Iris: Breaking GUI Complexity with Adaptive Focus and Self-Refining

Digital agents are increasingly employed to automate tasks in interactive digital environments such as web pages, software applications, and operating systems. While text-based agents built on Large Language Models (LLMs) often require frequent updates due to platform-specific APIs, visual agents leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer enhanced adaptability by interacting directly with Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). However, these agents face significant challenges in visual perception, particularly when handling high-resolution, visually complex digital environments. This paper introduces Iris, a foundational visual agent that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: Information-Sensitive Cropping (ISC) and Self-Refining Dual Learning (SRDL). ISC dynamically identifies and prioritizes visually dense regions using a edge detection algorithm, enabling efficient processing by allocating more computational resources to areas with higher information density. SRDL enhances the agent's ability to handle complex tasks by leveraging a dual-learning loop, where improvements in referring (describing UI elements) reinforce grounding (locating elements) and vice versa, all without requiring additional annotated data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Iris achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks with only 850K GUI annotations, outperforming methods using 10x more training data. These improvements further translate to significant gains in both web and OS agent downstream tasks.

Mastering Collaborative Multi-modal Data Selection: A Focus on Informativeness, Uniqueness, and Representativeness

Instruction tuning fine-tunes pre-trained Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to handle real-world tasks. However, the rapid expansion of visual instruction datasets introduces data redundancy, leading to excessive computational costs. We propose a collaborative framework, DataTailor, which leverages three key principles--informativeness, uniqueness, and representativeness--for effective data selection. We argue that a valuable sample should be informative of the task, non-redundant, and represent the sample distribution (i.e., not an outlier). We further propose practical ways to score against each principle, which automatically adapts to a given dataset without tedious hyperparameter tuning. Comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that DataTailor achieves 100.8% of the performance of full-data fine-tuning with only 15% of the data, significantly reducing computational costs while maintaining superior results. This exemplifies the "Less is More" philosophy in MLLM development.

RADAR: Robust Two-stage Modality-incomplete Industrial Anomaly Detection

Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection (MIAD), utilizing 3D point clouds and 2D RGB images to identify the abnormal region of products, plays a crucial role in industrial quality inspection. However, the conventional MIAD setting presupposes that all 2D and 3D modalities are paired, overlooking the fact that multimodal data collected from the real world is often imperfect due to missing modalities. Consequently, MIAD models that demonstrate robustness against modal-incomplete data are highly desirable in practice. To address this practical challenge, we introduce a first-of-its-kind study that comprehensively investigates Modality-Incomplete Industrial Anomaly Detection (MIIAD), to consider the imperfect learning environment in which the multimodal information may be incomplete. Not surprisingly, we discovered that most existing MIAD approaches are inadequate for addressing MIIAD challenges, leading to significant performance degradation on the MIIAD benchmark we developed. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage Robust modAlity-imcomplete fusing and Detecting frAmewoRk, abbreviated as RADAR. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to enhance two stages in MIIAD, improving the robustness of the Multimodal Transformer: i) In feature fusion, we first explore learning modality-incomplete instruction, guiding the pre-trained Multimodal Transformer to robustly adapt to various modality-incomplete scenarios, and implement adaptive parameter learning based on a HyperNetwork; ii) In anomaly detection, we construct a real-pseudo hybrid module to highlight the distinctiveness of modality combinations, further enhancing the robustness of the MIIAD model. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RADAR significantly surpasses conventional MIAD methods in terms of effectiveness and robustness on our newly created MIIAD dataset, underscoring its practical application value.

Align$^2$LLaVA: Cascaded Human and Large Language Model Preference Alignment for Multi-modal Instruction Curation

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently introduce significant variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel instruction curation algorithm, derived from two unique perspectives, human and LLM preference alignment, to compress this vast corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions to a compact and high-quality form: (i) For human preference alignment, we have collected a machine-generated multimodal instruction dataset and established a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria to guide the data quality assessment critically from human experts. By doing so, a reward model was trained on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of instruction alignment. (ii) For LLM preference alignment, given the instruction selected by the reward model, we propose leveraging the inner LLM used in MLLM to align the writing style of visual instructions with that of the inner LLM itself, resulting in LLM-aligned instruction improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can maintain or even improve model performance by compressing synthetic multimodal instructions by up to 90%. Impressively, by aggressively reducing the total training sample size from 158k to 14k (9$\times$ smaller), our model consistently outperforms its full-size dataset counterpart across various MLLM benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Align2LLaVA.

TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition

While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA have effectively addressed GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their performance often falls short, especially in multidimensional task scenarios. To address this issue, one straightforward solution is to introduce task-specific LoRA modules as domain experts, leveraging the modeling of multiple experts' capabilities and thus enhancing the general capability of multi-task learning. Despite promising, these additional components often add complexity to the training and inference process, contravening the efficient characterization of PEFT designed for. Considering this, we introduce an innovative PEFT method, TeamLoRA, consisting of a collaboration and competition module for experts, and thus achieving the right balance of effectiveness and efficiency: (i) For collaboration, a novel knowledge-sharing and -organizing mechanism is devised to appropriately reduce the scale of matrix operations, thereby boosting the training and inference speed. (ii) For competition, we propose leveraging a game-theoretic interaction mechanism for experts, encouraging experts to transfer their domain-specific knowledge while facing diverse downstream tasks, and thus enhancing the performance. By doing so, TeamLoRA elegantly connects the experts as a "Team" with internal collaboration and competition, enabling a faster and more accurate PEFT paradigm for multi-task learning. To validate the superiority of TeamLoRA, we curate a comprehensive multi-task evaluation(CME) benchmark to thoroughly assess the capability of multi-task learning. Experiments conducted on our CME and other benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of TeamLoRA. Our project is available at https://github.com/Lin-Tianwei/TeamLoRA.

Leveraging Invariant Principle for Heterophilic Graph Structure Distribution Shifts

Heterophilic Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have shown promising results for semi-supervised learning tasks on graphs. Notably, most real-world heterophilic graphs are composed of a mixture of nodes with different neighbor patterns, exhibiting local node-level homophilic and heterophilic structures. However, existing works are only devoted to designing better HGNN backbones or architectures for node classification tasks on heterophilic and homophilic graph benchmarks simultaneously, and their analyses of HGNN performance with respect to nodes are only based on the determined data distribution without exploring the effect caused by this structural difference between training and testing nodes. How to learn invariant node representations on heterophilic graphs to handle this structure difference or distribution shifts remains unexplored. In this paper, we first discuss the limitations of previous graph-based invariant learning methods from the perspective of data augmentation. Then, we propose \textbf{HEI}, a framework capable of generating invariant node representations through incorporating heterophily information to infer latent environments without augmentation, which are then used for invariant prediction, under heterophilic graph structure distribution shifts. We theoretically show that our proposed method can achieve guaranteed performance under heterophilic graph structure distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and backbones can also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Semantic Codebook Learning for Dynamic Recommendation Models

Dynamic sequential recommendation (DSR) can generate model parameters based on user behavior to improve the personalization of sequential recommendation under various user preferences. However, it faces the challenges of large parameter search space and sparse and noisy user-item interactions, which reduces the applicability of the generated model parameters. The Semantic Codebook Learning for Dynamic Recommendation Models (SOLID) framework presents a significant advancement in DSR by effectively tackling these challenges. By transforming item sequences into semantic sequences and employing a dual parameter model, SOLID compresses the parameter generation search space and leverages homogeneity within the recommendation system. The introduction of the semantic metacode and semantic codebook, which stores disentangled item representations, ensures robust and accurate parameter generation. Extensive experiments demonstrates that SOLID consistently outperforms existing DSR, delivering more accurate, stable, and robust recommendations.

IDEAL: Leveraging Infinite and Dynamic Characterizations of Large Language Models for Query-focused Summarization

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to produce summaries that answer particular questions of interest, enabling greater user control and personalization. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), shows their impressive capability of textual understanding through large-scale pretraining, which implies the great potential of extractive snippet generation. In this paper, we systematically investigated two indispensable characteristics that the LLMs-based QFS models should be harnessed, Lengthy Document Summarization and Efficiently Fine-grained Query-LLM Alignment, respectively. Correspondingly, we propose two modules called Query-aware HyperExpert and Query-focused Infini-attention to access the aforementioned characteristics. These innovations pave the way for broader application and accessibility in the field of QFS technology. Extensive experiments conducted on existing QFS benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/IDEAL_Summary.

Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is vital for real-world applications, as they combine semantic textual and contextual structural information. Research in this field generally consist of two main perspectives: local-level encoding and global-level aggregating, respectively refer to textual node information unification (e.g., using Language Models) and structure-augmented modeling (e.g., using Graph Neural Networks). Most existing works focus on combining different information levels but overlook the interconnections, i.e., the contextual textual information among nodes, which provides semantic insights to bridge local and global levels. In this paper, we propose GraphBridge, a multi-granularity integration framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information, enhancing fine-grained understanding of TAGs. Besides, to tackle scalability and efficiency challenges, we introduce a graphaware token reduction module. Extensive experiments across various models and datasets show that our method achieves state-of-theart performance, while our graph-aware token reduction module significantly enhances efficiency and solves scalability issues.

LASER: Tuning-Free LLM-Driven Attention Control for Efficient Text-conditioned Image-to-Animation

Revolutionary advancements in text-to-image models have unlocked new dimensions for sophisticated content creation, e.g., text-conditioned image editing, allowing us to edit the diverse images that convey highly complex visual concepts according to the textual guidance. Despite being promising, existing methods focus on texture- or non-rigid-based visual manipulation, which struggles to produce the fine-grained animation of smooth text-conditioned image morphing without fine-tuning, i.e., due to their highly unstructured latent space. In this paper, we introduce a tuning-free LLM-driven attention control framework, encapsulated by the progressive process of LLM planning, prompt-Aware editing, StablE animation geneRation, abbreviated as LASER. LASER employs a large language model (LLM) to refine coarse descriptions into detailed prompts, guiding pre-trained text-to-image models for subsequent image generation. We manipulate the model's spatial features and self-attention mechanisms to maintain animation integrity and enable seamless morphing directly from text prompts, eliminating the need for additional fine-tuning or annotations. Our meticulous control over spatial features and self-attention ensures structural consistency in the images. This paper presents a novel framework integrating LLMs with text-to-image models to create high-quality animations from a single text input. We also propose a Text-conditioned Image-to-Animation Benchmark to validate the effectiveness and efficacy of LASER. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LASER produces impressive, consistent, and efficient results in animation generation, positioning it as a powerful tool for advanced digital content creation.