Generating human-like behavior on robots is a great challenge especially in dexterous manipulation tasks with robotic hands. Scripting policies from scratch is intractable due to the high-dimensional control space, and training policies with reinforcement learning (RL) and manual reward engineering can also be hard and lead to unnatural motions. Leveraging the recent progress on RL from Human Feedback, we propose a framework that learns a universal human prior using direct human preference feedback over videos, for efficiently tuning the RL policies on 20 dual-hand robot manipulation tasks in simulation, without a single human demonstration. A task-agnostic reward model is trained through iteratively generating diverse polices and collecting human preference over the trajectories; it is then applied for regularizing the behavior of polices in the fine-tuning stage. Our method empirically demonstrates more human-like behaviors on robot hands in diverse tasks including even unseen tasks, indicating its generalization capability.
Generalist robot manipulators need to learn a wide variety of manipulation skills across diverse environments. Current robot training pipelines rely on humans to provide kinesthetic demonstrations or to program simulation environments and to code up reward functions for reinforcement learning. Such human involvement is an important bottleneck towards scaling up robot learning across diverse tasks and environments. We propose Generation to Simulation (Gen2Sim), a method for scaling up robot skill learning in simulation by automating generation of 3D assets, task descriptions, task decompositions and reward functions using large pre-trained generative models of language and vision. We generate 3D assets for simulation by lifting open-world 2D object-centric images to 3D using image diffusion models and querying LLMs to determine plausible physics parameters. Given URDF files of generated and human-developed assets, we chain-of-thought prompt LLMs to map these to relevant task descriptions, temporal decompositions, and corresponding python reward functions for reinforcement learning. We show Gen2Sim succeeds in learning policies for diverse long horizon tasks, where reinforcement learning with non temporally decomposed reward functions fails. Gen2Sim provides a viable path for scaling up reinforcement learning for robot manipulators in simulation, both by diversifying and expanding task and environment development, and by facilitating the discovery of reinforcement-learned behaviors through temporal task decomposition in RL. Our work contributes hundreds of simulated assets, tasks and demonstrations, taking a step towards fully autonomous robotic manipulation skill acquisition in simulation.
Learning from demonstration (LfD) is a popular technique that uses expert demonstrations to learn robot control policies. However, the difficulty in acquiring expert-quality demonstrations limits the applicability of LfD methods: real-world data collection is often costly, and the quality of the demonstrations depends greatly on the demonstrator's abilities and safety concerns. A number of works have leveraged data augmentation (DA) to inexpensively generate additional demonstration data, but most DA works generate augmented data in a random fashion and ultimately produce highly suboptimal data. In this work, we propose Guided Data Augmentation (GuDA), a human-guided DA framework that generates expert-quality augmented data. The key insight of GuDA is that while it may be difficult to demonstrate the sequence of actions required to produce expert data, a user can often easily identify when an augmented trajectory segment represents task progress. Thus, the user can impose a series of simple rules on the DA process to automatically generate augmented samples that approximate expert behavior. To extract a policy from GuDA, we use off-the-shelf offline reinforcement learning and behavior cloning algorithms. We evaluate GuDA on a physical robot soccer task as well as simulated D4RL navigation tasks, a simulated autonomous driving task, and a simulated soccer task. Empirically, we find that GuDA enables learning from a small set of potentially suboptimal demonstrations and substantially outperforms a DA strategy that samples augmented data randomly.
Hyperparameters play a critical role in machine learning. Hyperparameter tuning can make the difference between state-of-the-art and poor prediction performance for any algorithm, but it is particularly challenging for structure learning due to its unsupervised nature. As a result, hyperparameter tuning is often neglected in favour of using the default values provided by a particular implementation of an algorithm. While there have been numerous studies on performance evaluation of causal discovery algorithms, how hyperparameters affect individual algorithms, as well as the choice of the best algorithm for a specific problem, has not been studied in depth before. This work addresses this gap by investigating the influence of hyperparameters on causal structure learning tasks. Specifically, we perform an empirical evaluation of hyperparameter selection for some seminal learning algorithms on datasets of varying levels of complexity. We find that, while the choice of algorithm remains crucial to obtaining state-of-the-art performance, hyperparameter selection in ensemble settings strongly influences the choice of algorithm, in that a poor choice of hyperparameters can lead to analysts using algorithms which do not give state-of-the-art performance for their data.
This paper presents a new synthesis-based approach for solving the Learning from Demonstration (LfD) problem in robotics. Given a set of user demonstrations, the goal of programmatic LfD is to learn a policy in a programming language that can be used to control a robot's behavior. We address this problem through a novel program synthesis algorithm that leverages two key ideas: First, to perform fast and effective generalization from user demonstrations, our synthesis algorithm views these demonstrations as strings over a finite alphabet and abstracts programs in our DSL as regular expressions over the same alphabet. This regex abstraction facilitates synthesis by helping infer useful program sketches and pruning infeasible parts of the search space. Second, to deal with the large number of object types in the environment, our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to guide search. We have implemented our approach in a tool called Prolex and present the results of a comprehensive experimental evaluation on 120 benchmarks involving 40 unique tasks in three different environments. We show that, given a 120 second time limit, Prolex can find a program consistent with the demonstrations in 80% of the cases. Furthermore, for 81% of the tasks for which a solution is returned, Prolex is able to find the ground truth program with just one demonstration. To put these results in perspective, we conduct a comparison against two baselines and show that both perform much worse.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can enable robots to autonomously acquire complex behaviors, such as legged locomotion. However, RL in the real world is complicated by constraints on efficiency, safety, and overall training stability, which limits its practical applicability. We present APRL, a policy regularization framework that modulates the robot's exploration over the course of training, striking a balance between flexible improvement potential and focused, efficient exploration. APRL enables a quadrupedal robot to efficiently learn to walk entirely in the real world within minutes and continue to improve with more training where prior work saturates in performance. We demonstrate that continued training with APRL results in a policy that is substantially more capable of navigating challenging situations and is able to adapt to changes in dynamics with continued training.
Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects in diverse environments is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent studies have shown that point-level affordance provides actionable priors for downstream manipulation tasks. However, existing works primarily focus on single-object scenarios with homogeneous agents, overlooking the realistic constraints imposed by the environment and the agent's morphology, e.g., occlusions and physical limitations. In this paper, we propose an environment-aware affordance framework that incorporates both object-level actionable priors and environment constraints. Unlike object-centric affordance approaches, learning environment-aware affordance faces the challenge of combinatorial explosion due to the complexity of various occlusions, characterized by their quantities, geometries, positions and poses. To address this and enhance data efficiency, we introduce a novel contrastive affordance learning framework capable of training on scenes containing a single occluder and generalizing to scenes with complex occluder combinations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in learning affordance considering environment constraints. Project page at //chengkaiacademycity.github.io/EnvAwareAfford/
The use of pretrained deep neural networks represents an attractive way to achieve strong results with few data available. When specialized in dense problems such as object detection, learning local rather than global information in images has proven to be more efficient. However, for unsupervised pretraining, the popular contrastive learning requires a large batch size and, therefore, a lot of resources. To address this problem, we are interested in transformer-based object detectors that have recently gained traction in the community with good performance and with the particularity of generating many diverse object proposals. In this work, we present Proposal Selection Contrast (ProSeCo), a novel unsupervised overall pretraining approach that leverages this property. ProSeCo uses the large number of object proposals generated by the detector for contrastive learning, which allows the use of a smaller batch size, combined with object-level features to learn local information in the images. To improve the effectiveness of the contrastive loss, we introduce the object location information in the selection of positive examples to take into account multiple overlapping object proposals. When reusing pretrained backbone, we advocate for consistency in learning local information between the backbone and the detection head. We show that our method outperforms state of the art in unsupervised pretraining for object detection on standard and novel benchmarks in learning with fewer data.
Schizophrenia is a severe yet treatable mental disorder, it is diagnosed using a multitude of primary and secondary symptoms. Diagnosis and treatment for each individual depends on the severity of the symptoms, therefore there is a need for accurate, personalised assessments. However, the process can be both time-consuming and subjective; hence, there is a motivation to explore automated methods that can offer consistent diagnosis and precise symptom assessments, thereby complementing the work of healthcare practitioners. Machine Learning has demonstrated impressive capabilities across numerous domains, including medicine; the use of Machine Learning in patient assessment holds great promise for healthcare professionals and patients alike, as it can lead to more consistent and accurate symptom estimation.This survey aims to review methodologies that utilise Machine Learning for diagnosis and assessment of schizophrenia. Contrary to previous reviews that primarily focused on binary classification, this work recognises the complexity of the condition and instead, offers an overview of Machine Learning methods designed for fine-grained symptom estimation. We cover multiple modalities, namely Medical Imaging, Electroencephalograms and Audio-Visual, as the illness symptoms can manifest themselves both in a patient's pathology and behaviour. Finally, we analyse the datasets and methodologies used in the studies and identify trends, gaps as well as opportunities for future research.
Decoding the human brain has been a hallmark of neuroscientists and Artificial Intelligence researchers alike. Reconstruction of visual images from brain Electroencephalography (EEG) signals has garnered a lot of interest due to its applications in brain-computer interfacing. This study proposes a two-stage method where the first step is to obtain EEG-derived features for robust learning of deep representations and subsequently utilize the learned representation for image generation and classification. We demonstrate the generalizability of our feature extraction pipeline across three different datasets using deep-learning architectures with supervised and contrastive learning methods. We have performed the zero-shot EEG classification task to support the generalizability claim further. We observed that a subject invariant linearly separable visual representation was learned using EEG data alone in an unimodal setting that gives better k-means accuracy as compared to a joint representation learning between EEG and images. Finally, we propose a novel framework to transform unseen images into the EEG space and reconstruct them with approximation, showcasing the potential for image reconstruction from EEG signals. Our proposed image synthesis method from EEG shows 62.9% and 36.13% inception score improvement on the EEGCVPR40 and the Thoughtviz datasets, which is better than state-of-the-art performance in GAN.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.