Jing Gu

Jing Gu, Eliana Stefani, Qi Wu et al. · uw

A long-term goal of AI research is to build intelligent agents that can communicate with humans in natural language, perceive the environment, and perform real-world tasks. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental and interdisciplinary research topic towards this goal, and receives increasing attention from natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and machine learning communities. In this paper, we review contemporary studies in the emerging field of VLN, covering tasks, evaluation metrics, methods, etc. Through structured analysis of current progress and challenges, we highlight the limitations of current VLN and opportunities for future work. This paper serves as a thorough reference for the VLN research community.

Kaizhi Zheng, Kaiwen Zhou, Jing Gu et al.

Building a conversational embodied agent to execute real-life tasks has been a long-standing yet quite challenging research goal, as it requires effective human-agent communication, multi-modal understanding, long-range sequential decision making, etc. Traditional symbolic methods have scaling and generalization issues, while end-to-end deep learning models suffer from data scarcity and high task complexity, and are often hard to explain. To benefit from both worlds, we propose JARVIS, a neuro-symbolic commonsense reasoning framework for modular, generalizable, and interpretable conversational embodied agents. First, it acquires symbolic representations by prompting large language models (LLMs) for language understanding and sub-goal planning, and by constructing semantic maps from visual observations. Then the symbolic module reasons for sub-goal planning and action generation based on task- and action-level common sense. Extensive experiments on the TEACh dataset validate the efficacy and efficiency of our JARVIS framework, which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on all three dialog-based embodied tasks, including Execution from Dialog History (EDH), Trajectory from Dialog (TfD), and Two-Agent Task Completion (TATC) (e.g., our method boosts the unseen Success Rate on EDH from 6.1\% to 15.8\%). Moreover, we systematically analyze the essential factors that affect the task performance and also demonstrate the superiority of our method in few-shot settings. Our JARVIS model ranks first in the Alexa Prize SimBot Public Benchmark Challenge.

Zhiqiang Zhou, Chaoli Zhang, Lingna Ma et al.

The existing resource allocation policy for application instances in Kubernetes cannot dynamically adjust according to the requirement of business, which would cause an enormous waste of resources during fluctuations. Moreover, the emergence of new cloud services puts higher resource management requirements. This paper discusses horizontal POD resources management in Alibaba Cloud Container Services with a newly deployed AI algorithm framework named AHPA -- the adaptive horizontal pod auto-scaling system. Based on a robust decomposition forecasting algorithm and performance training model, AHPA offers an optimal pod number adjustment plan that could reduce POD resources and maintain business stability. Since being deployed in April 2021, this system has expanded to multiple customer scenarios, including logistics, social networks, AI audio and video, e-commerce, etc. Compared with the previous algorithms, AHPA solves the elastic lag problem, increasing CPU usage by 10% and reducing resource cost by more than 20%. In addition, AHPA can automatically perform flexible planning according to the predicted business volume without manual intervention, significantly saving operation and maintenance costs.

Kaizhi Zheng, Yue Fan, Jing Gu et al.

Generating high-quality, textured 3D scenes from a single image remains a fundamental challenge in vision and graphics. Recent image-to-3D generators recover reasonable geometry from single views, but their object-centric training limits generalization to complex, large-scale scenes with faithful structure and texture. We present EvoScene, a self-evolving, training-free framework that progressively reconstructs complete 3D scenes from single images. The key idea is combining the complementary strengths of existing models: geometric reasoning from 3D generation models and visual knowledge from video generation models. Through three iterative stages--Spatial Prior Initialization, Visual-guided 3D Scene Mesh Generation, and Spatial-guided Novel View Generation--EvoScene alternates between 2D and 3D domains, gradually improving both structure and appearance. Experiments on diverse scenes demonstrate that EvoScene achieves superior geometric stability, view-consistent textures, and unseen-region completion compared to strong baselines, producing ready-to-use 3D meshes for practical applications.

Jing Gu, Morteza Mardani, Wonjun Lee et al.

Diffusion models often degrade when trained in latent spaces (e.g., VAEs), yet the formal causes remain poorly understood. We quantify latent-space diffusability through the rate of change of the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) along the diffusion trajectory. Our framework decomposes this MMSE rate into contributions from Fisher Information (FI) and Fisher Information Rate (FIR). We demonstrate that while global isometry ensures FI alignment, FIR is governed by the encoder's local geometric properties. Our analysis explicitly decouples latent geometric distortion into three measurable penalties: dimensional compression, tangential distortion, and curvature injection. We derive theoretical conditions for FIR preservation across spaces, ensuring maintained diffusability. Experiments across diverse autoencoding architectures validate our framework and establish these efficient FI and FIR metrics as a robust diagnostic suite for identifying and mitigating latent diffusion failure.

Jing Gu, Xian Liu, Yu Zeng et al.

Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress in creating high-quality, photorealistic content. However, their ability to accurately simulate physical phenomena remains a critical and unresolved challenge. This paper presents PhyWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate video generation models based on their adherence to the laws of physics. The benchmark covers multiple levels of physical phenomena, ranging from fundamental principles like object motion and energy conservation to more complex scenarios involving rigid body interactions and human or animal motion. Additionally, we introduce a novel ""Anti-Physics"" category, where prompts intentionally violate real-world physics, enabling the assessment of whether models can follow such instructions while maintaining logical consistency. Besides large-scale human evaluation, we also design a simple yet effective method that could utilize current MLLM to evaluate the physics realism in a zero-shot fashion. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art text-to-video generation models, including five open-source and five proprietary models, with a detailed comparison and analysis. we identify pivotal challenges models face in adhering to real-world physics. Through systematic testing of their outputs across 1,050 curated prompts-spanning fundamental, composite, and anti-physics scenarios-we identify pivotal challenges these models face in adhering to real-world physics. We then rigorously examine their performance on diverse physical phenomena with varying prompt types, deriving targeted recommendations for crafting prompts that enhance fidelity to physical principles.

Yi Yu, Junzhuo Ma, Chenghuang Shen et al.

Adapting Large Language Models in complex technical service domains is constrained by the absence of explicit cognitive chains in human demonstrations and the inherent ambiguity arising from the diversity of valid responses. These limitations severely hinder agents from internalizing latent decision dynamics and generalizing effectively. Moreover, practical adaptation is often impeded by the prohibitive resource and time costs associated with standard training paradigms. To overcome these challenges and guarantee computational efficiency, we propose a lightweight adaptation framework comprising three key contributions. (1) Latent Logic Augmentation: We introduce Planning-Aware Trajectory Modeling and Decision Reasoning Augmentation to bridge the gap between surface-level supervision and latent decision logic. These approaches strengthen the stability of Supervised Fine-Tuning alignment. (2) Robust Noise Reduction: We construct a Multiple Ground Truths dataset through a dual-filtering method to reduce the noise by validating diverse responses, thereby capturing the semantic diversity. (3) Lightweight Adaptation: We design a Hybrid Reward mechanism that fuses an LLM-based judge with a lightweight relevance-based Reranker to distill high-fidelity reward signals while reducing the computational cost compared to standard LLM-as-a-Judge reinforcement learning. Empirical evaluations on real-world Cloud service tasks, conducted across semantically diverse settings, demonstrate that our framework achieves stability and performance gains through Latent Logic Augmentation and Robust Noise Reduction. Concurrently, our Hybrid Reward mechanism achieves alignment comparable to standard LLM-as-a-judge methods with reduced training time, underscoring the practical value for deploying technical service agents.

Yutong Dai, Krithika Ramakrishnan, Jing Gu et al.

We introduce SCUBA, a benchmark designed to evaluate computer-use agents on customer relationship management (CRM) workflows within the Salesforce platform. SCUBA contains 300 task instances derived from real user interviews, spanning three primary personas, platform administrators, sales representatives, and service agents. The tasks test a range of enterprise-critical abilities, including Enterprise Software UI navigation, data manipulation, workflow automation, information retrieval, and troubleshooting. To ensure realism, SCUBA operates in Salesforce sandbox environments with support for parallel execution and fine-grained evaluation metrics to capture milestone progress. We benchmark a diverse set of agents under both zero-shot and demonstration-augmented settings. We observed huge performance gaps in different agent design paradigms and gaps between the open-source model and the closed-source model. In the zero-shot setting, open-source model powered computer-use agents that have strong performance on related benchmarks like OSWorld only have less than 5\% success rate on SCUBA, while methods built on closed-source models can still have up to 39% task success rate. In the demonstration-augmented settings, task success rates can be improved to 50\% while simultaneously reducing time and costs by 13% and 16%, respectively. These findings highlight both the challenges of enterprise tasks automation and the promise of agentic solutions. By offering a realistic benchmark with interpretable evaluation, SCUBA aims to accelerate progress in building reliable computer-use agents for complex business software ecosystems.

Fangrui Zhu, Hanhui Wang, Yiming Xie et al.

Unlocking spatial reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is crucial for enabling intelligent interaction with 3D environments. While prior efforts often rely on explicit 3D inputs or specialized model architectures, we ask: can MLLMs reason about 3D space using only structured 2D representations derived from perception? We introduce Struct2D, a perception-guided prompting framework that combines bird's-eye-view (BEV) images with object marks and object-centric metadata, optionally incorporating egocentric keyframes when needed. Using Struct2D, we conduct an in-depth zero-shot analysis of closed-source MLLMs (e.g., GPT-o3) and find that they exhibit surprisingly strong spatial reasoning abilities when provided with structured 2D inputs, effectively handling tasks such as relative direction estimation and route planning. Building on these insights, we construct Struct2D-Set, a large-scale instruction tuning dataset with 200K fine-grained QA pairs across eight spatial reasoning categories, generated automatically from 3D indoor scenes. We fine-tune an open-source MLLM (Qwen2.5VL) on Struct2D-Set, achieving competitive performance on multiple benchmarks, including 3D question answering, dense captioning, and object grounding. Our approach demonstrates that structured 2D inputs can effectively bridge perception and language reasoning in MLLMs-without requiring explicit 3D representations as input. We will release both our code and dataset to support future research.

Yi Yu, Guangquan Hu, Chenghuang Shen et al.

The increasing agentic capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their deployment in real-world applications, such as cloud services, where customer-assistant interactions exhibit high technical complexity and long-horizon dependencies, making robustness and resolution efficiency critical for customer satisfaction. However, existing benchmarks for LLM-based agents largely rely on synthetic environments that fail to capture the diversity and unpredictability of authentic customer inputs, often ignoring the resolution efficiency essential for real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CirrusBench, a novel evaluation framework distinguished by its foundation in real-world data from authentic cloud service tickets. CirrusBench preserves the intricate multi-turn logical chains and realistic tool dependencies inherent to technical service environments. Moving beyond execution correctness, we introduce novel Customer-Centric metrics to define agent success, quantifying service quality through metrics such as the Normalized Efficiency Index and Multi-Turn Latency to explicitly measure resolution efficiency. Experiments utilizing our framework reveal that while state-of-the-art models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, they frequently struggle in complex, realistic multi-turn tasks and fail to meet the high-efficiency standards required for customer service, highlighting critical directions for the future development of LLM-based agents in practical technical service applications. CirrusBench evaluation framework is released at: https://github.com/CirrusAI

Mu Cai, Reuben Tan, Jianrui Zhang et al.

Understanding fine-grained temporal dynamics is crucial for multimodal video comprehension and generation. Due to the lack of fine-grained temporal annotations, existing video benchmarks mostly resemble static image benchmarks and are incompetent at evaluating models for temporal understanding. In this paper, we introduce TemporalBench, a new benchmark dedicated to evaluating fine-grained temporal understanding in videos. TemporalBench consists of ~10K video question-answer pairs, derived from ~2K high-quality human annotations detailing the temporal dynamics in video clips. As a result, our benchmark provides a unique testbed for evaluating various temporal understanding and reasoning abilities such as action frequency, motion magnitude, event order, etc. Moreover, it enables evaluations on various tasks like both video question answering and captioning, both short and long video understanding, as well as different models such as multimodal video embedding models and text generation models. Results show that state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o achieve only 38.5% question answering accuracy on TemporalBench, demonstrating a significant gap (~30%) between humans and AI in temporal understanding. Furthermore, we notice a critical pitfall for multi-choice QA where LLMs can detect the subtle changes in negative captions and find a centralized description as a cue for its prediction, where we propose Multiple Binary Accuracy (MBA) to correct such bias. We hope that TemporalBench can foster research on improving models' temporal reasoning capabilities. Both dataset and evaluation code will be made available.

Jing Gu, Nanxuan Zhao, Wei Xiong et al.

Effective editing of personal content holds a pivotal role in enabling individuals to express their creativity, weaving captivating narratives within their visual stories, and elevate the overall quality and impact of their visual content. Therefore, in this work, we introduce SwapAnything, a novel framework that can swap any objects in an image with personalized concepts given by the reference, while keeping the context unchanged. Compared with existing methods for personalized subject swapping, SwapAnything has three unique advantages: (1) precise control of arbitrary objects and parts rather than the main subject, (2) more faithful preservation of context pixels, (3) better adaptation of the personalized concept to the image. First, we propose targeted variable swapping to apply region control over latent feature maps and swap masked variables for faithful context preservation and initial semantic concept swapping. Then, we introduce appearance adaptation, to seamlessly adapt the semantic concept into the original image in terms of target location, shape, style, and content during the image generation process. Extensive results on both human and automatic evaluation demonstrate significant improvements of our approach over baseline methods on personalized swapping. Furthermore, SwapAnything shows its precise and faithful swapping abilities across single object, multiple objects, partial object, and cross-domain swapping tasks. SwapAnything also achieves great performance on text-based swapping and tasks beyond swapping such as object insertion.

Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou et al.

Multipanel images, commonly seen as web screenshots, posters, etc., pervade our daily lives. These images, characterized by their composition of multiple subfigures in distinct layouts, effectively convey information to people. Toward building advanced multimodal AI applications, such as agents that understand complex scenes and navigate through webpages, the skill of multipanel visual reasoning is essential, and a comprehensive evaluation of models in this regard is important. Therefore, we introduce Multipanel Visual Question Answering (MultipanelVQA), a novel benchmark comprising 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images that specifically challenge models in comprehending multipanel images. Our evaluation shows that questions in the MultipanelVQA benchmark pose significant challenges to the state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) tested, even though humans can attain approximately 99% accuracy on these questions. Distinctively, the MultipanelVQA benchmark features synthetically generated multipanel images specifically crafted to isolate and assess the impact of various factors, such as the layout, on MLLMs' multipanel image comprehension abilities. As a result, in addition to benchmarking the capabilities of MLLMs in understanding multipanel images, we analyze various factors of the multipanel image that affect MLLMs' performance with synthetic data and offer insights for enhancement. Code and data are released at https://sites.google.com/view/multipanelvqa/home.

Jing Gu, Dongmian Zou

Graph anomaly detection plays a vital role for identifying abnormal instances in complex networks. Despite advancements of methodology based on deep learning in recent years, existing benchmarking approaches exhibit limitations that hinder a comprehensive comparison. In this paper, we revisit datasets and approaches for unsupervised node-level graph anomaly detection tasks from three aspects. Firstly, we introduce outlier injection methods that create more diverse and graph-based anomalies in graph datasets. Secondly, we compare methods employing message passing against those without, uncovering the unexpected decline in performance associated with message passing. Thirdly, we explore the use of hyperbolic neural networks, specifying crucial architecture and loss design that contribute to enhanced performance. Through rigorous experiments and evaluations, our study sheds light on general strategies for improving node-level graph anomaly detection methods.

Mohammad Amin Samadi, Spencer JaQuay, Jing Gu et al.

AI Collaborator, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, is a groundbreaking tool designed for human-AI collaboration research. Its standout feature is the ability for researchers to create customized AI personas for diverse experimental setups using a user-friendly interface. This functionality is essential for simulating various interpersonal dynamics in team settings. AI Collaborator excels in mimicking different team behaviors, enabled by its advanced memory system and a sophisticated personality framework. Researchers can tailor AI personas along a spectrum from dominant to cooperative, enhancing the study of their impact on team processes. The tool's modular design facilitates integration with digital platforms like Slack, making it versatile for various research scenarios. AI Collaborator is thus a crucial resource for exploring human-AI team dynamics more profoundly.

Yidan Mao, Jing Gu, Marcus C. Werner et al.

Hyperbolic neural networks (HNNs) have been proved effective in modeling complex data structures. However, previous works mainly focused on the Poincaré ball model and the hyperboloid model as coordinate representations of the hyperbolic space, often neglecting the Klein model. Despite this, the Klein model offers its distinct advantages thanks to its straight-line geodesics, which facilitates the well-known Einstein midpoint construction, previously leveraged to accompany HNNs in other models. In this work, we introduce a framework for hyperbolic neural networks based on the Klein model. We provide detailed formulation for representing useful operations using the Klein model. We further study the Klein linear layer and prove that the "tangent space construction" of the scalar multiplication and parallel transport are exactly the Einstein scalar multiplication and the Einstein addition, analogous to the Möbius operations used in the Poincaré ball model. We show numerically that the Klein HNN performs on par with the Poincaré ball model, providing a third option for HNN that works as a building block for more complicated architectures.

Hamza Alsharif, Jing Gu, Pavol Jancura et al.

Radar perception models are trained with different inputs, from range-Doppler spectra to sparse point clouds. Dense spectra are assumed to outperform sparse point clouds, yet they can vary considerably across sensors and configurations, which hinders transfer. In this paper, we provide alternatives for incorporating spectral information into radar point clouds and show that, point clouds need not underperform compared to spectra. We introduce the spectral point cloud paradigm, where point clouds are treated as sparse, compressed representations of the radar spectra, and argue that, when enriched with spectral information, they serve as strong candidates for a unified input representation that is more robust against sensor-specific differences. We develop an experimental framework that compares spectral point cloud (PC) models at varying densities against a dense range-Doppler (RD) benchmark, and report the density levels where the PC configurations meet the performance of the RD benchmark. Furthermore, we experiment with two basic spectral enrichment approaches, that inject additional target-relevant information into the point clouds. Contrary to the common belief that the dense RD approach is superior, we show that point clouds can do just as well, and can surpass the RD benchmark when enrichment is applied. Spectral point clouds can therefore serve as strong candidates for unified radar perception, paving the way for future radar foundation models.

Jing Gu, Niccolò Cavagnero, Gijs Dubbelman

Leveraging the general world knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) holds significant promise for improving the ability of autonomous driving systems to handle rare and complex scenarios. While integrating LLMs into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has yielded state-of-the-art performance, their massive parameter counts pose severe challenges for latency-sensitive and energy-efficient deployment. Distilling LLM knowledge into a compact driving model offers a compelling solution to retain these reasoning capabilities while maintaining a manageable computational footprint. Although previous works have demonstrated the efficacy of distillation, these efforts have primarily focused on relatively simple scenarios and open-loop evaluations. Therefore, in this work, we investigate LLM distillation in more complex, interactive scenarios under closed-loop evaluation. We demonstrate that through a combination of latent feature distillation and ground-truth trajectory supervision, an efficient vision-only student model \textbf{Orion-Lite} can even surpass the performance of its massive VLA teacher, ORION. Setting a new state-of-the-art on the rigorous Bench2Drive benchmark, with a Driving Score of 80.6. Ultimately, this reveals that vision-only architectures still possess significant, untapped potential for high-performance reactive planning.

Viraj Prabhu, Yutong Dai, Matthew Fernandez et al.

Web agents promise to automate complex browser tasks, but current methods remain brittle -- relying on step-by-step UI interactions and heavy LLM reasoning that break under dynamic layouts and long horizons. Humans, by contrast, exploit website-provided functionality through high-level operations like search, filter, and sort. We introduce WALT (Web Agents that Learn Tools), a framework that reverse-engineers latent website functionality into reusable invocable tools. Rather than hypothesizing ad-hoc skills, WALT exposes robust implementations of automations already designed into websites -- spanning discovery (search, filter, sort), communication (post, comment, upvote), and content management (create, edit, delete). Tools abstract away low-level execution: instead of reasoning about how to click and type, agents simply call search(query) or create(listing). This shifts the computational burden from fragile step-by-step reasoning to reliable tool invocation. On VisualWebArena and WebArena, WALT achieves higher success with fewer steps and less LLM-dependent reasoning, establishing a robust and generalizable paradigm for browser automation.

Kaizhi Zheng, Ruijian Zha, Zishuo Xu et al.

Acquiring detailed 3D scenes typically demands costly equipment, multi-view data, or labor-intensive modeling. Therefore, a lightweight alternative, generating complex 3D scenes from a single top-down image, plays an essential role in real-world applications. While recent 3D generative models have achieved remarkable results at the object level, their extension to full-scene generation often leads to inconsistent geometry, layout hallucinations, and low-quality meshes. In this work, we introduce SceneFuse-3D, a training-free framework designed to synthesize coherent 3D scenes from a single top-down view. Our method is grounded in two principles: region-based generation to improve image-to-3D alignment and resolution, and spatial-aware 3D inpainting to ensure global scene coherence and high-quality geometry generation. Specifically, we decompose the input image into overlapping regions and generate each using a pretrained 3D object generator, followed by a masked rectified flow inpainting process that fills in missing geometry while maintaining structural continuity. This modular design allows us to overcome resolution bottlenecks and preserve spatial structure without requiring 3D supervision or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across diverse scenes show that SceneFuse-3D outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including Trellis, Hunyuan3D-2, TripoSG, and LGM, in terms of geometry quality, spatial coherence, and texture fidelity. Our results demonstrate that high-quality coherent 3D scene-level asset generation is achievable from a single top-down image using a principled, training-free pipeline.

Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao et al.

This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload? This study focuses on the topic of LLMs assist NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLM in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with "deficiency" labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) "LLMs as Reviewers", how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) "LLMs as Metareviewers", how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

Jing Gu, Yuwei Fang, Ivan Skorokhodov et al.

Video editing serves as a fundamental pillar of digital media, spanning applications in entertainment, education, and professional communication. However, previous methods often overlook the necessity of comprehensively understanding both global and local contexts, leading to inaccurate and inconsistent edits in the spatiotemporal dimension, especially for long videos. In this paper, we introduce VIA, a unified spatiotemporal Video Adaptation framework for global and local video editing, pushing the limits of consistently editing minute-long videos. First, to ensure local consistency within individual frames, we designed test-time editing adaptation to adapt a pre-trained image editing model for improving consistency between potential editing directions and the text instruction, and adapts masked latent variables for precise local control. Furthermore, to maintain global consistency over the video sequence, we introduce spatiotemporal adaptation that recursively gather consistent attention variables in key frames and strategically applies them across the whole sequence to realize the editing effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to baseline methods, our VIA approach produces edits that are more faithful to the source videos, more coherent in the spatiotemporal context, and more precise in local control. More importantly, we show that VIA can achieve consistent long video editing in minutes, unlocking the potential for advanced video editing tasks over long video sequences.

Jing Gu, Yilin Wang, Nanxuan Zhao et al.

In an era where images and visual content dominate our digital landscape, the ability to manipulate and personalize these images has become a necessity. Envision seamlessly substituting a tabby cat lounging on a sunlit window sill in a photograph with your own playful puppy, all while preserving the original charm and composition of the image. We present Photoswap, a novel approach that enables this immersive image editing experience through personalized subject swapping in existing images. Photoswap first learns the visual concept of the subject from reference images and then swaps it into the target image using pre-trained diffusion models in a training-free manner. We establish that a well-conceptualized visual subject can be seamlessly transferred to any image with appropriate self-attention and cross-attention manipulation, maintaining the pose of the swapped subject and the overall coherence of the image. Comprehensive experiments underscore the efficacy and controllability of Photoswap in personalized subject swapping. Furthermore, Photoswap significantly outperforms baseline methods in human ratings across subject swapping, background preservation, and overall quality, revealing its vast application potential, from entertainment to professional editing.

Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaizhi Zheng et al.

Intelligent navigation-helper agents are critical as they can navigate users in unknown areas through environmental awareness and conversational ability, serving as potential accessibility tools for individuals with disabilities. In this work, we first introduce a novel benchmark, Respond to Help Requests (R2H), to promote the development of multi-modal navigation helpers capable of responding to requests for help, utilizing existing dialog-based embodied datasets. R2H mainly includes two tasks: (1) Respond to Dialog History (RDH), which assesses the helper agent's ability to generate informative responses based on a given dialog history, and (2) Respond during Interaction (RdI), which evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the response during consistent cooperation with a task performer. Furthermore, we explore two approaches to construct the navigation-helper agent, including fine-tuning a novel task-oriented multi-modal response generation model that can see and respond, named SeeRee, and employing a multi-modal large language model in a zero-shot manner. Analysis of the task and method was conducted based on both automatic benchmarking and human evaluations. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/response2helprequests/home.

Jing Gu, Mostafa Mirshekari, Zhou Yu et al.

Conversational systems enable numerous valuable applications, and question-answering is an important component underlying many of these. However, conversational question-answering remains challenging due to the lack of realistic, domain-specific training data. Inspired by this bottleneck, we focus on conversational question generation as a means to generate synthetic conversations for training and evaluation purposes. We present a number of novel strategies to improve conversational flow and accommodate varying question types and overall fluidity. Specifically, we design ChainCQG as a two-stage architecture that learns question-answer representations across multiple dialogue turns using a flow propagation training strategy.ChainCQG significantly outperforms both answer-aware and answer-unaware SOTA baselines (e.g., up to 48% BLEU-1 improvement). Additionally, our model is able to generate different types of questions, with improved fluidity and coreference alignment.

Qingyang Wu, Zhenzhong Lan, Kun Qian et al.

Transformers have reached remarkable success in sequence modeling. However, these models have efficiency issues as they need to store all the history token-level representations as memory. We present Memformer, an efficient neural network for sequence modeling, that utilizes an external dynamic memory to encode and retrieve past information. Our model achieves linear time complexity and constant memory space complexity when processing long sequences. We also propose a new optimization scheme, memory replay back-propagation (MRBP), which promotes long-range back-propagation through time with a significantly reduced memory requirement. Experimental results show that Memformer has achieved comparable performance compared to the baselines by using 8.1x less memory space and 3.2x faster on inference. Analysis of the attention pattern shows that our external memory slots can encode and retain important information through timesteps.

Jing Gu, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu

Automatic evaluation for open-ended natural language generation tasks remains a challenge. Existing metrics such as BLEU show a low correlation with human judgment. We propose a novel and powerful learning-based evaluation metric: Perception Score. The method measures the overall quality of the generation and scores holistically instead of only focusing on one evaluation criteria, such as word overlapping. Moreover, it also shows the amount of uncertainty about its evaluation result. By connecting the uncertainty, Perception Score gives a more accurate evaluation for the generation system. Perception Score provides state-of-the-art results on two conditional generation tasks and two unconditional generation tasks.

Jing Gu, Zhou Yu

There is a huge performance gap between formal and informal language understanding tasks. The recent pre-trained models that improved the performance of formal language understanding tasks did not achieve a comparable result on informal language. We pro-pose a data annealing transfer learning procedure to bridge the performance gap on informal natural language understanding tasks. It successfully utilizes a pre-trained model such as BERT in informal language. In our data annealing procedure, the training set contains mainly formal text data at first; then, the proportion of the informal text data is gradually increased during the training process. Our data annealing procedure is model-independent and can be applied to various tasks. We validate its effectiveness in exhaustive experiments. When BERT is implemented with our learning procedure, it outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the three common informal language tasks.

Jing Gu, Qingyang Wu, Chongruo Wu et al.

The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 has suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in downstream dialog generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on the dialog task is not as optimal as expected. In this paper, we propose a Pre-trained Role Alternating Language model (PRAL), designed specifically for task-oriented conversational systems. We adopted (Wu et al., 2019) that models two speakers separately. We also design several techniques, such as start position randomization, knowledge distillation, and history discount to improve pre-training performance. We introduce a task-oriented dialog pretraining dataset by cleaning 13 existing data sets. We test PRAL on three different downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL performs better or on par with state-of-the-art methods.