As collaborative robot (Cobot) adoption in many sectors grows, so does the interest in integrating digital twins in human-robot collaboration (HRC). Virtual representations of physical systems (PT) and assets, known as digital twins, can revolutionize human-robot collaboration by enabling real-time simulation, monitoring, and control. In this article, we present a review of the state-of-the-art and our perspective on the future of digital twins (DT) in human-robot collaboration. We argue that DT will be crucial in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of these systems by presenting compelling evidence and a concise vision of the future of DT in human-robot collaboration, as well as insights into the possible advantages and challenges associated with their integration.
The ability to leverage heterogeneous robotic experience from different robots and tasks to quickly master novel skills and embodiments has the potential to transform robot learning. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models for vision and language, we propose a multi-embodiment, multi-task generalist agent for robotic manipulation. This agent, named RoboCat, is a visual goal-conditioned decision transformer capable of consuming action-labelled visual experience. This data spans a large repertoire of motor control skills from simulated and real robotic arms with varying sets of observations and actions. With RoboCat, we demonstrate the ability to generalise to new tasks and robots, both zero-shot as well as through adaptation using only 100-1000 examples for the target task. We also show how a trained model itself can be used to generate data for subsequent training iterations, thus providing a basic building block for an autonomous improvement loop. We investigate the agent's capabilities, with large-scale evaluations both in simulation and on three different real robot embodiments. We find that as we grow and diversify its training data, RoboCat not only shows signs of cross-task transfer, but also becomes more efficient at adapting to new tasks.
Super-resolution (SR) techniques have recently been proposed to upscale the outputs of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and generate high-quality images with enhanced inference speeds. However, existing NeRF+SR methods increase training overhead by using extra input features, loss functions, and/or expensive training procedures such as knowledge distillation. In this paper, we aim to leverage SR for efficiency gains without costly training or architectural changes. Specifically, we build a simple NeRF+SR pipeline that directly combines existing modules, and we propose a lightweight augmentation technique, random patch sampling, for training. Compared to existing NeRF+SR methods, our pipeline mitigates the SR computing overhead and can be trained up to 23x faster, making it feasible to run on consumer devices such as the Apple MacBook. Experiments show our pipeline can upscale NeRF outputs by 2-4x while maintaining high quality, increasing inference speeds by up to 18x on an NVIDIA V100 GPU and 12.8x on an M1 Pro chip. We conclude that SR can be a simple but effective technique for improving the efficiency of NeRF models for consumer devices.
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 breakthrough of AlphaGo, deep reinforcement learning becomes a recognized technique for solving sequential decision-making problems. Despite its reputation, data inefficiency caused by its trial and error learning mechanism makes deep reinforcement learning hard to be practical in a wide range of areas. Plenty of methods have been developed for sample efficient deep reinforcement learning, such as environment modeling, experience transfer, and distributed modifications, amongst which, distributed deep reinforcement learning has shown its potential in various applications, such as human-computer gaming, and intelligent transportation. In this paper, we conclude the state of this exciting field, by comparing the classical distributed deep reinforcement learning methods, and studying important components to achieve efficient distributed learning, covering single player single agent distributed deep reinforcement learning to the most complex multiple players multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we review recently released toolboxes that help to realize distributed deep reinforcement learning without many modifications of their non-distributed versions. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, a multi-player multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning toolbox is developed and released, which is further validated on Wargame, a complex environment, showing usability of the proposed toolbox for multiple players and multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning under complex games. Finally, we try to point out challenges and future trends, hoping this brief review can provide a guide or a spark for researchers who are interested in distributed deep reinforcement learning.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in many tasks. One of the main focuses of the DA methods is to improve the diversity of training data, thereby helping the model to better generalize to unseen testing data. In this survey, we frame DA methods into three categories based on the diversity of augmented data, including paraphrasing, noising, and sampling. Our paper sets out to analyze DA methods in detail according to the above categories. Further, we also introduce their applications in NLP tasks as well as the challenges.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
The difficulty of deploying various deep learning (DL) models on diverse DL hardwares has boosted the research and development of DL compilers in the community. Several DL compilers have been proposed from both industry and academia such as Tensorflow XLA and TVM. Similarly, the DL compilers take the DL models described in different DL frameworks as input, and then generate optimized codes for diverse DL hardwares as output. However, none of the existing survey has analyzed the unique design of the DL compilers comprehensively. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive survey of existing DL compilers by dissecting the commonly adopted design in details, with emphasis on the DL oriented multi-level IRs, and frontend/backend optimizations. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive comparison among existing DL compilers from various aspects. In addition, we present detailed analysis of the multi-level IR design and compiler optimization techniques. Finally, several insights are highlighted as the potential research directions of DL compiler. This is the first survey paper focusing on the unique design of DL compiler, which we hope can pave the road for future research towards the DL compiler.