Jie Tang

Xiao Liu, Tianjie Zhang, Yu Gu et al. · cmu, microsoft-research

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have ushered in a new era in artificial intelligence, merging capabilities in both language and vision to form highly capable Visual Foundation Agents. These agents are postulated to excel across a myriad of tasks, potentially approaching general artificial intelligence. However, existing benchmarks fail to sufficiently challenge or showcase the full potential of LMMs in complex, real-world environments. To address this gap, we introduce VisualAgentBench (VAB), a comprehensive and pioneering benchmark specifically designed to train and evaluate LMMs as visual foundation agents across diverse scenarios, including Embodied, Graphical User Interface, and Visual Design, with tasks formulated to probe the depth of LMMs' understanding and interaction capabilities. Through rigorous testing across nine proprietary LMM APIs and eight open models, we demonstrate the considerable yet still developing agent capabilities of these models. Additionally, VAB constructs a trajectory training set constructed through hybrid methods including Program-based Solvers, LMM Agent Bootstrapping, and Human Demonstrations, promoting substantial performance improvements in LMMs through behavior cloning. Our work not only aims to benchmark existing models but also provides a solid foundation for future development into visual foundation agents. Code, train \& test data, and part of fine-tuned open LMMs are available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/VisualAgentBench}.

Dan Zhang, Tao Feng, Lilong Xue et al.

This survey delves into the realm of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) within the context of Foundation Models (FMs). PEFT, a cost-effective fine-tuning technique, minimizes parameters and computational complexity while striving for optimal downstream task performance. FMs, like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and LLaVA specialize in language understanding, generative tasks, and multimodal tasks, trained on diverse datasets spanning text, images, and videos. The diversity of FMs guides various adaptation strategies for PEFT. Therefore, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of PEFT techniques applied to diverse FMs and address critical gaps in understanding the techniques, trends, and applications. We start by providing a detailed development of FMs and PEFT. Subsequently, we systematically review the key categories and core mechanisms of PEFT across diverse FMs to offer a comprehensive understanding of trends. We also explore the most recent applications across various FMs to demonstrate the versatility of PEFT, shedding light on the integration of systematic PEFT methods with a range of FMs. Furthermore, we identify potential research and development directions for improving PEFTs in the future. This survey provides a valuable resource for both newcomers and experts seeking to understand and use the power of PEFT across FMs. All reviewed papers are listed at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/Awesome-Parameter-Efficient-Fine-Tuning-for-Foundation-Models}.

Zhenyu Hou, Xin Lv, Rui Lu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches mainly rely on imitation learning and struggle to achieve effective test-time scaling. While reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for enabling self-exploration, recent attempts yield modest improvements in complex reasoning. In this paper, we present T1 to scale RL by encouraging exploration and understand inference scaling. We first initialize the LLM using synthesized chain-of-thought data that integrates trial-and-error and self-verification. To scale RL training, we promote increased sampling diversity through oversampling. We demonstrate that T1 with open LLMs as its base exhibits inference scaling behavior and achieves superior performance on challenging math reasoning benchmarks. More importantly, we present a simple strategy to examine inference scaling, where increased inference budgets directly lead to T1's better performance without any additional verification.

Xiao Liu, Bo Qin, Dongzhu Liang et al. · tsinghua

We present AutoGLM, a new series in the ChatGLM family, designed to serve as foundation agents for autonomous control of digital devices through Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). While foundation models excel at acquiring human knowledge, they often struggle with decision-making in dynamic real-world environments, limiting their progress toward artificial general intelligence. This limitation underscores the importance of developing foundation agents capable of learning through autonomous environmental interactions by reinforcing existing models. Focusing on Web Browser and Phone as representative GUI scenarios, we have developed AutoGLM as a practical foundation agent system for real-world GUI interactions. Our approach integrates a comprehensive suite of techniques and infrastructures to create deployable agent systems suitable for user delivery. Through this development, we have derived two key insights: First, the design of an appropriate "intermediate interface" for GUI control is crucial, enabling the separation of planning and grounding behaviors, which require distinct optimization for flexibility and accuracy respectively. Second, we have developed a novel progressive training framework that enables self-evolving online curriculum reinforcement learning for AutoGLM. Our evaluations demonstrate AutoGLM's effectiveness across multiple domains. For web browsing, AutoGLM achieves a 55.2% success rate on VAB-WebArena-Lite (improving to 59.1% with a second attempt) and 96.2% on OpenTable evaluation tasks. In Android device control, AutoGLM attains a 36.2% success rate on AndroidLab (VAB-Mobile) and 89.7% on common tasks in popular Chinese APPs.

Jie Zhang, Yan Wang, Jie Tang et al.

Network embedding aims to learn low-dimensional representations of nodes in a network, while the network structure and inherent properties are preserved. It has attracted tremendous attention recently due to significant progress in downstream network learning tasks, such as node classification, link prediction, and visualization. However, most existing network embedding methods suffer from the expensive computations due to the large volume of networks. In this paper, we propose a $10\times \sim 100\times$ faster network embedding method, called Progle, by elegantly utilizing the sparsity property of online networks and spectral analysis. In Progle, we first construct a \textit{sparse} proximity matrix and train the network embedding efficiently via sparse matrix decomposition. Then we introduce a network propagation pattern via spectral analysis to incorporate local and global structure information into the embedding. Besides, this model can be generalized to integrate network information into other insufficiently trained embeddings at speed. Benefiting from sparse spectral network embedding, our experiment on four different datasets shows that Progle outperforms or is comparable to state-of-the-art unsupervised comparison approaches---DeepWalk, LINE, node2vec, GraRep, and HOPE, regarding accuracy, while is $10\times$ faster than the fastest word2vec-based method. Finally, we validate the scalability of Progle both in real large-scale networks and multiple scales of synthetic networks.