Xiaojian Ma


2025

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JARVIS-VLA: Post-Training Large-Scale Vision Language Models to Play Visual Games with Keyboards and Mouse
Muyao Li | Zihao Wang | Kaichen He | Xiaojian Ma | Yitao Liang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Recently, action-based decision-making in open-world environments has gained significant attention. Visual Language Action (VLA) models, pretrained on large-scale web datasets, have shown promise in decision-making tasks. However, previous work has primarily focused on action post-training, often neglecting enhancements to the foundation model itself. In response, we introduce Act from Visual Language Post-Training (ActVLP), a novel training paradigm. ActVLP distinctively enhances the foundation model prior to action-specific tuning by first post-training it on a curated set of environment-specific visual and linguistic tasks using self-supervised learning. This initial stage significantly improves the model’s capabilities in world knowledge, visual recognition, and spatial grounding. Subsequently, this strengthened VLM undergoes action post-training via imitation learning on trajectory datasets.Following this paradigm, we develop JARVIS-VLA, the first VLA model in Minecraft that can follow human instructions on over 1k different atomic tasks, including crafting, smelting, cooking, mining, and killing. Our experiments demonstrate that our ActVLP paradigm leads to a significant 40% improvement over the best agent baseline on a diverse set of atomic tasks. Furthermore, JARVIS-VLA surpasses traditional imitation learning-based policies in Minecraft, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We have open-sourced the code, models, and datasets to foster further research.The project page can be found at https://craftjarvis.github.io/JarvisVLA.

2024

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MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction
Ran Gong | Qiuyuan Huang | Xiaojian Ma | Yusuke Noda | Zane Durante | Zilong Zheng | Demetri Terzopoulos | Li Fei-Fei | Jianfeng Gao | Hoi Vo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

Large Foundation Models (LFMs) can perform complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate agents to complete sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration.However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community lacks adequate benchmarks that support the implementation of a general multi-agent infrastructure encompassing collaboration between LFMs and human-NPCs. We propose a novel infrastructure—Mindagent—for evaluating planning and coordination capabilities in the context of gaming interaction. In particular, our infrastructure leverages an existing gaming framework to (i) act as the coordinator for a multi-agent system, (ii) collaborate with human players via instructions, and (iii) enable in-context learning based on few-shot prompting with feedback.Furthermore, we introduce “Cuisineworld”, a new gaming scenario and its related benchmark that supervises multiple agents playing the game simultaneously and measures multi-agent collaboration efficiency. We have conducted comprehensive evaluations with a new auto-metric Collaboration Score: CoS for assessing the collaboration efficiency. Finally, Mindagent can be deployed in real-world gaming scenarios in a customized VR version of Cuisineworld and adapted in the “Minecraft” domain. Our work involving LFMs within our new infrastructure for general-purpose scheduling and coordination can elucidate how such skills may be obtained by learning from large language corpora.