Baian Chen

Baian Chen, Chang Shu, Ehsan Shareghi et al.

Recent efforts have augmented language models (LMs) with external tools or environments, leading to the development of language agents that can reason and act. However, most of these agents rely on few-shot prompting techniques with off-the-shelf LMs. In this paper, we investigate and argue for the overlooked direction of fine-tuning LMs to obtain language agents. Using a setup of question answering (QA) with a Google search API, we explore a variety of base LMs, prompting methods, fine-tuning data, and QA tasks, and find language agents are consistently improved after fine-tuning their backbone LMs. For example, fine-tuning Llama2-7B with 500 agent trajectories generated by GPT-4 leads to a 77% HotpotQA performance increase. Furthermore, we propose FireAct, a novel approach to fine-tuning LMs with trajectories from multiple tasks and prompting methods, and show having more diverse fine-tuning data can further improve agents. Along with other findings regarding scaling effects, robustness, generalization, efficiency and cost, our work establishes comprehensive benefits of fine-tuning LMs for agents, and provides an initial set of experimental designs, insights, as well as open questions toward language agent fine-tuning.

Baian Chen, Zhilei Chen, Xiaowei Hu et al.

This paper presents a novel deep neural network framework for RGB-D salient object detection by controlling the message passing between the RGB images and depth maps on the feature level and exploring the long-range semantic contexts and geometric information on both RGB and depth features to infer salient objects. To achieve this, we formulate a dynamic message propagation (DMP) module with the graph neural networks and deformable convolutions to dynamically learn the context information and to automatically predict filter weights and affinity matrices for message propagation control. We further embed this module into a Siamese-based network to process the RGB image and depth map respectively and design a multi-level feature fusion (MFF) module to explore the cross-level information between the refined RGB and depth features. Compared with 17 state-of-the-art methods on six benchmark datasets for RGB-D salient object detection, experimental results show that our method outperforms all the others, both quantitatively and visually.

Baian Chen, Liangliang Nan, Haoran Xie et al.

Capturing both local and global features of irregular point clouds is essential to 3D object detection (3OD). However, mainstream 3D detectors, e.g., VoteNet and its variants, either abandon considerable local features during pooling operations or ignore many global features in the whole scene context. This paper explores new modules to simultaneously learn local-global features of scene point clouds that serve 3OD positively. To this end, we propose an effective 3OD network via simultaneous local-global feature learning (dubbed 3DLG-Detector). 3DLG-Detector has two key contributions. First, it develops a Dynamic Points Interaction (DPI) module that preserves effective local features during pooling. Besides, DPI is detachable and can be incorporated into existing 3OD networks to boost their performance. Second, it develops a Global Context Aggregation module to aggregate multi-scale features from different layers of the encoder to achieve scene context-awareness. Our method shows improvements over thirteen competitors in terms of detection accuracy and robustness on both the SUN RGB-D and ScanNet datasets. Source code will be available upon publication.

Jingdi Lei, Di Zhang, Junxian Li et al.

Large language models increasingly need to accumulate and reuse historical information in long-term assistants and agent systems. Simply expanding the context window is costly and often fails to ensure effective context utilization. We propose $δ$-mem, a lightweight memory mechanism that augments a frozen full-attention backbone with a compact online state of associative memory. $δ$-mem compresses past information into a fixed-size state matrix updated by delta-rule learning, and uses its readout to generate low-rank corrections to the backbone's attention computation during generation. With only an $8\times8$ online memory state, $δ$-mem improves the average score to $1.10\times$ that of the frozen backbone and $1.15\times$ that of the strongest non-$δ$-mem memory baseline. It achieves larger gains on memory-heavy benchmarks, reaching $1.31\times$ on MemoryAgentBench and $1.20\times$ on LoCoMo, while largely preserving general capabilities. These results show that effective memory can be realized through a compact online state directly coupled with attention computation, without full fine-tuning, backbone replacement, or explicit context extension.