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Apr 13

A Trace-Based Assurance Framework for Agentic AI Orchestration: Contracts, Testing, and Governance

In Agentic AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the orchestration layer to coordinate multiple agents and to interact with external services, retrieval components, and shared memory. In this setting, failures are not limited to incorrect final outputs. They also arise from long-horizon interaction, stochastic decisions, and external side effects (such as API calls, database writes, and message sends). Common failures include non-termination, role drift, propagation of unsupported claims, and attacks via untrusted context or external channels. This paper presents an assurance framework for such Agentic AI systems. Executions are instrumented as Message-Action Traces (MAT) with explicit step and trace contracts. Contracts provide machine-checkable verdicts, localize the first violating step, and support deterministic replay. The framework includes stress testing, formulated as a budgeted counterexample search over bounded perturbations. It also supports structured fault injection at service, retrieval, and memory boundaries to assess containment under realistic operational faults and degraded conditions. Finally, governance is treated as a runtime component, enforcing per-agent capability limits and action mediation (allow, rewrite, block) at the language-to-action boundary. To support comparative evaluations across stochastic seeds, models, and orchestration configurations, the paper defines trace-based metrics for task success, termination reliability, contract compliance, factuality indicators, containment rate, and governance outcome distributions. More broadly, the framework is intended as a common abstraction to support testing and evaluation of multi-agent LLM systems, and to facilitate reproducible comparison across orchestration designs and configurations.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 17

ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner, allowing for greater synergy between the two: reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with external sources, such as knowledge bases or environments, to gather additional information. We apply our approach, named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines, as well as improved human interpretability and trustworthiness over methods without reasoning or acting components. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes issues of hallucination and error propagation prevalent in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generates human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. On two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples. Project site with code: https://react-lm.github.io

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022 1

GraphTracer: Graph-Guided Failure Tracing in LLM Agents for Robust Multi-Turn Deep Search

Multi-agent systems powered by Large Language Models excel at complex tasks through coordinated collaboration, yet they face high failure rates in multi-turn deep search scenarios. Existing temporal attribution methods struggle to accurately diagnose root causes, particularly when errors propagate across multiple agents. Attempts to automate failure attribution by analyzing action sequences remain ineffective due to their inability to account for information dependencies that span agents. This paper identifies two core challenges: (i) distinguishing symptoms from root causes in multi-agent error propagation, and (ii) tracing information dependencies beyond temporal order. To address these issues, we introduce GraphTracer, a framework that redefines failure attribution through information flow analysis. GraphTracer constructs Information Dependency Graphs (IDGs) to explicitly capture how agents reference and build on prior outputs. It localizes root causes by tracing through these dependency structures instead of relying on temporal sequences. GraphTracer also uses graph-aware synthetic data generation to target critical nodes, creating realistic failure scenarios. Evaluations on the Who\&When benchmark and integration into production systems demonstrate that GraphTracer-8B achieves up to 18.18\% higher attribution accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models and enables 4.8\% to 14.2\% performance improvements in deployed multi-agent frameworks, establishing a robust solution for multi-agent system debugging.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 12, 2025 2

TRACE: Temporal Grounding Video LLM via Causal Event Modeling

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) is a crucial capability for video understanding models and plays a vital role in downstream tasks such as video browsing and editing. To effectively handle various tasks simultaneously and enable zero-shot prediction, there is a growing trend in employing video LLMs for VTG tasks. However, current video LLM-based methods rely exclusively on natural language generation, lacking the ability to model the clear structure inherent in videos, which restricts their effectiveness in tackling VTG tasks. To address this issue, this paper first formally introduces causal event modeling framework, which represents videos as sequences of events, and predict the current event using previous events, video inputs, and textural instructions. Each event consists of three components: timestamps, salient scores, and textual captions. We then propose a novel task-interleaved video LLM called TRACE to effectively implement the causal event modeling framework in practice. The TRACE processes visual frames, timestamps, salient scores, and text as distinct tasks, employing various encoders and decoding heads for each. Task tokens are arranged in an interleaved sequence according to the causal event modeling framework's formulation. Extensive experiments on various VTG tasks and datasets demonstrate the superior performance of TRACE compared to state-of-the-art video LLMs. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/gyxxyg/TRACE.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024 3

KG-TRACES: Enhancing Large Language Models with Knowledge Graph-constrained Trajectory Reasoning and Attribution Supervision

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in various natural language processing tasks, but their performance on complex reasoning problems remains hindered by a lack of explainability and trustworthiness. This issue, often manifesting as hallucinations or unattributable reasoning processes, limits their applicability in complex reasoning scenarios. To address this, we propose Knowledge Graph-constrained Trajectory Reasoning Attribution and Chain Explanation Supervision (KG-TRACES), a novel framework that enhances the reasoning ability of LLMs through explicit supervision over reasoning paths and processes. KG-TRACES jointly supervises the model to: (1) predict symbolic relation paths, (2) predict full triple-level reasoning paths, and (3) generate attribution-aware reasoning processes grounded in the reasoning paths. At inference phase, the model adapts to both KG-available and KG-unavailable scenarios, retrieving reasoning paths from a KG when possible or predicting plausible reasoning paths with only intrinsic knowledge when not. This design enables the model to reason in an explainable and source-attributable pattern. Through extensive experiments on complex reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that KG-TRACES significantly outperforms existing SOTA: it improves Hits@1 by 1.6% and F1 by 4.7% on WebQSP, and achieves improvements of 4.8% in Hits@1 and 2.1% in F1 on CWQ. Moreover, we show its transferability to specialized domains such as medicine. By visualizing the intermediate steps of reasoning processes, we further show that the explicit supervision introduced by KG-TRACES leads to more stable and goal-directed reasoning processes, aligning closely with correct answers. Code is available at https://github.com/Edaizi/KG-TRACES.

  • 8 authors
·
May 31, 2025

Goal Recognition as a Deep Learning Task: the GRNet Approach

In automated planning, recognising the goal of an agent from a trace of observations is an important task with many applications. The state-of-the-art approaches to goal recognition rely on the application of planning techniques, which requires a model of the domain actions and of the initial domain state (written, e.g., in PDDL). We study an alternative approach where goal recognition is formulated as a classification task addressed by machine learning. Our approach, called GRNet, is primarily aimed at making goal recognition more accurate as well as faster by learning how to solve it in a given domain. Given a planning domain specified by a set of propositions and a set of action names, the goal classification instances in the domain are solved by a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). A run of the RNN processes a trace of observed actions to compute how likely it is that each domain proposition is part of the agent's goal, for the problem instance under considerations. These predictions are then aggregated to choose one of the candidate goals. The only information required as input of the trained RNN is a trace of action labels, each one indicating just the name of an observed action. An experimental analysis confirms that \our achieves good performance in terms of both goal classification accuracy and runtime, obtaining better performance w.r.t. a state-of-the-art goal recognition system over the considered benchmarks.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022

From Accidents to Insights: Leveraging Multimodal Data for Scenario-Driven ADS Testing

The rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) have necessitated robust software testing to ensure safety and reliability. However, automating the generation of scalable and concrete test scenarios remains a significant challenge. Current scenario-based test case generation methods often face limitations, such as unrealistic scenes and inaccurate vehicle trajectories. These challenges largely result from the loss of map information during data extraction and the lack of an effective verification mechanism to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces TRACE, a scenario-based ADS Test case Generation framework for Critical Scenarios. By leveraging multimodal data to extract challenging scenarios from real-world car crash reports, TRACE constructs numerous critical test cases with less data, significantly enhancing ADS bug detection efficiency. Using in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-validation approaches, we use LLMs to extract environmental and road network information from crash reports. For vehicle trajectory planning, data containing map information and vehicle coordinates serves as a knowledge base to build a ChatGPT-based LLM with path-planning capabilities, which we named TrackMate. Based on 50 existing crash reports, our approach successfully tested three ADS models across two simulation platforms, MetaDrive and BeamNG. Of the 290 constructed test scenarios, 127 are identified as critical, as they resulted in vehicle collisions. Additionally, user feedback reveals that TRACE demonstrates superior scenario reconstruction accuracy, with 77.5% of the scenarios being rated as 'mostly or 'totally' consistent, compared to only 27% for the most related SOTA, LCTGen.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025

Trace is the New AutoDiff -- Unlocking Efficient Optimization of Computational Workflows

We study a class of optimization problems motivated by automating the design and update of AI systems like coding assistants, robots, and copilots. We propose an end-to-end optimization framework, Trace, which treats the computational workflow of an AI system as a graph akin to neural networks, based on a generalization of back-propagation. Optimization of computational workflows often involves rich feedback (e.g. console output or user's responses), heterogeneous parameters (e.g. prompts, hyper-parameters, codes), and intricate objectives (beyond maximizing a score). Moreover, its computation graph can change dynamically with the inputs and parameters. We frame a new mathematical setup of iterative optimization, Optimization with Trace Oracle (OPTO), to capture and abstract these properties so as to design optimizers that work across many domains. In OPTO, an optimizer receives an execution trace along with feedback on the computed output and updates parameters iteratively. Trace is the tool to implement OPTO in practice. Trace has a Python interface that efficiently converts a computational workflow into an OPTO instance using a PyTorch-like interface. Using Trace, we develop a general-purpose LLM-based optimizer called OptoPrime that can effectively solve OPTO problems. In empirical studies, we find that OptoPrime is capable of first-order numerical optimization, prompt optimization, hyper-parameter tuning, robot controller design, code debugging, etc., and is often competitive with specialized optimizers for each domain. We believe that Trace, OptoPrime and the OPTO framework will enable the next generation of interactive agents that automatically adapt using various kinds of feedback. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/Trace

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 23, 2024 1

TransRAC: Encoding Multi-scale Temporal Correlation with Transformers for Repetitive Action Counting

Counting repetitive actions are widely seen in human activities such as physical exercise. Existing methods focus on performing repetitive action counting in short videos, which is tough for dealing with longer videos in more realistic scenarios. In the data-driven era, the degradation of such generalization capability is mainly attributed to the lack of long video datasets. To complement this margin, we introduce a new large-scale repetitive action counting dataset covering a wide variety of video lengths, along with more realistic situations where action interruption or action inconsistencies occur in the video. Besides, we also provide a fine-grained annotation of the action cycles instead of just counting annotation along with a numerical value. Such a dataset contains 1,451 videos with about 20,000 annotations, which is more challenging. For repetitive action counting towards more realistic scenarios, we further propose encoding multi-scale temporal correlation with transformers that can take into account both performance and efficiency. Furthermore, with the help of fine-grained annotation of action cycles, we propose a density map regression-based method to predict the action period, which yields better performance with sufficient interpretability. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all datasets and also achieves better performance on the unseen dataset without fine-tuning. The dataset and code are available.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 3, 2022

TraceCoder: A Trace-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Debugging of LLM-Generated Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate code with subtle but critical bugs, especially for complex tasks. Existing automated repair methods typically rely on superficial pass/fail signals, offering limited visibility into program behavior and hindering precise error localization. In addition, without a way to learn from prior failures, repair processes often fall into repetitive and inefficient cycles. To overcome these challenges, we present TraceCoder, a collaborative multi-agent framework that emulates the observe-analyze-repair process of human experts. The framework first instruments the code with diagnostic probes to capture fine-grained runtime traces, enabling deep insight into its internal execution. It then conducts causal analysis on these traces to accurately identify the root cause of the failure. This process is further enhanced by a novel Historical Lesson Learning Mechanism (HLLM), which distills insights from prior failed repair attempts to inform subsequent correction strategies and prevent recurrence of similar mistakes. To ensure stable convergence, a Rollback Mechanism enforces that each repair iteration constitutes a strict improvement toward the correct solution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that TraceCoder achieves up to a 34.43\% relative improvement in Pass@1 accuracy over existing advanced baselines. Ablation studies verify the significance of each system component, with the iterative repair process alone contributing a 65.61\% relative gain in accuracy. Furthermore, TraceCoder significantly outperforms leading iterative methods in terms of both accuracy and cost-efficiency.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 6

Signals: Trajectory Sampling and Triage for Agentic Interactions

Agentic applications based on large language models increasingly rely on multi-step interaction loops involving planning, action execution, and environment feedback. While such systems are now deployed at scale, improving them post-deployment remains challenging. Agent trajectories are voluminous and non-deterministic, and reviewing each one, whether through human review or auxiliary LLMs, is slow and cost-prohibitive. We propose a lightweight, signal-based framework for triaging agentic interaction trajectories. Our approach computes cheap, broadly applicable signals from live interactions and attaches them as structured attributes for trajectory triage, identifying interactions likely to be informative without affecting online agent behavior. We organize signals into a coarse-grained taxonomy spanning interaction (misalignment, stagnation, disengagement, satisfaction), execution (failure, loop), and environment (exhaustion), designed for computation without model calls. In a controlled annotation study on τ-bench, a widely used benchmark for tool-augmented agent evaluation, we show that signal-based sampling achieves an 82\% informativeness rate compared to 74\% for heuristic filtering and 54\% for random sampling, with a 1.52x efficiency gain per informative trajectory. The advantage is robust across reward strata and task domains, confirming that signals provide genuine per-trajectory informativeness gains rather than merely oversampling obvious failures. These results show that lightweight signals can serve as practical sampling infrastructure for agentic systems, and suggest a path toward preference data construction and post-deployment optimization.

digitalocean DigitalOcean
·
Mar 31 2

TRACE: Task-Adaptive Reasoning and Representation Learning for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

Universal Multimodal Retrieval requires unified embedding models capable of interpreting diverse user intents, ranging from simple keywords to complex compositional instructions. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess strong reasoning capabilities, prevailing adaptations confine them to static encoders, underutilizing their generative potential. This encoder-only paradigm struggles with complex intents that demand logical deduction rather than superficial pattern matching. To address this, we introduce TRACE (Task-adaptive Reasoning And Compressing Embeddings). TRACE unifies generative reasoning with discriminative representation learning. It first generates a structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to explicitly reason about the query, and subsequently compresses this reasoning trace into a compact embedding via a dedicated token. To train this framework, we construct M-BEIR-CoT, a large-scale dataset featuring a difficulty-aware routing strategy. Experiments on the M-BEIR benchmark establish TRACE as the new state-of-the-art. Crucially, TRACE demonstrates a learned implicit routing behavior. It autonomously activates reasoning for complex queries while bypassing it for simpler ones, achieving an optimal balance between retrieval accuracy and inference throughput. Furthermore, by internalizing the deductive process, TRACE exhibits remarkable zero-shot transferability to unseen domains and novel constraints.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 3

From Features to Actions: Explainability in Traditional and Agentic AI Systems

Over the last decade, explainable AI has primarily focused on interpreting individual model predictions, producing post-hoc explanations that relate inputs to outputs under a fixed decision structure. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic AI systems whose behaviour unfolds over multi-step trajectories. In these settings, success and failure are determined by sequences of decisions rather than a single output. While useful, it remains unclear how explanation approaches designed for static predictions translate to agentic settings where behaviour emerges over time. In this work, we bridge the gap between static and agentic explainability by comparing attribution-based explanations with trace-based diagnostics across both settings. To make this distinction explicit, we empirically compare attribution-based explanations used in static classification tasks with trace-based diagnostics used in agentic benchmarks (TAU-bench Airline and AssistantBench). Our results show that while attribution methods achieve stable feature rankings in static settings (Spearman ρ= 0.86), they cannot be applied reliably to diagnose execution-level failures in agentic trajectories. In contrast, trace-grounded rubric evaluation for agentic settings consistently localizes behaviour breakdowns and reveals that state tracking inconsistency is 2.7times more prevalent in failed runs and reduces success probability by 49\%. These findings motivate a shift towards trajectory-level explainability for agentic systems when evaluating and diagnosing autonomous AI behaviour. Resources: https://github.com/VectorInstitute/unified-xai-evaluation-framework https://vectorinstitute.github.io/unified-xai-evaluation-framework

Benchmarking Reward Hack Detection in Code Environments via Contrastive Analysis

Recent advances in reinforcement learning for code generation have made robust environments essential to prevent reward hacking. As LLMs increasingly serve as evaluators in code-based RL, their ability to detect reward hacking remains understudied. In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy of reward exploits spanning across 54 categories and introduce TRACE (Testing Reward Anomalies in Code Environments), a synthetically curated and human-verified benchmark containing 517 testing trajectories. Unlike prior work that evaluates reward hack detection in isolated classification scenarios, we contrast these evaluations with a more realistic, contrastive anomaly detection setup on TRACE. Our experiments reveal that models capture reward hacks more effectively in contrastive settings than in isolated classification settings, with GPT-5.2 with highest reasoning mode achieving the best detection rate at 63%, up from 45% in isolated settings on TRACE. Building on this insight, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art models struggle significantly more with semantically contextualized reward hacks compared to syntactically contextualized ones. We further conduct qualitative analyses of model behaviors, as well as ablation studies showing that the ratio of benign to hacked trajectories and analysis cluster sizes substantially impact detection performance. We release the benchmark and evaluation harness to enable the community to expand TRACE and evaluate their models.

PatronusAI Patronus AI
·
Jan 27 3

Motion Tracks: A Unified Representation for Human-Robot Transfer in Few-Shot Imitation Learning

Teaching robots to autonomously complete everyday tasks remains a challenge. Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful approach that imbues robots with skills via demonstrations, but is limited by the labor-intensive process of collecting teleoperated robot data. Human videos offer a scalable alternative, but it remains difficult to directly train IL policies from them due to the lack of robot action labels. To address this, we propose to represent actions as short-horizon 2D trajectories on an image. These actions, or motion tracks, capture the predicted direction of motion for either human hands or robot end-effectors. We instantiate an IL policy called Motion Track Policy (MT-pi) which receives image observations and outputs motion tracks as actions. By leveraging this unified, cross-embodiment action space, MT-pi completes tasks with high success given just minutes of human video and limited additional robot demonstrations. At test time, we predict motion tracks from two camera views, recovering 6DoF trajectories via multi-view synthesis. MT-pi achieves an average success rate of 86.5% across 4 real-world tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art IL baselines which do not leverage human data or our action space by 40%, and generalizes to scenarios seen only in human videos. Code and videos are available on our website https://portal-cornell.github.io/motion_track_policy/.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 12, 2025

Claw-Eval: Toward Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agents

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents executing multi-step workflows in real-world software environments. However, existing agent benchmarks suffer from three critical limitations: (1) trajectory-opaque grading that checks only final outputs, (2) underspecified safety and robustness evaluation, and (3) narrow modality coverage and interaction paradigms. We introduce Claw-Eval, an end-to-end evaluation suite addressing all three gaps. It comprises 300 human-verified tasks spanning 9 categories across three groups (general service orchestration, multimodal perception and generation, and multi-turn professional dialogue). Every agent action is recorded through three independent evidence channels (execution traces, audit logs, and environment snapshots), enabling trajectory-aware grading over 2,159 fine-grained rubric items. The scoring protocol evaluates Completion, Safety, and Robustness, reporting Average Score, Pass@k, and Pass^k across three trials to distinguish genuine capability from lucky outcomes. Experiments on 14 frontier models reveal that: (1) trajectory-opaque evaluation is systematically unreliable, missing 44% of safety violations and 13% of robustness failures that our hybrid pipeline catches; (2) controlled error injection primarily degrades consistency rather than peak capability, with Pass^3 dropping up to 24% while Pass@3 remains stable; (3) multimodal performance varies sharply, with most models performing poorer on video than on document or image, and no single model dominating across all modalities. Beyond benchmarking, Claw-Eval highlights actionable directions for agent development, shedding light on what it takes to build agents that are not only capable but reliably deployable.

claw-eval Claw-Eval
·
Apr 6 5

From Commit Message Generation to History-Aware Commit Message Completion

Commit messages are crucial to software development, allowing developers to track changes and collaborate effectively. Despite their utility, most commit messages lack important information since writing high-quality commit messages is tedious and time-consuming. The active research on commit message generation (CMG) has not yet led to wide adoption in practice. We argue that if we could shift the focus from commit message generation to commit message completion and use previous commit history as additional context, we could significantly improve the quality and the personal nature of the resulting commit messages. In this paper, we propose and evaluate both of these novel ideas. Since the existing datasets lack historical data, we collect and share a novel dataset called CommitChronicle, containing 10.7M commits across 20 programming languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the completion setting and the usefulness of the historical context for state-of-the-art CMG models and GPT-3.5-turbo. Our results show that in some contexts, commit message completion shows better results than generation, and that while in general GPT-3.5-turbo performs worse, it shows potential for long and detailed messages. As for the history, the results show that historical information improves the performance of CMG models in the generation task, and the performance of GPT-3.5-turbo in both generation and completion.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

OrgForge: A Multi-Agent Simulation Framework for Verifiable Synthetic Corporate Corpora

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines requires corpora where ground truth is knowable, temporally structured, and cross-artifact properties that real-world datasets rarely provide cleanly. Existing resources such as the Enron corpus carry legal ambiguity, demographic skew, and no structured ground truth. Purely LLM-generated synthetic data solves the legal problem but introduces a subtler one: the generating model cannot be prevented from hallucinating facts that contradict themselves across documents.We present OrgForge, an open-source multi-agent simulation framework that enforces a strict physics-cognition boundary: a deterministic Python engine maintains a SimEvent ground truth bus; large language models generate only surface prose, constrained by validated proposals. An actor-local clock enforces causal timestamp correctness across all artifact types, eliminating the class of timeline inconsistencies that arise when timestamps are sampled independently per document. We formalize three graph-dynamic subsystems stress propagation via betweenness centrality, temporal edge-weight decay, and Dijkstra escalation routing that govern organizational behavior independently of any LLM. Running a configurable N-day simulation, OrgForge produces interleaved Slack threads, JIRA tickets, Confluence pages, Git pull requests, and emails, all traceable to a shared, immutable event log. We additionally describe a causal chain tracking subsystem that accumulates cross-artifact evidence graphs per incident, a hybrid reciprocal-rank-fusion recurrence detector for identifying repeated failure classes, and an inbound/outbound email engine that routes vendor alerts, customer complaints, and HR correspondence through gated causal chains with probabilistic drop simulation. OrgForge is available under the MIT license.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 16

ShIOEnv: A CLI Behavior-Capturing Environment Enabling Grammar-Guided Command Synthesis for Dataset Curation

Command-line interfaces (CLIs) provide structured textual environments for system administration. Explorations have been performed using pre-trained language models (PLMs) to simulate these environments for safe interaction in high-risk environments. However, their use has been constrained to frozen, large parameter models like GPT. For smaller architectures to reach a similar level of believability, a rich dataset of CLI interactions is required. Existing public datasets focus on mapping natural-language tasks to commands, omitting crucial execution data such as exit codes, outputs, and environmental side effects, limiting their usability for behavioral modeling. We introduce a Shell Input -Output Environment (ShIOEnv), which casts command construction as a Markov Decision Process whose state is the partially built sequence and whose actions append arguments. After each action, ShIOEnv executes the candidate and returns its exit status, output, and progress toward a minimal-length behavioral objective. Due to the intractable nature of the combinatorial argument state-action space, we derive a context-free grammar from man pages to mask invalid arguments from being emitted. We explore random and proximal-policy optimization (PPO)-optimized sampling of unrestricted and grammar-masked action spaces to produce four exploration strategies. We observed that grammar masking and PPO significantly improve sample efficiency to produce a higher quality dataset (maximizing the number of arguments while minimizing redundancies). Policy-generated datasets of shell input-output behavior pairs are used to fine-tune CodeT5, where we observe 85% improvements in BLEU-4 when constraining the action space to grammar productions with an additional 26% improvement when applying PPO. The ShIOEnv environment and curated command behavior datasets are released for use in future research.

  • 2 authors
·
May 23, 2025

Masked Temporal Interpolation Diffusion for Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos

In this paper, we address the challenge of procedure planning in instructional videos, aiming to generate coherent and task-aligned action sequences from start and end visual observations. Previous work has mainly relied on text-level supervision to bridge the gap between observed states and unobserved actions, but it struggles with capturing intricate temporal relationships among actions. Building on these efforts, we propose the Masked Temporal Interpolation Diffusion (MTID) model that introduces a latent space temporal interpolation module within the diffusion model. This module leverages a learnable interpolation matrix to generate intermediate latent features, thereby augmenting visual supervision with richer mid-state details. By integrating this enriched supervision into the model, we enable end-to-end training tailored to task-specific requirements, significantly enhancing the model's capacity to predict temporally coherent action sequences. Additionally, we introduce an action-aware mask projection mechanism to restrict the action generation space, combined with a task-adaptive masked proximity loss to prioritize more accurate reasoning results close to the given start and end states over those in intermediate steps. Simultaneously, it filters out task-irrelevant action predictions, leading to contextually aware action sequences. Experimental results across three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our MTID achieves promising action planning performance on most metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/WiserZhou/MTID.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

On the Evaluation of Commit Message Generation Models: An Experimental Study

Commit messages are natural language descriptions of code changes, which are important for program understanding and maintenance. However, writing commit messages manually is time-consuming and laborious, especially when the code is updated frequently. Various approaches utilizing generation or retrieval techniques have been proposed to automatically generate commit messages. To achieve a better understanding of how the existing approaches perform in solving this problem, this paper conducts a systematic and in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art models and datasets. We find that: (1) Different variants of the BLEU metric are used in previous works, which affects the evaluation and understanding of existing methods. (2) Most existing datasets are crawled only from Java repositories while repositories in other programming languages are not sufficiently explored. (3) Dataset splitting strategies can influence the performance of existing models by a large margin. Some models show better performance when the datasets are split by commit, while other models perform better when the datasets are split by timestamp or by project. Based on our findings, we conduct a human evaluation and find the BLEU metric that best correlates with the human scores for the task. We also collect a large-scale, information-rich, and multi-language commit message dataset MCMD and evaluate existing models on this dataset. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments under different dataset splitting strategies and suggest the suitable models under different scenarios. Based on the experimental results and findings, we provide feasible suggestions for comprehensively evaluating commit message generation models and discuss possible future research directions. We believe this work can help practitioners and researchers better evaluate and select models for automatic commit message generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 12, 2021

AgentProcessBench: Diagnosing Step-Level Process Quality in Tool-Using Agents

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into tool-using agents, they remain brittle in long-horizon interactions. Unlike mathematical reasoning where errors are often rectifiable via backtracking, tool-use failures frequently induce irreversible side effects, making accurate step-level verification critical. However, existing process-level benchmarks are predominantly confined to closed-world mathematical domains, failing to capture the dynamic and open-ended nature of tool execution. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentProcessBench, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating step-level effectiveness in realistic, tool-augmented trajectories. The benchmark comprises 1,000 diverse trajectories and 8,509 human-labeled step annotations with 89.1% inter-annotator agreement. It features a ternary labeling scheme to capture exploration and an error propagation rule to reduce labeling ambiguity. Extensive experiments reveal key insights: (1) weaker policy models exhibit inflated ratios of correct steps due to early termination; (2) distinguishing neutral and erroneous actions remains a significant challenge for current models; and (3) process-derived signals provide complementary value to outcome supervision, significantly enhancing test-time scaling. We hope AgentProcessBench can foster future research in reward models and pave the way toward general agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/RUCBM/AgentProcessBench.

Grounded Language Acquisition From Object and Action Imagery

Deep learning approaches to natural language processing have made great strides in recent years. While these models produce symbols that convey vast amounts of diverse knowledge, it is unclear how such symbols are grounded in data from the world. In this paper, we explore the development of a private language for visual data representation by training emergent language (EL) encoders/decoders in both i) a traditional referential game environment and ii) a contrastive learning environment utilizing a within-class matching training paradigm. An additional classification layer utilizing neural machine translation and random forest classification was used to transform symbolic representations (sequences of integer symbols) to class labels. These methods were applied in two experiments focusing on object recognition and action recognition. For object recognition, a set of sketches produced by human participants from real imagery was used (Sketchy dataset) and for action recognition, 2D trajectories were generated from 3D motion capture systems (MOVI dataset). In order to interpret the symbols produced for data in each experiment, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) methods were used to identify pixel regions indicating semantic features which contribute evidence towards symbols in learned languages. Additionally, a t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) method was used to investigate embeddings learned by CNN feature extractors.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 12, 2023

GUI-360: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Computer-Using Agents

We introduce GUI-360^circ, a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmark suite designed to advance computer-using agents (CUAs). CUAs present unique challenges and is constrained by three persistent gaps: a scarcity of real-world CUA tasks, the lack of automated collection-and-annotation pipelines for multi-modal trajectories, and the absence of a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction. GUI-360^circ addresses these gaps with an LLM-augmented, largely automated pipeline for query sourcing, environment-template construction, task instantiation, batched execution, and LLM-driven quality filtering. The released corpus contains over 1.2M executed action steps across thousands of trajectories in popular Windows office applications, and includes full-resolution screenshots, accessibility metadata when available, instantiated goals, intermediate reasoning traces, and both successful and failed action trajectories. The dataset supports three canonical tasks, GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction, and a hybrid GUI+API action space that reflects modern agent designs. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision--language models on GUI-360^circ reveals substantial out-of-the-box shortcomings in grounding and action prediction; supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield significant gains but do not close the gap to human-level reliability. We release GUI-360^circ and accompanying code to facilitate reproducible research and accelerate progress on robust desktop CUAs. The full dataset has been made public on https://huggingface.co/datasets/vyokky/GUI-360.

microsoft Microsoft
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Nov 6, 2025 2

TrackSSM: A General Motion Predictor by State-Space Model

Temporal motion modeling has always been a key component in multiple object tracking (MOT) which can ensure smooth trajectory movement and provide accurate positional information to enhance association precision. However, current motion models struggle to be both efficient and effective across different application scenarios. To this end, we propose TrackSSM inspired by the recently popular state space models (SSM), a unified encoder-decoder motion framework that uses data-dependent state space model to perform temporal motion of trajectories. Specifically, we propose Flow-SSM, a module that utilizes the position and motion information from historical trajectories to guide the temporal state transition of object bounding boxes. Based on Flow-SSM, we design a flow decoder. It is composed of a cascaded motion decoding module employing Flow-SSM, which can use the encoded flow information to complete the temporal position prediction of trajectories. Additionally, we propose a Step-by-Step Linear (S^2L) training strategy. By performing linear interpolation between the positions of the object in the previous frame and the current frame, we construct the pseudo labels of step-by-step linear training, ensuring that the trajectory flow information can better guide the object bounding box in completing temporal transitions. TrackSSM utilizes a simple Mamba-Block to build a motion encoder for historical trajectories, forming a temporal motion model with an encoder-decoder structure in conjunction with the flow decoder. TrackSSM is applicable to various tracking scenarios and achieves excellent tracking performance across multiple benchmarks, further extending the potential of SSM-like temporal motion models in multi-object tracking tasks. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Xavier-Lin/TrackSSM.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 31, 2024

Evaluating the Ability of LLMs to Solve Semantics-Aware Process Mining Tasks

The process mining community has recently recognized the potential of large language models (LLMs) for tackling various process mining tasks. Initial studies report the capability of LLMs to support process analysis and even, to some extent, that they are able to reason about how processes work. This latter property suggests that LLMs could also be used to tackle process mining tasks that benefit from an understanding of process behavior. Examples of such tasks include (semantic) anomaly detection and next activity prediction, which both involve considerations of the meaning of activities and their inter-relations. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of LLMs to tackle such semantics-aware process mining tasks. Furthermore, whereas most works on the intersection of LLMs and process mining only focus on testing these models out of the box, we provide a more principled investigation of the utility of LLMs for process mining, including their ability to obtain process mining knowledge post-hoc by means of in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Concretely, we define three process mining tasks that benefit from an understanding of process semantics and provide extensive benchmarking datasets for each of them. Our evaluation experiments reveal that (1) LLMs fail to solve challenging process mining tasks out of the box and when provided only a handful of in-context examples, (2) but they yield strong performance when fine-tuned for these tasks, consistently surpassing smaller, encoder-based language models.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 2, 2024

Generating the Traces You Need: A Conditional Generative Model for Process Mining Data

In recent years, trace generation has emerged as a significant challenge within the Process Mining community. Deep Learning (DL) models have demonstrated accuracy in reproducing the features of the selected processes. However, current DL generative models are limited in their ability to adapt the learned distributions to generate data samples based on specific conditions or attributes. This limitation is particularly significant because the ability to control the type of generated data can be beneficial in various contexts, enabling a focus on specific behaviours, exploration of infrequent patterns, or simulation of alternative 'what-if' scenarios. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing a conditional model for process data generation based on a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Conditional models offer control over the generation process by tuning input conditional variables, enabling more targeted and controlled data generation. Unlike other domains, CVAE for process mining faces specific challenges due to the multiperspective nature of the data and the need to adhere to control-flow rules while ensuring data variability. Specifically, we focus on generating process executions conditioned on control flow and temporal features of the trace, allowing us to produce traces for specific, identified sub-processes. The generated traces are then evaluated using common metrics for generative model assessment, along with additional metrics to evaluate the quality of the conditional generation

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

Spatio-Temporal Context Prompting for Zero-Shot Action Detection

Spatio-temporal action detection encompasses the tasks of localizing and classifying individual actions within a video. Recent works aim to enhance this process by incorporating interaction modeling, which captures the relationship between people and their surrounding context. However, these approaches have primarily focused on fully-supervised learning, and the current limitation lies in the lack of generalization capability to recognize unseen action categories. In this paper, we aim to adapt the pretrained image-language models to detect unseen actions. To this end, we propose a method which can effectively leverage the rich knowledge of visual-language models to perform Person-Context Interaction. Meanwhile, our Context Prompting module will utilize contextual information to prompt labels, thereby enhancing the generation of more representative text features. Moreover, to address the challenge of recognizing distinct actions by multiple people at the same timestamp, we design the Interest Token Spotting mechanism which employs pretrained visual knowledge to find each person's interest context tokens, and then these tokens will be used for prompting to generate text features tailored to each individual. To evaluate the ability to detect unseen actions, we propose a comprehensive benchmark on J-HMDB, UCF101-24, and AVA datasets. The experiments show that our method achieves superior results compared to previous approaches and can be further extended to multi-action videos, bringing it closer to real-world applications. The code and data can be found in https://webber2933.github.io/ST-CLIP-project-page.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024

Large Content And Behavior Models To Understand, Simulate, And Optimize Content And Behavior

Shannon, in his seminal paper introducing information theory, divided the communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectivenss. While the technical level is concerned with accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. Thanks to telecommunications, the first level problem has produced great advances like the internet. Large Language Models (LLMs) make some progress towards the second goal, but the third level still remains largely untouched. The third problem deals with predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behavior. LLMs, while showing wide generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks, are unable to solve for this. One reason for the underperformance could be a lack of "behavior tokens" in LLMs' training corpora. Behavior tokens define receiver behavior over a communication, such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, retweets, etc. While preprocessing data for LLM training, behavior tokens are often removed from the corpora as noise. Therefore, in this paper, we make some initial progress towards reintroducing behavior tokens in LLM training. The trained models, other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, show generalization capabilities on behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. Using a wide range of tasks on two corpora, we show results on all these capabilities. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 1, 2023

Recon-Act: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Browser-Use System via Web Reconnaissance, Tool Generation, and Task Execution

Recent years, multimodal models have made remarkable strides and pave the way for intelligent browser use agents. However, when solving tasks on real world webpages in multi-turn, long-horizon trajectories, current agents still suffer from disordered action sequencing and excessive trial and error during execution. This paper introduces Recon-Act, a self-evolving multi-agent framework grounded in Reconnaissance-Action behavioral paradigm. The system comprises a Reconnaissance Team and an Action Team: the former conducts comparative analysis and tool generation, while the latter handles intent decomposition, tool orchestration, and execution. By contrasting the erroneous trajectories with successful ones, the Reconnaissance Team infers remedies, and abstracts them into a unified notion of generalized tools, either expressed as hints or as rule-based codes, and register to the tool archive in real time. The Action Team reinference the process empowered with these targeting tools, thus establishing a closed-loop training pipeline of data-tools-action-feedback. Following the 6 level implementation roadmap proposed in this work, we have currently reached Level 3 (with limited human-in-the-loop intervention). Leveraging generalized tools obtained through reconnaissance, Recon-Act substantially improves adaptability to unseen websites and solvability on long-horizon tasks, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging VisualWebArena dataset.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025 2

DoVer: Intervention-Driven Auto Debugging for LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are challenging to debug because failures often arise from long, branching interaction traces. The prevailing practice is to leverage LLMs for log-based failure localization, attributing errors to a specific agent and step. However, this paradigm has two key limitations: (i) log-only debugging lacks validation, producing untested hypotheses, and (ii) single-step or single-agent attribution is often ill-posed, as we find that multiple distinct interventions can independently repair the failed task. To address the first limitation, we introduce DoVer, an intervention-driven debugging framework, which augments hypothesis generation with active verification through targeted interventions (e.g., editing messages, altering plans). For the second limitation, rather than evaluating on attribution accuracy, we focus on measuring whether the system resolves the failure or makes quantifiable progress toward task success, reflecting a more outcome-oriented view of debugging. Within the Magnetic-One agent framework, on the datasets derived from GAIA and AssistantBench, DoVer flips 18-28% of failed trials into successes, achieves up to 16% milestone progress, and validates or refutes 30-60% of failure hypotheses. DoVer also performs effectively on a different dataset (GSMPlus) and agent framework (AG2), where it recovers 49% of failed trials. These results highlight intervention as a practical mechanism for improving reliability in agentic systems and open opportunities for more robust, scalable debugging methods for LLM-based multi-agent systems. Project website and code will be available at https://aka.ms/DoVer.

microsoft Microsoft
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Dec 7, 2025 4

Enhancing Automated Software Traceability by Transfer Learning from Open-World Data

Software requirements traceability is a critical component of the software engineering process, enabling activities such as requirements validation, compliance verification, and safety assurance. However, the cost and effort of manually creating a complete set of trace links across natural language artifacts such as requirements, design, and test-cases can be prohibitively expensive. Researchers have therefore proposed automated link-generation solutions primarily based on information-retrieval (IR) techniques; however, these solutions have failed to deliver the accuracy needed for full adoption in industrial projects. Improvements can be achieved using deep-learning traceability models; however, their efficacy is impeded by the limited size and availability of project-level artifacts and links to serve as training data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing and evaluating several deep-learning approaches for text-to-text traceability. Our method, named NLTrace, explores three transfer learning strategies that use datasets mined from open world platforms. Through pretraining Language Models (LMs) and leveraging adjacent tracing tasks, we demonstrate that NLTrace can significantly improve the performance of LM based trace models when training links are available. In such scenarios NLTrace outperforms the best performing classical IR method with an 188% improvement in F2 score and 94.01% in Mean Average Precision (MAP). It also outperforms the general LM based trace model by 7% and 23% for F2 and MAP respectively. In addition, NLTrace can adapt to low-resource tracing scenarios where other LM models can not. The knowledge learned from adjacent tasks enables NLTrace to outperform VSM models by 28% F2 on generation challenges when presented with a small number of training examples.

An Interdisciplinary Comparison of Sequence Modeling Methods for Next-Element Prediction

Data of sequential nature arise in many application domains in forms of, e.g. textual data, DNA sequences, and software execution traces. Different research disciplines have developed methods to learn sequence models from such datasets: (i) in the machine learning field methods such as (hidden) Markov models and recurrent neural networks have been developed and successfully applied to a wide-range of tasks, (ii) in process mining process discovery techniques aim to generate human-interpretable descriptive models, and (iii) in the grammar inference field the focus is on finding descriptive models in the form of formal grammars. Despite their different focuses, these fields share a common goal - learning a model that accurately describes the behavior in the underlying data. Those sequence models are generative, i.e, they can predict what elements are likely to occur after a given unfinished sequence. So far, these fields have developed mainly in isolation from each other and no comparison exists. This paper presents an interdisciplinary experimental evaluation that compares sequence modeling techniques on the task of next-element prediction on four real-life sequence datasets. The results indicate that machine learning techniques that generally have no aim at interpretability in terms of accuracy outperform techniques from the process mining and grammar inference fields that aim to yield interpretable models.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 31, 2018

Event-Guided Procedure Planning from Instructional Videos with Text Supervision

In this work, we focus on the task of procedure planning from instructional videos with text supervision, where a model aims to predict an action sequence to transform the initial visual state into the goal visual state. A critical challenge of this task is the large semantic gap between observed visual states and unobserved intermediate actions, which is ignored by previous works. Specifically, this semantic gap refers to that the contents in the observed visual states are semantically different from the elements of some action text labels in a procedure. To bridge this semantic gap, we propose a novel event-guided paradigm, which first infers events from the observed states and then plans out actions based on both the states and predicted events. Our inspiration comes from that planning a procedure from an instructional video is to complete a specific event and a specific event usually involves specific actions. Based on the proposed paradigm, we contribute an Event-guided Prompting-based Procedure Planning (E3P) model, which encodes event information into the sequential modeling process to support procedure planning. To further consider the strong action associations within each event, our E3P adopts a mask-and-predict approach for relation mining, incorporating a probabilistic masking scheme for regularization. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 17, 2023

Think over Trajectories: Leveraging Video Generation to Reconstruct GPS Trajectories from Cellular Signaling

Mobile devices continuously interact with cellular base stations, generating massive volumes of signaling records that provide broad coverage for understanding human mobility. However, such records offer only coarse location cues (e.g., serving-cell identifiers) and therefore limit their direct use in applications that require high-precision GPS trajectories. This paper studies the Sig2GPS problem: reconstructing GPS trajectories from cellular signaling. Inspired by domain experts often lay the signaling trace on the map and sketch the corresponding GPS route, unlike conventional solutions that rely on complex multi-stage engineering pipelines or regress coordinates, Sig2GPS is reframed as an image-to-video generation task that directly operates in the map-visual domain: signaling traces are rendered on a map, and a video generation model is trained to draw a continuous GPS path. To support this paradigm, a paired signaling-to-trajectory video dataset is constructed to fine-tune an open-source video model, and a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning-based optimization method is introduced to improve generation fidelity via rewards. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show substantial improvements over strong engineered and learning-based baselines, while additional results on next GPS prediction indicate scalability and cross-city transferability. Overall, these results suggest that map-visual video generation provides a practical interface for trajectory data mining by enabling direct generation and refinement of continuous paths under map constraints.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 27 2

Abduct, Act, Predict: Scaffolding Causal Inference for Automated Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems

Failure attribution in multi-agent systems -- pinpointing the exact step where a decisive error occurs -- is a critical yet unsolved challenge. Current methods treat this as a pattern recognition task over long conversation logs, leading to critically low step-level accuracy (below 17\%), which renders them impractical for debugging complex systems. Their core weakness is a fundamental inability to perform robust counterfactual reasoning: to determine if correcting a single action would have actually averted the task failure. To bridge this counterfactual inference gap, we introduce Abduct-Act-Predict (A2P) Scaffolding, a novel agent framework that transforms failure attribution from pattern recognition into a structured causal inference task. A2P explicitly guides a large language model through a formal three-step reasoning process within a single inference pass: (1) Abduction, to infer the hidden root causes behind an agent's actions; (2) Action, to define a minimal corrective intervention; and (3) Prediction, to simulate the subsequent trajectory and verify if the intervention resolves the failure. This structured approach leverages the holistic context of the entire conversation while imposing a rigorous causal logic on the model's analysis. Our extensive experiments on the Who\&When benchmark demonstrate its efficacy. On the Algorithm-Generated dataset, A2P achieves 47.46\% step-level accuracy, a 2.85times improvement over the 16.67\% of the baseline. On the more complex Hand-Crafted dataset, it achieves 29.31\% step accuracy, a 2.43times improvement over the baseline's 12.07\%. By reframing the problem through a causal lens, A2P Scaffolding provides a robust, verifiable, and significantly more accurate solution for automated failure attribution. Ours code are released at https://github.com/ResearAI/A2P.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

Predictive-CSM: Lightweight Fragment Security for 6LoWPAN IoT Networks

Fragmentation is a routine part of communication in 6LoWPAN-based IoT networks, designed to accommodate small frame sizes on constrained wireless links. However, this process introduces a critical vulnerability fragments are typically stored and processed before their legitimacy is confirmed, allowing attackers to exploit this gap with minimal effort. In this work, we explore a defense strategy that takes a more adaptive, behavior-aware approach to this problem. Our system, called Predictive-CSM, introduces a combination of two lightweight mechanisms. The first tracks how each node behaves over time, rewarding consistent and successful interactions while quickly penalizing suspicious or failing patterns. The second checks the integrity of packet fragments using a chained hash, allowing incomplete or manipulated sequences to be caught early, before they can occupy memory or waste processing time. We put this system to the test using a set of targeted attack simulations, including early fragment injection, replayed headers, and flooding with fake data. Across all scenarios, Predictive CSM preserved network delivery and maintained energy efficiency, even under pressure. Rather than relying on heavyweight cryptography or rigid filters, this approach allows constrained de vices to adapt their defenses in real time based on what they observe, not just what they're told. In that way, it offers a step forward for securing fragmented communication in real world IoT systems

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025

Masked Diffusion with Task-awareness for Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos

A key challenge with procedure planning in instructional videos lies in how to handle a large decision space consisting of a multitude of action types that belong to various tasks. To understand real-world video content, an AI agent must proficiently discern these action types (e.g., pour milk, pour water, open lid, close lid, etc.) based on brief visual observation. Moreover, it must adeptly capture the intricate semantic relation of the action types and task goals, along with the variable action sequences. Recently, notable progress has been made via the integration of diffusion models and visual representation learning to address the challenge. However, existing models employ rudimentary mechanisms to utilize task information to manage the decision space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective enhancement - a masked diffusion model. The introduced mask acts akin to a task-oriented attention filter, enabling the diffusion/denoising process to concentrate on a subset of action types. Furthermore, to bolster the accuracy of task classification, we harness more potent visual representation learning techniques. In particular, we learn a joint visual-text embedding, where a text embedding is generated by prompting a pre-trained vision-language model to focus on human actions. We evaluate the method on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/ffzzy840304/Masked-PDPP.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 13, 2023

Traceability Transformed: Generating more Accurate Links with Pre-Trained BERT Models

Software traceability establishes and leverages associations between diverse development artifacts. Researchers have proposed the use of deep learning trace models to link natural language artifacts, such as requirements and issue descriptions, to source code; however, their effectiveness has been restricted by availability of labeled data and efficiency at runtime. In this study, we propose a novel framework called Trace BERT (T-BERT) to generate trace links between source code and natural language artifacts. To address data sparsity, we leverage a three-step training strategy to enable trace models to transfer knowledge from a closely related Software Engineering challenge, which has a rich dataset, to produce trace links with much higher accuracy than has previously been achieved. We then apply the T-BERT framework to recover links between issues and commits in Open Source Projects. We comparatively evaluated accuracy and efficiency of three BERT architectures. Results show that a Single-BERT architecture generated the most accurate links, while a Siamese-BERT architecture produced comparable results with significantly less execution time. Furthermore, by learning and transferring knowledge, all three models in the framework outperform classical IR trace models. On the three evaluated real-word OSS projects, the best T-BERT stably outperformed the VSM model with average improvements of 60.31% measured using Mean Average Precision (MAP). RNN severely underperformed on these projects due to insufficient training data, while T-BERT overcame this problem by using pretrained language models and transfer learning.

AntGPT: Can Large Language Models Help Long-term Action Anticipation from Videos?

Can we better anticipate an actor's future actions (e.g. mix eggs) by knowing what commonly happens after his/her current action (e.g. crack eggs)? What if we also know the longer-term goal of the actor (e.g. making egg fried rice)? The long-term action anticipation (LTA) task aims to predict an actor's future behavior from video observations in the form of verb and noun sequences, and it is crucial for human-machine interaction. We propose to formulate the LTA task from two perspectives: a bottom-up approach that predicts the next actions autoregressively by modeling temporal dynamics; and a top-down approach that infers the goal of the actor and plans the needed procedure to accomplish the goal. We hypothesize that large language models (LLMs), which have been pretrained on procedure text data (e.g. recipes, how-tos), have the potential to help LTA from both perspectives. It can help provide the prior knowledge on the possible next actions, and infer the goal given the observed part of a procedure, respectively. To leverage the LLMs, we propose a two-stage framework, AntGPT. It first recognizes the actions already performed in the observed videos and then asks an LLM to predict the future actions via conditioned generation, or to infer the goal and plan the whole procedure by chain-of-thought prompting. Empirical results on the Ego4D LTA v1 and v2 benchmarks, EPIC-Kitchens-55, as well as EGTEA GAZE+ demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. AntGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance on all above benchmarks, and can successfully infer the goal and thus perform goal-conditioned "counterfactual" prediction via qualitative analysis. Code and model will be released at https://brown-palm.github.io/AntGPT

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 30, 2023

SemParser: A Semantic Parser for Log Analysis

Logs, being run-time information automatically generated by software, record system events and activities with their timestamps. Before obtaining more insights into the run-time status of the software, a fundamental step of log analysis, called log parsing, is employed to extract structured templates and parameters from the semi-structured raw log messages. However, current log parsers are all syntax-based and regard each message as a character string, ignoring the semantic information included in parameters and templates. Thus, we propose the semantic-based parser SemParser to unlock the critical bottleneck of mining semantics from log messages. It contains two steps, an end-to-end semantic miner and a joint parser. Specifically, the first step aims to identify explicit semantics inside a single log, and the second step is responsible for jointly inferring implicit semantics and computing structural outputs based on the contextual knowledge base. To analyze the effectiveness of our semantic parser, we first demonstrate that it can derive rich semantics from log messages collected from six widely-applied systems with an average F1 score of 0.985. Then, we conduct two representative downstream tasks, showing that current downstream models improve their performance with appropriately extracted semantics by 1.2%-11.7% and 8.65% on two anomaly detection datasets and a failure identification dataset, respectively. We believe these findings provide insights into semantically understanding log messages for the log analysis community.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 23, 2021

The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends

In the era of large language models (LLMs), a vast amount of conversation logs will be accumulated thanks to the rapid development trend of language UI. Conversation Analysis (CA) strives to uncover and analyze critical information from conversation data, streamlining manual processes and supporting business insights and decision-making. The need for CA to extract actionable insights and drive empowerment is becoming increasingly prominent and attracting widespread attention. However, the lack of a clear scope for CA leads to a dispersion of various techniques, making it difficult to form a systematic technical synergy to empower business applications. In this paper, we perform a thorough review and systematize CA task to summarize the existing related work. Specifically, we formally define CA task to confront the fragmented and chaotic landscape in this field, and derive four key steps of CA from conversation scene reconstruction, to in-depth attribution analysis, and then to performing targeted training, finally generating conversations based on the targeted training for achieving the specific goals. In addition, we showcase the relevant benchmarks, discuss potential challenges and point out future directions in both industry and academia. In view of current advancements, it is evident that the majority of efforts are still concentrated on the analysis of shallow conversation elements, which presents a considerable gap between the research and business, and with the assist of LLMs, recent work has shown a trend towards research on causality and strategic tasks which are sophisticated and high-level. The analyzed experiences and insights will inevitably have broader application value in business operations that target conversation logs.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 21, 2024 2

TracLLM: A Generic Framework for Attributing Long Context LLMs

Long context large language models (LLMs) are deployed in many real-world applications such as RAG, agent, and broad LLM-integrated applications. Given an instruction and a long context (e.g., documents, PDF files, webpages), a long context LLM can generate an output grounded in the provided context, aiming to provide more accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable outputs while reducing hallucinations and unsupported claims. This raises a research question: how to pinpoint the texts (e.g., sentences, passages, or paragraphs) in the context that contribute most to or are responsible for the generated output by an LLM? This process, which we call context traceback, has various real-world applications, such as 1) debugging LLM-based systems, 2) conducting post-attack forensic analysis for attacks (e.g., prompt injection attack, knowledge corruption attacks) to an LLM, and 3) highlighting knowledge sources to enhance the trust of users towards outputs generated by LLMs. When applied to context traceback for long context LLMs, existing feature attribution methods such as Shapley have sub-optimal performance and/or incur a large computational cost. In this work, we develop TracLLM, the first generic context traceback framework tailored to long context LLMs. Our framework can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of existing feature attribution methods. To improve the efficiency, we develop an informed search based algorithm in TracLLM. We also develop contribution score ensemble/denoising techniques to improve the accuracy of TracLLM. Our evaluation results show TracLLM can effectively identify texts in a long context that lead to the output of an LLM. Our code and data are at: https://github.com/Wang-Yanting/TracLLM.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

Improving Generalization in Task-oriented Dialogues with Workflows and Action Plans

Task-oriented dialogue is difficult in part because it involves understanding user intent, collecting information from the user, executing API calls, and generating helpful and fluent responses. However, for complex tasks one must also correctly do all of these things over multiple steps, and in a specific order. While large pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned end-to-end to create multi-step task-oriented dialogue agents that generate fluent text, our experiments confirm that this approach alone cannot reliably perform new multi-step tasks that are unseen during training. To address these limitations, we augment the dialogue contexts given to text2text transformers with known valid workflow names and action plans. Action plans consist of sequences of actions required to accomplish a task, and are encoded as simple sequences of keywords (e.g. verify-identity, pull-up-account, reset-password, etc.). We perform extensive experiments on the Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD) with T5-small, base and large models, and show that such models: a) are able to more readily generalize to unseen workflows by following the provided plan, and b) are able to generalize to executing unseen actions if they are provided in the plan. In contrast, models are unable to fully accomplish new multi-step tasks when they are not provided action plan information, even when given new valid workflow names.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents

Autonomous user interface (UI) agents aim to facilitate task automation by interacting with the user interface without manual intervention. Recent studies have investigated eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for effective engagement in diverse environments. To align with the input-output requirement of LLMs, existing approaches are developed under a sandbox setting where they rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to parse the environment into textual elements and interpret the predicted actions. Consequently, those approaches often grapple with inference inefficiency and error propagation risks. To mitigate the challenges, we introduce Auto-UI, a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the interface, bypassing the need for environment parsing or reliance on application-dependent APIs. Moreover, we propose a chain-of-action technique -- leveraging a series of intermediate previous action histories and future action plans -- to help the agent decide what action to execute. We evaluate our approach on a new device-control benchmark AITW with 30K unique instructions, spanning multi-step tasks such as application operation, web searching, and web shopping. Experimental results show that Auto-UI achieves state-of-the-art performance with an action type prediction accuracy of 90% and an overall action success rate of 74%. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/Auto-UI.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 20, 2023

Trace Anything: Representing Any Video in 4D via Trajectory Fields

Effective spatio-temporal representation is fundamental to modeling, understanding, and predicting dynamics in videos. The atomic unit of a video, the pixel, traces a continuous 3D trajectory over time, serving as the primitive element of dynamics. Based on this principle, we propose representing any video as a Trajectory Field: a dense mapping that assigns a continuous 3D trajectory function of time to each pixel in every frame. With this representation, we introduce Trace Anything, a neural network that predicts the entire trajectory field in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, for each pixel in each frame, our model predicts a set of control points that parameterizes a trajectory (i.e., a B-spline), yielding its 3D position at arbitrary query time instants. We trained the Trace Anything model on large-scale 4D data, including data from our new platform, and our experiments demonstrate that: (i) Trace Anything achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark for trajectory field estimation and performs competitively on established point-tracking benchmarks; (ii) it offers significant efficiency gains thanks to its one-pass paradigm, without requiring iterative optimization or auxiliary estimators; and (iii) it exhibits emergent abilities, including goal-conditioned manipulation, motion forecasting, and spatio-temporal fusion. Project page: https://trace-anything.github.io/.

ByteDance-Seed ByteDance Seed
·
Oct 15, 2025 2

KADEL: Knowledge-Aware Denoising Learning for Commit Message Generation

Commit messages are natural language descriptions of code changes, which are important for software evolution such as code understanding and maintenance. However, previous methods are trained on the entire dataset without considering the fact that a portion of commit messages adhere to good practice (i.e., good-practice commits), while the rest do not. On the basis of our empirical study, we discover that training on good-practice commits significantly contributes to the commit message generation. Motivated by this finding, we propose a novel knowledge-aware denoising learning method called KADEL. Considering that good-practice commits constitute only a small proportion of the dataset, we align the remaining training samples with these good-practice commits. To achieve this, we propose a model that learns the commit knowledge by training on good-practice commits. This knowledge model enables supplementing more information for training samples that do not conform to good practice. However, since the supplementary information may contain noise or prediction errors, we propose a dynamic denoising training method. This method composes a distribution-aware confidence function and a dynamic distribution list, which enhances the effectiveness of the training process. Experimental results on the whole MCMD dataset demonstrate that our method overall achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with previous methods. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/KADEL

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

Pixels or Positions? Benchmarking Modalities in Group Activity Recognition

Group Activity Recognition (GAR) is well studied on the video modality for surveillance and indoor team sports (e.g., volleyball, basketball). Yet, other modalities such as agent positions and trajectories over time, i.e. tracking, remain comparatively under-explored despite being compact, agent-centric signals that explicitly encode spatial interactions. Understanding whether pixel (video) or position (tracking) modalities leads to better group activity recognition is therefore important to drive further research on the topic. However, no standardized benchmark currently exists that aligns broadcast video and tracking data for the same group activities, leading to a lack of apples-to-apples comparison between these modalities for GAR. In this work, we introduce SoccerNet-GAR, a multimodal dataset built from the 64 matches of the football World Cup 2022. Specifically, the broadcast videos and player tracking modalities for 94{,}285 group activities are synchronized and annotated with 10 categories. Furthermore, we define a unified evaluation protocol to benchmark two strong unimodal approaches: (i) a competitive video-based classifiers and (ii) a tracking-based classifiers leveraging graph neural networks. In particular, our novel role-aware graph architecture for tracking-based GAR directly encodes tactical structure through positional edges and temporal attention. Our tracking model achieves 67.2% balanced accuracy compared to 58.1% for the best video baseline, while training 4.25 times faster with 438 times fewer parameters (197K \vs 86.3M). This study provides new insights into the relative strengths of pixels and positions for group activity recognition. Overall, it highlights the importance of modality choice and role-aware modeling for GAR.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 16, 2025

CoCoNUT: Structural Code Understanding does not fall out of a tree

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a wide array of tasks involving both structured and unstructured textual data. Recent results on various benchmarks for code generation, repair, or completion suggest that certain models have programming abilities comparable to or even surpass humans. In this work, we demonstrate that high performance on such benchmarks does not correlate to humans' innate ability to understand structural control flow in code. To this end, we extract solutions from the HumanEval benchmark, which the relevant models perform strongly on, and trace their execution path using function calls sampled from the respective test set. Using this dataset, we investigate the ability of seven state-of-the-art LLMs to match the execution trace and find that, despite their ability to generate semantically identical code, they possess limited ability to trace execution paths, especially for longer traces and specific control structures. We find that even the top-performing model, Gemini, can fully and correctly generate only 47% of HumanEval task traces. Additionally, we introduce a subset for three key structures not contained in HumanEval: Recursion, Parallel Processing, and Object-Oriented Programming, including concepts like Inheritance and Polymorphism. Besides OOP, we show that none of the investigated models achieve an accuracy over 5% on the relevant traces. Aggregating these specialized parts with HumanEval tasks, we present Benchmark CoCoNUT: Code Control Flow for Navigation Understanding and Testing, which measures a model's ability to trace execution of code upon relevant calls, including advanced structural components. We conclude that current LLMs need significant improvement to enhance code reasoning abilities. We hope our dataset helps researchers bridge this gap.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025

TRACE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Continual Learning in Large Language Models

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs, owing to both their simplicity and the models' potential exposure during instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs. TRACE consists of 8 distinct datasets spanning challenging tasks including domain-specific tasks, multilingual capabilities, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. All datasets are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Our experiments show that after training on TRACE, aligned LLMs exhibit significant declines in both general ability and instruction-following capabilities. For example, the accuracy of llama2-chat 13B on gsm8k dataset declined precipitously from 28.8\% to 2\% after training on our datasets. This highlights the challenge of finding a suitable tradeoff between achieving performance on specific tasks while preserving the original prowess of LLMs. Empirical findings suggest that tasks inherently equipped with reasoning paths contribute significantly to preserving certain capabilities of LLMs against potential declines. Motivated by this, we introduce the Reasoning-augmented Continual Learning (RCL) approach. RCL integrates task-specific cues with meta-rationales, effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs while expediting convergence on novel tasks.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

Generative Action Description Prompts for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has recently received considerable attention. Current approaches to skeleton-based action recognition are typically formulated as one-hot classification tasks and do not fully exploit the semantic relations between actions. For example, "make victory sign" and "thumb up" are two actions of hand gestures, whose major difference lies in the movement of hands. This information is agnostic from the categorical one-hot encoding of action classes but could be unveiled from the action description. Therefore, utilizing action description in training could potentially benefit representation learning. In this work, we propose a Generative Action-description Prompts (GAP) approach for skeleton-based action recognition. More specifically, we employ a pre-trained large-scale language model as the knowledge engine to automatically generate text descriptions for body parts movements of actions, and propose a multi-modal training scheme by utilizing the text encoder to generate feature vectors for different body parts and supervise the skeleton encoder for action representation learning. Experiments show that our proposed GAP method achieves noticeable improvements over various baseline models without extra computation cost at inference. GAP achieves new state-of-the-arts on popular skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks, including NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and NW-UCLA. The source code is available at https://github.com/MartinXM/GAP.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 10, 2022

Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with domain-specific skills is critical for tackling complex tasks. Yet, manual authoring creates a severe scalability bottleneck. Conversely, automated skill generation often yields fragile or fragmented results because it either relies on shallow parametric knowledge or sequentially overfits to non-generalizable trajectory-local lessons. To overcome this, we introduce Trace2Skill, a framework that mirrors how human experts author skills: by holistically analyzing broad execution experience before distilling it into a single, comprehensive guide. Instead of reacting sequentially to individual trajectories, Trace2Skill dispatches a parallel fleet of sub-agents to analyze a diverse pool of executions. It extracts trajectory-specific lessons and hierarchically consolidates them into a unified, conflict-free skill directory via inductive reasoning. Trace2Skill supports both deepening existing human-written skills and creating new ones from scratch. Experiments in challenging domains, such as spreadsheet, VisionQA and math reasoning, show that Trace2Skill significantly improves upon strong baselines, including Anthropic's official xlsx skills. Crucially, this trajectory-grounded evolution does not merely memorize task instances or model-specific quirks: evolved skills transfer across LLM scales and generalize to OOD settings. For example, skills evolved by Qwen3.5-35B on its own trajectories improved a Qwen3.5-122B agent by up to 57.65 absolute percentage points on WikiTableQuestions. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that complex agent experience can be packaged into highly transferable, declarative skills -- requiring no parameter updates, no external retrieval modules, and utilizing open-source models as small as 35B parameters.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 26 14

OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talking

Every agent interaction generates a next-state signal, namely the user reply, tool output, terminal or GUI state change that follows each action, yet no existing agentic RL system recovers it as a live, online learning source. We present OpenClaw-RL, a framework built on a simple observation: next-state signals are universal, and policy can learn from all of them simultaneously. Personal conversations, terminal executions, GUI interactions, SWE tasks, and tool-call traces are not separate training problems. They are all interactions that can be used to train the same policy in the same loop. Next-state signals encode two forms of information: evaluative signals, which indicate how well the action performed and are extracted as scalar rewards via a PRM judge; and directive signals, which indicate how the action should have been different and are recovered through Hindsight-Guided On-Policy Distillation (OPD). We extract textual hints from the next state, construct an enhanced teacher context, and provide token-level directional advantage supervision that is richer than any scalar reward. Due to the asynchronous design, the model serves live requests, the PRM judges ongoing interactions, and the trainer updates the policy at the same time, with zero coordination overhead between them. Applied to personal agents, OpenClaw-RL enables an agent to improve simply by being used, recovering conversational signals from user re-queries, corrections, and explicit feedback. Applied to general agents, the same infrastructure supports scalable RL across terminal, GUI, SWE, and tool-call settings, where we additionally demonstrate the utility of process rewards. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/OpenClaw-RL

Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation

Sequential dynamics are a key feature of many modern recommender systems, which seek to capture the `context' of users' activities on the basis of actions they have performed recently. To capture such patterns, two approaches have proliferated: Markov Chains (MCs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Markov Chains assume that a user's next action can be predicted on the basis of just their last (or last few) actions, while RNNs in principle allow for longer-term semantics to be uncovered. Generally speaking, MC-based methods perform best in extremely sparse datasets, where model parsimony is critical, while RNNs perform better in denser datasets where higher model complexity is affordable. The goal of our work is to balance these two goals, by proposing a self-attention based sequential model (SASRec) that allows us to capture long-term semantics (like an RNN), but, using an attention mechanism, makes its predictions based on relatively few actions (like an MC). At each time step, SASRec seeks to identify which items are `relevant' from a user's action history, and use them to predict the next item. Extensive empirical studies show that our method outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models (including MC/CNN/RNN-based approaches) on both sparse and dense datasets. Moreover, the model is an order of magnitude more efficient than comparable CNN/RNN-based models. Visualizations on attention weights also show how our model adaptively handles datasets with various density, and uncovers meaningful patterns in activity sequences.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 20, 2018

Learning Next Action Predictors from Human-Computer Interaction

Truly proactive AI systems must anticipate what we will do next. This foresight demands far richer information than the sparse signals we type into our prompts -- it demands reasoning over the entire context of what we see and do. We formalize this as next action prediction (NAP): given a sequence of a user's multimodal interactions with a computer (screenshots, clicks, sensor data), predict that user's next action. Progress on this task requires both new data and modeling approaches. To scale data, we annotate longitudinal, naturalistic computer use with vision-language models. We release an open-source pipeline for performing this labeling on private infrastructure, and label over 360K actions across one month of continuous phone usage from 20 users, amounting to 1,800 hours of screen time. We then introduce LongNAP, a user model that combines parametric and in-context learning to reason over long interaction histories. LongNAP is trained via policy gradient methods to generate user-specific reasoning traces given some context; retrieve relevant traces from a library of past traces; and then apply retrieved traces in-context to predict future actions. Using an LLM-as-judge evaluation metric (0-1 similarity to ground truth), LongNAP significantly outperforms supervised finetuning and prompted baselines on held-out data (by 79% and 39% respectively). Additionally, LongNAP generalizes to held out users when trained across individuals. The space of next actions a user might take at any moment is unbounded, spanning thousands of possible outcomes. Despite this, 17.1% of LongNAP's predicted trajectories are well-aligned with what a user does next (LLM-judge score geq 0.5). This rises to 26% when we filter to highly confident predictions. In sum, we argue that learning from the full context of user behavior to anticipate user needs is now a viable task with substantial opportunity.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 6

ActionHub: A Large-scale Action Video Description Dataset for Zero-shot Action Recognition

Zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR) aims to learn an alignment model between videos and class descriptions of seen actions that is transferable to unseen actions. The text queries (class descriptions) used in existing ZSAR works, however, are often short action names that fail to capture the rich semantics in the videos, leading to misalignment. With the intuition that video content descriptions (e.g., video captions) can provide rich contextual information of visual concepts in videos, we propose to utilize human annotated video descriptions to enrich the semantics of the class descriptions of each action. However, all existing action video description datasets are limited in terms of the number of actions, the semantics of video descriptions, etc. To this end, we collect a large-scale action video descriptions dataset named ActionHub, which covers a total of 1,211 common actions and provides 3.6 million action video descriptions. With the proposed ActionHub dataset, we further propose a novel Cross-modality and Cross-action Modeling (CoCo) framework for ZSAR, which consists of a Dual Cross-modality Alignment module and a Cross-action Invariance Mining module. Specifically, the Dual Cross-modality Alignment module utilizes both action labels and video descriptions from ActionHub to obtain rich class semantic features for feature alignment. The Cross-action Invariance Mining module exploits a cycle-reconstruction process between the class semantic feature spaces of seen actions and unseen actions, aiming to guide the model to learn cross-action invariant representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CoCo framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on three popular ZSAR benchmarks (i.e., Kinetics-ZSAR, UCF101 and HMDB51) under two different learning protocols in ZSAR. We will release our code, models, and the proposed ActionHub dataset.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 21, 2024

Aligning Language Models from User Interactions

Multi-turn user interactions are among the most abundant data produced by language models, yet we lack effective methods to learn from them. While typically discarded, these interactions often contain useful information: follow-up user messages may indicate that a response was incorrect, failed to follow an instruction, or did not align with the user's preferences. Importantly, language models are already able to make use of this information in context. After observing a user's follow-up, the same model is often able to revise its behavior. We leverage this ability to propose a principled and scalable method for learning directly from user interactions through self-distillation. By conditioning the model on the user's follow-up message and comparing the resulting token distribution with the original policy, we obtain a target for updating the policy that captures how the model's behavior changes in hindsight. We then distill this hindsight distribution back into the current policy. Remarkably, we show that training on real-world user conversations from WildChat improves language models across standard alignment and instruction-following benchmarks, without regressing other capabilities. The same mechanism enables personalization, allowing models to continually adapt to individual users through interaction without explicit feedback. Our results demonstrate that raw user interactions that arise naturally during deployment enable alignment, personalization, and continual adaptation.

Empowering Dynamics-aware Text-to-Video Diffusion with Large Language Models

Text-to-video (T2V) synthesis has gained increasing attention in the community, in which the recently emerged diffusion models (DMs) have promisingly shown stronger performance than the past approaches. While existing state-of-the-art DMs are competent to achieve high-resolution video generation, they may largely suffer from key limitations (e.g., action occurrence disorders, crude video motions) with respect to the intricate temporal dynamics modeling, one of the crux of video synthesis. In this work, we investigate strengthening the awareness of video dynamics for DMs, for high-quality T2V generation. Inspired by human intuition, we design an innovative dynamic scene manager (dubbed as Dysen) module, which includes (step-1) extracting from input text the key actions with proper time-order arrangement, (step-2) transforming the action schedules into the dynamic scene graph (DSG) representations, and (step-3) enriching the scenes in the DSG with sufficient and reasonable details. Taking advantage of the existing powerful LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) via in-context learning, Dysen realizes (nearly) human-level temporal dynamics understanding. Finally, the resulting video DSG with rich action scene details is encoded as fine-grained spatio-temporal features, integrated into the backbone T2V DM for video generating. Experiments on popular T2V datasets suggest that our framework consistently outperforms prior arts with significant margins, especially in the scenario with complex actions. Project page at https://haofei.vip/Dysen-VDM

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 26, 2023

GUIDE: Graphical User Interface Data for Execution

In this paper, we introduce GUIDE, a novel dataset tailored for the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) applications, particularly focusing on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) use cases. Our dataset encompasses diverse data from various websites including Apollo(62.67\%), Gmail(3.43\%), Calendar(10.98\%) and Canva(22.92\%). Each data entry includes an image, a task description, the last action taken, CoT and the next action to be performed along with grounding information of where the action needs to be executed. The data is collected using our in-house advanced annotation tool NEXTAG (Next Action Grounding and Annotation Tool). The data is adapted for multiple OS, browsers and display types. It is collected by multiple annotators to capture the variation of design and the way person uses a website. Through this dataset, we aim to facilitate research and development in the realm of LLMs for graphical user interfaces, particularly in tasks related to RPA. The dataset's multi-platform nature and coverage of diverse websites enable the exploration of cross-interface capabilities in automation tasks. We believe that our dataset will serve as a valuable resource for advancing the capabilities of multi-platform LLMs in practical applications, fostering innovation in the field of automation and natural language understanding. Using GUIDE, we build V-Zen, the first RPA model to automate multiple websites using our in-House Automation tool AUTONODE

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 9, 2024

MAPLE: A Mobile Agent with Persistent Finite State Machines for Structured Task Reasoning

Mobile GUI agents aim to autonomously complete user-instructed tasks across mobile apps. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable these agents to interpret UI screens, identify actionable elements, and perform interactions such as tapping or typing. However, existing agents remain reactive: they reason only over the current screen and lack a structured model of app navigation flow, limiting their ability to understand context, detect unexpected outcomes, and recover from errors. We present MAPLE, a state-aware multi-agent framework that abstracts app interactions as a Finite State Machine (FSM). We computationally model each UI screen as a discrete state and user actions as transitions, allowing the FSM to provide a structured representation of the app execution. MAPLE consists of specialized agents responsible for four phases of task execution: planning, execution, verification, error recovery, and knowledge retention. These agents collaborate to dynamically construct FSMs in real time based on perception data extracted from the UI screen, allowing the GUI agents to track navigation progress and flow, validate action outcomes through pre- and post-conditions of the states, and recover from errors by rolling back to previously stable states. Our evaluation results on two challenging cross-app benchmarks, Mobile-Eval-E and SPA-Bench, show that MAPLE outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline, improving task success rate by up to 12%, recovery success by 13.8%, and action accuracy by 6.5%. Our results highlight the importance of structured state modeling in guiding mobile GUI agents during task execution. Moreover, our FSM representation can be integrated into future GUI agent architectures as a lightweight, model-agnostic memory layer to support structured planning, execution verification, and error recovery.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Automatic Malware Description via Attribute Tagging and Similarity Embedding

With the rapid proliferation and increased sophistication of malicious software (malware), detection methods no longer rely only on manually generated signatures but have also incorporated more general approaches like machine learning detection. Although powerful for conviction of malicious artifacts, these methods do not produce any further information about the type of threat that has been detected neither allows for identifying relationships between malware samples. In this work, we address the information gap between machine learning and signature-based detection methods by learning a representation space for malware samples in which files with similar malicious behaviors appear close to each other. We do so by introducing a deep learning based tagging model trained to generate human-interpretable semantic descriptions of malicious software, which, at the same time provides potentially more useful and flexible information than malware family names. We show that the malware descriptions generated with the proposed approach correctly identify more than 95% of eleven possible tag descriptions for a given sample, at a deployable false positive rate of 1% per tag. Furthermore, we use the learned representation space to introduce a similarity index between malware files, and empirically demonstrate using dynamic traces from files' execution, that is not only more effective at identifying samples from the same families, but also 32 times smaller than those based on raw feature vectors.

  • 5 authors
·
May 15, 2019