AI Agents for Computer Use: A Review of Instruction-based Computer Control, GUI Automation, and Operator Assistants

Instruction-based computer control agents (CCAs) execute complex action sequences on personal computers or mobile devices to fulfill tasks using the same graphical user interfaces as a human user would, provided instructions in natural language. This review offers a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of instruction-based computer control, examining available agents -- their taxonomy, development, and respective resources -- and emphasizing the shift from manually designed, specialized agents to leveraging foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We formalize the problem and establish a taxonomy of the field to analyze agents from three perspectives: (a) the environment perspective, analyzing computer environments; (b) the interaction perspective, describing observations spaces (e.g., screenshots, HTML) and action spaces (e.g., mouse and keyboard actions, executable code); and (c) the agent perspective, focusing on the core principle of how an agent acts and learns to act. Our framework encompasses both specialized and foundation agents, facilitating their comparative analysis and revealing how prior solutions in specialized agents, such as an environment learning step, can guide the development of more capable foundation agents. Additionally, we review current CCA datasets and CCA evaluation methods and outline the challenges to deploying such agents in a productive setting. In total, we review and classify 86 CCAs and 33 related datasets. By highlighting trends, limitations, and future research directions, this work presents a comprehensive foundation to obtain a broad understanding of the field and push its future development.

Local vs Global continual learning

Continual learning is the problem of integrating new information in a model while retaining the knowledge acquired in the past. Despite the tangible improvements achieved in recent years, the problem of continual learning is still an open one. A better understanding of the mechanisms behind the successes and failures of existing continual learning algorithms can unlock the development of new successful strategies. In this work, we view continual learning from the perspective of the multi-task loss approximation, and we compare two alternative strategies, namely local and global approximations. We classify existing continual learning algorithms based on the approximation used, and we assess the practical effects of this distinction in common continual learning settings.Additionally, we study optimal continual learning objectives in the case of local polynomial approximations and we provide examples of existing algorithms implementing the optimal objectives

The Dynamic Net Architecture: Learning Robust and Holistic Visual Representations Through Self-Organizing Networks

We present a novel intelligent-system architecture called "Dynamic Net Architecture" (DNA) that relies on recurrence-stabilized networks and discuss it in application to vision. Our architecture models a (cerebral cortical) area wherein elementary feature neurons encode details of visual structures, and coherent nets of such neurons model holistic object structures. By interpreting smaller or larger coherent pieces of an area network as complex features, our model encodes hierarchical feature representations essentially different than artificial neural networks (ANNs). DNA models operate on a dynamic connectionism principle, wherein neural activations stemming from initial afferent signals undergo stabilization through a self-organizing mechanism facilitated by Hebbian plasticity alongside periodically tightening inhibition. In contrast to ANNs, which rely on feed-forward connections and backpropagation of error, we posit that this processing paradigm leads to highly robust representations, as by employing dynamic lateral connections, irrelevant details in neural activations are filtered out, freeing further processing steps from distracting noise and premature decisions. We empirically demonstrate the viability of the DNA by composing line fragments into longer lines and show that the construction of nets representing lines remains robust even with the introduction of up to $59\%$ noise at each spatial location. Furthermore, we demonstrate the model's capability to reconstruct anticipated features from partially obscured inputs and that it can generalize to patterns not observed during training. In this work, we limit the DNA to one cortical area and focus on its internals while providing insights into a standalone area's strengths and shortcomings. Additionally, we provide an outlook on how future work can implement invariant object recognition by combining multiple areas.

Towards guarantees for parameter isolation in continual learning

Deep learning has proved to be a successful paradigm for solving many challenges in machine learning. However, deep neural networks fail when trained sequentially on multiple tasks, a shortcoming known as catastrophic forgetting in the continual learning literature. Despite a recent flourish of learning algorithms successfully addressing this problem, we find that provable guarantees against catastrophic forgetting are lacking. In this work, we study the relationship between learning and forgetting by looking at the geometry of neural networks' loss landscape. We offer a unifying perspective on a family of continual learning algorithms, namely methods based on parameter isolation, and we establish guarantees on catastrophic forgetting for some of them.

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Transfer Learning for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Time Series: Methods, Applications, and Directions

Automating the monitoring of industrial processes has the potential to enhance efficiency and optimize quality by promptly detecting abnormal events and thus facilitating timely interventions. Deep learning, with its capacity to discern non-trivial patterns within large datasets, plays a pivotal role in this process. Standard deep learning methods are suitable to solve a specific task given a specific type of data. During training, the algorithms demand large volumes of labeled training data. However, due to the dynamic nature of processes and the environment, it is impractical to acquire the needed data for standard deep learning training for every slightly different case anew. Deep transfer learning offers a solution to this problem. By leveraging knowledge from related tasks and accounting for variations in data distributions, this learning framework solves new tasks even with little or no additional labeled data. The approach bypasses the need to retrain a model from scratch for every new setup and dramatically reduces the labeled data requirement. This survey provides an in-depth review of deep transfer learning, examining the problem settings of transfer learning and classifying the prevailing deep transfer learning methods. Moreover, we delve into applying deep transfer learning in the context of a broad spectrum of time series anomaly detection tasks prevalent in primary industrial domains, e.g., manufacturing process monitoring, predictive maintenance, energy management, and infrastructure facility monitoring. We conclude this survey by underlining the challenges and limitations of deep transfer learning in industrial contexts. We also provide practical directions for solution design and implementation for these tasks, leading to specific, actionable suggestions.

Safe Deep RL for Intraoperative Planning of Pedicle Screw Placement

Spinal fusion surgery requires highly accurate implantation of pedicle screw implants, which must be conducted in critical proximity to vital structures with a limited view of anatomy. Robotic surgery systems have been proposed to improve placement accuracy, however, state-of-the-art systems suffer from the limitations of open-loop approaches, as they follow traditional concepts of preoperative planning and intraoperative registration, without real-time recalculation of the surgical plan. In this paper, we propose an intraoperative planning approach for robotic spine surgery that leverages real-time observation for drill path planning based on Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The main contributions of our method are (1) the capability to guarantee safe actions by introducing an uncertainty-aware distance-based safety filter; and (2) the ability to compensate for incomplete intraoperative anatomical information, by encoding a-priori knowledge about anatomical structures with a network pre-trained on high-fidelity anatomical models. Planning quality was assessed by quantitative comparison with the gold standard (GS) drill planning. In experiments with 5 models derived from real magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, our approach was capable of achieving 90% bone penetration with respect to the GS while satisfying safety requirements, even under observation and motion uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first safe DRL approach focusing on orthopedic surgeries.

Bio-Inspired, Task-Free Continual Learning through Activity Regularization

The ability to sequentially learn multiple tasks without forgetting is a key skill of biological brains, whereas it represents a major challenge to the field of deep learning. To avoid catastrophic forgetting, various continual learning (CL) approaches have been devised. However, these usually require discrete task boundaries. This requirement seems biologically implausible and often limits the application of CL methods in the real world where tasks are not always well defined. Here, we take inspiration from neuroscience, where sparse, non-overlapping neuronal representations have been suggested to prevent catastrophic forgetting. As in the brain, we argue that these sparse representations should be chosen on the basis of feed forward (stimulus-specific) as well as top-down (context-specific) information. To implement such selective sparsity, we use a bio-plausible form of hierarchical credit assignment known as Deep Feedback Control (DFC) and combine it with a winner-take-all sparsity mechanism. In addition to sparsity, we introduce lateral recurrent connections within each layer to further protect previously learned representations. We evaluate the new sparse-recurrent version of DFC on the split-MNIST computer vision benchmark and show that only the combination of sparsity and intra-layer recurrent connections improves CL performance with respect to standard backpropagation. Our method achieves similar performance to well-known CL methods, such as Elastic Weight Consolidation and Synaptic Intelligence, without requiring information about task boundaries. Overall, we showcase the idea of adopting computational principles from the brain to derive new, task-free learning algorithms for CL.

Meta-Learning via Classifier(-free) Guidance

State-of-the-art meta-learning techniques do not optimize for zero-shot adaptation to unseen tasks, a setting in which humans excel. On the contrary, meta-learning algorithms learn hyperparameters and weight initializations that explicitly optimize for few-shot learning performance. In this work, we take inspiration from recent advances in generative modeling and language-conditioned image synthesis to propose meta-learning techniques that use natural language guidance to achieve higher zero-shot performance compared to the state-of-the-art. We do so by recasting the meta-learning problem as a multi-modal generative modeling problem: given a task, we consider its adapted neural network weights and its natural language description as equivalent multi-modal task representations. We first train an unconditional generative hypernetwork model to produce neural network weights; then we train a second "guidance" model that, given a natural language task description, traverses the hypernetwork latent space to find high-performance task-adapted weights in a zero-shot manner. We explore two alternative approaches for latent space guidance: "HyperCLIP"-based classifier guidance and a conditional Hypernetwork Latent Diffusion Model ("HyperLDM"), which we show to benefit from the classifier-free guidance technique common in image generation. Finally, we demonstrate that our approaches outperform existing meta-learning methods with zero-shot learning experiments on our Meta-VQA dataset, which we specifically constructed to reflect the multi-modal meta-learning setting.

Homomorphism Autoencoder -- Learning Group Structured Representations from Observed Transitions

How can we acquire world models that veridically represent the outside world both in terms of what is there and in terms of how our actions affect it? Can we acquire such models by interacting with the world, and can we state mathematical desiderata for their relationship with a hypothetical reality existing outside our heads? As machine learning is moving towards representations containing not just observational but also interventional knowledge, we study these problems using tools from representation learning and group theory. Under the assumption that our actuators act upon the world, we propose methods to learn internal representations of not just sensory information but also of actions that modify our sensory representations in a way that is consistent with the actions and transitions in the world. We use an autoencoder equipped with a group representation linearly acting on its latent space, trained on 2-step reconstruction such as to enforce a suitable homomorphism property on the group representation. Compared to existing work, our approach makes fewer assumptions on the group representation and on which transformations the agent can sample from the group. We motivate our method theoretically, and demonstrate empirically that it can learn the correct representation of the groups and the topology of the environment. We also compare its performance in trajectory prediction with previous methods.

Minimizing Control for Credit Assignment with Strong Feedback

The success of deep learning attracted interest in whether the brain learns hierarchical representations using gradient-based learning. However, current biologically plausible methods for gradient-based credit assignment in deep neural networks need infinitesimally small feedback signals, which is problematic in biologically realistic noisy environments and at odds with experimental evidence in neuroscience showing that top-down feedback can significantly influence neural activity. Building upon deep feedback control (DFC), a recently proposed credit assignment method, we combine strong feedback influences on neural activity with gradient-based learning and show that this naturally leads to a novel view on neural network optimization. Instead of gradually changing the network weights towards configurations with low output loss, weight updates gradually minimize the amount of feedback required from a controller that drives the network to the supervised output label. Moreover, we show that the use of strong feedback in DFC allows learning forward and feedback connections simultaneously, using a learning rule fully local in space and time. We complement our theoretical results with experiments on standard computer-vision benchmarks, showing competitive performance to backpropagation as well as robustness to noise. Overall, our work presents a fundamentally novel view of learning as control minimization, while sidestepping biologically unrealistic assumptions.