The full potential of large pretrained models remains largely untapped in control domains like robotics. This is mainly because of the scarcity of data and the computational challenges associated with training or fine-tuning these large models for such applications. Prior work mainly emphasizes effective pretraining of large models for decision-making, with little exploration into how to perform data-efficient continual adaptation of these models for new tasks. Recognizing these constraints, we introduce TAIL (Task-specific Adapters for Imitation Learning), a framework for efficient adaptation to new control tasks. Inspired by recent advancements in parameter-efficient fine-tuning in language domains, we explore efficient fine-tuning techniques -- e.g., Bottleneck Adapters, P-Tuning, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) -- in TAIL to adapt large pretrained models for new tasks with limited demonstration data. Our extensive experiments in large-scale language-conditioned manipulation tasks comparing prevalent parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques and adaptation baselines suggest that TAIL with LoRA can achieve the best post-adaptation performance with only 1\% of the trainable parameters of full fine-tuning, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting and preserving adaptation plasticity in continual learning settings.
Automation can transform productivity in research activities that use liquid handling, such as organic synthesis, but it has made less impact in materials laboratories, which require sample preparation steps and a range of solid-state characterization techniques. For example, powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) is a key method in materials and pharmaceutical chemistry, but its end-to-end automation is challenging because it involves solid powder handling and sample processing. Here we present a fully autonomous solid-state workflow for PXRD experiments that can match or even surpass manual data quality. The workflow involves 12 steps performed by a team of three multipurpose robots, illustrating the power of flexible, modular automation to integrate complex, multitask laboratories.
In this work, the development of a framework for the multi-scale data-driven parametrization of averaged-scale models is outlined and applied to dispersive transport. Dispersive transport is a common phenomena included in transport models at the averaged scale, describing the velocity and geometry dependent mixing seen at the pore scale. Optimal parameters for the development of dispersion tensors can be extracted from pore-scale simulations in the form of an averaged velocity and characteristic length scales. In this work, the determination of these parameters is outlined and tested first on simple and later on complex random pore geometries. These parametrizations are then used to develop a data-driven model extracting optimal parameters from pore geometries. In order to better understand the relationships between these parameters and pore geometries, we introduce a series of metrics based on interfacial geometry, volume ratios, and connectivity. These metrics are then compared against the parametrizations, and used to develop a metrics based data-driven model.
Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative method for training models while preserving data privacy in decentralized settings. However, FL encounters challenges related to data heterogeneity, which can result in performance degradation. In our study, we observe that as data heterogeneity increases, feature representation in the FedAVG model deteriorates more significantly compared to classifier weight. Additionally, we observe that as data heterogeneity increases, the gap between higher feature norms for observed classes, obtained from local models, and feature norms of unobserved classes widens, in contrast to the behavior of classifier weight norms. This widening gap extends to encompass the feature norm disparities between local and the global models. To address these issues, we introduce Federated Averaging with Feature Normalization Update (FedFN), a straightforward learning method. We demonstrate the superior performance of FedFN through extensive experiments, even when applied to pretrained ResNet18. Subsequently, we confirm the applicability of FedFN to foundation models.
Multimedia generation approaches occupy a prominent place in artificial intelligence research. Text-to-image models achieved high-quality results over the last few years. However, video synthesis methods recently started to develop. This paper presents a new two-stage latent diffusion text-to-video generation architecture based on the text-to-image diffusion model. The first stage concerns keyframes synthesis to figure the storyline of a video, while the second one is devoted to interpolation frames generation to make movements of the scene and objects smooth. We compare several temporal conditioning approaches for keyframes generation. The results show the advantage of using separate temporal blocks over temporal layers in terms of metrics reflecting video generation quality aspects and human preference. The design of our interpolation model significantly reduces computational costs compared to other masked frame interpolation approaches. Furthermore, we evaluate different configurations of MoVQ-based video decoding scheme to improve consistency and achieve higher PSNR, SSIM, MSE, and LPIPS scores. Finally, we compare our pipeline with existing solutions and achieve top-2 scores overall and top-1 among open-source solutions: CLIPSIM = 0.2976 and FVD = 433.054. Project page: //ai-forever.github.io/kandinsky-video/
Geometric navigation is nowadays a well-established field of robotics and the research focus is shifting towards higher-level scene understanding, such as Semantic Mapping. When a robot needs to interact with its environment, it must be able to comprehend the contextual information of its surroundings. This work focuses on classifying and localising objects within a map, which is under construction (SLAM) or already built. To further explore this direction, we propose a framework that can autonomously detect and localize predefined objects in a known environment using a multi-modal sensor fusion approach (combining RGB and depth data from an RGB-D camera and a lidar). The framework consists of three key elements: understanding the environment through RGB data, estimating depth through multi-modal sensor fusion, and managing artifacts (i.e., filtering and stabilizing measurements). The experiments show that the proposed framework can accurately detect 98% of the objects in the real sample environment, without post-processing, while 85% and 80% of the objects were mapped using the single RGBD camera or RGB + lidar setup respectively. The comparison with single-sensor (camera or lidar) experiments is performed to show that sensor fusion allows the robot to accurately detect near and far obstacles, which would have been noisy or imprecise in a purely visual or laser-based approach.
Ensuring alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions [1,2], has become a critical task before deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. For instance, OpenAI devoted six months to iteratively aligning GPT-4 before its release [3]. However, a major challenge faced by practitioners is the lack of clear guidance on evaluating whether LLM outputs align with social norms, values, and regulations. This obstacle hinders systematic iteration and deployment of LLMs. To address this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of key dimensions that are crucial to consider when assessing LLM trustworthiness. The survey covers seven major categories of LLM trustworthiness: reliability, safety, fairness, resistance to misuse, explainability and reasoning, adherence to social norms, and robustness. Each major category is further divided into several sub-categories, resulting in a total of 29 sub-categories. Additionally, a subset of 8 sub-categories is selected for further investigation, where corresponding measurement studies are designed and conducted on several widely-used LLMs. The measurement results indicate that, in general, more aligned models tend to perform better in terms of overall trustworthiness. However, the effectiveness of alignment varies across the different trustworthiness categories considered. This highlights the importance of conducting more fine-grained analyses, testing, and making continuous improvements on LLM alignment. By shedding light on these key dimensions of LLM trustworthiness, this paper aims to provide valuable insights and guidance to practitioners in the field. Understanding and addressing these concerns will be crucial in achieving reliable and ethically sound deployment of LLMs in various applications.
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.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.