Daily Papers

We present M, an open-source, low-cost social robot platform designed to reduce platform friction that slows social robotics research by making robots easier to reproduce, modify, and deploy in real-world settings. M combines a modular mechanical design, multimodal sensing, and expressive yet mechanically simple actuation architecture with a ROS2-native software package that cleanly separates perception, expression control, and data management. The platform includes a simulation environment with interface equivalence to hardware to support rapid sim-to-real transfer of interaction behaviors. We demonstrate extensibility through additional sensing/actuation modules and provide example interaction templates for storytelling and two-way conversational coaching. Finally, we report real-world use in participatory design and week-long in-home deployments, showing how M can serve as a practical foundation for longitudinal, reproducible social robotics research.

Large-scale communities of AI agents are becoming increasingly prevalent, creating new environments for agent-agent social interaction. Prior work has examined multi-agent behavior primarily in controlled or small-scale settings, limiting our understanding of emergent social dynamics at scale. The recent emergence of MoltBook, a social networking platform designed explicitly for AI agents, presents a unique opportunity to study whether and how these interactions reproduce core human social mechanisms. We present MoltNet, a large-scale empirical analysis of agent interaction on MoltBook using data collected in early 2026. Grounded in sociological and social-psychological theory, we examine behavior along four dimensions: intent and motivation, norms and templates, incentives and behavioral drift, emotion and contagion. Our analysis revealed that agents strongly respond to social rewards and rapidly converge on community-specific interaction templates, resembling human patterns of incentive sensitivity and normative conformity. However, they are predominantly knowledge-driven rather than persona-aligned, and display limited emotional reciprocity along with weak dialogic engagement, which diverges systematically from human online communities. Together, these results reveal both similarities and differences between artificial and human social systems and provide an empirical foundation for understanding, designing, and governing large-scale agent communities.

Tracking human object interaction from videos is important to understand human behavior from the rapidly growing stream of video data. Previous video-based methods require predefined object templates while single-image-based methods are template-free but lack temporal consistency. In this paper, we present a method to track human object interaction without any object shape templates. We decompose the 4D tracking problem into per-frame pose tracking and canonical shape optimization. We first apply a single-view reconstruction method to obtain temporally-inconsistent per-frame interaction reconstructions. Then, for the human, we propose an efficient autoencoder to predict SMPL vertices directly from the per-frame reconstructions, introducing temporally consistent correspondence. For the object, we introduce a pose estimator that leverages temporal information to predict smooth object rotations under occlusions. To train our model, we propose a method to generate synthetic interaction videos and synthesize in total 10 hour videos of 8.5k sequences with full 3D ground truth. Experiments on BEHAVE and InterCap show that our method significantly outperforms previous template-based video tracking and single-frame reconstruction methods. Our proposed synthetic video dataset also allows training video-based methods that generalize to real-world videos. Our code and dataset will be publicly released.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) acquire real-world knowledge and general reasoning ability through Internet-scale image-text corpora. They can augment robotic systems with scene understanding and task planning, and assist visuomotor policies that are trained on robot trajectory data. We explore the reverse paradigm - using rich, real, multi-modal robot trajectory data to enhance and evaluate VLMs. In this paper, we present Robo2VLM, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset generation framework for VLMs. Given a human tele-operated robot trajectory, Robo2VLM derives ground-truth from non-visual and non-descriptive sensory modalities, such as end-effector pose, gripper aperture, and force sensing. Based on these modalities, it segments the robot trajectory into a sequence of manipulation phases. At each phase, Robo2VLM uses scene and interaction understanding to identify 3D properties of the robot, task goal, and the target object. The properties are used to generate representative VQA queries - images with textural multiple-choice questions - based on spatial, goal-conditioned, and interaction reasoning question templates. We curate Robo2VLM-1, a large-scale in-the-wild dataset with 684,710 questions covering 463 distinct scenes and 3,396 robotic manipulation tasks from 176k real robot trajectories. Results suggest that Robo2VLM-1 can benchmark and improve VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning.

Understanding realistic hand-object interactions from monocular RGB videos is essential for AR/VR, robotics, and embodied AI. Existing methods rely on category-specific templates or heavy computation, yet still produce physically inconsistent hand-object alignment in 3D. We introduce GHOST (Gaussian Hand-Object Splatting), a fast, category-agnostic framework for reconstructing dynamic hand-object interactions using 2D Gaussian Splatting. GHOST represents both hands and objects as dense, view-consistent Gaussian discs and introduces three key innovations: (1) a geometric-prior retrieval and consistency loss that completes occluded object regions, (2) a grasp-aware alignment that refines hand translations and object scale to ensure realistic contact, and (3) a hand-aware background loss that prevents penalizing hand-occluded object regions. GHOST achieves complete, physically consistent, and animatable reconstructions from a single RGB video while running an order of magnitude faster than prior category-agnostic methods. Extensive experiments on ARCTIC, HO3D, and in-the-wild datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D reconstruction and 2D rendering quality, establishing GHOST as an efficient and robust solution for realistic hand-object interaction modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/ATAboukhadra/GHOST.

Reconstructing 3Ds of hand-object interaction (HOI) is a fundamental problem that can find numerous applications. Despite recent advances, there is no comprehensive pipeline yet for bimanual class-agnostic interaction reconstruction from a monocular RGB video, where two hands and an unknown object are interacting with each other. Previous works tackled the limited hand-object interaction case, where object templates are pre-known or only one hand is involved in the interaction. The bimanual interaction reconstruction exhibits severe occlusions introduced by complex interactions between two hands and an object. To solve this, we first introduce BIGS (Bimanual Interaction 3D Gaussian Splatting), a method that reconstructs 3D Gaussians of hands and an unknown object from a monocular video. To robustly obtain object Gaussians avoiding severe occlusions, we leverage prior knowledge of pre-trained diffusion model with score distillation sampling (SDS) loss, to reconstruct unseen object parts. For hand Gaussians, we exploit the 3D priors of hand model (i.e., MANO) and share a single Gaussian for two hands to effectively accumulate hand 3D information, given limited views. To further consider the 3D alignment between hands and objects, we include the interacting-subjects optimization step during Gaussian optimization. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy on two challenging datasets, in terms of 3D hand pose estimation (MPJPE), 3D object reconstruction (CDh, CDo, F10), and rendering quality (PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS), respectively.

Given a query, the task of Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) is to localize a temporal moment in an untrimmed video that semantically matches the query. In this paper, we adopt a proposal-based solution that generates proposals (i.e., candidate moments) and then select the best matching proposal. On top of modeling the cross-modal interaction between candidate moments and the query, our proposed Moment Sampling DETR (MS-DETR) enables efficient moment-moment relation modeling. The core idea is to sample a subset of moments guided by the learnable templates with an adopted DETR (DEtection TRansformer) framework. To achieve this, we design a multi-scale visual-linguistic encoder, and an anchor-guided moment decoder paired with a set of learnable templates. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MS-DETR.

We propose EgoGrasp, the first method to reconstruct world-space hand-object interactions (W-HOI) from dynamic egoview videos, supporting open-vocabulary objects. Accurate W-HOI reconstruction is critical for embodied intelligence yet remains challenging. Existing HOI methods are largely restricted to local camera coordinates or single frames, failing to capture global temporal dynamics. While some recent approaches attempt world-space hand estimation, they overlook object poses and HOI constraints. Moreover, previous HOI estimation methods either fail to handle open-set categories due to their reliance on object templates or employ differentiable rendering that requires per-instance optimization, resulting in prohibitive computational costs. Finally, frequent occlusions in egocentric videos severely degrade performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose a multi-stage framework: (i) a robust pre-processing pipeline leveraging vision foundation models for initial 3D scene, hand and object reconstruction; (ii) a body-guided diffusion model that incorporates explicit egocentric body priors for hand pose estimation; and (iii) an HOI-prior-informed diffusion model for hand-aware 6DoF pose infilling, ensuring physically plausible and temporally consistent W-HOI estimation. We experimentally demonstrate that EgoGrasp can achieve state-of-the-art performance in W-HOI reconstruction, handling multiple and open vocabulary objects robustly.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex workflows in mobile and desktop environments. However, current model-centric agent architectures struggle to self-evolve post-deployment: improving personalization, capability, and efficiency typically requires continuous model retraining/fine-tuning, which incurs prohibitive computational overheads and suffers from an inherent trade-off between model accuracy and inference efficiency. To enable iterative self-evolution without model retraining, we propose MOBIMEM, a memory-centric agent system. MOBIMEM first introduces three specialized memory primitives to decouple agent evolution from model weights: (1) Profile Memory uses a lightweight distance-graph (DisGraph) structure to align with user preferences, resolving the accuracy-latency trade-off in user profile retrieval; (2) Experience Memory employs multi-level templates to instantiate execution logic for new tasks, ensuring capability generalization; and (3) Action Memory records fine-grained interaction sequences, reducing the reliance on expensive model inference. Building upon this memory architecture, MOBIMEM further integrates a suite of OS-inspired services to orchestrate execution: a scheduler that coordinates parallel sub-task execution and memory operations; an agent record-and-replay (AgentRR) mechanism that enables safe and efficient action reuse; and a context-aware exception handling that ensures graceful recovery from user interruptions and runtime errors. Evaluation on AndroidWorld and top-50 apps shows that MOBIMEM achieves 83.1% profile alignment with 23.83 ms retrieval time (280x faster than GraphRAG baselines), improves task success rates by up to 50.3%, and reduces end-to-end latency by up to 9x on mobile devices.

The applications of generative AI have become extremely impressive, and the interplay between users and AI is even more so. Current human-AI interaction literature has taken a broad look at how humans interact with generative AI, but it lacks specificity regarding the user interface designs and patterns used to create these applications. Therefore, we present a survey that comprehensively presents taxonomies of how a human interacts with AI and the user interaction patterns designed to meet the needs of a variety of relevant use cases. We focus primarily on user-guided interactions, surveying interactions that are initiated by the user and do not include any implicit signals given by the user. With this survey, we aim to create a compendium of different user-interaction patterns that can be used as a reference for designers and developers alike. In doing so, we also strive to lower the entry barrier for those attempting to learn more about the design of generative AI applications.

Template mining is one of the foundational tasks to support log analysis, which supports the diagnosis and troubleshooting of large scale Web applications. This paper develops a human-in-the-loop template mining framework to support interactive log analysis, which is highly desirable in real-world diagnosis or troubleshooting of Web applications but yet previous template mining algorithms fails to support it. We formulate three types of light-weight user feedbacks and based on them we design three atomic human-in-the-loop template mining algorithms. We derive mild conditions under which the outputs of our proposed algorithms are provably correct. We also derive upper bounds on the computational complexity and query complexity of each algorithm. We demonstrate the versatility of our proposed algorithms by combining them to improve the template mining accuracy of five representative algorithms over sixteen widely used benchmark datasets.

Large language models demonstrate a remarkable capability for learning to solve new tasks from a few examples. The prompt template, or the way the input examples are formatted to obtain the prompt, is an important yet often overlooked aspect of in-context learning. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study of the template format's influence on the in-context learning performance. We evaluate the impact of the prompt template across models (from 770M to 70B parameters) and 4 standard classification datasets. We show that a poor choice of the template can reduce the performance of the strongest models and inference methods to a random guess level. More importantly, the best templates do not transfer between different setups and even between models of the same family. Our findings show that the currently prevalent approach to evaluation, which ignores template selection, may give misleading results due to different templates in different works. As a first step towards mitigating this issue, we propose Template Ensembles that aggregate model predictions across several templates. This simple test-time augmentation boosts average performance while being robust to the choice of random set of templates.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly common in educational applications, there is a growing need for evidence-based methods to design and evaluate LLM prompts that produce personalized and pedagogically aligned out-puts. This study presents a generalizable, systematic approach for evaluating prompts, demonstrated through an analysis of LLM-generated follow-up questions in a structured dialogue activity. Six prompt templates were designed and tested. The templates incorporated established prompt engineering patterns, with each prompt emphasizing distinct pedagogical strategies. The prompt templates were compared through a tournament-style evaluation framework that can be adapted for other educational applications. The tournament employed the Glicko2 rating system with eight judges evaluating question pairs across three dimensions: format, dialogue support, and appropriateness for learners. Data was sourced from 120 authentic user interactions across three distinct educational deployments. Results showed that a single prompt related to strategic reading out-performed other templates with win probabilities ranging from 81% to 100% in pairwise comparisons. This prompt combined persona and context manager pat-terns and was designed to support metacognitive learning strategies such as self-directed learning. The methodology showcases how educational technology re- searchers can systematically evaluate and improve prompt designs, moving beyond ad-hoc prompt engineering toward evidence-based prompt development for educational applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated growing competence in web page generation. However, existing text-driven approaches rely on complex prompts that impose substantial demands on users and offer limited expressivity for page layout and cross-page visual coherence. Image-driven paradigms, which take UI screenshots as input, align more closely with real development workflows. However, current benchmarks focus primarily on visual fidelity and lack a systematic evaluation of the interaction capabilities in generated artifacts. To address this gap, we introduce UI2App, the first benchmark targeting interaction inference, the ability to recover application behavior from screenshots alone, without any textual or behavioral guidance. UI2App comprises 327 screenshots grouped into 45 state-coherent screenshot sets for runnable multi-route web applications. We design an end-to-end pipeline that evaluates each artifact along four dimensions: executability, navigation reachability, visual fidelity, and interaction inference. The interaction metric (IIS) assesses inferred interactions by functional correctness and state-management complexity, crediting any valid implementation rather than matching a single reference. Experiments on six frontier vision-language models reveal a marked capability mismatch between visual reconstruction and interaction realization: the visual-fidelity leader scores only 7.5 on IIS, ranking fourth and trailing the IIS leader by 5.2x. High-complexity interactions such as cross-page state remain a pervasive bottleneck, with half of the evaluated models scoring exactly zero on this dimension. Overall, the results indicate that inferring complete interaction behavior from static screenshots remains a key challenge for models.

As AI systems enter into a growing number of societal domains, these systems increasingly shape and are shaped by user preferences, opinions, and behaviors. However, the design of AI systems rarely accounts for how AI and users shape one another. In this position paper, we argue for the development of formal interaction models which mathematically specify how AI and users shape one another. Formal interaction models can be leveraged to (1) specify interactions for implementation, (2) monitor interactions through empirical analysis, (3) anticipate societal impacts via counterfactual analysis, and (4) control societal impacts via interventions. The design space of formal interaction models is vast, and model design requires careful consideration of factors such as style, granularity, mathematical complexity, and measurability. Using content recommender systems as a case study, we critically examine the nascent literature of formal interaction models with respect to these use-cases and design axes. More broadly, we call for the community to leverage formal interaction models when designing, evaluating, or auditing any AI system which interacts with users.

Chat template is a common technique used in the training and inference stages of Large Language Models (LLMs). It can transform input and output data into role-based and templated expressions to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, this also creates a breeding ground for novel attack surfaces. In this paper, we first reveal that the customizability of chat templates allows an attacker who controls the template to inject arbitrary strings into the system prompt without the user's notice. Building on this, we propose a training-free backdoor attack, termed BadTemplate. Specifically, BadTemplate inserts carefully crafted malicious instructions into the high-priority system prompt, thereby causing the target LLM to exhibit persistent backdoor behaviors. BadTemplate outperforms traditional backdoor attacks by embedding malicious instructions directly into the system prompt, eliminating the need for model retraining while achieving high attack effectiveness with minimal cost. Furthermore, its simplicity and scalability make it easily and widely deployed in real-world systems, raising serious risks of rapid propagation, economic damage, and large-scale misinformation. Furthermore, detection by major third-party platforms HuggingFace and LLM-as-a-judge proves largely ineffective against BadTemplate. Extensive experiments conducted on 5 benchmark datasets across 6 open-source and 3 closed-source LLMs, compared with 3 baselines, demonstrate that BadTemplate achieves up to a 100% attack success rate and significantly outperforms traditional prompt-based backdoors in both word-level and sentence-level attacks. Our work highlights the potential security risks raised by chat templates in the LLM supply chain, thereby supporting the development of effective defense mechanisms.

Developing documentation guidelines and easy-to-use templates for datasets and models is a challenging task, especially given the variety of backgrounds, skills, and incentives of the people involved in the building of natural language processing (NLP) tools. Nevertheless, the adoption of standard documentation practices across the field of NLP promotes more accessible and detailed descriptions of NLP datasets and models, while supporting researchers and developers in reflecting on their work. To help with the standardization of documentation, we present two case studies of efforts that aim to develop reusable documentation templates -- the HuggingFace data card, a general purpose card for datasets in NLP, and the GEM benchmark data and model cards with a focus on natural language generation. We describe our process for developing these templates, including the identification of relevant stakeholder groups, the definition of a set of guiding principles, the use of existing templates as our foundation, and iterative revisions based on feedback.

Despite great progress in multimodal tracking, these trackers remain too heavy and expensive for resource-constrained devices. To alleviate this problem, we propose LightFC-X, a family of lightweight convolutional RGB-X trackers that explores a unified convolutional architecture for lightweight multimodal tracking. Our core idea is to achieve lightweight cross-modal modeling and joint refinement of the multimodal features and the spatiotemporal appearance features of the target. Specifically, we propose a novel efficient cross-attention module (ECAM) and a novel spatiotemporal template aggregation module (STAM). The ECAM achieves lightweight cross-modal interaction of template-search area integrated feature with only 0.08M parameters. The STAM enhances the model's utilization of temporal information through module fine-tuning paradigm. Comprehensive experiments show that our LightFC-X achieves state-of-the-art performance and the optimal balance between parameters, performance, and speed. For example, LightFC-T-ST outperforms CMD by 4.3% and 5.7% in SR and PR on the LasHeR benchmark, which it achieves 2.6x reduction in parameters and 2.7x speedup. It runs in real-time on the CPU at a speed of 22 fps. The code is available at https://github.com/LiYunfengLYF/LightFC-X.

Transformer-based trackers have achieved promising success and become the dominant tracking paradigm due to their accuracy and efficiency. Despite the substantial progress, most of the existing approaches tackle object tracking as a deterministic coordinate regression problem, while the target localization uncertainty has been greatly overlooked, which hampers trackers' ability to maintain reliable target state prediction in challenging scenarios. To address this issue, we propose UncTrack, a novel uncertainty-aware transformer tracker that predicts the target localization uncertainty and incorporates this uncertainty information for accurate target state inference. Specifically, UncTrack utilizes a transformer encoder to perform feature interaction between template and search images. The output features are passed into an uncertainty-aware localization decoder (ULD) to coarsely predict the corner-based localization and the corresponding localization uncertainty. Then the localization uncertainty is sent into a prototype memory network (PMN) to excavate valuable historical information to identify whether the target state prediction is reliable or not. To enhance the template representation, the samples with high confidence are fed back into the prototype memory bank for memory updating, making the tracker more robust to challenging appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ManOfStory/UncTrack.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on the design-to-code task, i.e., generating UI code from UI mock-ups. However, existing benchmarks only contain static web pages for evaluation and ignore the dynamic interaction, limiting the practicality, usability and user engagement of the generated webpages. To bridge these gaps, we present the first systematic investigation of MLLMs in generating interactive webpages. Specifically, we formulate the Interaction-to-Code task and establish the Interaction2Code benchmark, encompassing 127 unique webpages and 374 distinct interactions across 15 webpage types and 31 interaction categories. Through comprehensive experiments utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs, evaluated via both automatic metrics and human assessments, we identify four critical limitations of MLLM on Interaction-to-Code task: (1) inadequate generation of interaction compared with full page, (2) prone to ten types of failure, (3) poor performance on visually subtle interactions, and (4) insufficient undestanding on interaction when limited to single-modality visual descriptions. To address these limitations, we propose four enhancement strategies: Interactive Element Highlighting, Failureaware Prompting (FAP), Visual Saliency Enhancement, and Visual-Textual Descriptions Combination, all aiming at improving MLLMs' performance on the Interaction-toCode task. The Interaction2Code benchmark and code are available in https://github. com/WebPAI/Interaction2Code.

Controllable diffusion methods have substantially expanded the practical utility of diffusion models, but they are typically developed as isolated, backbone-specific systems with incompatible training pipelines, parameter formats, and runtime hooks. This fragmentation makes it difficult to reuse infrastructure across tasks, transfer capabilities across backbones, or compose multiple controls within a single generation pipeline. We present Diffusion Templates, a unified and open plugin framework that decouples base-model inference from controllable capability injection. The framework is organized around three components: Template models that map arbitrary task-specific inputs to an intermediate capability representation, a Template cache that functions as a standardized interface for capability injection, and a Template pipeline that loads, merges, and injects one or more Template caches into the base diffusion runtime. Because the interface is defined at the systems level rather than tied to a specific control architecture, heterogeneous capability carriers such as KV-Cache and LoRA can be supported under the same abstraction. Based on this design, we build a diverse model zoo spanning structural control, brightness adjustment, color adjustment, image editing, super-resolution, sharpness enhancement, aesthetic alignment, content reference, local inpainting, and age control. These case studies show that Diffusion Templates can unify a broad range of controllable generation tasks while preserving modularity, composability, and practical extensibility across rapidly evolving diffusion backbones. All resources will be open sourced, including code, models, and datasets.

Designing user interfaces (UIs) is a critical step when launching products, building portfolios, or personalizing projects, yet end users without design expertise often struggle to articulate their intent and to trust design choices. Existing example-based tools either promote broad exploration, which can cause overwhelm and design drift, or require adapting a single example, risking design fixation. We present UI Remix, an interactive system that supports mobile UI design through an example-driven design workflow. Powered by a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MMRAG) model, UI Remix enables iterative search, selection, and adaptation of examples at both the global (whole interface) and local (component) level. To foster trust, it presents source transparency cues such as ratings, download counts, and developer information. In an empirical study with 24 end users, UI Remix significantly improved participants' ability to achieve their design goals, facilitated effective iteration, and encouraged exploration of alternative designs. Participants also reported that source transparency cues enhanced their confidence in adapting examples. Our findings suggest new directions for AI-assisted, example-driven systems that empower end users to design with greater control, trust, and openness to exploration.

Platforms such as GitHub and GitLab introduce Issue Report Templates (IRTs) to enable more effective issue management and better alignment with developer expectations. However, these templates are not widely adopted in most repositories, and there is currently no tool available to aid developers in generating them. In this work, we introduce GIRT-Model, an assistant language model that automatically generates IRTs based on the developer's instructions regarding the structure and necessary fields. We create GIRT-Instruct, a dataset comprising pairs of instructions and IRTs, with the IRTs sourced from GitHub repositories. We use GIRT-Instruct to instruction-tune a T5-base model to create the GIRT-Model. In our experiments, GIRT-Model outperforms general language models (T5 and Flan-T5 with different parameter sizes) in IRT generation by achieving significantly higher scores in ROUGE, BLEU, METEOR, and human evaluation. Additionally, we analyze the effectiveness of GIRT-Model in a user study in which participants wrote short IRTs with GIRT-Model. Our results show that the participants find GIRT-Model useful in the automated generation of templates. We hope that through the use of GIRT-Model, we can encourage more developers to adopt IRTs in their repositories. We publicly release our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/ISE-Research/girt-model.

Agents are widely deployed as assistants over documents, tools, and code. However, they typically act only on explicit user requests, which surface only the problems the user has noticed, while many other important problems coexist, hidden in plain sight, within the broader user context, with their total number unknown in advance. We frame this as the task of discovering multiple hidden problems from context, in which coexisting problems should be uncovered, grounded in supporting evidence, and paired with concrete actions. To this end, we introduce TIDE, a template-guided iterative framework with two complementary mechanisms. Specifically, motivated by the observation that single-pass prediction anchors on the most salient cases and yields generic claims, we propose iterative discovery, which surfaces a small batch of candidates per round while conditioning on what has already been found, so subsequent rounds extend coverage; and thought templates, reusable schemas distilled from previously solved cases that specify what contextual signals to attend to and how to connect them, anchoring each prediction in a recognizable problem class. We validate TIDE on two realistic settings, personal workspaces and software repositories, across four model backbones, showing substantial gains over single-shot and parallel multi-agent baselines on task coverage, identification, and resolution.

In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt optimization is crucial for model performance. Although previous research has explored aspects like rephrasing prompt contexts, using various prompting techniques (like in-context learning and chain-of-thought), and ordering few-shot examples, our understanding of LLM sensitivity to prompt templates remains limited. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of different prompt templates on LLM performance. We formatted the same contexts into various human-readable templates, including plain text, Markdown, JSON, and YAML, and evaluated their impact across tasks like natural language reasoning, code generation, and translation using OpenAI's GPT models. Experiments show that GPT-3.5-turbo's performance varies by up to 40\% in a code translation task depending on the prompt template, while larger models like GPT-4 are more robust to these variations. Our analysis highlights the need to reconsider the use of fixed prompt templates, as different formats can significantly affect model performance.

Recent Long-Context Language Models (LCLMs) can process hundreds of thousands of tokens in a single prompt, enabling new opportunities for knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning by integrating large sets of retrieved documents or, in some cases, directly all necessary information. However, simply feeding more documents into the context window fails to capture how evidence should be connected. We address this gap with thought templates, which recast reasoning as reusable thought caches, derived from prior problem solving traces, structuring how evidence is combined and guiding multi-hop inference with factual documents. To keep these templates effective, we propose an update strategy that iteratively refines templates derived from training data through natural-language feedback. Across diverse benchmarks and LCLM families, our approach delivers consistent gains over strong baselines in both retrieval-based and retrieval-free settings. Furthermore, we show that optimized templates can be distilled into smaller open-source models, demonstrating its broad applicability and transparent reasoning reuse. We refer to our framework as Thought Template Augmented LCLMs (ToTAL).

Large pretrained language models (LLMs) can be rapidly adapted to a wide variety of tasks via a text-to-text approach, where the instruction and input are fed to the model in natural language. Combined with in-context learning (ICL), this paradigm is impressively flexible and powerful. However, it also burdens users with an overwhelming number of choices, many of them arbitrary. Inspired by markup languages like HTML, we contribute a method of using soft-token tags to compose prompt templates. This approach reduces arbitrary decisions and streamlines the application of ICL. Our method is a form of meta-learning for ICL; it learns these tags in advance during a parameter-efficient fine-tuning ``warm-up'' process. The tags can subsequently be used in templates for ICL on new, unseen tasks without any additional fine-tuning. Our experiments with this approach yield promising initial results, improving LLM performance on important enterprise applications such as few-shot and open-world intent detection, as well as text classification in news and legal domains.

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly seen as assistants, copilots, and consultants, capable of supporting a wide range of tasks through natural conversation. However, most systems remain constrained by a linear request-response format that often makes interactions inefficient in multi-turn, information-dense, and exploratory tasks. To address these limitations, we propose Generative Interfaces for Language Models, a paradigm in which LLMs respond to user queries by proactively generating user interfaces (UIs) that enable more adaptive and interactive engagement. Our framework leverages structured interface-specific representations and iterative refinements to translate user queries into task-specific UIs. For systematic evaluation, we introduce a multidimensional assessment framework that compares generative interfaces with traditional chat-based ones across diverse tasks, interaction patterns, and query types, capturing functional, interactive, and emotional aspects of user experience. Results show that generative interfaces consistently outperform conversational ones, with humans preferring them in over 70% of cases. These findings clarify when and why users favor generative interfaces, paving the way for future advancements in human-AI interaction.

LLMs have demonstrated commendable performance across diverse domains. Nevertheless, formulating high-quality prompts to instruct LLMs proficiently poses a challenge for non-AI experts. Existing research in prompt engineering suggests somewhat scattered optimization principles and designs empirically dependent prompt optimizers. Unfortunately, these endeavors lack a structured design template, incurring high learning costs and resulting in low reusability. In addition, it is not conducive to the iterative updating of prompts. Inspired by structured reusable programming languages, we propose LangGPT, a dual-layer prompt design framework as the programming language for LLMs. LangGPT has an easy-to-learn normative structure and provides an extended structure for migration and reuse. Experiments illustrate that LangGPT significantly enhances the performance of LLMs. Moreover, the case study shows that LangGPT leads LLMs to generate higher-quality responses. Furthermore, we analyzed the ease of use and reusability of LangGPT through a user survey in our online community.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama has significantly transformed natural language processing, showcasing remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating language. However, these models often struggle with tasks requiring complex reasoning, particularly in mathematical problem-solving, due in part to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality, domain-specific datasets necessary for training sophisticated reasoning abilities. To address this limitation, we introduce Template-based Data Generation (TDG), a novel approach that leverages LLMs (GPT-4) to automatically generate parameterized meta-templates, which are then used to synthesize a vast array of high-quality problems and solutions. Leveraging TDG, we create TemplateMath Part I: TemplateGSM, a dataset comprising over 7 million synthetically generated grade school math problems--each accompanied by code-based and natural language solutions--with the potential to generate an effectively unlimited number more. This dataset alleviates the scarcity of large-scale mathematical datasets and serves as a valuable resource for pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluating LLMs in mathematical reasoning. Our method not only enables the generation of virtually infinite data but also elevates data augmentation to a new level by using GPT-4 for meta-template generation, ensuring diverse and high-quality problem structures. The TemplateMath Part I: TemplateGSM dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/math-ai/TemplateGSM. The code is available at https://github.com/iiis-ai/TemplateMath.

Object modeling has become a core part of recent tracking frameworks. Current popular tackers use Transformer attention to extract the template feature separately or interactively with the search region. However, separate template learning lacks communication between the template and search regions, which brings difficulty in extracting discriminative target-oriented features. On the other hand, interactive template learning produces hybrid template features, which may introduce potential distractors to the template via the cluttered search regions. To enjoy the merits of both methods, we propose a robust object modeling framework for visual tracking (ROMTrack), which simultaneously models the inherent template and the hybrid template features. As a result, harmful distractors can be suppressed by combining the inherent features of target objects with search regions' guidance. Target-related features can also be extracted using the hybrid template, thus resulting in a more robust object modeling framework. To further enhance robustness, we present novel variation tokens to depict the ever-changing appearance of target objects. Variation tokens are adaptable to object deformation and appearance variations, which can boost overall performance with negligible computation. Experiments show that our ROMTrack sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks.

Templates serve as a good starting point to implement a design (e.g., banner, slide) but it takes great effort from designers to manually create. In this paper, we present Desigen, an automatic template creation pipeline which generates background images as well as harmonious layout elements over the background. Different from natural images, a background image should preserve enough non-salient space for the overlaying layout elements. To equip existing advanced diffusion-based models with stronger spatial control, we propose two simple but effective techniques to constrain the saliency distribution and reduce the attention weight in desired regions during the background generation process. Then conditioned on the background, we synthesize the layout with a Transformer-based autoregressive generator. To achieve a more harmonious composition, we propose an iterative inference strategy to adjust the synthesized background and layout in multiple rounds. We constructed a design dataset with more than 40k advertisement banners to verify our approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed pipeline generates high-quality templates comparable to human designers. More than a single-page design, we further show an application of presentation generation that outputs a set of theme-consistent slides. The data and code are available at https://whaohan.github.io/desigen.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) automate on-screen work, as illustrated by GPT-5.4 and Claude. Yet their reliability on complex, low-frequency interactions is still poor, limiting user trust. Our analysis of failure cases from advanced models suggests a long-tail pattern in GUI operations, where a relatively small fraction of complex and diverse interactions accounts for a disproportionate share of task failures. We hypothesize that this issue largely stems from the scarcity of data for complex interactions. To address this problem, we propose a new benchmark CUActSpot for evaluating models' capabilities on complex interactions across five modalities: GUI, text, table, canvas, and natural image, as well as a variety of actions (click, drag, draw, etc.), covering a broader range of interaction types than prior click-centric benchmarks that focus mainly on GUI widgets. We also design a renderer-based data-synthesis pipeline: scenes are automatically generated for each modality, screenshots and element coordinates are recorded, and an LLM produces matching instructions and action traces. After training on this corpus, our Phi-Ground-Any-4B outperforms open-source models with fewer than 32B parameters. We will release our benchmark, data, code, and models at https://github.com/microsoft/Phi-Ground.git

User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs' potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates tool-based design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet they often fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent. These issues often stem from an incomplete understanding of user goals and inadequate comprehension of tool documentation. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven effective for enhancing reasoning in general contexts, our analysis reveals that free-form CoT is insufficient and sometimes counterproductive for structured function-calling tasks. To address this, we introduce a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function callings. Experimental results show that our method reduces tool-use errors, achieving 3-12% relative improvements over strong baselines across diverse model series and approaches. Moreover, our framework enhances the robustness, interpretability, and transparency of tool-using agents, advancing the development of more reliable AI assistants for real-world applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on single-turn text-to-SQL tasks, but real-world database applications predominantly require multi-turn interactions to handle ambiguous queries, execution errors, and evolving user requirements. Existing multi-turn benchmarks fall short by treating conversation histories as static context or limiting evaluation to read-only operations, failing to reflect production-grade database assistant challenges. We introduce BIRD-INTERACT, a benchmark that restores this realism through: (1) a comprehensive interaction environment coupling each database with a hierarchical knowledge base, metadata files, and a function-driven user simulator, enabling models to solicit clarifications, retrieve knowledge, and recover from errors without human supervision; (2) two evaluation settings consisting of a pre-defined conversational protocol (c-Interact) and an open-ended agentic setting (a-Interact) where models autonomously decide when to query the user simulator or explore the environment; (3) a challenging task suite covering the full CRUD spectrum for business-intelligence and operational use cases, guarded by executable test cases. Each task features ambiguous and follow-up sub-tasks requiring dynamic interaction. The suite comprises BIRD-INTERACT-FULL (600 tasks, up to 11,796 interactions) for comprehensive performance assessment, and BIRD-INTERACT-LITE (300 tasks with simplified databases) for detailed behavioral analysis and rapid method development. Our empirical results highlight BIRD-INTERACT's difficulty: GPT-5 completes only 8.67% of tasks in c-Interact and 17.00% in a-Interact. Analysis via memory grafting and Interaction Test-time Scaling validates the importance of effective interaction for complex, dynamic text-to-SQL tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of generating complete applications from natural language instructions, creating new opportunities in science and education. In these domains, interactive scientific demonstrations are particularly valuable for explaining concepts, supporting new teaching methods, and presenting research findings. Generating such demonstrations requires models to combine accurate scientific knowledge with the ability to implement interactive front-end code that behaves correctly and responds to user actions. This capability goes beyond the scope of existing benchmarks, which typically evaluate either knowledge question answering without grounding in code or static web code generation without scientific interactivity. To evaluate this integrated ability, we design a hybrid framework that combines programmatic functional testing to rigorously verify interaction logic with visually-grounded qualitative testing to assess rendered outputs against reference snapshots. Building on this framework, we present InteractScience, a benchmark consisting of a substantial set of carefully designed questions across five scientific domains, each paired with unit tests, reference snapshots, and checklists. We evaluate 30 leading open- and closed-source LLMs and report results that highlight ongoing weaknesses in integrating domain knowledge with interactive front-end coding. Our work positions InteractScience as the first benchmark to automatically measure this combined capability with realistic interactive operations, providing a foundation for advancing reliable and educationally useful scientific demonstration code generation. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/open-compass/InteractScience.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to proactively elicit user preference and recommend high-quality items through natural language conversations. Typically, a CRS consists of a recommendation module to predict preferred items for users and a conversation module to generate appropriate responses. To develop an effective CRS, it is essential to seamlessly integrate the two modules. Existing works either design semantic alignment strategies, or share knowledge resources and representations between the two modules. However, these approaches still rely on different architectures or techniques to develop the two modules, making it difficult for effective module integration. To address this problem, we propose a unified CRS model named UniCRS based on knowledge-enhanced prompt learning. Our approach unifies the recommendation and conversation subtasks into the prompt learning paradigm, and utilizes knowledge-enhanced prompts based on a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to fulfill both subtasks in a unified approach. In the prompt design, we include fused knowledge representations, task-specific soft tokens, and the dialogue context, which can provide sufficient contextual information to adapt the PLM for the CRS task. Besides, for the recommendation subtask, we also incorporate the generated response template as an important part of the prompt, to enhance the information interaction between the two subtasks. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: user-friendly interaction, controllable generation, and wide applicability. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this framework, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. The code, prompts, and experimental details are available at https://github.com/moymix/TaskMatrix/tree/main/LowCodeLLM. A system demonstration video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2C1vaeO3E.

User interface to code (UI2Code) aims to generate executable code that can faithfully reconstruct a given input UI. Prior work focuses largely on web pages and mobile screens, leaving app widgets underexplored. Unlike web or mobile UIs with rich hierarchical context, widgets are compact, context-free micro-interfaces that summarize key information through dense layouts and iconography under strict spatial constraints. Moreover, while (image, code) pairs are widely available for web or mobile UIs, widget designs are proprietary and lack accessible markup. We formalize this setting as the Widget-to-Code (Widget2Code) and introduce an image-only widget benchmark with fine-grained, multi-dimensional evaluation metrics. Benchmarking shows that although generalized multimodal large language models (MLLMs) outperform specialized UI2Code methods, they still produce unreliable and visually inconsistent code. To address these limitations, we develop a baseline that jointly advances perceptual understanding and structured code generation. At the perceptual level, we follow widget design principles to assemble atomic components into complete layouts, equipped with icon retrieval and reusable visualization modules. At the system level, we design an end-to-end infrastructure, WidgetFactory, which includes a framework-agnostic widget-tailored domain-specific language (WidgetDSL) and a compiler that translates it into multiple front-end implementations (e.g., React, HTML/CSS). An adaptive rendering module further refines spatial dimensions to satisfy compactness constraints. Together, these contributions substantially enhance visual fidelity, establishing a strong baseline and unified infrastructure for future Widget2Code research.

The progression from traditional prompt engineering to a more rigorous discipline of prompt design marks a pivotal shift in human-LLM interaction. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in mission-critical applications, there emerges a pressing need for frameworks that are not only explicit and systematic but also minimal enough to remain practical and broadly accessible. While many existing approaches address prompt structuring through elaborate Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) or multi-layered templates, such methods can impose significant token and cognitive overhead, potentially constraining the model's creative capacity. In this context, we propose the 5C Prompt Contract, a framework that distills prompt design into five intuitive components: Character, Cause, Constraint, Contingency, and Calibration. This minimal cognitive schema explicitly integrates fallback and output optimization directives, fostering reliable, interpretable, and creatively flexible AI interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the 5C framework consistently achieves superior input token efficiency while maintaining rich and consistent outputs across diverse LLM architectures (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Gemini), making it particularly suited for individuals and Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with limited AI engineering resources.

We develop a learning framework for building deformable templates, which play a fundamental role in many image analysis and computational anatomy tasks. Conventional methods for template creation and image alignment to the template have undergone decades of rich technical development. In these frameworks, templates are constructed using an iterative process of template estimation and alignment, which is often computationally very expensive. Due in part to this shortcoming, most methods compute a single template for the entire population of images, or a few templates for specific sub-groups of the data. In this work, we present a probabilistic model and efficient learning strategy that yields either universal or conditional templates, jointly with a neural network that provides efficient alignment of the images to these templates. We demonstrate the usefulness of this method on a variety of domains, with a special focus on neuroimaging. This is particularly useful for clinical applications where a pre-existing template does not exist, or creating a new one with traditional methods can be prohibitively expensive. Our code and atlases are available online as part of the VoxelMorph library at http://voxelmorph.csail.mit.edu.

Automatic presentation slide generation can greatly streamline content creation. However, since preferences of each user may vary, existing under-specified formulations often lead to suboptimal results that fail to align with individual user needs. We introduce a novel task that conditions paper-to-slides generation on user-specified preferences. We propose a human behavior-inspired agentic framework, SlideTailor, that progressively generates editable slides in a user-aligned manner. Instead of requiring users to write their preferences in detailed textual form, our system only asks for a paper-slides example pair and a visual template - natural and easy-to-provide artifacts that implicitly encode rich user preferences across content and visual style. Despite the implicit and unlabeled nature of these inputs, our framework effectively distills and generalizes the preferences to guide customized slide generation. We also introduce a novel chain-of-speech mechanism to align slide content with planned oral narration. Such a design significantly enhances the quality of generated slides and enables downstream applications like video presentations. To support this new task, we construct a benchmark dataset that captures diverse user preferences, with carefully designed interpretable metrics for robust evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to process and reason over long textual inputs is critical for a wide range of real-world applications. However, progress in this area is significantly constrained by the absence of high-quality, diverse, and verifiable long-context datasets suitable for both training and evaluation. This work introduces a modular, extensible framework for synthetic long-context data generation via prompt-based interaction with LLMs. The framework supports multiple training and alignment objectives, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). It encompasses four core generation paradigms: multi-turn conversational dialogues, document-grounded input-output pairs, verifiable instruction-response tasks, and long-context reasoning examples. Through templated prompting, a model-agnostic architecture, and metadata-enriched outputs, the proposed approach facilitates scalable, controllable, and purpose-aligned dataset creation for advancing long-context capabilities in LLMs.

This study explores the utility of various internet data sources to select among a set of template robot behaviors to perform skills. Learning contact-rich skills involving tool use from internet data sources has typically been challenging due to the lack of physical information such as contact existence, location, areas, and force in this data. Prior works have generally used internet data and foundation models trained on this data to generate low-level robot behavior. We hypothesize that these data and models may be better suited to selecting among a set of basic robot behaviors to perform these contact-rich skills. We explore three methods of template selection: querying large language models, comparing video of robot execution to retrieved human video using features from a pretrained video encoder common in prior work, and performing the same comparison using features from an optic flow encoder trained on internet data. Our results show that LLMs are surprisingly capable template selectors despite their lack of visual information, optical flow encoding significantly outperforms video encoders trained with an order of magnitude more data, and important synergies exist between various forms of internet data for template selection. By exploiting these synergies, we create a template selector using multiple forms of internet data that achieves a 79\% success rate on a set of 16 different cooking skills involving tool-use.

Compositional Customized Image Generation aims to customize multiple target concepts within generation content, which has gained attention for its wild application. Existing approaches mainly concentrate on the target entity's appearance preservation, while neglecting the fine-grained interaction control among target entities. To enable the model of such interaction control capability, we focus on human object interaction scenario and propose the task of Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation(CHOI), which simultaneously requires identity preservation for target human object and the interaction semantic control between them. Two primary challenges exist for CHOI:(1)simultaneous identity preservation and interaction control demands require the model to decompose the human object into self-contained identity features and pose-oriented interaction features, while the current HOI image datasets fail to provide ideal samples for such feature-decomposed learning.(2)inappropriate spatial configuration between human and object may lead to the lack of desired interaction semantics. To tackle it, we first process a large-scale dataset, where each sample encompasses the same pair of human object involving different interactive poses. Then we design a two-stage model Interact-Custom, which firstly explicitly models the spatial configuration by generating a foreground mask depicting the interaction behavior, then under the guidance of this mask, we generate the target human object interacting while preserving their identities features. Furthermore, if the background image and the union location of where the target human object should appear are provided by users, Interact-Custom also provides the optional functionality to specify them, offering high content controllability. Extensive experiments on our tailored metrics for CHOI task demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy userleftrightarrowagent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.

Conditional graphic layout generation, which automatically maps user constraints to high-quality layouts, has attracted widespread attention today. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and data efficiency hinders their practical applications. In this work, we propose LayoutPrompter, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to address the above problems through in-context learning. LayoutPrompter is made up of three key components, namely input-output serialization, dynamic exemplar selection and layout ranking. Specifically, the input-output serialization component meticulously designs the input and output formats for each layout generation task. Dynamic exemplar selection is responsible for selecting the most helpful prompting exemplars for a given input. And a layout ranker is used to pick the highest quality layout from multiple outputs of LLMs. We conduct experiments on all existing layout generation tasks using four public datasets. Despite the simplicity of our approach, experimental results show that LayoutPrompter can compete with or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on these tasks without any model training or fine-tuning. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this versatile and training-free approach. In addition, the ablation studies show that LayoutPrompter is significantly superior to the training-based baseline in a low-data regime, further indicating the data efficiency of LayoutPrompter. Our project is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/tree/main/LayoutPrompter.

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

Existing benchmarks for MLLM-generated web artifacts assess interaction through local evidence and miss the requirement-induced states and transitions that determine whether a page works. We introduce WebRISE, which compiles task requirements into Interaction Contract Graphs (ICGs) of observable states, user-intent transitions, and DOM/visual assertions for implementation-agnostic browser execution. WebRISE spans 442 tasks across five input modalities (Text, Markdown, Sketch, Image, Video), with 5,495 transitions and 5,271 requirement checks that separate user-stated functions from implicit product-level constraints. Across 14 MLLMs, even the strongest model reaches only 65.6% transition validity and 66.3% requirement coverage, and visual quality is no proxy for behavior (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Markdown: V=80.8 yet T=15.5). Video gives the strongest interaction signal (+10.6 pp implicit coverage over Text), while implicit constraints persist; defect injection shows ICG-based scoring detects state errors at 2-16x the rate of checkpoint-style evaluation.

Academic project websites can more effectively disseminate research when they clearly present core content and enable intuitive navigation and interaction. However, current approaches such as direct Large Language Model (LLM) generation, templates, or direct HTML conversion struggle to produce layout-aware, interactive sites, and a comprehensive evaluation suite for this task has been lacking. In this paper, we introduce Paper2Web, a benchmark dataset and multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation. It incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and human-verified LLM-as-a-Judge (covering interactivity, aesthetics, and informativeness), and PaperQuiz, which measures paper-level knowledge retention. We further present PWAgent, an autonomous pipeline that converts scientific papers into interactive and multimedia-rich academic homepages. The agent iteratively refines both content and layout through MCP tools that enhance emphasis, balance, and presentation quality. Our experiments show that PWAgent consistently outperforms end-to-end baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXiv versions by a large margin while maintaining low cost, achieving the Pareto-front in academic webpage generation.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models, yet their inference strategies remain limited to prefix-based prompting inherited from the autoregressive paradigm. In this paper, we propose Template Infilling (TI), a tailored conditioning methodology for DLMs. Unlike conventional prefix prompting, TI flexibly aligns structural anchors across the entire target response space, establishing a global blueprint before filling in the masked segments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on diverse benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and trip planning, achieving consistent improvements of 9.40% over the baseline. Furthermore, we observe that TI provides additional advantages in multi-token generation settings, enabling effective speedup while maintaining generation quality and robustness. By enforcing these global constraints, TI ultimately facilitates System-2 reasoning, empowering the model to deliberate within a structurally defined solution space.

This paper introduces the WordArt Designer API, a novel framework for user-driven artistic typography synthesis utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on ModelScope. We address the challenge of simplifying artistic typography for non-professionals by offering a dynamic, adaptive, and computationally efficient alternative to traditional rigid templates. Our approach leverages the power of LLMs to understand and interpret user input, facilitating a more intuitive design process. We demonstrate through various case studies how users can articulate their aesthetic preferences and functional requirements, which the system then translates into unique and creative typographic designs. Our evaluations indicate significant improvements in user satisfaction, design flexibility, and creative expression over existing systems. The WordArt Designer API not only democratizes the art of typography but also opens up new possibilities for personalized digital communication and design.

The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated interest among researchers and industry professionals, particularly in their application to tasks concerning mobile user interfaces (UIs). This position paper investigates the use of LLMs for UI layout generation. Central to our exploration is the introduction of UI grammar -- a novel approach we proposed to represent the hierarchical structure inherent in UI screens. The aim of this approach is to guide the generative capacities of LLMs more effectively and improve the explainability and controllability of the process. Initial experiments conducted with GPT-4 showed the promising capability of LLMs to produce high-quality user interfaces via in-context learning. Furthermore, our preliminary comparative study suggested the potential of the grammar-based approach in improving the quality of generative results in specific aspects.

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis of prompt engineering techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs). Emphasizing linguistic principles, we examine various techniques to identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Our findings provide insights into enhancing AI interactions and improving language model comprehension of human prompts. The analysis covers techniques including template-based approaches and fine-tuning, addressing the problems and challenges associated with each. The conclusion offers future research directions aimed at advancing the effectiveness of prompt engineering in optimizing human-machine communication.

Graphic design plays a crucial role in both commercial and personal contexts, yet creating high-quality, editable, and aesthetically pleasing graphic compositions remains a time-consuming and skill-intensive task, especially for beginners. Current AI tools automate parts of the workflow, but struggle to accurately incorporate user-supplied assets, maintain editability, and achieve professional visual appeal. Commercial systems, like Canva Magic Design, rely on vast template libraries, which are impractical for replicate. In this paper, we introduce CreatiPoster, a framework that generates editable, multi-layer compositions from optional natural-language instructions or assets. A protocol model, an RGBA large multimodal model, first produces a JSON specification detailing every layer (text or asset) with precise layout, hierarchy, content and style, plus a concise background prompt. A conditional background model then synthesizes a coherent background conditioned on this rendered foreground layers. We construct a benchmark with automated metrics for graphic-design generation and show that CreatiPoster surpasses leading open-source approaches and proprietary commercial systems. To catalyze further research, we release a copyright-free corpus of 100,000 multi-layer designs. CreatiPoster supports diverse applications such as canvas editing, text overlay, responsive resizing, multilingual adaptation, and animated posters, advancing the democratization of AI-assisted graphic design. Project homepage: https://github.com/graphic-design-ai/creatiposter

LLMs have demonstrated commendable performance across diverse domains. Nevertheless, formulating high-quality prompts to assist them in their work poses a challenge for non-AI experts. Existing research in prompt engineering suggests somewhat scattered optimization principles and designs empirically dependent prompt optimizers. Unfortunately, these endeavors lack a structural design, incurring high learning costs and it is not conducive to the iterative updating of prompts, especially for non-AI experts. Inspired by structured reusable programming languages, we propose LangGPT, a structural prompt design framework. Furthermore, we introduce Minstrel, a multi-generative agent system with reflection to automate the generation of structural prompts. Experiments and the case study illustrate that structural prompts generated by Minstrel or written manually significantly enhance the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the ease of use of structural prompts through a user survey in our online community.

We introduce InteractiveVideo, a user-centric framework for video generation. Different from traditional generative approaches that operate based on user-provided images or text, our framework is designed for dynamic interaction, allowing users to instruct the generative model through various intuitive mechanisms during the whole generation process, e.g. text and image prompts, painting, drag-and-drop, etc. We propose a Synergistic Multimodal Instruction mechanism, designed to seamlessly integrate users' multimodal instructions into generative models, thus facilitating a cooperative and responsive interaction between user inputs and the generative process. This approach enables iterative and fine-grained refinement of the generation result through precise and effective user instructions. With InteractiveVideo, users are given the flexibility to meticulously tailor key aspects of a video. They can paint the reference image, edit semantics, and adjust video motions until their requirements are fully met. Code, models, and demo are available at https://github.com/invictus717/InteractiveVideo

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

Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) is a vital component of fields like embodied AI and virtual reality. Despite advancements in motion quality and physical plausibility, two pivotal factors, versatile interaction control and the development of a user-friendly interface, require further exploration before the practical application of HSI. This paper presents a unified HSI framework, UniHSI, which supports unified control of diverse interactions through language commands. This framework is built upon the definition of interaction as Chain of Contacts (CoC): steps of human joint-object part pairs, which is inspired by the strong correlation between interaction types and human-object contact regions. Based on the definition, UniHSI constitutes a Large Language Model (LLM) Planner to translate language prompts into task plans in the form of CoC, and a Unified Controller that turns CoC into uniform task execution. To facilitate training and evaluation, we collect a new dataset named ScenePlan that encompasses thousands of task plans generated by LLMs based on diverse scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in versatile task execution and generalizability to real scanned scenes. The project page is at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/UniHSI .

In an ideal design pipeline, user interface (UI) design is intertwined with user research to validate decisions, yet studies are often resource-constrained during early exploration. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising opportunity to act as early evaluators, helping designers narrow options before formal testing. Unlike prior work that emphasizes user behavior in narrow domains such as e-commerce with metrics like clicks or conversions, we focus on subjective user evaluations across varied interfaces. We investigate whether MLLMs can mimic human preferences when evaluating individual UIs and comparing them. Using data from a crowdsourcing platform, we benchmark GPT-4o, Claude, and Llama across 30 interfaces and examine alignment with human judgments on multiple UI factors. Our results show that MLLMs approximate human preferences on some dimensions but diverge on others, underscoring both their potential and limitations in supplementing early UX research.

Following the rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) models, language models are applied to increasingly more complex interactive tasks such as negotiations and conversation moderations. Having human evaluators directly interact with these NLP models is essential for adequately evaluating the performance on such interactive tasks. We develop BotEval, an easily customizable, open-source, evaluation toolkit that focuses on enabling human-bot interactions as part of the evaluation process, as opposed to human evaluators making judgements for a static input. BotEval balances flexibility for customization and user-friendliness by providing templates for common use cases that span various degrees of complexity and built-in compatibility with popular crowdsourcing platforms. We showcase the numerous useful features of BotEval through a study that evaluates the performance of various chatbots on their effectiveness for conversational moderation and discuss how BotEval differs from other annotation tools.

While recent research increasingly emphasizes the value of human-LLM collaboration in competitive programming and proposes numerous empirical methods, a comprehensive understanding remains elusive due to the fragmented nature of existing studies and their use of diverse, application-specific human feedback. Thus, our work serves a three-fold purpose: First, we present the first taxonomy of human feedback consolidating the entire programming process, which promotes fine-grained evaluation. Second, we introduce ELABORATIONSET, a novel programming dataset specifically designed for human-LLM collaboration, meticulously annotated to enable large-scale simulated human feedback and facilitate costeffective real human interaction studies. Third, we introduce ELABORATION, a novel benchmark to facilitate a thorough assessment of human-LLM competitive programming. With ELABORATION, we pinpoint strengthes and weaknesses of existing methods, thereby setting the foundation for future improvement. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/ELABORATION

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

Prompting and steering techniques are well established in general-purpose generative AI, yet assistive visual question answering (VQA) tools for blind users still follow rigid interaction patterns with limited opportunities for customization. User control can be helpful when system responses are misaligned with their goals and contexts, a gap that becomes especially consequential for blind users that may rely on these systems for access. We invite 11 blind users to customize their interactions with a real-world conversational VQA system. Drawing on 418 interactions, reflections, and post-study interviews, we analyze prompting-based techniques participants adopted, including those introduced in the study and those developed independently in real-world settings. VQA interactions were often lengthy: participants averaged 3 turns, sometimes up to 21, with input text typically tenfold shorter than the responses they heard. Built on state-of-the-art LLMs, the system lacked verbosity controls, was limited in estimating distance in space and time, relied on inaccessible image framing, and offered little to no camera guidance. We discuss how customization techniques such as prompt engineering can help participants work around these limitations. Alongside a new publicly available dataset, we offer insights for interaction design at both query and system levels.

Conversational agents show the promise to allow users to interact with mobile devices using language. However, to perform diverse UI tasks with natural language, developers typically need to create separate datasets and models for each specific task, which is expensive and effort-consuming. Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have been shown capable of generalizing to various downstream tasks when prompted with a handful of examples from the target task. This paper investigates the feasibility of enabling versatile conversational interactions with mobile UIs using a single LLM. We designed prompting techniques to adapt an LLM to mobile UIs. We experimented with four important modeling tasks that address various scenarios in conversational interaction. Our method achieved competitive performance on these challenging tasks without requiring dedicated datasets and training, offering a lightweight and generalizable approach to enable language-based mobile interaction.

Code generation techniques generate code snippets automatically based on the problem requirements in natural language. Recently, large language models (LLMs) achieve the SOTA performance on code generation. However, LLMs still struggle at times to generate accurate code, which diminishes their promised efficiency as developers must spend significant effort evaluating and debugging the generated code. To improve the reliability and quality of the generated codes, researchers propose to leverage Consistency to obtain a better code based on generating and ranking multiple candidates. The existing approach is problematic as Consistency thinks a code is better when (1) the code pass more tests (inter-consistency) (2) more codes share the same behavior (intra-consistency). However, because the tests are also generated by LLMs, they could be wrong as well. As a result, majority voting based on testing results is unreliable. Relying solely on consistency is insufficient to address this issue; integrating user feedback is essential for effectively guiding consistency. We show that with minimal human effort, performance can be significantly enhanced. We propose Consistency-Augmented Iterative Interaction Framework to Enhance the Reliability of Code Generation, ConAIR, which is an approach that aims to improve the performance of a code generator through two distinctive ingredients, i.e., (1) lightweight user effort for validating the correctness of selected tests; and (2) a dynamic strategy for ranking, localizing and correcting multiple tests and codes. Overall, we propose a lightweight interaction framework that incorporates user feedback to correct identified tests and guide the iterative process. The iteration rounds are only 4 in average with the help of consistency. With only lightweight human efforts, we can achieve an improvement of 33% towards the base model.

Our interest is in the design of software systems involving a human-expert interacting -- using natural language -- with a large language model (LLM) on data analysis tasks. For complex problems, it is possible that LLMs can harness human expertise and creativity to find solutions that were otherwise elusive. On one level, this interaction takes place through multiple turns of prompts from the human and responses from the LLM. Here we investigate a more structured approach based on an abstract protocol described in [3] for interaction between agents. The protocol is motivated by a notion of "two-way intelligibility" and is modelled by a pair of communicating finite-state machines. We provide an implementation of the protocol, and provide empirical evidence of using the implementation to mediate interactions between an LLM and a human-agent in two areas of scientific interest (radiology and drug design). We conduct controlled experiments with a human proxy (a database), and uncontrolled experiments with human subjects. The results provide evidence in support of the protocol's capability of capturing one- and two-way intelligibility in human-LLM interaction; and for the utility of two-way intelligibility in the design of human-machine systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/karannb/interact.

Personalized interaction is highly valued by parents in their story-reading activities with children. While AI-empowered story-reading tools have been increasingly used, their abilities to support personalized interaction with children are still limited. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promise in facilitating personalized interactions, but little is known about how to effectively and appropriately use LLMs to enhance children's personalized story-reading experiences. This work explores this question through a design-based study. Drawing on a formative study, we designed and developed StoryMate, an LLM-empowered personalized interactive story-reading tool for children, following an empirical study with children, parents, and education experts. Our participants valued the personalized features in StoryMate, and also highlighted the need to support personalized content, guiding mechanisms, reading context variations, and interactive interfaces. Based on these findings, we propose a series of design recommendations for better using LLMs to empower children's personalized story reading and interaction.

The proliferation of applications using artificial intelligence (AI) systems has led to a growing number of users interacting with these systems through sophisticated interfaces. Human-computer interaction research has long shown that interfaces shape both user behavior and user perception of technical capabilities and risks. Yet, practitioners and researchers evaluating the social and ethical risks of AI systems tend to overlook the impact of anthropomorphic, deceptive, and immersive interfaces on human-AI interactions. Here, we argue that design features of interfaces with adaptive AI systems can have cascading impacts, driven by feedback loops, which extend beyond those previously considered. We first conduct a scoping review of AI interface designs and their negative impact to extract salient themes of potentially harmful design patterns in AI interfaces. Then, we propose Design-Enhanced Control of AI systems (DECAI), a conceptual model to structure and facilitate impact assessments of AI interface designs. DECAI draws on principles from control systems theory -- a theory for the analysis and design of dynamic physical systems -- to dissect the role of the interface in human-AI systems. Through two case studies on recommendation systems and conversational language model systems, we show how DECAI can be used to evaluate AI interface designs.

Formulating effective search queries remains a challenging task, particularly when users lack expertise in a specific domain or are not proficient in the language of the content. Providing example documents of interest might be easier for a user. However, such query-by-example scenarios are prone to concept drift, and the retrieval effectiveness is highly sensitive to the query generation method, without a clear way to incorporate user feedback. To enable exploration and to support Human-In-The-Loop experiments we propose QueryExplorer -- an interactive query generation, reformulation, and retrieval interface with support for HuggingFace generation models and PyTerrier's retrieval pipelines and datasets, and extensive logging of human feedback. To allow users to create and modify effective queries, our demo supports complementary approaches of using LLMs interactively, assisting the user with edits and feedback at multiple stages of the query formulation process. With support for recording fine-grained interactions and user annotations, QueryExplorer can serve as a valuable experimental and research platform for annotation, qualitative evaluation, and conducting Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) experiments for complex search tasks where users struggle to formulate queries.

While LLMs can effectively help prototype single ML functionalities, many real-world applications involve complex tasks that cannot be easily handled via a single run of an LLM. Recent work has found that chaining multiple LLM runs together (with the output of one step being the input to the next) can help users accomplish these more complex tasks, and in a way that is perceived to be more transparent and controllable. However, it remains unknown what users need when authoring their own LLM chains -- a key step for lowering the barriers for non-AI-experts to prototype AI-infused applications. In this work, we explore the LLM chain authoring process. We conclude from pilot studies find that chaining requires careful scaffolding for transforming intermediate node outputs, as well as debugging the chain at multiple granularities; to help with these needs, we designed PromptChainer, an interactive interface for visually programming chains. Through case studies with four people, we show that PromptChainer supports building prototypes for a range of applications, and conclude with open questions on scaling chains to complex tasks, and supporting low-fi chain prototyping.

Language agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in web search and information retrieval. However, these search agents assume user queries are complete and unambiguous, an assumption that diverges from reality where users begin with incomplete queries requiring clarification through interaction. Yet most agents lack interactive mechanisms during the search process, and existing benchmarks cannot assess this capability. To address this gap, we introduce InteractComp, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether search agents can recognize query ambiguity and actively interact to resolve it during search. Following the principle of easy to verify, interact to disambiguate, we construct 210 expert-curated questions across 9 domains through a target-distractor methodology that creates genuine ambiguity resolvable only through interaction. Evaluation of 17 models reveals striking failure: the best model achieves only 13.73% accuracy despite 71.50% with complete context, exposing systematic overconfidence rather than reasoning deficits. Forced interaction produces dramatic gains, demonstrating latent capability current strategies fail to engage. Longitudinal analysis shows interaction capabilities stagnated over 15 months while search performance improved seven-fold, revealing a critical blind spot. This stagnation, coupled with the immediate feedback inherent to search tasks, makes InteractComp a valuable resource for both evaluating and training interaction capabilities in search agents. The code is available at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/InteractComp.

Large Language Models(LLMs) have dramatically revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing(NLP), offering remarkable capabilities that have garnered widespread usage. However, existing interaction paradigms between LLMs and users are constrained by either inflexibility, limitations in customization, or a lack of persistent learning. This inflexibility is particularly evident as users, especially those without programming skills, have restricted avenues to enhance or personalize the model. Existing frameworks further complicate the model training and deployment process due to their computational inefficiencies and lack of user-friendly interfaces. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel interaction paradigm-'Online Training using External Interactions'-that merges the benefits of persistent, real-time model updates with the flexibility for individual customization through external interactions such as AI agents or online/offline knowledge bases.

Deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly adopted and deployed by analysts without formal training in NLP or machine learning (ML). However, the documentation intended to convey the model's details and appropriate use is tailored primarily to individuals with ML or NLP expertise. To address this gap, we conduct a design inquiry into interactive model cards, which augment traditionally static model cards with affordances for exploring model documentation and interacting with the models themselves. Our investigation consists of an initial conceptual study with experts in ML, NLP, and AI Ethics, followed by a separate evaluative study with non-expert analysts who use ML models in their work. Using a semi-structured interview format coupled with a think-aloud protocol, we collected feedback from a total of 30 participants who engaged with different versions of standard and interactive model cards. Through a thematic analysis of the collected data, we identified several conceptual dimensions that summarize the strengths and limitations of standard and interactive model cards, including: stakeholders; design; guidance; understandability & interpretability; sensemaking & skepticism; and trust & safety. Our findings demonstrate the importance of carefully considered design and interactivity for orienting and supporting non-expert analysts using deep learning models, along with a need for consideration of broader sociotechnical contexts and organizational dynamics. We have also identified design elements, such as language, visual cues, and warnings, among others, that support interactivity and make non-interactive content accessible. We summarize our findings as design guidelines and discuss their implications for a human-centered approach towards AI/ML documentation.

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to follow instructions from users and engage in conversations. Techniques to enhance LLMs' instruction-following capabilities typically fine-tune them using data structured according to a predefined chat template. Although chat templates are shown to be effective in optimizing LLM performance, their impact on safety alignment of LLMs has been less understood, which is crucial for deploying LLMs safely at scale. In this paper, we investigate how chat templates affect safety alignment of LLMs. We identify a common vulnerability, named ChatBug, that is introduced by chat templates. Our key insight to identify ChatBug is that the chat templates provide a rigid format that need to be followed by LLMs, but not by users. Hence, a malicious user may not necessarily follow the chat template when prompting LLMs. Instead, malicious users could leverage their knowledge of the chat template and accordingly craft their prompts to bypass safety alignments of LLMs. We develop two attacks to exploit the ChatBug vulnerability. We demonstrate that a malicious user can exploit the ChatBug vulnerability of eight state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs and effectively elicit unintended responses from these models. Moreover, we show that ChatBug can be exploited by existing jailbreak attacks to enhance their attack success rates. We investigate potential countermeasures to ChatBug. Our results show that while adversarial training effectively mitigates the ChatBug vulnerability, the victim model incurs significant performance degradation. These results highlight the trade-off between safety alignment and helpfulness. Developing new methods for instruction tuning to balance this trade-off is an open and critical direction for future research

Large language models (LLMs) are a new and powerful tool for a wide span of applications involving natural language and demonstrate impressive code generation abilities. In this paper, we explore the capabilitity of state-of-the-art LLMs, including closed-source options like OpenAI GPT-4 and open-source alternatives like Meta AI Codellama, to automatically generate tests and use these tests to validate and verify compiler implementations of a directive-based programming paradigm, OpenACC. Our approach entails exploring various prompt engineering techniques including a code template, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with code template, expressive prompt using RAG with code template, one-shot example, and RAG with one-shot example. This paper focusses on (a) exploring the capabilities of the latest LLMs for code generation, (b) investigating prompt and fine tuning methods, and (c) analyzing the outcome of LLMs generated tests

Current generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are widely used for knowledge dissemination, task decomposition, and creative thinking. However, their linear interaction methods often force users to repeatedly compare and copy contextual information when handling complex tasks, increasing cognitive load and operational costs. Moreover, the ambiguity in model responses requires users to refine and simplify the information further. To address these issues, we developed "Mindalogue", a system using a non-linear interaction model based on "nodes + canvas" to enhance user efficiency and freedom while generating structured responses. A formative study with 11 users informed the design of Mindalogue, which was then evaluated through a study with 16 participants. The results showed that Mindalogue significantly reduced task steps and improved users' comprehension of complex information. This study highlights the potential of non-linear interaction in improving AI tool efficiency and user experience in the HCI field.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread adoption of AI-powered coding assistants integrated into a development environment. On one hand, low-latency code completion offers completion suggestions but is fundamentally constrained to the cursor's current position. On the other hand, chat-based editing can perform complex modifications, yet forces developers to stop their work, describe the intent in natural language, which causes a context-switch away from the code. This creates a suboptimal user experience, as neither paradigm proactively predicts the developer's next edit in a sequence of related edits. To bridge this gap and provide the seamless code edit suggestion, we introduce the task of Next Edit Prediction, a novel task designed to infer developer intent from recent interaction history to predict both the location and content of the subsequent edit. Specifically, we curate a high-quality supervised fine-tuning dataset and an evaluation benchmark for the Next Edit Prediction task. Then, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on a series of models and performed a comprehensive evaluation of both the fine-tuned models and other baseline models, yielding several novel findings. This work lays the foundation for a new interaction paradigm that proactively collaborate with developers by anticipating their following action, rather than merely reacting to explicit instructions.

User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.

Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri enable users to interact with a large number of services and APIs on the web using natural language. In this work, we investigate two methods for Natural Language Generation (NLG) using a single domain-independent model across a large number of APIs. First, we propose a schema-guided approach which conditions the generation on a schema describing the API in natural language. Our second method investigates the use of a small number of templates, growing linearly in number of slots, to convey the semantics of the API. To generate utterances for an arbitrary slot combination, a few simple templates are first concatenated to give a semantically correct, but possibly incoherent and ungrammatical utterance. A pre-trained language model is subsequently employed to rewrite it into coherent, natural sounding text. Through automatic metrics and human evaluation, we show that our method improves over strong baselines, is robust to out-of-domain inputs and shows improved sample efficiency.

The revolutionary potential of automatic code generation tools based on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) frameworks has yet to be realized. Beyond their ability to help software professionals write more accurate, reusable code, they could make programming accessible for a whole new class of non-technical users. However, non-technical users have been slow to embrace these tools. This may be because their concrete syntax is often patterned after the operations of textual or graphical interfaces. The interfaces are common, but users would need more extensive, precise and detailed knowledge of them than they can be assumed to have, to use them as concrete syntax. Conversational interfaces (chatbots) offer a much more accessible way for non-technical users to generate code. In this paper, we discuss the basic challenge of integrating conversational agents within Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) frameworks, then turn to look at a specific application: the auto-generation of smart contract code in multiple languages by non-technical users, based on conversational syntax. We demonstrate how this can be done, and evaluate our approach by conducting user experience survey to assess the usability and functionality of the chatbot framework.

Language model applications are becoming increasingly popular and complex, often including features like tool usage and retrieval augmentation. However, existing frameworks for such applications are often opinionated, deciding for developers how their prompts ought to be formatted and imposing limitations on customizability and reproducibility. To solve this we present Kani: a lightweight, flexible, and model-agnostic open-source framework for building language model applications. Kani helps developers implement a variety of complex features by supporting the core building blocks of chat interaction: model interfacing, chat management, and robust function calling. All Kani core functions are easily overridable and well documented to empower developers to customize functionality for their own needs. Kani thus serves as a useful tool for researchers, hobbyists, and industry professionals alike to accelerate their development while retaining interoperability and fine-grained control.

Users often rely on GUIs to edit and interact with visualizations - a daunting task due to the large space of editing options. As a result, users are either overwhelmed by a complex UI or constrained by a custom UI with a tailored, fixed subset of options with limited editing flexibility. Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) are emerging as a feasible alternative for users to specify edits. However, NLIs forgo the advantages of traditional GUI: the ability to explore and repeat edits and see instant visual feedback. We introduce DynaVis, which blends natural language and dynamically synthesized UI widgets. As the user describes an editing task in natural language, DynaVis performs the edit and synthesizes a persistent widget that the user can interact with to make further modifications. Study participants (n=24) preferred DynaVis over the NLI-only interface citing ease of further edits and editing confidence due to immediate visual feedback.

Understanding the nuances of a user's extensive interaction history is key to building accurate and personalized natural language systems that can adapt to evolving user preferences. To address this, we introduce PERSOMA, Personalized Soft Prompt Adapter architecture. Unlike previous personalized prompting methods for large language models, PERSOMA offers a novel approach to efficiently capture user history. It achieves this by resampling and compressing interactions as free form text into expressive soft prompt embeddings, building upon recent research utilizing embedding representations as input for LLMs. We rigorously validate our approach by evaluating various adapter architectures, first-stage sampling strategies, parameter-efficient tuning techniques like LoRA, and other personalization methods. Our results demonstrate PERSOMA's superior ability to handle large and complex user histories compared to existing embedding-based and text-prompt-based techniques.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) has kindled a need for prompt-response, document-based datasets. As annotating new datasets from scratch is labor-intensive, the existing literature has generated prompt-response datasets from available resources using simple templates. For the case of key information extraction (KIE), one of the most common VRDU tasks, past work has typically employed the template "What is the value for the {key}?". However, given the variety of questions encountered in the wild, simple and uniform templates are insufficient for creating robust models in research and industrial contexts. In this work, we present K2Q, a diverse collection of five datasets converted from KIE to a prompt-response format using a plethora of bespoke templates. The questions in K2Q can span multiple entities and be extractive or boolean. We empirically compare the performance of seven baseline generative models on K2Q with zero-shot prompting. We further compare three of these models when training on K2Q versus training on simpler templates to motivate the need of our work. We find that creating diverse and intricate KIE questions enhances the performance and robustness of VRDU models. We hope this work encourages future studies on data quality for generative model training.

Large language models are increasingly used within larger systems ("LLM agents"). These make a sequence of LLM calls, each call providing the LLM with a combination of instructions, observations, and interaction history. The design of the encoded information and its structure play a central role in the quality of the resulting system, leading to efforts spent on context engineering. It is therefore critical to communicate the composition of the LLM context in a system, and how it evolves over time. Yet, no standard exists for doing so: context construction is typically conveyed through informal prose, ad hoc diagrams, or direct inspection of code, none of which precisely capture how a prompt evolves across interaction steps or how two context representation strategies differ. To remedy this, we introduce the Agentic Context Description Language (ACDL), a language for specifying the structure and dynamics of LLM input contexts in a precise, readable, and standard manner, along with visualizations. ACDL provides constructs for specifying context aspects such as role message sequences, dynamic content, time-indexed references, and conditional or iterative structure, capturing the full architecture of a prompt independently of any particular implementation. ACDL diagrams can be hand drawn on a whiteboard, or written in formal language which can then be rendered. We describe the language, demonstrate it by documenting several existing systems and their variants, and encourage the community to adopt it for describing LLM systems context, both in day-to-day communication and in papers. Tooling, examples and documentation are available at www.acdlang.org.

Reconstructing interacting hands from monocular images is indispensable in AR/VR applications. Most existing solutions rely on the accurate localization of each skeleton joint. However, these methods tend to be unreliable due to the severe occlusion and confusing similarity among adjacent hand parts. This also defies human perception because humans can quickly imitate an interaction pattern without localizing all joints. Our key idea is to first construct a two-hand interaction prior and recast the interaction reconstruction task as the conditional sampling from the prior. To expand more interaction states, a large-scale multimodal dataset with physical plausibility is proposed. Then a VAE is trained to further condense these interaction patterns as latent codes in a prior distribution. When looking for image cues that contribute to interaction prior sampling, we propose the interaction adjacency heatmap (IAH). Compared with a joint-wise heatmap for localization, IAH assigns denser visible features to those invisible joints. Compared with an all-in-one visible heatmap, it provides more fine-grained local interaction information in each interaction region. Finally, the correlations between the extracted features and corresponding interaction codes are linked by the ViT module. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark datasets have verified the effectiveness of this framework. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/binghui-z/InterPrior_pytorch

Evaluating LLMs with a single prompt has proven unreliable, with small changes leading to significant performance differences. However, generating the prompt variations needed for a more robust multi-prompt evaluation is challenging, limiting its adoption in practice. To address this, we introduce PromptSuite, a framework that enables the automatic generation of various prompts. PromptSuite is flexible - working out of the box on a wide range of tasks and benchmarks. It follows a modular prompt design, allowing controlled perturbations to each component, and is extensible, supporting the addition of new components and perturbation types. Through a series of case studies, we show that PromptSuite provides meaningful variations to support strong evaluation practices. It is available through both a Python API: https://github.com/eliyahabba/PromptSuite, and a user-friendly web interface: https://promptsuite.streamlit.app/

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). In practical scenarios like recommendations, as users increasingly seek personalized experiences, it becomes crucial to incorporate user interaction history into the context of LLMs to enhance personalization. However, from a practical utility perspective, user interactions' extensive length and noise present challenges when used directly as text prompts. A promising solution is to compress and distill interactions into compact embeddings, serving as soft prompts to assist LLMs in generating personalized responses. Although this approach brings efficiency, a critical concern emerges: Can user embeddings adequately capture valuable information and prompt LLMs? To address this concern, we propose \name, a benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of user embeddings in prompting LLMs for personalization. We establish a fair and standardized evaluation process, encompassing pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation stages. To thoroughly evaluate user embeddings, we design three dimensions of tasks: sequence understanding, action prediction, and interest perception. These evaluation tasks cover the industry's demands in traditional recommendation tasks, such as improving prediction accuracy, and its aspirations for LLM-based methods, such as accurately understanding user interests and enhancing the user experience. We conduct extensive experiments on various state-of-the-art methods for modeling user embeddings. Additionally, we reveal the scaling laws of leveraging user embeddings to prompt LLMs. The benchmark is available online.

This study introduces Conversation Routines (CR), a structured prompt engineering framework for developing task-oriented dialog systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs demonstrate remarkable natural language understanding capabilities, engineering them to reliably execute complex business workflows remains challenging. The proposed CR framework enables the development of Conversation Agentic Systems (CAS) through natural language specifications, embedding task-oriented logic within LLM prompts. This approach provides a systematic methodology for designing and implementing complex conversational workflows while maintaining behavioral consistency. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness through two proof-of-concept implementations: a Train Ticket Booking System and an Interactive Troubleshooting Copilot. These case studies validate CR's capability to encode sophisticated behavioral patterns and decision logic while preserving natural conversational flexibility. Results show that CR enables domain experts to design conversational workflows in natural language while leveraging custom functions (tools) developed by software engineers, creating an efficient division of responsibilities where developers focus on core API implementation and domain experts handle conversation design. While the framework shows promise in accessibility and adaptability, we identify key challenges including computational overhead, non-deterministic behavior, and domain-specific logic optimization. Future research directions include CR evaluation methods based on prompt engineering frameworks driven by goal-oriented grading criteria, improving scalability for complex multi-agent interactions, and enhancing system robustness to address the identified limitations across diverse business applications.

Screen user interfaces (UIs) and infographics, sharing similar visual language and design principles, play important roles in human communication and human-machine interaction. We introduce ScreenAI, a vision-language model that specializes in UI and infographics understanding. Our model improves upon the PaLI architecture with the flexible patching strategy of pix2struct and is trained on a unique mixture of datasets. At the heart of this mixture is a novel screen annotation task in which the model has to identify the type and location of UI elements. We use these text annotations to describe screens to Large Language Models and automatically generate question-answering (QA), UI navigation, and summarization training datasets at scale. We run ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of these design choices. At only 5B parameters, ScreenAI achieves new state-of-the-artresults on UI- and infographics-based tasks (Multi-page DocVQA, WebSRC, MoTIF and Widget Captioning), and new best-in-class performance on others (Chart QA, DocVQA, and InfographicVQA) compared to models of similar size. Finally, we release three new datasets: one focused on the screen annotation task and two others focused on question answering.

How human interact with objects depends on the functional roles of the target objects, which introduces the problem of affordance-aware hand-object interaction. It requires a large number of human demonstrations for the learning and understanding of plausible and appropriate hand-object interactions. In this work, we present AffordPose, a large-scale dataset of hand-object interactions with affordance-driven hand pose. We first annotate the specific part-level affordance labels for each object, e.g. twist, pull, handle-grasp, etc, instead of the general intents such as use or handover, to indicate the purpose and guide the localization of the hand-object interactions. The fine-grained hand-object interactions reveal the influence of hand-centered affordances on the detailed arrangement of the hand poses, yet also exhibit a certain degree of diversity. We collect a total of 26.7K hand-object interactions, each including the 3D object shape, the part-level affordance label, and the manually adjusted hand poses. The comprehensive data analysis shows the common characteristics and diversity of hand-object interactions per affordance via the parameter statistics and contacting computation. We also conduct experiments on the tasks of hand-object affordance understanding and affordance-oriented hand-object interaction generation, to validate the effectiveness of our dataset in learning the fine-grained hand-object interactions. Project page: https://github.com/GentlesJan/AffordPose.

Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive potential on simple tasks, their breadth of scope, lack of transparency, and insufficient controllability can make them less effective when assisting humans on more complex tasks. In response, we introduce the concept of Chaining LLM steps together, where the output of one step becomes the input for the next, thus aggregating the gains per step. We first define a set of LLM primitive operations useful for Chain construction, then present an interactive system where users can modify these Chains, along with their intermediate results, in a modular way. In a 20-person user study, we found that Chaining not only improved the quality of task outcomes, but also significantly enhanced system transparency, controllability, and sense of collaboration. Additionally, we saw that users developed new ways of interacting with LLMs through Chains: they leveraged sub-tasks to calibrate model expectations, compared and contrasted alternative strategies by observing parallel downstream effects, and debugged unexpected model outputs by "unit-testing" sub-components of a Chain. In two case studies, we further explore how LLM Chains may be used in future applications

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal counterparts have spurred significant interest in developing web agents -- AI systems capable of autonomously navigating and completing tasks within web environments. While holding tremendous promise for automating complex web interactions, current approaches face substantial challenges due to the fundamental mismatch between human-designed interfaces and LLM capabilities. Current methods struggle with the inherent complexity of web inputs, whether processing massive DOM trees, relying on screenshots augmented with additional information, or bypassing the user interface entirely through API interactions. This position paper advocates for a paradigm shift in web agent research: rather than forcing web agents to adapt to interfaces designed for humans, we should develop a new interaction paradigm specifically optimized for agentic capabilities. To this end, we introduce the concept of an Agentic Web Interface (AWI), an interface specifically designed for agents to navigate a website. We establish six guiding principles for AWI design, emphasizing safety, efficiency, and standardization, to account for the interests of all primary stakeholders. This reframing aims to overcome fundamental limitations of existing interfaces, paving the way for more efficient, reliable, and transparent web agent design, which will be a collaborative effort involving the broader ML community.

Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting ``high-stakes'' interactions -- where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm -- as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such monitoring. We evaluate several probe architectures trained on synthetic data, and find them to exhibit robust generalization to diverse, out-of-distribution, real-world data. Probes' performance is comparable to that of prompted or finetuned medium-sized LLM monitors, while offering computational savings of six orders-of-magnitude. These savings are enabled by reusing activations of the model that is being monitored. Our experiments also highlight the potential of building resource-aware hierarchical monitoring systems, where probes serve as an efficient initial filter and flag cases for more expensive downstream analysis. We release our novel synthetic dataset and the codebase at https://github.com/arrrlex/models-under-pressure.

The recent developments in Large Language Models (LLM), mark a significant moment in the research and development of social interactions with artificial agents. These agents are widely deployed in a variety of settings, with potential impact on users. However, the study of social interactions with agents powered by LLM is still emerging, limited by access to the technology and to data, the absence of standardised interfaces, and challenges to establishing controlled experimental setups using the currently available business-oriented platforms. To answer these gaps, we developed LEXI, LLMs Experimentation Interface, an open-source tool enabling the deployment of artificial agents powered by LLM in social interaction behavioural experiments. Using a graphical interface, LEXI allows researchers to build agents, and deploy them in experimental setups along with forms and questionnaires while collecting interaction logs and self-reported data. The outcomes of usability testing indicate LEXI's broad utility, high usability and minimum mental workload requirement, with distinctive benefits observed across disciplines. A proof-of-concept study exploring the tool's efficacy in evaluating social HAIs was conducted, resulting in high-quality data. A comparison of empathetic versus neutral agents indicated that people perceive empathetic agents as more social, and write longer and more positive messages towards them.

Slide design requires personalizing both deck themes and page layouts. Yet, current AI agent-based methods struggle with fine-grained, page-level design. Solely relying on prespecified templates or user verbose instructions, they fail to capture latent design intents, leaving Page-level Slide Personalization (PSP) unresolved. To close this gap, this work formulates PSP as an inverse planning problem. We propose to learn a design intent without assuming any knowledge of the specific executing tools (e.g., PowerPoint, Beamer) being used. However, relinquishing control over these tools makes the problem intractable to optimize end-to-end. To overcome this, we propose SPIRE, a principled framework to solve PSP approximately. By intentionally corrupting the visual structures of clean slides, SPIRE creates a verifiable task to denoise the corruption, whereby two agents learn to collaboratively refine executable designs via reinforcement learning (RL). We present a proof that structural denoising is a consistent surrogate for PSP, and that the multi-agent formulation strictly reduces policy gradient variance in RL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SPIRE.

Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) often assumes users hold static preferences that reflect globally in all tasks. In reality, humans hold dynamic preferences that change depending on the context. As users interact with an LLM in various contexts, they naturally reveal their contextual preferences, which a model must infer and apply in future contexts to ensure alignment. To assess this, we introduce CUPID, a benchmark of 756 human-curated interaction session histories between users and LLM-based chat assistants. In each interaction session, the user provides a request in a specific context and expresses their preference through multi-turn feedback. Given a new user request and prior interaction sessions, our benchmark assesses whether LLMs can infer the preference relevant to this request and generate a response that satisfies this preference. With CUPID, we evaluated 10 open and proprietary LLMs, revealing that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to infer preferences from multi-turn interactions and fail to discern what previous context is relevant to a new request -- under 50% precision and 65% recall. Our work highlights the need to advance LLM capabilities for more contextually personalized interactions and proposes CUPID as a resource to drive these improvements.

Modern mobile applications rely on hidden interactions--gestures without visual cues like long presses and swipes--to provide functionality without cluttering interfaces. While experienced users may discover these interactions through prior use or onboarding tutorials, their implicit nature makes them difficult for most users to uncover. Similarly, mobile agents--systems designed to automate tasks on mobile user interfaces, powered by vision language models (VLMs)--struggle to detect veiled interactions or determine actions for completing tasks. To address this challenge, we present GhostUI, a new dataset designed to enable the detection of hidden interactions in mobile applications. GhostUI provides before-and-after screenshots, simplified view hierarchies, gesture metadata, and task descriptions, allowing VLMs to better recognize concealed gestures and anticipate post-interaction states. Quantitative evaluations with VLMs show that models fine-tuned on GhostUI outperform baseline VLMs, particularly in predicting hidden interactions and inferring post-interaction screens, underscoring GhostUI's potential as a foundation for advancing mobile task automation.

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

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are attracting widespread attention when accessing up-to-date knowledge and alleviating hallucination issues. Nowadays, advanced closed-source LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) have demonstrated surprising tool-usage capabilities through prompting and in-context learning techniques. To empower the capabilities of open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA) in manipulating tools, current efforts focus on either template-driven or token-triggered tool-usage. However, the former hampers LLMs' flexibility to address diverse user's queries due to constrained tool interactions, while the latter limits the generalizability when engaging with new tools, since tool-usage learning is based on task- and tool-specific datasets. To alleviate these concerns, in this paper, we propose a decision-aware and generalizable tool-usage framework (DEER). Specifically, we first construct the tool-usage samples with multiple decision branches via an automatic generation pipeline, thereby inspiring the decision-making awareness of LLMs under diverse scenarios. Meanwhile, we propose a novel tool sampling strategy to enhance the generalizability of LLMs over unseen tools. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DEER is effective and significantly outperforms baselines across various datasets.

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

Web applications are critical to modern software ecosystems, yet ensuring their reliability remains challenging due to the complexity and dynamic nature of web interfaces. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating complex tasks, but limitations persist in handling dynamic navigation flows and complex form interactions. This paper presents an automated system for generating test cases for two key aspects of web application testing: site navigation and form filling. For site navigation, the system employs screen transition graphs and LLMs to model navigation flows and generate test scenarios. For form filling, it uses state graphs to handle conditional forms and automates Selenium script generation. Key contributions include: (1) a novel integration of graph structures and LLMs for site navigation testing, (2) a state graph-based approach for automating form-filling test cases, and (3) a comprehensive dataset for evaluating form-interaction testing. Experimental results demonstrate the system's effectiveness in improving test coverage and robustness, advancing the state of web application testing.

Current AI agent frameworks commit early to a single interaction protocol, a fixed tool integration strategy, and static user models, limiting their deployment across diverse interaction paradigms. To address these constraints, we introduce STEM Agent (Self-adapting, Tool-enabled, Extensible, Multi-agent), a modular architecture inspired by biological pluripotency in which an undifferentiated agent core differentiates into specialized protocol handlers, tool bindings, and memory subsystems that compose into a fully functioning AI system. The framework unifies five interoperability protocols (A2A, AG-UI, A2UI, UCP, and AP2) behind a single gateway, introduces a Caller Profiler that continuously learns user preferences across more than twenty behavioral dimensions, externalizes all domain capabilities through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and implements a biologically inspired skills acquisition system in which recurring interaction patterns crystallize into reusable agent skills through a maturation lifecycle analogous to cell differentiation. Complementing these capabilities, the memory system incorporates consolidation mechanisms, including episodic pruning, semantic deduplication, and pattern extraction, designed for sub-linear growth under sustained interaction. A comprehensive 413-test suite validates protocol handler behavior and component integration across all five architectural layers, completing in under three seconds.

Automatic furniture layout is long desired for convenient interior design. Leveraging the remarkable visual reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), recent methods address layout generation in a static manner, lacking the feedback-driven refinement essential for interactive user engagement. We introduce Chat2Layout, a novel interactive furniture layout generation system that extends the functionality of MLLMs into the realm of interactive layout design. To achieve this, we establish a unified vision-question paradigm for in-context learning, enabling seamless communication with MLLMs to steer their behavior without altering model weights. Within this framework, we present a novel training-free visual prompting mechanism. This involves a visual-text prompting technique that assist MLLMs in reasoning about plausible layout plans, followed by an Offline-to-Online search (O2O-Search) method, which automatically identifies the minimal set of informative references to provide exemplars for visual-text prompting. By employing an agent system with MLLMs as the core controller, we enable bidirectional interaction. The agent not only comprehends the 3D environment and user requirements through linguistic and visual perception but also plans tasks and reasons about actions to generate and arrange furniture within the virtual space. Furthermore, the agent iteratively updates based on visual feedback from execution results. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach facilitates language-interactive generation and arrangement for diverse and complex 3D furniture.

With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and coding agents, the website development has shifted from manual programming to agent-based project-level code synthesis. Existing benchmarks rely on idealized assumptions, especially for well-structured, information-rich inputs and static execution settings. In contrast, real-world development is constrained by a critical bottleneck: the semantic misalignment between ambiguous, low-quality instructions from non-expert users and model understanding, which results in a failure mode that we term blind execution. To address this gap, we introduce InteractWeb-Bench, the first multimodal interactive benchmark for website generation under non-expert low-code user conditions. InteractWeb-Bench introduces four types of user agents and persona-driven instruction perturbations to systematically simulate diverse user behaviors, including ambiguity, redundancy, and contradiction, grounded in requirement engineering defect taxonomies. We develop an interactive execution environment for agents, featuring a unified action space comprising Clarify, Implement, Verify, and Submit, enabling iterative intent refinement, code synthesis, and visual feedback-based validation. Extensive experiments and analysis reveal that frontier MLLM-based agents remain trapped in blind execution, exposing limitations in intent recognition and adaptive interaction.

This paper examines how different types of large language model (LLM) agents perform on scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks, where users generate visualization workflows from natural-language instructions. We compare three primary interaction paradigms, including domain-specific agents with structured tool use, computer-use agents, and general-purpose coding agents, by evaluating eight representative agents across 15 benchmark tasks and measuring visualization quality, efficiency, robustness, and computational cost. We further analyze interaction modalities, including code scripts and model context protocol (MCP) or API calls for structured tool use, as well as command-line interfaces (CLI) and graphical user interfaces (GUI) for more general interaction, while additionally studying the effect of persistent memory in selected agents. The results reveal clear tradeoffs across paradigms and modalities. General-purpose coding agents achieve the highest task success rates but are computationally expensive, while domain-specific agents are more efficient and stable but less flexible. Computer-use agents perform well on individual steps but struggle with longer multi-step workflows, indicating that long-horizon planning is their primary limitation. Across both CLI- and GUI-based settings, persistent memory improves performance over repeated trials, although its benefits depend on the underlying interaction mode and the quality of feedback. These findings suggest that no single approach is sufficient, and future SciVis systems should combine structured tool use, interactive capabilities, and adaptive memory mechanisms to balance performance, robustness, and flexibility.

Textual interaction networks (TINs) are an omnipresent data structure used to model the interplay between users and items on e-commerce websites, social networks, etc., where each interaction is associated with a text description. Classifying such textual interactions (TIC) finds extensive use in detecting spam reviews in e-commerce, fraudulent transactions in finance, and so on. Existing TIC solutions either (i) fail to capture the rich text semantics due to the use of context-free text embeddings, and/or (ii) disregard the bipartite structure and node heterogeneity of TINs, leading to compromised TIC performance. In this work, we propose SAFT, a new architecture that integrates language- and graph-based modules for the effective fusion of textual and structural semantics in the representation learning of interactions. In particular, line graph attention (LGA)/gated attention units (GAUs) and pretrained language models (PLMs) are capitalized on to model the interaction-level and token-level signals, which are further coupled via the proxy token in an iterative and contextualized fashion. Additionally, an efficient and theoretically-grounded approach is developed to encode the local and global topology information pertaining to interactions into structural embeddings. The resulting embeddings not only inject the structural features underlying TINs into the textual interaction encoding but also facilitate the design of graph sampling strategies. Extensive empirical evaluations on multiple real TIN datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAFT over the state-of-the-art baselines in TIC accuracy.

Customizing pre-trained text-to-image generation model has attracted massive research interest recently, due to its huge potential in real-world applications. Although existing methods are able to generate creative content for a novel concept contained in single user-input image, their capability are still far from perfection. Specifically, most existing methods require fine-tuning the generative model on testing images. Some existing methods do not require fine-tuning, while their performance are unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the interaction between users and models are still limited to directive and descriptive prompts such as instructions and captions. In this work, we build a customization assistant based on pre-trained large language model and diffusion model, which can not only perform customized generation in a tuning-free manner, but also enable more user-friendly interactions: users can chat with the assistant and input either ambiguous text or clear instruction. Specifically, we propose a new framework consists of a new model design and a novel training strategy. The resulting assistant can perform customized generation in 2-5 seconds without any test time fine-tuning. Extensive experiments are conducted, competitive results have been obtained across different domains, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Prompt engineering is an increasingly important skill set needed to converse effectively with large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. Prompts are instructions given to an LLM to enforce rules, automate processes, and ensure specific qualities (and quantities) of generated output. Prompts are also a form of programming that can customize the outputs and interactions with an LLM. This paper describes a catalog of prompt engineering techniques presented in pattern form that have been applied to solve common problems when conversing with LLMs. Prompt patterns are a knowledge transfer method analogous to software patterns since they provide reusable solutions to common problems faced in a particular context, i.e., output generation and interaction when working with LLMs. This paper provides the following contributions to research on prompt engineering that apply LLMs to automate software development tasks. First, it provides a framework for documenting patterns for structuring prompts to solve a range of problems so that they can be adapted to different domains. Second, it presents a catalog of patterns that have been applied successfully to improve the outputs of LLM conversations. Third, it explains how prompts can be built from multiple patterns and illustrates prompt patterns that benefit from combination with other prompt patterns.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited the ability to effectively utilize external tools to address user queries. However, their performance may be limited in complex, multi-turn interactions involving users and multiple tools. To address this, we propose Magnet, a principled framework for synthesizing high-quality training trajectories to enhance the function calling capability of large language model agents in multi-turn conversations with humans. The framework is based on automatic and iterative translations from a function signature path to a sequence of queries and executable function calls. We model the complicated function interactions in multi-turn cases with graph and design novel node operations to build reliable signature paths. Motivated by context distillation, when guiding the generation of positive and negative trajectories using a teacher model, we provide reference function call sequences as positive hints in context and contrastive, incorrect function calls as negative hints. Experiments show that training with the positive trajectories with supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization against negative trajectories, our 14B model, Magnet-14B-mDPO, obtains 68.01 on BFCL-v3 and 73.30 on ToolQuery, surpassing the performance of the teacher model Gemini-1.5-pro-002 by a large margin in function calling.

Macros are building block tasks of our everyday smartphone activity (e.g., "login", or "booking a flight"). Effectively extracting macros is important for understanding mobile interaction and enabling task automation. These macros are however difficult to extract at scale as they can be comprised of multiple steps yet hidden within programmatic components of mobile apps. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract semantically meaningful macros from both random and user-curated mobile interaction traces. The macros produced by our approach are automatically tagged with natural language descriptions and are fully executable. We conduct multiple studies to validate the quality of extracted macros, including user evaluation, comparative analysis against human-curated tasks, and automatic execution of these macros. These experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of our approach and the usefulness of extracted macros in various downstream applications.

Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interface, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user study. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.

Benefiting from language flexibility and compositionality, humans naturally intend to use language to command an embodied agent for complex tasks such as navigation and object manipulation. In this work, we aim to fill the blank of the last mile of embodied agents -- object manipulation by following human guidance, e.g., "move the red mug next to the box while keeping it upright." To this end, we introduce an Automatic Manipulation Solver (AMSolver) system and build a Vision-and-Language Manipulation benchmark (VLMbench) based on it, containing various language instructions on categorized robotic manipulation tasks. Specifically, modular rule-based task templates are created to automatically generate robot demonstrations with language instructions, consisting of diverse object shapes and appearances, action types, and motion constraints. We also develop a keypoint-based model 6D-CLIPort to deal with multi-view observations and language input and output a sequence of 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) actions. We hope the new simulator and benchmark will facilitate future research on language-guided robotic manipulation.

Tool-use capability is a fundamental component of LLM agents, enabling them to interact with external systems through structured function calls. However, existing research exhibits inconsistent interaction representations, largely overlooks the structural distribution of tool-use trajectories, and relies on incompatible evaluation benchmarks. We present UniToolCall, a unified framework for tool learning that standardizes the entire pipeline from toolset construction and dataset generation to evaluation. The framework curates a large tool pool of 22k+ tools and constructs a hybrid training corpus of 390k+ instances by combining 10 standardized public datasets with structurally controlled synthetic trajectories. It explicitly models diverse interaction patterns, including single-hop vs. multi-hop and single-turn vs. multi-turn, while capturing both serial and parallel execution structures. To support coherent multi-turn reasoning, we further introduce an Anchor Linkage mechanism that enforces cross-turn dependencies. Furthermore, we convert 7 public benchmarks into a unified Query--Action--Observation--Answer (QAOA) representation with fine-grained evaluation at the function-call, turn, and conversation levels. Experiments show that fine-tuning Qwen3-8B on our dataset substantially improves tool-use performance. Under the distractor-heavy Hybrid-20 setting, achieves 93.0% single-turn Strict Precision, outperforming commercial models including GPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, expected to decompose goals, invoke tools, and verify results in dynamic environments. Realizing these capabilities requires access to agentic data-structured interaction records that couple user intents with tool specifications, argument-grounded calls, and verifiable execution traces. However, collecting such data from human annotators is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. We present a unified framework for synthesizing agentic data using only LLMs, without any human-in-the-loop supervision. This framework decomposes generation into modular pipelines that produce complete interaction records spanning task specifications, tool definitions, policy pseudocode, natural language exchanges, and execution traces. Records conform to strict syntactic and semantic constraints, ensuring machine-parseability and faithful alignment across inputs, outputs, and tool calls. Beyond single tasks, there is support for both multi-task and multi-turn agent interactions, enabling the construction of datasets that reflect the full spectrum of tool-use competencies. To ensure quality and consistency, the framework integrates constrained generation formats, JSON-schema validation, and judge-based filtering. This paper formalizes the schema for agentic records, details the prompt design principles that guide generation, and introduces scalable pipelines for high-quality synthetic data. By providing a reproducible, LLM-only alternative to manual collection, hence advancing the development of agentic LLMs capable of robust tool use.

Deep research agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform multi-step reasoning, web exploration, and long-form report generation. However, most existing systems operate in an autonomous manner, assuming fully specified user intent and evaluating only final outputs. In practice, research goals are often underspecified and evolve during exploration, making sustained interaction essential for robust alignment. Despite its importance, interaction remains largely invisible to existing deep research benchmarks, which neither model dynamic user feedback nor quantify its costs. We introduce IDRBench, the first benchmark for systematically evaluating interactive deep research. IDRBench combines a modular multi-agent research framework with on-demand interaction, a scalable reference-grounded user simulator, and an interaction-aware evaluation suite that jointly measures interaction benefits (quality and alignment) and costs (turns and tokens). Experiments across seven state-of-the-art LLMs show that interaction consistently improves research quality and robustness, often outweighing differences in model capacity, while revealing substantial trade-offs in interaction efficiency.