Tianbao Xie

Zhoujun Cheng, Tianbao Xie, Peng Shi et al. · cambridge

Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of language model (LM) functionalities to a programming language (e.g., SQL, Python) to extend its grammar coverage and thus tackle more diverse questions, (2) adopts an LM as both the program parser and the underlying model called by the API during execution, and (3) requires only a few in-context exemplar annotations. Specifically, we employ GPT-3 Codex as the LM. In the parsing stage, with only a few in-context exemplars, Codex is able to identify the part of the task input that cannot be answerable by the original programming language, correctly generate API calls to prompt Codex to solve the unanswerable part, and identify where to place the API calls while being compatible with the original grammar. In the execution stage, Codex can perform versatile functionalities (e.g., commonsense QA, information extraction) given proper prompts in the API calls. Binder achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Note that previous best systems are all finetuned on tens of thousands of task-specific samples, while Binder only uses dozens of annotations as in-context exemplars without any training. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/Binder .

Yiheng Xu, Hongjin Su, Chen Xing et al.

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemur

Tianbao Xie, Siheng Zhao, Chen Henry Wu et al. · cmu

Designing reward functions is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning (RL); it requires specialized knowledge or domain data, leading to high costs for development. To address this, we introduce Text2Reward, a data-free framework that automates the generation and shaping of dense reward functions based on large language models (LLMs). Given a goal described in natural language, Text2Reward generates shaped dense reward functions as an executable program grounded in a compact representation of the environment. Unlike inverse RL and recent work that uses LLMs to write sparse reward codes or unshaped dense rewards with a constant function across timesteps, Text2Reward produces interpretable, free-form dense reward codes that cover a wide range of tasks, utilize existing packages, and allow iterative refinement with human feedback. We evaluate Text2Reward on two robotic manipulation benchmarks (ManiSkill2, MetaWorld) and two locomotion environments of MuJoCo. On 13 of the 17 manipulation tasks, policies trained with generated reward codes achieve similar or better task success rates and convergence speed than expert-written reward codes. For locomotion tasks, our method learns six novel locomotion behaviors with a success rate exceeding 94%. Furthermore, we show that the policies trained in the simulator with our method can be deployed in the real world. Finally, Text2Reward further improves the policies by refining their reward functions with human feedback. Video results are available at https://text-to-reward.github.io/ .

Ruisheng Cao, Fangyu Lei, Haoyuan Wu et al. · tsinghua

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.

Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Tianbao Xie et al.

Due to high data demands of current methods, attention to zero-shot cross-lingual spoken language understanding (SLU) has grown, as such approaches greatly reduce human annotation effort. However, existing models solely rely on shared parameters, which can only perform implicit alignment across languages. We present Global--Local Contrastive Learning Framework (GL-CLeF) to address this shortcoming. Specifically, we employ contrastive learning, leveraging bilingual dictionaries to construct multilingual views of the same utterance, then encourage their representations to be more similar than negative example pairs, which achieves to explicitly aligned representations of similar sentences across languages. In addition, a key step in GL-CLeF is a proposed Local and Global component, which achieves a fine-grained cross-lingual transfer (i.e., sentence-level Local intent transfer, token-level Local slot transfer, and semantic-level Global transfer across intent and slot). Experiments on MultiATIS++ show that GL-CLeF achieves the best performance and successfully pulls representations of similar sentences across languages closer.

Tianbao Xie, Fan Zhou, Zhoujun Cheng et al.

Language agents show potential in being capable of utilizing natural language for varied and intricate tasks in diverse environments, particularly when built upon large language models (LLMs). Current language agent frameworks aim to facilitate the construction of proof-of-concept language agents while neglecting the non-expert user access to agents and paying little attention to application-level designs. We present OpenAgents, an open platform for using and hosting language agents in the wild of everyday life. OpenAgents includes three agents: (1) Data Agent for data analysis with Python/SQL and data tools; (2) Plugins Agent with 200+ daily API tools; (3) Web Agent for autonomous web browsing. OpenAgents enables general users to interact with agent functionalities through a web user interface optimized for swift responses and common failures while offering developers and researchers a seamless deployment experience on local setups, providing a foundation for crafting innovative language agents and facilitating real-world evaluations. We elucidate the challenges and opportunities, aspiring to set a foundation for future research and development of real-world language agents.

Yiru Chen, Ryan Li, Austin Mac et al.

We develop NL2INTERFACE to explore the potential of generating usable interactive multi-visualization interfaces from natural language queries. With NL2INTERFACE, users can directly write natural language queries to automatically generate a fully interactive multi-visualization interface without any extra effort of learning a tool or programming language. Further, users can interact with the interfaces to easily transform the data and quickly see the results in the visualizations.

Tianbao Xie, Danyang Zhang, Jixuan Chen et al.

Autonomous agents that accomplish complex computer tasks with minimal human interventions have the potential to transform human-computer interaction, significantly enhancing accessibility and productivity. However, existing benchmarks either lack an interactive environment or are limited to environments specific to certain applications or domains, failing to reflect the diverse and complex nature of real-world computer use, thereby limiting the scope of tasks and agent scalability. To address this issue, we introduce OSWorld, the first-of-its-kind scalable, real computer environment for multimodal agents, supporting task setup, execution-based evaluation, and interactive learning across various operating systems such as Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS. OSWorld can serve as a unified, integrated computer environment for assessing open-ended computer tasks that involve arbitrary applications. Building upon OSWorld, we create a benchmark of 369 computer tasks involving real web and desktop apps in open domains, OS file I/O, and workflows spanning multiple applications. Each task example is derived from real-world computer use cases and includes a detailed initial state setup configuration and a custom execution-based evaluation script for reliable, reproducible evaluation. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents on OSWorld reveals significant deficiencies in their ability to serve as computer assistants. While humans can accomplish over 72.36% of the tasks, the best model achieves only 12.24% success, primarily struggling with GUI grounding and operational knowledge. Comprehensive analysis using OSWorld provides valuable insights for developing multimodal generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Our code, environment, baseline models, and data are publicly available at https://os-world.github.io.

Yiheng Xu, Zekun Wang, Junli Wang et al.

Automating GUI tasks remains challenging due to reliance on textual representations, platform-specific action spaces, and limited reasoning capabilities. We introduce Aguvis, a unified vision-based framework for autonomous GUI agents that directly operates on screen images, standardizes cross-platform interactions and incorporates structured reasoning via inner monologue. To enable this, we construct Aguvis Data Collection, a large-scale dataset with multimodal grounding and reasoning annotations, and develop a two-stage training pipeline that separates GUI grounding from planning and reasoning. Experiments show that Aguvis achieves state-of-the-art performance across offline and real-world online benchmarks, marking the first fully autonomous vision-based GUI agent that operates without closed-source models. We open-source all datasets, models, and training recipes at https://aguvis-project.github.io to advance future research.

Tianbao Xie, Jiaqi Deng, Xiaochuan Li et al. · salesforce

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the ability to map natural language instructions to specific actions on graphical user interfaces, remains a critical bottleneck in computer use agent development. Current benchmarks oversimplify grounding tasks as short referring expressions, failing to capture the complexity of real-world interactions that require software commonsense, layout understanding, and fine-grained manipulation capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce OSWorld-G, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 564 finely annotated samples across diverse task types including text matching, element recognition, layout understanding, and precise manipulation. Additionally, we synthesize and release the largest computer use grounding dataset Jedi, which contains 4 million examples through multi-perspective decoupling of tasks. Our multi-scale models trained on Jedi demonstrate its effectiveness by outperforming existing approaches on ScreenSpot-v2, ScreenSpot-Pro, and our OSWorld-G. Furthermore, we demonstrate that improved grounding with Jedi directly enhances agentic capabilities of general foundation models on complex computer tasks, improving from 5% to 27% on OSWorld. Through detailed ablation studies, we identify key factors contributing to grounding performance and verify that combining specialized data for different interface elements enables compositional generalization to novel interfaces. All benchmark, data, checkpoints, and code are open-sourced and available at https://osworld-grounding.github.io.

Chengyou Jia, Minnan Luo, Zhuohang Dang et al.

Digital agents capable of automating complex computer tasks have attracted considerable attention due to their immense potential to enhance human-computer interaction. However, existing agent methods exhibit deficiencies in their generalization and specialization capabilities, especially in handling open-ended computer tasks in real-world environments. Inspired by the rich functionality of the App store, we present AgentStore, a scalable platform designed to dynamically integrate heterogeneous agents for automating computer tasks. AgentStore empowers users to integrate third-party agents, allowing the system to continuously enrich its capabilities and adapt to rapidly evolving operating systems. Additionally, we propose a novel core \textbf{MetaAgent} with the \textbf{AgentToken} strategy to efficiently manage diverse agents and utilize their specialized and generalist abilities for both domain-specific and system-wide tasks. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate that AgentStore surpasses the limitations of previous systems with narrow capabilities, particularly achieving a significant improvement from 11.21\% to 23.85\% on the OSWorld benchmark, more than doubling the previous results. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative results further demonstrate AgentStore's ability to enhance agent systems in both generalization and specialization, underscoring its potential for developing the specialized generalist computer assistant. All our codes will be made publicly available in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/AgentStore-Home.

Xuehui Wang, Zhenyu Wu, JingJing Xie et al. · pku

We introduce MMBench-GUI, a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating GUI automation agents across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and Web platforms. It comprises four levels: GUI Content Understanding, Element Grounding, Task Automation, and Task Collaboration, covering essential skills for GUI agents. In addition, we propose a novel Efficiency-Quality Area (EQA) metric to assess GUI agent execution efficiency in online automation scenarios. Through MMBench-GUI, we identify accurate visual grounding as a critical determinant of overall task success, emphasizing the substantial benefits of modular frameworks that integrate specialized grounding modules. Furthermore, to achieve reliable GUI automation, an agent requires strong task planning and cross-platform generalization abilities, with long-context memory, a broad action space, and long-term reasoning playing a critical role. More important, task efficiency remains a critically underexplored dimension, and all models suffer from substantial inefficiencies, with excessive redundant steps even when tasks are ultimately completed. The integration of precise localization, effective planning, and early stopping strategies is indispensable to enable truly efficient and scalable GUI automation. Our benchmark code, evaluation data, and running environment will be publicly available at https://github.com/open-compass/MMBench-GUI.

Shuai Bai, Keqin Chen, Xuejing Liu et al. · pku

We introduce Qwen2.5-VL, the latest flagship model of Qwen vision-language series, which demonstrates significant advancements in both foundational capabilities and innovative functionalities. Qwen2.5-VL achieves a major leap forward in understanding and interacting with the world through enhanced visual recognition, precise object localization, robust document parsing, and long-video comprehension. A standout feature of Qwen2.5-VL is its ability to localize objects using bounding boxes or points accurately. It provides robust structured data extraction from invoices, forms, and tables, as well as detailed analysis of charts, diagrams, and layouts. To handle complex inputs, Qwen2.5-VL introduces dynamic resolution processing and absolute time encoding, enabling it to process images of varying sizes and videos of extended durations (up to hours) with second-level event localization. This allows the model to natively perceive spatial scales and temporal dynamics without relying on traditional normalization techniques. By training a native dynamic-resolution Vision Transformer (ViT) from scratch and incorporating Window Attention, we reduce computational overhead while maintaining native resolution. As a result, Qwen2.5-VL excels not only in static image and document understanding but also as an interactive visual agent capable of reasoning, tool usage, and task execution in real-world scenarios such as operating computers and mobile devices. Qwen2.5-VL is available in three sizes, addressing diverse use cases from edge AI to high-performance computing. The flagship Qwen2.5-VL-72B model matches state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, particularly excelling in document and diagram understanding. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL maintains robust linguistic performance, preserving the core language competencies of the Qwen2.5 LLM.

Xuetian Chen, Yinghao Chen, Xinfeng Yuan et al.

Computer-using agents have shown strong potential to boost human productivity and enable new application forms across platforms. While recent advances have led to usable applications, existing benchmarks fail to account for the internal task heterogeneity and the corresponding agent capabilities, as well as their alignment with actual user demands-hindering both targeted capability development and the reliable transition of research progress into practical deployment. To bridge the gap, we present OS-MAP, a benchmark for daily computer-using automation that organizes its 416 realistic tasks across 15 applications along two key dimensions: a five-level taxonomy of automation and a generalization scope derived from a real-world user demand hierarchy. To enable fine-grained analysis of required capabilities and alignment with real-world scenarios, OS-MAP evaluates agents along two dimensions: automation level across a five-level taxonomy, and generalization scope across a demand hierarchy. This design captures varying levels of required agent autonomy and generalization, forming a performance-generalization evaluation matrix for structured and comprehensive assessment. Experiments show that even State-of-the-Art agents with VLM backbones struggle with higher-level tasks involving perception, reasoning, and coordination-highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of current strengths and limitations to drive the future progress in computer-using agents research and deployment. All code, environments, baselines, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/OS-Copilot/OS-Map.

Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi et al.

Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) leverages structured knowledge to complete user requests, such as semantic parsing over databases and question answering over knowledge bases. Since the inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately by different communities, which limits systematic and compatible research on SKG. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing the UnifiedSKG framework, which unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format, aiming to promote systematic SKG research, instead of being exclusive to a single task, domain, or dataset. We use UnifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes and show that T5, with simple modifications when necessary, achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks. We further demonstrate that multi-task prefix-tuning improves the performance on most tasks, largely improving the overall performance. UnifiedSKG also facilitates the investigation of zero-shot and few-shot learning, and we show that T0, GPT-3, and Codex struggle in zero-shot and few-shot learning for SKG. We also use UnifiedSKG to conduct a series of controlled experiments on structured knowledge encoding variants across SKG tasks. UnifiedSKG is easily extensible to more tasks, and it is open-sourced at https://github.com/hkunlp/unifiedskg.

Shuai Bai, Yuxuan Cai, Ruizhe Chen et al.

We introduce Qwen3-VL, the most capable vision-language model in the Qwen series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. It natively supports interleaved contexts of up to 256K tokens, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video. The model family includes both dense (2B/4B/8B/32B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B/235B-A22B) variants to accommodate diverse latency-quality trade-offs. Qwen3-VL delivers three core pillars: (i) markedly stronger pure-text understanding, surpassing comparable text-only backbones in several cases; (ii) robust long-context comprehension with a native 256K-token window for both text and interleaved multimodal inputs, enabling faithful retention, retrieval, and cross-referencing across long documents and videos; and (iii) advanced multimodal reasoning across single-image, multi-image, and video tasks, demonstrating leading performance on comprehensive evaluations such as MMMU and visual-math benchmarks (e.g., MathVista and MathVision). Architecturally, we introduce three key upgrades: (i) an enhanced interleaved-MRoPE for stronger spatial-temporal modeling across images and video; (ii) DeepStack integration, which effectively leverages multi-level ViT features to tighten vision-language alignment; and (iii) text-based time alignment for video, evolving from T-RoPE to explicit textual timestamp alignment for more precise temporal grounding. Under comparable token budgets and latency constraints, Qwen3-VL achieves superior performance in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We envision Qwen3-VL serving as a foundational engine for image-grounded reasoning, agentic decision-making, and multimodal code intelligence in real-world workflows.