Achieving virtual agents capable of automating tasks across diverse digital environments remains a pivotal challenge in Embodied AI. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer enhanced visual perception and reasoning, their agentic deployment faces three challenges: costly data annotation, imprecise action-intent alignment, and inefficient exploration from discarded failed trajectories. To address these, we introduce Iron, an intent-aligned, self-improved, and annotation-efficient framework for training GUI agents. Iron employs a novel dual learning strategy that utilizes a stepwise cycle-consistent (SCC) reward to achieve fine-grained alignment between low-level actions and high-level intents, thereby improving instruction grounding and intent understanding. Concurrently, Iron introduces a hindsight reproduction mechanism to repurpose failed trajectories for training, improving both learning efficiency and task diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Iron-trained generalist agents consistently improve performance on cross-environment and cross-device tasks, outperforming models trained with three times more data. Iron also achieves a substantial 25.06% relative improvement on unseen web tasks, with further gains observed on inherently complex tasks, demonstrating the feasibility of building more capable virtual agents.
Nonverbal behavior generation systems for virtual agents often take an utterance as input and generate nonverbal behaviors that emphasize or illustrate the content of the verbal channel. However, human nonverbal behavior is shaped by more than the content of the speech. It is also influenced by speaker roles, interpersonal relationships, social context, and the cognitive and emotional states of the interactants. As a result, the nonverbal channel may reinforce, weaken, qualify, or even contradict the verbal channel. It may also reveal internal states that are hidden or only indirectly implied in speech, including emotional "leakage" that may be incidental to the immediate interaction. Modeling this richer relationship between verbal and nonverbal behavior is important for designing virtual agents that exhibit realistic, human-like behavior. It is especially critical in training contexts that require nuanced social interpretation, such as counseling simulations involving virtual patients. Drawing on Ekman's framework of verbal nonverbal relationships, we propose a taxonomy of categories in which mismatches between verbal and nonverbal behavior can occur. We then examine alternative approaches for realizing these behaviors using large language models, focusing on whether LLMs can select contextually appropriate mismatched verbal and nonverbal behaviors from a given dialogue and social interaction context. Finally, we evaluate the resulting behaviors in a human-subject study, assessing whether context-driven nonverbal behavior, when embodied in a virtual human, produces the intended effects on observers.
Embodied intelligent virtual agents are expected to operate as persistent, adaptive, and context-aware entities within complex virtual and Metaverse worlds. However, implementing cognitively capable agents in such environments is conceptually and technologically challenging. Among a range of blueprints and development approaches, the Cognitive Embodied Agent Architecture (CEAA) has been developed as an implementation-oriented framework for architecting components of perception, memory, reasoning, planning, and embodied action. Considering the recent advances in edge computing and generative AI language models, this paper explores the use of Small Language Models (SLMs) to support edge-based operation of selected CEAA components, focusing on "Think" and "Memory" as processes central to cognitive orchestration and persistence of virtual agents in interactive virtual worlds. An edge-based virtual agent gateway system was developed and evaluated on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX using Qwen2.5 models of different sizes, exploring the system's capability to process service requests and handle memory-driven conversations. A series of simulation experiments evaluated routing accuracy, memory-read performance, and latency, demonstrating an SLM-driven prototype agent system that partially implements selected CEAA processes to support the development of embodied agents whose cognitive "brain" can operate efficiently and contextually for interactive experiences in immersive virtual worlds.