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Dec 17

Enhancing Automated Paper Reproduction via Prompt-Free Collaborative Agents

Automated paper reproduction has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate scientific research, employing multi-step workflow frameworks to systematically convert academic papers into executable code. However, existing frameworks often lack mechanisms to verify and refine the outputs at each generation step, or rely heavily on manually designed prompts for self-refinement, which limits their adaptability and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a prompt-free collaborative agent framework that automatically enhances the quality of paper-to-code generation. Our approach employs two collaborative agents: a verification agent that examines whether the outputs at each step satisfy the requirements specified in the corresponding system prompt, and a refinement agent that revises the outputs based on the identified issues. Unlike previous methods that require human experts to craft specific refinement prompts for each step, our framework achieves automatic verification and improvement by leveraging only the original system prompts. We integrate our collaborative agents into the Paper2Code framework and conduct comprehensive experiments on PaperBench Code-Dev and Paper2CodeBench datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the accuracy and completeness of reproduced code, achieving performance gains of approximately 15\% and 13\%, respectively, compared to the baseline without our agents. Furthermore, comparative experiments against Self-Refine validate the robustness and consistency of our prompt-free approach across different datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 2

AI-Driven Scholarly Peer Review via Persistent Workflow Prompting, Meta-Prompting, and Meta-Reasoning

Critical peer review of scientific manuscripts presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to data limitations and the complexity of expert reasoning. This report introduces Persistent Workflow Prompting (PWP), a potentially broadly applicable prompt engineering methodology designed to bridge this gap using standard LLM chat interfaces (zero-code, no APIs). We present a proof-of-concept PWP prompt for the critical analysis of experimental chemistry manuscripts, featuring a hierarchical, modular architecture (structured via Markdown) that defines detailed analysis workflows. We develop this PWP prompt through iterative application of meta-prompting techniques and meta-reasoning aimed at systematically codifying expert review workflows, including tacit knowledge. Submitted once at the start of a session, this PWP prompt equips the LLM with persistent workflows triggered by subsequent queries, guiding modern reasoning LLMs through systematic, multimodal evaluations. Demonstrations show the PWP-guided LLM identifying major methodological flaws in a test case while mitigating LLM input bias and performing complex tasks, including distinguishing claims from evidence, integrating text/photo/figure analysis to infer parameters, executing quantitative feasibility checks, comparing estimates against claims, and assessing a priori plausibility. To ensure transparency and facilitate replication, we provide full prompts, detailed demonstration analyses, and logs of interactive chats as supplementary resources. Beyond the specific application, this work offers insights into the meta-development process itself, highlighting the potential of PWP, informed by detailed workflow formalization, to enable sophisticated analysis using readily available LLMs for complex scientific tasks.

  • 1 authors
·
May 6 2

WorkflowLLM: Enhancing Workflow Orchestration Capability of Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven a revolutionary paradigm shift in process automation from Robotic Process Automation to Agentic Process Automation by automating the workflow orchestration procedure based on LLMs. However, existing LLMs (even the advanced OpenAI GPT-4o) are confined to achieving satisfactory capability in workflow orchestration. To address this limitation, we present WorkflowLLM, a data-centric framework elaborately designed to enhance the capability of LLMs in workflow orchestration. It first constructs a large-scale fine-tuning dataset WorkflowBench with 106,763 samples, covering 1,503 APIs from 83 applications across 28 categories. Specifically, the construction process can be divided into three phases: (1) Data Collection: we collect real-world workflow data from Apple Shortcuts and RoutineHub, transcribing them into Python-style code. We further equip them with generated hierarchical thought via ChatGPT. (2) Query Expansion: we prompt ChatGPT to generate more task queries to enrich the diversity and complexity of workflows. (3) Workflow Generation: we leverage an annotator model trained on collected data to generate workflows for synthesized queries. Finally, we merge the synthetic samples that pass quality confirmation with the collected samples to obtain the WorkflowBench. Based on WorkflowBench, we fine-tune Llama-3.1-8B to obtain WorkflowLlama. Our experiments show that WorkflowLlama demonstrates a strong capacity to orchestrate complex workflows, while also achieving notable generalization performance on previously unseen APIs. Additionally, WorkflowBench exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities on an out-of-distribution task planning dataset, T-Eval. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/WorkflowLLM.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 8, 2024

Advancing vision-language models in front-end development via data synthesis

Modern front-end (FE) development, especially when leveraging the unique features of frameworks like React and Vue, presents distinctive challenges. These include managing modular architectures, ensuring synchronization between data and visual outputs for declarative rendering, and adapting reusable components to various scenarios. Such complexities make it particularly difficult for state-of-the-art large vision-language models (VLMs) to generate accurate and functional code directly from design images. To address these challenges, we propose a reflective agentic workflow that synthesizes high-quality image-text data to capture the diverse characteristics of FE development. This workflow automates the extraction of self-containedA \textbf{self-contained code snippet is one that encapsulates all necessary logic, styling, and dependencies, ensuring it functions independently without requiring external imports or context.} code snippets from real-world projects, renders the corresponding visual outputs, and generates detailed descriptions that link design elements to functional code. To further expand the scope and utility of the synthesis, we introduce three data synthesis strategies: Evolution-based synthesis, which enables scalable and diverse dataset expansion; Waterfall-Model-based synthesis, which generates logically coherent code derived from system requirements; and Additive Development synthesis, which iteratively increases the complexity of human-authored components. We build a large vision-language model, Flame, trained on the synthesized datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness in generating React code via the pass@k metric. Our results suggest that a code VLM trained to interpret images before code generation may achieve better performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3

Visual Prompting with Iterative Refinement for Design Critique Generation

Feedback is crucial for every design process, such as user interface (UI) design, and automating design critiques can significantly improve the efficiency of the design workflow. Although existing multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks, they often struggle with generating high-quality design critiques -- a complex task that requires producing detailed design comments that are visually grounded in a given design's image. Building on recent advancements in iterative refinement of text output and visual prompting methods, we propose an iterative visual prompting approach for UI critique that takes an input UI screenshot and design guidelines and generates a list of design comments, along with corresponding bounding boxes that map each comment to a specific region in the screenshot. The entire process is driven completely by LLMs, which iteratively refine both the text output and bounding boxes using few-shot samples tailored for each step. We evaluated our approach using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, and found that human experts generally preferred the design critiques generated by our pipeline over those by the baseline, with the pipeline reducing the gap from human performance by 50% for one rating metric. To assess the generalizability of our approach to other multimodal tasks, we applied our pipeline to open-vocabulary object and attribute detection, and experiments showed that our method also outperformed the baseline.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 21, 2024

(P)rior(D)yna(F)low: A Priori Dynamic Workflow Construction via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Recent studies have shown that carefully designed workflows coordinating large language models(LLMs) significantly enhance task-solving capabilities compared to using a single model. While an increasing number of works focus on autonomous workflow construction, most existing approaches rely solely on historical experience, leading to limitations in efficiency and adaptability. We argue that while historical experience is valuable, workflow construction should also flexibly respond to the unique characteristics of each task. To this end, we propose an a priori dynamic framework for automated workflow construction. Our framework first leverages Q-table learning to optimize the decision space, guiding agent decisions and enabling effective use of historical experience. At the same time, agents evaluate the current task progress and make a priori decisions regarding the next executing agent, allowing the system to proactively select the more suitable workflow structure for each given task. Additionally, we incorporate mechanisms such as cold-start initialization, early stopping, and pruning to further improve system efficiency. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method achieves an average improvement of 4.05%, while reducing workflow construction and inference costs to only 30.68%-48.31% of those required by existing methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 17

RefineX: Learning to Refine Pre-training Data at Scale from Expert-Guided Programs

The foundational capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are deeply influenced by the quality of their pre-training corpora. However, enhancing data quality at scale remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the trade-off between refinement effectiveness and processing efficiency. While rule-based filtering remains the dominant paradigm, it typically operates at the document level and lacks the granularity needed to refine specific content within documents. Inspired by emerging work such as ProX, we propose RefineX, a novel framework for large-scale, surgical refinement of pre-training data through programmatic editing tasks. RefineX enables efficient and fine-grained data refinement while reliably preserving the diversity and naturalness of raw text. The core strength of RefineX lies in distilling high-quality, expert-guided end-to-end refinement results into minimal edit-based deletion programs. This high-precision distillation pipeline is used to train an efficient and reliable refine model that can systematically improve every instance in the corpus at scale. We evaluate RefineX across from-scratch pre-training at multiple model scales and find that it consistently outperforms models trained on raw, filtered, or alternatively refined data across diverse downstream tasks. On the 750M model, RefineX yields 2.6%-7.2% average gains on lighteval tasks, and achieves comparable performance using significantly fewer training tokens. Further analysis shows that RefineX reliably enhances text quality with both high efficiency and precision, outperforming prior approaches such as end-to-end generation and Prox-C. These results position RefineX as a scalable, effective, and reliable solution for optimizing pre-training data in modern LLM pipelines.

Opus: A Large Work Model for Complex Workflow Generation

This paper introduces Opus, a novel framework for generating and optimizing Workflows tailored to complex Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) use cases, focusing on cost reduction and quality enhancement while adhering to established industry processes and operational constraints. Our approach generates executable Workflows from Intention, defined as the alignment of Client Input, Client Output, and Process Context. These Workflows are represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), with nodes as Tasks consisting of sequences of executable Instructions, including tools and human expert reviews. We adopt a two-phase methodology: Workflow Generation and Workflow Optimization. In the Generation phase, Workflows are generated using a Large Work Model (LWM) informed by a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) that encodes domain-specific procedural and operational knowledge. In the Optimization phase, Workflows are transformed into Workflow Graphs (WFGs), where optimal Workflows are determined through path optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in reliably retrieving detailed process data as well as generating industry-compliant workflows. The key contributions of this paper include: - The integration of a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) into a Large Work Model (LWM), enabling the generation of context-aware, semantically aligned, structured and auditable Workflows. - A two-phase approach that combines Workflow Generation from Intention with graph-based Workflow Optimization. - Opus Alpha 1 Large and Opus Alpha 1 Small, models that outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by 38\% and 29\% respectively in Workflow Generation for a Medical Coding use case.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 30, 2024

ComfyGPT: A Self-Optimizing Multi-Agent System for Comprehensive ComfyUI Workflow Generation

ComfyUI provides a widely-adopted, workflow-based interface that enables users to customize various image generation tasks through an intuitive node-based architecture. However, the intricate connections between nodes and diverse modules often present a steep learning curve for users. In this paper, we introduce ComfyGPT, the first self-optimizing multi-agent system designed to generate ComfyUI workflows based on task descriptions automatically. ComfyGPT comprises four specialized agents: ReformatAgent, FlowAgent, RefineAgent, and ExecuteAgent. The core innovation of ComfyGPT lies in two key aspects. First, it focuses on generating individual node links rather than entire workflows, significantly improving generation precision. Second, we proposed FlowAgent, a LLM-based workflow generation agent that uses both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to improve workflow generation accuracy. Moreover, we introduce FlowDataset, a large-scale dataset containing 13,571 workflow-description pairs, and FlowBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating workflow generation systems. We also propose four novel evaluation metrics: Format Validation (FV), Pass Accuracy (PA), Pass Instruct Alignment (PIA), and Pass Node Diversity (PND). Experimental results demonstrate that ComfyGPT significantly outperforms existing LLM-based methods in workflow generation.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 22

PaperDebugger: A Plugin-Based Multi-Agent System for In-Editor Academic Writing, Review, and Editing

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf. We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools. PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI). Early aggregated analytics demonstrate active user engagement and validate the practicality of an editor-native, agentic writing assistant. More details about this demo and video could be found at https://github.com/PaperDebugger/PaperDebugger.

Planning-Driven Programming: A Large Language Model Programming Workflow

The strong performance of large language models (LLMs) on natural language processing tasks raises extensive discussion on their application to code generation. Recent work suggests multiple sampling approaches to improve initial code generation accuracy or program repair approaches to refine the code. However, these methods suffer from LLMs' inefficiencies and limited reasoning capacity. In this work, we propose an LLM programming workflow (LPW) designed to improve both initial code generation and subsequent refinements within a structured two-phase workflow. Specifically, in the solution generation phase, the LLM first outlines a solution plan that decomposes the problem into manageable sub-problems and then verifies the generated solution plan through visible test cases. Subsequently, in the code implementation phase, the LLM initially drafts a code according to the solution plan and its verification. If the generated code fails the visible tests, the plan verification serves as the intended natural language solution to inform the refinement process for correcting bugs. We further introduce SLPW, a sampling variant of LPW, which initially generates multiple solution plans and plan verifications, produces a program for each plan and its verification, and refines each program as necessary until one successfully passes the visible tests. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods across various existing LLMs, our experimental results show that LPW significantly improves the Pass@1 accuracy by up to 16.4% on well-established text-to-code generation benchmarks, especially with a notable improvement of around 10% on challenging benchmarks. Additionally, SLPW demonstrates up to a 5.6% improvement over LPW and sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy on various benchmarks, e.g., 98.2% on HumanEval, 84.8% on MBPP, 64.0% on APPS, and 35.3% on CodeContest, using GPT-4o as the backbone.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 21, 2024

Automating Code Review Activities by Large-Scale Pre-training

Code review is an essential part to software development lifecycle since it aims at guaranteeing the quality of codes. Modern code review activities necessitate developers viewing, understanding and even running the programs to assess logic, functionality, latency, style and other factors. It turns out that developers have to spend far too much time reviewing the code of their peers. Accordingly, it is in significant demand to automate the code review process. In this research, we focus on utilizing pre-training techniques for the tasks in the code review scenario. We collect a large-scale dataset of real-world code changes and code reviews from open-source projects in nine of the most popular programming languages. To better understand code diffs and reviews, we propose CodeReviewer, a pre-trained model that utilizes four pre-training tasks tailored specifically for the code review scenario. To evaluate our model, we focus on three key tasks related to code review activities, including code change quality estimation, review comment generation and code refinement. Furthermore, we establish a high-quality benchmark dataset based on our collected data for these three tasks and conduct comprehensive experiments on it. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art pre-training approaches in all tasks. Further analysis show that our proposed pre-training tasks and the multilingual pre-training dataset benefit the model on the understanding of code changes and reviews.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 17, 2022

A User-Friendly Framework for Generating Model-Preferred Prompts in Text-to-Image Synthesis

Well-designed prompts have demonstrated the potential to guide text-to-image models in generating amazing images. Although existing prompt engineering methods can provide high-level guidance, it is challenging for novice users to achieve the desired results by manually entering prompts due to a discrepancy between novice-user-input prompts and the model-preferred prompts. To bridge the distribution gap between user input behavior and model training datasets, we first construct a novel Coarse-Fine Granularity Prompts dataset (CFP) and propose a novel User-Friendly Fine-Grained Text Generation framework (UF-FGTG) for automated prompt optimization. For CFP, we construct a novel dataset for text-to-image tasks that combines coarse and fine-grained prompts to facilitate the development of automated prompt generation methods. For UF-FGTG, we propose a novel framework that automatically translates user-input prompts into model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we propose a prompt refiner that continually rewrites prompts to empower users to select results that align with their unique needs. Meanwhile, we integrate image-related loss functions from the text-to-image model into the training process of text generation to generate model-preferred prompts. Additionally, we propose an adaptive feature extraction module to ensure diversity in the generated results. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of generating more visually appealing and diverse images than previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 5% across six quality and aesthetic metrics.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

DesignRepair: Dual-Stream Design Guideline-Aware Frontend Repair with Large Language Models

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has streamlined frontend interface creation through tools like Vercel's V0, yet surfaced challenges in design quality (e.g., accessibility, and usability). Current solutions, often limited by their focus, generalisability, or data dependency, fall short in addressing these complexities. Moreover, none of them examine the quality of LLM-generated UI design. In this work, we introduce DesignRepair, a novel dual-stream design guideline-aware system to examine and repair the UI design quality issues from both code aspect and rendered page aspect. We utilised the mature and popular Material Design as our knowledge base to guide this process. Specifically, we first constructed a comprehensive knowledge base encoding Google's Material Design principles into low-level component knowledge base and high-level system design knowledge base. After that, DesignRepair employs a LLM for the extraction of key components and utilizes the Playwright tool for precise page analysis, aligning these with the established knowledge bases. Finally, we integrate Retrieval-Augmented Generation with state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 to holistically refine and repair frontend code through a strategic divide and conquer approach. Our extensive evaluations validated the efficacy and utility of our approach, demonstrating significant enhancements in adherence to design guidelines, accessibility, and user experience metrics.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 3, 2024

CoSTAast: Cost-Sensitive Toolpath Agent for Multi-turn Image Editing

Text-to-image models like stable diffusion and DALLE-3 still struggle with multi-turn image editing. We decompose such a task as an agentic workflow (path) of tool use that addresses a sequence of subtasks by AI tools of varying costs. Conventional search algorithms require expensive exploration to find tool paths. While large language models (LLMs) possess prior knowledge of subtask planning, they may lack accurate estimations of capabilities and costs of tools to determine which to apply in each subtask. Can we combine the strengths of both LLMs and graph search to find cost-efficient tool paths? We propose a three-stage approach "CoSTA*" that leverages LLMs to create a subtask tree, which helps prune a graph of AI tools for the given task, and then conducts A* search on the small subgraph to find a tool path. To better balance the total cost and quality, CoSTA* combines both metrics of each tool on every subtask to guide the A* search. Each subtask's output is then evaluated by a vision-language model (VLM), where a failure will trigger an update of the tool's cost and quality on the subtask. Hence, the A* search can recover from failures quickly to explore other paths. Moreover, CoSTA* can automatically switch between modalities across subtasks for a better cost-quality trade-off. We build a novel benchmark of challenging multi-turn image editing, on which CoSTA* outperforms state-of-the-art image-editing models or agents in terms of both cost and quality, and performs versatile trade-offs upon user preference.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 13 10

VideoRepair: Improving Text-to-Video Generation via Misalignment Evaluation and Localized Refinement

Recent text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive generation capabilities across various domains. However, these models often generate videos that have misalignments with text prompts, especially when the prompts describe complex scenes with multiple objects and attributes. To address this, we introduce VideoRepair, a novel model-agnostic, training-free video refinement framework that automatically identifies fine-grained text-video misalignments and generates explicit spatial and textual feedback, enabling a T2V diffusion model to perform targeted, localized refinements. VideoRepair consists of four stages: In (1) video evaluation, we detect misalignments by generating fine-grained evaluation questions and answering those questions with MLLM. In (2) refinement planning, we identify accurately generated objects and then create localized prompts to refine other areas in the video. Next, in (3) region decomposition, we segment the correctly generated area using a combined grounding module. We regenerate the video by adjusting the misaligned regions while preserving the correct regions in (4) localized refinement. On two popular video generation benchmarks (EvalCrafter and T2V-CompBench), VideoRepair substantially outperforms recent baselines across various text-video alignment metrics. We provide a comprehensive analysis of VideoRepair components and qualitative examples.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024 3

Tool Documentation Enables Zero-Shot Tool-Usage with Large Language Models

Today, large language models (LLMs) are taught to use new tools by providing a few demonstrations of the tool's usage. Unfortunately, demonstrations are hard to acquire, and can result in undesirable biased usage if the wrong demonstration is chosen. Even in the rare scenario that demonstrations are readily available, there is no principled selection protocol to determine how many and which ones to provide. As tasks grow more complex, the selection search grows combinatorially and invariably becomes intractable. Our work provides an alternative to demonstrations: tool documentation. We advocate the use of tool documentation, descriptions for the individual tool usage, over demonstrations. We substantiate our claim through three main empirical findings on 6 tasks across both vision and language modalities. First, on existing benchmarks, zero-shot prompts with only tool documentation are sufficient for eliciting proper tool usage, achieving performance on par with few-shot prompts. Second, on a newly collected realistic tool-use dataset with hundreds of available tool APIs, we show that tool documentation is significantly more valuable than demonstrations, with zero-shot documentation significantly outperforming few-shot without documentation. Third, we highlight the benefits of tool documentations by tackling image generation and video tracking using just-released unseen state-of-the-art models as tools. Finally, we highlight the possibility of using tool documentation to automatically enable new applications: by using nothing more than the documentation of GroundingDino, Stable Diffusion, XMem, and SAM, LLMs can re-invent the functionalities of the just-released Grounded-SAM and Track Anything models.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 1, 2023 1

ComfyUI-R1: Exploring Reasoning Models for Workflow Generation

AI-generated content has evolved from monolithic models to modular workflows, particularly on platforms like ComfyUI, enabling customization in creative pipelines. However, crafting effective workflows requires great expertise to orchestrate numerous specialized components, presenting a steep learning curve for users. To address this challenge, we introduce ComfyUI-R1, the first large reasoning model for automated workflow generation. Starting with our curated dataset of 4K workflows, we construct long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning data, including node selection, workflow planning, and code-level workflow representation. ComfyUI-R1 is trained through a two-stage framework: (1) CoT fine-tuning for cold start, adapting models to the ComfyUI domain; (2) reinforcement learning for incentivizing reasoning capability, guided by a fine-grained rule-metric hybrid reward, ensuring format validity, structural integrity, and node-level fidelity. Experiments show that our 7B-parameter model achieves a 97\% format validity rate, along with high pass rate, node-level and graph-level F1 scores, significantly surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods that employ leading closed-source models such as GPT-4o and Claude series. Further analysis highlights the critical role of the reasoning process and the advantage of transforming workflows into code. Qualitative comparison reveals our strength in synthesizing intricate workflows with diverse nodes, underscoring the potential of long CoT reasoning in AI art creation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11 4

SemAgent: A Semantics Aware Program Repair Agent

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in downstream software engineering tasks such as Automated Program Repair (APR). In particular, there has been a lot of research on repository-level issue-resolution benchmarks such as SWE-Bench. Although there has been significant progress on this topic, we notice that in the process of solving such issues, existing agentic systems tend to hyper-localize on immediately suspicious lines of code and fix them in isolation, without a deeper understanding of the issue semantics, code semantics, or execution semantics. Consequently, many existing systems generate patches that overfit to the user issue, even when a more general fix is preferable. To address this limitation, we introduce SemAgent, a novel workflow-based procedure that leverages issue, code, and execution semantics to generate patches that are complete - identifying and fixing all lines relevant to the issue. We achieve this through a novel pipeline that (a) leverages execution semantics to retrieve relevant context, (b) comprehends issue-semantics via generalized abstraction, (c) isolates code-semantics within the context of this abstraction, and (d) leverages this understanding in a two-stage architecture: a repair stage that proposes fine-grained fixes, followed by a reviewer stage that filters relevant fixes based on the inferred issue-semantics. Our evaluations show that our methodology achieves a solve rate of 44.66% on the SWEBench-Lite benchmark beating all other workflow-based approaches, and an absolute improvement of 7.66% compared to our baseline, which lacks such deep semantic understanding. We note that our approach performs particularly well on issues requiring multi-line reasoning (and editing) and edge-case handling, suggesting that incorporating issue and code semantics into APR pipelines can lead to robust and semantically consistent repairs.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 19

LayoutPrompter: Awaken the Design Ability of Large Language Models

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 11, 2023

Rethinking Prompt Design for Inference-time Scaling in Text-to-Visual Generation

Achieving precise alignment between user intent and generated visuals remains a central challenge in text-to-visual generation, as a single attempt often fails to produce the desired output. To handle this, prior approaches mainly scale the visual generation process (e.g., increasing sampling steps or seeds), but this quickly leads to a quality plateau. This limitation arises because the prompt, crucial for guiding generation, is kept fixed. To address this, we propose Prompt Redesign for Inference-time Scaling, coined PRIS, a framework that adaptively revises the prompt during inference in response to the scaled visual generations. The core idea of PRIS is to review the generated visuals, identify recurring failure patterns across visuals, and redesign the prompt accordingly before regenerating the visuals with the revised prompt. To provide precise alignment feedback for prompt revision, we introduce a new verifier, element-level factual correction, which evaluates the alignment between prompt attributes and generated visuals at a fine-grained level, achieving more accurate and interpretable assessments than holistic measures. Extensive experiments on both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including a 15% gain on VBench 2.0. These results highlight that jointly scaling prompts and visuals is key to fully leveraging scaling laws at inference-time. Visualizations are available at the website: https://subin-kim-cv.github.io/PRIS.

PyGen: A Collaborative Human-AI Approach to Python Package Creation

The principles of automation and innovation serve as foundational elements for advancement in contemporary science and technology. Here, we introduce Pygen, an automation platform designed to empower researchers, technologists, and hobbyists to bring abstract ideas to life as core, usable software tools written in Python. Pygen leverages the immense power of autoregressive large language models to augment human creativity during the ideation, iteration, and innovation process. By combining state-of-the-art language models with open-source code generation technologies, Pygen has significantly reduced the manual overhead of tool development. From a user prompt, Pygen automatically generates Python packages for a complete workflow from concept to package generation and documentation. The findings of our work show that Pygen considerably enhances the researcher's productivity by enabling the creation of resilient, modular, and well-documented packages for various specialized purposes. We employ a prompt enhancement approach to distill the user's package description into increasingly specific and actionable. While being inherently an open-ended task, we have evaluated the generated packages and the documentation using Human Evaluation, LLM-based evaluation, and CodeBLEU, with detailed results in the results section. Furthermore, we documented our results, analyzed the limitations, and suggested strategies to alleviate them. Pygen is our vision of ethical automation, a framework that promotes inclusivity, accessibility, and collaborative development. This project marks the beginning of a large-scale effort towards creating tools where intelligent agents collaborate with humans to improve scientific and technological development substantially. Our code and generated examples are open-sourced at [https://github.com/GitsSaikat/Pygen]

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 12, 2024

Consolidating Attention Features for Multi-view Image Editing

Large-scale text-to-image models enable a wide range of image editing techniques, using text prompts or even spatial controls. However, applying these editing methods to multi-view images depicting a single scene leads to 3D-inconsistent results. In this work, we focus on spatial control-based geometric manipulations and introduce a method to consolidate the editing process across various views. We build on two insights: (1) maintaining consistent features throughout the generative process helps attain consistency in multi-view editing, and (2) the queries in self-attention layers significantly influence the image structure. Hence, we propose to improve the geometric consistency of the edited images by enforcing the consistency of the queries. To do so, we introduce QNeRF, a neural radiance field trained on the internal query features of the edited images. Once trained, QNeRF can render 3D-consistent queries, which are then softly injected back into the self-attention layers during generation, greatly improving multi-view consistency. We refine the process through a progressive, iterative method that better consolidates queries across the diffusion timesteps. We compare our method to a range of existing techniques and demonstrate that it can achieve better multi-view consistency and higher fidelity to the input scene. These advantages allow us to train NeRFs with fewer visual artifacts, that are better aligned with the target geometry.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 22, 2024 1

MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows

Scientific innovation relies on detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as analyzing literature, generating ideas, validating these ideas, interpreting results, and inspiring follow-up research. However, scientific publications that document these workflows are extensive and unstructured. This makes it difficult for both human researchers and AI systems to effectively navigate and explore the space of scientific innovation. To address this issue, we introduce MASSW, a comprehensive text dataset on Multi-Aspect Summarization of Scientific Workflows. MASSW includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we automatically extract five core aspects from these publications -- context, key idea, method, outcome, and projected impact -- which correspond to five key steps in the research workflow. These structured summaries facilitate a variety of downstream tasks and analyses. The quality of the LLM-extracted summaries is validated by comparing them with human annotations. We demonstrate the utility of MASSW through multiple novel machine-learning tasks that can be benchmarked using this new dataset, which make various types of predictions and recommendations along the scientific workflow. MASSW holds significant potential for researchers to create and benchmark new AI methods for optimizing scientific workflows and fostering scientific innovation in the field. Our dataset is openly available at https://github.com/xingjian-zhang/massw.

  • 11 authors
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Jun 10, 2024

Finch: Benchmarking Finance & Accounting across Spreadsheet-Centric Enterprise Workflows

We introduce a finance & accounting benchmark (Finch) for evaluating AI agents on real-world, enterprise-grade professional workflows -- interleaving data entry, structuring, formatting, web search, cross-file retrieval, calculation, modeling, validation, translation, visualization, and reporting. Finch is sourced from authentic enterprise workspaces at Enron (15,000 spreadsheets and 500,000 emails from 150 employees) and other financial institutions, preserving in-the-wild messiness across multimodal artifacts (text, tables, formulas, charts, code, and images) and spanning diverse domains such as budgeting, trading, and asset management. We propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted discovery with expert annotation: (1) LLM-assisted, expert-verified derivation of workflows from real-world email threads and version histories of spreadsheet files, and (2) meticulous expert annotation for workflows, requiring over 700 hours of domain-expert effort. This yields 172 composite workflows with 384 tasks, involving 1,710 spreadsheets with 27 million cells, along with PDFs and other artifacts, capturing the intrinsically messy, long-horizon, knowledge-intensive, and collaborative nature of real-world enterprise work. We conduct both human and automated evaluations of frontier AI systems including GPT 5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4, and Qwen 3 Max, and GPT 5.1 Pro spends 48 hours in total yet passes only 38.4% of workflows, while Claude Sonnet 4.5 passes just 25.0%. Comprehensive case studies further surface the challenges that real-world enterprise workflows pose for AI agents.

Chain of Tools: Large Language Model is an Automatic Multi-tool Learner

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to extend their utility, empowering them to solve practical tasks. Existing work typically empowers LLMs as tool users with a manually designed workflow, where the LLM plans a series of tools in a step-by-step manner, and sequentially executes each tool to obtain intermediate results until deriving the final answer. However, they suffer from two challenges in realistic scenarios: (1) The handcrafted control flow is often ad-hoc and constraints the LLM to local planning; (2) The LLM is instructed to use only manually demonstrated tools or well-trained Python functions, which limits its generalization to new tools. In this work, we first propose Automatic Tool Chain (ATC), a framework that enables the LLM to act as a multi-tool user, which directly utilizes a chain of tools through programming. To scale up the scope of the tools, we next propose a black-box probing method. This further empowers the LLM as a tool learner that can actively discover and document tool usages, teaching themselves to properly master new tools. For a comprehensive evaluation, we build a challenging benchmark named ToolFlow, which diverges from previous benchmarks by its long-term planning scenarios and complex toolset. Experiments on both existing datasets and ToolFlow illustrate the superiority of our framework. Analysis on different settings also validates the effectiveness and the utility of our black-box probing algorithm.

  • 10 authors
·
May 26, 2024

FreeEdit: Mask-free Reference-based Image Editing with Multi-modal Instruction

Introducing user-specified visual concepts in image editing is highly practical as these concepts convey the user's intent more precisely than text-based descriptions. We propose FreeEdit, a novel approach for achieving such reference-based image editing, which can accurately reproduce the visual concept from the reference image based on user-friendly language instructions. Our approach leverages the multi-modal instruction encoder to encode language instructions to guide the editing process. This implicit way of locating the editing area eliminates the need for manual editing masks. To enhance the reconstruction of reference details, we introduce the Decoupled Residual ReferAttention (DRRA) module. This module is designed to integrate fine-grained reference features extracted by a detail extractor into the image editing process in a residual way without interfering with the original self-attention. Given that existing datasets are unsuitable for reference-based image editing tasks, particularly due to the difficulty in constructing image triplets that include a reference image, we curate a high-quality dataset, FreeBench, using a newly developed twice-repainting scheme. FreeBench comprises the images before and after editing, detailed editing instructions, as well as a reference image that maintains the identity of the edited object, encompassing tasks such as object addition, replacement, and deletion. By conducting phased training on FreeBench followed by quality tuning, FreeEdit achieves high-quality zero-shot editing through convenient language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of FreeEdit across multiple task types, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods. The code will be available at: https://freeedit.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

MonetGPT: Solving Puzzles Enhances MLLMs' Image Retouching Skills

Retouching is an essential task in post-manipulation of raw photographs. Generative editing, guided by text or strokes, provides a new tool accessible to users but can easily change the identity of the original objects in unacceptable and unpredictable ways. In contrast, although traditional procedural edits, as commonly supported by photoediting tools (e.g., Gimp, Lightroom), are conservative, they are still preferred by professionals. Unfortunately, professional quality retouching involves many individual procedural editing operations that is challenging to plan for most novices. In this paper, we ask if a multimodal large language model (MLLM) can be taught to critique raw photographs, suggest suitable remedies, and finally realize them with a given set of pre-authored procedural image operations. We demonstrate that MLLMs can be first made aware of the underlying image processing operations, by training them to solve specially designed visual puzzles. Subsequently, such an operation-aware MLLM can both plan and propose edit sequences. To facilitate training, given a set of expert-edited photos, we synthesize a reasoning dataset by procedurally manipulating the expert edits and then grounding a pretrained LLM on the visual adjustments, to synthesize reasoning for finetuning. The proposed retouching operations are, by construction, understandable by the users, preserve object details and resolution, and can be optionally overridden. We evaluate our setup on a variety of test examples and show advantages, in terms of explainability and identity preservation, over existing generative and other procedural alternatives. Code, data, models, and supplementary results can be found via our project website at https://monetgpt.github.io.

  • 3 authors
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May 9 2

EditCast3D: Single-Frame-Guided 3D Editing with Video Propagation and View Selection

Recent advances in foundation models have driven remarkable progress in image editing, yet their extension to 3D editing remains underexplored. A natural approach is to replace the image editing modules in existing workflows with foundation models. However, their heavy computational demands and the restrictions and costs of closed-source APIs make plugging these models into existing iterative editing strategies impractical. To address this limitation, we propose EditCast3D, a pipeline that employs video generation foundation models to propagate edits from a single first frame across the entire dataset prior to reconstruction. While editing propagation enables dataset-level editing via video models, its consistency remains suboptimal for 3D reconstruction, where multi-view alignment is essential. To overcome this, EditCast3D introduces a view selection strategy that explicitly identifies consistent and reconstruction-friendly views and adopts feedforward reconstruction without requiring costly refinement. In combination, the pipeline both minimizes reliance on expensive image editing and mitigates prompt ambiguities that arise when applying foundation models independently across images. We evaluate EditCast3D on commonly used 3D editing datasets and compare it against state-of-the-art 3D editing baselines, demonstrating superior editing quality and high efficiency. These results establish EditCast3D as a scalable and general paradigm for integrating foundation models into 3D editing pipelines. The code is available at https://github.com/UNITES-Lab/EditCast3D

  • 8 authors
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Oct 11

Exploring Direct Instruction and Summary-Mediated Prompting in LLM-Assisted Code Modification

This paper presents a study of using large language models (LLMs) in modifying existing code. While LLMs for generating code have been widely studied, their role in code modification remains less understood. Although "prompting" serves as the primary interface for developers to communicate intents to LLMs, constructing effective prompts for code modification introduces challenges different from generation. Prior work suggests that natural language summaries may help scaffold this process, yet such approaches have been validated primarily in narrow domains like SQL rewriting. This study investigates two prompting strategies for LLM-assisted code modification: Direct Instruction Prompting, where developers describe changes explicitly in free-form language, and Summary-Mediated Prompting, where changes are made by editing the generated summaries of the code. We conducted an exploratory study with 15 developers who completed modification tasks using both techniques across multiple scenarios. Our findings suggest that developers followed an iterative workflow: understanding the code, localizing the edit, and validating outputs through execution or semantic reasoning. Each prompting strategy presented trade-offs: direct instruction prompting was more flexible and easier to specify, while summary-mediated prompting supported comprehension, prompt scaffolding, and control. Developers' choice of strategy was shaped by task goals and context, including urgency, maintainability, learning intent, and code familiarity. These findings highlight the need for more usable prompt interactions, including adjustable summary granularity, reliable summary-code traceability, and consistency in generated summaries.

  • 5 authors
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Aug 2

Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows

Real-world enterprise text-to-SQL workflows often involve complex cloud or local data across various database systems, multiple SQL queries in various dialects, and diverse operations from data transformation to analytics. We introduce Spider 2.0, an evaluation framework comprising 632 real-world text-to-SQL workflow problems derived from enterprise-level database use cases. The databases in Spider 2.0 are sourced from real data applications, often containing over 1,000 columns and stored in local or cloud database systems such as BigQuery and Snowflake. We show that solving problems in Spider 2.0 frequently requires understanding and searching through database metadata, dialect documentation, and even project-level codebases. This challenge calls for models to interact with complex SQL workflow environments, process extremely long contexts, perform intricate reasoning, and generate multiple SQL queries with diverse operations, often exceeding 100 lines, which goes far beyond traditional text-to-SQL challenges. Our evaluations indicate that based on o1-preview, our code agent framework successfully solves only 17.0% of the tasks, compared with 91.2% on Spider 1.0 and 73.0% on BIRD. Our results on Spider 2.0 show that while language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in code generation -- especially in prior text-to-SQL benchmarks -- they require significant improvement in order to achieve adequate performance for real-world enterprise usage. Progress on Spider 2.0 represents crucial steps towards developing intelligent, autonomous, code agents for real-world enterprise settings. Our code, baseline models, and data are available at https://spider2-sql.github.io.

  • 16 authors
·
Nov 12, 2024

Towards Realistic Evaluation of Commit Message Generation by Matching Online and Offline Settings

Commit message generation (CMG) is a crucial task in software engineering that is challenging to evaluate correctly. When a CMG system is integrated into the IDEs and other products at JetBrains, we perform online evaluation based on user acceptance of the generated messages. However, performing online experiments with every change to a CMG system is troublesome, as each iteration affects users and requires time to collect enough statistics. On the other hand, offline evaluation, a prevalent approach in the research literature, facilitates fast experiments but employs automatic metrics that are not guaranteed to represent the preferences of real users. In this work, we describe a novel way we employed to deal with this problem at JetBrains, by leveraging an online metric - the number of edits users introduce before committing the generated messages to the VCS - to select metrics for offline experiments. To support this new type of evaluation, we develop a novel markup collection tool mimicking the real workflow with a CMG system, collect a dataset with 57 pairs consisting of commit messages generated by GPT-4 and their counterparts edited by human experts, and design and verify a way to synthetically extend such a dataset. Then, we use the final dataset of 656 pairs to study how the widely used similarity metrics correlate with the online metric reflecting the real users' experience. Our results indicate that edit distance exhibits the highest correlation, whereas commonly used similarity metrics such as BLEU and METEOR demonstrate low correlation. This contradicts the previous studies on similarity metrics for CMG, suggesting that user interactions with a CMG system in real-world settings differ significantly from the responses by human labelers operating within controlled research environments. We release all the code and the dataset for researchers: https://jb.gg/cmg-evaluation.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024

MultiEdits: Simultaneous Multi-Aspect Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-driven image synthesis has made significant advancements with the development of diffusion models, transforming how visual content is generated from text prompts. Despite these advances, text-driven image editing, a key area in computer graphics, faces unique challenges. A major challenge is making simultaneous edits across multiple objects or attributes. Applying these methods sequentially for multi-aspect edits increases computational demands and efficiency losses. In this paper, we address these challenges with significant contributions. Our main contribution is the development of MultiEdits, a method that seamlessly manages simultaneous edits across multiple attributes. In contrast to previous approaches, MultiEdits not only preserves the quality of single attribute edits but also significantly improves the performance of multitasking edits. This is achieved through an innovative attention distribution mechanism and a multi-branch design that operates across several processing heads. Additionally, we introduce the PIE-Bench++ dataset, an expansion of the original PIE-Bench dataset, to better support evaluating image-editing tasks involving multiple objects and attributes simultaneously. This dataset is a benchmark for evaluating text-driven image editing methods in multifaceted scenarios. Dataset and code are available at https://mingzhenhuang.com/projects/MultiEdits.html.

  • 5 authors
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Jun 3, 2024

ScreenCoder: Advancing Visual-to-Code Generation for Front-End Automation via Modular Multimodal Agents

Automating the transformation of user interface (UI) designs into front-end code holds significant promise for accelerating software development and democratizing design workflows. While recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated progress in text-to-code generation, many existing approaches rely solely on natural language prompts, limiting their effectiveness in capturing spatial layout and visual design intent. In contrast, UI development in practice is inherently multimodal, often starting from visual sketches or mockups. To address this gap, we introduce a modular multi-agent framework that performs UI-to-code generation in three interpretable stages: grounding, planning, and generation. The grounding agent uses a vision-language model to detect and label UI components, the planning agent constructs a hierarchical layout using front-end engineering priors, and the generation agent produces HTML/CSS code via adaptive prompt-based synthesis. This design improves robustness, interpretability, and fidelity over end-to-end black-box methods. Furthermore, we extend the framework into a scalable data engine that automatically produces large-scale image-code pairs. Using these synthetic examples, we fine-tune and reinforce an open-source VLM, yielding notable gains in UI understanding and code quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout accuracy, structural coherence, and code correctness. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/leigest519/ScreenCoder.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 30 4

From Exploration to Mastery: Enabling LLMs to Master Tools via Self-Driven Interactions

Tool learning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external environments by invoking tools, serving as an effective strategy to mitigate the limitations inherent in their pre-training data. In this process, tool documentation plays a crucial role by providing usage instructions for LLMs, thereby facilitating effective tool utilization. This paper concentrates on the critical challenge of bridging the comprehension gap between LLMs and external tools due to the inadequacies and inaccuracies inherent in existing human-centric tool documentation. We propose a novel framework, DRAFT, aimed at Dynamically Refining tool documentation through the Analysis of Feedback and Trails emanating from LLMs' interactions with external tools. This methodology pivots on an innovative trial-and-error approach, consisting of three distinct learning phases: experience gathering, learning from experience, and documentation rewriting, to iteratively enhance the tool documentation. This process is further optimized by implementing a diversity-promoting exploration strategy to ensure explorative diversity and a tool-adaptive termination mechanism to prevent overfitting while enhancing efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that DRAFT's iterative, feedback-based refinement significantly ameliorates documentation quality, fostering a deeper comprehension and more effective utilization of tools by LLMs. Notably, our analysis reveals that the tool documentation refined via our approach demonstrates robust cross-model generalization capabilities.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

SWE-fficiency: Can Language Models Optimize Real-World Repositories on Real Workloads?

Optimizing the performance of large-scale software repositories demands expertise in code reasoning and software engineering (SWE) to reduce runtime while preserving program correctness. However, most benchmarks emphasize what to fix rather than how to fix code. We introduce SWE-fficiency, a benchmark for evaluating repository-level performance optimization on real workloads. Our suite contains 498 tasks across nine widely used data-science, machine-learning, and HPC repositories (e.g., numpy, pandas, scipy): given a complete codebase and a slow workload, an agent must investigate code semantics, localize bottlenecks and relevant tests, and produce a patch that matches or exceeds expert speedup while passing the same unit tests. To enable this how-to-fix evaluation, our automated pipeline scrapes GitHub pull requests for performance-improving edits, combining keyword filtering, static analysis, coverage tooling, and execution validation to both confirm expert speedup baselines and identify relevant repository unit tests. Empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art agents reveals significant underperformance. On average, agents achieve less than 0.15x the expert speedup: agents struggle in localizing optimization opportunities, reasoning about execution across functions, and maintaining correctness in proposed edits. We release the benchmark and accompanying data pipeline to facilitate research on automated performance engineering and long-horizon software reasoning.

A Systematic Literature Review of Software Engineering Research on Jupyter Notebook

Context: Jupyter Notebook has emerged as a versatile tool that transforms how researchers, developers, and data scientists conduct and communicate their work. As the adoption of Jupyter notebooks continues to rise, so does the interest from the software engineering research community in improving the software engineering practices for Jupyter notebooks. Objective: The purpose of this study is to analyze trends, gaps, and methodologies used in software engineering research on Jupyter notebooks. Method: We selected 146 relevant publications from the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography up to the end of 2024, following established systematic literature review guidelines. We explored publication trends, categorized them based on software engineering topics, and reported findings based on those topics. Results: The most popular venues for publishing software engineering research on Jupyter notebooks are related to human-computer interaction instead of traditional software engineering venues. Researchers have addressed a wide range of software engineering topics on notebooks, such as code reuse, readability, and execution environment. Although reusability is one of the research topics for Jupyter notebooks, only 64 of the 146 studies can be reused based on their provided URLs. Additionally, most replication packages are not hosted on permanent repositories for long-term availability and adherence to open science principles. Conclusion: Solutions specific to notebooks for software engineering issues, including testing, refactoring, and documentation, are underexplored. Future research opportunities exist in automatic testing frameworks, refactoring clones between notebooks, and generating group documentation for coherent code cells.

  • 3 authors
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Apr 22

UniTune: Text-Driven Image Editing by Fine Tuning a Diffusion Model on a Single Image

Text-driven image generation methods have shown impressive results recently, allowing casual users to generate high quality images by providing textual descriptions. However, similar capabilities for editing existing images are still out of reach. Text-driven image editing methods usually need edit masks, struggle with edits that require significant visual changes and cannot easily keep specific details of the edited portion. In this paper we make the observation that image-generation models can be converted to image-editing models simply by fine-tuning them on a single image. We also show that initializing the stochastic sampler with a noised version of the base image before the sampling and interpolating relevant details from the base image after sampling further increase the quality of the edit operation. Combining these observations, we propose UniTune, a novel image editing method. UniTune gets as input an arbitrary image and a textual edit description, and carries out the edit while maintaining high fidelity to the input image. UniTune does not require additional inputs, like masks or sketches, and can perform multiple edits on the same image without retraining. We test our method using the Imagen model in a range of different use cases. We demonstrate that it is broadly applicable and can perform a surprisingly wide range of expressive editing operations, including those requiring significant visual changes that were previously impossible.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2022

From Medprompt to o1: Exploration of Run-Time Strategies for Medical Challenge Problems and Beyond

Run-time steering strategies like Medprompt are valuable for guiding large language models (LLMs) to top performance on challenging tasks. Medprompt demonstrates that a general LLM can be focused to deliver state-of-the-art performance on specialized domains like medicine by using a prompt to elicit a run-time strategy involving chain of thought reasoning and ensembling. OpenAI's o1-preview model represents a new paradigm, where a model is designed to do run-time reasoning before generating final responses. We seek to understand the behavior of o1-preview on a diverse set of medical challenge problem benchmarks. Following on the Medprompt study with GPT-4, we systematically evaluate the o1-preview model across various medical benchmarks. Notably, even without prompting techniques, o1-preview largely outperforms the GPT-4 series with Medprompt. We further systematically study the efficacy of classic prompt engineering strategies, as represented by Medprompt, within the new paradigm of reasoning models. We found that few-shot prompting hinders o1's performance, suggesting that in-context learning may no longer be an effective steering approach for reasoning-native models. While ensembling remains viable, it is resource-intensive and requires careful cost-performance optimization. Our cost and accuracy analysis across run-time strategies reveals a Pareto frontier, with GPT-4o representing a more affordable option and o1-preview achieving state-of-the-art performance at higher cost. Although o1-preview offers top performance, GPT-4o with steering strategies like Medprompt retains value in specific contexts. Moreover, we note that the o1-preview model has reached near-saturation on many existing medical benchmarks, underscoring the need for new, challenging benchmarks. We close with reflections on general directions for inference-time computation with LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 1

Spider2-V: How Far Are Multimodal Agents From Automating Data Science and Engineering Workflows?

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.

  • 23 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024 2

ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmark

Recent advancements in generative models have enabled high-fidelity text-to-image generation. However, open-source image-editing models still lag behind their proprietary counterparts, primarily due to limited high-quality data and insufficient benchmarks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ImgEdit, a large-scale, high-quality image-editing dataset comprising 1.2 million carefully curated edit pairs, which contain both novel and complex single-turn edits, as well as challenging multi-turn tasks. To ensure the data quality, we employ a multi-stage pipeline that integrates a cutting-edge vision-language model, a detection model, a segmentation model, alongside task-specific in-painting procedures and strict post-processing. ImgEdit surpasses existing datasets in both task novelty and data quality. Using ImgEdit, we train ImgEdit-E1, an editing model using Vision Language Model to process the reference image and editing prompt, which outperforms existing open-source models on multiple tasks, highlighting the value of ImgEdit and model design. For comprehensive evaluation, we introduce ImgEdit-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate image editing performance in terms of instruction adherence, editing quality, and detail preservation. It includes a basic testsuite, a challenging single-turn suite, and a dedicated multi-turn suite. We evaluate both open-source and proprietary models, as well as ImgEdit-E1, providing deep analysis and actionable insights into the current behavior of image-editing models. The source data are publicly available on https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/ImgEdit.

  • 8 authors
·
May 26 3

Prompt Alchemy: Automatic Prompt Refinement for Enhancing Code Generation

Code generation has emerged as a key task to automate software development by converting high-level descriptions into executable code. Large language models (LLMs) excel at this but depend heavily on input prompt quality.Manual prompt engineering can be time-consuming and inconsistent, limiting LLM effectiveness. This paper introduces Prochemy, an innovative method for automatically refining prompts to boost code generation. Prochemy overcomes manual prompt limitations by automating optimization, ensuring consistency during inference, and supporting multi-agent systems.It iteratively refines prompts based on model performance, using an optimized final prompt for improved consistency across tasks. We tested Prochemy on natural language-based code generation and translation tasks using three LLM series. Results indicate Prochemy enhances existing methods, improving performance by 5.0% for GPT-3.5-Turbo and 1.9% for GPT-4o over zero-shot baselines on HumanEval. In state-of-the-art LDB, Prochemy + LDB surpasses standalone methods by 1.2-1.8%. For code translation, Prochemy boosts GPT-4o's Java-to-Python (AVATAR) performance from 74.5 to 84.1 (+12.9%) and Python-to-Java from 66.8 to 78.2 (+17.1%). Moreover, Prochemy maintains strong performance when integrated with the o1-mini model, validating its efficacy in code tasks. Designed as plug-and-play, Prochemy optimizes prompts with minimal human input, bridging the gap between simple prompts and complex frameworks.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 14