Manipulating objects without grasping them is an essential component of human dexterity, referred to as non-prehensile manipulation. Non-prehensile manipulation may enable more complex interactions with the objects, but also presents challenges in reasoning about gripper-object interactions. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Actor-Critic Maps for Manipulation (HACMan), a reinforcement learning approach for 6D non-prehensile manipulation of objects using point cloud observations. HACMan proposes a temporally-abstracted and spatially-grounded object-centric action representation that consists of selecting a contact location from the object point cloud and a set of motion parameters describing how the robot will move after making contact. We modify an existing off-policy RL algorithm to learn in this hybrid discrete-continuous action representation. We evaluate HACMan on a 6D object pose alignment task in both simulation and in the real world. On the hardest version of our task, with randomized initial poses, randomized 6D goals, and diverse object categories, our policy demonstrates strong generalization to unseen object categories without a performance drop, achieving an 89% success rate on unseen objects in simulation and 50% success rate with zero-shot transfer in the real world. Compared to alternative action representations, HACMan achieves a success rate more than three times higher than the best baseline. With zero-shot sim2real transfer, our policy can successfully manipulate unseen objects in the real world for challenging non-planar goals, using dynamic and contact-rich non-prehensile skills. Videos can be found on the project website: //hacman-2023.github.io.
Recent advancements in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have paved the way for a myriad of groundbreaking applications in various fields. However, a significant challenge arises as these models often "hallucinate", i.e., fabricate facts without providing users an apparent means to discern the veracity of their statements. Uncertainty estimation (UE) methods are one path to safer, more responsible, and more effective use of LLMs. However, to date, research on UE methods for LLMs has been focused primarily on theoretical rather than engineering contributions. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing LM-Polygraph, a framework with implementations of a battery of state-of-the-art UE methods for LLMs in text generation tasks, with unified program interfaces in Python. Additionally, it introduces an extendable benchmark for consistent evaluation of UE techniques by researchers, and a demo web application that enriches the standard chat dialog with confidence scores, empowering end-users to discern unreliable responses. LM-Polygraph is compatible with the most recent LLMs, including BLOOMz, LLaMA-2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, and is designed to support future releases of similarly-styled LMs.
In contrastive self-supervised learning, positive samples are typically drawn from the same image but in different augmented views, resulting in a relatively limited source of positive samples. An effective way to alleviate this problem is to incorporate the relationship between samples, which involves including the top-K nearest neighbors of positive samples. However, the problem of false neighbors (i.e., neighbors that do not belong to the same category as the positive sample) is an objective but often overlooked challenge due to the query of neighbor samples without supervision information. In this paper, we present a simple self-supervised learning framework called Mixed Nearest-Neighbors for Self-Supervised Learning (MNN). MNN optimizes the influence of neighbor samples on the semantics of positive samples through an intuitive weighting approach and image mixture operations. The results demonstrate that MNN exhibits exceptional generalization performance and training efficiency on four benchmark datasets.
Causal effect estimation from observational data is a central problem in causal inference. Methods based on potential outcomes framework solve this problem by exploiting inductive biases and heuristics from causal inference. Each of these methods addresses a specific aspect of causal effect estimation, such as controlling propensity score, enforcing randomization, etc., by designing neural network (NN) architectures and regularizers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive method called Neurosymbolic Causal Effect Estimator (NESTER), a generalized method for causal effect estimation. NESTER integrates the ideas used in existing methods based on multi-head NNs for causal effect estimation into one framework. We design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) tailored for causal effect estimation based on causal inductive biases used in literature. We conduct a theoretical analysis to investigate NESTER's efficacy in estimating causal effects. Our comprehensive empirical results show that NESTER performs better than state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Recent research indicates that frequent model communication stands as a major bottleneck to the efficiency of decentralized machine learning (ML), particularly for large-scale and over-parameterized neural networks (NNs). In this paper, we introduce MALCOM-PSGD, a new decentralized ML algorithm that strategically integrates gradient compression techniques with model sparsification. MALCOM-PSGD leverages proximal stochastic gradient descent to handle the non-smoothness resulting from the $\ell_1$ regularization in model sparsification. Furthermore, we adapt vector source coding and dithering-based quantization for compressed gradient communication of sparsified models. Our analysis shows that decentralized proximal stochastic gradient descent with compressed communication has a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(\ln(t)/\sqrt{t}\right)$ assuming a diminishing learning rate and where $t$ denotes the number of iterations. Numerical results verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate that our method reduces communication costs by approximately $75\%$ when compared to the state-of-the-art method.
Existing neural networks are memory-consuming and computationally intensive, making deploying them challenging in resource-constrained environments. However, there are various methods to improve their efficiency. Two such methods are quantization, a well-known approach for network compression, and re-parametrization, an emerging technique designed to improve model performance. Although both techniques have been studied individually, there has been limited research on their simultaneous application. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach called RepQ, which applies quantization to re-parametrized networks. Our method is based on the insight that the test stage weights of an arbitrary re-parametrized layer can be presented as a differentiable function of trainable parameters. We enable quantization-aware training by applying quantization on top of this function. RepQ generalizes well to various re-parametrized models and outperforms the baseline method LSQ quantization scheme in all experiments.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.
Recurrent neural nets (RNN) and convolutional neural nets (CNN) are widely used on NLP tasks to capture the long-term and local dependencies, respectively. Attention mechanisms have recently attracted enormous interest due to their highly parallelizable computation, significantly less training time, and flexibility in modeling dependencies. We propose a novel attention mechanism in which the attention between elements from input sequence(s) is directional and multi-dimensional (i.e., feature-wise). A light-weight neural net, "Directional Self-Attention Network (DiSAN)", is then proposed to learn sentence embedding, based solely on the proposed attention without any RNN/CNN structure. DiSAN is only composed of a directional self-attention with temporal order encoded, followed by a multi-dimensional attention that compresses the sequence into a vector representation. Despite its simple form, DiSAN outperforms complicated RNN models on both prediction quality and time efficiency. It achieves the best test accuracy among all sentence encoding methods and improves the most recent best result by 1.02% on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset, and shows state-of-the-art test accuracy on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST), Multi-Genre natural language inference (MultiNLI), Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK), Customer Review, MPQA, TREC question-type classification and Subjectivity (SUBJ) datasets.