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Caution for the Environment: Multimodal LLM Agents are Susceptible to Environmental Distractions

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arxiv 2408.02544 v3 pith:DP7RMKEX submitted 2024-08-05 cs.CL

Caution for the Environment: Multimodal LLM Agents are Susceptible to Environmental Distractions

classification cs.CL
keywords agentsenvironmentdistractionsenvironmentalmultimodalfaithfulnessfocussusceptible
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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This paper investigates the faithfulness of multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents in a graphical user interface (GUI) environment, aiming to address the research question of whether multimodal GUI agents can be distracted by environmental context. A general scenario is proposed where both the user and the agent are benign, and the environment, while not malicious, contains unrelated content. A wide range of MLLMs are evaluated as GUI agents using a simulated dataset, following three working patterns with different levels of perception. Experimental results reveal that even the most powerful models, whether generalist agents or specialist GUI agents, are susceptible to distractions. While recent studies predominantly focus on the helpfulness of agents, our findings first indicate that these agents are prone to environmental distractions. Furthermore, we implement an adversarial environment injection and analyze the approach to improve faithfulness, calling for a collective focus on this important topic.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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