Decoder-Only LLMs are Better Controllers for Diffusion Models

Groundbreaking advancements in text-to-image generation have recently been achieved with the emergence of diffusion models. These models exhibit a remarkable ability to generate highly artistic and intricately detailed images based on textual prompts. However, obtaining desired generation outcomes often necessitates repetitive trials of manipulating text prompts just like casting spells on a magic mirror, and the reason behind that is the limited capability of semantic understanding inherent in current image generation models. Specifically, existing diffusion models encode the text prompt input with a pre-trained encoder structure, which is usually trained on a limited number of image-caption pairs. The state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) based on the decoder-only structure have shown a powerful semantic understanding capability as their architectures are more suitable for training on very large-scale unlabeled data. In this work, we propose to enhance text-to-image diffusion models by borrowing the strength of semantic understanding from large language models, and devise a simple yet effective adapter to allow the diffusion models to be compatible with the decoder-only structure. Meanwhile, we also provide a supporting theoretical analysis with various architectures (e.g., encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only), and conduct extensive empirical evaluations to verify its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the enhanced models with our adapter module are superior to the stat-of-the-art models in terms of text-to-image generation quality and reliability.

A Causality-aware Paradigm for Evaluating Creativity of Multimodal Large Language Models

Recently, numerous benchmarks have been developed to evaluate the logical reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, assessing the equally important creative capabilities of LLMs is challenging due to the subjective, diverse, and data-scarce nature of creativity, especially in multimodal scenarios. In this paper, we consider the comprehensive pipeline for evaluating the creativity of multimodal LLMs, with a focus on suitable evaluation platforms and methodologies. First, we find the Oogiri game, a creativity-driven task requiring humor, associative thinking, and the ability to produce unexpected responses to text, images, or both. This game aligns well with the input-output structure of modern multimodal LLMs and benefits from a rich repository of high-quality, human-annotated creative responses, making it an ideal platform for studying LLM creativity. Next, beyond using the Oogiri game for standard evaluations like ranking and selection, we propose LoTbench, an interactive, causality-aware evaluation framework, to further address some intrinsic risks in standard evaluations, such as information leakage and limited interpretability. The proposed LoTbench not only quantifies LLM creativity more effectively but also visualizes the underlying creative thought processes. Our results show that while most LLMs exhibit constrained creativity, the performance gap between LLMs and humans is not insurmountable. Furthermore, we observe a strong correlation between results from the multimodal cognition benchmark MMMU and LoTbench, but only a weak connection with traditional creativity metrics. This suggests that LoTbench better aligns with human cognitive theories, highlighting cognition as a critical foundation in the early stages of creativity and enabling the bridging of diverse concepts. https://lotbench.github.io

SR-FoT: A Syllogistic-Reasoning Framework of Thought for Large Language Models Tackling Knowledge-based Reasoning Tasks

Deductive reasoning is a crucial logical capability that assists us in solving complex problems based on existing knowledge. Although augmented by Chain-of-Thought prompts, Large Language Models (LLMs) might not follow the correct reasoning paths. Enhancing the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs, and leveraging their extensive built-in knowledge for various reasoning tasks, remains an open question. Attempting to mimic the human deductive reasoning paradigm, we propose a multi-stage Syllogistic-Reasoning Framework of Thought (SR-FoT) that enables LLMs to perform syllogistic deductive reasoning to handle complex knowledge-based reasoning tasks. Our SR-FoT begins by interpreting the question and then uses the interpretation and the original question to propose a suitable major premise. It proceeds by generating and answering minor premise questions in two stages to match the minor premises. Finally, it guides LLMs to use the previously generated major and minor premises to perform syllogistic deductive reasoning to derive the answer to the original question. Extensive and thorough experiments on knowledge-based reasoning tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of our SR-FoT.

Towards Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation: Platform, Benchmark and Method

Existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) methods primarily focus on single-stage navigation, limiting their effectiveness in multi-stage and long-horizon tasks within complex and dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we propose a novel VLN task, named Long-Horizon Vision-Language Navigation (LH-VLN), which emphasizes long-term planning and decision consistency across consecutive subtasks. Furthermore, to support LH-VLN, we develop an automated data generation platform NavGen, which constructs datasets with complex task structures and improves data utility through a bidirectional, multi-granularity generation approach. To accurately evaluate complex tasks, we construct the Long-Horizon Planning and Reasoning in VLN (LHPR-VLN) benchmark consisting of 3,260 tasks with an average of 150 task steps, serving as the first dataset specifically designed for the long-horizon vision-language navigation task. Furthermore, we propose Independent Success Rate (ISR), Conditional Success Rate (CSR), and CSR weight by Ground Truth (CGT) metrics, to provide fine-grained assessments of task completion. To improve model adaptability in complex tasks, we propose a novel Multi-Granularity Dynamic Memory (MGDM) module that integrates short-term memory blurring with long-term memory retrieval to enable flexible navigation in dynamic environments. Our platform, benchmark and method supply LH-VLN with a robust data generation pipeline, comprehensive model evaluation dataset, reasonable metrics, and a novel VLN model, establishing a foundational framework for advancing LH-VLN.

Category-Adaptive Cross-Modal Semantic Refinement and Transfer for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Recognition

Benefiting from the generalization capability of CLIP, recent vision language pre-training (VLP) models have demonstrated an impressive ability to capture virtually any visual concept in daily images. However, due to the presence of unseen categories in open-vocabulary settings, existing algorithms struggle to effectively capture strong semantic correlations between categories, resulting in sub-optimal performance on the open-vocabulary multi-label recognition (OV-MLR). Furthermore, the substantial variation in the number of discriminative areas across diverse object categories is misaligned with the fixed-number patch matching used in current methods, introducing noisy visual cues that hinder the accurate capture of target semantics. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel category-adaptive cross-modal semantic refinement and transfer (C$^2$SRT) framework to explore the semantic correlation both within each category and across different categories, in a category-adaptive manner. The proposed framework consists of two complementary modules, i.e., intra-category semantic refinement (ISR) module and inter-category semantic transfer (IST) module. Specifically, the ISR module leverages the cross-modal knowledge of the VLP model to adaptively find a set of local discriminative regions that best represent the semantics of the target category. The IST module adaptively discovers a set of most correlated categories for a target category by utilizing the commonsense capabilities of LLMs to construct a category-adaptive correlation graph and transfers semantic knowledge from the correlated seen categories to unseen ones. Extensive experiments on OV-MLR benchmarks clearly demonstrate that the proposed C$^2$SRT framework outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms.

InfiniteWorld: A Unified Scalable Simulation Framework for General Visual-Language Robot Interaction

Realizing scaling laws in embodied AI has become a focus. However, previous work has been scattered across diverse simulation platforms, with assets and models lacking unified interfaces, which has led to inefficiencies in research. To address this, we introduce InfiniteWorld, a unified and scalable simulator for general vision-language robot interaction built on Nvidia Isaac Sim. InfiniteWorld encompasses a comprehensive set of physics asset construction methods and generalized free robot interaction benchmarks. Specifically, we first built a unified and scalable simulation framework for embodied learning that integrates a series of improvements in generation-driven 3D asset construction, Real2Sim, automated annotation framework, and unified 3D asset processing. This framework provides a unified and scalable platform for robot interaction and learning. In addition, to simulate realistic robot interaction, we build four new general benchmarks, including scene graph collaborative exploration and open-world social mobile manipulation. The former is often overlooked as an important task for robots to explore the environment and build scene knowledge, while the latter simulates robot interaction tasks with different levels of knowledge agents based on the former. They can more comprehensively evaluate the embodied agent's capabilities in environmental understanding, task planning and execution, and intelligent interaction. We hope that this work can provide the community with a systematic asset interface, alleviate the dilemma of the lack of high-quality assets, and provide a more comprehensive evaluation of robot interactions.

DAGSM: Disentangled Avatar Generation with GS-enhanced Mesh

Text-driven avatar generation has gained significant attention owing to its convenience. However, existing methods typically model the human body with all garments as a single 3D model, limiting its usability, such as clothing replacement, and reducing user control over the generation process. To overcome the limitations above, we propose DAGSM, a novel pipeline that generates disentangled human bodies and garments from the given text prompts. Specifically, we model each part (e.g., body, upper/lower clothes) of the clothed human as one GS-enhanced mesh (GSM), which is a traditional mesh attached with 2D Gaussians to better handle complicated textures (e.g., woolen, translucent clothes) and produce realistic cloth animations. During the generation, we first create the unclothed body, followed by a sequence of individual cloth generation based on the body, where we introduce a semantic-based algorithm to achieve better human-cloth and garment-garment separation. To improve texture quality, we propose a view-consistent texture refinement module, including a cross-view attention mechanism for texture style consistency and an incident-angle-weighted denoising (IAW-DE) strategy to update the appearance. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that DAGSM generates high-quality disentangled avatars, supports clothing replacement and realistic animation, and outperforms the baselines in visual quality.

Towards Sample-Efficiency and Generalization of Transfer and Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward it receives from the environment. This learning paradigm is, however, well-known for being time-consuming due to the necessity of collecting a large amount of data, making RL suffer from sample inefficiency and difficult generalization. Furthermore, the construction of an explicit reward function that accounts for the trade-off between multiple desiderata of a decision problem is often a laborious task. These challenges have been recently addressed utilizing transfer and inverse reinforcement learning (T-IRL). In this regard, this paper is devoted to a comprehensive review of realizing the sample efficiency and generalization of RL algorithms through T-IRL. Following a brief introduction to RL, the fundamental T-IRL methods are presented and the most recent advancements in each research field have been extensively reviewed. Our findings denote that a majority of recent research works have dealt with the aforementioned challenges by utilizing human-in-the-loop and sim-to-real strategies for the efficient transfer of knowledge from source domains to the target domain under the transfer learning scheme. Under the IRL structure, training schemes that require a low number of experience transitions and extension of such frameworks to multi-agent and multi-intention problems have been the priority of researchers in recent years.

Integration of Communication and Computational Imaging

Communication enables the expansion of human visual perception beyond the limitations of time and distance, while computational imaging overcomes the constraints of depth and breadth. Although impressive achievements have been witnessed with the two types of technologies, the occlusive information flow between the two domains is a bottleneck hindering their ulterior progression. Herein, we propose a novel framework that integrates communication and computational imaging (ICCI) to break through the inherent isolation between communication and computational imaging for remote perception. By jointly considering the sensing and transmitting of remote visual information, the ICCI framework performs a full-link information transfer optimization, aiming to minimize information loss from the generation of the information source to the execution of the final vision tasks. We conduct numerical analysis and experiments to demonstrate the ICCI framework by integrating communication systems and snapshot compressive imaging systems. Compared with straightforward combination schemes, which sequentially execute sensing and transmitting, the ICCI scheme shows greater robustness against channel noise and impairments while achieving higher data compression. Moreover, an 80 km 27-band hyperspectral video perception with a rate of 30 fps is experimentally achieved. This new ICCI remote perception paradigm offers a highefficiency solution for various real-time computer vision tasks.

All Robots in One: A New Standard and Unified Dataset for Versatile, General-Purpose Embodied Agents

Embodied AI is transforming how AI systems interact with the physical world, yet existing datasets are inadequate for developing versatile, general-purpose agents. These limitations include a lack of standardized formats, insufficient data diversity, and inadequate data volume. To address these issues, we introduce ARIO (All Robots In One), a new data standard that enhances existing datasets by offering a unified data format, comprehensive sensory modalities, and a combination of real-world and simulated data. ARIO aims to improve the training of embodied AI agents, increasing their robustness and adaptability across various tasks and environments. Building upon the proposed new standard, we present a large-scale unified ARIO dataset, comprising approximately 3 million episodes collected from 258 series and 321,064 tasks. The ARIO standard and dataset represent a significant step towards bridging the gaps of existing data resources. By providing a cohesive framework for data collection and representation, ARIO paves the way for the development of more powerful and versatile embodied AI agents, capable of navigating and interacting with the physical world in increasingly complex and diverse ways. The project is available on https://imaei.github.io/project_pages/ario/