General-purposed embodied agents are designed to understand the users' natural instructions or intentions and act precisely to complete universal tasks. Recently, methods based on foundation models especially Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have shown a substantial potential to solve language-conditioned manipulation (LCM) tasks well. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately meet the needs of VLAs and relative algorithms. To better define such general-purpose tasks in the context of LLMs and advance the research in VLAs, we present VLABench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating universal LCM task learning. VLABench provides 100 carefully designed categories of tasks, with strong randomization in each category of task and a total of 2000+ objects. VLABench stands out from previous benchmarks in four key aspects: 1) tasks requiring world knowledge and common sense transfer, 2) natural language instructions with implicit human intentions rather than templates, 3) long-horizon tasks demanding multi-step reasoning, and 4) evaluation of both action policies and language model capabilities. The benchmark assesses multiple competencies including understanding of mesh\&texture, spatial relationship, semantic instruction, physical laws, knowledge transfer and reasoning, etc. To support the downstream finetuning, we provide high-quality training data collected via an automated framework incorporating heuristic skills and prior information. The experimental results indicate that both the current state-of-the-art pretrained VLAs and the workflow based on VLMs face challenges in our tasks.

Pretraining data of large language models composes multiple domains (e.g., web texts, academic papers, codes), whose mixture proportions crucially impact the competence of outcome models. While existing endeavors rely on heuristics or qualitative strategies to tune the proportions, we discover the quantitative predictability of model performance regarding the mixture proportions in function forms, which we refer to as the data mixing laws. Fitting such functions on sample mixtures unveils model performance on unseen mixtures before actual runs, thus guiding the selection of an ideal data mixture. Furthermore, we propose nested use of the scaling laws of training steps, model sizes, and our data mixing laws to predict the performance of large models trained on massive data under various mixtures with only small-scale training. Experimental results verify that our method effectively optimizes the training mixture of a 1B model trained for 100B tokens in RedPajama, reaching a performance comparable to the one trained for 48% more steps on the default mixture. Extending the application of data mixing laws to continual training accurately predicts the critical mixture proportion that avoids catastrophic forgetting and outlooks the potential for dynamic data schedules.

Most existing methods of Out-of-Domain (OOD) intent classification rely on extensive auxiliary OOD corpora or specific training paradigms. However, they are underdeveloped in the underlying principle that the models should have differentiated confidence in In- and Out-of-domain intent. In this work, we shed light on the fundamental cause of model overconfidence on OOD and demonstrate that calibrated subnetworks can be uncovered by pruning the overparameterized model. Calibrated confidence provided by the subnetwork can better distinguish In- and Out-of-domain, which can be a benefit for almost all post hoc methods. In addition to bringing fundamental insights, we also extend the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis to open-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets to demonstrate our approach can establish consistent improvements compared with a suite of competitive baselines.

The Out-of-Domain (OOD) intent classification is a basic and challenging task for dialogue systems.Previous methods commonly restrict the region (in feature space) of In-domain (IND) intent features to be compact or simplyconnected implicitly, which assumes no OOD intents reside, to learn discriminative semantic features.Then the distribution of the IND intent features is often assumed to obey a hypothetical distribution (Gaussian mostly) and samples outside this distribution are regarded as OOD samples.In this paper, we start from the nature of OOD intent classification and explore its optimization objective.We further propose a simple yet effective method, named KNN-contrastive learning.Our approach utilizes K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) of IND intents to learn discriminative semantic features that are more conducive to OOD detection.Notably, the density-based novelty detection algorithm is so well-grounded in the essence of our method that it is reasonable to use it as the OOD detection algorithm without making any requirements for the feature distribution.Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that our approach can not only enhance the OOD detection performance substantially but also improve the IND intent classification while requiring no restrictions on feature distribution.Code is available.1

The task of Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) aims to automatically infer the missing fact information in Knowledge Graph (KG). In this paper, we take a new perspective that aims to leverage rich user-item interaction data (user interaction data for short) for improving the KGC task. Our work is inspired by the observation that many KG entities correspond to online items in application systems. However, the two kinds of data sources have very different intrinsic characteristics, and it is likely to hurt the original performance using simple fusion strategy.