Prompt tuning, in which prompts are optimized to adapt large-scale pre-trained language models to downstream tasks instead of fine-tuning the full model parameters, has been shown to be particularly effective when the prompts are trained in a multi-task transfer learning setting. These methods generally involve individually training prompts for each source task and then aggregating them to provide the initialization of the prompt for the target task. However, this approach critically ignores the fact that some of the source tasks could be negatively or positively interfering with each other. We argue that when we extract knowledge from source tasks via training source prompts, we need to consider this correlation among source tasks for better transfer to target tasks. To this end, we propose a Bayesian approach where we work with the posterior distribution of prompts across source tasks. We obtain representative source prompts corresponding to the samples from the posterior utilizing Stein Variational Gradient Descent, which are then aggregated to constitute the initial target prompt. We show extensive experimental results on the standard benchmark NLP tasks, where our Bayesian multi-task transfer learning approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in many settings. Furthermore, our approach requires no auxiliary models other than the prompt itself, achieving a high degree of parameter efficiency.
Deep learning faces significant challenges during the training of neural networks, including internal covariate shift, label shift, vanishing/exploding gradients, overfitting, and computational complexity. While conventional normalization methods, such as Batch Normalization, aim to tackle some of these issues, they often depend on assumptions that constrain their adaptability. Mixture Normalization faces computational hurdles in its pursuit of handling multiple Gaussian distributions. This paper introduces Cluster-Based Normalization (CB-Norm) in two variants - Supervised Cluster-Based Normalization (SCB-Norm) and Unsupervised Cluster-Based Normalization (UCB-Norm) - proposing a groundbreaking one-step normalization approach. CB-Norm leverages a Gaussian mixture model to specifically address challenges related to gradient stability and learning acceleration. For SCB-Norm, a supervised variant, the novel mechanism involves introducing predefined data partitioning, termed clusters, to normalize activations based on the assigned cluster. This cluster-driven approach creates a space that conforms to a Gaussian mixture model. On the other hand, UCB-Norm, an unsupervised counterpart, dynamically clusters neuron activations during training, adapting to task-specific challenges without relying on predefined data partitions (clusters). This dual approach ensures flexibility in addressing diverse learning scenarios. CB-Norm innovatively uses a one-step normalization approach, where parameters of each mixture component (cluster in activation space) serve as weights for deep neural networks. This adaptive clustering process tackles both clustering and resolution of deep neural network tasks concurrently during training, signifying a notable advancement in the field.
Force interaction is inevitable when robots face multiple operation scenarios. How to make the robot competent in force control for generalized operations such as multi-tasks still remains a challenging problem. Aiming at the reproducibility of interaction tasks and the lack of a generalized force control framework for multi-task scenarios, this paper proposes a novel hybrid control framework based on active admittance control with iterative learning parameters-tunning mechanism. The method adopts admittance control as the underlying algorithm to ensure flexibility, and iterative learning as the high-level algorithm to regulate the parameters of the admittance model. The whole algorithm has flexibility and learning ability, which is capable of achieving the goal of excellent versatility. Four representative interactive robot manipulation tasks are chosen to investigate the consistency and generalisability of the proposed method. Experiments are designed to verify the effectiveness of the whole framework, and an average of 98.21% and 91.52% improvement of RMSE is obtained relative to the traditional admittance control as well as the model-free adaptive control, respectively.
Language models have shown promise in various tasks but can be affected by undesired data during training, fine-tuning, or alignment. For example, if some unsafe conversations are wrongly annotated as safe ones, the model fine-tuned on these samples may be harmful. Therefore, the correctness of annotations, i.e., the credibility of the dataset, is important. This study focuses on the credibility of real-world datasets, including the popular benchmarks Jigsaw Civil Comments, Anthropic Harmless & Red Team, PKU BeaverTails & SafeRLHF, that can be used for training a harmless language model. Given the cost and difficulty of cleaning these datasets by humans, we introduce a systematic framework for evaluating the credibility of datasets, identifying label errors, and evaluating the influence of noisy labels in the curated language data, specifically focusing on unsafe comments and conversation classification. With the framework, we find and fix an average of 6.16% label errors in 11 datasets constructed from the above benchmarks. The data credibility and downstream learning performance can be remarkably improved by directly fixing label errors, indicating the significance of cleaning existing real-world datasets. We provide an open-source tool, Docta, for data cleaning at //github.com/Docta-ai/docta.
Data-driven optimization models have the potential to significantly improve hospital capacity management, particularly during demand surges, when effective allocation of capacity is most critical and challenging. However, integrating models into existing processes in a way that provides value requires recognizing that hospital administrators are ultimately responsible for making capacity management decisions, and carefully building trustworthy and accessible tools for them. In this study, we develop an interactive, user-friendly, electronic dashboard for informing hospital capacity management decisions during surge periods. The dashboard integrates real-time hospital data, predictive analytics, and optimization models. It allows hospital administrators to interactively customize parameters, enabling them to explore a range of scenarios, and provides real-time updates on recommended optimal decisions. The dashboard was created through a participatory design process, involving hospital administrators in the development team to ensure practical utility, trustworthiness, transparency, explainability, and usability. We successfully deployed our dashboard within the Johns Hopkins Health System during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing the increased need for tools to inform hospital capacity management. It was used on a daily basis, with results regularly communicated to hospital leadership. This study demonstrates the practical application of a prospective, data-driven, interactive decision-support tool for hospital system capacity management.
We propose a data-driven control method for systems with aleatoric uncertainty, for example, robot fleets with variations between agents. Our method leverages shared trajectory data to increase the robustness of the designed controller and thus facilitate transfer to new variations without the need for prior parameter and uncertainty estimations. In contrast to existing work on experience transfer for performance, our approach focuses on robustness and uses data collected from multiple realizations to guarantee generalization to unseen ones. Our method is based on scenario optimization combined with recent formulations for direct data-driven control. We derive lower bounds on the amount of data required to achieve quadratic stability for probabilistic systems with aleatoric uncertainty and demonstrate the benefits of our data-driven method through a numerical example. We find that the learned controllers generalize well to high variations in the dynamics even when based on only a few short open-loop trajectories. Robust experience transfer enables the design of safe and robust controllers that work out of the box without any additional learning during deployment.
Sample efficient learning of manipulation skills poses a major challenge in robotics. While recent approaches demonstrate impressive advances in the type of task that can be addressed and the sensing modalities that can be incorporated, they still require large amounts of training data. Especially with regard to learning actions on robots in the real world, this poses a major problem due to the high costs associated with both demonstrations and real-world robot interactions. To address this challenge, we introduce BOpt-GMM, a hybrid approach that combines imitation learning with own experience collection. We first learn a skill model as a dynamical system encoded in a Gaussian Mixture Model from a few demonstrations. We then improve this model with Bayesian optimization building on a small number of autonomous skill executions in a sparse reward setting. We demonstrate the sample efficiency of our approach on multiple complex manipulation skills in both simulations and real-world experiments. Furthermore, we make the code and pre-trained models publicly available at //bopt-gmm. cs.uni-freiburg.de.
The 3D Gaussian splatting method has drawn a lot of attention, thanks to its high performance in training and high quality of the rendered image. However, it uses anisotropic Gaussian kernels to represent the scene. Although such anisotropic kernels have advantages in representing the geometry, they lead to difficulties in terms of computation, such as splitting or merging two kernels. In this paper, we propose to use isotropic Gaussian kernels to avoid such difficulties in the computation, leading to a higher performance method. The experiments confirm that the proposed method is about {\bf 100X} faster without losing the geometry representation accuracy. The proposed method can be applied in a large range applications where the radiance field is needed, such as 3D reconstruction, view synthesis, and dynamic object modeling.
Robot Imitation Learning (IL) is a widely used method for training robots to perform manipulation tasks that involve mimicking human demonstrations to acquire skills. However, its practicality has been limited due to its requirement that users be trained in operating real robot arms to provide demonstrations. This paper presents an innovative solution: an Augmented Reality (AR)-assisted framework for demonstration collection, empowering non-roboticist users to produce demonstrations for robot IL using devices like the HoloLens 2. Our framework facilitates scalable and diverse demonstration collection for real-world tasks. We validate our approach with experiments on three classical robotics tasks: reach, push, and pick-and-place. The real robot performs each task successfully while replaying demonstrations collected via AR.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
The low resolution of objects of interest in aerial images makes pedestrian detection and action detection extremely challenging tasks. Furthermore, using deep convolutional neural networks to process large images can be demanding in terms of computational requirements. In order to alleviate these challenges, we propose a two-step, yes and no question answering framework to find specific individuals doing one or multiple specific actions in aerial images. First, a deep object detector, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD), is used to generate object proposals from small aerial images. Second, another deep network, is used to learn a latent common sub-space which associates the high resolution aerial imagery and the pedestrian action labels that are provided by the human-based sources