Mr.Steve: Instruction-Following Agents in Minecraft with What-Where-When Memory

Significant advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied AI in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. While these approaches, which combine high-level planners with low-level controllers, show promise, low-level controllers frequently become performance bottlenecks due to repeated failures. In this paper, we argue that the primary cause of failure in many low-level controllers is the absence of an episodic memory system. To address this, we introduce Mr. Steve (Memory Recall Steve-1), a novel low-level controller equipped with Place Event Memory (PEM), a form of episodic memory that captures what, where, and when information from episodes. This directly addresses the main limitation of the popular low-level controller, Steve-1. Unlike previous models that rely on short-term memory, PEM organizes spatial and event-based data, enabling efficient recall and navigation in long-horizon tasks. Additionally, we propose an Exploration Strategy and a Memory-Augmented Task Solving Framework, allowing agents to alternate between exploration and task-solving based on recalled events. Our approach significantly improves task-solving and exploration efficiency compared to existing methods. We will release our code and demos on the project page: https://sites.google.com/view/mr-steve.

Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond

Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive in LLMs that goes beyond multilinguality and builds on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this paper, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking the definitions of culture from anthropology and psychology as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of Human-Computer Interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.

Imagine the Unseen World: A Benchmark for Systematic Generalization in Visual World Models

Systematic compositionality, or the ability to adapt to novel situations by creating a mental model of the world using reusable pieces of knowledge, remains a significant challenge in machine learning. While there has been considerable progress in the language domain, efforts towards systematic visual imagination, or envisioning the dynamical implications of a visual observation, are in their infancy. We introduce the Systematic Visual Imagination Benchmark (SVIB), the first benchmark designed to address this problem head-on. SVIB offers a novel framework for a minimal world modeling problem, where models are evaluated based on their ability to generate one-step image-to-image transformations under a latent world dynamics. The framework provides benefits such as the possibility to jointly optimize for systematic perception and imagination, a range of difficulty levels, and the ability to control the fraction of possible factor combinations used during training. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of various baseline models on SVIB, offering insight into the current state-of-the-art in systematic visual imagination. We hope that this benchmark will help advance visual systematic compositionality.

Facing off World Model Backbones: RNNs, Transformers, and S4

World models are a fundamental component in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents. To perform temporally extended and consistent simulations of the future in partially observable environments, world models need to possess long-term memory. However, state-of-the-art MBRL agents, such as Dreamer, predominantly employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as their world model backbone, which have limited memory capacity. In this paper, we seek to explore alternative world model backbones for improving long-term memory. In particular, we investigate the effectiveness of Transformers and Structured State Space Sequence (S4) models, motivated by their remarkable ability to capture long-range dependencies in low-dimensional sequences and their complementary strengths. We propose S4WM, the first S4-based world model that can generate high-dimensional image sequences through latent imagination. Furthermore, we extensively compare RNN-, Transformer-, and S4-based world models across four sets of environments, which we have specifically tailored to assess crucial memory capabilities of world models, including long-term imagination, context-dependent recall, reward prediction, and memory-based reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that S4WM outperforms Transformer-based world models in terms of long-term memory, while exhibiting greater efficiency during training and imagination. These results pave the way for the development of stronger MBRL agents.