Boyuan Zheng

Fei Teng, Buyin Deng, Boyuan Zheng et al.

Field of Parallax (FoP)}, a spatial field that distills the common features from different LF representations to provide flexible and consistent support for multi-task learning. FoP is built upon three core features--projection difference, adjacency divergence, and contextual consistency--which are essential for cross-task adaptability. To implement FoP, we design a two-step angular adapter: the first step captures angular-specific differences, while the second step consolidates contextual consistency to ensure robust representation. Leveraging the FoP-based representation, we introduce the LFX framework, the first to handle arbitrary LF representations seamlessly, unifying LF multi-task vision. We evaluated LFX across three different tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art results, compared with previous task-specific architectures: 84.74% in mIoU for semantic segmentation on UrbanLF, 0.84% in AP for object detection on PKU, and 0.030 in MAE and 0.026 in MAE for salient object detection on Duftv2 and PKU, respectively. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/warriordby/LFX.

Yu Gu, Kai Zhang, Yuting Ning et al. · microsoft-research

Language agents based on large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great promise in automating web-based tasks. Recent work has shown that incorporating advanced planning algorithms, e.g., tree search, is advantageous over reactive planning for web agents. However, unlike simulated sandbox environments, real-world environments such as the web are rife with irreversible actions. This undermines the feasibility of backtracking, a cornerstone of (tree) search. Overly relying on test-time search also hurts efficiency. We advocate model-based planning for web agents that employs a world model to simulate and deliberate over the outcome of each candidate action before committing to one. We systematically explore this paradigm by (1) Proposing a model-based planning framework, WebDreamer, which employs LLMs to serve as both world models and value functions; (2) Training specialized LLMs as world models with a scalable data synthesis pipeline. Empirical results demonstrate that WebDreamer achieves substantial performance improvements over reactive baselines. It is competitive, while being 4-5 times more efficient, with tree search in sandbox environments (VisualWebArena) and also works effectively on real-world websites (Online-Mind2Web and Mind2Web-Live). Furthermore, our trained world model, Dreamer-7B, performs comparable to GPT-4o, highlighting the potential of specialized world models for efficient and effective planning in complex web environments.

Boyuan Zheng, Michael Y. Fatemi, Xiaolong Jin et al. · microsoft-research

To survive and thrive in complex environments, humans have evolved sophisticated self-improvement mechanisms through environment exploration, hierarchical abstraction of experiences into reuseable skills, and collaborative construction of an ever-growing skill repertoire. Despite recent advancements, autonomous web agents still lack crucial self-improvement capabilities, struggling with procedural knowledge abstraction, refining skills, and skill composition. In this work, we introduce SkillWeaver, a skill-centric framework enabling agents to self-improve by autonomously synthesizing reusable skills as APIs. Given a new website, the agent autonomously discovers skills, executes them for practice, and distills practice experiences into robust APIs. Iterative exploration continually expands a library of lightweight, plug-and-play APIs, significantly enhancing the agent's capabilities. Experiments on WebArena and real-world websites demonstrate the efficacy of SkillWeaver, achieving relative success rate improvements of 31.8% and 39.8%, respectively. Additionally, APIs synthesized by strong agents substantially enhance weaker agents through transferable skills, yielding improvements of up to 54.3% on WebArena. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of honing diverse website interactions into APIs, which can be seamlessly shared among various web agents.