EmbodiedCity: A Benchmark Platform for Embodied Agent in Real-world City Environment

Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and acting abilities, thereby enabling real-time interaction with the world. However, most works focus on bounded indoor environments, such as navigation in a room or manipulating a device, with limited exploration of embodying the agents in open-world scenarios. That is, embodied intelligence in the open and outdoor environment is less explored, for which one potential reason is the lack of high-quality simulators, benchmarks, and datasets. To address it, in this paper, we construct a benchmark platform for embodied intelligence evaluation in real-world city environments. Specifically, we first construct a highly realistic 3D simulation environment based on the real buildings, roads, and other elements in a real city. In this environment, we combine historically collected data and simulation algorithms to conduct simulations of pedestrian and vehicle flows with high fidelity. Further, we designed a set of evaluation tasks covering different EmbodiedAI abilities. Moreover, we provide a complete set of input and output interfaces for access, enabling embodied agents to easily take task requirements and current environmental observations as input and then make decisions and obtain performance evaluations. On the one hand, it expands the capability of existing embodied intelligence to higher levels. On the other hand, it has a higher practical value in the real world and can support more potential applications for artificial general intelligence. Based on this platform, we evaluate some popular large language models for embodied intelligence capabilities of different dimensions and difficulties.

GUI Action Narrator: Where and When Did That Action Take Place?

The advent of Multimodal LLMs has significantly enhanced image OCR recognition capabilities, making GUI automation a viable reality for increasing efficiency in digital tasks. One fundamental aspect of developing a GUI automation system is understanding primitive GUI actions. This comprehension is crucial as it enables agents to learn from user demonstrations, an essential element of automation. To rigorously evaluate such capabilities, we developed a video captioning benchmark for GUI actions, comprising 4,189 diverse video captioning samples. This task presents unique challenges compared to natural scene video captioning: 1) GUI screenshots typically contain denser information than natural scenes, and 2) events within GUIs are subtler and occur more rapidly, requiring precise attention to the appropriate time span and spatial region for accurate understanding. To address these challenges, we introduce our GUI action dataset \textbf{Act2Cap} as well as a simple yet effective framework, \textbf{GUI Narrator}, for GUI video captioning that utilizes the cursor as a visual prompt to enhance the interpretation of high-resolution screenshots. Specifically, a cursor detector is trained on our dataset, and a multimodal LLM model with mechanisms for selecting keyframes and key regions generates the captions. Experimental results indicate that even for today's most advanced multimodal models, such as GPT-4o, the task remains highly challenging. Additionally, our evaluations show that our strategy effectively enhances model performance, whether integrated into the fine-tuning of open-source models or employed as a prompting strategy in closed-source models.

ASSISTGUI: Task-Oriented Desktop Graphical User Interface Automation

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for assisting users with complex tasks, thereby boosting human productivity. Existing works leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) or LLM-based AI agents have shown capabilities in automating tasks on Android and Web platforms. However, these tasks are primarily aimed at simple device usage and entertainment operations. This paper presents a novel benchmark, AssistGUI, to evaluate whether models are capable of manipulating the mouse and keyboard on the Windows platform in response to user-requested tasks. We carefully collected a set of 100 tasks from nine widely-used software applications, such as, After Effects and MS Word, each accompanied by the necessary project files for better evaluation. Moreover, we propose an advanced Actor-Critic Embodied Agent framework, which incorporates a sophisticated GUI parser driven by an LLM-agent and an enhanced reasoning mechanism adept at handling lengthy procedural tasks. Our experimental results reveal that our GUI Parser and Reasoning mechanism outshine existing methods in performance. Nevertheless, the potential remains substantial, with the best model attaining only a 46% success rate on our benchmark. We conclude with a thorough analysis of the current methods' limitations, setting the stage for future breakthroughs in this domain.

MA-NeRF: Motion-Assisted Neural Radiance Fields for Face Synthesis from Sparse Images

We address the problem of photorealistic 3D face avatar synthesis from sparse images. Existing Parametric models for face avatar reconstruction struggle to generate details that originate from inputs. Meanwhile, although current NeRF-based avatar methods provide promising results for novel view synthesis, they fail to generalize well for unseen expressions. We improve from NeRF and propose a novel framework that, by leveraging the parametric 3DMM models, can reconstruct a high-fidelity drivable face avatar and successfully handle the unseen expressions. At the core of our implementation are structured displacement feature and semantic-aware learning module. Our structured displacement feature will introduce the motion prior as an additional constraints and help perform better for unseen expressions, by constructing displacement volume. Besides, the semantic-aware learning incorporates multi-level prior, e.g., semantic embedding, learnable latent code, to lift the performance to a higher level. Thorough experiments have been doen both quantitatively and qualitatively to demonstrate the design of our framework, and our method achieves much better results than the current state-of-the-arts.

Towards Arbitrary Text-driven Image Manipulation via Space Alignment

The recent GAN inversion methods have been able to successfully invert the real image input to the corresponding editable latent code in StyleGAN. By combining with the language-vision model (CLIP), some text-driven image manipulation methods are proposed. However, these methods require extra costs to perform optimization for a certain image or a new attribute editing mode. To achieve a more efficient editing method, we propose a new Text-driven image Manipulation framework via Space Alignment (TMSA). The Space Alignment module aims to align the same semantic regions in CLIP and StyleGAN spaces. Then, the text input can be directly accessed into the StyleGAN space and be used to find the semantic shift according to the text description. The framework can support arbitrary image editing mode without additional cost. Our work provides the user with an interface to control the attributes of a given image according to text input and get the result in real time. Ex tensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance over prior works.

Maximum-Margin Structured Learning with Deep Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation

This paper focuses on structured-output learning using deep neural networks for 3D human pose estimation from monocular images. Our network takes an image and 3D pose as inputs and outputs a score value, which is high when the image-pose pair matches and low otherwise. The network structure consists of a convolutional neural network for image feature extraction, followed by two sub-networks for transforming the image features and pose into a joint embedding. The score function is then the dot-product between the image and pose embeddings. The image-pose embedding and score function are jointly trained using a maximum-margin cost function. Our proposed framework can be interpreted as a special form of structured support vector machines where the joint feature space is discriminatively learned using deep neural networks. We test our framework on the Human3.6m dataset and obtain state-of-the-art results compared to other recent methods. Finally, we present visualizations of the image-pose embedding space, demonstrating the network has learned a high-level embedding of body-orientation and pose-configuration.