Multi-object rearrangement is a crucial skill for service robots, and commonsense reasoning is frequently needed in this process. However, achieving commonsense arrangements requires knowledge about objects, which is hard to transfer to robots. Large language models (LLMs) are one potential source of this knowledge, but they do not naively capture information about plausible physical arrangements of the world. We propose LLM-GROP, which uses prompting to extract commonsense knowledge about semantically valid object configurations from an LLM and instantiates them with a task and motion planner in order to generalize to varying scene geometry. LLM-GROP allows us to go from natural-language commands to human-aligned object rearrangement in varied environments. Based on human evaluations, our approach achieves the highest rating while outperforming competitive baselines in terms of success rate while maintaining comparable cumulative action costs. Finally, we demonstrate a practical implementation of LLM-GROP on a mobile manipulator in real-world scenarios. Supplementary materials are available at: //sites.google.com/view/llm-grop
Three challenges limit the progress of robot learning research: robots are expensive (few labs can participate), everyone uses different robots (findings do not generalize across labs), and we lack internet-scale robotics data. We take on these challenges via a new benchmark: Train Offline, Test Online (TOTO). TOTO provides remote users with access to shared robotic hardware for evaluating methods on common tasks and an open-source dataset of these tasks for offline training. Its manipulation task suite requires challenging generalization to unseen objects, positions, and lighting. We present initial results on TOTO comparing five pretrained visual representations and four offline policy learning baselines, remotely contributed by five institutions. The real promise of TOTO, however, lies in the future: we release the benchmark for additional submissions from any user, enabling easy, direct comparison to several methods without the need to obtain hardware or collect data.
Symbolization methods in large language models (LLMs) have been shown effective to improve LLMs' reasoning ability. However, most of these approaches hinge on mapping natural languages to formal languages (e.g., Python, SQL) that are more syntactically complete and free of ambiguity. Although effective, they depart from the natural language itself and deviate from the habits of human thinking, and instead cater more to the execution mindset of computers. In contrast, we hope to simplify natural language by starting from the concept of symbols in linguistics itself, so that LLMs can learn the common formulation and general solution of reasoning problems wrapped in different natural semantics. From this consideration, we propose \textbf{Meta-Reasoning}, which allows LLMs to automatically accomplish semantic-symbol deconstruction, i.e., semantic resolution, to maximally reduce different questions of certain reasoning tasks to similar natural language representation, thus gaining the ability to learn by analogy and facilitating data-efficient in-context learning. Our experiments show that the Meta-Reasoning paradigm saliently enhances LLMs' reasoning performance with fewer demonstrations. They can learn not only reasoning chains but also general solutions to certain types of tasks. In particular, for symbolic reasoning tasks, such as 7-step Tracking Shuffled Objects, GPT-3 (text-davinci-002) achieves over 99% accuracy with only one Meta-Reasoning demonstration, outperforming all current LLMs with the standard chain-of-thought prompting.
Most Artificial Intelligence applications are based on supervised machine learning (ML), which ultimately grounds on manually annotated data. The annotation process is often performed in terms of a majority vote and this has been proved to be often problematic, as highlighted by recent studies on the evaluation of ML models. In this article we describe and advocate for a different paradigm, which we call data perspectivism, which moves away from traditional gold standard datasets, towards the adoption of methods that integrate the opinions and perspectives of the human subjects involved in the knowledge representation step of ML processes. Drawing on previous works which inspired our proposal we describe the potential of our proposal for not only the more subjective tasks (e.g. those related to human language) but also to tasks commonly understood as objective (e.g. medical decision making), and present the main advantages of adopting a perspectivist stance in ML, as well as possible disadvantages, and various ways in which such a stance can be implemented in practice. Finally, we share a set of recommendations and outline a research agenda to advance the perspectivist stance in ML.
Despite its importance in both industrial and service robotics, mobile manipulation remains a significant challenge as it requires a seamless integration of end-effector trajectory generation with navigation skills as well as reasoning over long-horizons. Existing methods struggle to control the large configuration space, and to navigate dynamic and unknown environments. In previous work, we proposed to decompose mobile manipulation tasks into a simplified motion generator for the end-effector in task space and a trained reinforcement learning agent for the mobile base to account for kinematic feasibility of the motion. In this work, we introduce Neural Navigation for Mobile Manipulation (N$^2$M$^2$) which extends this decomposition to complex obstacle environments and enables it to tackle a broad range of tasks in real world settings. The resulting approach can perform unseen, long-horizon tasks in unexplored environments while instantly reacting to dynamic obstacles and environmental changes. At the same time, it provides a simple way to define new mobile manipulation tasks. We demonstrate the capabilities of our proposed approach in extensive simulation and real-world experiments on multiple kinematically diverse mobile manipulators. Code and videos are publicly available at //mobile-rl.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
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.
In this paper, we tackle two challenges in multimodal learning for visual recognition: 1) when missing-modality occurs either during training or testing in real-world situations; and 2) when the computation resources are not available to finetune on heavy transformer models. To this end, we propose to utilize prompt learning and mitigate the above two challenges together. Specifically, our modality-missing-aware prompts can be plugged into multimodal transformers to handle general missing-modality cases, while only requiring less than 1% learnable parameters compared to training the entire model. We further explore the effect of different prompt configurations and analyze the robustness to missing modality. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our prompt learning framework that improves the performance under various missing-modality cases, while alleviating the requirement of heavy model re-training. Code is available.
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.
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.