Acquiring food items with a fork poses an immense challenge to a robot-assisted feeding system, due to the wide range of material properties and visual appearances present across food groups. Deformable foods necessitate different skewering strategies than firm ones, but inferring such characteristics for several previously unseen items on a plate remains nontrivial. Our key insight is to leverage visual and haptic observations during interaction with an item to rapidly and reactively plan skewering motions. We learn a generalizable, multimodal representation for a food item from raw sensory inputs which informs the optimal skewering strategy. Given this representation, we propose a zero-shot framework to sense visuo-haptic properties of a previously unseen item and reactively skewer it, all within a single interaction. Real-robot experiments with foods of varying levels of visual and textural diversity demonstrate that our multimodal policy outperforms baselines which do not exploit both visual and haptic cues or do not reactively plan. Across 6 plates of different food items, our proposed framework achieves 71\% success over 69 skewering attempts total. Supplementary material, datasets, code, and videos can be found on our $\href{//sites.google.com/view/hapticvisualnet-corl22/home}{website}$.
Domain adaptation has attracted a great deal of attention in the machine learning community, but it requires access to source data, which often raises concerns about data privacy. We are thus motivated to address these issues and propose a simple yet efficient method. This work treats domain adaptation as an unsupervised clustering problem and trains the target model without access to the source data. Specifically, we propose a loss function called contrast and clustering (CaC), where a positive pair term pulls neighbors belonging to the same class together in the feature space to form clusters, while a negative pair term pushes samples of different classes apart. In addition, extended neighbors are taken into account by querying the nearest neighbor indexes in the memory bank to mine for more valuable negative pairs. Extensive experiments on three common benchmarks, VisDA, Office-Home and Office-31, demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be made publicly available at //github.com/yukilulu/CaC.
Model-based methods have recently shown great potential for off-policy evaluation (OPE); offline trajectories induced by behavioral policies are fitted to transitions of Markov decision processes (MDPs), which are used to rollout simulated trajectories and estimate the performance of policies. Model-based OPE methods face two key challenges. First, as offline trajectories are usually fixed, they tend to cover limited state and action space. Second, the performance of model-based methods can be sensitive to the initialization of their parameters. In this work, we propose the variational latent branching model (VLBM) to learn the transition function of MDPs by formulating the environmental dynamics as a compact latent space, from which the next states and rewards are then sampled. Specifically, VLBM leverages and extends the variational inference framework with the recurrent state alignment (RSA), which is designed to capture as much information underlying the limited training data, by smoothing out the information flow between the variational (encoding) and generative (decoding) part of VLBM. Moreover, we also introduce the branching architecture to improve the model's robustness against randomly initialized model weights. The effectiveness of the VLBM is evaluated on the deep OPE (DOPE) benchmark, from which the training trajectories are designed to result in varied coverage of the state-action space. We show that the VLBM outperforms existing state-of-the-art OPE methods in general.
Humans naturally exploit haptic feedback during contact-rich tasks like loading a dishwasher or stocking a bookshelf. Current robotic systems focus on avoiding unexpected contact, often relying on strategically placed environment sensors. Recently, contact-exploiting manipulation policies have been trained in simulation and deployed on real robots. However, they require some form of real-world adaptation to bridge the sim-to-real gap, which might not be feasible in all scenarios. In this paper we train a contact-exploiting manipulation policy in simulation for the contact-rich household task of loading plates into a slotted holder, which transfers without any fine-tuning to the real robot. We investigate various factors necessary for this zero-shot transfer, like time delay modeling, memory representation, and domain randomization. Our policy transfers with minimal sim-to-real gap and significantly outperforms heuristic and learnt baselines. It also generalizes to plates of different sizes and weights. Demonstration videos and code are available at //sites.google.com/view/ compliant-object-insertion.
Recently, test-time adaptation (TTA) has been proposed as a promising solution for addressing distribution shifts. It allows a base model to adapt to an unforeseen distribution during inference by leveraging the information from the batch of (unlabeled) test data. However, we uncover a novel security vulnerability of TTA based on the insight that predictions on benign samples can be impacted by malicious samples in the same batch. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose Distribution Invading Attack (DIA), which injects a small fraction of malicious data into the test batch. DIA causes models using TTA to misclassify benign and unperturbed test data, providing an entirely new capability for adversaries that is infeasible in canonical machine learning pipelines. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate the high effectiveness of our attack on multiple benchmarks across six TTA methods. In response, we investigate two countermeasures to robustify the existing insecure TTA implementations, following the principle of "security by design". Together, we hope our findings can make the community aware of the utility-security tradeoffs in deploying TTA and provide valuable insights for developing robust TTA approaches.
Stacking (or stacked generalization) is an ensemble learning method with one main distinctiveness from the rest: even though several base models are trained on the original data set, their predictions are further used as input data for one or more metamodels arranged in at least one extra layer. Composing a stack of models can produce high-performance outcomes, but it usually involves a trial-and-error process. Therefore, our previously developed visual analytics system, StackGenVis, was mainly designed to assist users in choosing a set of top-performing and diverse models by measuring their predictive performance. However, it only employs a single logistic regression metamodel. In this paper, we investigate the impact of alternative metamodels on the performance of stacking ensembles using a novel visualization tool, called MetaStackVis. Our interactive tool helps users to visually explore different singular and pairs of metamodels according to their predictive probabilities and multiple validation metrics, as well as their ability to predict specific problematic data instances. MetaStackVis was evaluated with a usage scenario based on a medical data set and via expert interviews.
Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: from a pre-trained foundation model, they fine-tune the weights on the target task of interest. So, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks: these individual fine-tunings exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain rich and diverse features. In this paper, we thus propose model ratatouille, a new strategy to recycle the multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks. Specifically, we repurpose these auxiliary weights as initializations for multiple parallel fine-tunings on the target task; then, we average all fine-tuned weights to obtain the final model. This recycling strategy aims at maximizing the diversity in weights by leveraging the diversity in auxiliary tasks. Empirically, it improves the state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, this work contributes to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to reliably update machine learning models.
The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new paradigm called reinforcement learning from human preferences (or preference-based RL) has emerged as a promising solution, in which reward functions are learned from human preference labels among behavior trajectories. However, existing methods for preference-based RL are limited by the need for accurate oracle preference labels. This paper addresses this limitation by developing a method for crowd-sourcing preference labels and learning from diverse human preferences. The key idea is to stabilize reward learning through regularization and correction in a latent space. To ensure temporal consistency, a strong constraint is imposed on the reward model that forces its latent space to be close to the prior distribution. Additionally, a confidence-based reward model ensembling method is designed to generate more stable and reliable predictions. The proposed method is tested on a variety of tasks in DMcontrol and Meta-world and has shown consistent and significant improvements over existing preference-based RL algorithms when learning from diverse feedback, paving the way for real-world applications of RL methods.
Understanding the interaction between different road users is critical for road safety and automated vehicles (AVs). Existing mathematical models on this topic have been proposed based mostly on either cognitive or machine learning (ML) approaches. However, current cognitive models are incapable of simulating road user trajectories in general scenarios, and ML models lack a focus on the mechanisms generating the behavior and take a high-level perspective which can cause failures to capture important human-like behaviors. Here, we develop a model of human pedestrian crossing decisions based on computational rationality, an approach using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to learn boundedly optimal behavior policies given human constraints, in our case a model of the limited human visual system. We show that the proposed combined cognitive-RL model captures human-like patterns of gap acceptance and crossing initiation time. Interestingly, our model's decisions are sensitive to not only the time gap, but also the speed of the approaching vehicle, something which has been described as a "bias" in human gap acceptance behavior. However, our results suggest that this is instead a rational adaption to human perceptual limitations. Moreover, we demonstrate an approach to accounting for individual differences in computational rationality models, by conditioning the RL policy on the parameters of the human constraints. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of generating more human-like road user behavior by combining RL with cognitive models.
Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) attracts increasing attention due to its potential to resolve the scalability problem of supervised Re-ID models. Most existing unsupervised methods adopt an iterative clustering mechanism, where the network was trained based on pseudo labels generated by unsupervised clustering. However, clustering errors are inevitable. To generate high-quality pseudo-labels and mitigate the impact of clustering errors, we propose a novel clustering relationship modeling framework for unsupervised person Re-ID. Specifically, before clustering, the relation between unlabeled images is explored based on a graph correlation learning (GCL) module and the refined features are then used for clustering to generate high-quality pseudo-labels.Thus, GCL adaptively mines the relationship between samples in a mini-batch to reduce the impact of abnormal clustering when training. To train the network more effectively, we further propose a selective contrastive learning (SCL) method with a selective memory bank update policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows much better results than most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and MSMT17 datasets. We will release the code for model reproduction.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen before and cannot make a safe decision. This problem first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. These include anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). Despite having different definitions and problem settings, these problems often confuse readers and practitioners, and as a result, some existing studies misuse terms. In this survey, we first present a generic framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. Then, we conduct a thorough review of each of the five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.