Infogent: An Agent-Based Framework for Web Information Aggregation

Despite seemingly performant web agents on the task-completion benchmarks, most existing methods evaluate the agents based on a presupposition: the web navigation task consists of linear sequence of actions with an end state that marks task completion. In contrast, our work focuses on web navigation for information aggregation, wherein the agent must explore different websites to gather information for a complex query. We consider web information aggregation from two different perspectives: (i) Direct API-driven Access relies on a text-only view of the Web, leveraging external tools such as Google Search API to navigate the web and a scraper to extract website contents. (ii) Interactive Visual Access uses screenshots of the webpages and requires interaction with the browser to navigate and access information. Motivated by these diverse information access settings, we introduce Infogent, a novel modular framework for web information aggregation involving three distinct components: Navigator, Extractor and Aggregator. Experiments on different information access settings demonstrate Infogent beats an existing SOTA multi-agent search framework by 7% under Direct API-Driven Access on FRAMES, and improves over an existing information-seeking web agent by 4.3% under Interactive Visual Access on AssistantBench.

Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction

As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly advanced capabilities, aligning their behaviors with human values and preferences becomes crucial for their wide adoption. While previous research focuses on general alignment to principles such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty, the need to account for individual and diverse preferences has been largely overlooked, potentially undermining customized human experiences. To address this gap, we train LLMs that can ''interact to align'', essentially cultivating the meta-skill of LLMs to implicitly infer the unspoken personalized preferences of the current user through multi-turn conversations, and then dynamically align their following behaviors and responses to these inferred preferences. Our approach involves establishing a diverse pool of 3,310 distinct user personas by initially creating seed examples, which are then expanded through iterative self-generation and filtering. Guided by distinct user personas, we leverage multi-LLM collaboration to develop a multi-turn preference dataset containing 3K+ multi-turn conversations in tree structures. Finally, we apply supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enhance LLMs using this dataset. For evaluation, we establish the ALOE (ALign With CustOmized PrEferences) benchmark, consisting of 100 carefully selected examples and well-designed metrics to measure the customized alignment performance during conversations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enabling dynamic, personalized alignment via interaction.

Search and Detect: Training-Free Long Tail Object Detection via Web-Image Retrieval

In this paper, we introduce SearchDet, a training-free long-tail object detection framework that significantly enhances open-vocabulary object detection performance. SearchDet retrieves a set of positive and negative images of an object to ground, embeds these images, and computes an input image-weighted query which is used to detect the desired concept in the image. Our proposed method is simple and training-free, yet achieves over 48.7% mAP improvement on ODinW and 59.1% mAP improvement on LVIS compared to state-of-the-art models such as GroundingDINO. We further show that our approach of basing object detection on a set of Web-retrieved exemplars is stable with respect to variations in the exemplars, suggesting a path towards eliminating costly data annotation and training procedures.

ARMADA: Attribute-Based Multimodal Data Augmentation

In Multimodal Language Models (MLMs), the cost of manually annotating high-quality image-text pair data for fine-tuning and alignment is extremely high. While existing multimodal data augmentation frameworks propose ways to augment image-text pairs, they either suffer from semantic inconsistency between texts and images, or generate unrealistic images, causing knowledge gap with real world examples. To address these issues, we propose Attribute-based Multimodal Data Augmentation (ARMADA), a novel multimodal data augmentation method via knowledge-guided manipulation of visual attributes of the mentioned entities. Specifically, we extract entities and their visual attributes from the original text data, then search for alternative values for the visual attributes under the guidance of knowledge bases (KBs) and large language models (LLMs). We then utilize an image-editing model to edit the images with the extracted attributes. ARMADA is a novel multimodal data generation framework that: (i) extracts knowledge-grounded attributes from symbolic KBs for semantically consistent yet distinctive image-text pair generation, (ii) generates visually similar images of disparate categories using neighboring entities in the KB hierarchy, and (iii) uses the commonsense knowledge of LLMs to modulate auxiliary visual attributes such as backgrounds for more robust representation of original entities. Our empirical results over four downstream tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our framework to produce high-quality data and enhance the model performance. This also highlights the need to leverage external knowledge proxies for enhanced interpretability and real-world grounding.

Finer: Investigating and Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Concept Recognition in Large Vision Language Models

Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs like LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate an accurate explanation with detailed attributes based on the concept that appears within an input image despite their capability to generate holistic image-level descriptions. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs exhibit modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept, preventing the image modality from leveraging the rich parametric knowledge within the LLMs. In an effort to further the community's endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric evaluation benchmark, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs' fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.

ParaHome: Parameterizing Everyday Home Activities Towards 3D Generative Modeling of Human-Object Interactions

To enable machines to learn how humans interact with the physical world in our daily activities, it is crucial to provide rich data that encompasses the 3D motion of humans as well as the motion of objects in a learnable 3D representation. Ideally, this data should be collected in a natural setup, capturing the authentic dynamic 3D signals during human-object interactions. To address this challenge, we introduce the ParaHome system, designed to capture and parameterize dynamic 3D movements of humans and objects within a common home environment. Our system consists of a multi-view setup with 70 synchronized RGB cameras, as well as wearable motion capture devices equipped with an IMU-based body suit and hand motion capture gloves. By leveraging the ParaHome system, we collect a novel large-scale dataset of human-object interaction. Notably, our dataset offers key advancement over existing datasets in three main aspects: (1) capturing 3D body and dexterous hand manipulation motion alongside 3D object movement within a contextual home environment during natural activities; (2) encompassing human interaction with multiple objects in various episodic scenarios with corresponding descriptions in texts; (3) including articulated objects with multiple parts expressed with parameterized articulations. Building upon our dataset, we introduce new research tasks aimed at building a generative model for learning and synthesizing human-object interactions in a real-world room setting.

ACE: Adversarial Correspondence Embedding for Cross Morphology Motion Retargeting from Human to Nonhuman Characters

Motion retargeting is a promising approach for generating natural and compelling animations for nonhuman characters. However, it is challenging to translate human movements into semantically equivalent motions for target characters with different morphologies due to the ambiguous nature of the problem. This work presents a novel learning-based motion retargeting framework, Adversarial Correspondence Embedding (ACE), to retarget human motions onto target characters with different body dimensions and structures. Our framework is designed to produce natural and feasible robot motions by leveraging generative-adversarial networks (GANs) while preserving high-level motion semantics by introducing an additional feature loss. In addition, we pretrain a robot motion prior that can be controlled in a latent embedding space and seek to establish a compact correspondence. We demonstrate that the proposed framework can produce retargeted motions for three different characters -- a quadrupedal robot with a manipulator, a crab character, and a wheeled manipulator. We further validate the design choices of our framework by conducting baseline comparisons and a user study. We also showcase sim-to-real transfer of the retargeted motions by transferring them to a real Spot robot.

Discern and Answer: Mitigating the Impact of Misinformation in Retrieval-Augmented Models with Discriminators

Most existing retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) for question answering assume all retrieved information is factually correct. In this work, we study a more realistic scenario in which retrieved documents may contain misinformation, causing conflicts among them. We observe that the existing models are highly brittle to such information in both fine-tuning and in-context few-shot learning settings. We propose approaches to make retrieval-augmented LMs robust to misinformation by explicitly fine-tuning a discriminator or prompting to elicit discrimination capability in GPT-3. Our empirical results on open-domain question answering show that these approaches significantly improve LMs' robustness to knowledge conflicts. We also provide our findings on interleaving the fine-tuned model's decision with the in-context learning process, paving a new path to leverage the best of both worlds.

Sampling is Matter: Point-guided 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction

This paper presents a simple yet powerful method for 3D human mesh reconstruction from a single RGB image. Most recently, the non-local interactions of the whole mesh vertices have been effectively estimated in the transformer while the relationship between body parts also has begun to be handled via the graph model. Even though those approaches have shown the remarkable progress in 3D human mesh reconstruction, it is still difficult to directly infer the relationship between features, which are encoded from the 2D input image, and 3D coordinates of each vertex. To resolve this problem, we propose to design a simple feature sampling scheme. The key idea is to sample features in the embedded space by following the guide of points, which are estimated as projection results of 3D mesh vertices (i.e., ground truth). This helps the model to concentrate more on vertex-relevant features in the 2D space, thus leading to the reconstruction of the natural human pose. Furthermore, we apply progressive attention masking to precisely estimate local interactions between vertices even under severe occlusions. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method efficiently improves the performance of 3D human mesh reconstruction. The code and model are publicly available at: https://github.com/DCVL-3D/PointHMR_release.

ARMP: Autoregressive Motion Planning for Quadruped Locomotion and Navigation in Complex Indoor Environments

Generating natural and physically feasible motions for legged robots has been a challenging problem due to its complex dynamics. In this work, we introduce a novel learning-based framework of autoregressive motion planner (ARMP) for quadruped locomotion and navigation. Our method can generate motion plans with an arbitrary length in an autoregressive fashion, unlike most offline trajectory optimization algorithms for a fixed trajectory length. To this end, we first construct the motion library by solving a dense set of trajectory optimization problems for diverse scenarios and parameter settings. Then we learn the motion manifold from the dataset in a supervised learning fashion. We show that the proposed ARMP can generate physically plausible motions for various tasks and situations. We also showcase that our method can be successfully integrated with the recent robot navigation frameworks as a low-level controller and unleash the full capability of legged robots for complex indoor navigation.