Chain-of-Modality: Learning Manipulation Programs from Multimodal Human Videos with Vision-Language-Models

Learning to perform manipulation tasks from human videos is a promising approach for teaching robots. However, many manipulation tasks require changing control parameters during task execution, such as force, which visual data alone cannot capture. In this work, we leverage sensing devices such as armbands that measure human muscle activities and microphones that record sound, to capture the details in the human manipulation process, and enable robots to extract task plans and control parameters to perform the same task. To achieve this, we introduce Chain-of-Modality (CoM), a prompting strategy that enables Vision Language Models to reason about multimodal human demonstration data -- videos coupled with muscle or audio signals. By progressively integrating information from each modality, CoM refines a task plan and generates detailed control parameters, enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks based on a single multimodal human video prompt. Our experiments show that CoM delivers a threefold improvement in accuracy for extracting task plans and control parameters compared to baselines, with strong generalization to new task setups and objects in real-world robot experiments. Videos and code are available at https://chain-of-modality.github.io

Enhancing Web Agents with Explicit Rollback Mechanisms

With recent advancements in large language models, web agents have been greatly improved. However, dealing with complex and dynamic web environments requires more advanced planning and search abilities. Previous studies usually adopt a greedy one-way search strategy, which may struggle to recover from erroneous states. In this work, we enhance web agents with an explicit rollback mechanism, enabling the agent to revert back to a previous state in its navigation trajectory. This mechanism gives the model the flexibility to directly control the search process, leading to an effective and efficient web navigation method. We conduct experiments on two live web navigation benchmarks with zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Towards Trustworthy GUI Agents: A Survey

GUI agents, powered by large foundation models, can interact with digital interfaces, enabling various applications in web automation, mobile navigation, and software testing. However, their increasing autonomy has raised critical concerns about their security, privacy, and safety. This survey examines the trustworthiness of GUI agents in five critical dimensions: security vulnerabilities, reliability in dynamic environments, transparency and explainability, ethical considerations, and evaluation methodologies. We also identify major challenges such as vulnerability to adversarial attacks, cascading failure modes in sequential decision-making, and a lack of realistic evaluation benchmarks. These issues not only hinder real-world deployment but also call for comprehensive mitigation strategies beyond task success. As GUI agents become more widespread, establishing robust safety standards and responsible development practices is essential. This survey provides a foundation for advancing trustworthy GUI agents through systematic understanding and future research.

Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World

Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. This report introduces a new family of AI models purposefully designed for robotics and built upon the foundation of Gemini 2.0. We present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Gemini Robotics executes smooth and reactive movements to tackle a wide range of complex manipulation tasks while also being robust to variations in object types and positions, handling unseen environments as well as following diverse, open vocabulary instructions. We show that with additional fine-tuning, Gemini Robotics can be specialized to new capabilities including solving long-horizon, highly dexterous tasks, learning new short-horizon tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations and adapting to completely novel robot embodiments. This is made possible because Gemini Robotics builds on top of the Gemini Robotics-ER model, the second model we introduce in this work. Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning) extends Gemini's multimodal reasoning capabilities into the physical world, with enhanced spatial and temporal understanding. This enables capabilities relevant to robotics including object detection, pointing, trajectory and grasp prediction, as well as multi-view correspondence and 3D bounding box predictions. We show how this novel combination can support a variety of robotics applications. We also discuss and address important safety considerations related to this new class of robotics foundation models. The Gemini Robotics family marks a substantial step towards developing general-purpose robots that realizes AI's potential in the physical world.

QuietPaw: Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion with Versatile Noise Preference Alignment

When operating at their full capacity, quadrupedal robots can produce loud footstep noise, which can be disruptive in human-centered environments like homes, offices, and hospitals. As a result, balancing locomotion performance with noise constraints is crucial for the successful real-world deployment of quadrupedal robots. However, achieving adaptive noise control is challenging due to (a) the trade-off between agility and noise minimization, (b) the need for generalization across diverse deployment conditions, and (c) the difficulty of effectively adjusting policies based on noise requirements. We propose QuietPaw, a framework incorporating our Conditional Noise-Constrained Policy (CNCP), a constrained learning-based algorithm that enables flexible, noise-aware locomotion by conditioning policy behavior on noise-reduction levels. We leverage value representation decomposition in the critics, disentangling state representations from condition-dependent representations and this allows a single versatile policy to generalize across noise levels without retraining while improving the Pareto trade-off between agility and noise reduction. We validate our approach in simulation and the real world, demonstrating that CNCP can effectively balance locomotion performance and noise constraints, achieving continuously adjustable noise reduction.

Do Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Adapt to Varying User Needs?

Recent advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have demonstrated their efficacy in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing evaluation benchmarks often assume a single optimal approach to leveraging retrieved information, failing to account for varying user needs. This paper introduces a novel evaluation framework that systematically assesses RALMs under three user need cases-Context-Exclusive, Context-First, and Memory-First-across three distinct context settings: Context Matching, Knowledge Conflict, and Information Irrelevant. By varying both user instructions and the nature of retrieved information, our approach captures the complexities of real-world applications where models must adapt to diverse user requirements. Through extensive experiments on multiple QA datasets, including HotpotQA, DisentQA, and our newly constructed synthetic URAQ dataset, we find that restricting memory usage improves robustness in adversarial retrieval conditions but decreases peak performance with ideal retrieval results and model family dominates behavioral differences. Our findings highlight the necessity of user-centric evaluations in the development of retrieval-augmented systems and provide insights into optimizing model performance across varied retrieval contexts. We will release our code and URAQ dataset upon acceptance of the paper.

Self-Regularization with Latent Space Explanations for Controllable LLM-based Classification

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model training. However, they also introduce a challenge: we lose the ability to manually remove unintended features, such as sensitive or task-irrelevant features, to guarantee regulatory compliance or improve the generalizability of classification models. This limitation arises because LLM embeddings are opaque and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to identify and regularize unintended features in the LLM latent space. Specifically, we first pre-train a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to extract interpretable features from LLM latent spaces. To ensure the SAE can capture task-specific features, we further fine-tune it on task-specific datasets. In training the classification model, we propose a simple and effective regularizer, by minimizing the similarity between the classifier weights and the identified unintended feature, to remove the impacts of these unintended features toward classification. We evaluate the proposed framework on three real-world tasks, including toxic chat detection, reward modeling, and disease diagnosis. Results show that the proposed framework can significantly improve the classifier's generalizability by regularizing those features that are not semantically correlated to each task. This work pioneers controllable text classification on LLM latent spaces by leveraging interpreted features to address generalizability, fairness, and privacy challenges. We will release our code and data once accepted.

OpenCharacter: Training Customizable Role-Playing LLMs with Large-Scale Synthetic Personas

Customizable role-playing in large language models (LLMs), also known as character generalization, is gaining increasing attention for its versatility and cost-efficiency in developing and deploying role-playing dialogue agents. This study explores a large-scale data synthesis approach to equip LLMs with character generalization capabilities. We begin by synthesizing large-scale character profiles using personas from Persona Hub and then explore two strategies: response rewriting and response generation, to create character-aligned instructional responses. To validate the effectiveness of our synthetic instruction tuning data for character generalization, we perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using the LLaMA-3 8B model. Our best-performing model strengthens the original LLaMA-3 8B Instruct model and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o models on role-playing dialogue. We release our synthetic characters and instruction-tuning dialogues to support public research.

GDiffRetro: Retrosynthesis Prediction with Dual Graph Enhanced Molecular Representation and Diffusion Generation

Retrosynthesis prediction focuses on identifying reactants capable of synthesizing a target product. Typically, the retrosynthesis prediction involves two phases: Reaction Center Identification and Reactant Generation. However, we argue that most existing methods suffer from two limitations in the two phases: (i) Existing models do not adequately capture the ``face'' information in molecular graphs for the reaction center identification. (ii) Current approaches for the reactant generation predominantly use sequence generation in a 2D space, which lacks versatility in generating reasonable distributions for completed reactive groups and overlooks molecules' inherent 3D properties. To overcome the above limitations, we propose GDiffRetro. For the reaction center identification, GDiffRetro uniquely integrates the original graph with its corresponding dual graph to represent molecular structures, which helps guide the model to focus more on the faces in the graph. For the reactant generation, GDiffRetro employs a conditional diffusion model in 3D to further transform the obtained synthon into a complete reactant. Our experimental findings reveal that GDiffRetro outperforms state-of-the-art semi-template models across various evaluative metrics.

Humanoid Locomotion and Manipulation: Current Progress and Challenges in Control, Planning, and Learning

Humanoid robots have great potential to perform various human-level skills. These skills involve locomotion, manipulation, and cognitive capabilities. Driven by advances in machine learning and the strength of existing model-based approaches, these capabilities have progressed rapidly, but often separately. Therefore, a timely overview of current progress and future trends in this fast-evolving field is essential. This survey first summarizes the model-based planning and control that have been the backbone of humanoid robotics for the past three decades. We then explore emerging learning-based methods, with a focus on reinforcement learning and imitation learning that enhance the versatility of loco-manipulation skills. We examine the potential of integrating foundation models with humanoid embodiments, assessing the prospects for developing generalist humanoid agents. In addition, this survey covers emerging research for whole-body tactile sensing that unlocks new humanoid skills that involve physical interactions. The survey concludes with a discussion of the challenges and future trends.