Building a generalist agent that can interact with the world is the intriguing target of AI systems, thus spurring the research for embodied navigation, where an agent is required to navigate according to instructions or respond to queries. Despite the major progress attained, previous works primarily focus on task-specific agents and lack generalizability to unseen scenarios. Recently, LLMs have presented remarkable capabilities across various fields, and provided a promising opportunity for embodied navigation. Drawing on this, we propose the first generalist model for embodied navigation, NaviLLM. It adapts LLMs to embodied navigation by introducing schema-based instruction. The schema-based instruction flexibly casts various tasks into generation problems, thereby unifying a wide range of tasks. This approach allows us to integrate diverse data sources from various datasets into the training, equipping NaviLLM with a wide range of capabilities required by embodied navigation. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance and generalizability of our model. The experimental results demonstrate that our unified model achieves state-of-the-art performance on CVDN, SOON, and ScanQA. Specifically, it surpasses the previous stats-of-the-art method by a significant margin of 29% in goal progress on CVDN. Moreover, our model also demonstrates strong generalizability and presents impressive results on unseen tasks, e.g., embodied question answering and 3D captioning.
Recent studies have uncovered the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in addressing complex sequential decision-making tasks through the provision of high-level instructions. However, LLM-based agents lack specialization in tackling specific target problems, particularly in real-time dynamic environments. Additionally, deploying an LLM-based agent in practical scenarios can be both costly and time-consuming. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) approaches train agents that specialize in the target task but often suffer from low sampling efficiency and high exploration costs. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that addresses these challenges by training a smaller, specialized student RL agent using instructions from an LLM-based teacher agent. By incorporating the guidance from the teacher agent, the student agent can distill the prior knowledge of the LLM into its own model. Consequently, the student agent can be trained with significantly less data. Moreover, through further training with environment feedback, the student agent surpasses the capabilities of its teacher for completing the target task. We conducted experiments on challenging MiniGrid and Habitat environments, specifically designed for embodied AI research, to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework. The results clearly demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to strong baseline methods. Our code is available at //github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/LLM4Teach.
This work introduces a time domain personalized method (pGTFF0) to achieve intelligibility improvement of noisy speech for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) situation. For this proposal, harmonic features estimated from speech frames are considered as center frequencies of Gammatone auditory filterbanks. A gain factor is further applied to the output of the filtered samples. The key goal is the emulation of an external noise filtering tailored for individuals with ASD. A perceptual listening test demonstrates that ASD volunteers attained lower intelligibility rates than Neurotypical (NT). The proposed solution is compared to three competing approaches considering four acoustic noises at different signal-to-noise ratios. Two objective measures (ESTOI and PESQ) are also adopted for evaluation. The experimental results show that the personalized solution outperformed the competing approaches in terms of intelligibility and quality improvement.
This work aims to address an open problem in data valuation literature concerning the efficient computation of Data Shapley for weighted $K$ nearest neighbor algorithm (WKNN-Shapley). By considering the accuracy of hard-label KNN with discretized weights as the utility function, we reframe the computation of WKNN-Shapley into a counting problem and introduce a quadratic-time algorithm, presenting a notable improvement from $O(N^K)$, the best result from existing literature. We develop a deterministic approximation algorithm that further improves computational efficiency while maintaining the key fairness properties of the Shapley value. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate WKNN-Shapley's computational efficiency and its superior performance in discerning data quality compared to its unweighted counterpart.
Generating proofs of unsatisfiability is a valuable capability of most SAT solvers, and is an active area of research for SMT solvers. This paper introduces the first method to efficiently generate proofs of unsatisfiability specifically for an important subset of SMT: SAT Modulo Monotonic Theories (SMMT), which includes many useful finite-domain theories (e.g., bit vectors and many graph-theoretic properties) and is used in production at Amazon Web Services. Our method uses propositional definitions of the theory predicates, from which it generates compact Horn approximations of the definitions, which lead to efficient DRAT proofs, leveraging the large investment the SAT community has made in DRAT. In experiments on practical SMMT problems, our proof generation overhead is minimal (7.41% geometric mean slowdown, 28.8% worst-case), and we can generate and check proofs for many problems that were previously intractable.
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can provide recalibration supervision and task-specific concepts. Specifically, an attention modulation module (AMM) is employed to rearrange the distribution of feature importance from the channel-spatial sequential perspective, which helps to explicitly model channel-wise interdependencies and spatial encodings to adaptively modulate segmentation-oriented activation responses. Furthermore, we introduce a cross pseudo supervision for dual branches, which can be regarded as a semantic similar regularization to mutually refine two branches. Extensive experiments show that AMR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing not only current methods trained with the image-level of supervision but also some methods relying on stronger supervision, such as saliency label. Experiments also reveal that our scheme is plug-and-play and can be incorporated with other approaches to boost their performance.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.