A Generalist Hanabi Agent

Traditional multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems can develop cooperative strategies through repeated interactions. However, these systems are unable to perform well on any other setting than the one they have been trained on, and struggle to successfully cooperate with unfamiliar collaborators. This is particularly visible in the Hanabi benchmark, a popular 2-to-5 player cooperative card-game which requires complex reasoning and precise assistance to other agents. Current MARL agents for Hanabi can only learn one specific game-setting (e.g., 2-player games), and play with the same algorithmic agents. This is in stark contrast to humans, who can quickly adjust their strategies to work with unfamiliar partners or situations. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Replay Relevance Distributed DQN (R3D2), a generalist agent for Hanabi, designed to overcome these limitations. We reformulate the task using text, as language has been shown to improve transfer. We then propose a distributed MARL algorithm that copes with the resulting dynamic observation- and action-space. In doing so, our agent is the first that can play all game settings concurrently, and extend strategies learned from one setting to other ones. As a consequence, our agent also demonstrates the ability to collaborate with different algorithmic agents -- agents that are themselves unable to do so. The implementation code is available at: $\href{https://github.com/chandar-lab/R3D2-A-Generalist-Hanabi-Agent}{R3D2-A-Generalist-Hanabi-Agent}$

ST-Think: How Multimodal Large Language Models Reason About 4D Worlds from Ego-Centric Videos

Humans excel at spatio-temporal reasoning, effortlessly interpreting dynamic visual events from an egocentric viewpoint. However, whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can similarly comprehend the 4D world remains uncertain. This paper explores multimodal spatio-temporal reasoning from an egocentric perspective, aiming to equip MLLMs with human-like reasoning capabilities. To support this objective, we introduce Ego-ST Bench, a novel benchmark containing over 5,000 question-answer pairs across four categories, systematically evaluating spatial, temporal, and integrated spatio-temporal reasoning. Additionally, we propose the ST-R1 Video model, a video-based reasoning model that incorporates reverse thinking into its reinforcement learning process, significantly enhancing performance. We combine long-chain-of-thought (long-CoT) supervised fine-tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning, achieving notable improvements with limited high-quality data. Ego-ST Bench and ST-R1 provide valuable insights and resources for advancing video-based spatio-temporal reasoning research.

X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding

Long-form egocentric video understanding provides rich contextual information and unique insights into long-term human behaviors, holding significant potential for applications in embodied intelligence, long-term activity analysis, and personalized assistive technologies. However, existing benchmark datasets primarily focus on single, short-duration videos or moderately long videos up to dozens of minutes, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. To address this, we introduce X-LeBench, a novel benchmark dataset specifically crafted for evaluating tasks on extremely long egocentric video recordings. Leveraging the advanced text processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), X-LeBench develops a life-logging simulation pipeline that produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data. This approach enables the flexible integration of synthetic daily plans with real-world footage from Ego4D-a massive-scale egocentric video dataset covers a wide range of daily life scenarios-resulting in 432 simulated video life logs that mirror realistic daily activities in contextually rich scenarios. The video life-log durations span from 23 minutes to 16.4 hours. The evaluation of several baseline systems and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveals their poor performance across the board, highlighting the inherent challenges of long-form egocentric video understanding and underscoring the need for more advanced models.

Building a Mind Palace: Structuring Environment-Grounded Semantic Graphs for Effective Long Video Analysis with LLMs

Long-form video understanding with Large Vision Language Models is challenged by the need to analyze temporally dispersed yet spatially concentrated key moments within limited context windows. In this work, we introduce VideoMindPalace, a new framework inspired by the "Mind Palace", which organizes critical video moments into a topologically structured semantic graph. VideoMindPalace organizes key information through (i) hand-object tracking and interaction, (ii) clustered activity zones representing specific areas of recurring activities, and (iii) environment layout mapping, allowing natural language parsing by LLMs to provide grounded insights on spatio-temporal and 3D context. In addition, we propose the Video MindPalace Benchmark (VMB), to assess human-like reasoning, including spatial localization, temporal reasoning, and layout-aware sequential understanding. Evaluated on VMB and established video QA datasets, including EgoSchema, NExT-QA, IntentQA, and the Active Memories Benchmark, VideoMindPalace demonstrates notable gains in spatio-temporal coherence and human-aligned reasoning, advancing long-form video analysis capabilities in VLMs.

Can Large Language Models Adapt to Other Agents In-Context?

As the research community aims to build better AI assistants that are more dynamic and personalized to the diversity of humans that they interact with, there is increased interest in evaluating the theory of mind capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Indeed, several recent studies suggest that LLM theory of mind capabilities are quite impressive, approximating human-level performance. Our paper aims to rebuke this narrative and argues instead that past studies were not directly measuring agent performance, potentially leading to findings that are illusory in nature as a result. We draw a strong distinction between what we call literal theory of mind i.e. measuring the agent's ability to predict the behavior of others and functional theory of mind i.e. adapting to agents in-context based on a rational response to predictions of their behavior. We find that top performing open source LLMs may display strong capabilities in literal theory of mind, depending on how they are prompted, but seem to struggle with functional theory of mind -- even when partner policies are exceedingly simple. Our work serves to highlight the double sided nature of inductive bias in LLMs when adapting to new situations. While this bias can lead to strong performance over limited horizons, it often hinders convergence to optimal long-term behavior.

Unleashing In-context Learning of Autoregressive Models for Few-shot Image Manipulation

Text-guided image manipulation has experienced notable advancement in recent years. In order to mitigate linguistic ambiguity, few-shot learning with visual examples has been applied for instructions that are underrepresented in the training set, or difficult to describe purely in language. However, learning from visual prompts requires strong reasoning capability, which diffusion models are struggling with. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-modal autoregressive model, dubbed $\textbf{InstaManip}$, that can $\textbf{insta}$ntly learn a new image $\textbf{manip}$ulation operation from textual and visual guidance via in-context learning, and apply it to new query images. Specifically, we propose an innovative group self-attention mechanism to break down the in-context learning process into two separate stages -- learning and applying, which simplifies the complex problem into two easier tasks. We also introduce a relation regularization method to further disentangle image transformation features from irrelevant contents in exemplar images. Extensive experiments suggest that our method surpasses previous few-shot image manipulation models by a notable margin ($\geq$19% in human evaluation). We also find our model can be further boosted by increasing the number or diversity of exemplar images.

Accelerating Multimodel Large Language Models by Searching Optimal Vision Token Reduction

Prevailing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) encode the input image(s) as vision tokens and feed them into the language backbone, similar to how Large Language Models (LLMs) process the text tokens. However, the number of vision tokens increases quadratically as the image resolutions, leading to huge computational costs. In this paper, we consider improving MLLM's efficiency from two scenarios, (I) Reducing computational cost without degrading the performance. (II) Improving the performance with given budgets. We start with our main finding that the ranking of each vision token sorted by attention scores is similar in each layer except the first layer. Based on it, we assume that the number of essential top vision tokens does not increase along layers. Accordingly, for Scenario I, we propose a greedy search algorithm (G-Search) to find the least number of vision tokens to keep at each layer from the shallow to the deep. Interestingly, G-Search is able to reach the optimal reduction strategy based on our assumption. For Scenario II, based on the reduction strategy from G-Search, we design a parametric sigmoid function (P-Sigmoid) to guide the reduction at each layer of the MLLM, whose parameters are optimized by Bayesian Optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly accelerate those popular MLLMs, e.g. LLaVA, and InternVL2 models, by more than $2 \times$ without performance drops. Our approach also far outperforms other token reduction methods when budgets are limited, achieving a better trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness.

Evaluating the Prompt Steerability of Large Language Models

Building pluralistic AI requires designing models that are able to be shaped to represent a wide range of value systems and cultures. Achieving this requires first being able to evaluate the degree to which a given model is capable of reflecting various personas. To this end, we propose a benchmark for evaluating the steerability of model personas as a function of prompting. Our design is based on a formal definition of prompt steerability, which analyzes the degree to which a model's joint behavioral distribution can be shifted from its baseline behavior. By defining steerability indices and inspecting how these indices change as a function of steering effort, we can estimate the steerability of a model across various persona dimensions and directions. Our benchmark reveals that the steerability of many current models is limited -- due to both a skew in their baseline behavior and an asymmetry in their steerability across many persona dimensions. We release an implementation of our benchmark at https://github.com/IBM/prompt-steering.

OpenLS-DGF: An Adaptive Open-Source Dataset Generation Framework for Machine Learning Tasks in Logic Synthesis

This paper introduces OpenLS-DGF, an adaptive logic synthesis dataset generation framework, to enhance machine learning~(ML) applications within the logic synthesis process. Previous dataset generation flows were tailored for specific tasks or lacked integrated machine learning capabilities. While OpenLS-DGF supports various machine learning tasks by encapsulating the three fundamental steps of logic synthesis: Boolean representation, logic optimization, and technology mapping. It preserves the original information in both Verilog and machine-learning-friendly GraphML formats. The verilog files offer semi-customizable capabilities, enabling researchers to insert additional steps and incrementally refine the generated dataset. Furthermore, OpenLS-DGF includes an adaptive circuit engine that facilitates the final dataset management and downstream tasks. The generated OpenLS-D-v1 dataset comprises 46 combinational designs from established benchmarks, totaling over 966,000 Boolean circuits. OpenLS-D-v1 supports integrating new data features, making it more versatile for new challenges. This paper demonstrates the versatility of OpenLS-D-v1 through four distinct downstream tasks: circuit classification, circuit ranking, quality of results (QoR) prediction, and probability prediction. Each task is chosen to represent essential steps of logic synthesis, and the experimental results show the generated dataset from OpenLS-DGF achieves prominent diversity and applicability. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Logic-Factory/ACE/blob/master/OpenLS-DGF/readme.md.

An Adaptive Open-Source Dataset Generation Framework for Machine Learning Tasks in Logic Synthesis

This paper introduces an adaptive logic synthesis dataset generation framework designed to enhance machine learning applications within the logic synthesis process. Unlike previous dataset generation flows that were tailored for specific tasks or lacked integrated machine learning capabilities, the proposed framework supports a comprehensive range of machine learning tasks by encapsulating the three fundamental steps of logic synthesis: Boolean representation, logic optimization, and technology mapping. It preserves the original information in the intermediate files that can be stored in both Verilog and Graphmal format. Verilog files enable semi-customizability, allowing researchers to add steps and incrementally refine the generated dataset. The framework also includes an adaptive circuit engine to facilitate the loading of GraphML files for final dataset packaging and sub-dataset extraction. The generated OpenLS-D dataset comprises 46 combinational designs from established benchmarks, totaling over 966,000 Boolean circuits, with each design containing 21,000 circuits generated from 1000 synthesis recipes, including 7000 Boolean networks, 7000 ASIC netlists, and 7000 FPGA netlists. Furthermore, OpenLS-D supports integrating newly desired data features, making it more versatile for new challenges. The utility of OpenLS-D is demonstrated through four distinct downstream tasks: circuit classification, circuit ranking, quality of results (QoR) prediction, and probability prediction. Each task highlights different internal steps of logic synthesis, with the datasets extracted and relabeled from the OpenLS-D dataset using the circuit engine. The experimental results confirm the dataset's diversity and extensive applicability. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Logic-Factory/ACE/blob/master/OpenLS-D/readme.md.