An‐Ping Li

Saaket Agashe, Kyle Wong, Vincent Tu et al.

Computer use agents automate digital tasks by directly interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on computers and mobile devices, offering significant potential to enhance human productivity by completing an open-ended space of user queries. However, current agents face significant challenges: imprecise grounding of GUI elements, difficulties with long-horizon task planning, and performance bottlenecks from relying on single generalist models for diverse cognitive tasks. To this end, we introduce Agent S2, a novel compositional framework that delegates cognitive responsibilities across various generalist and specialist models. We propose a novel Mixture-of-Grounding technique to achieve precise GUI localization and introduce Proactive Hierarchical Planning, dynamically refining action plans at multiple temporal scales in response to evolving observations. Evaluations demonstrate that Agent S2 establishes new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on three prominent computer use benchmarks. Specifically, Agent S2 achieves 18.9% and 32.7% relative improvements over leading baseline agents such as Claude Computer Use and UI-TARS on the OSWorld 15-step and 50-step evaluation. Moreover, Agent S2 generalizes effectively to other operating systems and applications, surpassing previous best methods by 52.8% on WindowsAgentArena and by 16.52% on AndroidWorld relatively. Code available at https://github.com/simular-ai/Agent-S.

Ziyao Wang, Bowei Tian, Yexiao He et al.

The recent advancement of foundation models (FMs) has increased the demand for fine-tuning these models on large-scale cross-domain datasets. To address this, federated fine-tuning has emerged, allowing FMs to be fine-tuned on distributed datasets across multiple devices while ensuring data privacy. However, the substantial parameter size and the multi-round communication in federated learning algorithms result in prohibitively high communication costs, challenging the practicality of federated fine-tuning. In this paper, we identify and analyze, both theoretically and empirically, that the traditional multi-round aggregation algorithms may not be necessary for federated fine-tuning large FMs. Our experiments reveal that a single round of aggregation (i.e., one-shot federated fine-tuning) yields a global model performance comparable to that achieved through multiple rounds of aggregation. Through rigorous mathematical and empirical analyses, we demonstrate that large FMs, due to their extensive parameter sizes and pre-training on general tasks, achieve significantly lower training loss in one-shot federated fine-tuning compared to smaller models. Our extensive experiments show that one-shot federated fine-tuning significantly reduces communication costs. It also has the potential to enable asynchronous aggregation, enhances privacy, and maintains performance consistency with multi-round federated fine-tuning on both text generation and text-to-image generation tasks. Our findings provide insights to revolutionize federated fine-tuning in practice, enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and expanding accessibility for FMs.

Ganesh Narasimha, Mykola Telychko, Wooin Yang et al.

Manipulating matter with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) enables creation of atomically defined artificial structures that host designer quantum states. However, the time-consuming nature of the manipulation process, coupled with the sensitivity of the STM tip, constrains the exploration of diverse configurations and limits the size of designed features. In this study, we present a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for creating artificial structures by spatially manipulating carbon monoxide (CO) molecules on a copper substrate using the STM tip. The automated workflow combines molecule detection and manipulation, employing deep learning-based object detection to locate CO molecules and linear assignment algorithms to allocate these molecules to designated target sites. We initially perform molecule maneuvering based on randomized parameter sampling for sample bias, tunneling current setpoint and manipulation speed. This dataset is then structured into an action trajectory used to train an RL agent. The model is subsequently deployed on the STM for real-time fine-tuning of manipulation parameters during structure construction. Our approach incorporates path planning protocols coupled with active drift compensation to enable atomically precise fabrication of structures with significantly reduced human input while realizing larger-scale artificial lattices with desired electronic properties. To underpin of efficiency of our approach we demonstrate the automated construction of an extended artificial graphene lattice and confirm the existence of characteristic Dirac point in its electronic structure. Further challenges to RL-based structural assembly scalability are discussed.