Visual target navigation in unknown environments is a crucial problem in robotics. Despite extensive investigation of classical and learning-based approaches in the past, robots lack common-sense knowledge about household objects and layouts. Prior state-of-the-art approaches to this task rely on learning the priors during the training and typically require significant expensive resources and time for learning. To address this, we propose a new framework for visual target navigation that leverages Large Language Models (LLM) to impart common sense for object searching. Specifically, we introduce two paradigms: (i) zero-shot and (ii) feed-forward approaches that use language to find the relevant frontier from the semantic map as a long-term goal and explore the environment efficiently. Our analysis demonstrates the notable zero-shot generalization and transfer capabilities from the use of language. Experiments on Gibson and Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms existing map-based methods in terms of success rate and generalization. Ablation analysis also indicates that the common-sense knowledge from the language model leads to more efficient semantic exploration. Finally, we provide a real robot experiment to verify the applicability of our framework in real-world scenarios. The supplementary video and code can be accessed via the following link: //sites.google.com/view/l3mvn.
To realize effective large-scale, real-world robotic applications, we must evaluate how well our robot policies adapt to changes in environmental conditions. Unfortunately, a majority of studies evaluate robot performance in environments closely resembling or even identical to the training setup. We present THE COLOSSEUM, a novel simulation benchmark, with 20 diverse manipulation tasks, that enables systematical evaluation of models across 12 axes of environmental perturbations. These perturbations include changes in color, texture, and size of objects, table-tops, and backgrounds; we also vary lighting, distractors, and camera pose. Using THE COLOSSEUM, we compare 4 state-of-the-art manipulation models to reveal that their success rate degrades between 30-50% across these perturbation factors. When multiple perturbations are applied in unison, the success rate degrades $\geq$75%. We identify that changing the number of distractor objects, target object color, or lighting conditions are the perturbations that reduce model performance the most. To verify the ecological validity of our results, we show that our results in simulation are correlated ($\bar{R}^2 = 0.614$) to similar perturbations in real-world experiments. We open source code for others to use THE COLOSSEUM, and also release code to 3D print the objects used to replicate the real-world perturbations. Ultimately, we hope that THE COLOSSEUM will serve as a benchmark to identify modeling decisions that systematically improve generalization for manipulation. See //robot-colosseum.github.io/ for more details.
Despite advancements in evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) for code synthesis, benchmarks have predominantly focused on functional correctness, overlooking the importance of code efficiency. We present Mercury, the first benchmark designated for assessing the code efficiency of LLM code synthesis tasks. Mercury consists of 1,889 programming tasks covering diverse difficulty levels alongside test case generators generating unlimited cases for comprehensive evaluation. Unlike existing benchmarks, Mercury integrates a novel metric Beyond@K to measure normalized code efficiency based on historical submissions, leading to a new evaluation indicator for code synthesis, which encourages generating functionally correct and computationally efficient code, mirroring the real-world software development standard. Our findings reveal that while LLMs demonstrate the remarkable capability to generate functionally correct code, there still exists a substantial gap in their efficiency output, underscoring a new frontier for LLM research and development.
This work explores the zero-shot adaptation capability of semantic skills, semantically interpretable experts' behavior patterns, in cross-domain settings, where a user input in interleaved multi-modal snippets can prompt a new long-horizon task for different domains. In these cross-domain settings, we present a semantic skill translator framework SemTra which utilizes a set of multi-modal models to extract skills from the snippets, and leverages the reasoning capabilities of a pretrained language model to adapt these extracted skills to the target domain. The framework employs a two-level hierarchy for adaptation: task adaptation and skill adaptation. During task adaptation, seq-to-seq translation by the language model transforms the extracted skills into a semantic skill sequence, which is tailored to fit the cross-domain contexts. Skill adaptation focuses on optimizing each semantic skill for the target domain context, through parametric instantiations that are facilitated by language prompting and contrastive learning-based context inferences. This hierarchical adaptation empowers the framework to not only infer a complex task specification in one-shot from the interleaved multi-modal snippets, but also adapt it to new domains with zero-shot learning abilities. We evaluate our framework with Meta-World, Franka Kitchen, RLBench, and CARLA environments. The results clarify the framework's superiority in performing long-horizon tasks and adapting to different domains, showing its broad applicability in practical use cases, such as cognitive robots interpreting abstract instructions and autonomous vehicles operating under varied configurations.
Trajectory planning is a fundamental problem in robotics. It facilitates a wide range of applications in navigation and motion planning, control, and multi-agent coordination. Trajectory planning is a difficult problem due to its computational complexity and real-world environment complexity with uncertainty, non-linearity, and real-time requirements. The multi-agent trajectory planning problem adds another dimension of difficulty due to inter-agent interaction. Existing solutions are either search-based or optimization-based approaches with simplified assumptions of environment, limited planning speed, and limited scalability in the number of agents. In this work, we make the first attempt to reformulate single agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problem as query problems over an implicit neural representation of trajectories. We formulate such implicit representation as Neural Trajectory Models (NTM) which can be queried to generate nearly optimal trajectory in complex environments. We conduct experiments in simulation environments and demonstrate that NTM can solve single-agent and multi-agent trajectory planning problems. In the experiments, NTMs achieve (1) sub-millisecond panning time using GPUs, (2) almost avoiding all environment collision, (3) almost avoiding all inter-agent collision, and (4) generating almost shortest paths. We also demonstrate that the same NTM framework can also be used for trajectories correction and multi-trajectory conflict resolution refining low quality and conflicting multi-agent trajectories into nearly optimal solutions efficiently. (Open source code will be available at //github.com/laser2099/neural-trajectory-model)
The electronic design automation of analog circuits has been a longstanding challenge in the integrated circuit field due to the huge design space and complex design trade-offs among circuit specifications. In the past decades, intensive research efforts have mostly been paid to automate the transistor sizing with a given circuit topology. By recognizing the graph nature of circuits, this paper presents a Circuit Graph Neural Network (CktGNN) that simultaneously automates the circuit topology generation and device sizing based on the encoder-dependent optimization subroutines. Particularly, CktGNN encodes circuit graphs using a two-level GNN framework (of nested GNN) where circuits are represented as combinations of subgraphs in a known subgraph basis. In this way, it significantly improves design efficiency by reducing the number of subgraphs to perform message passing. Nonetheless, another critical roadblock to advancing learning-assisted circuit design automation is a lack of public benchmarks to perform canonical assessment and reproducible research. To tackle the challenge, we introduce Open Circuit Benchmark (OCB), an open-sourced dataset that contains $10$K distinct operational amplifiers with carefully-extracted circuit specifications. OCB is also equipped with communicative circuit generation and evaluation capabilities such that it can help to generalize CktGNN to design various analog circuits by producing corresponding datasets. Experiments on OCB show the extraordinary advantages of CktGNN through representation-based optimization frameworks over other recent powerful GNN baselines and human experts' manual designs. Our work paves the way toward a learning-based open-sourced design automation for analog circuits. Our source code is available at \url{//github.com/zehao-dong/CktGNN}.
We present a novel approach for the detection of deepfake videos using a pair of vision transformers pre-trained by a self-supervised masked autoencoding setup. Our method consists of two distinct components, one of which focuses on learning spatial information from individual RGB frames of the video, while the other learns temporal consistency information from optical flow fields generated from consecutive frames. Unlike most approaches where pre-training is performed on a generic large corpus of images, we show that by pre-training on smaller face-related datasets, namely Celeb-A (for the spatial learning component) and YouTube Faces (for the temporal learning component), strong results can be obtained. We perform various experiments to evaluate the performance of our method on commonly used datasets namely FaceForensics++ (Low Quality and High Quality, along with a new highly compressed version named Very Low Quality) and Celeb-DFv2 datasets. Our experiments show that our method sets a new state-of-the-art on FaceForensics++ (LQ, HQ, and VLQ), and obtains competitive results on Celeb-DFv2. Moreover, our method outperforms other methods in the area in a cross-dataset setup where we fine-tune our model on FaceForensics++ and test on CelebDFv2, pointing to its strong cross-dataset generalization ability.
Physical adversarial attacks pose a significant practical threat as it deceives deep learning systems operating in the real world by producing prominent and maliciously designed physical perturbations. Emphasizing the evaluation of naturalness is crucial in such attacks, as humans can readily detect and eliminate unnatural manipulations. To overcome this limitation, recent work has proposed leveraging generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate naturalistic patches, which may not catch human's attention. However, these approaches suffer from a limited latent space which leads to an inevitable trade-off between naturalness and attack efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate naturalistic and inconspicuous adversarial patches. Specifically, we redefine the optimization problem by introducing an additional loss term to the cost function. This term works as a semantic constraint to ensure that the generated camouflage pattern holds semantic meaning rather than arbitrary patterns. The additional term leverages similarity metrics to construct a similarity loss that we optimize within the global objective function. Our technique is based on directly manipulating the pixel values in the patch, which gives higher flexibility and larger space compared to the GAN-based techniques that are based on indirectly optimizing the patch by modifying the latent vector. Our attack achieves superior success rate of up to 91.19\% and 72\%, respectively, in the digital world and when deployed in smart cameras at the edge compared to the GAN-based technique.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
With the extremely rapid advances in remote sensing (RS) technology, a great quantity of Earth observation (EO) data featuring considerable and complicated heterogeneity is readily available nowadays, which renders researchers an opportunity to tackle current geoscience applications in a fresh way. With the joint utilization of EO data, much research on multimodal RS data fusion has made tremendous progress in recent years, yet these developed traditional algorithms inevitably meet the performance bottleneck due to the lack of the ability to comprehensively analyse and interpret these strongly heterogeneous data. Hence, this non-negligible limitation further arouses an intense demand for an alternative tool with powerful processing competence. Deep learning (DL), as a cutting-edge technology, has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in numerous computer vision tasks owing to its impressive ability in data representation and reconstruction. Naturally, it has been successfully applied to the field of multimodal RS data fusion, yielding great improvement compared with traditional methods. This survey aims to present a systematic overview in DL-based multimodal RS data fusion. More specifically, some essential knowledge about this topic is first given. Subsequently, a literature survey is conducted to analyse the trends of this field. Some prevalent sub-fields in the multimodal RS data fusion are then reviewed in terms of the to-be-fused data modalities, i.e., spatiospectral, spatiotemporal, light detection and ranging-optical, synthetic aperture radar-optical, and RS-Geospatial Big Data fusion. Furthermore, We collect and summarize some valuable resources for the sake of the development in multimodal RS data fusion. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.
Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet) for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance of scales and extremely small objects.