7.3AIJul 1
Can Agents Generalize to the Open World? Unveiling the Fragility of Static Training in Tool UseSong-Lin Lv, Weiming Wu, Rui Zhu et al.
While Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate proficiency in static benchmarks, their deployment in real-world scenarios is hindered by the dynamic nature of user queries, tool sets, and interaction dynamics. To address this generalization gap, we formalize OpenAgent (Tool-Use Agent in Open-World), a problem setting characterized by distributional shifts across query, action, observation, and domain dimensions. To systematically diagnose its impact, we construct a controlled sandbox environment where we define fine-grained environmental shifts across a four-tier hierarchy, Perception, Interaction, Reasoning, and Internalization, and conduct a comprehensive series of experiments. Our analysis yields a series of key insights, demonstrating that agents trained via both Supervised Fine-Tuning(SFT) and Reinforcement Learning suffer from varying degrees of performance degradation when confronting open environmental shifts. Building on these insights, we propose Perturbation-Augmented Fine-Tuning, a disturbance-based intervention strategy for SFT that lays the foundation for enhancing agent robustness and utility in realistic environments. Our code will be released at: https://github. com/LAMDA-NeSy/OpenAgent.
4.1LGOct 23, 2025
Bi-CoG: Bi-Consistency-Guided Self-Training for Vision-Language ModelsRui Zhu, Song-Lin Lv, Zi-Kang Wang et al.
Exploiting unlabeled data through semi-supervised learning (SSL) or leveraging pre-trained models via fine-tuning are two prevailing paradigms for addressing label-scarce scenarios. Recently, growing attention has been given to combining fine-tuning of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with SSL, forming the emerging paradigm of semi-supervised fine-tuning. However, existing methods often suffer from model bias and hyperparameter sensitivity, due to reliance on prediction consistency or pre-defined confidence thresholds. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play methodology named $\underline{\textbf{Bi-Co}}$nsistency-$\underline{\textbf{G}}$uided Self-Training (Bi-CoG), which assigns high-quality and low-bias pseudo-labels, by simultaneously exploiting inter-model and intra-model consistency, along with an error-aware dynamic pseudo-label assignment strategy. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments over 14 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Bi-CoG, which consistently and significantly improves the performance of existing methods.
6.2CVJan 31, 2025
Contrast-Aware Calibration for Fine-Tuned CLIP: Leveraging Image-Text AlignmentSong-Lin Lv, Yu-Yang Chen, Zhi Zhou et al.
Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities and can quickly adapt to downstream tasks through prompt fine-tuning. Unfortunately, in classification tasks involving non-training classes, known as open-vocabulary setting, fine-tuned VLMs often overfit to train classes, resulting in a misalignment between confidence scores and actual accuracy on unseen classes, which significantly undermines their reliability in real-world deployments. Existing confidence calibration methods typically require training parameters or analyzing features from the training dataset, restricting their ability to generalize unseen classes without corresponding train data. Moreover, VLM-specific calibration methods rely solely on text features from train classes as calibration indicators, which inherently limits their ability to calibrate train classes. To address these challenges, we propose an effective multimodal calibration method Contrast-Aware Calibration (CAC). Building on the original CLIP's zero-shot adaptability and the conclusion from empirical analysis that poor intra-class and inter-class discriminative ability on unseen classes is the root cause, we calculate calibration weights based on the contrastive difference between the original and fine-tuned CLIP. This method not only adapts to calibrating unseen classes but also overcomes the limitations of previous VLM calibration methods that could not calibrate train classes. In experiments involving 11 datasets with 5 fine-tuning methods, CAC consistently achieved the best calibration effect on both train and unseen classes without sacrificing accuracy and inference speed.