine-grained interaction sequences, reducing the reliance on expensive model inference. Building upon this memory architecture, MOBIMEM further integrates a suite of OS-inspired services to orchestrate execution: a scheduler that coordinates parallel sub-task execution and memory operations; an agent record-and-replay (AgentRR) mechanism that enables safe and efficient action reuse; and a context-aware exception handling that ensures graceful recovery from user interruptions and runtime errors. Evaluation on AndroidWorld and top-50 apps shows that MOBIMEM achieves 83.1% profile alignment with 23.83 ms retrieval time (280x faster than GraphRAG baselines), improves task success rates by up to 50.3%, and reduces end-to-end latency by up to 9x on mobile devices.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025

DropVLA: An Action-Level Backdoor Attack on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal perception and language instructions to executable robot actions, making them particularly vulnerable to behavioral backdoor manipulation: a hidden trigger introduced during training can induce unintended physical actions while nominal task performance remains intact. Prior work on VLA backdoors primarily studies untargeted attacks or task-level hijacking, leaving fine-grained control over individual actions largely unexplored. In this work, we present DropVLA, an action-level backdoor attack that forces a reusable action primitive (e.g., open_gripper) to execute at attacker-chosen decision points under a realistic pipeline-black-box setting with limited data-poisoning access, using a window-consistent relabeling scheme for chunked fine-tuning. On OpenVLA-7B evaluated with LIBERO, vision-only poisoning achieves 98.67%-99.83% attack success rate (ASR) with only 0.31% poisoned episodes while preserving 98.50%-99.17% clean-task retention, and successfully triggers the targeted action within 25 control steps at 500 Hz (0.05 s). Text-only triggers are unstable at low poisoning budgets, and combining text with vision provides no consistent ASR improvement over vision-only attacks. The backdoor remains robust to moderate trigger variations and transfers across evaluation suites (96.27%, 99.09%), whereas text-only largely fails (0.72%). We further validate physical-world feasibility on a 7-DoF Franka arm with pi0-fast, demonstrating non-trivial attack efficacy under camera-relative motion that induces image-plane trigger drift. These results reveal that VLA models can be covertly steered at the granularity of safety-critical actions with minimal poisoning and without observable degradation of nominal performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 12, 2025

Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Reinforcement Learning for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Task-Level Rewards

Vision-language model-based mobile agents have gained the ability to not only understand complex instructions and mobile screenshots, but also optimize their action outputs via thinking and reasoning, benefiting from reinforcement learning, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, existing research centers on offline reinforcement learning training or online optimization using action-level rewards, which limits the agent's dynamic interaction with the environment. This often results in agents settling into local optima, thereby weakening their ability for exploration and error action correction. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach called Mobile-R1, which employs interactive multi-turn reinforcement learning with task-level rewards for mobile agents. Our training framework consists of three stages: initial format finetuning, single-step online training via action-level reward, followed by online training via task-level reward based on multi-turn trajectories. This strategy is designed to enhance the exploration and error correction capabilities of Mobile-R1, leading to significant performance improvements. Moreover, we have collected a dataset covering 28 Chinese applications with 24,521 high-quality manual annotations and established a new benchmark with 500 trajectories. We will open source all resources, including the dataset, benchmark, model weight, and codes: https://mobile-r1.github.io/Mobile-R1/.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 25, 2025

XSkill: Continual Learning from Experience and Skills in Multimodal Agents

Multimodal agents can now tackle complex reasoning tasks with diverse tools, yet they still suffer from inefficient tool use and inflexible orchestration in open-ended settings. A central challenge is enabling such agents to continually improve without parameter updates by learning from past trajectories. We identify two complementary forms of reusable knowledge essential for this goal: experiences, providing concise action-level guidance for tool selection and decision making, and skills, providing structured task-level guidance for planning and tool use. To this end, we propose XSkill, a dual-stream framework for continual learning from experience and skills in multimodal agents. XSkill grounds both knowledge extraction and retrieval in visual observations. During accumulation, XSkill distills and consolidates experiences and skills from multi-path rollouts via visually grounded summarization and cross-rollout critique. During inference, it retrieves and adapts this knowledge to the current visual context and feeds usage history back into accumulation to form a continual learning loop. Evaluated on five benchmarks across diverse domains with four backbone models, XSkill consistently and substantially outperforms both tool-only and learning-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that the two knowledge streams play complementary roles in influencing the reasoning behaviors of agents and show superior zero-shot generalization.

  • 5 authors
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Mar 12 2

UI-Genie: A Self-Improving Approach for Iteratively Boosting MLLM-based Mobile GUI Agents

In this paper, we introduce UI-Genie, a self-improving framework addressing two key challenges in GUI agents: verification of trajectory outcome is challenging and high-quality training data are not scalable. These challenges are addressed by a reward model and a self-improving pipeline, respectively. The reward model, UI-Genie-RM, features an image-text interleaved architecture that efficiently pro- cesses historical context and unifies action-level and task-level rewards. To sup- port the training of UI-Genie-RM, we develop deliberately-designed data genera- tion strategies including rule-based verification, controlled trajectory corruption, and hard negative mining. To address the second challenge, a self-improvement pipeline progressively expands solvable complex GUI tasks by enhancing both the agent and reward models through reward-guided exploration and outcome verification in dynamic environments. For training the model, we generate UI- Genie-RM-517k and UI-Genie-Agent-16k, establishing the first reward-specific dataset for GUI agents while demonstrating high-quality synthetic trajectory gen- eration without manual annotation. Experimental results show that UI-Genie achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple GUI agent benchmarks with three generations of data-model self-improvement. We open-source our complete framework implementation and generated datasets to facilitate further research in https://github.com/Euphoria16/UI-Genie.

  • 15 authors
·
May 27, 2025 1

Improving Generalization in Task-oriented Dialogues with Workflows and Action Plans

Task-oriented dialogue is difficult in part because it involves understanding user intent, collecting information from the user, executing API calls, and generating helpful and fluent responses. However, for complex tasks one must also correctly do all of these things over multiple steps, and in a specific order. While large pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned end-to-end to create multi-step task-oriented dialogue agents that generate fluent text, our experiments confirm that this approach alone cannot reliably perform new multi-step tasks that are unseen during training. To address these limitations, we augment the dialogue contexts given to text2text transformers with known valid workflow names and action plans. Action plans consist of sequences of actions required to accomplish a task, and are encoded as simple sequences of keywords (e.g. verify-identity, pull-up-account, reset-password, etc.). We perform extensive experiments on the Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD) with T5-small, base and large models, and show that such models: a) are able to more readily generalize to unseen workflows by following the provided plan, and b) are able to generalize to executing unseen actions if they are provided in the plan. In contrast, models are unable to fully accomplish new multi-step tasks when they are not provided action plan information, even when given new valid workflow names.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

ADAPT: Vision-Language Navigation with Modality-Aligned Action Prompts

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires an embodied agent to perform action-level modality alignment, i.e., make instruction-asked actions sequentially in complex visual environments. Most existing VLN agents learn the instruction-path data directly and cannot sufficiently explore action-level alignment knowledge inside the multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose modAlity-aligneD Action PrompTs (ADAPT), which provides the VLN agent with action prompts to enable the explicit learning of action-level modality alignment to pursue successful navigation. Specifically, an action prompt is defined as a modality-aligned pair of an image sub-prompt and a text sub-prompt, where the former is a single-view observation and the latter is a phrase like ''walk past the chair''. When starting navigation, the instruction-related action prompt set is retrieved from a pre-built action prompt base and passed through a prompt encoder to obtain the prompt feature. Then the prompt feature is concatenated with the original instruction feature and fed to a multi-layer transformer for action prediction. To collect high-quality action prompts into the prompt base, we use the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model which has powerful cross-modality alignment ability. A modality alignment loss and a sequential consistency loss are further introduced to enhance the alignment of the action prompt and enforce the agent to focus on the related prompt sequentially. Experimental results on both R2R and RxR show the superiority of ADAPT over state-of-the-art methods.

  • 6 authors
·
May 30, 2022

GraphCoT-VLA: A 3D Spatial-Aware Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation with Ambiguous Instructions

Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

SOP: A Scalable Online Post-Training System for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models achieve strong generalization through large-scale pre-training, but real-world deployment requires expert-level task proficiency in addition to broad generality. Existing post-training approaches for VLA models are typically offline, single-robot, or task-specific, limiting effective on-policy adaptation and scalable learning from real-world interaction. We introduce a Scalable Online Post-training (SOP) system that enables online, distributed, multi-task post-training of generalist VLA models directly in the physical world. SOP tightly couples execution and learning through a closed-loop architecture in which a fleet of robots continuously streams on-policy experience and human intervention signals to a centralized cloud learner, and asynchronously receives updated policies. This design supports prompt on-policy correction, scales experience collection through parallel deployment, and preserves generality during adaptation. SOP is agnostic to the choice of post-training algorithm; we instantiate it with both interactive imitation learning (HG-DAgger) and reinforcement learning (RECAP). Across a range of real-world manipulation tasks including cloth folding, box assembly, and grocery restocking, we show that SOP substantially improves the performance of large pretrained VLA models while maintaining a single shared policy across tasks. Effective post-training can be achieved within hours of real-world interaction, and performance scales near-linearly with the number of robots in the fleet. These results suggest that tightly coupling online learning with fleet-scale deployment is instrumental to enabling efficient, reliable, and scalable post-training of generalist robot policies in the physical world.

KineMind AGIBOT Finch
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Jan 6 2

A^2Nav: Action-Aware Zero-Shot Robot Navigation by Exploiting Vision-and-Language Ability of Foundation Models

We study the task of zero-shot vision-and-language navigation (ZS-VLN), a practical yet challenging problem in which an agent learns to navigate following a path described by language instructions without requiring any path-instruction annotation data. Normally, the instructions have complex grammatical structures and often contain various action descriptions (e.g., "proceed beyond", "depart from"). How to correctly understand and execute these action demands is a critical problem, and the absence of annotated data makes it even more challenging. Note that a well-educated human being can easily understand path instructions without the need for any special training. In this paper, we propose an action-aware zero-shot VLN method (A^2Nav) by exploiting the vision-and-language ability of foundation models. Specifically, the proposed method consists of an instruction parser and an action-aware navigation policy. The instruction parser utilizes the advanced reasoning ability of large language models (e.g., GPT-3) to decompose complex navigation instructions into a sequence of action-specific object navigation sub-tasks. Each sub-task requires the agent to localize the object and navigate to a specific goal position according to the associated action demand. To accomplish these sub-tasks, an action-aware navigation policy is learned from freely collected action-specific datasets that reveal distinct characteristics of each action demand. We use the learned navigation policy for executing sub-tasks sequentially to follow the navigation instruction. Extensive experiments show A^2Nav achieves promising ZS-VLN performance and even surpasses the supervised learning methods on R2R-Habitat and RxR-Habitat datasets.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

JARVIS: A Neuro-Symbolic Commonsense Reasoning Framework for Conversational Embodied Agents

Building a conversational embodied agent to execute real-life tasks has been a long-standing yet quite challenging research goal, as it requires effective human-agent communication, multi-modal understanding, long-range sequential decision making, etc. Traditional symbolic methods have scaling and generalization issues, while end-to-end deep learning models suffer from data scarcity and high task complexity, and are often hard to explain. To benefit from both worlds, we propose JARVIS, a neuro-symbolic commonsense reasoning framework for modular, generalizable, and interpretable conversational embodied agents. First, it acquires symbolic representations by prompting large language models (LLMs) for language understanding and sub-goal planning, and by constructing semantic maps from visual observations. Then the symbolic module reasons for sub-goal planning and action generation based on task- and action-level common sense. Extensive experiments on the TEACh dataset validate the efficacy and efficiency of our JARVIS framework, which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on all three dialog-based embodied tasks, including Execution from Dialog History (EDH), Trajectory from Dialog (TfD), and Two-Agent Task Completion (TATC) (e.g., our method boosts the unseen Success Rate on EDH from 6.1\% to 15.8\%). Moreover, we systematically analyze the essential factors that affect the task performance and also demonstrate the superiority of our method in few-shot settings. Our JARVIS model ranks first in the Alexa Prize SimBot Public Benchmark Challenge.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 28, 2022

GenoMAS: A Multi-Agent Framework for Scientific Discovery via Code-Driven Gene Expression Analysis

Gene expression analysis holds the key to many biomedical discoveries, yet extracting insights from raw transcriptomic data remains formidable due to the complexity of multiple large, semi-structured files and the need for extensive domain expertise. Current automation approaches are often limited by either inflexible workflows that break down in edge cases or by fully autonomous agents that lack the necessary precision for rigorous scientific inquiry. GenoMAS charts a different course by presenting a team of LLM-based scientists that integrates the reliability of structured workflows with the adaptability of autonomous agents. GenoMAS orchestrates six specialized LLM agents through typed message-passing protocols, each contributing complementary strengths to a shared analytic canvas. At the heart of GenoMAS lies a guided-planning framework: programming agents unfold high-level task guidelines into Action Units and, at each juncture, elect to advance, revise, bypass, or backtrack, thereby maintaining logical coherence while bending gracefully to the idiosyncrasies of genomic data. On the GenoTEX benchmark, GenoMAS reaches a Composite Similarity Correlation of 89.13% for data preprocessing and an F_1 of 60.48% for gene identification, surpassing the best prior art by 10.61% and 16.85% respectively. Beyond metrics, GenoMAS surfaces biologically plausible gene-phenotype associations corroborated by the literature, all while adjusting for latent confounders. Code is available at https://github.com/Liu-Hy/GenoMAS.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025 2

EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents

Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create embodied agents offers a promising avenue for tackling real-world tasks. While language-centric embodied agents have garnered substantial attention, MLLM-based embodied agents remain underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmbodiedBench, an extensive benchmark designed to evaluate vision-driven embodied agents. EmbodiedBench features: (1) a diverse set of 1,128 testing tasks across four environments, ranging from high-level semantic tasks (e.g., household) to low-level tasks involving atomic actions (e.g., navigation and manipulation); and (2) six meticulously curated subsets evaluating essential agent capabilities like commonsense reasoning, complex instruction understanding, spatial awareness, visual perception, and long-term planning. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated 13 leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs within EmbodiedBench. Our findings reveal that: MLLMs excel at high-level tasks but struggle with low-level manipulation, with the best model, GPT-4o, scoring only 28.9% on average. EmbodiedBench provides a multifaceted standardized evaluation platform that not only highlights existing challenges but also offers valuable insights to advance MLLM-based embodied agents. Our code is available at https://embodiedbench.github.io.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 13, 2025 2

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/.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 25, 2023 4

OSExpert: Computer-Use Agents Learning Professional Skills via Exploration

General-purpose computer-use agents have shown impressive performance across diverse digital environments. However, our new benchmark, OSExpert-Eval, indicates they remain far less helpful than human experts. Although inference-time scaling enables adaptation, these agents complete complex tasks inefficiently with degraded performance, transfer poorly to unseen UIs, and struggle with fine-grained action sequences. To solve the problem, we introduce a GUI-based depth-first search (GUI-DFS) exploration algorithm to comprehensively explore and verify an environment's unit functions. The agent then exploits compositionality between unit skills to self-construct a curriculum for composite tasks. To support fine-grained actions, we curate a database of action primitives for agents to discover during exploration; these are saved as a skill set once the exploration is complete. We use the learned skills to improve the agent's performance and efficiency by (1) enriching agents with ready-to-use procedural knowledge, allowing them to plan only once for long trajectories and generate accurate actions, and (2) enabling them to end inference-time scaling earlier by realizing their boundary of capabilities. Extensive experiments show that our environment-learned agent takes a meaningful step toward expert-level computer use, achieving a around 20 percent performance gain on OSExpert-Eval and closing the efficiency gap to humans by around 80 percent

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 8

MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents

Autonomous embodied agents live on an Internet of multimedia websites. Can they hop around multimodal websites to complete complex user tasks? Existing benchmarks fail to assess them in a realistic, evolving environment for their embodiment across websites. To answer this question, we present MMInA, a multihop and multimodal benchmark to evaluate the embodied agents for compositional Internet tasks, with several appealing properties: 1) Evolving real-world multimodal websites. Our benchmark uniquely operates on evolving real-world websites, ensuring a high degree of realism and applicability to natural user tasks. Our data includes 1,050 human-written tasks covering various domains such as shopping and travel, with each task requiring the agent to autonomously extract multimodal information from web pages as observations; 2) Multihop web browsing. Our dataset features naturally compositional tasks that require information from or actions on multiple websites to solve, to assess long-range reasoning capabilities on web tasks; 3) Holistic evaluation. We propose a novel protocol for evaluating an agent's progress in completing multihop tasks. We experiment with both standalone (multimodal) language models and heuristic-based web agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while long-chain multihop web tasks are easy for humans, they remain challenging for state-of-the-art web agents. We identify that agents are more likely to fail on the early hops when solving tasks of more hops, which results in lower task success rates. To address this issue, we propose a simple memory augmentation approach replaying past action trajectories to reflect. Our method significantly improved both the single-hop and multihop web browsing abilities of agents. See our code and data at https://mmina.cliangyu.com

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 15, 2024

OAKINK2: A Dataset of Bimanual Hands-Object Manipulation in Complex Task Completion

We present OAKINK2, a dataset of bimanual object manipulation tasks for complex daily activities. In pursuit of constructing the complex tasks into a structured representation, OAKINK2 introduces three level of abstraction to organize the manipulation tasks: Affordance, Primitive Task, and Complex Task. OAKINK2 features on an object-centric perspective for decoding the complex tasks, treating them as a sequence of object affordance fulfillment. The first level, Affordance, outlines the functionalities that objects in the scene can afford, the second level, Primitive Task, describes the minimal interaction units that humans interact with the object to achieve its affordance, and the third level, Complex Task, illustrates how Primitive Tasks are composed and interdependent. OAKINK2 dataset provides multi-view image streams and precise pose annotations for the human body, hands and various interacting objects. This extensive collection supports applications such as interaction reconstruction and motion synthesis. Based on the 3-level abstraction of OAKINK2, we explore a task-oriented framework for Complex Task Completion (CTC). CTC aims to generate a sequence of bimanual manipulation to achieve task objectives. Within the CTC framework, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose the complex task objectives into sequences of Primitive Tasks and have developed a Motion Fulfillment Model that generates bimanual hand motion for each Primitive Task. OAKINK2 datasets and models are available at https://oakink.net/v2.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

SwitchVLA: Execution-Aware Task Switching for Vision-Language-Action Models

Robots deployed in dynamic environments must be able to not only follow diverse language instructions but flexibly adapt when user intent changes mid-execution. While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced multi-task learning and instruction following, they typically assume static task intent, failing to respond when new instructions arrive during ongoing execution. This limitation hinders natural and robust interaction in dynamic settings, such as retail or household environments, where real-time intent changes are common. We propose SwitchVLA, a unified, execution-aware framework that enables smooth and reactive task switching without external planners or additional switch-specific data. We model task switching as a behavior modulation problem conditioned on execution state and instruction context. Expert demonstrations are segmented into temporally grounded contact phases, allowing the policy to infer task progress and adjust its behavior accordingly. A multi-behavior conditional policy is then trained to generate flexible action chunks under varying behavior modes through conditioned trajectory modeling. Experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation demonstrate that SwitchVLA enables robust instruction adherence, fluid task switching, and strong generalization-outperforming prior VLA baselines in both task success rate and interaction naturalness.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025 1

GUIDE: Graphical User Interface Data for Execution

In this paper, we introduce GUIDE, a novel dataset tailored for the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) applications, particularly focusing on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) use cases. Our dataset encompasses diverse data from various websites including Apollo(62.67\%), Gmail(3.43\%), Calendar(10.98\%) and Canva(22.92\%). Each data entry includes an image, a task description, the last action taken, CoT and the next action to be performed along with grounding information of where the action needs to be executed. The data is collected using our in-house advanced annotation tool NEXTAG (Next Action Grounding and Annotation Tool). The data is adapted for multiple OS, browsers and display types. It is collected by multiple annotators to capture the variation of design and the way person uses a website. Through this dataset, we aim to facilitate research and development in the realm of LLMs for graphical user interfaces, particularly in tasks related to RPA. The dataset's multi-platform nature and coverage of diverse websites enable the exploration of cross-interface capabilities in automation tasks. We believe that our dataset will serve as a valuable resource for advancing the capabilities of multi-platform LLMs in practical applications, fostering innovation in the field of automation and natural language understanding. Using GUIDE, we build V-Zen, the first RPA model to automate multiple websites using our in-House Automation tool AUTONODE

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 9, 2024

VideoGUI: A Benchmark for GUI Automation from Instructional Videos

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

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024 1

VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks

General-purposed embodied agents are designed to understand the users' natural instructions or intentions and act precisely to complete universal tasks. Recently, methods based on foundation models especially Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have shown a substantial potential to solve language-conditioned manipulation (LCM) tasks well. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately meet the needs of VLAs and relative algorithms. To better define such general-purpose tasks in the context of LLMs and advance the research in VLAs, we present VLABench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating universal LCM task learning. VLABench provides 100 carefully designed categories of tasks, with strong randomization in each category of task and a total of 2000+ objects. VLABench stands out from previous benchmarks in four key aspects: 1) tasks requiring world knowledge and common sense transfer, 2) natural language instructions with implicit human intentions rather than templates, 3) long-horizon tasks demanding multi-step reasoning, and 4) evaluation of both action policies and language model capabilities. The benchmark assesses multiple competencies including understanding of mesh\&texture, spatial relationship, semantic instruction, physical laws, knowledge transfer and reasoning, etc. To support the downstream finetuning, we provide high-quality training data collected via an automated framework incorporating heuristic skills and prior information. The experimental results indicate that both the current state-of-the-art pretrained VLAs and the workflow based on VLMs face challenges in our tasks.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024 2

GTA1: GUI Test-time Scaling Agent

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents autonomously operate across platforms (e.g., Linux) to complete tasks by interacting with visual elements. Specifically, a user instruction is decomposed into a sequence of action proposals, each corresponding to an interaction with the GUI. After each action, the agent observes the updated GUI environment to plan the next step. However, two main challenges arise: i) resolving ambiguity in task planning (i.e., the action proposal sequence), where selecting an appropriate plan is non-trivial, as many valid ones may exist; ii) accurately grounding actions in complex and high-resolution interfaces, i.e., precisely interacting with visual targets. This paper investigates the two aforementioned challenges with our GUI Test-time Scaling Agent, namely GTA1. First, to select the most appropriate action proposal, we introduce a test-time scaling method. At each step, we sample multiple candidate action proposals and leverage a judge model to evaluate and select the most suitable one. It trades off computation for better decision quality by concurrent sampling, shortening task execution steps, and improving overall performance. Second, we propose a model that achieves improved accuracy when grounding the selected action proposal to its corresponding visual elements. Our key insight is that reinforcement learning (RL) facilitates visual grounding through inherent objective alignments, rewarding successful clicks on interface elements. Experimentally, our method establishes state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks. For example, GTA1-7B achieves 50.1%, 92.4%, and 67.7% accuracies on Screenspot-Pro, Screenspot-V2, and OSWorld-G, respectively. When paired with a planner applying our test-time scaling strategy, it exhibits state-of-the-art agentic performance (e.g., 45.2% task success rate on OSWorld). We open-source our code and models here.

An Anatomy of Vision-Language-Action Models: From Modules to Milestones and Challenges

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are driving a revolution in robotics, enabling machines to understand instructions and interact with the physical world. This field is exploding with new models and datasets, making it both exciting and challenging to keep pace with. This survey offers a clear and structured guide to the VLA landscape. We design it to follow the natural learning path of a researcher: we start with the basic Modules of any VLA model, trace the history through key Milestones, and then dive deep into the core Challenges that define recent research frontier. Our main contribution is a detailed breakdown of the five biggest challenges in: (1) Representation, (2) Execution, (3) Generalization, (4) Safety, and (5) Dataset and Evaluation. This structure mirrors the developmental roadmap of a generalist agent: establishing the fundamental perception-action loop, scaling capabilities across diverse embodiments and environments, and finally ensuring trustworthy deployment-all supported by the essential data infrastructure. For each of them, we review existing approaches and highlight future opportunities. We position this paper as both a foundational guide for newcomers and a strategic roadmap for experienced researchers, with the dual aim of accelerating learning and inspiring new ideas in embodied intelligence. A live version of this survey, with continuous updates, is maintained on our https://suyuz1.github.io/Survery/{project page}.

IRootech IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY
·
Dec 12, 2025 3

P-RAG: Progressive Retrieval Augmented Generation For Planning on Embodied Everyday Task

Embodied Everyday Task is a popular task in the embodied AI community, requiring agents to make a sequence of actions based on natural language instructions and visual observations. Traditional learning-based approaches face two challenges. Firstly, natural language instructions often lack explicit task planning. Secondly, extensive training is required to equip models with knowledge of the task environment. Previous works based on Large Language Model (LLM) either suffer from poor performance due to the lack of task-specific knowledge or rely on ground truth as few-shot samples. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel approach called Progressive Retrieval Augmented Generation (P-RAG), which not only effectively leverages the powerful language processing capabilities of LLMs but also progressively accumulates task-specific knowledge without ground-truth. Compared to the conventional RAG methods, which retrieve relevant information from the database in a one-shot manner to assist generation, P-RAG introduces an iterative approach to progressively update the database. In each iteration, P-RAG retrieves the latest database and obtains historical information from the previous interaction as experiential references for the current interaction. Moreover, we also introduce a more granular retrieval scheme that not only retrieves similar tasks but also incorporates retrieval of similar situations to provide more valuable reference experiences. Extensive experiments reveal that P-RAG achieves competitive results without utilizing ground truth and can even further improve performance through self-iterations.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 17, 2024

Masked Diffusion with Task-awareness for Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 13, 2023

You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents

Autonomous user interface (UI) agents aim to facilitate task automation by interacting with the user interface without manual intervention. Recent studies have investigated eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for effective engagement in diverse environments. To align with the input-output requirement of LLMs, existing approaches are developed under a sandbox setting where they rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to parse the environment into textual elements and interpret the predicted actions. Consequently, those approaches often grapple with inference inefficiency and error propagation risks. To mitigate the challenges, we introduce Auto-UI, a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the interface, bypassing the need for environment parsing or reliance on application-dependent APIs. Moreover, we propose a chain-of-action technique -- leveraging a series of intermediate previous action histories and future action plans -- to help the agent decide what action to execute. We evaluate our approach on a new device-control benchmark AITW with 30K unique instructions, spanning multi-step tasks such as application operation, web searching, and web shopping. Experimental results show that Auto-UI achieves state-of-the-art performance with an action type prediction accuracy of 90% and an overall action success rate of 74%. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/Auto-UI.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023

Large Video Planner Enables Generalizable Robot Control

General-purpose robots require decision-making models that generalize across diverse tasks and environments. Recent works build robot foundation models by extending multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with action outputs, creating vision-language-action (VLA) systems. These efforts are motivated by the intuition that MLLMs' large-scale language and image pretraining can be effectively transferred to the action output modality. In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm of using large-scale video pretraining as a primary modality for building robot foundation models. Unlike static images and language, videos capture spatio-temporal sequences of states and actions in the physical world that are naturally aligned with robotic behavior. We curate an internet-scale video dataset of human activities and task demonstrations, and train, for the first time at a foundation-model scale, an open video model for generative robotics planning. The model produces zero-shot video plans for novel scenes and tasks, which we post-process to extract executable robot actions. We evaluate task-level generalization through third-party selected tasks in the wild and real-robot experiments, demonstrating successful physical execution. Together, these results show robust instruction following, strong generalization, and real-world feasibility. We release both the model and dataset to support open, reproducible video-based robot learning. Our website is available at https://www.boyuan.space/large-video-planner/.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 17, 2025