Hang Su

Xianghao Kong, Jinyu Chen, Wenguan Wang et al.

Instruction generation is a vital and multidisciplinary research area with broad applications. Existing instruction generation models are limited to generating instructions in a single style from a particular dataset, and the style and content of generated instructions cannot be controlled. Moreover, most existing instruction generation methods also disregard the spatial modeling of the navigation environment. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose C-Instructor, which utilizes the chain-of-thought-style prompt for style-controllable and content-controllable instruction generation. Firstly, we propose a Chain of Thought with Landmarks (CoTL) mechanism, which guides the LLM to identify key landmarks and then generate complete instructions. CoTL renders generated instructions more accessible to follow and offers greater controllability over the manipulation of landmark objects. Furthermore, we present a Spatial Topology Modeling Task to facilitate the understanding of the spatial structure of the environment. Finally, we introduce a Style-Mixed Training policy, harnessing the prior knowledge of LLMs to enable style control for instruction generation based on different prompts within a single model instance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that instructions generated by C-Instructor outperform those generated by previous methods in text metrics, navigation guidance evaluation, and user studies.

Yichi Zhang, Yinpeng Dong, Siyuan Zhang et al.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising versatile capabilities, their performance is still inferior to specialized models on downstream tasks, which makes adaptation necessary to enhance their utility. However, fine-tuning methods require independent training for every model, leading to huge computation and memory overheads. In this paper, we propose a novel setting where we aim to improve the performance of diverse MLLMs with a group of shared parameters optimized for a downstream task. To achieve this, we propose Transferable Visual Prompting (TVP), a simple and effective approach to generate visual prompts that can transfer to different models and improve their performance on downstream tasks after trained on only one model. We introduce two strategies to address the issue of cross-model feature corruption of existing visual prompting methods and enhance the transferability of the learned prompts, including 1) Feature Consistency Alignment: which imposes constraints to the prompted feature changes to maintain task-agnostic knowledge; 2) Task Semantics Enrichment: which encourages the prompted images to contain richer task-specific semantics with language guidance. We validate the effectiveness of TVP through extensive experiments with 6 modern MLLMs on a wide variety of tasks ranging from object recognition and counting to multimodal reasoning and hallucination correction.

Yuwei Zhang, Siffi Singh, Sailik Sengupta et al.

Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don't particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks -- (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model's understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems -- negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.

Devang Kulshreshtha, Wanyu Du, Raghav Jain et al. · mila

This paper introduces a novel framework for simulating and analyzing how uncooperative behaviors can destabilize or collapse LLM-based multi-agent systems. Our framework includes two key components: (1) a game theory-based taxonomy of uncooperative agent behaviors, addressing a notable gap in the existing literature; and (2) a structured, multi-stage simulation pipeline that dynamically generates and refines uncooperative behaviors as agents' states evolve. We evaluate the framework via a collaborative resource management setting, measuring system stability using metrics such as survival time and resource overuse rate. Empirically, our framework achieves 96.7% accuracy in generating realistic uncooperative behaviors, validated by human evaluations. Our results reveal a striking contrast: cooperative agents maintain perfect system stability (100% survival over 12 rounds with 0% resource overuse), while any uncooperative behavior can trigger rapid system collapse within 1 to 7 rounds. These findings demonstrate that uncooperative agents can significantly degrade collective outcomes, highlighting the need for designing more resilient multi-agent systems.