Abstract: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.
Abstract: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.
Abstract:Effective robotic manipulation relies on a precise understanding of 3D scene geometry, and one of the most straightforward ways to acquire such geometry is through multi-view observations. Motivated by this, we present GP3 -- a 3D geometry-aware robotic manipulation policy that leverages multi-view input. GP3 employs a spatial encoder to infer dense spatial features from RGB observations, which enable the estimation of depth and camera parameters, leading to a compact yet expressive 3D scene representation tailored for manipulation. This representation is fused with language instructions and translated into continuous actions via a lightweight policy head. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GP3 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on simulated benchmarks. Furthermore, GP3 transfers effectively to real-world robots without depth sensors or pre-mapped environments, requiring only minimal fine-tuning. These results highlight GP3 as a practical, sensor-agnostic solution for geometry-aware robotic manipulation.
Abstract:Autonomous agents that operate computers via Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) often struggle with efficiency and reliability on complex, long-horizon tasks. While augmenting these agents with planners can improve task decomposition, they remain constrained by the inherent limitations of performing all actions through GUI manipulation, leading to brittleness and inefficiency. In this work, we introduce a more robust and flexible paradigm: enabling agents to use coding as a enhanced action. We present CoAct-1, a novel multi-agent system that synergistically combines GUI-based control with direct programmatic execution. CoAct-1 features an Orchestrator that dynamically delegates subtasks to either a conventional GUI Operator or a specialized Programmer agent, which can write and execute Python or Bash scripts. This hybrid approach allows the agent to bypass inefficient GUI action sequences for tasks like file management and data processing, while still leveraging visual interaction when necessary. We evaluate our system on the challenging OSWorld benchmark, where CoAct-1 achieves a new state-of-the-art success rate of 60.76%, significantly outperforming prior methods. Furthermore, our approach dramatically improves efficiency, reducing the average number of steps required to complete a task to just 10.15, compared to 15 for leading GUI agents. Our results demonstrate that integrating coding as a core action provides a more powerful, efficient, and scalable path toward generalized computer automation.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge retrieved at inference time. While RAG demonstrates strong performance on benchmarks largely derived from general-domain corpora like Wikipedia, its effectiveness under realistic, diverse retrieval scenarios remains underexplored. We evaluated RAG systems using MassiveDS, a large-scale datastore with mixture of knowledge, and identified critical limitations: retrieval mainly benefits smaller models, rerankers add minimal value, and no single retrieval source consistently excels. Moreover, current LLMs struggle to route queries across heterogeneous knowledge sources. These findings highlight the need for adaptive retrieval strategies before deploying RAG in real-world settings. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/ritaranx/RAG_in_the_Wild.
Abstract:We introduce MedAgentGYM, the first publicly available training environment designed to enhance coding-based medical reasoning capabilities in large language model (LLM) agents. MedAgentGYM comprises 72,413 task instances across 129 categories derived from authentic real-world biomedical scenarios. Tasks are encapsulated within executable coding environments, each featuring detailed task descriptions, interactive feedback mechanisms, verifiable ground-truth annotations, and scalable training trajectory generation. Extensive benchmarking of over 30 LLMs reveals a notable performance disparity between commercial API-based models and open-source counterparts. Leveraging MedAgentGYM, Med-Copilot-7B achieves substantial performance gains through supervised fine-tuning (+36.44%) and continued reinforcement learning (+42.47%), emerging as an affordable and privacy-preserving alternative competitive with gpt-4o. By offering both a comprehensive benchmark and accessible, expandable training resources within unified execution environments, MedAgentGYM delivers an integrated platform to develop LLM-based coding assistants for advanced biomedical research and practice.
Abstract:Unifying image understanding and generation has gained growing attention in recent research on multimodal models. Although design choices for image understanding have been extensively studied, the optimal model architecture and training recipe for a unified framework with image generation remain underexplored. Motivated by the strong potential of autoregressive and diffusion models for high-quality generation and scalability, we conduct a comprehensive study of their use in unified multimodal settings, with emphasis on image representations, modeling objectives, and training strategies. Grounded in these investigations, we introduce a novel approach that employs a diffusion transformer to generate semantically rich CLIP image features, in contrast to conventional VAE-based representations. This design yields both higher training efficiency and improved generative quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a sequential pretraining strategy for unified models-first training on image understanding and subsequently on image generation-offers practical advantages by preserving image understanding capability while developing strong image generation ability. Finally, we carefully curate a high-quality instruction-tuning dataset BLIP3o-60k for image generation by prompting GPT-4o with a diverse set of captions covering various scenes, objects, human gestures, and more. Building on our innovative model design, training recipe, and datasets, we develop BLIP3-o, a suite of state-of-the-art unified multimodal models. BLIP3-o achieves superior performance across most of the popular benchmarks spanning both image understanding and generation tasks. To facilitate future research, we fully open-source our models, including code, model weights, training scripts, and pretraining and instruction tuning datasets.
Abstract:We present DyMU, an efficient, training-free framework that dynamically reduces the computational burden of vision-language models (VLMs) while maintaining high task performance. Our approach comprises two key components. First, Dynamic Token Merging (DToMe) reduces the number of visual token embeddings by merging similar tokens based on image complexity, addressing the inherent inefficiency of fixed-length outputs in vision transformers. Second, Virtual Token Unmerging (VTU) simulates the expected token sequence for large language models (LLMs) by efficiently reconstructing the attention dynamics of a full sequence, thus preserving the downstream performance without additional fine-tuning. Unlike previous approaches, our method dynamically adapts token compression to the content of the image and operates completely training-free, making it readily applicable to most state-of-the-art VLM architectures. Extensive experiments on image and video understanding tasks demonstrate that DyMU can reduce the average visual token count by 32%-85% while achieving comparable performance to full-length models across diverse VLM architectures, including the recently popularized AnyRes-based visual encoders. Furthermore, through qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that DToMe effectively adapts token reduction based on image complexity and, unlike existing systems, provides users more control over computational costs. Project page: https://mikewangwzhl.github.io/dymu/.
Abstract:Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often struggle to handle multi-hop question-answering tasks accurately due to irrelevant context retrieval and limited complex reasoning capabilities. We introduce Collab-RAG, a collaborative training framework that leverages mutual enhancement between a white-box small language model (SLM) and a blackbox large language model (LLM) for RAG. Specifically, the SLM decomposes complex queries into simpler sub-questions, thus enhancing the accuracy of the retrieval and facilitating more effective reasoning by the black-box LLM. Concurrently, the black-box LLM provides feedback signals to improve the SLM's decomposition capability. We observe that Collab-RAG relies solely on supervision from an affordable black-box LLM without additional distillation from frontier LLMs, yet demonstrates strong generalization across multiple black-box LLMs. Experimental evaluations across five multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that Collab-RAG substantially outperforms existing black-box-only and SLM fine-tuning baselines by 1.8%-14.2% on average. In particular, our fine-tuned 3B SLM surpasses a frozen 32B LLM in question decomposition, highlighting the efficiency of Collab-RAG in improving reasoning and retrieval for complex questions. The code of Collab-RAG is available on https://github.com/ritaranx/Collab-RAG/.
Abstract:AI-generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent in the real world, leading to serious ethical and societal concerns. For instance, adversaries might exploit large multimodal models (LMMs) to create images that violate ethical or legal standards, while paper reviewers may misuse large language models (LLMs) to generate reviews without genuine intellectual effort. While prior work has explored detecting AI-generated images and texts, and occasionally tracing their source models, there is a lack of a systematic and fine-grained comparative study. Important dimensions--such as AI-generated images vs. text, fully vs. partially AI-generated images, and general vs. malicious use cases--remain underexplored. Furthermore, whether AI systems like GPT-4o can explain why certain forged content is attributed to specific generative models is still an open question, with no existing benchmark addressing this. To fill this gap, we introduce AI-FAKER, a comprehensive multimodal dataset with over 280,000 samples spanning multiple LLMs and LMMs, covering both general and malicious use cases for AI-generated images and texts. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (i) AI authorship detection depends not only on the generated output but also on the model's original training intent; and (ii) GPT-4o provides highly consistent but less specific explanations when analyzing content produced by OpenAI's own models, such as DALL-E and GPT-4o itself.