arXiv subjects

Xiaojian Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaojian Ma.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

LongViTU: Instruction Tuning for Long-Form Video Understanding

This paper introduces LongViTU, a large-scale (~121k QA pairs, ~900h videos), automatically generated dataset for long-form video understanding. We propose a systematic approach that organizes videos into a hierarchical tree structure for QA generation and incorporates self-revision mechanisms to ensure high-quality QA pairs. Each QA pair in LongViTU features: 1) long-term context (average certificate length of 4.6 minutes); 2) rich knowledge and condensed reasoning (commonsense, causality, planning, etc.)). We also offer explicit timestamp annotations of relevant events for each QA pair. We have conducted extensive human studies on LongViTU, and the results prove the quality of our dataset. To better evaluate the challenges posed by LongViTU's emphasis on long-term context and condensed reasoning, we manually curate a subset of LongViTU into a benchmark. Evaluations using a state-of-the-art open-source model (LongVU), a proprietary model (Gemini-1.5-Pro), and human annotators yield GPT-4 scores of 49.9, 52.3, and 81.0, respectively, underscoring the substantial difficulty presented by LongViTU questions. Performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LongVU and LLaVA-Video on LongViTU data results in average performance gains of 2.5% and 3.7%, respectively, across a suite of long video understanding benchmarks (EgoSchema, VideoMME-Long, MLVU, LVBench).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ROCKET-1: Mastering Open-World Interaction with Visual-Temporal Context Prompting

Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. One critical issue is bridging the gap between discrete entities in low-level observations and the abstract concepts required for effective planning. A common solution is building hierarchical agents, where VLMs serve as high-level reasoners that break down tasks into executable sub-tasks, typically specified using language. However, language suffers from the inability to communicate detailed spatial information. We propose visual-temporal context prompting, a novel communication protocol between VLMs and policy models. This protocol leverages object segmentation from past observations to guide policy-environment interactions. Using this approach, we train ROCKET-1, a low-level policy that predicts actions based on concatenated visual observations and segmentation masks, supported by real-time object tracking from SAM-2. Our method unlocks the potential of VLMs, enabling them to tackle complex tasks that demand spatial reasoning. Experiments in Minecraft show that our approach enables agents to achieve previously unattainable tasks, with a $\mathbf{76}\%$ absolute improvement in open-world interaction performance. Codes and demos are now available on the project page: https://craftjarvis.github.io/ROCKET-1.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation in 3D Scenes

Grounding natural language in 3D environments is a critical step toward achieving robust 3D vision-language alignment. Current datasets and models for 3D visual grounding predominantly focus on identifying and localizing objects from static, object-centric descriptions. These approaches do not adequately address the dynamic and sequential nature of task-oriented scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel task: Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation in 3D Scenes, where models must interpret step-by-step instructions for daily activities by either localizing a sequence of target objects in indoor scenes or navigating toward them within a 3D simulator. To facilitate this task, we present SG3D, a large-scale dataset comprising 22,346 tasks with 112,236 steps across 4,895 real-world 3D scenes. The dataset is constructed by combining RGB-D scans from various 3D scene datasets with an automated task generation pipeline, followed by human verification for quality assurance. We benchmark contemporary methods on SG3D, revealing the significant challenges in understanding task-oriented context across multiple steps. Furthermore, we propose SG-LLM, a state-of-the-art approach leveraging a stepwise grounding paradigm to tackle the sequential grounding task. Our findings underscore the need for further research to advance the development of more capable and context-aware embodied agents.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Multi-modal Agent Tuning: Building a VLM-Driven Agent for Efficient Tool Usage

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) prompts the development of multi-modal agents, which are used as a controller to call external tools, providing a feasible way to solve practical tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal agent tuning method that automatically generates multi-modal tool-usage data and tunes a vision-language model (VLM) as the controller for powerful tool-usage reasoning. To preserve the data quality, we prompt the GPT-4o mini model to generate queries, files, and trajectories, followed by query-file and trajectory verifiers. Based on the data synthesis pipeline, we collect the MM-Traj dataset that contains 20K tasks with trajectories of tool usage. Then, we develop the T3-Agent via \underline{T}rajectory \underline{T}uning on VLMs for \underline{T}ool usage using MM-Traj. Evaluations on the GTA and GAIA benchmarks show that the T3-Agent consistently achieves improvements on two popular VLMs: MiniCPM-V-8.5B and {Qwen2-VL-7B}, which outperforms untrained VLMs by $20\%$, showing the effectiveness of the proposed data synthesis pipeline, leading to high-quality data for tool-usage capabilities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Embodied VideoAgent: Persistent Memory from Egocentric Videos and Embodied Sensors Enables Dynamic Scene Understanding

This paper investigates the problem of understanding dynamic 3D scenes from egocentric observations, a key challenge in robotics and embodied AI. Unlike prior studies that explored this as long-form video understanding and utilized egocentric video only, we instead propose an LLM-based agent, Embodied VideoAgent, which constructs scene memory from both egocentric video and embodied sensory inputs (e.g. depth and pose sensing). We further introduce a VLM-based approach to automatically update the memory when actions or activities over objects are perceived. Embodied VideoAgent attains significant advantages over counterparts in challenging reasoning and planning tasks in 3D scenes, achieving gains of 4.9% on Ego4D-VQ3D, 5.8% on OpenEQA, and 11.7% on EnvQA. We have also demonstrated its potential in various embodied AI tasks including generating embodied interactions and perception for robot manipulation. The code and demo will be made public.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Bongard-OpenWorld: Few-Shot Reasoning for Free-form Visual Concepts in the Real World

We introduce Bongard-OpenWorld, a new benchmark for evaluating real-world few-shot reasoning for machine vision. It originates from the classical Bongard Problems (BPs): Given two sets of images (positive and negative), the model needs to identify the set that query images belong to by inducing the visual concepts, which is exclusively depicted by images from the positive set. Our benchmark inherits the few-shot concept induction of the original BPs while adding the two novel layers of challenge: 1) open-world free-form concepts, as the visual concepts in Bongard-OpenWorld are unique compositions of terms from an open vocabulary, ranging from object categories to abstract visual attributes and commonsense factual knowledge; 2) real-world images, as opposed to the synthetic diagrams used by many counterparts. In our exploration, Bongard-OpenWorld already imposes a significant challenge to current few-shot reasoning algorithms. We further investigate to which extent the recently introduced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve our task, by directly probing VLMs, and combining VLMs and LLMs in an interactive reasoning scheme. We even conceived a neuro-symbolic reasoning approach that reconciles LLMs & VLMs with logical reasoning to emulate the human problem-solving process for Bongard Problems. However, none of these approaches manage to close the human-machine gap, as the best learner achieves 64% accuracy while human participants easily reach 91%. We hope Bongard-OpenWorld can help us better understand the limitations of current visual intelligence and facilitate future research on visual agents with stronger few-shot visual reasoning capabilities.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale

This paper presents UltraEdit, a large-scale (approximately 4 million editing samples), automatically generated dataset for instruction-based image editing. Our key idea is to address the drawbacks in existing image editing datasets like InstructPix2Pix and MagicBrush, and provide a systematic approach to producing massive and high-quality image editing samples. UltraEdit offers several distinct advantages: 1) It features a broader range of editing instructions by leveraging the creativity of large language models (LLMs) alongside in-context editing examples from human raters; 2) Its data sources are based on real images, including photographs and artworks, which provide greater diversity and reduced bias compared to datasets solely generated by text-to-image models; 3) It also supports region-based editing, enhanced by high-quality, automatically produced region annotations. Our experiments show that canonical diffusion-based editing baselines trained on UltraEdit set new records on MagicBrush and Emu-Edit benchmarks. Our analysis further confirms the crucial role of real image anchors and region-based editing data. The dataset, code, and models can be found in https://ultra-editing.github.io.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

GROOT-2: Weakly Supervised Multi-Modal Instruction Following Agents

Developing agents that can follow multimodal instructions remains a fundamental challenge in robotics and AI. Although large-scale pre-training on unlabeled datasets (no language instruction) has enabled agents to learn diverse behaviors, these agents often struggle with following instructions. While augmenting the dataset with instruction labels can mitigate this issue, acquiring such high-quality annotations at scale is impractical. To address this issue, we frame the problem as a semi-supervised learning task and introduce GROOT-2, a multimodal instructable agent trained using a novel approach that combines weak supervision with latent variable models. Our method consists of two key components: constrained self-imitating, which utilizes large amounts of unlabeled demonstrations to enable the policy to learn diverse behaviors, and human intention alignment, which uses a smaller set of labeled demonstrations to ensure the latent space reflects human intentions. GROOT-2's effectiveness is validated across four diverse environments, ranging from video games to robotic manipulation, demonstrating its robust multimodal instruction-following capabilities.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Multi-modal Situated Reasoning in 3D Scenes

Situation awareness is essential for understanding and reasoning about 3D scenes in embodied AI agents. However, existing datasets and benchmarks for situated understanding are limited in data modality, diversity, scale, and task scope. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-modal Situated Question Answering (MSQA), a large-scale multi-modal situated reasoning dataset, scalably collected leveraging 3D scene graphs and vision-language models (VLMs) across a diverse range of real-world 3D scenes. MSQA includes 251K situated question-answering pairs across 9 distinct question categories, covering complex scenarios within 3D scenes. We introduce a novel interleaved multi-modal input setting in our benchmark to provide text, image, and point cloud for situation and question description, resolving ambiguity in previous single-modality convention (e.g., text). Additionally, we devise the Multi-modal Situated Next-step Navigation (MSNN) benchmark to evaluate models' situated reasoning for navigation. Comprehensive evaluations on MSQA and MSNN highlight the limitations of existing vision-language models and underscore the importance of handling multi-modal interleaved inputs and situation modeling. Experiments on data scaling and cross-domain transfer further demonstrate the efficacy of leveraging MSQA as a pre-training dataset for developing more powerful situated reasoning models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

OmniJARVIS: Unified Vision-Language-Action Tokenization Enables Open-World Instruction Following Agents

This paper presents OmniJARVIS, a novel Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for open-world instruction-following agents in Minecraft. Compared to prior works that either emit textual goals to separate controllers or produce the control command directly, OmniJARVIS seeks a different path to ensure both strong reasoning and efficient decision-making capabilities via unified tokenization of multimodal interaction data. First, we introduce a self-supervised approach to learn a behavior encoder that produces discretized tokens for behavior trajectories $τ= \{o_0, a_0, \dots\}$ and an imitation learning policy decoder conditioned on these tokens. These additional behavior tokens will be augmented to the vocabulary of pretrained Multimodal Language Models. With this encoder, we then pack long-term multimodal interactions involving task instructions, memories, thoughts, observations, textual responses, behavior trajectories, etc into unified token sequences and model them with autoregressive transformers. Thanks to the semantically meaningful behavior tokens, the resulting VLA model, OmniJARVIS, can reason (by producing chain-of-thoughts), plan, answer questions, and act (by producing behavior tokens for the imitation learning policy decoder). OmniJARVIS demonstrates excellent performances on a comprehensive collection of atomic, programmatic, and open-ended tasks in open-world Minecraft. Our analysis further unveils the crucial design principles in interaction data formation, unified tokenization, and its scaling potentials. The dataset, models, and code will be released at https://craftjarvis.org/OmniJARVIS.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Semantic Gaussians: Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding presents a significant challenge in computer vision, with wide-ranging applications in embodied agents and augmented reality systems. Existing methods adopt neurel rendering methods as 3D representations and jointly optimize color and semantic features to achieve rendering and scene understanding simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce Semantic Gaussians, a novel open-vocabulary scene understanding approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our key idea is to distill knowledge from 2D pre-trained models to 3D Gaussians. Unlike existing methods, we design a versatile projection approach that maps various 2D semantic features from pre-trained image encoders into a novel semantic component of 3D Gaussians, which is based on spatial relationship and need no additional training. We further build a 3D semantic network that directly predicts the semantic component from raw 3D Gaussians for fast inference. The quantitative results on ScanNet segmentation and LERF object localization demonstates the superior performance of our method. Additionally, we explore several applications of Semantic Gaussians including object part segmentation, instance segmentation, scene editing, and spatiotemporal segmentation with better qualitative results over 2D and 3D baselines, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness on supporting diverse downstream tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Unifying 3D Vision-Language Understanding via Promptable Queries

A unified model for 3D vision-language (3D-VL) understanding is expected to take various scene representations and perform a wide range of tasks in a 3D scene. However, a considerable gap exists between existing methods and such a unified model, due to the independent application of representation and insufficient exploration of 3D multi-task training. In this paper, we introduce PQ3D, a unified model capable of using Promptable Queries to tackle a wide range of 3D-VL tasks, from low-level instance segmentation to high-level reasoning and planning. This is achieved through three key innovations: (1) unifying various 3D scene representations (i.e., voxels, point clouds, multi-view images) into a shared 3D coordinate space by segment-level grouping, (2) an attention-based query decoder for task-specific information retrieval guided by prompts, and (3) universal output heads for different tasks to support multi-task training. Tested across ten diverse 3D-VL datasets, PQ3D demonstrates impressive performance on these tasks, setting new records on most benchmarks. Particularly, PQ3D improves the state-of-the-art on ScanNet200 by 4.9% (AP25), ScanRefer by 5.4% (acc@0.5), Multi3DRefer by 11.7% (F1@0.5), and Scan2Cap by 13.4% (CIDEr@0.5). Moreover, PQ3D supports flexible inference with individual or combined forms of available 3D representations, e.g., solely voxel input.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

VideoAgent: A Memory-augmented Multimodal Agent for Video Understanding

We explore how reconciling several foundation models (large language models and vision-language models) with a novel unified memory mechanism could tackle the challenging video understanding problem, especially capturing the long-term temporal relations in lengthy videos. In particular, the proposed multimodal agent VideoAgent: 1) constructs a structured memory to store both the generic temporal event descriptions and object-centric tracking states of the video; 2) given an input task query, it employs tools including video segment localization and object memory querying along with other visual foundation models to interactively solve the task, utilizing the zero-shot tool-use ability of LLMs. VideoAgent demonstrates impressive performances on several long-horizon video understanding benchmarks, an average increase of 6.6% on NExT-QA and 26.0% on EgoSchema over baselines, closing the gap between open-sourced models and private counterparts including Gemini 1.5 Pro.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents

We investigate the challenge of task planning for multi-task embodied agents in open-world environments. Two main difficulties are identified: 1) executing plans in an open-world environment (e.g., Minecraft) necessitates accurate and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider how easy the current agent can achieve a given sub-task when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient or even infeasible. To this end, we propose "$\underline{D}$escribe, $\underline{E}$xplain, $\underline{P}$lan and $\underline{S}$elect" ($\textbf{DEPS}$), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). DEPS facilitates better error correction on initial LLM-generated $\textit{plan}$ by integrating $\textit{description}$ of the plan execution process and providing self-$\textit{explanation}$ of feedback when encountering failures during the extended planning phases. Furthermore, it includes a goal $\textit{selector}$, which is a trainable module that ranks parallel candidate sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion, consequently refining the initial plan. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first zero-shot multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly double the overall performances. Further testing reveals our method's general effectiveness in popularly adopted non-open-ended domains as well (i.e., ALFWorld and tabletop manipulation). The ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the $\texttt{ObtainDiamond}$ grand challenge with our approach. The code is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MC-Planner.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

An Embodied Generalist Agent in 3D World

Leveraging massive knowledge from large language models (LLMs), recent machine learning models show notable successes in general-purpose task solving in diverse domains such as computer vision and robotics. However, several significant challenges remain: (i) most of these models rely on 2D images yet exhibit a limited capacity for 3D input; (ii) these models rarely explore the tasks inherently defined in 3D world, e.g., 3D grounding, embodied reasoning and acting. We argue these limitations significantly hinder current models from performing real-world tasks and approaching general intelligence. To this end, we introduce LEO, an embodied multi-modal generalist agent that excels in perceiving, grounding, reasoning, planning, and acting in the 3D world. LEO is trained with a unified task interface, model architecture, and objective in two stages: (i) 3D vision-language (VL) alignment and (ii) 3D vision-language-action (VLA) instruction tuning. We collect large-scale datasets comprising diverse object-level and scene-level tasks, which require considerable understanding of and interaction with the 3D world. Moreover, we meticulously design an LLM-assisted pipeline to produce high-quality 3D VL data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate LEO's remarkable proficiency across a wide spectrum of tasks, including 3D captioning, question answering, embodied reasoning, navigation and manipulation. Our ablative studies and scaling analyses further provide valuable insights for developing future embodied generalist agents. Code and data are available on project page.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

CLOVA: A Closed-Loop Visual Assistant with Tool Usage and Update

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) to compose off-the-shelf visual tools represents a promising avenue of research for developing robust visual assistants capable of addressing diverse visual tasks. However, these methods often overlook the potential for continual learning, typically by freezing the utilized tools, thus limiting their adaptation to environments requiring new knowledge. To tackle this challenge, we propose CLOVA, a Closed-Loop Visual Assistant, which operates within a framework encompassing inference, reflection, and learning phases. During the inference phase, LLMs generate programs and execute corresponding tools to complete assigned tasks. In the reflection phase, a multimodal global-local reflection scheme analyzes human feedback to determine which tools require updating. Lastly, the learning phase employs three flexible approaches to automatically gather training data and introduces a novel prompt tuning scheme to update the tools, allowing CLOVA to efficiently acquire new knowledge. Experimental findings demonstrate that CLOVA surpasses existing tool-usage methods by 5% in visual question answering and multiple-image reasoning, by 10% in knowledge tagging, and by 20% in image editing. These results underscore the significance of the continual learning capability in general visual assistants.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning

Since the resurgence of deep learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enhanced by large language models (LLMs) have grown exponentially in popularity. However, while LLMs can utilize extensive background knowledge and task information with in-context learning, most VLMs still struggle with understanding complex multi-modal prompts with multiple images, making VLMs less effective in downstream vision-language tasks. In this paper, we address the limitation above by 1) introducing vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning(MMICL), a new approach to allow the VLM to deal with multi-modal inputs efficiently; 2) proposing a novel context scheme to augment the in-context learning ability of the VLM; 3) constructing the Multi-modal In-Context Learning (MIC) dataset, designed to enhance the VLM's ability to understand complex multi-modal prompts. Our experiments confirm that MMICL achieves new state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on a wide range of general vision-language tasks, especially for complex benchmarks, including MME and MMBench. Our analysis demonstrates that MMICL effectively tackles the challenge of complex multi-modal prompt understanding and emerges the impressive ICL ability. Furthermore, we observe that MMICL successfully alleviates language bias in VLMs, a common issue for VLMs that often leads to hallucination when faced with extensive textual context. Our code, dataset, dataset tool, and model are available at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/MIC

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

RAT: Retrieval Augmented Thoughts Elicit Context-Aware Reasoning in Long-Horizon Generation

We explore how iterative revising a chain of thoughts with the help of information retrieval significantly improves large language models' reasoning and generation ability in long-horizon generation tasks, while hugely mitigating hallucination. In particular, the proposed method -- *retrieval-augmented thoughts* (RAT) -- revises each thought step one by one with retrieved information relevant to the task query, the current and the past thought steps, after the initial zero-shot CoT is generated. Applying RAT to GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and CodeLLaMA-7b substantially improves their performances on various long-horizon generation tasks; on average of relatively increasing rating scores by 13.63% on code generation, 16.96% on mathematical reasoning, 19.2% on creative writing, and 42.78% on embodied task planning. The demo page can be found at https://craftjarvis.github.io/RAT

cs.CL↗