Daily Papers

Creating interactive scenes often involves complex programming tasks. Although large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate code from natural language, their output is often error-prone, particularly when scripting interactions among multiple elements. The linear conversational structure limits the editing of individual elements, and lacking graphical and precise control complicates visual integration. To address these issues, we integrate an element-level modularization technique that processes textual descriptions for individual elements through separate LLM modules, with a central module managing interactions among elements. This modular approach allows for refining each element independently. We design a graphical user interface, MoGraphGPT , which combines modular LLMs with enhanced graphical control to generate codes for 2D interactive scenes. It enables direct integration of graphical information and offers quick, precise control through automatically generated sliders. Our comparative evaluation against an AI coding tool, Cursor Composer, as the baseline system and a usability study show MoGraphGPT significantly improves easiness, controllability, and refinement in creating complex 2D interactive scenes with multiple visual elements in a coding-free manner.

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial patches has motivated numerous defense strategies for boosting model robustness. However, the prevailing defenses depend on single observation or pre-established adversary information to counter adversarial patches, often failing to be confronted with unseen or adaptive adversarial attacks and easily exhibiting unsatisfying performance in dynamic 3D environments. Inspired by active human perception and recurrent feedback mechanisms, we develop Embodied Active Defense (EAD), a proactive defensive strategy that actively contextualizes environmental information to address misaligned adversarial patches in 3D real-world settings. To achieve this, EAD develops two central recurrent sub-modules, i.e., a perception module and a policy module, to implement two critical functions of active vision. These models recurrently process a series of beliefs and observations, facilitating progressive refinement of their comprehension of the target object and enabling the development of strategic actions to counter adversarial patches in 3D environments. To optimize learning efficiency, we incorporate a differentiable approximation of environmental dynamics and deploy patches that are agnostic to the adversary strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAD substantially enhances robustness against a variety of patches within just a few steps through its action policy in safety-critical tasks (e.g., face recognition and object detection), without compromising standard accuracy. Furthermore, due to the attack-agnostic characteristic, EAD facilitates excellent generalization to unseen attacks, diminishing the averaged attack success rate by 95 percent across a range of unseen adversarial attacks.

Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent behavior, but has proven difficult for neural networks to learn. In this paper we describe how to use Relation Networks (RNs) as a simple plug-and-play module to solve problems that fundamentally hinge on relational reasoning. We tested RN-augmented networks on three tasks: visual question answering using a challenging dataset called CLEVR, on which we achieve state-of-the-art, super-human performance; text-based question answering using the bAbI suite of tasks; and complex reasoning about dynamic physical systems. Then, using a curated dataset called Sort-of-CLEVR we show that powerful convolutional networks do not have a general capacity to solve relational questions, but can gain this capacity when augmented with RNs. Our work shows how a deep learning architecture equipped with an RN module can implicitly discover and learn to reason about entities and their relations.

Story visualization, the task of generating coherent images based on a narrative, has seen significant advancements with the emergence of text-to-image models, particularly diffusion models. However, maintaining semantic consistency, generating high-quality fine-grained interactions, and ensuring computational feasibility remain challenging, especially in long story visualization (i.e., up to 100 frames). In this work, we propose a training-free and computationally efficient framework, termed Story-Adapter, to enhance the generative capability of long stories. Specifically, we propose an iterative paradigm to refine each generated image, leveraging both the text prompt and all generated images from the previous iteration. Central to our framework is a training-free global reference cross-attention module, which aggregates all generated images from the previous iteration to preserve semantic consistency across the entire story, while minimizing computational costs with global embeddings. This iterative process progressively optimizes image generation by repeatedly incorporating text constraints, resulting in more precise and fine-grained interactions. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Story-Adapter in improving both semantic consistency and generative capability for fine-grained interactions, particularly in long story scenarios. The project page and associated code can be accessed via https://jwmao1.github.io/storyadapter .

Transformer-based visual trackers have demonstrated significant progress owing to their superior modeling capabilities. However, existing trackers are hampered by low speed, limiting their applicability on devices with limited computational power. To alleviate this problem, we propose HiT, a new family of efficient tracking models that can run at high speed on different devices while retaining high performance. The central idea of HiT is the Bridge Module, which bridges the gap between modern lightweight transformers and the tracking framework. The Bridge Module incorporates the high-level information of deep features into the shallow large-resolution features. In this way, it produces better features for the tracking head. We also propose a novel dual-image position encoding technique that simultaneously encodes the position information of both the search region and template images. The HiT model achieves promising speed with competitive performance. For instance, it runs at 61 frames per second (fps) on the Nvidia Jetson AGX edge device. Furthermore, HiT attains 64.6% AUC on the LaSOT benchmark, surpassing all previous efficient trackers.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and are a powerful enabler for interactive systems. However, they still face challenges in long-term interactions that require adaptation towards the user as well as contextual knowledge and understanding of the ever-changing environment. To overcome these challenges, holistic memory modeling is required to efficiently retrieve and store relevant information across interaction sessions for suitable responses. Cognitive AI, which aims to simulate the human thought process in a computerized model, highlights interesting aspects, such as thoughts, memory mechanisms, and decision-making, that can contribute towards improved memory modeling for LLMs. Inspired by these cognitive AI principles, we propose our memory framework CAIM. CAIM consists of three modules: 1.) The Memory Controller as the central decision unit; 2.) the Memory Retrieval, which filters relevant data for interaction upon request; and 3.) the Post-Thinking, which maintains the memory storage. We compare CAIM against existing approaches, focusing on metrics such as retrieval accuracy, response correctness, contextual coherence, and memory storage. The results demonstrate that CAIM outperforms baseline frameworks across different metrics, highlighting its context-awareness and potential to improve long-term human-AI interactions.

Rare diseases collectively affect over 300 million individuals worldwide, yet timely and accurate diagnosis remains a pervasive challenge. This is largely due to their clinical heterogeneity, low individual prevalence, and the limited familiarity most clinicians have with rare conditions. Here, we introduce DeepRare, the first rare disease diagnosis agentic system powered by a large language model (LLM), capable of processing heterogeneous clinical inputs. The system generates ranked diagnostic hypotheses for rare diseases, each accompanied by a transparent chain of reasoning that links intermediate analytic steps to verifiable medical evidence. DeepRare comprises three key components: a central host with a long-term memory module; specialized agent servers responsible for domain-specific analytical tasks integrating over 40 specialized tools and web-scale, up-to-date medical knowledge sources, ensuring access to the most current clinical information. This modular and scalable design enables complex diagnostic reasoning while maintaining traceability and adaptability. We evaluate DeepRare on eight datasets. The system demonstrates exceptional diagnostic performance among 2,919 diseases, achieving 100% accuracy for 1013 diseases. In HPO-based evaluations, DeepRare significantly outperforms other 15 methods, like traditional bioinformatics diagnostic tools, LLMs, and other agentic systems, achieving an average Recall@1 score of 57.18% and surpassing the second-best method (Reasoning LLM) by a substantial margin of 23.79 percentage points. For multi-modal input scenarios, DeepRare achieves 70.60% at Recall@1 compared to Exomiser's 53.20% in 109 cases. Manual verification of reasoning chains by clinical experts achieves 95.40% agreements. Furthermore, the DeepRare system has been implemented as a user-friendly web application http://raredx.cn/doctor.

This article presents a theoretical framework for adapting the Common Model of Cognition to large generative network models within the field of artificial intelligence. This can be accomplished by restructuring modules within the Common Model into shadow production systems that are peripheral to a central production system, which handles higher-level reasoning based on the shadow productions' output. Implementing this novel structure within the Common Model allows for a seamless connection between cognitive architectures and generative neural networks.

Recommender systems play a central role in numerous real-life applications, yet evaluating their performance remains a significant challenge due to the gap between offline metrics and online behaviors. Given the scarcity and limits (e.g., privacy issues) of real user data, we introduce SimUSER, an agent framework that serves as believable and cost-effective human proxies. SimUSER first identifies self-consistent personas from historical data, enriching user profiles with unique backgrounds and personalities. Then, central to this evaluation are users equipped with persona, memory, perception, and brain modules, engaging in interactions with the recommender system. SimUSER exhibits closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments to explore the effects of thumbnails on click rates, the exposure effect, and the impact of reviews on user engagement. Finally, we refine recommender system parameters based on offline A/B test results, resulting in improved user engagement in the real world.

Active vision, also known as active perception, refers to the process of actively selecting where and how to look in order to gather task-relevant information. It is a critical component of efficient perception and decision-making in humans and advanced embodied agents. Recently, the use of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as central planning and decision-making modules in robotic systems has gained extensive attention. However, despite the importance of active perception in embodied intelligence, there is little to no exploration of how MLLMs can be equipped with or learn active perception capabilities. In this paper, we first provide a systematic definition of MLLM-based active perception tasks. We point out that the recently proposed GPT-o3 model's zoom-in search strategy can be regarded as a special case of active perception; however, it still suffers from low search efficiency and inaccurate region selection. To address these issues, we propose ACTIVE-O3, a purely reinforcement learning based training framework built on top of GRPO, designed to equip MLLMs with active perception capabilities. We further establish a comprehensive benchmark suite to evaluate ACTIVE-O3 across both general open-world tasks, such as small-object and dense object grounding, and domain-specific scenarios, including small object detection in remote sensing and autonomous driving, as well as fine-grained interactive segmentation. In addition, ACTIVE-O3 also demonstrates strong zero-shot reasoning abilities on the V* Benchmark, without relying on any explicit reasoning data. We hope that our work can provide a simple codebase and evaluation protocol to facilitate future research on active perception in MLLMs.

Despite the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs), the process of endowing them with new capabilities--such as mathematical reasoning--remains largely empirical and opaque. A critical open question is whether reasoning abilities stem from the entire model, specific modules, or are merely artifacts of overfitting. In this work, we hypothesize that the reasoning capabilities in well-trained LLMs are primarily attributed to the output projection module (oproj) in the Transformer's multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism. To support this hypothesis, we introduce Stethoscope for Networks (SfN), a suite of diagnostic tools designed to probe and analyze the internal behaviors of LLMs. Using SfN, we provide both circumstantial and empirical evidence suggesting that oproj plays a central role in enabling reasoning, whereas other modules contribute more to fluent dialogue. These findings offer a new perspective on LLM interpretability and open avenues for more targeted training strategies, potentially enabling more efficient and specialized LLMs.

The integration of tools in LLM-based agents overcame the difficulties of standalone LLMs and traditional agents' limited capabilities. However, the conjunction of these technologies and the proposed enhancements in several state-of-the-art works followed a non-unified software architecture resulting in a lack of modularity. Indeed, they focused mainly on functionalities and overlooked the definition of the component's boundaries within the agent. This caused terminological and architectural ambiguities between researchers which we addressed in this paper by proposing a unified framework that establishes a clear foundation for LLM-based agents' development from both functional and software architectural perspectives. Our framework, LLM-Agent-UMF (LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework), clearly distinguishes between the different components of an agent, setting LLMs, and tools apart from a newly introduced element: the core-agent, playing the role of the central coordinator of the agent which comprises five modules: planning, memory, profile, action, and security, the latter often neglected in previous works. Differences in the internal structure of core-agents led us to classify them into a taxonomy of passive and active types. Based on this, we proposed different multi-core agent architectures combining unique characteristics of various individual agents. For evaluation purposes, we applied this framework to a selection of state-of-the-art agents, thereby demonstrating its alignment with their functionalities and clarifying the overlooked architectural aspects. Moreover, we thoroughly assessed four of our proposed architectures by integrating distinctive agents into hybrid active/passive core-agents' systems. This analysis provided clear insights into potential improvements and highlighted the challenges involved in the combination of specific agents.