Large Action Models: From Inception to Implementation

As AI continues to advance, there is a growing demand for systems that go beyond language-based assistance and move toward intelligent agents capable of performing real-world actions. This evolution requires the transition from traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating textual responses, to Large Action Models (LAMs), designed for action generation and execution within dynamic environments. Enabled by agent systems, LAMs hold the potential to transform AI from passive language understanding to active task completion, marking a significant milestone in the progression toward artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework for developing LAMs, offering a systematic approach to their creation, from inception to deployment. We begin with an overview of LAMs, highlighting their unique characteristics and delineating their differences from LLMs. Using a Windows OS-based agent as a case study, we provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on the key stages of LAM development, including data collection, model training, environment integration, grounding, and evaluation. This generalizable workflow can serve as a blueprint for creating functional LAMs in various application domains. We conclude by identifying the current limitations of LAMs and discussing directions for future research and industrial deployment, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in realizing the full potential of LAMs in real-world applications. The code for the data collection process utilized in this paper is publicly available at: https://github.com/microsoft/UFO/tree/main/dataflow, and comprehensive documentation can be found at https://microsoft.github.io/UFO/dataflow/overview/.

AutoBench-V: Can Large Vision-Language Models Benchmark Themselves?

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have become essential for advancing the integration of visual and linguistic information, facilitating a wide range of complex applications and tasks. However, the evaluation of LVLMs presents significant challenges as the evaluation benchmark always demands lots of human cost for its construction, and remains static, lacking flexibility once constructed. Even though automatic evaluation has been explored in textual modality, the visual modality remains under-explored. As a result, in this work, we address a question: "Can LVLMs serve as a path to automatic benchmarking?". We introduce AutoBench-V, an automated framework for serving evaluation on demand, i.e., benchmarking LVLMs based on specific aspects of model capability. Upon receiving an evaluation capability, AutoBench-V leverages text-to-image models to generate relevant image samples and then utilizes LVLMs to orchestrate visual question-answering (VQA) tasks, completing the evaluation process efficiently and flexibly. Through an extensive evaluation of seven popular LVLMs across five demanded user inputs (i.e., evaluation capabilities), the framework shows effectiveness and reliability. We observe the following: (1) Our constructed benchmark accurately reflects varying task difficulties; (2) As task difficulty rises, the performance gap between models widens; (3) While models exhibit strong performance in abstract level understanding, they underperform in details reasoning tasks; and (4) Constructing a dataset with varying levels of difficulties is critical for a comprehensive and exhaustive evaluation. Overall, AutoBench-V not only successfully utilizes LVLMs for automated benchmarking but also reveals that LVLMs as judges have significant potential in various domains.

Justice or Prejudice? Quantifying Biases in LLM-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-Judge has been widely utilized as an evaluation method in various benchmarks and served as supervised rewards in model training. However, despite their excellence in many domains, potential issues are under-explored, undermining their reliability and the scope of their utility. Therefore, we identify 12 key potential biases and propose a new automated bias quantification framework-CALM-which systematically quantifies and analyzes each type of bias in LLM-as-a-Judge by using automated and principle-guided modification. Our experiments cover multiple popular language models, and the results indicate that while advanced models have achieved commendable overall performance, significant biases persist in certain specific tasks. Empirical results suggest that there remains room for improvement in the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge. Moreover, we also discuss the explicit and implicit influence of these biases and give some suggestions for the reliable application of LLM-as-a-Judge. Our work highlights the need for stakeholders to address these issues and remind users to exercise caution in LLM-as-a-Judge applications.

Archiving Body Movements: Collective Generation of Chinese Calligraphy

As a communication channel, body movements have been widely explored in behavioral studies and kinesics. Performing and visual arts share the same interests but focus on documenting and representing human body movements, such as for dance notation and visual work creation. This paper investigates body movements in oriental calligraphy and how to apply calligraphy principles to stimulate and archive body movements. Through an artwork (Wushu), the authors experiment with an interactive and generative approach to engage the audience's bodily participation and archive the body movements as a compendium of generated calligraphy. The audience assumes the role of both writers and readers; creating ("writing") and appreciating ("reading") the generated calligraphy becomes a cyclical process within this infinite "Book," which can motivate further attention and discussions concerning Chinese characters and calligraphy.

Chasing Consistency in Text-to-3D Generation from a Single Image

Text-to-3D generation from a single-view image is a popular but challenging task in 3D vision. Although numerous methods have been proposed, existing works still suffer from the inconsistency issues, including 1) semantic inconsistency, 2) geometric inconsistency, and 3) saturation inconsistency, resulting in distorted, overfitted, and over-saturated generations. In light of the above issues, we present Consist3D, a three-stage framework Chasing for semantic-, geometric-, and saturation-Consistent Text-to-3D generation from a single image, in which the first two stages aim to learn parameterized consistency tokens, and the last stage is for optimization. Specifically, the semantic encoding stage learns a token independent of views and estimations, promoting semantic consistency and robustness. Meanwhile, the geometric encoding stage learns another token with comprehensive geometry and reconstruction constraints under novel-view estimations, reducing overfitting and encouraging geometric consistency. Finally, the optimization stage benefits from the semantic and geometric tokens, allowing a low classifier-free guidance scale and therefore preventing oversaturation. Experimental results demonstrate that Consist3D produces more consistent, faithful, and photo-realistic 3D assets compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, Consist3D also allows background and object editing through text prompts.

Classifying Video based on Automatic Content Detection Overview

Video classification and analysis is always a popular and challenging field in computer vision. It is more than just simple image classification due to the correlation with respect to the semantic contents of subsequent frames brings difficulties for video analysis. In this literature review, we summarized some state-of-the-art methods for multi-label video classification. Our goal is first to experimentally research the current widely used architectures, and then to develop a method to deal with the sequential data of frames and perform multi-label classification based on automatic content detection of video.

An Overview Of 3D Object Detection

Point cloud 3D object detection has recently received major attention and becomes an active research topic in 3D computer vision community. However, recognizing 3D objects in LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is still a challenge due to the complexity of point clouds. Objects such as pedestrians, cyclists, or traffic cones are usually represented by quite sparse points, which makes the detection quite complex using only point cloud. In this project, we propose a framework that uses both RGB and point cloud data to perform multiclass object recognition. We use existing 2D detection models to localize the region of interest (ROI) on the RGB image, followed by a pixel mapping strategy in the point cloud, and finally, lift the initial 2D bounding box to 3D space. We use the recently released nuScenes dataset---a large-scale dataset contains many data formats---to training and evaluate our proposed architecture.