Xinyi Yang

Shu Zhang, Xinyi Yang, Yihao Feng et al. · apple-ml

Incorporating human feedback has been shown to be crucial to align text generated by large language models to human preferences. We hypothesize that state-of-the-art instructional image editing models, where outputs are generated based on an input image and an editing instruction, could similarly benefit from human feedback, as their outputs may not adhere to the correct instructions and preferences of users. In this paper, we present a novel framework to harness human feedback for instructional visual editing (HIVE). Specifically, we collect human feedback on the edited images and learn a reward function to capture the underlying user preferences. We then introduce scalable diffusion model fine-tuning methods that can incorporate human preferences based on the estimated reward. Besides, to mitigate the bias brought by the limitation of data, we contribute a new 1M training dataset, a 3.6K reward dataset for rewards learning, and a 1K evaluation dataset to boost the performance of instructional image editing. We conduct extensive empirical experiments quantitatively and qualitatively, showing that HIVE is favored over previous state-of-the-art instructional image editing approaches by a large margin.

Chao Yu, Xinyi Yang, Jiaxuan Gao et al. · bytedance

We consider the problem of cooperative exploration where multiple robots need to cooperatively explore an unknown region as fast as possible. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently become a trending paradigm for solving this challenge. However, existing MARL-based methods adopt action-making steps as the metric for exploration efficiency by assuming all the agents are acting in a fully synchronous manner: i.e., every single agent produces an action simultaneously and every single action is executed instantaneously at each time step. Despite its mathematical simplicity, such a synchronous MARL formulation can be problematic for real-world robotic applications. It can be typical that different robots may take slightly different wall-clock times to accomplish an atomic action or even periodically get lost due to hardware issues. Simply waiting for every robot being ready for the next action can be particularly time-inefficient. Therefore, we propose an asynchronous MARL solution, Asynchronous Coordination Explorer (ACE), to tackle this real-world challenge. We first extend a classical MARL algorithm, multi-agent PPO (MAPPO), to the asynchronous setting and additionally apply action-delay randomization to enforce the learned policy to generalize better to varying action delays in the real world. Moreover, each navigation agent is represented as a team-size-invariant CNN-based policy, which greatly benefits real-robot deployment by handling possible robot lost and allows bandwidth-efficient intra-agent communication through low-dimensional CNN features. We first validate our approach in a grid-based scenario. Both simulation and real-robot results show that ACE reduces over 10% actual exploration time compared with classical approaches. We also apply our framework to a high-fidelity visual-based environment, Habitat, achieving 28% improvement in exploration efficiency.

Xinyi Yang, Shiyu Huang, Yiwen Sun et al.

This paper investigates the multi-agent navigation problem, which requires multiple agents to reach the target goals in a limited time. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promising results for solving this issue. However, it is inefficient for MARL to directly explore the (nearly) optimal policy in the large search space, which is exacerbated as the agent number increases (e.g., 10+ agents) or the environment is more complex (e.g., 3D simulator). Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) provides a promising direction to tackle this challenge by introducing a hierarchical structure to decompose the search space, where the low-level policy predicts primitive actions in the guidance of the goals derived from the high-level policy. In this paper, we propose Multi-Agent Graph-Enhanced Commander-Executor (MAGE-X), a graph-based goal-conditioned hierarchical method for multi-agent navigation tasks. MAGE-X comprises a high-level Goal Commander and a low-level Action Executor. The Goal Commander predicts the probability distribution of goals and leverages them to assign each agent the most appropriate final target. The Action Executor utilizes graph neural networks (GNN) to construct a subgraph for each agent that only contains crucial partners to improve cooperation. Additionally, the Goal Encoder in the Action Executor captures the relationship between the agent and the designated goal to encourage the agent to reach the final target. The results show that MAGE-X outperforms the state-of-the-art MARL baselines with a 100% success rate with only 3 million training steps in multi-agent particle environments (MPE) with 50 agents, and at least a 12% higher success rate and 2x higher data efficiency in a more complicated quadrotor 3D navigation task.

Rui Meng, Ziyan Jiang, Ye Liu et al. · amazon-science

Multimodal embedding models have been crucial in enabling various downstream tasks such as semantic similarity, information retrieval, and clustering over different modalities. However, existing multimodal embeddings like VLM2Vec, E5-V, GME are predominantly focused on natural images, with limited support for other visual forms such as videos and visual documents. This restricts their applicability in real-world scenarios, including AI agents, multi-modal search and recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). To close this gap, we propose VLM2Vec-V2, a unified framework for learning embeddings across diverse visual forms. First, we introduce MMEB-V2, a comprehensive benchmark that extends MMEB with five new task types: visual document retrieval, video retrieval, temporal grounding, video classification and video question answering - spanning text, image, video, and visual document inputs. Next, we train VLM2Vec-V2, a general-purpose embedding model that supports text, image, video, and visual document inputs. Extensive experiments show that VLM2Vec-V2 achieves strong performance not only on the newly introduced video and document retrieval tasks, but also improves over prior baselines on the original image benchmarks. Through extensive evaluation, our study offers insights into the generalizability of various multimodal embedding models and highlights effective strategies for unified embedding learning, laying the groundwork for more scalable and adaptable representation learning in both research and real-world settings.

Xinyi Yang, Xinting Yang, Chao Yu et al.

We investigate multi-agent navigation tasks, where multiple agents need to reach initially unassigned goals in a limited time. Classical planning-based methods suffer from expensive computation overhead at each step and offer limited expressiveness for complex cooperation strategies. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a popular approach for addressing this issue. However, RL struggles with low data efficiency and cooperation when directly exploring (nearly) optimal policies in a large exploration space, especially with an increased number of agents(e.g., 10+ agents) or in complex environments (e.g., 3-D simulators). In this paper, we propose the Multi-Agent Scalable Graph-based Planner (MASP), a goal-conditioned hierarchical planner for navigation tasks with a substantial number of agents in the decentralized setting. MASP employs a hierarchical framework to reduce space complexity by decomposing a large exploration space into multiple goal-conditioned subspaces, where a high-level policy assigns agents goals, and a low-level policy navigates agents toward designated goals. For agent cooperation and the adaptation to varying team sizes, we model agents and goals as graphs to better capture their relationship. The high-level policy, the Goal Matcher, leverages a graph-based Self-Encoder and Cross-Encoder to optimize goal assignment by updating the agent and the goal graphs. The low-level policy, the Coordinated Action Executor, introduces the Group Information Fusion to facilitate group division and extract agent relationships across groups, enhancing training efficiency for agent cooperation. The results demonstrate that MASP outperforms RL and planning-based baselines in task efficiency.

Can Qin, Shu Zhang, Ning Yu et al.

Achieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural, or geometric controls. The integration of such controls, which can accommodate various visual conditions in a single unified model, remains an unaddressed challenge. In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts. UniControl enables pixel-level-precise image generation, where visual conditions primarily influence the generated structures and language prompts guide the style and context. To equip UniControl with the capacity to handle diverse visual conditions, we augment pretrained text-to-image diffusion models and introduce a task-aware HyperNet to modulate the diffusion models, enabling the adaptation to different C2I tasks simultaneously. Trained on nine unique C2I tasks, UniControl demonstrates impressive zero-shot generation abilities with unseen visual conditions. Experimental results show that UniControl often surpasses the performance of single-task-controlled methods of comparable model sizes. This control versatility positions UniControl as a significant advancement in the realm of controllable visual generation.

Chao Yu, Xinyi Yang, Jiaxuan Gao et al.

We tackle the problem of cooperative visual exploration where multiple agents need to jointly explore unseen regions as fast as possible based on visual signals. Classical planning-based methods often suffer from expensive computation overhead at each step and a limited expressiveness of complex cooperation strategy. By contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a popular paradigm for tackling this challenge due to its modeling capability of arbitrarily complex strategies and minimal inference overhead. In this paper, we extend the state-of-the-art single-agent visual navigation method, Active Neural SLAM (ANS), to the multi-agent setting by introducing a novel RL-based planning module, Multi-agent Spatial Planner (MSP).MSP leverages a transformer-based architecture, Spatial-TeamFormer, which effectively captures spatial relations and intra-agent interactions via hierarchical spatial self-attentions. In addition, we also implement a few multi-agent enhancements to process local information from each agent for an aligned spatial representation and more precise planning. Finally, we perform policy distillation to extract a meta policy to significantly improve the generalization capability of final policy. We call this overall solution, Multi-Agent Active Neural SLAM (MAANS). MAANS substantially outperforms classical planning-based baselines for the first time in a photo-realistic 3D simulator, Habitat. Code and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/maans.