Bowen Chen

Pan Lu, Bowen Chen, Sheng Liu et al. · stanford

Solving complex reasoning tasks may involve visual understanding, domain knowledge retrieval, numerical calculation, and multi-step reasoning. Existing methods augment large language models (LLMs) with external tools but are restricted to specialized domains, limited tool types, or require additional training data. In this paper, we introduce OctoTools, a training-free, user-friendly, and easily extensible open-source agentic framework designed to tackle complex reasoning across diverse domains. OctoTools introduces standardized tool cards to encapsulate tool functionality, a planner for both high-level and low-level planning, and an executor to carry out tool usage. We validate OctoTools' generality across 16 diverse tasks (including MathVista, MMLU-Pro, MedQA, and GAIA-Text), achieving substantial average accuracy gains of 9.3% over GPT-4o. Furthermore, OctoTools outperforms AutoGen, GPT-Functions and LangChain by up to 10.6% when given the same set of tools. Through comprehensive analysis and ablations, OctoTools demonstrates advantages in task planning, effective tool usage, and multi-step problem solving.

Bowen Chen, Zaixi Shang, Jae Won Chung et al.

Demand for streaming services, including satellite, continues to exhibit unprecedented growth. Internet Service Providers find themselves at the crossroads of technological advancements and rising customer expectations. To stay relevant and competitive, these ISPs must ensure their networks deliver optimal video streaming quality, a key determinant of user satisfaction. Towards this end, it is important to have accurate Quality of Experience prediction models in place. However, achieving robust performance by these models requires extensive data sets labeled by subjective opinion scores on videos impaired by diverse playback disruptions. To bridge this data gap, we introduce the LIVE-Viasat Real-World Satellite QoE Database. This database consists of 179 videos recorded from real-world streaming services affected by various authentic distortion patterns. We also conducted a comprehensive subjective study involving 54 participants, who contributed both continuous-time opinion scores and endpoint (retrospective) QoE scores. Our analysis sheds light on various determinants influencing subjective QoE, such as stall events, spatial resolutions, bitrate, and certain network parameters. We demonstrate the usefulness of this unique new resource by evaluating the efficacy of prevalent QoE-prediction models on it. We also created a new model that maps the network parameters to predicted human perception scores, which can be used by ISPs to optimize the video streaming quality of their networks. Our proposed model, which we call SatQA, is able to accurately predict QoE using only network parameters, without any access to pixel data or video-specific metadata, estimated by Spearman's Rank Order Correlation Coefficient (SROCC), Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), indicating high accuracy and reliability.