Daily Papers

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive world knowledge across a wide range of tasks, making them promising candidates for embodied reasoning applications. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate the embodied reasoning ability of VLMs through multiple-choice questions based on image annotations -- for example, selecting which trajectory better describes an event in the image. In this work, we introduce the Point-It-Out (PIO) benchmark, a novel benchmark designed to systematically assess the embodied reasoning abilities of VLMs through precise visual grounding. We propose a hierarchical evaluation protocol spanning three stages (S1: referred-object localization, S2: task-driven pointing, and S3: visual trace prediction), with data collected from critical domains for embodied intelligence, including indoor, kitchen, driving, and robotic manipulation scenarios. Extensive experiments with over ten state-of-the-art VLMs reveal several interesting findings. For example, strong general-purpose models such as GPT-4o, while excelling on many benchmarks (e.g., language, perception, and reasoning), underperform compared to some open-source models in precise visual grounding; models such as MoLMO perform well in S1 and S2 but struggle in S3, where requires grounding combined with visual trace planning.

Pointing serves as a fundamental and intuitive mechanism for grounding language within visual contexts, with applications spanning robotics, assistive technologies, and interactive AI systems. While recent multimodal models have started to support pointing capabilities, existing benchmarks typically focus only on referential object localization tasks. We introduce PointArena, a comprehensive platform for evaluating multimodal pointing across diverse reasoning scenarios. PointArena comprises three components: (1) Point-Bench, a curated dataset containing approximately 1,000 pointing tasks across five reasoning categories; (2) Point-Battle, an interactive, web-based arena facilitating blind, pairwise model comparisons, which has already gathered over 4,500 anonymized votes; and (3) Point-Act, a real-world robotic manipulation system allowing users to directly evaluate multimodal model pointing capabilities in practical settings. We conducted extensive evaluations of both state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary multimodal models. Results indicate that Molmo-72B consistently outperforms other models, though proprietary models increasingly demonstrate comparable performance. Additionally, we find that supervised training specifically targeting pointing tasks significantly enhances model performance. Across our multi-stage evaluation pipeline, we also observe strong correlations, underscoring the critical role of precise pointing capabilities in enabling multimodal models to effectively bridge abstract reasoning with concrete, real-world actions. Project page: https://pointarena.github.io/

Grounding has become a fundamental capability of vision-language models (VLMs). Most existing VLMs point by generating coordinates as part of their text output, which requires learning a complicated coordinate system and results in a high token count. Instead, we propose a more intuitive pointing mechanism that directly selects the visual tokens that contain the target concept. Our model generates a special pointing token that cross-attends to the input image or video tokens and selects the appropriate one. To make this model more fine-grained, we follow these pointing tokens with an additional special token that selects a fine-grained subpatch within the initially selected region, and then a third token that specifies a location within that subpatch. We further show that performance improves by generating points sequentially in a consistent order, encoding the relative position of the previously selected point, and including a special no-more-points class when selecting visual tokens. Using this method, we set a new state-of-the-art on image pointing (70.7% on PointBench), set a new state-of-the-art among fully open models on GUI pointing (61.1% on ScreenSpotPro), and improve video pointing (59.1% human preference win rate vs. a text coordinate baseline) and tracking (+6.3% gain on Molmo2Track). We additionally show that our method achieves much higher sample efficiency and discuss the qualitative differences that emerge from this design change.

Egocentric AI agents, such as smart glasses, rely on pointing gestures to resolve referential ambiguities in natural language commands. However, despite advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), current systems often fail to precisely ground the spatial semantics of pointing. Instead, they rely on spurious correlations with visual proximity or object saliency, a phenomenon we term "Referential Hallucination." To address this gap, we introduce EgoPoint-Bench, a comprehensive question-answering benchmark designed to evaluate and enhance multimodal pointing reasoning in egocentric views. Comprising over 11k high-fidelity simulated and real-world samples, the benchmark spans five evaluation dimensions and three levels of referential complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models struggle with egocentric pointing, models fine-tuned on our synthetic data achieve significant performance gains and robust sim-to-real generalization. This work highlights the importance of spatially aware supervision and offers a scalable path toward precise egocentric AI assistants. Project page: https://guyyyug.github.io/EgoPoint-Bench/

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to our interaction with digital devices. Recently, growing efforts have been made to build models for various GUI understanding tasks. However, these efforts largely overlook an important GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points, which we name the Screen Point-and-Read (SPR) task. This task is predominantly handled by rigid accessible screen reading tools, in great need of new models driven by advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this paper, we propose a Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent, utilizing a novel ToL grounding mechanism, to address the SPR task. Based on the input point coordinate and the corresponding GUI screenshot, our ToL agent constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree. Based on the tree, our ToL agent not only comprehends the content of the indicated area but also articulates the layout and spatial relationships between elements. Such layout information is crucial for accurately interpreting information on the screen, distinguishing our ToL agent from other screen reading tools. We also thoroughly evaluate the ToL agent against other baselines on a newly proposed SPR benchmark, which includes GUIs from mobile, web, and operating systems. Last but not least, we test the ToL agent on mobile GUI navigation tasks, demonstrating its utility in identifying incorrect actions along the path of agent execution trajectories. Code and data: screen-point-and-read.github.io

We address the problem of Embodied Reference Understanding, which involves predicting the object that a person in the scene is referring to through both pointing gesture and language. Accurately identifying the referent requires multimodal understanding: integrating textual instructions, visual pointing, and scene context. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively leverage visual clues for disambiguation. We also observe that, while the referent is often aligned with the head-to-fingertip line, it occasionally aligns more closely with the wrist-to-fingertip line. Therefore, relying on a single line assumption can be overly simplistic and may lead to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a dual-model framework, where one model learns from the head-to-fingertip direction and the other from the wrist-to-fingertip direction. We further introduce a Gaussian ray heatmap representation of these lines and use them as input to provide a strong supervisory signal that encourages the model to better attend to pointing cues. To combine the strengths of both models, we present the CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble module, which performs a hybrid ensemble based on CLIP features. Additionally, we propose an object center prediction head as an auxiliary task to further enhance referent localization. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and analysis on the benchmark YouRefIt dataset, achieving an improvement of approximately 4 mAP at the 0.25 IoU threshold.

Understanding and answering questions based on a user's pointing gesture is essential for next-generation egocentric AI assistants. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with such tasks due to the lack of gesture-rich data and their limited ability to infer fine-grained pointing intent from egocentric video. To address this, we introduce EgoPointVQA, a dataset and benchmark for gesture-grounded egocentric question answering, comprising 4000 synthetic and 400 real-world videos across multiple deictic reasoning tasks. Built upon it, we further propose Hand Intent Tokens (HINT), which encodes tokens derived from 3D hand keypoints using an off-the-shelf reconstruction model and interleaves them with the model input to provide explicit spatial and temporal context for interpreting pointing intent. We show that our model outperforms others in different backbones and model sizes. In particular, HINT-14B achieves 68.1% accuracy, on average over 6 tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art, InternVL3-14B, by 6.6%. To further facilitate the open research, we will release the code, model, and dataset. Project page: https://yuuraa.github.io/papers/choi2026egovqa

Modern web interfaces are unnecessarily complex to use as they overwhelm users with excessive text and visuals unrelated to their current goals. This problem particularly impacts screen reader users (SRUs), who navigate content sequentially and may spend minutes traversing irrelevant elements before reaching desired information compared to vision users (VUs) who visually skim in seconds. We present Task Mode, a system that dynamically filters web content based on user-specified goals using large language models to identify and prioritize relevant elements while minimizing distractions. Our approach preserves page structure while offering multiple viewing modes tailored to different access needs. Our user study with 12 participants (6 VUs, 6 SRUs) demonstrates that our approach reduced task completion time for SRUs while maintaining performance for VUs, decreasing the completion time gap between groups from 2x to 1.2x. 11 of 12 participants wanted to use Task Mode in the future, reporting that Task Mode supported completing tasks with less effort and fewer distractions. This work demonstrates how designing new interactions simultaneously for visual and non-visual access can reduce rather than reinforce accessibility disparities in future technology created by human-computer interaction researchers and practitioners.

Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

Graphical user interfaces (GUI) automation agents are emerging as powerful tools, enabling humans to accomplish increasingly complex tasks on smart devices. However, users often inadvertently omit key information when conveying tasks, which hinders agent performance in the current agent paradigm that does not support immediate user intervention. To address this issue, we introduce a Self-Correction GUI Navigation task that incorporates interactive information completion capabilities within GUI agents. We developed the Navi-plus dataset with GUI follow-up question-answer pairs, alongside a Dual-Stream Trajectory Evaluation method to benchmark this new capability. Our results show that agents equipped with the ability to ask GUI follow-up questions can fully recover their performance when faced with ambiguous user tasks.

Aligning text-to-image generation with user intent remains challenging, for users who provide ambiguous inputs and struggle with model idiosyncrasies. We propose Adaptive Prompt Elicitation (APE), a technique that adaptively asks visual queries to help users refine prompts without extensive writing. Our technical contribution is a formulation of interactive intent inference under an information-theoretic framework. APE represents latent intent as interpretable feature requirements using language model priors, adaptively generates visual queries, and compiles elicited requirements into effective prompts. Evaluation on IDEA-Bench and DesignBench shows that APE achieves stronger alignment with improved efficiency. A user study with challenging user-defined tasks demonstrates 19.8% higher alignment without workload overhead. Our work contributes a principled approach to prompting that, for general users, offers an effective and efficient complement to the prevailing prompt-based interaction paradigm with text-to-image models.

We present OAKINK2, a dataset of bimanual object manipulation tasks for complex daily activities. In pursuit of constructing the complex tasks into a structured representation, OAKINK2 introduces three level of abstraction to organize the manipulation tasks: Affordance, Primitive Task, and Complex Task. OAKINK2 features on an object-centric perspective for decoding the complex tasks, treating them as a sequence of object affordance fulfillment. The first level, Affordance, outlines the functionalities that objects in the scene can afford, the second level, Primitive Task, describes the minimal interaction units that humans interact with the object to achieve its affordance, and the third level, Complex Task, illustrates how Primitive Tasks are composed and interdependent. OAKINK2 dataset provides multi-view image streams and precise pose annotations for the human body, hands and various interacting objects. This extensive collection supports applications such as interaction reconstruction and motion synthesis. Based on the 3-level abstraction of OAKINK2, we explore a task-oriented framework for Complex Task Completion (CTC). CTC aims to generate a sequence of bimanual manipulation to achieve task objectives. Within the CTC framework, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose the complex task objectives into sequences of Primitive Tasks and have developed a Motion Fulfillment Model that generates bimanual hand motion for each Primitive Task. OAKINK2 datasets and models are available at https://oakink.net/v2.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents increasingly act over streaming omni-modal observations spanning screenshots, audio, video, interaction history, and device states. However, exposing this complete context uniformly at every step ignores that relevance is transient and sparse: the signal determining one action can become clutter at the next. Because executed actions feed back into the context, these errors compound into Sequential Distraction, driving the agent into irreversible trajectory drift. We formulate the underlying requirement as Focused Perception: a representation that is step-adaptive, action-sufficient, and non-intrusive. We realize this in FocusGUI, a lightweight adapter that dynamically prioritizes multimodal channels against a step-specific decision reference. Instead of uniformly processing all inputs, it compresses the most relevant evidence into a compact latent and subtly injects it into the frozen decoder's embeddings, guiding the model's attention without altering its native parameter space. FocusGUI trains from action supervision alone, requiring neither modality-relevance labels nor backbone fine-tuning. Across four omni-modal backbones, it raises overall Type Match by +33.2 and Exact Match by 3.0 times over the frozen backbone on average, and Type Match by +30.1 over the strongest existing enhancement method.

This work explores the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to address problems at the intersection of spatial planning and natural language interfaces for navigation.Our focus is on following relatively complex instructions that are more akin to natural conversation than traditional explicit procedural directives seen in robotics. Unlike most prior work, where navigation directives are provided as imperative commands (e.g., go to the fridge), we examine implicit directives within conversational interactions. We leverage the 3D simulator AI2Thor to create complex and repeatable scenarios at scale, and augment it by adding complex language queries for 40 object types. We demonstrate that a robot can better parse descriptive language queries than existing methods by using an LLM to interpret the user interaction in the context of a list of the objects in the scene.

Autonomous agents that interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) hold significant potential for enhancing user experiences. To further improve these experiences, agents need to be personalized and proactive. By effectively comprehending user intentions through their actions and interactions with GUIs, agents will be better positioned to achieve these goals. This paper introduces the task of goal identification from observed UI trajectories, aiming to infer the user's intended task based on their GUI interactions. We propose a novel evaluation metric to assess whether two task descriptions are paraphrases within a specific UI environment. By Leveraging the inverse relation with the UI automation task, we utilized the Android-In-The-Wild and Mind2Web datasets for our experiments. Using our metric and these datasets, we conducted several experiments comparing the performance of humans and state-of-the-art models, specifically GPT-4 and Gemini-1.5 Pro. Our results show that Gemini performs better than GPT but still underperforms compared to humans, indicating significant room for improvement.

We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a real-life visual urban environment, and then identify a location described in natural language to find a hidden object at the goal position. The data contains 9,326 examples of English instructions and spatial descriptions paired with demonstrations. Empirical analysis shows the data presents an open challenge to existing methods, and qualitative linguistic analysis shows that the data displays richer use of spatial reasoning compared to related resources.

Much of the previous work towards digital agents for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) has relied on text-based representations (derived from HTML or other structured data sources), which are not always readily available. These input representations have been often coupled with custom, task-specific action spaces. This paper focuses on creating agents that interact with the digital world using the same conceptual interface that humans commonly use -- via pixel-based screenshots and a generic action space corresponding to keyboard and mouse actions. Building upon recent progress in pixel-based pretraining, we show, for the first time, that it is possible for such agents to outperform human crowdworkers on the MiniWob++ benchmark of GUI-based instruction following tasks.

One of the long-term challenges of robotics is to enable robots to interact with humans in the visual world via natural language, as humans are visual animals that communicate through language. Overcoming this challenge requires the ability to perform a wide variety of complex tasks in response to multifarious instructions from humans. In the hope that it might drive progress towards more flexible and powerful human interactions with robots, we propose a dataset of varied and complex robot tasks, described in natural language, in terms of objects visible in a large set of real images. Given an instruction, success requires navigating through a previously-unseen environment to identify an object. This represents a practical challenge, but one that closely reflects one of the core visual problems in robotics. Several state-of-the-art vision-and-language navigation, and referring-expression models are tested to verify the difficulty of this new task, but none of them show promising results because there are many fundamental differences between our task and previous ones. A novel Interactive Navigator-Pointer model is also proposed that provides a strong baseline on the task. The proposed model especially achieves the best performance on the unseen test split, but still leaves substantial room for improvement compared to the human performance.

Visual prompt learning, as a newly emerged technique, leverages the knowledge learned by a large-scale pre-trained model and adapts it to downstream tasks through the usage of prompts. While previous research has focused on designing effective prompts, in this work, we argue that compared to prompt design, a good mapping strategy matters more. In this sense, we propose SeMap, a more effective mapping using the semantic alignment between the pre-trained model's knowledge and the downstream task. Our experimental results show that SeMap can largely boost the performance of visual prompt learning. Moreover, our experiments show that SeMap is capable of achieving competitive zero-shot transfer, indicating that it can perform the downstream task without any fine-tuning on the corresponding dataset. This demonstrates the potential of our proposed method to be used in a broader range of applications where the zero-shot transfer is desired. Results suggest that our proposed SeMap could lead to significant advancements in both visual prompt learning and zero-shot transfer. We hope with SeMap, we can help the community move forward to more efficient and lightweight utilization of large vision models.

Humans can flexibly switch between different modes of thinking based on task complexity: from rapid intuitive judgments to in-depth analytical understanding. However, current Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding systems which locate interface elements based on natural language instructions rely solely on immediate prediction without reasoning, struggling to understand complex interface layouts with nested structures and hierarchical relationships, limiting their effectiveness on complex interfaces. Inspired by human dual-system cognition, we present Focus, a novel GUI grounding framework that combines fast prediction with systematic analysis. The framework dynamically switches between rapid and deliberate processing through an adaptive system switching based on task complexity, optimizing both efficiency and accuracy. Focus decomposes grounding into progressive stages: interface summarization, visual focused analysis, and precise coordinate prediction. This structured decomposition enables systematic understanding of both interface layouts and visual relationships. Extensive experiments show that Focus achieves state-of-the-art performance using only 300K of the training data with a 2B parameter model compared to existing approaches. Focus demonstrates superior performance particularly in complex GUI scenarios, achieving 77.4% average accuracy on ScreenSpot and 13.3% on the more challenging ScreenSpot-Pro. Our analysis reveals the effectiveness of this dual-system approach while demonstrating its potential for improving complex GUI interaction scenarios.

In this paper, we realize automatic visual recognition and direction estimation of pointing. We introduce the first neural pointing understanding method based on two key contributions. The first is the introduction of a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset for pointing recognition and direction estimation, which we refer to as the DP Dataset. DP Dataset consists of more than 2 million frames of over 33 people pointing in various styles annotated for each frame with pointing timings and 3D directions. The second is DeePoint, a novel deep network model for joint recognition and 3D direction estimation of pointing. DeePoint is a Transformer-based network which fully leverages the spatio-temporal coordination of the body parts, not just the hands. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of DeePoint. We believe DP Dataset and DeePoint will serve as a sound foundation for visual human intention understanding.

In the last years, the research interest in visual navigation towards objects in indoor environments has grown significantly. This growth can be attributed to the recent availability of large navigation datasets in photo-realistic simulated environments, like Gibson and Matterport3D. However, the navigation tasks supported by these datasets are often restricted to the objects present in the environment at acquisition time. Also, they fail to account for the realistic scenario in which the target object is a user-specific instance that can be easily confused with similar objects and may be found in multiple locations within the environment. To address these limitations, we propose a new task denominated Personalized Instance-based Navigation (PIN), in which an embodied agent is tasked with locating and reaching a specific personal object by distinguishing it among multiple instances of the same category. The task is accompanied by PInNED, a dedicated new dataset composed of photo-realistic scenes augmented with additional 3D objects. In each episode, the target object is presented to the agent using two modalities: a set of visual reference images on a neutral background and manually annotated textual descriptions. Through comprehensive evaluations and analyses, we showcase the challenges of the PIN task as well as the performance and shortcomings of currently available methods designed for object-driven navigation, considering modular and end-to-end agents.

Prompt highlighting steers a large language model to prioritize user-specified text spans during generation. A key challenge of existing Key-editing approaches is extracting steering directions that capture the difference between relevant and irrelevant contexts, rather than shared structural patterns common to both. We propose PRISM-Δ (Projection-based Relevance-Informed Steering Method), which decomposes the difference between positive and negative cross-covariance matrices to maximize discriminative energy while eliminating shared directions. Each attention head receives a continuous softplus importance weight, letting weak-but-useful heads contribute at reduced strength. The framework extends naturally to Value representations, capturing content-channel signal that Key-only methods leave unused. Across four benchmarks and five models, our methods match or exceed the best existing method on 19 of 20 configurations, with relative gains up to +13.0%, while halving the fluency cost of steering. Our methods also scale to long-context retrieval, outperforming the best existing method by up to +5.1% relative gain. PRISM-Δ is compatible with FlashAttention and adds negligible memory overhead.

Current benchmarks for language models primarily evaluate execution on fully specified tasks. However, real user tasks are often ambiguous. Users arrive with incomplete, exploratory, or even inconsistent goals, requiring the assistant to first determine the intended task before carrying it out. We study this problem as task alignment: the ability to align with a user on their intended task. We introduce a general framework for converting specified tasks into underspecified interactions, formalized as a POMDP in which the model must infer a latent task from partial and evolving user intent. We validate our user simulator post hoc with a human user study. Across shopping, coding, and professional work settings, we find that while models often perform well once the task is specified, models still struggle with task alignment: current models act prematurely, interact ineffectively, and fail to resolve ambiguous requests. Models on average recover the user's intended task only 22-32% of the time under ambiguity. In a human study in the same setting, humans reach 48%, outperforming all evaluated models. We show that post-training with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning improves task alignment, but models still lag behind humans in resolving uncertainty through interaction. Together, our results suggest that current models still lack key interaction abilities required for reliable agency.

Robotic manipulation is often specified through language instructions or task identifiers, yet cluttered environments with similar objects are better handled by spatially indicating what to move and where to place it. Addressing the vision-centric challenge of object and goal specification, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first formalization of Spatially Prompted Visual Trajectory Prediction (SP-VTP). This novel setting utilizes initial spatial prompts (like bounding boxes or points) to define task objectives, tasking the model with forecasting future end-effector trajectories from egocentric streams. To study this problem, we collect and annotate EgoSPT, a dataset of egocentric spatially prompted manipulation trajectories with first-frame object and target grounding annotations and recovered 3D end-effector motion. SP-VTP is challenging because the task specification is static, while the scene configuration evolves over time. To solve this problem, we propose SPOT(Spatially Prompted Object-Target Policy), which combines a task encoder for first-frame visual and coordinate spatial prompts, an observation encoder for current visual and history context, and a trajectory generator for future end-effector motion. Experiments under strict scene-level splits show that SPOT improves cross-scene trajectory prediction over non-prompted or single-source prompted baselines. Together, EgoSPT and SPOT establish a new spatial prompting problem SP-VTP, as a simple and scalable task condition for egocentric manipulation.

Reactive vision-language-action (VLA) policies suffer from task-state aliasing in long-horizon manipulation, where identical multimodal inputs call for distinct, context-dependent actions. Given that pretrained VLAs already possess rich control primitives to express diverse behaviors, we hypothesize that the execution bottleneck lies not in policy capacity, but in input ambiguity. In this paper, we propose TaskAnchor, a lightweight adapter that grounds task state by injecting execution context into the VLA's native input space. During post-training, TaskAnchor learns to represent the semantic execution stage as a milestone-supervised coordinate prepended to the language instruction, while incorporating fine-grained historical evidence via a residual update to the current visual tokens. This formulation avoids generating complex subtask instructions and leaves the backbone architecture unchanged. Across long-horizon benchmarks, TaskAnchor delivers substantial gains, achieving approximately 6 times the average success rate of the pi0.5 and X-VLA baselines on RMBench and more than doubling the task success rate of pi0.5 on RoboMemArena. Real-robot experiments further validate reliable multi-stage execution, with the same policy adapting its subsequent behaviors using earlier human interactions as in-context cues. Our project website is available at https://taskanchor.netlify.app/.

Pretrained VLMs bring rich world knowledge and semantic priors to object-goal navigation, and fine-tuning a VLM into a navigation policy has become a common recipe. Despite this progress, success rates remain low, and it is unclear which capability these fine-tuned policies lack. Our diagnosis identifies goal grounding as the dominant failure. These policies explore well, yet often fail to notice that the goal is already in view or to estimate how far away it is. To address this failure, we ground the goal explicitly. Explicit grounding substantially improves success and reaches state-of-the-art results on six benchmarks across three scene collections. We also correct annotation defects in these benchmarks, so that future methods are evaluated more faithfully. Our analysis on the clean benchmarks shows that, with ground-truth grounding, our policy nearly matches the expert that generated its demonstrations, leaving the headroom in perception rather than policy learning. Our work points to goal grounding as a missing piece of object-goal navigation and offers a simple and effective solution to the task.

Recent advancements in tool-augmented large language models have enabled them to interact with external tools, enhancing their ability to perform complex user tasks. However, existing approaches overlook the role of personalisation in guiding tool use. This work investigates how user preferences can be effectively integrated into goal-oriented dialogue agents. Through extensive analysis, we identify key weaknesses in the ability of LLMs to personalise tool use. To this end, we introduce TAPS, a novel solution that enhances personalised tool use by leveraging a structured tagging tool and an uncertainty-based tool detector. TAPS significantly improves the ability of LLMs to incorporate user preferences, achieving the new state-of-the-art for open source models on the NLSI task.

Search-augmented language models increasingly serve as long-horizon research agents, yet most open training methods assume a fixed user goal throughout search. We study mid-response steering, where users redirect a model during ongoing reasoning or retrieval. We identify answer-target anchoring, a failure mode in which fixed-query search agents retrieve evidence for the updated request but still answer an earlier question. We introduce SteerSearch, an RL framework that trains on interactive search trajectories with injected interventions to enable context-preserving target reassignment, and SteerSearch-Bench, a benchmark adapted from multi-hop QA datasets. We also investigate Contrastive Context Reward (CCR), an auxiliary signal for aligning post-intervention reasoning with the updated goal. Without CCR, SteerSearch improves average steering accuracy over Search-R1 from 11.1% to 31.3% on Qwen2.5-3B and from 36.6% to 44.6% on Qwen3-4B, while preserving standard single-query performance. Gains also extend to larger Qwen2.5 models and natural multi-turn conversations.

Existing GUI agent models relying on coordinate-based one-step visual grounding struggle with generalizing to varying input resolutions and aspect ratios. Alternatives introduce coordinate-free strategies yet suffer from learning under severe data scarcity. To address the limitations, we propose ToolTok, a novel paradigm of multi-step pathfinding for GUI agents, where operations are modeled as a sequence of progressive tool usage. Specifically, we devise tools aligned with human interaction habits and represent each tool using learnable token embeddings. To enable efficient embedding learning under limited supervision, ToolTok introduces a semantic anchoring mechanism that grounds each tool with semantically related concepts as natural inductive bias. To further enable a pre-trained large language model to progressively acquire tool semantics, we construct an easy-to-hard curriculum consisting of three tasks: token definition question-answering, pure text-guided tool selection, and simplified visual pathfinding. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that ToolTok achieves superior performance among models of comparable scale (4B) and remains competitive with a substantially larger model (235B). Notably, these results are obtained using less than 1% of the training data required by other post-training approaches. In addition, ToolTok demonstrates strong generalization across unseen scenarios. Our training & inference code is open-source at https://github.com/ZephinueCode/ToolTok.

Learning how humans manipulate objects requires machines to acquire knowledge from two perspectives: one for understanding object affordances and the other for learning human's interactions based on the affordances. Even though these two knowledge bases are crucial, we find that current databases lack a comprehensive awareness of them. In this work, we propose a multi-modal and rich-annotated knowledge repository, OakInk, for visual and cognitive understanding of hand-object interactions. We start to collect 1,800 common household objects and annotate their affordances to construct the first knowledge base: Oak. Given the affordance, we record rich human interactions with 100 selected objects in Oak. Finally, we transfer the interactions on the 100 recorded objects to their virtual counterparts through a novel method: Tink. The recorded and transferred hand-object interactions constitute the second knowledge base: Ink. As a result, OakInk contains 50,000 distinct affordance-aware and intent-oriented hand-object interactions. We benchmark OakInk on pose estimation and grasp generation tasks. Moreover, we propose two practical applications of OakInk: intent-based interaction generation and handover generation. Our datasets and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/lixiny/OakInk.

Large language models (LLMs) are shaping a new user interface (UI) paradigm in writing tools by enabling users to generate text through prompts. This paradigm shifts some creative control from the user to the system, thereby diminishing the user's authorship and autonomy in the writing process. To restore autonomy, we introduce Textfocals, a UI prototype designed to investigate a human-centered approach that emphasizes the user's role in writing. Textfocals supports the writing process by providing LLM-generated summaries, questions, and advice (i.e., LLM views) in a sidebar of a text editor, encouraging reflection and self-driven revision in writing without direct text generation. Textfocals' UI affordances, including contextually adaptive views and scaffolding for prompt selection and customization, offer a novel way to interact with LLMs where users maintain full authorship of their writing. A formative user study with Textfocals showed promising evidence that this approach might help users develop underdeveloped ideas, cater to the rhetorical audience, and clarify their writing. However, the study also showed interaction design challenges related to document navigation and scoping, prompt engineering, and context management. Our work highlights the breadth of the design space of writing support interfaces powered by generative AI that maintain authorship integrity.

Current language model-driven agents often lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. Although adept at devising strategies and performing tasks, these agents struggle with seeking clarification and grasping precise user intentions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Intention-in-Interaction (IN3), a novel benchmark designed to inspect users' implicit intentions through explicit queries. Next, we propose the incorporation of model experts as the upstream in agent designs to enhance user-agent interaction. Employing IN3, we empirically train Mistral-Interact, a powerful model that proactively assesses task vagueness, inquires user intentions, and refines them into actionable goals before starting downstream agent task execution. Integrating it into the XAgent framework, we comprehensively evaluate the enhanced agent system regarding user instruction understanding and execution, revealing that our approach notably excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. All the data and codes are released.

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) requires an agent to continuously follow a specified target while actively moving through dynamic environments. However, prevailing EVT paradigms predominantly rely on language-based target indication. While language is expressive and convenient, cluttered scenes often contain multiple objects that satisfy the same semantic description, leading to ambiguous target grounding. We therefore propose a paradigm shift, reframing target indication in EVT from text-only specification to unified spatial-semantic prompting. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Unified Spatial-Semantic Prompts for Embodied Visual Tracking with Latent Dynamics Learning, USS, an end-to-end embodied tracking framework that supports text, point, bounding box, and mask prompts within a unified architecture. USS encodes heterogeneous prompts with modality-specific encoders, fuses prompt tokens with visual features through hybrid attention, and decodes compact prompt-conditioned representations into egocentric waypoints. To further improve temporal robustness, USS incorporates a latent world model that predicts future representations through self-supervised alignment. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that explicit spatial target cues yield higher success rates than text-only prompts, particularly in scenarios involving similar distractors and longer-horizon tracking where maintaining instance-level target identity is critical. In the simulation benchmark, USS also achieves state-of-the-art performance among non-MLLM-based methods and competitive results against recent MLLM-based approaches with faster inference speed. Our findings reveal that spatial-semantic prompting provides a more precise and flexible target indication interface for embodied visual tracking. Project site: https://arescheah.github.io/uss-project-page/.

We present ALFRED (Action Learning From Realistic Environments and Directives), a benchmark for learning a mapping from natural language instructions and egocentric vision to sequences of actions for household tasks. ALFRED includes long, compositional tasks with non-reversible state changes to shrink the gap between research benchmarks and real-world applications. ALFRED consists of expert demonstrations in interactive visual environments for 25k natural language directives. These directives contain both high-level goals like "Rinse off a mug and place it in the coffee maker." and low-level language instructions like "Walk to the coffee maker on the right." ALFRED tasks are more complex in terms of sequence length, action space, and language than existing vision-and-language task datasets. We show that a baseline model based on recent embodied vision-and-language tasks performs poorly on ALFRED, suggesting that there is significant room for developing innovative grounded visual language understanding models with this benchmark.

The ability to anticipate human-object interactions is highly desirable in an intelligent assistive system in order to guide users during daily life activities and understand their short and long-term goals. Creating systems with such capabilities requires to approach several complex challenges. This work addresses the problem of human-object interaction anticipation in Egocentric Vision using Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). We tackle key limitations in existing approaches by improving visual grounding capabilities through Set-of-Mark prompting and understanding user intent via the trajectory formed by the user's most recent gaze fixations. To effectively capture the temporal dynamics immediately preceding the interaction, we further introduce a novel inverse exponential sampling strategy for input video frames. Experiments conducted on the egocentric dataset HD-EPIC demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for the considered task, showing its model-agnostic nature.

Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to move and interact within physical environments. However, existing navigation tasks primarily focus on predefined object navigation or instruction following, which significantly differs from human needs in real-world scenarios involving complex, open-ended scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a challenging long-horizon navigation task that requires understanding high-level human instructions and performing spatial-aware object navigation in real-world environments. Existing embodied navigation methods struggle with such tasks due to their limitations in comprehending high-level human instructions and localizing objects with an open vocabulary. In this paper, we propose NavA^3, a hierarchical framework divided into two stages: global and local policies. In the global policy, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of Reasoning-VLM to parse high-level human instructions and integrate them with global 3D scene views. This allows us to reason and navigate to regions most likely to contain the goal object. In the local policy, we have collected a dataset of 1.0 million samples of spatial-aware object affordances to train the NaviAfford model (PointingVLM), which provides robust open-vocabulary object localization and spatial awareness for precise goal identification and navigation in complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NavA^3 achieves SOTA results in navigation performance and can successfully complete longhorizon navigation tasks across different robot embodiments in real-world settings, paving the way for universal embodied navigation. The dataset and code will be made available. Project website: https://NavigationA3.github.io/.

Certain statistical models are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Many approaches to prompting and pre-training these models involve the automated generation of these prompts. We call these approaches meta-prompting, or prompting to obtain prompts. We propose a theoretical framework based on category theory to generalize and describe them. This framework is flexible enough to account for LLM stochasticity; and allows us to obtain formal results around task agnosticity and equivalence of various meta-prompting approaches. We experiment with meta-prompting in two active areas of model research: creativity and ideation. We find that user preference favors (p < 0.01) the prompts generated under meta-prompting, as well as their corresponding outputs, over a series of hardcoded baseline prompts that include the original task prompt. Using our framework, we argue that meta-prompting is more effective than basic prompting at generating desirable outputs.

Language-guided human following is an important capability for embodied agents, but existing benchmarks typically assume that the target person is visible at the start of an episode. This setting simplifies the problem and overlooks a more realistic requirement: an agent often needs to first find a language-described target and then persistently follow that target in a dynamic environment. While recent work has started to study human search, existing settings are typically evaluated in task-specific scenarios and often rely on stronger prior knowledge of the environment. Moreover, they usually treat searching and following as separate tasks and still lack a unified benchmark for systematic evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce the Unified Embodied Seeking and Following Benchmark (UESF-Bench), a large-scale and diverse benchmark for embodied human seeking and following. The benchmark requires agents to handle semantic-guided exploration, reliable behavior switching and recovery, and delayed identity grounding. To this end, we propose SeekFollow-VLA, a vision-language-action framework with a task-driven routing mechanism for latent phase inference and transition modeling between seeking and following. Experimental results show that SeekFollow-VLA achieves clear improvements over both single-head and dual-head baselines across single-person and multi-person environments, establishing a baseline for unified embodied seek-and-follow.

Skillful mobile operation in three-dimensional environments is a primary topic of study in Artificial Intelligence. The past two years have seen a surge of creative work on navigation. This creative output has produced a plethora of sometimes incompatible task definitions and evaluation protocols. To coordinate ongoing and future research in this area, we have convened a working group to study empirical methodology in navigation research. The present document summarizes the consensus recommendations of this working group. We discuss different problem statements and the role of generalization, present evaluation measures, and provide standard scenarios that can be used for benchmarking.

Aligning vision and language concepts at a finer level remains an essential topic of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly for tasks such as referring and grounding. Existing methods, such as proxy encoding and geometry encoding, incorporate additional syntax to encode spatial information, imposing extra burdens when communicating between language and vision modules. In this study, we propose ClawMachine, offering a new methodology that explicitly notates each entity using token collectives groups of visual tokens that collaboratively represent higher level semantics. A hybrid perception mechanism is also explored to perceive and understand scenes from both discrete and continuous spaces. Our method unifies the prompt and answer of visual referential tasks without using additional syntax. By leveraging a joint vision-language vocabulary, ClawMachine further integrates referring and grounding in an auto-regressive manner, demonstrating great potential with scaled-up pre-training data. Experiments show that ClawMachine achieves superior performance on scene-level and referential understanding tasks with higher efficiency. It also exhibits the potential to integrate multi-source information for complex visual reasoning, which is beyond the capability of many MLLMs. Our code is available at github.com/martian422/ClawMachine.

Humans can perform complex manipulations given a simple intent through an overall instruction, while continuously adapting to evolving visual observations. However, current vision-language action (VLA) models and other action policies struggle to realize this high-level intelligent behavior under dense, evolving visual inputs and sparse language guidance. Visual correlations can then dominate semantic intent, leading actions to follow visual shortcuts rather than human goals. We present HINT (Human-INTent INcepTion), an agentic framework inspired by the human manipulation principles: semantic intent changes sparsely at manipulation-pattern transitions, whereas continuous control primarily depends on the evolving object-hand relationship. HINT invokes semantic reasoning only at pattern transitions to resolve the current subtask and target, then maintains this commitment through multi-view grounding and visual tracking. We explore two visual interfaces-image-space semantic highlighting and attention-prior injection-to communicate the tracked intent to the action policy without introducing additional trainable parameters into the foundation action model. Experiments across three long-horizon tasks and out-of-distribution variants show that HINT substantially improves intent understanding, task progress, and end-to-end success across two foundation policies while preserving low-latency control. Project page: https://robot-hint.github.io/

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

A number of tasks have been proposed recently to facilitate easy access to charts such as chart QA and summarization. The dominant paradigm to solve these tasks has been to fine-tune a pretrained model on the task data. However, this approach is not only expensive but also not generalizable to unseen tasks. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive generalization capabilities to unseen tasks with zero- or few-shot prompting. However, their application to chart-related tasks is not trivial as these tasks typically involve considering not only the underlying data but also the visual features in the chart image. We propose PromptChart, a multimodal few-shot prompting framework with LLMs for chart-related applications. By analyzing the tasks carefully, we have come up with a set of prompting guidelines for each task to elicit the best few-shot performance from LLMs. We further propose a strategy to inject visual information into the prompts. Our experiments on three different chart-related information consumption tasks show that with properly designed prompts LLMs can excel on the benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art.

Visual Language Navigation foundation models aim to unify deep reasoning for grounded spatial decisions with broad versatility for diverse embodied tasks. Current approaches typically achieve this integration via monolithic policies that map observations directly to actions, yet they often suffer from coordinate drift and poor handling of long-tail semantics. Furthermore, these black-box mappings lack interpretability, hindering the simultaneous achievement of generality, robustness, and transparency. We present ABot-N1, a step toward a general Visual Language Navigation foundation model, that addresses these challenges by decoupling cognition from control via a slow-fast architecture guided by dual visual-language signals. More specifically, a slow vision-language reasoner performs explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning while producing a pixel goal. This compact set of image-space anchor points serves as a universal interface for diverse tasks, including point-goal, object-goal, poi-goal, instruction-following, and person-following. Subsequently, a fast action expert leverages both the textual cues and the pixel guidance to generate continuous waypoints at the native control frequency. By bridging high-level intents and low-level control through pixel-grounded anchors paired with explicit linguistic traces, our approach ensures robust, generalizable, and interpretable navigation across simulation and real-world benchmarks. ABot-N1 establishes new state-of-the-art records, delivering massive gains specifically in urban-scale navigation: boosting POI arrival by 35.0% (to 77.3%) and achieving 95.4%/92.9% SR in complex indoor and outdoor scenes. It also maintains superior robustness across object-reaching, person-following, and instruction-following tasks. New Point-Goal/POI-Goal benchmarks are released as open source to advance the field of urban-scale navigation.

Despite great strides in language-guided manipulation, existing work has been constrained to table-top settings. Table-tops allow for perfect and consistent camera angles, properties are that do not hold in mobile manipulation. Task plans that involve moving around the environment must be robust to egocentric views and changes in the plane and angle of grasp. A further challenge is ensuring this is all true while still being able to learn skills efficiently from limited data. We propose Spatial-Language Attention Policies (SLAP) as a solution. SLAP uses three-dimensional tokens as the input representation to train a single multi-task, language-conditioned action prediction policy. Our method shows an 80% success rate in the real world across eight tasks with a single model, and a 47.5% success rate when unseen clutter and unseen object configurations are introduced, even with only a handful of examples per task. This represents an improvement of 30% over prior work (20% given unseen distractors and configurations). We see a 4x improvement over baseline in mobile manipulation setting. In addition, we show how SLAPs robustness allows us to execute Task Plans from open-vocabulary instructions using a large language model for multi-step mobile manipulation. For videos, see the website: https://robotslap.github.io

Despite the critical need to align search targets with users' intention, retrievers often only prioritize query information without delving into the users' intended search context. Enhancing the capability of retrievers to understand intentions and preferences of users, akin to language model instructions, has the potential to yield more aligned search targets. Prior studies restrict the application of instructions in information retrieval to a task description format, neglecting the broader context of diverse and evolving search scenarios. Furthermore, the prevailing benchmarks utilized for evaluation lack explicit tailoring to assess instruction-following ability, thereby hindering progress in this field. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark,INSTRUCTIR, specifically designed to evaluate instruction-following ability in information retrieval tasks. Our approach focuses on user-aligned instructions tailored to each query instance, reflecting the diverse characteristics inherent in real-world search scenarios. Through experimental analysis, we observe that retrievers fine-tuned to follow task-style instructions, such as INSTRUCTOR, can underperform compared to their non-instruction-tuned counterparts. This underscores potential overfitting issues inherent in constructing retrievers trained on existing instruction-aware retrieval datasets.

Mobile UI understanding is important for enabling various interaction tasks such as UI automation and accessibility. Previous mobile UI modeling often depends on the view hierarchy information of a screen, which directly provides the structural data of the UI, with the hope to bypass challenging tasks of visual modeling from screen pixels. However, view hierarchies are not always available, and are often corrupted with missing object descriptions or misaligned structure information. As a result, despite the use of view hierarchies could offer short-term gains, it may ultimately hinder the applicability and performance of the model. In this paper, we propose Spotlight, a vision-only approach for mobile UI understanding. Specifically, we enhance a vision-language model that only takes the screenshot of the UI and a region of interest on the screen -- the focus -- as the input. This general architecture of Spotlight is easily scalable and capable of performing a range of UI modeling tasks. Our experiments show that our model establishes SoTA results on several representative UI tasks and outperforms previous methods that use both screenshots and view hierarchies as inputs. Furthermore, we explore multi-task learning and few-shot prompting capacities of the proposed models, demonstrating promising results in the multi-task learning direction.

There has been a surge of interest in assistive wearable agents: agents embodied in wearable form factors (e.g., smart glasses) who take assistive actions toward a user's goal/query (e.g. "Where did I leave my keys?"). In this work, we consider the important complementary problem of inferring that goal from multi-modal contextual observations. Solving this "goal inference" problem holds the promise of eliminating the effort needed to interact with such an agent. This work focuses on creating WAGIBench, a strong benchmark to measure progress in solving this problem using vision-language models (VLMs). Given the limited prior work in this area, we collected a novel dataset comprising 29 hours of multimodal data from 348 participants across 3,477 recordings, featuring ground-truth goals alongside accompanying visual, audio, digital, and longitudinal contextual observations. We validate that human performance exceeds model performance, achieving 93% multiple-choice accuracy compared with 84% for the best-performing VLM. Generative benchmark results that evaluate several families of modern vision-language models show that larger models perform significantly better on the task, yet remain far from practical usefulness, as they produce relevant goals only 55% of the time. Through a modality ablation, we show that models benefit from extra information in relevant modalities with minimal performance degradation from irrelevant modalities.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are required to identify key information from conversations for the completion of given tasks. Such information is conventionally specified in terms of intents and slots contained in task-specific ontology or schemata. Since these schemata are designed by system developers, the naming convention for slots and intents is not uniform across tasks, and may not convey their semantics effectively. This can lead to models memorizing arbitrary patterns in data, resulting in suboptimal performance and generalization. In this paper, we propose that schemata should be modified by replacing names or notations entirely with natural language descriptions. We show that a language description-driven system exhibits better understanding of task specifications, higher performance on state tracking, improved data efficiency, and effective zero-shot transfer to unseen tasks. Following this paradigm, we present a simple yet effective Description-Driven Dialog State Tracking (D3ST) model, which relies purely on schema descriptions and an "index-picking" mechanism. We demonstrate the superiority in quality, data efficiency and robustness of our approach as measured on the MultiWOZ (Budzianowski et al.,2018), SGD (Rastogi et al., 2020), and the recent SGD-X (Lee et al., 2021) benchmarks.

Task driven object detection aims to detect object instances suitable for affording a task in an image. Its challenge lies in object categories available for the task being too diverse to be limited to a closed set of object vocabulary for traditional object detection. Simply mapping categories and visual features of common objects to the task cannot address the challenge. In this paper, we propose to explore fundamental affordances rather than object categories, i.e., common attributes that enable different objects to accomplish the same task. Moreover, we propose a novel multi-level chain-of-thought prompting (MLCoT) to extract the affordance knowledge from large language models, which contains multi-level reasoning steps from task to object examples to essential visual attributes with rationales. Furthermore, to fully exploit knowledge to benefit object recognition and localization, we propose a knowledge-conditional detection framework, namely CoTDet. It conditions the detector from the knowledge to generate object queries and regress boxes. Experimental results demonstrate that our CoTDet outperforms state-of-the-art methods consistently and significantly (+15.6 box AP and +14.8 mask AP) and can generate rationales for why objects are detected to afford the task.

The Embodied AI community has made significant strides in visual navigation tasks, exploring targets from 3D coordinates, objects, language descriptions, and images. However, these navigation models often handle only a single input modality as the target. With the progress achieved so far, it is time to move towards universal navigation models capable of handling various goal types, enabling more effective user interaction with robots. To facilitate this goal, we propose GOAT-Bench, a benchmark for the universal navigation task referred to as GO to AnyThing (GOAT). In this task, the agent is directed to navigate to a sequence of targets specified by the category name, language description, or image in an open-vocabulary fashion. We benchmark monolithic RL and modular methods on the GOAT task, analyzing their performance across modalities, the role of explicit and implicit scene memories, their robustness to noise in goal specifications, and the impact of memory in lifelong scenarios.

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the process of mapping human instructions to GUI actions, serves as a fundamental basis to autonomous GUI agents. While existing grounding models achieve promising performance to simulate the mouse click action on various click-based benchmarks, another essential mode of mouse interaction, namely dragging, remains largely underexplored. Yet, dragging the mouse to select and manipulate textual content represents a prevalent and important usage in practical GUI scenarios. To narrow this gap, we first introduce GUI-Drag, a diverse dataset of 161K text dragging examples synthesized through a scalable pipeline. To support systematic and robust evaluation, we further construct ScreenDrag, a benchmark with 5,333 examples spanning three levels of interface context, together with three dedicated metrics designed for assessing text dragging capability. Models trained on GUI-Drag with an efficient continual training strategy achieve substantial improvements on ScreenDrag, while preserving the original click-based performance on ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and OSWorld-G. Our work encourages further research on broader GUI grounding beyond just clicking and paves way toward a truly generalist GUI grounding model. All benchmark, data, checkpoints, and code are open-sourced and available at https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/GUI-Drag.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled autonomous GUI agents that translate natural language instructions into executable screen coordinates. However, grounding performance degrades in high-resolution interfaces, where dense layouts and small interactive elements expose a resolution gap between modern displays and model input constraints. Existing zoom-in strategies rely on fixed anchors, heuristic grids, or reinforcement learning, lacking a principled mechanism to adaptively determine where refinement is needed and how much spatial uncertainty should be explored. We propose AutoFocus, a training-free, uncertainty-aware active visual search framework for GUI grounding. Our key insight is that token-level perplexity in coordinate generation naturally reflects spatial uncertainty. Rather than committing to a single prediction, AutoFocus samples multiple coordinate hypotheses and converts their axial perplexities into an anisotropic gaussian spatial probability field, explicitly modeling directional uncertainty. Based on this field, we generate global and local region proposals and introduce Shape-Aware Zooming to balance tight localization with contextual preservation. A visual prompt-based aggregation step then selects the most consistent prediction via structured comparison. Extensive experiments on ScreenSpot-Pro and ScreenSpot-V2 demonstrate consistent improvements across both general-purpose and GUI-specialized VLMs.

Existing embodied instance goal navigation tasks, driven by natural language, assume human users to provide complete and nuanced instance descriptions prior to the navigation, which can be impractical in the real world as human instructions might be brief and ambiguous. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task, Collaborative Instance Navigation (CoIN), with dynamic agent-human interaction during navigation to actively resolve uncertainties about the target instance in natural, template-free, open-ended dialogues. To address CoIN, we propose a novel method, Agent-user Interaction with UncerTainty Awareness (AIUTA), leveraging the perception capability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) and the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). First, upon object detection, a Self-Questioner model initiates a self-dialogue to obtain a complete and accurate observation description, while a novel uncertainty estimation technique mitigates inaccurate VLM perception. Then, an Interaction Trigger module determines whether to ask a question to the user, continue or halt navigation, minimizing user input. For evaluation, we introduce CoIN-Bench, a benchmark supporting both real and simulated humans. AIUTA achieves competitive performance in instance navigation against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating great flexibility in handling user inputs.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding is commonly framed as a coordinate prediction task -- given a natural language instruction, generate on-screen coordinates for actions such as clicks and keystrokes. However, recent Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fail to predict accurate numeric coordinates when processing high-resolution GUI images with complex layouts. To address this issue, we reframe GUI grounding as an interactive search task, where the VLM generates actions to move a cursor in the GUI to locate UI elements. At each step, the model determines the target object, evaluates the spatial relations between the cursor and the target, and moves the cursor closer to the target conditioned on the movement history. In this interactive process, the rendered cursor provides visual feedback to help the model align its predictions with the corresponding on-screen locations. We train our GUI grounding model, GUI-Cursor, using multi-step online reinforcement learning with a dense trajectory-based reward function. Our experimental results show that GUI-Cursor, based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, improves the GUI grounding accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art results on ScreenSpot-v2 (88.8% rightarrow 93.9%) and ScreenSpot-Pro (26.8% rightarrow 56.5%). Moreover, we observe that GUI-Cursor learns to solve the problem within two steps for 95\% of instances and can adaptively conduct more steps on more difficult examples.

The academic field of learning instruction-guided visual navigation can be generally categorized into high-level category-specific search and low-level language-guided navigation, depending on the granularity of language instruction, in which the former emphasizes the exploration process, while the latter concentrates on following detailed textual commands. Despite the differing focuses of these tasks, the underlying requirements of interpreting instructions, comprehending the surroundings, and inferring action decisions remain consistent. This paper consolidates diverse navigation tasks into a unified and generic framework -- we investigate the core difficulties of sharing general knowledge and exploiting task-specific capabilities in learning navigation and propose a novel State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts (SAME) model that effectively enables an agent to infer decisions based on different-granularity language and dynamic observations. Powered by SAME, we present a versatile agent capable of addressing seven navigation tasks simultaneously that outperforms or achieves highly comparable performance to task-specific agents.

Situated embodied conversation requires robots to interleave real-time dialogue with active perception: deciding what to look at, when to look, and what to say under tight latency constraints. We present a simple, minimal system recipe that pairs a real-time multimodal language model with a small set of tool interfaces for attention and active perception. We study six home-style scenarios that require frequent attention shifts and increasing perceptual scope. Across four system variants, we evaluate turn-level tool-decision correctness against human annotations and collect subjective ratings of interaction quality. Results indicate that real-time multimodal large language models and tool use for active perception is a promising direction for practical situated embodied conversation.

This work focuses on object goal visual navigation, aiming at finding the location of an object from a given class, where in each step the agent is provided with an egocentric RGB image of the scene. We propose to learn the agent's policy using a reinforcement learning algorithm. Our key contribution is a novel attention probability model for visual navigation tasks. This attention encodes semantic information about observed objects, as well as spatial information about their place. This combination of the "what" and the "where" allows the agent to navigate toward the sought-after object effectively. The attention model is shown to improve the agent's policy and to achieve state-of-the-art results on commonly-used datasets.

We introduce an open-source system called SIGMA (short for "Situated Interactive Guidance, Monitoring, and Assistance") as a platform for conducting research on task-assistive agents in mixed-reality scenarios. The system leverages the sensing and rendering affordances of a head-mounted mixed-reality device in conjunction with large language and vision models to guide users step by step through procedural tasks. We present the system's core capabilities, discuss its overall design and implementation, and outline directions for future research enabled by the system. SIGMA is easily extensible and provides a useful basis for future research at the intersection of mixed reality and AI. By open-sourcing an end-to-end implementation, we aim to lower the barrier to entry, accelerate research in this space, and chart a path towards community-driven end-to-end evaluation of large language, vision, and multimodal models in the context of real-world interactive applications.

The paper investigates using a Large Language Model (LLM) to automatically perform web software tasks using click, scroll, and text input operations. Previous approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning, are inefficient to train and task-specific. Our method uses filtered Document Object Model (DOM) elements as observations and performs tasks step-by-step, sequentially generating small programs based on the current observations. We use in-context learning, either benefiting from a single manually provided example, or an automatically generated example based on a successful zero-shot trial. We evaluate the proposed method on the MiniWob++ benchmark. With only one in-context example, our WebWISE method achieves similar or better performance than other methods that require many demonstrations or trials.

Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform target tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts for can be challenging--especially in tasks that involve unusual edge cases, demand precise articulation of nebulous preferences, or require an accurate mental model of LM behavior. We propose to use *LMs themselves* to guide the task specification process. In this paper, we introduce **Generative Active Task Elicitation (GATE)**: a learning framework in which models elicit and infer intended behavior through free-form, language-based interaction with users. We study GATE in three domains: email validation, content recommendation, and moral reasoning. In preregistered experiments, we show that LMs prompted to perform GATE (e.g., by generating open-ended questions or synthesizing informative edge cases) elicit responses that are often more informative than user-written prompts or labels. Users report that interactive task elicitation requires less effort than prompting or example labeling and surfaces novel considerations not initially anticipated by users. Our findings suggest that LM-driven elicitation can be a powerful tool for aligning models to complex human preferences and values.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to translate high-level instructions into the precise spatial affordances required for robotic manipulation. While visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods exist, they are often computationally intensive. In this work, we introduce TRACE (Textual Reasoning for Affordance Coordinate Extraction), a novel methodology that integrates a textual Chain of Reasoning (CoR) into the affordance prediction process. We use this methodology to create the TRACE dataset, a large-scale collection created via an autonomous pipeline that pairs instructions with explicit textual rationales. By fine-tuning a VLM on this data, our model learns to externalize its spatial reasoning before acting. Our experiments show that our TRACE-tuned model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 48.1% accuracy on the primary Where2Place (W2P) benchmark (a 9.6% relative improvement) and 55.0% on the more challenging W2P(h) subset. Crucially, an ablation study demonstrates that performance scales directly with the amount of reasoning data used, confirming the CoR's effectiveness. Furthermore, analysis of the model's attention maps reveals an interpretable reasoning process where focus shifts dynamically across reasoning steps. This work shows that training VLMs to generate a textual CoR is an effective and robust strategy for enhancing the precision, reliability, and interpretability of VLM-based robot control. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/jink-ucla/TRACE

Evaluation is shifting from static QA toward agentic settings where models act through external tools. We identify a critical yet underexplored capability within this space - dexterous visual tool use: fine-grained, closed-loop parameterized visual action in which models infer tool parameters from visual evidence, and those parameters directly govern the final result. Existing benchmarks cover web navigation, GUI operation, and software engineering, but rarely target this coupling between visual evidence and execution precision. We propose EASEL, a benchmark evaluating a controlled instance of dexterous visual tool use that adopts reference-guided visual reconstruction as its primary proxy task: the agent incrementally paints a canvas to match a reference image. EASEL additionally includes semantic tasks spanning region annotation, handwriting, and path planning. We further provide EASEL-Data, a 440k-sample two-stage curriculum dataset for trajectory supervision, and EASEL-9B to investigate its effect on this capability. Evaluation of 25 models reveals that current multimodal agents systematically struggle on EASEL. Reconstruction similarity bottlenecks at low levels (0.40-0.54), while trajectory diagnostics expose severe closed-loop instability - models typically saturate early or degrade post-peak. Semantic tasks reveal sharp capability boundaries in precision annotation and path planning. EASEL-9B, trained on EASEL-Data, surpasses the base model by a relative 6.3%, ranking third among all evaluated models.

We investigate the internal representations of vision-and-language models (VLMs) and how they encode task representations. We consider tasks specified through examples or instructions, using either text or image inputs. Surprisingly, we find that conceptually similar tasks are mapped to similar task vector representations, regardless of how they are specified. Our findings suggest that to output answers, tokens in VLMs undergo three distinct phases: input, task, and answer, a process which is consistent across different modalities and specifications. The task vectors we identify in VLMs are general enough to be derived in one modality (e.g., text) and transferred to another (e.g., image). Additionally, we find that ensembling exemplar and instruction based task vectors produce better task representations. Taken together, these insights shed light on the underlying mechanisms of VLMs, particularly their ability to represent tasks in a shared manner across different modalities and task specifications. Project page: https://task-vectors-are-cross-modal.github.io.

Despite recent progress, learning new tasks through language instructions remains an extremely challenging problem. On the ALFRED benchmark for task learning, the published state-of-the-art system only achieves a task success rate of less than 10% in an unseen environment, compared to the human performance of over 90%. To address this issue, this paper takes a closer look at task learning. In a departure from a widely applied end-to-end architecture, we decomposed task learning into three sub-problems: sub-goal planning, scene navigation, and object manipulation; and developed a model HiTUT (stands for Hierarchical Tasks via Unified Transformers) that addresses each sub-problem in a unified manner to learn a hierarchical task structure. On the ALFRED benchmark, HiTUT has achieved the best performance with a remarkably higher generalization ability. In the unseen environment, HiTUT achieves over 160% performance gain in success rate compared to the previous state of the art. The explicit representation of task structures also enables an in-depth understanding of the nature of the problem and the ability of the agent, which provides insight for future benchmark development and evaluation.

Recent advancements in visual language models (VLMs) have notably enhanced their capabilities in handling complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) interaction tasks. Despite these improvements, current frameworks often struggle to generate correct actions in challenging GUI environments. State-of-the-art commercial VLMs are black-boxes, and fine-tuning open-source VLMs for GUI tasks requires significant resources. Additionally, existing trajectory-level evaluation and refinement techniques frequently fall short due to delayed feedback and local optimization issues. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that guides VLM agents with process supervision by a reward model during GUI navigation and control at inference time. This guidance allows the VLM agent to optimize actions at each inference step, thereby improving performance in both static and dynamic environments. In particular, our method demonstrates significant performance gains in three GUI navigation tasks, achieving a 3.4% improvement in single step action accuracy for static environments, along with a around 33% increase in task success rate in one dynamic environment. With further integration of trajectory reflection and retry mechanisms, we also demonstrate even greater enhancement in task success.

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are prone to be distracted by irrelevant contexts. The reason for distraction remains poorly understood. In this paper, we first identify the contextual heads, a special group of attention heads that control the overall attention of the LLM. Then, we demonstrate that distraction arises when contextual heads fail to allocate sufficient attention to relevant contexts and can be mitigated by increasing attention to these contexts. We further identify focus directions, located at the key and query activations of these heads, which enable them to allocate more attention to relevant contexts without explicitly specifying which context is relevant. We comprehensively evaluate the effect of focus direction on various long-context tasks and find out focus directions could help to mitigate the poor task alignment of the long-context LLMs. We believe our findings could promote further research on long-context LLM alignment.

Human-AI planning for complex goals remains challenging with current large language models (LLMs), which rely on linear chat histories and simplistic memory mechanisms. Despite advances in long-context prompting, users still manually manage information, leading to a high cognitive burden. Hence, we propose JumpStarter, a system that enables LLMs to collaborate with humans on complex goals by dynamically decomposing tasks to help users manage context. We specifically introduce task-structured context curation, a novel framework that breaks down a user's goal into a hierarchy of actionable subtasks, and scopes context to localized decision points, enabling finer-grained personalization and reuse. The framework is realized through three core mechanisms: context elicitation, selection, and reuse. We demonstrate that task-structured context curation significantly improves plan quality by 16% over ablations. Our user study shows that JumpStarter helped users generate plans with 79% higher quality compared to ChatGPT.

Task-oriented dialogue systems often face difficulties when user utterances seem semantically complete but lack necessary structural information for appropriate system action. This arises because users frequently do not fully understand their own needs, while systems require precise intent definitions. Current LLM-based agents cannot effectively distinguish between linguistically complete and contextually triggerable expressions, lacking frameworks for collaborative intent formation. We present STORM, a framework modeling asymmetric information dynamics through conversations between UserLLM (full internal access) and AgentLLM (observable behavior only). STORM produces annotated corpora capturing expression trajectories and latent cognitive transitions, enabling systematic analysis of collaborative understanding development. Our contributions include: (1) formalizing asymmetric information processing in dialogue systems; (2) modeling intent formation tracking collaborative understanding evolution; and (3) evaluation metrics measuring internal cognitive improvements alongside task performance. Experiments across four language models reveal that moderate uncertainty (40-60%) can outperform complete transparency in certain scenarios, with model-specific patterns suggesting reconsideration of optimal information completeness in human-AI collaboration. These findings contribute to understanding asymmetric reasoning dynamics and inform uncertainty-calibrated dialogue system design.

As large language models advance in reasoning and tool use capabilities, researchers increasingly seek to leverage them for computer use agents that can interact with existing software. The dominant approach develops GUI agents that control applications through visual interfaces: interpreting screenshots, locating UI elements, and executing mouse clicks to mimic human interaction. This GUI-centric paradigm fundamentally misaligns with agent capabilities. Current GUI agents struggle with brittle pixel-level interactions, timing dependencies, and coordinate-based actions that break with interface changes. They force agents to emulate human perceptual limitations rather than leverage their computational strengths in structured data processing and programmatic control. CLI-Anything argues for agent-native computer use design. Instead of forcing agents to navigate visual layouts, we create interfaces aligned with how agents naturally operate: through structured commands, explicit state representations, and deterministic feedback. We transform existing applications into command-line harnesses that preserve functionality while exposing machine-readable protocols optimized for AI-native interaction. This eliminates the lossy visual-to-computational translation that plagues GUI agents. Rather than building sophisticated screen readers and click simulators, we should redesign interaction paradigms around agent strengths: precise programmatic control and deterministic execution. We examine the methodology, architecture, evidence, and future directions for this agent-native transformation of computer use. We have built CLI-Hub as a comprehensive platform that operationalizes this agent-native computer use vision. The platform provides methodology, architecture, and infrastructure for this fundamental transformation of computer use.

When reading, we often have specific information that interests us in a text. For example, you might be reading this paper because you are curious about LLMs for eye movements in reading, the experimental design, or perhaps you only care about the question ``but does it work?''. More broadly, in daily life, people approach texts with any number of text-specific goals that guide their reading behavior. In this work, we ask, for the first time, whether open-ended reading goals can be automatically decoded from eye movements in reading. To address this question, we introduce goal classification and goal reconstruction tasks and evaluation frameworks, and use large-scale eye tracking for reading data in English with hundreds of text-specific information seeking tasks. We develop and compare several discriminative and generative multimodal LLMs that combine eye movements and text for goal classification and goal reconstruction. Our experiments show considerable success on both tasks, suggesting that LLMs can extract valuable information about the readers' text-specific goals from eye movements.

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do not always attend to these instructions reliably, and users lack simple mechanisms to emphasize their importance beyond modifying prompt wording or structure. To address this, we present an inference-time method that enables users to emphasize specific parts of their prompt by steering the model's attention toward them, aligning the model's perceived importance of different prompt tokens with user intent. Unlike prior approaches that are limited to static instructions, require significant offline profiling, or rely on fixed biases, we dynamically update the proportion of model attention given to the user-specified parts--ensuring improved instruction following without performance degradation. We demonstrate that our approach improves instruction following across a variety of tasks involving multiple instructions and generalizes across models of varying scales.

Embodied dialogue instruction following requires an agent to complete a complex sequence of tasks from a natural language exchange. The recent introduction of benchmarks (Padmakumar et al., 2022) raises the question of how best to train and evaluate models for this multi-turn, multi-agent, long-horizon task. This paper contributes to that conversation, by arguing that imitation learning (IL) and related low-level metrics are actually misleading and do not align with the goals of embodied dialogue research and may hinder progress. We provide empirical comparisons of metrics, analysis of three models, and make suggestions for how the field might best progress. First, we observe that models trained with IL take spurious actions during evaluation. Second, we find that existing models fail to ground query utterances, which are essential for task completion. Third, we argue evaluation should focus on higher-level semantic goals.

A vision--language--action (VLA) policy can complete complex tasks while ignoring the evidence that should determine its actions. An object held near the wrist camera can displace the instructed target. Language and action show the same pattern: a familiar noun can trigger the operation it was paired with in training even after the verb changes, and a gripper that closed on nothing may lift anyway. We call these dependencies modality shortcuts: regularities in successful demonstrations make visual, lexical, or motor cues sufficient to predict expert actions without the task evidence needed for the underlying decision. More demonstrations of the same kind can raise task success while leaving these shortcuts intact. We propose Perturbot which makes task-relevant evidence easier to use and shortcuts insufficient on their own: it applies task-preserving wrist-view perturbations, enriches instructions with decision-relevant captions, and adds random and failed trajectory segments relabeled with the behavior they contain. It complements scaling by changing what is scaled, and leaves inference unchanged. Moreover, we propose GroundingFscore, an offline score that diagnoses how severely a policy relies on modality shortcuts. Task success rate shows whether a policy improves, while GroundingFscore reveals whether the policy scales healthily, relying on task evidence rather than shortcuts. Together, Perturbot and GroundingFscore provide a training-and-evaluation framework for disentangling VLA decisions from shortcut priors while preserving responsiveness to task-relevant evidence.

Humans show an innate capability to identify tools to support specific actions. The association between objects parts and the actions they facilitate is usually named affordance. Being able to segment objects parts depending on the tasks they afford is crucial to enable intelligent robots to use objects of daily living. Traditional supervised learning methods for affordance segmentation require costly pixel-level annotations, while weakly supervised approaches, though less demanding, still rely on object-interaction examples and support a closed set of actions. These limitations hinder scalability, may introduce biases, and usually restrict models to a limited set of predefined actions. This paper proposes AffordanceCLIP, to overcome these limitations by leveraging the implicit affordance knowledge embedded within large pre-trained Vision-Language models like CLIP. We experimentally demonstrate that CLIP, although not explicitly trained for affordances detection, retains valuable information for the task. Our AffordanceCLIP achieves competitive zero-shot performance compared to methods with specialized training, while offering several advantages: i) it works with any action prompt, not just a predefined set; ii) it requires training only a small number of additional parameters compared to existing solutions and iii) eliminates the need for direct supervision on action-object pairs, opening new perspectives for functionality-based reasoning of models.

We propose a goal-driven web navigation as a benchmark task for evaluating an agent with abilities to understand natural language and plan on partially observed environments. In this challenging task, an agent navigates through a website, which is represented as a graph consisting of web pages as nodes and hyperlinks as directed edges, to find a web page in which a query appears. The agent is required to have sophisticated high-level reasoning based on natural languages and efficient sequential decision-making capability to succeed. We release a software tool, called WebNav, that automatically transforms a website into this goal-driven web navigation task, and as an example, we make WikiNav, a dataset constructed from the English Wikipedia. We extensively evaluate different variants of neural net based artificial agents on WikiNav and observe that the proposed goal-driven web navigation well reflects the advances in models, making it a suitable benchmark for evaluating future progress. Furthermore, we extend the WikiNav with question-answer pairs from Jeopardy! and test the proposed agent based on recurrent neural networks against strong inverted index based search engines. The artificial agents trained on WikiNav outperforms the engined based approaches, demonstrating the capability of the proposed goal-driven navigation as a good proxy for measuring the progress in real-world tasks such as focused crawling and question-answering.

Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands. We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments. Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.

In most existing embodied navigation tasks, instructions are well-defined and unambiguous, such as instruction following and object searching. Under this idealized setting, agents are required solely to produce effective navigation outputs conditioned on vision and language inputs. However, real-world navigation instructions are often vague and ambiguous, requiring the agent to resolve uncertainty and infer user intent through active dialog. To address this gap, we propose Interactive Instance Object Navigation (IION), a task that requires agents not only to generate navigation actions but also to produce language outputs via active dialog, thereby aligning more closely with practical settings. IION extends Instance Object Navigation (ION) by allowing agents to freely consult an oracle in natural language while navigating. Building on this task, we present the Vision Language-Language Navigation (VL-LN) benchmark, which provides a large-scale, automatically generated dataset and a comprehensive evaluation protocol for training and assessing dialog-enabled navigation models. VL-LN comprises over 41k long-horizon dialog-augmented trajectories for training and an automatic evaluation protocol with an oracle capable of responding to agent queries. Using this benchmark, we train a navigation model equipped with dialog capabilities and show that it achieves significant improvements over the baselines. Extensive experiments and analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of VL-LN for advancing research on dialog-enabled embodied navigation. Code and dataset: https://0309hws.github.io/VL-LN.github.io/

Modern code intelligence agents operate in contexts exceeding 1 million tokens--far beyond the scale where humans manually locate relevant files. Yet agents consistently fail to discover architecturally critical files when solving real-world coding tasks. We identify the Navigation Paradox: agents perform poorly not due to context limits, but because navigation and retrieval are fundamentally distinct problems. Through 258 automated trials across 30 benchmark tasks on a production FastAPI repository, we demonstrate that graph-based structural navigation via CodeCompass--a Model Context Protocol server exposing dependency graphs--achieves 99.4% task completion on hidden-dependency tasks, a 23.2 percentage-point improvement over vanilla agents (76.2%) and 21.2 points over BM25 retrieval (78.2%).However, we uncover a critical adoption gap: 58% of trials with graph access made zero tool calls, and agents required explicit prompt engineering to adopt the tool consistently. Our findings reveal that the bottleneck is not tool availability but behavioral alignment--agents must be explicitly guided to leverage structural context over lexical heuristics. We contribute: (1) a task taxonomy distinguishing semantic-search, structural, and hidden-dependency scenarios; (2) empirical evidence that graph navigation outperforms retrieval when dependencies lack lexical overlap; and (3) open-source infrastructure for reproducible evaluation of navigation tools.

Recent advances in Tool-Integrated Large Language Models have made web search a core capability of information-seeking agents. However, as interaction histories grow, agents increasingly struggle to track task progress. When search attempts fail to yield useful evidence, current single- and multi-agent systems can become trapped in repetitive loops, wasting search budgets and ultimately compromising the quality and completeness of the final output. We introduce SearchOS, a system-level multi-agent framework that turns fragile, implicit search progress into explicit, persistent, and shared state. First, we formulate open-domain information seeking as relational schema completion with grounded citations, where agents discover entities, populate attributes across linked tables, and anchor each value to source evidence. Then we design Search-Oriented Context Management (SOCM), which externalizes the evolving state into Frontier Task, an Evidence Graph, a Coverage Map, and Failure Memory. Built on SOCM, SearchOS applies a pipeline-parallel scheduling mechanism that overlaps the execution of sub-agents and continuously refills freed slots with tasks targeting unresolved coverage gaps to improve utilization and throughput. To schedule and control the execution of search agents, SearchOS introduces a Search Tool Middleware Harness that intercepts model and tool interactions to record grounded evidence and react to stalls or budget exhaustion, and provides a reusable hierarchical skill system comprising strategy and access skills to augment the agents' search process and avoid repeating failed search patterns across runs. On WideSearch and GISA, SearchOS leads all metrics among the evaluated single- and multi-agent baselines, paving the way toward robust information-seeking collaboration.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models, such as CLIP, learn powerful image-text representations that have found numerous applications, from zero-shot classification to text-to-image generation. Despite that, their capabilities for solving novel discriminative tasks via prompting fall behind those of large language models, such as GPT-3. Here we explore the idea of visual prompt engineering for solving computer vision tasks beyond classification by editing in image space instead of text. In particular, we discover an emergent ability of CLIP, where, by simply drawing a red circle around an object, we can direct the model's attention to that region, while also maintaining global information. We show the power of this simple approach by achieving state-of-the-art in zero-shot referring expressions comprehension and strong performance in keypoint localization tasks. Finally, we draw attention to some potential ethical concerns of large language-vision models.

Terminal agents are increasingly capable of executing complex, long-horizon tasks autonomously from a single user prompt. To do so, they must interpret instructions encountered in the environment (e.g., README files, code comments, stack traces) and determine their relevance to the task. This creates a fundamental challenge: relevant cues must be followed to complete a task, whereas irrelevant or misleading ones must be ignored. Existing benchmarks do not capture this ability. An agent may appear capable by blindly following all instructions, or appear robust by ignoring them altogether. We introduce TAB (Task Alignment Benchmark), a suite of 89 terminal tasks derived from Terminal-Bench 2.1. Each task is intentionally underspecified, with missing information provided as a necessary cue embedded in a natural environmental artifact, alongside a plausible but irrelevant distractor. Solving these tasks requires selectively using the cue while ignoring the distractor. Applying TAB to ten frontier agents reveals a systematic gap between task capability and task alignment. The strongest Terminal-Bench agent achieves high task completion but low task alignment on TAB. Evaluating six prompt-injection defenses further shows that suppressing distractor execution also suppresses the cues required for task completion. These results demonstrate that task-aligned agents require selective use of environmental instructions rather than blanket acceptance or rejection.

Computer-use agents need to reliably ground action targets in complex desktop scenes, where multiple applications, overlapping windows, and visually similar controls compete for attention. Existing training data rarely pair such scenes with dense annotations or vary them in a controlled way. We introduce DeskForge, a controllable desktop environment that composes and explores real applications to generate large-scale supervision for computer-use agents. It varies application states, content, window layout, appearance, and resolution, and fuses screenshots, accessibility trees, and window geometry into dense element annotations while recording the outcome of each executed action. Using this environment, we construct DeskForge-1M, a corpus of 1.2M annotated desktop observations containing 159.7M element instances. We fine-tune four vision-language models on 200K grounding examples drawn from DeskForge-1M. All four improve across held-out desktop conditions and on all five external GUI grounding benchmarks; for Qwen3.5-4B, accuracy increases by 11.51 percentage points on ScreenSpot-Pro and 10.11 points on OSWorld-G. The gains also translate to long-horizon task completion: under a fixed planner, the fine-tuned action models solve more WebArena-Infinity and OpenApps tasks, with Qwen3.5-4B increasing from 31 to 50 of 119 tasks and from 3 to 15 of 100 tasks, respectively. These results show that controllable composition of real desktop environments provides a scalable source of supervision for improving both GUI grounding and long-horizon computer use. The framework code, the dataset, and the fine-tuned model are available from the project page: https://saidgurbuz.github.io/deskforge/

We present a framework for assistive robot manipulation, which focuses on two fundamental challenges: first, efficiently adapting large-scale models to downstream scene affordance understanding tasks, especially in daily living scenarios where gathering multi-task data involving humans requires strenuous effort; second, effectively learning robot trajectories by grounding the visual affordance model. We tackle the first challenge by employing a parameter-efficient prompt tuning method that prepends learnable text prompts to the frozen vision model to predict manipulation affordances in multi-task scenarios. Then we propose to learn robot trajectories guided by affordances in a supervised Flow Matching method. Flow matching represents a robot visuomotor policy as a conditional process of flowing random waypoints to desired robot trajectories. Finally, we introduce a real-world dataset with 10 tasks across Activities of Daily Living to test our framework. Our extensive evaluation highlights that the proposed prompt tuning method for learning manipulation affordance with language prompter achieves competitive performance and even outperforms other finetuning protocols across data scales, while satisfying parameter efficiency. Learning multi-task robot trajectories with a single flow matching policy also leads to consistently better performance than alternative behavior cloning methods, especially given multimodal robot action distributions. Our framework seamlessly unifies affordance model learning and trajectory generation with flow matching for robot manipulation.

Skill usage has become a core component of modern agent systems and can substantially improve agents' ability to complete complex tasks. In real-world settings, where agents must monitor and interact with numerous personal applications, web browsers, and other environment interfaces, skill libraries can scale to thousands of reusable skills. Scaling to larger skill sets introduces two key challenges. First, loading the full skill set saturates the context window, driving up token costs, hallucination, and latency. In this paper, we present Graph of Skills (GoS), an inference-time structural retrieval layer for large skill libraries. GoS constructs an executable skill graph offline from skill packages, then at inference time retrieves a bounded, dependency-aware skill bundle through hybrid semantic-lexical seeding, reverse-weighted Personalized PageRank, and context-budgeted hydration. On SkillsBench and ALFWorld, GoS improves average reward by 43.6% over the vanilla full skill-loading baseline while reducing input tokens by 37.8%, and generalizes across three model families: Claude Sonnet, GPT-5.2 Codex, and MiniMax. Additional ablation studies across skill libraries ranging from 200 to 2,000 skills further demonstrate that GoS consistently outperforms both vanilla skills loading and simple vector retrieval in balancing reward, token efficiency, and runtime.

While long-horizon mobile GUI agents typically rely on thought-action-observation loops, they struggle to separate persistent task states from transient screen observations. As execution histories grow, this entanglement imposes a severe context burden, causing agents to forget initial requirements, hallucinate progress, or repeatedly interact with stale interfaces. To address this, we introduce Task-State Representation (TSR), a training-free framework that explicitly decouples task state from sensory input. Acting as a lightweight external wrapper, TSR maintains three structured components: a global instruction summary, a dynamic progress tracker for subgoals, and a transition-aware action verifier. By continuously updating through pre- and post-action visual comparisons, TSR effectively guides the agent's reasoning without requiring architectural modifications. Experiments across four mobile GUI benchmarks validate TSR's effectiveness, yielding up to a 12 absolute point increase in success rate on complex cross-application and memory-intensive tasks.

Recent advancements in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, yet they continue to struggle with long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Existing methods lack internal reasoning mechanisms that can identify task-relevant interaction cues or track progress within a subtask, leading to critical execution errors such as repeated actions, missed steps, and premature termination. To address these challenges, we introduce PALM, a VLA framework that structures policy learning around interaction-centric affordance reasoning and subtask progress cues. PALM distills complementary affordance representations that capture object relevance, contact geometry, spatial placements, and motion dynamics, and serve as task-relevant anchors for visuomotor control. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, PALM predicts continuous within-subtask progress, enabling seamless subtask transitions. Across extensive simulation and real-world experiments, PALM consistently outperforms baselines, achieving a 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-LONG, a 12.5% improvement in average length on CALVIN ABC->D, and a 2x improvement over real-world baselines across three long-horizon generalization settings.

Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are embedded overlays widely used on web systems to guide users through operations inside a page, helping them get started with unfamiliar interfaces quickly. Completing a real task, however, rarely means clicking a few buttons on a single page: it takes a sequence of actions that unfolds across changing page states. Prior studies have also treated automated web agent actions and guide text generation as two separate problems, and most of them feed models textual page representations such as the DOM or accessibility trees rather than the rendered screens that humans actually operate on. In this work we introduce MAG, the first benchmark that unifies task execution and guide writing into a single Multimodal Action and Guide task, with two grounding schemes over screenshots: Set-of-Mark element selection and raw pixel coordinates. We further build a complete harness for this compound task, covering annotation with LLM assistance and human verification, training, evaluation in live environments, and joint metrics for actions and guides. With this harness we evaluate frontier API models and open multimodal models, and report detailed analyses. Finally, we design a GRPO training method augmented with expert trajectories, which nearly doubles the success rate of a supervised 9B agent (from 6.9% to 13.2%) and improves guide quality at the same time. Even the strongest model completes fewer than 40% of the tasks, leaving ample room for future research.

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remain a topic of debate. Some methods such as ReAct-based prompting, have gained popularity for claiming to enhance sequential decision-making abilities of agentic LLMs. However, it is unclear what is the source of improvement in LLM reasoning with ReAct based prompting. In this paper we examine these claims of ReAct based prompting in improving agentic LLMs for sequential decision-making. By introducing systematic variations to the input prompt we perform a sensitivity analysis along the claims of ReAct and find that the performance is minimally influenced by the "interleaving reasoning trace with action execution" or the content of the generated reasoning traces in ReAct, contrary to original claims and common usage. Instead, the performance of LLMs is driven by the similarity between input example tasks and queries, implicitly forcing the prompt designer to provide instance-specific examples which significantly increases the cognitive burden on the human. Our investigation shows that the perceived reasoning abilities of LLMs stem from the exemplar-query similarity and approximate retrieval rather than any inherent reasoning abilities.

We present an interactive visual framework named InternChat, or iChat for short. The framework integrates chatbots that have planning and reasoning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, with non-verbal instructions like pointing movements that enable users to directly manipulate images or videos on the screen. Pointing (including gestures, cursors, etc.) movements can provide more flexibility and precision in performing vision-centric tasks that require fine-grained control, editing, and generation of visual content. The name InternChat stands for interaction, nonverbal, and chatbots. Different from existing interactive systems that rely on pure language, by incorporating pointing instructions, the proposed iChat significantly improves the efficiency of communication between users and chatbots, as well as the accuracy of chatbots in vision-centric tasks, especially in complicated visual scenarios where the number of objects is greater than 2. Additionally, in iChat, an auxiliary control mechanism is used to improve the control capability of LLM, and a large vision-language model termed Husky is fine-tuned for high-quality multi-modal dialogue (impressing ChatGPT-3.5-turbo with 93.89% GPT-4 Quality). We hope this work can spark new ideas and directions for future interactive visual systems. Welcome to watch the code at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternChat.

Readers can have different goals with respect to the text they are reading. Can these goals be decoded from the pattern of their eye movements over the text? In this work, we examine for the first time whether it is possible to decode two types of reading goals that are common in daily life: information seeking and ordinary reading. Using large scale eye-tracking data, we apply to this task a wide range of state-of-the-art models for eye movements and text that cover different architectural and data representation strategies, and further introduce a new model ensemble. We systematically evaluate these models at three levels of generalization: new textual item, new participant, and the combination of both. We find that eye movements contain highly valuable signals for this task. We further perform an error analysis which builds on prior empirical findings on differences between ordinary reading and information seeking and leverages rich textual annotations. This analysis reveals key properties of textual items and participant eye movements that contribute to the difficulty of the task.

Reusable skills are a key mechanism for extending agent capabilities, allowing agents to accumulate experience and solve increasingly complex tasks. Yet most existing skill-learning methods store reusable experience as text-only assets, such as instructions, reasoning traces, or summarized trajectories. We argue that this text-only paradigm creates a fundamental bottleneck for visual-centric tasks, where reusable knowledge often depends on spatial layout, visual grounding, fine-grained appearance, and localized state changes. To address this limitation, we propose \NAME, a multimodal skill paradigm that combines declarative textual logic with explicit visual support. We distinguish three reusable forms: static priors for stable spatial conventions, dynamic priors for in-situ visual working memory, and interleaved visual skills that bind ordered text steps to the source frames, screenshots, or page regions that justify them. Rather than only describing what to do, visual skills also encode where to look, how to inspect, and how to verify visual outcomes. To scale visual-skill construction, we introduce \SYSTEM, an automatic system that converts agent experience into reusable multimodal skills by preserving textual reasoning, spatial references, visual boundaries, and interaction patterns from task trajectories. Experiments on GUI and other visual-centric tasks show that visual skills consistently outperform text-only skills, particularly when success requires spatial correspondence, visual evidence, and state-aware interaction. These results support our central position: reusable agent skills should go beyond text and become multimodal assets for future multimodal agents.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems function as digital assistants, guiding users through various tasks such as booking flights or finding restaurants. Existing toolkits for building TOD systems often fall short of in delivering comprehensive arrays of data, models, and experimental environments with a user-friendly experience. We introduce ConvLab-3: a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit crafted to bridge this gap. Our unified data format simplifies the integration of diverse datasets and models, significantly reducing complexity and cost for studying generalization and transfer. Enhanced with robust reinforcement learning (RL) tools, featuring a streamlined training process, in-depth evaluation tools, and a selection of user simulators, ConvLab-3 supports the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. Through an extensive study, we demonstrate the efficacy of transfer learning and RL and showcase that ConvLab-3 is not only a powerful tool for seasoned researchers but also an accessible platform for newcomers.

Evaluation of robotic manipulation systems has largely relied on fixed benchmarks authored by a small number of experts, where task instances, constraints, and success criteria are predefined and difficult to extend. This paradigm limits who can shape evaluation and obscures how policies respond to user-authored variations in task intent, constraints, and notions of success. We argue that evaluating modern manipulation policies requires reframing evaluation as a language-driven process over structured physical domains. We present RoboPlayground, a framework that enables users to author executable manipulation tasks using natural language within a structured physical domain. Natural language instructions are compiled into reproducible task specifications with explicit asset definitions, initialization distributions, and success predicates. Each instruction defines a structured family of related tasks, enabling controlled semantic and behavioral variation while preserving executability and comparability. We instantiate RoboPlayground in a structured block manipulation domain and evaluate it along three axes. A user study shows that the language-driven interface is easier to use and imposes lower cognitive workload than programming-based and code-assist baselines. Evaluating learned policies on language-defined task families reveals generalization failures that are not apparent under fixed benchmark evaluations. Finally, we show that task diversity scales with contributor diversity rather than task count alone, enabling evaluation spaces to grow continuously through crowd-authored contributions. Project Page: https://roboplayground.github.io

Large language models (LLMs) have recently received considerable attention as alternative solutions for task planning. However, comparing the performance of language-oriented task planners becomes difficult, and there exists a dearth of detailed exploration regarding the effects of various factors such as pre-trained model selection and prompt construction. To address this, we propose a benchmark system for automatically quantifying performance of task planning for home-service embodied agents. Task planners are tested on two pairs of datasets and simulators: 1) ALFRED and AI2-THOR, 2) an extension of Watch-And-Help and VirtualHome. Using the proposed benchmark system, we perform extensive experiments with LLMs and prompts, and explore several enhancements of the baseline planner. We expect that the proposed benchmark tool would accelerate the development of language-oriented task planners.

Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents have advanced zero-shot object-goal navigation, yet single-frame reasoning leaves them without the cross-step behavioral awareness an embodied navigator requires, producing recurring failures such as dead-end stalls, in-room loops, and circuitous approaches to detected targets. Prompt-based remedies inflate token budgets across multi-submodule episodes and still struggle to encode inherently spatial signals such as angles, map cells, and viewpoint coordinates. In this paper, we propose SkillNav, an extensible behavioral skill framework for VLM-based navigation that treats the curiosity value map already maintained by modern VLM navigators as a writable substrate on which composable skills inscribe behavioral memory at zero token cost. Skills are stratified into three tiers by their level of behavioral authority, namely soft scaling for proportional reweighting, lower-bound boost for region-level guarantees, and hard override for threshold-triggered forced actions, and cooperate across tiers under a fixed composition order that establishes a predictable, declared priority among skills. This design turns capability improvement into skill registration: new behaviors plug in without retraining the VLM or disturbing existing skills, opening a path for continual refinement. A minimal prompt channel complements the score-level skills with category-level semantic hints, yielding a dual-representation design in which spatial memory lives on the map and semantic memory in short prompts. Training-free, SkillNav establishes new state-of-the-art SPL across MP3D (25.5), HM3D v0.1 (39.3), and HM3D v0.2 (43.2), improving SPL by up to 6.0 absolute over the strongest prior method, and achieves the highest Success Rate on HM3D v0.1 (69.7) and v0.2 (75.9).

Task planning can require defining myriad domain knowledge about the world in which a robot needs to act. To ameliorate that effort, large language models (LLMs) can be used to score potential next actions during task planning, and even generate action sequences directly, given an instruction in natural language with no additional domain information. However, such methods either require enumerating all possible next steps for scoring, or generate free-form text that may contain actions not possible on a given robot in its current context. We present a programmatic LLM prompt structure that enables plan generation functional across situated environments, robot capabilities, and tasks. Our key insight is to prompt the LLM with program-like specifications of the available actions and objects in an environment, as well as with example programs that can be executed. We make concrete recommendations about prompt structure and generation constraints through ablation experiments, demonstrate state of the art success rates in VirtualHome household tasks, and deploy our method on a physical robot arm for tabletop tasks. Website at progprompt.github.io

Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents have made impressive progress in reasoning and tool use, enabling them to solve complex tasks. However, their ability to proactively collaborate with users, especially when goals are vague, evolving, or indirectly expressed, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce UserBench, a user-centric benchmark designed to evaluate agents in multi-turn, preference-driven interactions. UserBench features simulated users who start with underspecified goals and reveal preferences incrementally, requiring agents to proactively clarify intent and make grounded decisions with tools. Our evaluation of leading open- and closed-source LLMs reveals a significant disconnect between task completion and user alignment. For instance, models provide answers that fully align with all user intents only 20% of the time on average, and even the most advanced models uncover fewer than 30% of all user preferences through active interaction. These results highlight the challenges of building agents that are not just capable task executors, but true collaborative partners. UserBench offers an interactive environment to measure and advance this critical capability.

Affordance is crucial for intelligent robots in the context of object manipulation. In this paper, we argue that affordance should be task-/instruction-dependent, which is overlooked by many previous works. That is, different instructions can lead to different manipulation regions and directions even for the same object. According to this observation, we present a new dataset comprising fifteen thousand object-instruction-affordance triplets. All scenes in the dataset are from an egocentric viewpoint, designed to approximate the perspective of a human-like robot. Furthermore, we investigate how to enable large multimodal models (LMMs) to serve as affordance predictors by implementing a ``search against verifiers'' pipeline. An LMM is asked to progressively predict affordances, with the output at each step being verified by itself during the iterative process, imitating a reasoning process. Experiments show that our method not only unlocks new instruction-oriented affordance prediction capabilities, but also achieves outstanding performance broadly.

Existing multimodal search agents process target entities sequentially, issuing one tool call per entity and accumulating redundant interaction rounds whenever a query decomposes into independent sub-retrievals. We argue that effective multimodal agents should search wider rather than longer: dispatching multiple grounded queries concurrently within a round. To this end, we present HyperEyes, a parallel multimodal search agent that fuses visual grounding and retrieval into a single atomic action, enabling concurrent search across multiple entities while treating inference efficiency as a first-class training objective. HyperEyes is trained in two stages. For cold-start supervision, we develop a Parallel-Amenable Data Synthesis Pipeline covering visual multi-entity and textual multi-constraint queries, curating efficiency-oriented trajectories via Progressive Rejection Sampling. Building on this, our central contribution, a Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework, operates at two levels. At the macro level, we propose TRACE (Tool-use Reference-Adaptive Cost Efficiency), a trajectory-level reward whose reference is monotonically tightened during training to suppress superfluous tool calls without restricting genuine multi-hop search. At the micro level, we adapt On-Policy Distillation to inject dense token-level corrective signals from an external teacher on failed rollouts, mitigating the credit-assignment deficiency of sparse outcome rewards. Since existing benchmarks evaluate accuracy as the sole metric, omitting inference cost, we introduce IMEB, a human-curated benchmark of 300 instances that jointly evaluates search capability and efficiency. Across six benchmarks, HyperEyes-30B surpasses the strongest comparable open-source agent by 9.9% in accuracy with 5.3x fewer tool-call rounds on average.

The rise of personal assistant agents, e.g., OpenClaw, highlights the growing potential of large language models to support users across everyday life and work. A core challenge in these settings is proactive assistance, since users often begin with underspecified requests and leave important needs, constraints, or preferences unstated. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can identify and act on such hidden intents before they are explicitly stated, especially in sustained multi-turn interactions where user needs emerge gradually. To address this gap, we introduce π-Bench, a benchmark for proactive assistance comprising 100 multi-turn tasks across 5 domain-specific user personas. By incorporating hidden user intents, inter-task dependencies, and cross-session continuity, π-Bench evaluates agents' ability to anticipate and address user needs over extended interactions, jointly measuring proactivity and task completion in long-horizon trajectories that better reflect real-world use. Experiments show (1) proactive assistance remains challenging, (2) a clear distinction between task completion and proactivity, and (3) the value of prior interaction for proactive intent resolution in later tasks.

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instruction-following benchmarks, it remains unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a broad variety of user goals, a concept we refer to as steerability. The abundance of methods proposed to modify LLM behavior makes it unclear whether current LLMs are already steerable, or require further intervention. In particular, LLMs may exhibit (i) poor coverage, where rare user goals are underrepresented; (ii) miscalibration, where models overshoot requests; and (iii) side effects, where changes to one dimension of text inadvertently affect others. To systematically evaluate these failures, we introduce a framework based on a multi-dimensional goal space that models user goals and LLM outputs as vectors with dimensions corresponding to text attributes (e.g., reading difficulty). Applied to a text-rewriting task, we find that current LLMs struggle with steerability, as side effects are persistent. Interventions to improve steerability, such as prompt engineering, best-of-N sampling, and reinforcement learning fine-tuning, have varying effectiveness, yet side effects remain problematic. Our findings suggest that even strong LLMs struggle with steerability, and existing alignment strategies may be insufficient. We open-source our steerability evaluation framework at https://github.com/MLD3/steerability.

We introduce "Talk The Walk", the first large-scale dialogue dataset grounded in action and perception. The task involves two agents (a "guide" and a "tourist") that communicate via natural language in order to achieve a common goal: having the tourist navigate to a given target location. The task and dataset, which are described in detail, are challenging and their full solution is an open problem that we pose to the community. We (i) focus on the task of tourist localization and develop the novel Masked Attention for Spatial Convolutions (MASC) mechanism that allows for grounding tourist utterances into the guide's map, (ii) show it yields significant improvements for both emergent and natural language communication, and (iii) using this method, we establish non-trivial baselines on the full task.

In collaborative tasks with asymmetric information, participants coordinate their understanding through interaction. We ask whether gaze provides evidence about grounding across two such tasks. Working from discrete behavioral annotations, we map HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991) and MUNDEX (Türk et al., 2023) into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and compute gaze features around task-relevant dialogue units. In both corpora, aligned reference interpretations (MapTask) and UND (understood) judgments (MUNDEX) are associated with more task-directed gaze and with less partner-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer gaze transitions. The associations are clearest for the participant leading the task: in giver-produced references, and in explainer judgments, which also co-vary with the explainee's gaze. In same-speaker MapTask reference chains, the speaker's gaze entropy is lower at the mention where a previously non-aligned referent becomes aligned. The best gaze feature groups improve modestly over controls under grouped cross-validation: temporal features in MapTask and raw proportions in MUNDEX. Because effects are small and several weaken when recurring participants rather than dialogues are the unit of inference, we treat gaze as one contributing cue to grounding, to be interpreted alongside task and dialogue context.

We propose Text2Motion, a language-based planning framework enabling robots to solve sequential manipulation tasks that require long-horizon reasoning. Given a natural language instruction, our framework constructs both a task- and motion-level plan that is verified to reach inferred symbolic goals. Text2Motion uses feasibility heuristics encoded in Q-functions of a library of skills to guide task planning with Large Language Models. Whereas previous language-based planners only consider the feasibility of individual skills, Text2Motion actively resolves geometric dependencies spanning skill sequences by performing geometric feasibility planning during its search. We evaluate our method on a suite of problems that require long-horizon reasoning, interpretation of abstract goals, and handling of partial affordance perception. Our experiments show that Text2Motion can solve these challenging problems with a success rate of 82%, while prior state-of-the-art language-based planning methods only achieve 13%. Text2Motion thus provides promising generalization characteristics to semantically diverse sequential manipulation tasks with geometric dependencies between skills.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for assisting users with complex tasks, thereby boosting human productivity. Existing works leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) or LLM-based AI agents have shown capabilities in automating tasks on Android and Web platforms. However, these tasks are primarily aimed at simple device usage and entertainment operations. This paper presents a novel benchmark, AssistGUI, to evaluate whether models are capable of manipulating the mouse and keyboard on the Windows platform in response to user-requested tasks. We carefully collected a set of 100 tasks from nine widely-used software applications, such as, After Effects and MS Word, each accompanied by the necessary project files for better evaluation. Moreover, we propose an advanced Actor-Critic Embodied Agent framework, which incorporates a sophisticated GUI parser driven by an LLM-agent and an enhanced reasoning mechanism adept at handling lengthy procedural tasks. Our experimental results reveal that our GUI Parser and Reasoning mechanism outshine existing methods in performance. Nevertheless, the potential remains substantial, with the best model attaining only a 46% success rate on our benchmark. We conclude with a thorough analysis of the current methods' limitations, setting the stage for future breakthroughs in this domain.

We introduce a task and dataset for referring expression generation and comprehension in multi-agent embodied environments. In this task, two agents in a shared scene must take into account one another's visual perspective, which may be different from their own, to both produce and understand references to objects in a scene and the spatial relations between them. We collect a dataset of 2,970 human-written referring expressions, each paired with human comprehension judgments, and evaluate the performance of automated models as speakers and listeners paired with human partners, finding that model performance in both reference generation and comprehension lags behind that of pairs of human agents. Finally, we experiment training an open-weight speaker model with evidence of communicative success when paired with a listener, resulting in an improvement from 58.9 to 69.3% in communicative success and even outperforming the strongest proprietary model.

GUI grounding requires locating small controls in cluttered screenshots and identifying which control a natural-language instruction refers to. Cropping and enlargement can expose local detail, but the resulting image may still leave ambiguity about the intended target. We propose PreView, an auxiliary preprocessor that improves the inputs to an existing grounding model without further training that model. PreView prepares two complementary types of input features: task-relevant views for localization and candidate-specific cues for target understanding. A trained lightweight auxiliary model predicts and refines a center, crops the screenshot into a local view, and enlarges that view for zoomed-in grounding. It also prepares a visual cue (i.e., a red-circle marker with a location hint) and a textual cue describing the candidate's identity or function. The frozen grounding model uses the prepared inputs to predict the final click. Across five benchmarks, PreView improves the average grounding accuracy of Qwen3-VL-2B, OS-Atlas-4B, and Qwen3-VL-4B without further training these grounding models. Extensive analyses examine the contributions of views and cues, center refinement, and visual input budgets.

Human-AI interactivity is a critical aspect that reflects the usability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing end-to-end MLLMs only allow users to interact with them through language instructions, leading to the limitation of the interactive accuracy and efficiency. In this study, we present precise referring instructions that utilize diverse reference representations such as points and boxes as referring prompts to refer to the special region. This enables MLLMs to focus on the region of interest and achieve finer-grained interaction. Based on precise referring instruction, we propose ChatSpot, a unified end-to-end multimodal large language model that supports diverse forms of interactivity including mouse clicks, drag-and-drop, and drawing boxes, which provides a more flexible and seamless interactive experience. We also construct a multi-grained vision-language instruction-following dataset based on existing datasets and GPT-4 generating. Furthermore, we design a series of evaluation tasks to assess the effectiveness of region recognition and interaction. Experimental results showcase ChatSpot's promising performance.

Incorporating domain-specific priors in search and navigation tasks has shown promising results in improving generalization and sample complexity over end-to-end trained policies. In this work, we study how object embeddings that capture spatial semantic priors can guide search and navigation tasks in a structured environment. We know that humans can search for an object like a book, or a plate in an unseen house, based on the spatial semantics of bigger objects detected. For example, a book is likely to be on a bookshelf or a table, whereas a plate is likely to be in a cupboard or dishwasher. We propose a method to incorporate such spatial semantic awareness in robots by leveraging pre-trained language models and multi-relational knowledge bases as object embeddings. We demonstrate using these object embeddings to search a query object in an unseen indoor environment. We measure the performance of these embeddings in an indoor simulator (AI2Thor). We further evaluate different pre-trained embedding onSuccess Rate(SR) and success weighted by Path Length(SPL).

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks by conditioning on input-output examples in the prompt, without requiring any update in model parameters. While widely adopted, it remains unclear whether prompting with multiple examples is the most effective and efficient way to convey task information. In this work, we propose Soft Injection of task embeddings. The task embeddings are constructed only once using few-shot ICL prompts and repeatedly used during inference. Soft injection is performed by softly mixing task embeddings with attention head activations using pre-optimized mixing parameters, referred to as soft head-selection parameters. This method not only allows a desired task to be performed without in-prompt demonstrations but also significantly outperforms existing ICL approaches while reducing memory usage and compute cost at inference time. An extensive evaluation is performed across 57 tasks and 12 LLMs, spanning four model families of sizes from 4B to 70B. Averaged across 57 tasks, our method outperforms 10-shot ICL by 10.2%-14.3% across 12 LLMs. Additional analyses show that our method also serves as an insightful tool for analyzing task-relevant roles of attention heads, revealing that task-relevant head positions selected by our method transfer across similar tasks but not across dissimilar ones -- underscoring the task-specific nature of head functionality. Our soft injection method opens a new paradigm for reducing prompt length and improving task performance by shifting task conditioning from the prompt space to the activation space.

Spatial intelligence is essential for agents to move from static semantic understanding toward interacting with the physical world. Many spatial tasks are grounded in continuous visual scenes, where locations, regions, and paths are more naturally expressed by pointing, marking, or drawing than by reporting precise coordinates or discrete textual symbols. Yet existing spatial reasoning benchmarks usually require coordinates, options, or text, creating an answer-interface mismatch for image-generation models. This makes it difficult to evaluate image-generation models under the same task semantics as text-output VLMs, despite their ability to externalize spatial judgments directly in pixel space. We propose ProVisE (Protocolized Visual Evaluation), a benchmark-agnostic framework that elicits protocol-constrained visual answers from image-generation models and parses them into structured predictions compatible with original metrics. ProVisE also includes an Agentic builder that constructs and validates task-specific protocols for new benchmarks. We further introduce SpatialGen-Bench, a curated diagnostic benchmark of 470 samples across 14 spatial subtasks, four capability levels, and diverse answer forms. We evaluate representative text-output VLMs and image-generation models in a unified setting and validate Agentic protocol construction on six external spatial benchmarks. Results show that image-generation models are competitive when spatial answers can be externalized directly in pixel space, while text-output VLMs retain a clear advantage in compositional spatial reasoning. These findings reveal complementary strengths of pixel-space expression and text-based reasoning and establish a metric-compatible testbed for studying spatial cognition in image-generation models.

Robotic manipulation policies often fail to generalize because they must simultaneously learn where to attend, what actions to take, and how to execute them. We argue that high-level reasoning about where and what can be offloaded to vision-language models (VLMs), leaving policies to specialize in how to act. We present PEEK (Policy-agnostic Extraction of Essential Keypoints), which fine-tunes VLMs to predict a unified point-based intermediate representation: 1. end-effector paths specifying what actions to take, and 2. task-relevant masks indicating where to focus. These annotations are directly overlaid onto robot observations, making the representation policy-agnostic and transferable across architectures. To enable scalable training, we introduce an automatic annotation pipeline, generating labeled data across 20+ robot datasets spanning 9 embodiments. In real-world evaluations, PEEK consistently boosts zero-shot generalization, including a 41.4x real-world improvement for a 3D policy trained only in simulation, and 2-3.5x gains for both large VLAs and small manipulation policies. By letting VLMs absorb semantic and visual complexity, PEEK equips manipulation policies with the minimal cues they need--where, what, and how. Website at https://peek-robot.github.io/.

The ability to actively ground task instructions from an egocentric view is crucial for AI agents to accomplish tasks or assist humans virtually. One important step towards this goal is to localize and track key active objects that undergo major state change as a consequence of human actions/interactions to the environment without being told exactly what/where to ground (e.g., localizing and tracking the `sponge` in video from the instruction "Dip the `sponge` into the bucket."). While existing works approach this problem from a pure vision perspective, we investigate to which extent the textual modality (i.e., task instructions) and their interaction with visual modality can be beneficial. Specifically, we propose to improve phrase grounding models' ability on localizing the active objects by: (1) learning the role of `objects undergoing change` and extracting them accurately from the instructions, (2) leveraging pre- and post-conditions of the objects during actions, and (3) recognizing the objects more robustly with descriptional knowledge. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to extract the aforementioned action-object knowledge, and design a per-object aggregation masking technique to effectively perform joint inference on object phrases and symbolic knowledge. We evaluate our framework on Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which leads to>54% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE-Det localization + tracking task, >7% improvements in all standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE tracking task, and >3% improvements in average precision (AP) on the Ego4D SCOD task.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are internally encoded and generalized remains a challenge. To address some of the empirical and technical gaps in the literature, we introduce an automated formulation for encoding task information in ICL prompts as a function of attention heads within the transformer architecture. This approach computes a single task vector as a weighted sum of attention heads, with the weights optimized causally via gradient descent. Our findings show that existing methods fail to generalize effectively to modalities beyond text. In response, we also design a benchmark to evaluate whether a task vector can preserve task fidelity in functional regression tasks. The proposed method successfully extracts task-specific information from in-context demonstrations and excels in both text and regression tasks, demonstrating its generalizability across modalities. Moreover, ablation studies show that our method's effectiveness stems from aligning the distribution of the last hidden state with that of an optimally performing in-context-learned model.

Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adapted for interactive decision-making tasks like web navigation. While achieving decent performance, previous methods implicitly assume a forward-only execution mode for the model, where they only provide oracle trajectories as in-context examples to teach the model how to reason in the interactive environment. Consequently, the model could not handle more challenging scenarios not covered in the in-context examples, e.g., mistakes, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to model the interactive task as state space exploration, where the LLM agent transitions among a pre-defined set of states by performing actions to complete the task. This formulation enables flexible back-tracking, allowing the model to easily recover from errors. We evaluate our proposed LLM Agent with State-Space ExploRation (LASER) on the WebShop task. Experimental results show that our LASER agent significantly outperforms previous methods and closes the gap with human performance on the web navigation task.

Vision-language navigation (VLN), in which an agent follows language instruction in a visual environment, has been studied under the premise that the input command is fully feasible in the environment. Yet in practice, a request may not be possible due to language ambiguity or environment changes. To study VLN with unknown command feasibility, we introduce a new dataset Mobile app Tasks with Iterative Feedback (MoTIF), where the goal is to complete a natural language command in a mobile app. Mobile apps provide a scalable domain to study real downstream uses of VLN methods. Moreover, mobile app commands provide instruction for interactive navigation, as they result in action sequences with state changes via clicking, typing, or swiping. MoTIF is the first to include feasibility annotations, containing both binary feasibility labels and fine-grained labels for why tasks are unsatisfiable. We further collect follow-up questions for ambiguous queries to enable research on task uncertainty resolution. Equipped with our dataset, we propose the new problem of feasibility prediction, in which a natural language instruction and multimodal app environment are used to predict command feasibility. MoTIF provides a more realistic app dataset as it contains many diverse environments, high-level goals, and longer action sequences than prior work. We evaluate interactive VLN methods using MoTIF, quantify the generalization ability of current approaches to new app environments, and measure the effect of task feasibility on navigation performance.

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users of a retrieval system explicitly describe their intent along with their queries. We aim to develop a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system using multi-task instruction tuning, which can follow human-written instructions to find the best documents for a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of approximately 40 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions. TART shows strong capabilities to adapt to a new retrieval task via instructions and advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval to better reflect real-world scenarios, where diverse domains and tasks are pooled and a system needs to find documents aligning users' intents. In this setup, TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines, further demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.

Prompt-based learning has been demonstrated as a compelling paradigm contributing to large language models' tremendous success (LLMs). Inspired by their success in language tasks, existing research has leveraged LLMs in embodied instruction following and task planning. However, not much attention has been paid to embodied tasks with multimodal prompts, combining vision signals with text descriptions. This type of task poses a major challenge to robots' capability to understand the interconnection and complementarity between vision and language signals. In this work, we introduce an effective framework that learns a policy to perform robot manipulation with multimodal prompts from multi-task expert trajectories. Our methods consist of a two-stage training pipeline that performs inverse dynamics pretraining and multi-task finetuning. To facilitate multimodal understanding, we design our multimodal prompt encoder by augmenting a pretrained LM with a residual connection to the visual input and model the dependencies among action dimensions. Empirically, we evaluate the efficacy of our method on the VIMA-BENCH and establish a new state-of-the-art (10% improvement in success rate). Moreover, we demonstrate that our model exhibits remarkable in-context learning ability.