new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Dec 5

LiveStar: Live Streaming Assistant for Real-World Online Video Understanding

Despite significant progress in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) for offline video understanding, existing online Video-LLMs typically struggle to simultaneously process continuous frame-by-frame inputs and determine optimal response timing, often compromising real-time responsiveness and narrative coherence. To address these limitations, we introduce LiveStar, a pioneering live streaming assistant that achieves always-on proactive responses through adaptive streaming decoding. Specifically, LiveStar incorporates: (1) a training strategy enabling incremental video-language alignment for variable-length video streams, preserving temporal consistency across dynamically evolving frame sequences; (2) a response-silence decoding framework that determines optimal proactive response timing via a single forward pass verification; (3) memory-aware acceleration via peak-end memory compression for online inference on 10+ minute videos, combined with streaming key-value cache to achieve 1.53x faster inference. We also construct an OmniStar dataset, a comprehensive dataset for training and benchmarking that encompasses 15 diverse real-world scenarios and 5 evaluation tasks for online video understanding. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks demonstrate LiveStar's state-of-the-art performance, achieving an average 19.5% improvement in semantic correctness with 18.1% reduced timing difference compared to existing online Video-LLMs, while improving FPS by 12.0% across all five OmniStar tasks. Our model and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/yzy-bupt/LiveStar.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 7

PreRoutGNN for Timing Prediction with Order Preserving Partition: Global Circuit Pre-training, Local Delay Learning and Attentional Cell Modeling

Pre-routing timing prediction has been recently studied for evaluating the quality of a candidate cell placement in chip design. It involves directly estimating the timing metrics for both pin-level (slack, slew) and edge-level (net delay, cell delay), without time-consuming routing. However, it often suffers from signal decay and error accumulation due to the long timing paths in large-scale industrial circuits. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage approach. First, we propose global circuit training to pre-train a graph auto-encoder that learns the global graph embedding from circuit netlist. Second, we use a novel node updating scheme for message passing on GCN, following the topological sorting sequence of the learned graph embedding and circuit graph. This scheme residually models the local time delay between two adjacent pins in the updating sequence, and extracts the lookup table information inside each cell via a new attention mechanism. To handle large-scale circuits efficiently, we introduce an order preserving partition scheme that reduces memory consumption while maintaining the topological dependencies. Experiments on 21 real world circuits achieve a new SOTA R2 of 0.93 for slack prediction, which is significantly surpasses 0.59 by previous SOTA method. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/EDA-AI.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 26, 2024

ViTAD: Timing Violation-Aware Debugging of RTL Code using Large Language Models

In modern Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit design flow, the Register-Transfer Level (RTL) stage presents a critical opportunity for timing optimization. Addressing timing violations at this early stage is essential, as modern systems demand higher speeds, where even minor timing violations can lead to functional failures or system crashes. However, traditional timing optimization heavily relies on manual expertise, requiring engineers to iteratively analyze timing reports and debug. To automate this process, this paper proposes ViTAD, a method that efficiently analyzes the root causes of timing violations and dynamically generates targeted repair strategies. Specifically, we first parse Verilog code and timing reports to construct a Signal Timing Dependency Graph (STDG). Based on the STDG, we perform violation path analysis and use large language models (LLMs) to infer the root causes of violations. Finally, by analyzing the causes of violations, we selectively retrieve relevant debugging knowledge from a domain-specific knowledge base to generate customized repair solutions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we construct a timing violation dataset based on real-world open-source projects. This dataset contains 54 cases of violations. Experimental results show that our method achieves a 73.68% success rate in repairing timing violations, while the baseline using only LLM is 54.38%. Our method improves the success rate by 19.30%.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 18

Towards Surveillance Video-and-Language Understanding: New Dataset, Baselines, and Challenges

Surveillance videos are an essential component of daily life with various critical applications, particularly in public security. However, current surveillance video tasks mainly focus on classifying and localizing anomalous events. Existing methods are limited to detecting and classifying the predefined events with unsatisfactory semantic understanding, although they have obtained considerable performance. To address this issue, we propose a new research direction of surveillance video-and-language understanding, and construct the first multimodal surveillance video dataset. We manually annotate the real-world surveillance dataset UCF-Crime with fine-grained event content and timing. Our newly annotated dataset, UCA (UCF-Crime Annotation), contains 23,542 sentences, with an average length of 20 words, and its annotated videos are as long as 110.7 hours. Furthermore, we benchmark SOTA models for four multimodal tasks on this newly created dataset, which serve as new baselines for surveillance video-and-language understanding. Through our experiments, we find that mainstream models used in previously publicly available datasets perform poorly on surveillance video, which demonstrates the new challenges in surveillance video-and-language understanding. To validate the effectiveness of our UCA, we conducted experiments on multimodal anomaly detection. The results demonstrate that our multimodal surveillance learning can improve the performance of conventional anomaly detection tasks. All the experiments highlight the necessity of constructing this dataset to advance surveillance AI. The link to our dataset is provided at: https://xuange923.github.io/Surveillance-Video-Understanding.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 25, 2023

EasyTPP: Towards Open Benchmarking Temporal Point Processes

Continuous-time event sequences play a vital role in real-world domains such as healthcare, finance, online shopping, social networks, and so on. To model such data, temporal point processes (TPPs) have emerged as the most natural and competitive models, making a significant impact in both academic and application communities. Despite the emergence of many powerful models in recent years, there hasn't been a central benchmark for these models and future research endeavors. This lack of standardization impedes researchers and practitioners from comparing methods and reproducing results, potentially slowing down progress in this field. In this paper, we present EasyTPP, the first central repository of research assets (e.g., data, models, evaluation programs, documentations) in the area of event sequence modeling. Our EasyTPP makes several unique contributions to this area: a unified interface of using existing datasets and adding new datasets; a wide range of evaluation programs that are easy to use and extend as well as facilitate reproducible research; implementations of popular neural TPPs, together with a rich library of modules by composing which one could quickly build complex models. All the data and implementation can be found at https://github.com/ant-research/EasyTemporalPointProcess. We will actively maintain this benchmark and welcome contributions from other researchers and practitioners. Our benchmark will help promote reproducible research in this field, thus accelerating research progress as well as making more significant real-world impacts.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 16, 2023

Time-IMM: A Dataset and Benchmark for Irregular Multimodal Multivariate Time Series

Time series data in real-world applications such as healthcare, climate modeling, and finance are often irregular, multimodal, and messy, with varying sampling rates, asynchronous modalities, and pervasive missingness. However, existing benchmarks typically assume clean, regularly sampled, unimodal data, creating a significant gap between research and real-world deployment. We introduce Time-IMM, a dataset specifically designed to capture cause-driven irregularity in multimodal multivariate time series. Time-IMM represents nine distinct types of time series irregularity, categorized into trigger-based, constraint-based, and artifact-based mechanisms. Complementing the dataset, we introduce IMM-TSF, a benchmark library for forecasting on irregular multimodal time series, enabling asynchronous integration and realistic evaluation. IMM-TSF includes specialized fusion modules, including a timestamp-to-text fusion module and a multimodality fusion module, which support both recency-aware averaging and attention-based integration strategies. Empirical results demonstrate that explicitly modeling multimodality on irregular time series data leads to substantial gains in forecasting performance. Time-IMM and IMM-TSF provide a foundation for advancing time series analysis under real-world conditions. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-IMM, and the benchmark library can be accessed at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/IMM-TSF. Project page: https://blacksnail789521.github.io/time-imm-project-page/

Real-Time Reasoning Agents in Evolving Environments

Agents in the real world must make not only logical but also timely judgments. This requires continuous awareness of the dynamic environment: hazards emerge, opportunities arise, and other agents act, while the agent's reasoning is still unfolding. Despite advances in language model reasoning, existing approaches fail to account for this dynamic nature. We introduce real-time reasoning as a new problem formulation for agents in evolving environments and build Real-Time Reasoning Gym to demonstrate it. We study two paradigms for deploying language models in agents: (1) reactive agents, which employ language models with bounded reasoning computation for rapid responses, and (2) planning agents, which allow extended reasoning computation for complex problems. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art models struggle with making logical and timely judgments in either paradigm. To address this limitation, we propose AgileThinker, which simultaneously engages both reasoning paradigms. AgileThinker consistently outperforms agents engaging only one reasoning paradigm as the task difficulty and time pressure rise, effectively balancing reasoning depth and response latency. Our work establishes real-time reasoning as a critical testbed for developing practical agents and provides a foundation for research in temporally constrained AI systems, highlighting a path toward real-time capable agents.

The Tool Decathlon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Diverse, Realistic, and Long-Horizon Task Execution

Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps. For instance, an agent may manage emails by coordinating with calendars and file systems, or monitor a production database to detect anomalies and generate reports following an operating manual. However, existing language agent benchmarks often focus on narrow domains or simplified tasks that lack the diversity, realism, and long-horizon complexity required to evaluate agents' real-world performance. To address this gap, we introduce the Tool Decathlon (dubbed as Toolathlon), a benchmark for language agents offering diverse Apps and tools, realistic environment setup, and reliable execution-based evaluation. Toolathlon spans 32 software applications and 604 tools, ranging from everyday platforms such as Google Calendar and Notion to professional ones like WooCommerce, Kubernetes, and BigQuery. Most of the tools are based on a high-quality set of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that we may have revised or implemented ourselves. Unlike prior works, which primarily ensure functional realism but offer limited environment state diversity, we provide realistic initial environment states from real software, such as Canvas courses with dozens of students or real financial spreadsheets. This benchmark includes 108 manually sourced or crafted tasks in total, requiring interacting with multiple Apps over around 20 turns on average to complete. Each task is strictly verifiable through dedicated evaluation scripts. Comprehensive evaluation of SOTA models highlights their significant shortcomings: the best-performing model, Claude-4.5-Sonnet, achieves only a 38.6% success rate with 20.2 tool calling turns on average, while the top open-weights model DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp reaches 20.1%. We expect Toolathlon to drive the development of more capable language agents for real-world, long-horizon task execution.

TI-PREGO: Chain of Thought and In-Context Learning for Online Mistake Detection in PRocedural EGOcentric Videos

Identifying procedural errors online from egocentric videos is a critical yet challenging task across various domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, and skill-based training. The nature of such mistakes is inherently open-set, as unforeseen or novel errors may occur, necessitating robust detection systems that do not rely on prior examples of failure. Currently, however, no technique effectively detects open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose a dual branch architecture to address this problem in an online fashion: one branch continuously performs step recognition from the input egocentric video, while the other anticipates future steps based on the recognition module's output. Mistakes are detected as mismatches between the currently recognized action and the action predicted by the anticipation module. The recognition branch takes input frames, predicts the current action, and aggregates frame-level results into action tokens. The anticipation branch, specifically, leverages the solid pattern-matching capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict action tokens based on previously predicted ones. Given the online nature of the task, we also thoroughly benchmark the difficulties associated with per-frame evaluations, particularly the need for accurate and timely predictions in dynamic online scenarios. Extensive experiments on two procedural datasets demonstrate the challenges and opportunities of leveraging a dual-branch architecture for mistake detection, showcasing the effectiveness of our proposed approach. In a thorough evaluation including recognition and anticipation variants and state-of-the-art models, our method reveals its robustness and effectiveness in online applications.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 4, 2024

CoDynTrust: Robust Asynchronous Collaborative Perception via Dynamic Feature Trust Modulus

Collaborative perception, fusing information from multiple agents, can extend perception range so as to improve perception performance. However, temporal asynchrony in real-world environments, caused by communication delays, clock misalignment, or sampling configuration differences, can lead to information mismatches. If this is not well handled, then the collaborative performance is patchy, and what's worse safety accidents may occur. To tackle this challenge, we propose CoDynTrust, an uncertainty-encoded asynchronous fusion perception framework that is robust to the information mismatches caused by temporal asynchrony. CoDynTrust generates dynamic feature trust modulus (DFTM) for each region of interest by modeling aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty as well as selectively suppressing or retaining single-vehicle features, thereby mitigating information mismatches. We then design a multi-scale fusion module to handle multi-scale feature maps processed by DFTM. Compared to existing works that also consider asynchronous collaborative perception, CoDynTrust combats various low-quality information in temporally asynchronous scenarios and allows uncertainty to be propagated to downstream tasks such as planning and control. Experimental results demonstrate that CoDynTrust significantly reduces performance degradation caused by temporal asynchrony across multiple datasets, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance even with temporal asynchrony. The code is available at https://github.com/CrazyShout/CoDynTrust.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 12

Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis

Time series data are ubiquitous across a wide range of real-world domains. While real-world time series analysis (TSA) requires human experts to integrate numerical series data with multimodal domain-specific knowledge, most existing TSA models rely solely on numerical data, overlooking the significance of information beyond numerical series. This oversight is due to the untapped potential of textual series data and the absence of a comprehensive, high-quality multimodal dataset. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce Time-MMD, the first multi-domain, multimodal time series dataset covering 9 primary data domains. Time-MMD ensures fine-grained modality alignment, eliminates data contamination, and provides high usability. Additionally, we develop MM-TSFlib, the first multimodal time-series forecasting (TSF) library, seamlessly pipelining multimodal TSF evaluations based on Time-MMD for in-depth analyses. Extensive experiments conducted on Time-MMD through MM-TSFlib demonstrate significant performance enhancements by extending unimodal TSF to multimodality, evidenced by over 15% mean squared error reduction in general, and up to 40% in domains with rich textual data. More importantly, our datasets and library revolutionize broader applications, impacts, research topics to advance TSA. The dataset and library are available at https://github.com/AdityaLab/Time-MMD and https://github.com/AdityaLab/MM-TSFlib.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024

Robust e-NeRF: NeRF from Sparse & Noisy Events under Non-Uniform Motion

Event cameras offer many advantages over standard cameras due to their distinctive principle of operation: low power, low latency, high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. Nonetheless, the success of many downstream visual applications also hinges on an efficient and effective scene representation, where Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is seen as the leading candidate. Such promise and potential of event cameras and NeRF inspired recent works to investigate on the reconstruction of NeRF from moving event cameras. However, these works are mainly limited in terms of the dependence on dense and low-noise event streams, as well as generalization to arbitrary contrast threshold values and camera speed profiles. In this work, we propose Robust e-NeRF, a novel method to directly and robustly reconstruct NeRFs from moving event cameras under various real-world conditions, especially from sparse and noisy events generated under non-uniform motion. It consists of two key components: a realistic event generation model that accounts for various intrinsic parameters (e.g. time-independent, asymmetric threshold and refractory period) and non-idealities (e.g. pixel-to-pixel threshold variation), as well as a complementary pair of normalized reconstruction losses that can effectively generalize to arbitrary speed profiles and intrinsic parameter values without such prior knowledge. Experiments on real and novel realistically simulated sequences verify our effectiveness. Our code, synthetic dataset and improved event simulator are public.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 15, 2023

OVO-Bench: How Far is Your Video-LLMs from Real-World Online Video Understanding?

Temporal Awareness, the ability to reason dynamically based on the timestamp when a question is raised, is the key distinction between offline and online video LLMs. Unlike offline models, which rely on complete videos for static, post hoc analysis, online models process video streams incrementally and dynamically adapt their responses based on the timestamp at which the question is posed. Despite its significance, temporal awareness has not been adequately evaluated in existing benchmarks. To fill this gap, we present OVO-Bench (Online-VideO-Benchmark), a novel video benchmark that emphasizes the importance of timestamps for advanced online video understanding capability benchmarking. OVO-Bench evaluates the ability of video LLMs to reason and respond to events occurring at specific timestamps under three distinct scenarios: (1) Backward tracing: trace back to past events to answer the question. (2) Real-time understanding: understand and respond to events as they unfold at the current timestamp. (3) Forward active responding: delay the response until sufficient future information becomes available to answer the question accurately. OVO-Bench comprises 12 tasks, featuring 644 unique videos and approximately human-curated 2,800 fine-grained meta-annotations with precise timestamps. We combine automated generation pipelines with human curation. With these high-quality samples, we further developed an evaluation pipeline to systematically query video LLMs along the video timeline. Evaluations of nine Video-LLMs reveal that, despite advancements on traditional benchmarks, current models struggle with online video understanding, showing a significant gap compared to human agents. We hope OVO-Bench will drive progress in video LLMs and inspire future research in online video reasoning. Our benchmark and code can be accessed at https://github.com/JoeLeelyf/OVO-Bench.

Time-R1: Towards Comprehensive Temporal Reasoning in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities but lack robust temporal intelligence, struggling to integrate reasoning about the past with predictions and plausible generations of the future. Meanwhile, existing methods typically target isolated temporal skills, such as question answering about past events or basic forecasting, and exhibit poor generalization, particularly when dealing with events beyond their knowledge cutoff or requiring creative foresight. To address these limitations, we introduce Time-R1, the first framework to endow a moderate-sized (3B-parameter) LLM with comprehensive temporal abilities: understanding, prediction, and creative generation. Our approach features a novel three-stage development path; the first two constitute a reinforcement learning (RL) curriculum driven by a meticulously designed dynamic rule-based reward system. This framework progressively builds (1) foundational temporal understanding and logical event-time mappings from historical data, (2) future event prediction skills for events beyond its knowledge cutoff, and finally (3) enables remarkable generalization to creative future scenario generation without any fine-tuning. Strikingly, experiments demonstrate that Time-R1 outperforms models over 200 times larger, including the state-of-the-art 671B DeepSeek-R1, on highly challenging future event prediction and creative scenario generation benchmarks. This work provides strong evidence that thoughtfully engineered, progressive RL fine-tuning allows smaller, efficient models to achieve superior temporal performance, offering a practical and scalable path towards truly time-aware AI. To foster further research, we also release Time-Bench, a large-scale multi-task temporal reasoning dataset derived from 10 years of news data, and our series of Time-R1 checkpoints.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16 3

Instruction-based Time Series Editing

In time series editing, we aim to modify some properties of a given time series without altering others. For example, when analyzing a hospital patient's blood pressure, we may add a sudden early drop and observe how it impacts their future while preserving other conditions. Existing diffusion-based editors rely on rigid, predefined attribute vectors as conditions and produce all-or-nothing edits through sampling. This attribute- and sampling-based approach limits flexibility in condition format and lacks customizable control over editing strength. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Instruction-based Time Series Editing, where users specify intended edits using natural language. This allows users to express a wider range of edits in a more accessible format. We then introduce InstructTime, the first instruction-based time series editor. InstructTime takes in time series and instructions, embeds them into a shared multi-modal representation space, then decodes their embeddings to generate edited time series. By learning a structured multi-modal representation space, we can easily interpolate between embeddings to achieve varying degrees of edit. To handle local and global edits together, we propose multi-resolution encoders. In our experiments, we use synthetic and real datasets and find that InstructTime is a state-of-the-art time series editor: InstructTime achieves high-quality edits with controllable strength, can generalize to unseen instructions, and can be easily adapted to unseen conditions through few-shot learning.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 2

You Don't Know Until You Click:Automated GUI Testing for Production-Ready Software Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) and code agents in software development are rapidly evolving from generating isolated code snippets to producing full-fledged software applications with graphical interfaces, interactive logic, and dynamic behaviors. However, current benchmarks fall short in evaluating such production-ready software, as they often rely on static checks or binary pass/fail scripts, failing to capture the interactive behaviors and runtime dynamics that define real-world usability - qualities that only emerge when an application is actively used. This is the blind spot of current evaluation: you don't know if an app works until you click through it, interact with it, and observe how it responds. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealDevWorld, a novel evaluation framework for automated end-to-end assessment of LLMs' ability to generate production-ready repositories from scratch. It features two key components: (1) RealDevBench, a diverse collection of 194 open-ended software engineering tasks across multiple domains, incorporating multimodal elements to reflect real-world complexity; and (2) AppEvalPilot, a new agent-as-a-judge evaluation system that simulates realistic, GUI-based user interactions to automatically and holistically assess software functional correctness, visual fidelity, and runtime behavior. The framework delivers fine-grained, task-specific diagnostic feedback, supporting nuanced evaluation beyond simple success/failure judgments. Empirical results show that RealDevWorld delivers effective, automatic, and human-aligned evaluations, achieving an accuracy of 0.92 and a correlation of 0.85 with expert human assessments, while significantly reducing the reliance on manual review. This enables scalable, human-aligned assessment of production-level software generated by LLMs. Our code is available on GitHub.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 17

Beyond Turn-Based Interfaces: Synchronous LLMs as Full-Duplex Dialogue Agents

Despite broad interest in modeling spoken dialogue agents, most approaches are inherently "half-duplex" -- restricted to turn-based interaction with responses requiring explicit prompting by the user or implicit tracking of interruption or silence events. Human dialogue, by contrast, is "full-duplex" allowing for rich synchronicity in the form of quick and dynamic turn-taking, overlapping speech, and backchanneling. Technically, the challenge of achieving full-duplex dialogue with LLMs lies in modeling synchrony as pre-trained LLMs do not have a sense of "time". To bridge this gap, we propose Synchronous LLMs for full-duplex spoken dialogue modeling. We design a novel mechanism to integrate time information into Llama3-8b so that they run synchronously with the real-world clock. We also introduce a training recipe that uses 212k hours of synthetic spoken dialogue data generated from text dialogue data to create a model that generates meaningful and natural spoken dialogue, with just 2k hours of real-world spoken dialogue data. Synchronous LLMs outperform state-of-the-art in dialogue meaningfulness while maintaining naturalness. Finally, we demonstrate the model's ability to participate in full-duplex dialogue by simulating interaction between two agents trained on different datasets, while considering Internet-scale latencies of up to 240 ms. Webpage: https://syncllm.cs.washington.edu/.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

Benchmarking Spatiotemporal Reasoning in LLMs and Reasoning Models: Capabilities and Challenges

Spatiotemporal reasoning plays a key role in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), their capacity to reason about complex spatiotemporal signals remains underexplored. This paper proposes a hierarchical SpatioTemporal reAsoning benchmaRK, STARK, to systematically evaluate LLMs across three levels of reasoning complexity: state estimation (e.g., predicting field variables, localizing and tracking events in space and time), spatiotemporal reasoning over states (e.g., inferring spatial-temporal relationships), and world-knowledge-aware reasoning that integrates contextual and domain knowledge (e.g., intent prediction, landmark-aware navigation). We curate 26 distinct spatiotemporal tasks with diverse sensor modalities, comprising 14,552 challenges where models answer directly or by Python Code Interpreter. Evaluating 3 LRMs and 8 LLMs, we find LLMs achieve limited success in tasks requiring geometric reasoning (e.g., multilateration or triangulation), particularly as complexity increases. Surprisingly, LRMs show robust performance across tasks with various levels of difficulty, often competing or surpassing traditional first-principle-based methods. Our results show that in reasoning tasks requiring world knowledge, the performance gap between LLMs and LRMs narrows, with some LLMs even surpassing LRMs. However, the LRM o3 model continues to achieve leading performance across all evaluated tasks, a result attributed primarily to the larger size of the reasoning models. STARK motivates future innovations in model architectures and reasoning paradigms for intelligent CPS by providing a structured framework to identify limitations in the spatiotemporal reasoning of LLMs and LRMs.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16

RealWebAssist: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Web Assistance with Real-World Users

To achieve successful assistance with long-horizon web-based tasks, AI agents must be able to sequentially follow real-world user instructions over a long period. Unlike existing web-based agent benchmarks, sequential instruction following in the real world poses significant challenges beyond performing a single, clearly defined task. For instance, real-world human instructions can be ambiguous, require different levels of AI assistance, and may evolve over time, reflecting changes in the user's mental state. To address this gap, we introduce RealWebAssist, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate sequential instruction-following in realistic scenarios involving long-horizon interactions with the web, visual GUI grounding, and understanding ambiguous real-world user instructions. RealWebAssist includes a dataset of sequential instructions collected from real-world human users. Each user instructs a web-based assistant to perform a series of tasks on multiple websites. A successful agent must reason about the true intent behind each instruction, keep track of the mental state of the user, understand user-specific routines, and ground the intended tasks to actions on the correct GUI elements. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art models struggle to understand and ground user instructions, posing critical challenges in following real-world user instructions for long-horizon web assistance.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 14

DeepSoCS: A Neural Scheduler for Heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) Resource Scheduling

In this paper, we~present a novel scheduling solution for a class of System-on-Chip (SoC) systems where heterogeneous chip resources (DSP, FPGA, GPU, etc.) must be efficiently scheduled for continuously arriving hierarchical jobs with their tasks represented by a directed acyclic graph. Traditionally, heuristic algorithms have been widely used for many resource scheduling domains, and Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT) has been a dominating state-of-the-art technique across a broad range of heterogeneous resource scheduling domains over many years. Despite their long-standing popularity, HEFT-like algorithms are known to be vulnerable to a small amount of noise added to the environment. Our Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based SoC Scheduler (DeepSoCS), capable of learning the "best" task ordering under dynamic environment changes, overcomes the brittleness of rule-based schedulers such as HEFT with significantly higher performance across different types of jobs. We~describe a DeepSoCS design process using a real-time heterogeneous SoC scheduling emulator, discuss major challenges, and present two novel neural network design features that lead to outperforming HEFT: (i) hierarchical job- and task-graph embedding; and (ii) efficient use of real-time task information in the state space. Furthermore, we~introduce effective techniques to address two fundamental challenges present in our environment: delayed consequences and joint actions. Through an extensive simulation study, we~show that our DeepSoCS exhibits the significantly higher performance of job execution time than that of HEFT with a higher level of robustness under realistic noise conditions. We~conclude with a discussion of the potential improvements for our DeepSoCS neural scheduler.

  • 6 authors
·
May 15, 2020

Towards Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Time Series Anomaly Detection: Leveraging Synthetic Data and Relative Context Discrepancy

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is a critical task, but developing models that generalize to unseen data in a zero-shot manner remains a major challenge. Prevailing foundation models for TSAD predominantly rely on reconstruction-based objectives, which suffer from a fundamental objective mismatch: they struggle to identify subtle anomalies while often misinterpreting complex normal patterns, leading to high rates of false negatives and positives. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TimeRCD, a novel foundation model for TSAD built upon a new pre-training paradigm: Relative Context Discrepancy (RCD). Instead of learning to reconstruct inputs, TimeRCD is explicitly trained to identify anomalies by detecting significant discrepancies between adjacent time windows. This relational approach, implemented with a standard Transformer architecture, enables the model to capture contextual shifts indicative of anomalies that reconstruction-based methods often miss. To facilitate this paradigm, we develop a large-scale, diverse synthetic corpus with token-level anomaly labels, providing the rich supervisory signal necessary for effective pre-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeRCD significantly outperforms existing general-purpose and anomaly-specific foundation models in zero-shot TSAD across diverse datasets. Our results validate the superiority of the RCD paradigm and establish a new, effective path toward building robust and generalizable foundation models for time series anomaly detection.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 25

TelecomTS: A Multi-Modal Observability Dataset for Time Series and Language Analysis

Modern enterprises generate vast streams of time series metrics when monitoring complex systems, known as observability data. Unlike conventional time series from domains such as weather, observability data are zero-inflated, highly stochastic, and exhibit minimal temporal structure. Despite their importance, observability datasets are underrepresented in public benchmarks due to proprietary restrictions. Existing datasets are often anonymized and normalized, removing scale information and limiting their use for tasks beyond forecasting, such as anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and multi-modal reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce TelecomTS, a large-scale observability dataset derived from a 5G telecommunications network. TelecomTS features heterogeneous, de-anonymized covariates with explicit scale information and supports a suite of downstream tasks, including anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and a question-answering benchmark requiring multi-modal reasoning. Benchmarking state-of-the-art time series, language, and reasoning models reveals that existing approaches struggle with the abrupt, noisy, and high-variance dynamics of observability data. Our experiments also underscore the importance of preserving covariates' absolute scale, emphasizing the need for foundation time series models that natively leverage scale information for practical observability applications.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 7

TimelyGPT: Extrapolatable Transformer Pre-training for Long-term Time-Series Forecasting in Healthcare

Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision domains. However, the development of PTMs on healthcare time-series data is lagging behind.This underscores the limitations of the existing transformer-based architectures, particularly their scalability to handle large-scale time series and ability to capture long-term temporal dependencies. In this study, we present Timely Generative Pre-trained Transformer (TimelyGPT). TimelyGPT employs an extrapolatable position (xPos) embedding to encode trend and periodic patterns into time-series representations. It also integrates recurrent attention and temporal convolution modules to effectively capture global-local temporal dependencies. We evaluated TimelyGPT on two large-scale healthcare time series datasets corresponding to continuous biosignals and irregularly-sampled time series, respectively. Our experiments show that during pre-training, TimelyGPT excels in learning time-series representations from continuously monitored biosignals and irregularly-sampled time series data commonly observed in longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). In forecasting continuous biosignals, TimelyGPT achieves accurate extrapolation up to 6,000 timesteps of body temperature during the sleep stage transition, given a short look-up window (i.e., prompt) containing only 2,000 timesteps. For irregularly-sampled time series, TimelyGPT with a proposed time-specific inference demonstrates high top recall scores in predicting future diagnoses using early diagnostic records, effectively handling irregular intervals between clinical records. Together, we envision TimelyGPT to be useful in a broad spectrum of health domains, including long-term patient health state forecasting and patient risk trajectory prediction.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

RealGen: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controllable Traffic Scenarios

Simulation plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to the potential risks associated with real-world testing. Although significant progress has been made in the visual aspects of simulators, generating complex behavior among agents remains a formidable challenge. It is not only imperative to ensure realism in the scenarios generated but also essential to incorporate preferences and conditions to facilitate controllable generation for AV training and evaluation. Traditional methods, mainly relying on memorizing the distribution of training datasets, often fall short in generating unseen scenarios. Inspired by the success of retrieval augmented generation in large language models, we present RealGen, a novel retrieval-based in-context learning framework for traffic scenario generation. RealGen synthesizes new scenarios by combining behaviors from multiple retrieved examples in a gradient-free way, which may originate from templates or tagged scenarios. This in-context learning framework endows versatile generative capabilities, including the ability to edit scenarios, compose various behaviors, and produce critical scenarios. Evaluations show that RealGen offers considerable flexibility and controllability, marking a new direction in the field of controllable traffic scenario generation. Check our project website for more information: https://realgen.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

Modeling Inter-Dependence Between Time and Mark in Multivariate Temporal Point Processes

Temporal Point Processes (TPP) are probabilistic generative frameworks. They model discrete event sequences localized in continuous time. Generally, real-life events reveal descriptive information, known as marks. Marked TPPs model time and marks of the event together for practical relevance. Conditioned on past events, marked TPPs aim to learn the joint distribution of the time and the mark of the next event. For simplicity, conditionally independent TPP models assume time and marks are independent given event history. They factorize the conditional joint distribution of time and mark into the product of individual conditional distributions. This structural limitation in the design of TPP models hurt the predictive performance on entangled time and mark interactions. In this work, we model the conditional inter-dependence of time and mark to overcome the limitations of conditionally independent models. We construct a multivariate TPP conditioning the time distribution on the current event mark in addition to past events. Besides the conventional intensity-based models for conditional joint distribution, we also draw on flexible intensity-free TPP models from the literature. The proposed TPP models outperform conditionally independent and dependent models in standard prediction tasks. Our experimentation on various datasets with multiple evaluation metrics highlights the merit of the proposed approach.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 27, 2022

TimeGraphs: Graph-based Temporal Reasoning

Many real-world systems exhibit temporal, dynamic behaviors, which are captured as time series of complex agent interactions. To perform temporal reasoning, current methods primarily encode temporal dynamics through simple sequence-based models. However, in general these models fail to efficiently capture the full spectrum of rich dynamics in the input, since the dynamics is not uniformly distributed. In particular, relevant information might be harder to extract and computing power is wasted for processing all individual timesteps, even if they contain no significant changes or no new information. Here we propose TimeGraphs, a novel approach that characterizes dynamic interactions as a hierarchical temporal graph, diverging from traditional sequential representations. Our approach models the interactions using a compact graph-based representation, enabling adaptive reasoning across diverse time scales. Adopting a self-supervised method, TimeGraphs constructs a multi-level event hierarchy from a temporal input, which is then used to efficiently reason about the unevenly distributed dynamics. This construction process is scalable and incremental to accommodate streaming data. We evaluate TimeGraphs on multiple datasets with complex, dynamic agent interactions, including a football simulator, the Resistance game, and the MOMA human activity dataset. The results demonstrate both robustness and efficiency of TimeGraphs on a range of temporal reasoning tasks. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art performance and leads to a performance increase of up to 12.2% on event prediction and recognition tasks over current approaches. Our experiments further demonstrate a wide array of capabilities including zero-shot generalization, robustness in case of data sparsity, and adaptability to streaming data flow.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 6, 2024

REAL: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Deterministic Simulations of Real Websites

We introduce REAL, a benchmark and framework for multi-turn agent evaluations on deterministic simulations of real-world websites. REAL comprises high-fidelity, deterministic replicas of 11 widely-used websites across domains such as e-commerce, travel, communication, and professional networking. We also release a benchmark consisting of 112 practical tasks that mirror everyday complex user interactions requiring both accurate information retrieval and state-changing actions. All interactions occur within this fully controlled setting, eliminating safety risks and enabling robust, reproducible evaluation of agent capability and reliability. Our novel evaluation framework combines programmatic checks of website state for action-based tasks with rubric-guided LLM-based judgments for information retrieval. The framework supports both open-source and proprietary agent systems through a flexible evaluation harness that accommodates black-box commands within browser environments, allowing research labs to test agentic systems without modification. Our empirical results show that frontier language models achieve at most a 41% success rate on REAL, highlighting critical gaps in autonomous web navigation and task completion capabilities. Our framework supports easy integration of new tasks, reproducible evaluation, and scalable post-training data generation, marking a significant step forward in evaluating and advancing agent capabilities.

  • 18 authors
·
Apr 15

Pseudo-Simulation for Autonomous Driving

Existing evaluation paradigms for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) face critical limitations. Real-world evaluation is often challenging due to safety concerns and a lack of reproducibility, whereas closed-loop simulation can face insufficient realism or high computational costs. Open-loop evaluation, while being efficient and data-driven, relies on metrics that generally overlook compounding errors. In this paper, we propose pseudo-simulation, a novel paradigm that addresses these limitations. Pseudo-simulation operates on real datasets, similar to open-loop evaluation, but augments them with synthetic observations generated prior to evaluation using 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our key idea is to approximate potential future states the AV might encounter by generating a diverse set of observations that vary in position, heading, and speed. Our method then assigns a higher importance to synthetic observations that best match the AV's likely behavior using a novel proximity-based weighting scheme. This enables evaluating error recovery and the mitigation of causal confusion, as in closed-loop benchmarks, without requiring sequential interactive simulation. We show that pseudo-simulation is better correlated with closed-loop simulations (R^2=0.8) than the best existing open-loop approach (R^2=0.7). We also establish a public leaderboard for the community to benchmark new methodologies with pseudo-simulation. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 4

UltraHorizon: Benchmarking Agent Capabilities in Ultra Long-Horizon Scenarios

Autonomous agents have recently achieved remarkable progress across diverse domains, yet most evaluations focus on short-horizon, fully observable tasks. In contrast, many critical real-world tasks, such as large-scale software development, commercial investment, and scientific discovery, unfold in long-horizon and partially observable scenarios where success hinges on sustained reasoning, planning, memory management, and tool use. Existing benchmarks rarely capture these long-horizon challenges, leaving a gap in systematic evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce UltraHorizon a novel benchmark that measures the foundational capabilities essential for complex real-world challenges. We use exploration as a unifying task across three distinct environments to validate these core competencies. Agents are designed in long-horizon discovery tasks where they must iteratively uncover hidden rules through sustained reasoning, planning, memory and tools management, and interaction with environments. Under the heaviest scale setting, trajectories average 200k+ tokens and 400+ tool calls, whereas in standard configurations they still exceed 35k tokens and involve more than 60 tool calls on average. Our extensive experiments reveal that LLM-agents consistently underperform in these settings, whereas human participants achieve higher scores, underscoring a persistent gap in agents' long-horizon abilities. We also observe that simple scaling fails in our task. To better illustrate the failure of agents, we conduct an in-depth analysis of collected trajectories. We identify eight types of errors and attribute them to two primary causes: in-context locking and functional fundamental capability gaps. https://github.com/StarDewXXX/UltraHorizon{Our code will be available here.}

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 15

Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Speed Control in Trajectory Simulation

Motion behaviour is driven by several factors -- goals, presence and actions of neighbouring agents, social relations, physical and social norms, the environment with its variable characteristics, and further. Most factors are not directly observable and must be modelled from context. Trajectory prediction, is thus a hard problem, and has seen increasing attention from researchers in the recent years. Prediction of motion, in application, must be realistic, diverse and controllable. In spite of increasing focus on multimodal trajectory generation, most methods still lack means for explicitly controlling different modes of the data generation. Further, most endeavours invest heavily in designing special mechanisms to learn the interactions in latent space. We present Conditional Speed GAN (CSG), that allows controlled generation of diverse and socially acceptable trajectories, based on user controlled speed. During prediction, CSG forecasts future speed from latent space and conditions its generation based on it. CSG is comparable to state-of-the-art GAN methods in terms of the benchmark distance metrics, while being simple and useful for simulation and data augmentation for different contexts such as fast or slow paced environments. Additionally, we compare the effect of different aggregation mechanisms and show that a naive approach of concatenation works comparable to its attention and pooling alternatives.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 21, 2021

Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 21

A Digital Twin Framework for Physical-Virtual Integration in V2X-Enabled Connected Vehicle Corridors

Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS) enhance safety and mobility by integrating cyber and physical transportation systems. A key component of T-CPS is the Digital Twin (DT), a virtual representation that enables simulation, analysis, and optimization through real-time data exchange and communication. Although existing studies have explored DTs for vehicles, communications, pedestrians, and traffic, real-world validations and implementations of DTs that encompass infrastructure, vehicles, signals, communications, and more remain limited due to several challenges. These include accessing real-world connected infrastructure, integrating heterogeneous, multi-sourced data, ensuring real-time data processing, and synchronizing the digital and physical systems. To address these challenges, this study develops a traffic DT based on a real-world connected vehicle corridor. Leveraging the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) infrastructure in the corridor, along with communication, computing, and simulation technologies, the proposed DT accurately replicates physical vehicle behaviors, signal timing, communications, and traffic patterns within the virtual environment. Building upon the previous data pipeline, the digital system ensures robust synchronization with the physical environment. Moreover, the DT's scalable and redundant architecture enhances data integrity, making it capable of supporting future large-scale C-V2X deployments. Furthermore, its ability to provide feedback to the physical system is demonstrated through applications such as signal timing adjustments, vehicle advisory messages, and incident notifications. The proposed DT is a vital tool in T-CPS, enabling real-time traffic monitoring, prediction, and optimization to enhance the reliability and safety of transportation systems.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024

NeoRL-2: Near Real-World Benchmarks for Offline Reinforcement Learning with Extended Realistic Scenarios

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn from historical data without requiring (costly) access to the environment. To facilitate offline RL research, we previously introduced NeoRL, which highlighted that datasets from real-world tasks are often conservative and limited. With years of experience applying offline RL to various domains, we have identified additional real-world challenges. These include extremely conservative data distributions produced by deployed control systems, delayed action effects caused by high-latency transitions, external factors arising from the uncontrollable variance of transitions, and global safety constraints that are difficult to evaluate during the decision-making process. These challenges are underrepresented in previous benchmarks but frequently occur in real-world tasks. To address this, we constructed the extended Near Real-World Offline RL Benchmark (NeoRL-2), which consists of 7 datasets from 7 simulated tasks along with their corresponding evaluation simulators. Benchmarking results from state-of-the-art offline RL approaches demonstrate that current methods often struggle to outperform the data-collection behavior policy, highlighting the need for more effective methods. We hope NeoRL-2 will accelerate the development of reinforcement learning algorithms for real-world applications. The benchmark project page is available at https://github.com/polixir/NeoRL2.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 24

Overcoming Slow Decision Frequencies in Continuous Control: Model-Based Sequence Reinforcement Learning for Model-Free Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) is rapidly reaching and surpassing human-level control capabilities. However, state-of-the-art RL algorithms often require timesteps and reaction times significantly faster than human capabilities, which is impractical in real-world settings and typically necessitates specialized hardware. Such speeds are difficult to achieve in the real world and often requires specialized hardware. We introduce Sequence Reinforcement Learning (SRL), an RL algorithm designed to produce a sequence of actions for a given input state, enabling effective control at lower decision frequencies. SRL addresses the challenges of learning action sequences by employing both a model and an actor-critic architecture operating at different temporal scales. We propose a "temporal recall" mechanism, where the critic uses the model to estimate intermediate states between primitive actions, providing a learning signal for each individual action within the sequence. Once training is complete, the actor can generate action sequences independently of the model, achieving model-free control at a slower frequency. We evaluate SRL on a suite of continuous control tasks, demonstrating that it achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art algorithms while significantly reducing actor sample complexity. To better assess performance across varying decision frequencies, we introduce the Frequency-Averaged Score (FAS) metric. Our results show that SRL significantly outperforms traditional RL algorithms in terms of FAS, making it particularly suitable for applications requiring variable decision frequencies. Additionally, we compare SRL with model-based online planning, showing that SRL achieves superior FAS while leveraging the same model during training that online planners use for planning.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

CausalTime: Realistically Generated Time-series for Benchmarking of Causal Discovery

Time-series causal discovery (TSCD) is a fundamental problem of machine learning. However, existing synthetic datasets cannot properly evaluate or predict the algorithms' performance on real data. This study introduces the CausalTime pipeline to generate time-series that highly resemble the real data and with ground truth causal graphs for quantitative performance evaluation. The pipeline starts from real observations in a specific scenario and produces a matching benchmark dataset. Firstly, we harness deep neural networks along with normalizing flow to accurately capture realistic dynamics. Secondly, we extract hypothesized causal graphs by performing importance analysis on the neural network or leveraging prior knowledge. Thirdly, we derive the ground truth causal graphs by splitting the causal model into causal term, residual term, and noise term. Lastly, using the fitted network and the derived causal graph, we generate corresponding versatile time-series proper for algorithm assessment. In the experiments, we validate the fidelity of the generated data through qualitative and quantitative experiments, followed by a benchmarking of existing TSCD algorithms using these generated datasets. CausalTime offers a feasible solution to evaluating TSCD algorithms in real applications and can be generalized to a wide range of fields. For easy use of the proposed approach, we also provide a user-friendly website, hosted on www.causaltime.cc.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited; (2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks; (3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework.

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 19, 2023 2

LTGS: Long-Term Gaussian Scene Chronology From Sparse View Updates

Recent advances in novel-view synthesis can create the photo-realistic visualization of real-world environments from conventional camera captures. However, acquiring everyday environments from casual captures faces challenges due to frequent scene changes, which require dense observations both spatially and temporally. We propose long-term Gaussian scene chronology from sparse-view updates, coined LTGS, an efficient scene representation that can embrace everyday changes from highly under-constrained casual captures. Given an incomplete and unstructured Gaussian splatting representation obtained from an initial set of input images, we robustly model the long-term chronology of the scene despite abrupt movements and subtle environmental variations. We construct objects as template Gaussians, which serve as structural, reusable priors for shared object tracks. Then, the object templates undergo a further refinement pipeline that modulates the priors to adapt to temporally varying environments based on few-shot observations. Once trained, our framework is generalizable across multiple time steps through simple transformations, significantly enhancing the scalability for a temporal evolution of 3D environments. As existing datasets do not explicitly represent the long-term real-world changes with a sparse capture setup, we collect real-world datasets to evaluate the practicality of our pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior reconstruction quality compared to other baselines while enabling fast and light-weight updates.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 10

Deblur e-NeRF: NeRF from Motion-Blurred Events under High-speed or Low-light Conditions

The stark contrast in the design philosophy of an event camera makes it particularly ideal for operating under high-speed, high dynamic range and low-light conditions, where standard cameras underperform. Nonetheless, event cameras still suffer from some amount of motion blur, especially under these challenging conditions, in contrary to what most think. This is attributed to the limited bandwidth of the event sensor pixel, which is mostly proportional to the light intensity. Thus, to ensure that event cameras can truly excel in such conditions where it has an edge over standard cameras, it is crucial to account for event motion blur in downstream applications, especially reconstruction. However, none of the recent works on reconstructing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) from events, nor event simulators, have considered the full effects of event motion blur. To this end, we propose, Deblur e-NeRF, a novel method to directly and effectively reconstruct blur-minimal NeRFs from motion-blurred events generated under high-speed motion or low-light conditions. The core component of this work is a physically-accurate pixel bandwidth model proposed to account for event motion blur under arbitrary speed and lighting conditions. We also introduce a novel threshold-normalized total variation loss to improve the regularization of large textureless patches. Experiments on real and novel realistically simulated sequences verify our effectiveness. Our code, event simulator and synthetic event dataset will be open-sourced.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

Time Travel is Cheating: Going Live with DeepFund for Real-Time Fund Investment Benchmarking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across financial tasks, including financial report summarization, earnings call transcript analysis, and asset classification. However, their real-world effectiveness in managing complex fund investment remains inadequately assessed. A fundamental limitation of existing benchmarks for evaluating LLM-driven trading strategies is their reliance on historical back-testing, inadvertently enabling LLMs to "time travel"-leveraging future information embedded in their training corpora, thus resulting in possible information leakage and overly optimistic performance estimates. To address this issue, we introduce DeepFund, a live fund benchmark tool designed to rigorously evaluate LLM in real-time market conditions. Utilizing a multi-agent architecture, DeepFund connects directly with real-time stock market data-specifically data published after each model pretraining cutoff-to ensure fair and leakage-free evaluations. Empirical tests on nine flagship LLMs from leading global institutions across multiple investment dimensions-including ticker-level analysis, investment decision-making, portfolio management, and risk control-reveal significant practical challenges. Notably, even cutting-edge models such as DeepSeek-V3 and Claude-3.7-Sonnet incur net trading losses within DeepFund real-time evaluation environment, underscoring the present limitations of LLMs for active fund management. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DeepFund.

  • 10 authors
·
May 16

SuPRA: Surgical Phase Recognition and Anticipation for Intra-Operative Planning

Intra-operative recognition of surgical phases holds significant potential for enhancing real-time contextual awareness in the operating room. However, we argue that online recognition, while beneficial, primarily lends itself to post-operative video analysis due to its limited direct impact on the actual surgical decisions and actions during ongoing procedures. In contrast, we contend that the prediction and anticipation of surgical phases are inherently more valuable for intra-operative assistance, as they can meaningfully influence a surgeon's immediate and long-term planning by providing foresight into future steps. To address this gap, we propose a dual approach that simultaneously recognises the current surgical phase and predicts upcoming ones, thus offering comprehensive intra-operative assistance and guidance on the expected remaining workflow. Our novel method, Surgical Phase Recognition and Anticipation (SuPRA), leverages past and current information for accurate intra-operative phase recognition while using future segments for phase prediction. This unified approach challenges conventional frameworks that treat these objectives separately. We have validated SuPRA on two reputed datasets, Cholec80 and AutoLaparo21, where it demonstrated state-of-the-art performance with recognition accuracies of 91.8% and 79.3%, respectively. Additionally, we introduce and evaluate our model using new segment-level evaluation metrics, namely Edit and F1 Overlap scores, for a more temporal assessment of segment classification. In conclusion, SuPRA presents a new multi-task approach that paves the way for improved intra-operative assistance through surgical phase recognition and prediction of future events.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

Towards Foundation Time Series Model: To Synthesize Or Not To Synthesize?

The industry is rich in cases when we are required to make forecasting for large amounts of time series at once. However, we might be in a situation where we can not afford to train a separate model for each of them. Such issue in time series modeling remains without due attention. The remedy for this setting is the establishment of a foundation model. Such a model is expected to work in zero-shot and few-shot regimes. However, what should we take as a training dataset for such kind of model? Witnessing the benefits from the enrichment of NLP datasets with artificially-generated data, we might want to adopt their experience for time series. In contrast to natural language, the process of generation of synthetic time series data is even more favorable because it provides full control of series patterns, time horizons, and number of samples. In this work, we consider the essential question if it is advantageous to train a foundation model on synthetic data or it is better to utilize only a limited number of real-life examples. Our experiments are conducted only for regular time series and speak in favor of leveraging solely the real time series. Moreover, the choice of the proper source dataset strongly influences the performance during inference. When provided access even to a limited quantity of short time series data, employing it within a supervised framework yields more favorable results than training on a larger volume of synthetic data. The code for our experiments is publicly available on Github https://github.com/sb-ai-lab/synthesize_or_not.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024

TiRex: Zero-Shot Forecasting Across Long and Short Horizons with Enhanced In-Context Learning

In-context learning, the ability of large language models to perform tasks using only examples provided in the prompt, has recently been adapted for time series forecasting. This paradigm enables zero-shot prediction, where past values serve as context for forecasting future values, making powerful forecasting tools accessible to non-experts and increasing the performance when training data are scarce. Most existing zero-shot forecasting approaches rely on transformer architectures, which, despite their success in language, often fall short of expectations in time series forecasting, where recurrent models like LSTMs frequently have the edge. Conversely, while LSTMs are well-suited for time series modeling due to their state-tracking capabilities, they lack strong in-context learning abilities. We introduce TiRex that closes this gap by leveraging xLSTM, an enhanced LSTM with competitive in-context learning skills. Unlike transformers, state-space models, or parallelizable RNNs such as RWKV, TiRex retains state-tracking, a critical property for long-horizon forecasting. To further facilitate its state-tracking ability, we propose a training-time masking strategy called CPM. TiRex sets a new state of the art in zero-shot time series forecasting on the HuggingFace benchmarks GiftEval and Chronos-ZS, outperforming significantly larger models including TabPFN-TS (Prior Labs), Chronos Bolt (Amazon), TimesFM (Google), and Moirai (Salesforce) across both short- and long-term forecasts.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29

Prompt-augmented Temporal Point Process for Streaming Event Sequence

Neural Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) are the prevalent paradigm for modeling continuous-time event sequences, such as user activities on the web and financial transactions. In real-world applications, event data is typically received in a streaming manner, where the distribution of patterns may shift over time. Additionally, privacy and memory constraints are commonly observed in practical scenarios, further compounding the challenges. Therefore, the continuous monitoring of a TPP to learn the streaming event sequence is an important yet under-explored problem. Our work paper addresses this challenge by adopting Continual Learning (CL), which makes the model capable of continuously learning a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting under realistic constraints. Correspondingly, we propose a simple yet effective framework, PromptTPPOur code is available at {\small \url{ https://github.com/yanyanSann/PromptTPP}}, by integrating the base TPP with a continuous-time retrieval prompt pool. The prompts, small learnable parameters, are stored in a memory space and jointly optimized with the base TPP, ensuring that the model learns event streams sequentially without buffering past examples or task-specific attributes. We present a novel and realistic experimental setup for modeling event streams, where PromptTPP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across three real user behavior datasets.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 7, 2023

R-ACP: Real-Time Adaptive Collaborative Perception Leveraging Robust Task-Oriented Communications

Collaborative perception enhances sensing in multirobot and vehicular networks by fusing information from multiple agents, improving perception accuracy and sensing range. However, mobility and non-rigid sensor mounts introduce extrinsic calibration errors, necessitating online calibration, further complicated by limited overlap in sensing regions. Moreover, maintaining fresh information is crucial for timely and accurate sensing. To address calibration errors and ensure timely and accurate perception, we propose a robust task-oriented communication strategy to optimize online self-calibration and efficient feature sharing for Real-time Adaptive Collaborative Perception (R-ACP). Specifically, we first formulate an Age of Perceived Targets (AoPT) minimization problem to capture data timeliness of multi-view streaming. Then, in the calibration phase, we introduce a channel-aware self-calibration technique based on reidentification (Re-ID), which adaptively compresses key features according to channel capacities, effectively addressing calibration issues via spatial and temporal cross-camera correlations. In the streaming phase, we tackle the trade-off between bandwidth and inference accuracy by leveraging an Information Bottleneck (IB) based encoding method to adjust video compression rates based on task relevance, thereby reducing communication overhead and latency. Finally, we design a priority-aware network to filter corrupted features to mitigate performance degradation from packet corruption. Extensive studies demonstrate that our framework outperforms five baselines, improving multiple object detection accuracy (MODA) by 25.49% and reducing communication costs by 51.36% under severely poor channel conditions. Code will be made publicly available: github.com/fangzr/R-ACP.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 5, 2024

Accident Risk Prediction based on Heterogeneous Sparse Data: New Dataset and Insights

Reducing traffic accidents is an important public safety challenge, therefore, accident analysis and prediction has been a topic of much research over the past few decades. Using small-scale datasets with limited coverage, being dependent on extensive set of data, and being not applicable for real-time purposes are the important shortcomings of the existing studies. To address these challenges, we propose a new solution for real-time traffic accident prediction using easy-to-obtain, but sparse data. Our solution relies on a deep-neural-network model (which we have named DAP, for Deep Accident Prediction); which utilizes a variety of data attributes such as traffic events, weather data, points-of-interest, and time. DAP incorporates multiple components including a recurrent (for time-sensitive data), a fully connected (for time-insensitive data), and a trainable embedding component (to capture spatial heterogeneity). To fill the data gap, we have - through a comprehensive process of data collection, integration, and augmentation - created a large-scale publicly available database of accident information named US-Accidents. By employing the US-Accidents dataset and through an extensive set of experiments across several large cities, we have evaluated our proposal against several baselines. Our analysis and results show significant improvements to predict rare accident events. Further, we have shown the impact of traffic information, time, and points-of-interest data for real-time accident prediction.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 19, 2019

Strefer: Empowering Video LLMs with Space-Time Referring and Reasoning via Synthetic Instruction Data

Next-generation AI companions must go beyond general video understanding to resolve spatial and temporal references in dynamic, real-world environments. Existing Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs), while capable of coarse-level comprehension, struggle with fine-grained, spatiotemporal reasoning, especially when user queries rely on time-based event references for temporal anchoring, or gestural cues for spatial anchoring to clarify object references and positions. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce Strefer, a synthetic instruction data generation framework designed to equip Video LLMs with spatiotemporal referring and reasoning capabilities. Strefer produces diverse instruction-tuning data using a data engine that pseudo-annotates temporally dense, fine-grained video metadata, capturing rich spatial and temporal information in a structured manner, including subjects, objects, their locations as masklets, and their action descriptions and timelines. Our approach enhances the ability of Video LLMs to interpret spatial and temporal references, fostering more versatile, space-time-aware reasoning essential for real-world AI companions. Without using proprietary models, costly human annotation, or the need to annotate large volumes of new videos, experimental evaluations show that models trained with data produced by Strefer outperform baselines on tasks requiring spatial and temporal disambiguation. Additionally, these models exhibit enhanced space-time-aware reasoning, establishing a new foundation for perceptually grounded, instruction-tuned Video LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 3

A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questions

Time is an important dimension in our physical world. Lots of facts can evolve with respect to time. For example, the U.S. President might change every four years. Therefore, it is important to consider the time dimension and empower the existing QA models to reason over time. However, the existing QA datasets contain rather few time-sensitive questions, hence not suitable for diagnosing or benchmarking the model's temporal reasoning capability. In order to promote research in this direction, we propose to construct a time-sensitive QA dataset. The dataset is constructed by 1) mining time-evolving facts from WikiData and aligning them to their corresponding Wikipedia page, 2) employing crowd workers to verify and calibrate these noisy facts, 3) generating question-answer pairs based on the annotated time-sensitive facts. Our dataset poses challenges in the aspect of both temporal understanding and temporal reasoning. We evaluate different SoTA long-document QA systems like BigBird and FiD on our dataset. The best-performing model FiD can only achieve 46\% accuracy, still far behind the human performance of 87\%. We demonstrate that these models are still lacking the ability to perform consistent temporal reasoning. Therefore, we believe that our dataset could serve as a benchmark to develop NLP models more sensitive to temporal shifts. The dataset and code are released in~https://github.com/wenhuchen/Time-Sensitive-QA.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 13, 2021

TOMATO: Assessing Visual Temporal Reasoning Capabilities in Multimodal Foundation Models

Existing benchmarks often highlight the remarkable performance achieved by state-of-the-art Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) in leveraging temporal context for video understanding. However, how well do the models truly perform visual temporal reasoning? Our study of existing benchmarks shows that this capability of MFMs is likely overestimated as many questions can be solved by using a single, few, or out-of-order frames. To systematically examine current visual temporal reasoning tasks, we propose three principles with corresponding metrics: (1) Multi-Frame Gain, (2) Frame Order Sensitivity, and (3) Frame Information Disparity. Following these principles, we introduce TOMATO, Temporal Reasoning Multimodal Evaluation, a novel benchmark crafted to rigorously assess MFMs' temporal reasoning capabilities in video understanding. TOMATO comprises 1,484 carefully curated, human-annotated questions spanning six tasks (i.e., action count, direction, rotation, shape & trend, velocity & frequency, and visual cues), applied to 1,417 videos, including 805 self-recorded and -generated videos, that encompass human-centric, real-world, and simulated scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 57.3% with the best-performing model. Moreover, our in-depth analysis uncovers more fundamental limitations beyond this gap in current MFMs. While they can accurately recognize events in isolated frames, they fail to interpret these frames as a continuous sequence. We believe TOMATO will serve as a crucial testbed for evaluating the next-generation MFMs and as a call to the community to develop AI systems capable of comprehending human world dynamics through the video modality.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024 2

Chronos-2: From Univariate to Universal Forecasting

Pretrained time series models have enabled inference-only forecasting systems that produce accurate predictions without task-specific training. However, existing approaches largely focus on univariate forecasting, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where multivariate data and covariates play a crucial role. We present Chronos-2, a pretrained model capable of handling univariate, multivariate, and covariate-informed forecasting tasks in a zero-shot manner. Chronos-2 employs a group attention mechanism that facilitates in-context learning (ICL) through efficient information sharing across multiple time series within a group, which may represent sets of related series, variates of a multivariate series, or targets and covariates in a forecasting task. These general capabilities are achieved through training on synthetic datasets that impose diverse multivariate structures on univariate series. Chronos-2 delivers state-of-the-art performance across three comprehensive benchmarks: fev-bench, GIFT-Eval, and Chronos Benchmark II. On fev-bench, which emphasizes multivariate and covariate-informed forecasting, Chronos-2's universal ICL capabilities lead to substantial improvements over existing models. On tasks involving covariates, it consistently outperforms baselines by a wide margin. Case studies in the energy and retail domains further highlight its practical advantages. The in-context learning capabilities of Chronos-2 establish it as a general-purpose forecasting model that can be used "as is" in real-world forecasting pipelines.

amazon Amazon
·
Oct 17 3

PVT++: A Simple End-to-End Latency-Aware Visual Tracking Framework

Visual object tracking is essential to intelligent robots. Most existing approaches have ignored the online latency that can cause severe performance degradation during real-world processing. Especially for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where robust tracking is more challenging and onboard computation is limited, the latency issue can be fatal. In this work, we present a simple framework for end-to-end latency-aware tracking, i.e., end-to-end predictive visual tracking (PVT++). Unlike existing solutions that naively append Kalman Filters after trackers, PVT++ can be jointly optimized, so that it takes not only motion information but can also leverage the rich visual knowledge in most pre-trained tracker models for robust prediction. Besides, to bridge the training-evaluation domain gap, we propose a relative motion factor, empowering PVT++ to generalize to the challenging and complex UAV tracking scenes. These careful designs have made the small-capacity lightweight PVT++ a widely effective solution. Additionally, this work presents an extended latency-aware evaluation benchmark for assessing an any-speed tracker in the online setting. Empirical results on a robotic platform from the aerial perspective show that PVT++ can achieve significant performance gain on various trackers and exhibit higher accuracy than prior solutions, largely mitigating the degradation brought by latency.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 21, 2022

AccidentBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning in Vehicle Accidents and Beyond

Rapid advances in multimodal models demand benchmarks that rigorously evaluate understanding and reasoning in safety-critical, dynamic real-world settings. We present AccidentBench, a large-scale benchmark that combines vehicle accident scenarios with Beyond domains, safety-critical settings in air and water that emphasize spatial and temporal reasoning (e.g., navigation, orientation, multi-vehicle motion). The benchmark contains approximately 2000 videos and over 19000 human-annotated question--answer pairs spanning multiple video lengths (short/medium/long) and difficulty levels (easy/medium/hard). Tasks systematically probe core capabilities: temporal, spatial, and intent understanding and reasoning. By unifying accident-centric traffic scenes with broader safety-critical scenarios in air and water, AccidentBench offers a comprehensive, physically grounded testbed for evaluating models under real-world variability. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models (e.g., Gemini-2.5 Pro and GPT-5) show that even the strongest models achieve only about 18% accuracy on the hardest tasks and longest videos, revealing substantial gaps in real-world temporal, spatial, and intent reasoning. AccidentBench is designed to expose these critical gaps and drive the development of multimodal models that are safer, more robust, and better aligned with real-world safety-critical challenges. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/AccidentBench

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 30