UnrealZoo: Enriching Photo-realistic Virtual Worlds for Embodied AI

We introduce UnrealZoo, a rich collection of photo-realistic 3D virtual worlds built on Unreal Engine, designed to reflect the complexity and variability of the open worlds. Additionally, we offer a variety of playable entities for embodied AI agents. Based on UnrealCV, we provide a suite of easy-to-use Python APIs and tools for various potential applications, such as data collection, environment augmentation, distributed training, and benchmarking. We optimize the rendering and communication efficiency of UnrealCV to support advanced applications, such as multi-agent interaction. Our experiments benchmark agents in various complex scenes, focusing on visual navigation and tracking, which are fundamental capabilities for embodied visual intelligence. The results yield valuable insights into the advantages of diverse training environments for reinforcement learning (RL) agents and the challenges faced by current embodied vision agents, including those based on RL and large vision-language models (VLMs), in open worlds. These challenges involve latency in closed-loop control in dynamic scenes and reasoning about 3D spatial structures in unstructured terrain.

Simulating Human-like Daily Activities with Desire-driven Autonomy

Existing task-oriented AI agents often depend on explicit instructions or external rewards, limiting their ability to be driven by intrinsic motivations like humans. In this paper, we present a desire-driven autonomy framework to guide a Large Language Model-based (LLM-based) agent to simulate human-like daily activities. In contrast to previous agents, our Desire-driven Autonomous Agent (D2A) operates on the principle of intrinsic desire, allowing it to propose and select tasks that fulfill its motivational framework autonomously. Inspired by the Theory of Needs, the motivational framework incorporates an understanding of human-like desires, such as the need for social interaction, personal fulfillment, and self-care. Utilizing a desire-driven task generation mechanism, the agent evaluates its current state and takes a sequence of activities aligned with its intrinsic motivations. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our Desire-driven Autonomous Agent (D2A) generates coherent, contextually relevant daily activities while exhibiting variability and adaptability similar to human behavior. A comparative analysis with other LLM-based frameworks demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances the rationality of the simulated activities.

Richelieu: Self-Evolving LLM-Based Agents for AI Diplomacy

Diplomacy is one of the most sophisticated activities in human society. The complex interactions among multiple parties/ agents involve various abilities like social reasoning, negotiation arts, and long-term strategy planning. Previous AI agents surely have proved their capability of handling multi-step games and larger action spaces on tasks involving multiple agents. However, diplomacy involves a staggering magnitude of decision spaces, especially considering the negotiation stage required. Recently, LLM agents have shown their potential for extending the boundary of previous agents on a couple of applications, however, it is still not enough to handle a very long planning period in a complex multi-agent environment. Empowered with cutting-edge LLM technology, we make the first stab to explore AI's upper bound towards a human-like agent for such a highly comprehensive multi-agent mission by combining three core and essential capabilities for stronger LLM-based societal agents: 1) strategic planner with memory and reflection; 2) goal-oriented negotiate with social reasoning; 3) augmenting memory by self-play games to self-evolving without any human in the loop.

SocialGFs: Learning Social Gradient Fields for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent systems (MAS) need to adaptively cope with dynamic environments, changing agent populations, and diverse tasks. However, most of the multi-agent systems cannot easily handle them, due to the complexity of the state and task space. The social impact theory regards the complex influencing factors as forces acting on an agent, emanating from the environment, other agents, and the agent's intrinsic motivation, referring to the social force. Inspired by this concept, we propose a novel gradient-based state representation for multi-agent reinforcement learning. To non-trivially model the social forces, we further introduce a data-driven method, where we employ denoising score matching to learn the social gradient fields (SocialGFs) from offline samples, e.g., the attractive or repulsive outcomes of each force. During interactions, the agents take actions based on the multi-dimensional gradients to maximize their own rewards. In practice, we integrate SocialGFs into the widely used multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms, e.g., MAPPO. The empirical results reveal that SocialGFs offer four advantages for multi-agent systems: 1) they can be learned without requiring online interaction, 2) they demonstrate transferability across diverse tasks, 3) they facilitate credit assignment in challenging reward settings, and 4) they are scalable with the increasing number of agents.

Empowering Embodied Visual Tracking with Visual Foundation Models and Offline RL

Embodied visual tracking is to follow a target object in dynamic 3D environments using an agent's egocentric vision. This is a vital and challenging skill for embodied agents. However, existing methods suffer from inefficient training and poor generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that combines visual foundation models (VFM) and offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) to empower embodied visual tracking. We use a pre-trained VFM, such as ``Tracking Anything", to extract semantic segmentation masks with text prompts. We then train a recurrent policy network with offline RL, e.g., Conservative Q-Learning, to learn from the collected demonstrations without online agent-environment interactions. To further improve the robustness and generalization of the policy network, we also introduce a mask re-targeting mechanism and a multi-level data collection strategy. In this way, we can train a robust tracker within an hour on a consumer-level GPU, e.g., Nvidia RTX 3090. Such efficiency is unprecedented for RL-based visual tracking methods. We evaluate our tracker on several high-fidelity environments with challenging situations, such as distraction and occlusion. The results show that our agent outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of sample efficiency, robustness to distractors, and generalization to unseen scenarios and targets. We also demonstrate the transferability of the learned tracker from the virtual world to real-world scenarios.

Fast Peer Adaptation with Context-aware Exploration

Fast adapting to unknown peers (partners or opponents) with different strategies is a key challenge in multi-agent games. To do so, it is crucial for the agent to efficiently probe and identify the peer's strategy, as this is the prerequisite for carrying out the best response in adaptation. However, it is difficult to explore the strategies of unknown peers, especially when the games are partially observable and have a long horizon. In this paper, we propose a peer identification reward, which rewards the learning agent based on how well it can identify the behavior pattern of the peer over the historical context, such as the observation over multiple episodes. This reward motivates the agent to learn a context-aware policy for effective exploration and fast adaptation, i.e., to actively seek and collect informative feedback from peers when uncertain about their policies and to exploit the context to perform the best response when confident. We evaluate our method on diverse testbeds that involve competitive (Kuhn Poker), cooperative (PO-Overcooked), or mixed (Predator-Prey-W) games with peer agents. We demonstrate that our method induces more active exploration behavior, achieving faster adaptation and better outcomes than existing methods.

Learning Semantic-Agnostic and Spatial-Aware Representation for Generalizable Visual-Audio Navigation

Visual-audio navigation (VAN) is attracting more and more attention from the robotic community due to its broad applications, \emph{e.g.}, household robots and rescue robots. In this task, an embodied agent must search for and navigate to the sound source with egocentric visual and audio observations. However, the existing methods are limited in two aspects: 1) poor generalization to unheard sound categories; 2) sample inefficient in training. Focusing on these two problems, we propose a brain-inspired plug-and-play method to learn a semantic-agnostic and spatial-aware representation for generalizable visual-audio navigation. We meticulously design two auxiliary tasks for respectively accelerating learning representations with the above-desired characteristics. With these two auxiliary tasks, the agent learns a spatially-correlated representation of visual and audio inputs that can be applied to work on environments with novel sounds and maps. Experiment results on realistic 3D scenes (Replica and Matterport3D) demonstrate that our method achieves better generalization performance when zero-shot transferred to scenes with unseen maps and unheard sound categories.

RSPT: Reconstruct Surroundings and Predict Trajectories for Generalizable Active Object Tracking

Active Object Tracking (AOT) aims to maintain a specific relation between the tracker and object(s) by autonomously controlling the motion system of a tracker given observations. AOT has wide-ranging applications, such as in mobile robots and autonomous driving. However, building a generalizable active tracker that works robustly across different scenarios remains a challenge, especially in unstructured environments with cluttered obstacles and diverse layouts. We argue that constructing a state representation capable of modeling the geometry structure of the surroundings and the dynamics of the target is crucial for achieving this goal. To address this challenge, we present RSPT, a framework that forms a structure-aware motion representation by Reconstructing the Surroundings and Predicting the target Trajectory. Additionally, we enhance the generalization of the policy network by training in an asymmetric dueling mechanism. We evaluate RSPT on various simulated scenarios and show that it outperforms existing methods in unseen environments, particularly those with complex obstacles and layouts. We also demonstrate the successful transfer of RSPT to real-world settings. Project Website: https://sites.google.com/view/aot-rspt.

Proactive Multi-Camera Collaboration For 3D Human Pose Estimation

This paper presents a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) scheme for proactive Multi-Camera Collaboration in 3D Human Pose Estimation in dynamic human crowds. Traditional fixed-viewpoint multi-camera solutions for human motion capture (MoCap) are limited in capture space and susceptible to dynamic occlusions. Active camera approaches proactively control camera poses to find optimal viewpoints for 3D reconstruction. However, current methods still face challenges with credit assignment and environment dynamics. To address these issues, our proposed method introduces a novel Collaborative Triangulation Contribution Reward (CTCR) that improves convergence and alleviates multi-agent credit assignment issues resulting from using 3D reconstruction accuracy as the shared reward. Additionally, we jointly train our model with multiple world dynamics learning tasks to better capture environment dynamics and encourage anticipatory behaviors for occlusion avoidance. We evaluate our proposed method in four photo-realistic UE4 environments to ensure validity and generalizability. Empirical results show that our method outperforms fixed and active baselines in various scenarios with different numbers of cameras and humans.

GFPose: Learning 3D Human Pose Prior with Gradient Fields

Learning 3D human pose prior is essential to human-centered AI. Here, we present GFPose, a versatile framework to model plausible 3D human poses for various applications. At the core of GFPose is a time-dependent score network, which estimates the gradient on each body joint and progressively denoises the perturbed 3D human pose to match a given task specification. During the denoising process, GFPose implicitly incorporates pose priors in gradients and unifies various discriminative and generative tasks in an elegant framework. Despite the simplicity, GFPose demonstrates great potential in several downstream tasks. Our experiments empirically show that 1) as a multi-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose outperforms existing SOTAs by 20% on Human3.6M dataset. 2) as a single-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose achieves comparable results to deterministic SOTAs, even with a vanilla backbone. 3) GFPose is able to produce diverse and realistic samples in pose denoising, completion and generation tasks. Project page https://sites.google.com/view/gfpose/