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Dec 17

The OpenHands Software Agent SDK: A Composable and Extensible Foundation for Production Agents

Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents, which has 64k+ GitHub stars. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex, full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VS Code, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude, and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. Empirical results on SWE-Bench Verified and GAIA benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 5

Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models for Text-to-Image Generation through Autoregressive Representation Alignment

We present Autoregressive Representation Alignment (ARRA), a new training framework that unlocks global-coherent text-to-image generation in autoregressive LLMs without architectural changes. Unlike prior work that requires complex architectural redesigns, ARRA aligns LLM hidden states with visual representations from external visual foundational models via a global visual alignment loss and a hybrid token, <HYBNEXT>. This token enforces dual constraints: local next-token prediction and global semantic distillation, enabling LLMs to implicitly learn spatial and contextual coherence while retaining their original autoregressive paradigm. Extensive experiments validate ARRA's plug-and-play versatility. When training from text-generation-only LLMs or random initialization, ARRA reduces FID by 25.5% (MIMIC-CXR), 8.8% (DeepEyeNet), and 7.5% (ImageNet) for advanced autoregressive LLMs like Chameleon and LlamaGen, all without framework modifications. For domain adaption, ARRA aligns general-purpose LLMs with specialized models (e.g., BioMedCLIP), achieving an 18.6% FID reduction over direct fine-tuning on medical imaging (MIMIC-CXR). By demonstrating that training objective redesign -- not just architectural innovation -- can resolve cross-modal global coherence challenges, ARRA offers a complementary paradigm for advancing autoregressive models. Code and models will be released to advance autoregressive image generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10 1

OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature. Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains. We introduce Workforce, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising: (i) a domain-agnostic Planner for task decomposition, (ii) a Coordinator for subtask management, and (iii) specialized Workers with domain-specific tool-calling capabilities. This decoupling enables cross-domain transferability during both inference and training phases: During inference, Workforce seamlessly adapts to new domains by adding or modifying worker agents; For training, we introduce Optimized Workforce Learning (OWL), which improves generalization across domains by optimizing a domain-agnostic planner with reinforcement learning from real-world feedback. To validate our approach, we evaluate Workforce on the GAIA benchmark, covering various realistic, multi-domain agentic tasks. Experimental results demonstrate Workforce achieves open-source state-of-the-art performance (69.70%), outperforming commercial systems like OpenAI's Deep Research by 2.34%. More notably, our OWL-trained 32B model achieves 52.73% accuracy (+16.37%) and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4o on challenging tasks. To summarize, by enabling scalable generalization and modular domain transfer, our work establishes a foundation for the next generation of general-purpose AI assistants.

  • 16 authors
·
May 29

SeqPE: Transformer with Sequential Position Encoding

Since self-attention layers in Transformers are permutation invariant by design, positional encodings must be explicitly incorporated to enable spatial understanding. However, fixed-size lookup tables used in traditional learnable position embeddings (PEs) limit extrapolation capabilities beyond pre-trained sequence lengths. Expert-designed methods such as ALiBi and RoPE, mitigate this limitation but demand extensive modifications for adapting to new modalities, underscoring fundamental challenges in adaptability and scalability. In this work, we present SeqPE, a unified and fully learnable position encoding framework that represents each n-dimensional position index as a symbolic sequence and employs a lightweight sequential position encoder to learn their embeddings in an end-to-end manner. To regularize SeqPE's embedding space, we introduce two complementary objectives: a contrastive objective that aligns embedding distances with a predefined position-distance function, and a knowledge distillation loss that anchors out-of-distribution position embeddings to in-distribution teacher representations, further enhancing extrapolation performance. Experiments across language modeling, long-context question answering, and 2D image classification demonstrate that SeqPE not only surpasses strong baselines in perplexity, exact match (EM), and accuracy--particularly under context length extrapolation--but also enables seamless generalization to multi-dimensional inputs without requiring manual architectural redesign. We release our code, data, and checkpoints at https://github.com/ghrua/seqpe.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 16 2

Protenix-Mini: Efficient Structure Predictor via Compact Architecture, Few-Step Diffusion and Switchable pLM

Lightweight inference is critical for biomolecular structure prediction and other downstream tasks, enabling efficient real-world deployment and inference-time scaling for large-scale applications. In this work, we address the challenge of balancing model efficiency and prediction accuracy by making several key modifications, 1) Multi-step AF3 sampler is replaced by a few-step ODE sampler, significantly reducing computational overhead for the diffusion module part during inference; 2) In the open-source Protenix framework, a subset of pairformer or diffusion transformer blocks doesn't make contributions to the final structure prediction, presenting opportunities for architectural pruning and lightweight redesign; 3) A model incorporating an ESM module is trained to substitute the conventional MSA module, reducing MSA preprocessing time. Building on these key insights, we present Protenix-Mini, a compact and optimized model designed for efficient protein structure prediction. This streamlined version incorporates a more efficient architectural design with a two-step Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) sampling strategy. By eliminating redundant Transformer components and refining the sampling process, Protenix-Mini significantly reduces model complexity with slight accuracy drop. Evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that it achieves high-fidelity predictions, with only a negligible 1 to 5 percent decrease in performance on benchmark datasets compared to its full-scale counterpart. This makes Protenix-Mini an ideal choice for applications where computational resources are limited but accurate structure prediction remains crucial.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 15

Vitruvio: 3D Building Meshes via Single Perspective Sketches

Today's architectural engineering and construction (AEC) software require a learning curve to generate a three-dimension building representation. This limits the ability to quickly validate the volumetric implications of an initial design idea communicated via a single sketch. Allowing designers to translate a single sketch to a 3D building will enable owners to instantly visualize 3D project information without the cognitive load required. If previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) data-driven methods for single view reconstruction (SVR) showed outstanding results in the reconstruction process from a single image or sketch, they lacked specific applications, analysis, and experiments in the AEC. Therefore, this research addresses this gap, introducing the first deep learning method focused only on buildings that aim to convert a single sketch to a 3D building mesh: Vitruvio. Vitruvio adapts Occupancy Network for SVR tasks on a specific building dataset (Manhattan 1K). This adaptation brings two main improvements. First, it accelerates the inference process by more than 26% (from 0.5s to 0.37s). Second, it increases the reconstruction accuracy (measured by the Chamfer Distance) by 18%. During this adaptation in the AEC domain, we evaluate the effect of the building orientation in the learning procedure since it constitutes an important design factor. While aligning all the buildings to a canonical pose improved the overall quantitative metrics, it did not capture fine-grain details in more complex building shapes (as shown in our qualitative analysis). Finally, Vitruvio outputs a 3D-printable building mesh with arbitrary topology and genus from a single perspective sketch, providing a step forward to allow owners and designers to communicate 3D information via a 2D, effective, intuitive, and universal communication medium: the sketch.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2022

DRAFT-ing Architectural Design Decisions using LLMs

Architectural Knowledge Management (AKM) is crucial for software development but remains challenging due to the lack of standardization and high manual effort. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) provide a structured approach to capture Architecture Design Decisions (ADDs), but their adoption is limited due to the manual effort involved and insufficient tool support. Our previous work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist in generating ADDs. However, simply prompting the LLM does not produce quality ADDs. Moreover, using third-party LLMs raises privacy concerns, while self-hosting them poses resource challenges. To this end, we experimented with different approaches like few-shot, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning to enhance LLM's ability to generate ADDs. Our results show that both techniques improve effectiveness. Building on this, we propose Domain Specific Retreival Augumented Few Shot Fine Tuninng, DRAFT, which combines the strengths of all these three approaches for more effective ADD generation. DRAFT operates in two phases: an offline phase that fine-tunes an LLM on generating ADDs augmented with retrieved examples and an online phase that generates ADDs by leveraging retrieved ADRs and the fine-tuned model. We evaluated DRAFT against existing approaches on a dataset of 4,911 ADRs and various LLMs and analyzed them using automated metrics and human evaluations. Results show DRAFT outperforms all other approaches in effectiveness while maintaining efficiency. Our findings indicate that DRAFT can aid architects in drafting ADDs while addressing privacy and resource constraints.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 10

ResPlan: A Large-Scale Vector-Graph Dataset of 17,000 Residential Floor Plans

We introduce ResPlan, a large-scale dataset of 17,000 detailed, structurally rich, and realistic residential floor plans, created to advance spatial AI research. Each plan includes precise annotations of architectural elements (walls, doors, windows, balconies) and functional spaces (such as kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms). ResPlan addresses key limitations of existing datasets such as RPLAN (Wu et al., 2019) and MSD (van Engelenburg et al., 2024) by offering enhanced visual fidelity and greater structural diversity, reflecting realistic and non-idealized residential layouts. Designed as a versatile, general-purpose resource, ResPlan supports a wide range of applications including robotics, reinforcement learning, generative AI, virtual and augmented reality, simulations, and game development. Plans are provided in both geometric and graph-based formats, enabling direct integration into simulation engines and fast 3D conversion. A key contribution is an open-source pipeline for geometry cleaning, alignment, and annotation refinement. Additionally, ResPlan includes structured representations of room connectivity, supporting graph-based spatial reasoning tasks. Finally, we present comparative analyses with existing benchmarks and outline several open benchmark tasks enabled by ResPlan. Ultimately, ResPlan offers a significant advance in scale, realism, and usability, providing a robust foundation for developing and benchmarking next-generation spatial intelligence systems.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 19

BIMgent: Towards Autonomous Building Modeling via Computer-use Agents

Existing computer-use agents primarily focus on general-purpose desktop automation tasks, with limited exploration of their application in highly specialized domains. In particular, the 3D building modeling process in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector involves open-ended design tasks and complex interaction patterns within Building Information Modeling (BIM) authoring software, which has yet to be thoroughly addressed by current studies. In this paper, we propose BIMgent, an agentic framework powered by multimodal large language models (LLMs), designed to enable autonomous building model authoring via graphical user interface (GUI) operations. BIMgent automates the architectural building modeling process, including multimodal input for conceptual design, planning of software-specific workflows, and efficient execution of the authoring GUI actions. We evaluate BIMgent on real-world building modeling tasks, including both text-based conceptual design generation and reconstruction from existing building design. The design quality achieved by BIMgent was found to be reasonable. Its operations achieved a 32% success rate, whereas all baseline models failed to complete the tasks (0% success rate). Results demonstrate that BIMgent effectively reduces manual workload while preserving design intent, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in real-world architectural modeling scenarios. Project page: https://tumcms.github.io/BIMgent.github.io/

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

Be the Change You Want to See: Revisiting Remote Sensing Change Detection Practices

Remote sensing change detection aims to localize semantic changes between images of the same location captured at different times. In the past few years, newer methods have attributed enhanced performance to the additions of new and complex components to existing architectures. Most fail to measure the performance contribution of fundamental design choices such as backbone selection, pre-training strategies, and training configurations. We claim that such fundamental design choices often improve performance even more significantly than the addition of new architectural components. Due to that, we systematically revisit the design space of change detection models and analyse the full potential of a well-optimised baseline. We identify a set of fundamental design choices that benefit both new and existing architectures. Leveraging this insight, we demonstrate that when carefully designed, even an architecturally simple model can match or surpass state-of-the-art performance on six challenging change detection datasets. Our best practices generalise beyond our architecture and also offer performance improvements when applied to related methods, indicating that the space of fundamental design choices has been underexplored. Our guidelines and architecture provide a strong foundation for future methods, emphasizing that optimizing core components is just as important as architectural novelty in advancing change detection performance. Code: https://github.com/blaz-r/BTC-change-detection

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4

ArchGym: An Open-Source Gymnasium for Machine Learning Assisted Architecture Design

Machine learning is a prevalent approach to tame the complexity of design space exploration for domain-specific architectures. Using ML for design space exploration poses challenges. First, it's not straightforward to identify the suitable algorithm from an increasing pool of ML methods. Second, assessing the trade-offs between performance and sample efficiency across these methods is inconclusive. Finally, lack of a holistic framework for fair, reproducible, and objective comparison across these methods hinders progress of adopting ML-aided architecture design space exploration and impedes creating repeatable artifacts. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce ArchGym, an open-source gym and easy-to-extend framework that connects diverse search algorithms to architecture simulators. To demonstrate utility, we evaluate ArchGym across multiple vanilla and domain-specific search algorithms in designing custom memory controller, deep neural network accelerators, and custom SoC for AR/VR workloads, encompassing over 21K experiments. Results suggest that with unlimited samples, ML algorithms are equally favorable to meet user-defined target specification if hyperparameters are tuned; no solution is necessarily better than another (e.g., reinforcement learning vs. Bayesian methods). We coin the term hyperparameter lottery to describe the chance for a search algorithm to find an optimal design provided meticulously selected hyperparameters. The ease of data collection and aggregation in ArchGym facilitates research in ML-aided architecture design space exploration. As a case study, we show this advantage by developing a proxy cost model with an RMSE of 0.61% that offers a 2,000-fold reduction in simulation time. Code and data for ArchGym is available at https://bit.ly/ArchGym.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 15, 2023

From Concept to Manufacturing: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Engineering Design

Engineering Design is undergoing a transformative shift with the advent of AI, marking a new era in how we approach product, system, and service planning. Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in enabling this shift. Yet, with text as their only input modality, they cannot leverage the large body of visual artifacts that engineers have used for centuries and are accustomed to. This gap is addressed with the release of multimodal vision language models, such as GPT-4V, enabling AI to impact many more types of tasks. In light of these advancements, this paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4V, a vision language model, across a wide spectrum of engineering design tasks, categorized into four main areas: Conceptual Design, System-Level and Detailed Design, Manufacturing and Inspection, and Engineering Education Tasks. Our study assesses GPT-4V's capabilities in design tasks such as sketch similarity analysis, concept selection using Pugh Charts, material selection, engineering drawing analysis, CAD generation, topology optimization, design for additive and subtractive manufacturing, spatial reasoning challenges, and textbook problems. Through this structured evaluation, we not only explore GPT-4V's proficiency in handling complex design and manufacturing challenges but also identify its limitations in complex engineering design applications. Our research establishes a foundation for future assessments of vision language models, emphasizing their immense potential for innovating and enhancing the engineering design and manufacturing landscape. It also contributes a set of benchmark testing datasets, with more than 1000 queries, for ongoing advancements and applications in this field.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 21, 2023

LLplace: The 3D Indoor Scene Layout Generation and Editing via Large Language Model

Designing 3D indoor layouts is a crucial task with significant applications in virtual reality, interior design, and automated space planning. Existing methods for 3D layout design either rely on diffusion models, which utilize spatial relationship priors, or heavily leverage the inferential capabilities of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), which require extensive prompt engineering and in-context exemplars via black-box trials. These methods often face limitations in generalization and dynamic scene editing. In this paper, we introduce LLplace, a novel 3D indoor scene layout designer based on lightweight fine-tuned open-source LLM Llama3. LLplace circumvents the need for spatial relationship priors and in-context exemplars, enabling efficient and credible room layout generation based solely on user inputs specifying the room type and desired objects. We curated a new dialogue dataset based on the 3D-Front dataset, expanding the original data volume and incorporating dialogue data for adding and removing objects. This dataset can enhance the LLM's spatial understanding. Furthermore, through dialogue, LLplace activates the LLM's capability to understand 3D layouts and perform dynamic scene editing, enabling the addition and removal of objects. Our approach demonstrates that LLplace can effectively generate and edit 3D indoor layouts interactively and outperform existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions. Code and dataset will be released.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

LLM-driven Indoor Scene Layout Generation via Scaled Human-aligned Data Synthesis and Multi-Stage Preference Optimization

Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 9