The exploration of whether agents can align with their environment without relying on human-labeled data presents an intriguing research topic. Drawing inspiration from the alignment process observed in intelligent organisms, where declarative memory plays a pivotal role in summarizing past experiences, we propose a novel learning framework. The agents adeptly distill insights from past experiences, refining and updating existing notes to enhance their performance in the environment. This entire process transpires within the memory components and is implemented through natural language, so we character this framework as In-memory Learning. We also delve into the key features of benchmarks designed to evaluate the self-improvement process. Through systematic experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and provide insights into this problem.
Improper parsing of attacker-controlled input is a leading source of software security vulnerabilities, especially when programmers transcribe informal format descriptions in RFCs into efficient parsing logic in low-level, memory unsafe languages. Several researchers have proposed formal specification languages for data formats from which efficient code can be extracted. However, distilling informal requirements into formal specifications is challenging and, despite their benefits, new, formal languages are hard for people to learn and use. In this work, we present 3DGen, a framework that makes use of AI agents to transform mixed informal input, including natural language documents (i.e., RFCs) and example inputs into format specifications in a language called 3D. To support humans in understanding and trusting the generated specifications, 3DGen uses symbolic methods to also synthesize test inputs that can be validated against an external oracle. Symbolic test generation also helps in distinguishing multiple plausible solutions. Through a process of repeated refinement, 3DGen produces a 3D specification that conforms to a test suite, and which yields safe, efficient, provably correct, parsing code in C. We have evaluated 3DGen on 20 Internet standard formats, demonstrating the potential for AI-agents to produce formally verified C code at a non-trivial scale. A key enabler is the use of a domain-specific language to limit AI outputs to a class for which automated, symbolic analysis is tractable.
The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is heavily dependent on the design of the underlying reward function. However, a misalignment between the reward function and user intentions, values, or social norms can be catastrophic in the real world. Current methods to mitigate this misalignment work by learning reward functions from human preferences; however, they inadvertently introduce a risk of reward overoptimization. In this work, we address this challenge by advocating for the adoption of regularized reward functions that more accurately mirror the intended behaviors. We propose a novel concept of reward regularization within the robotic RLHF (RL from Human Feedback) framework, which we refer to as \emph{agent preferences}. Our approach uniquely incorporates not just human feedback in the form of preferences but also considers the preferences of the RL agent itself during the reward function learning process. This dual consideration significantly mitigates the issue of reward function overoptimization in RL. We provide a theoretical justification for the proposed approach by formulating the robotic RLHF problem as a bilevel optimization problem. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm {\ours} in several continuous control benchmarks including DeepMind Control Suite \cite{tassa2018deepmind} and MetaWorld \cite{yu2021metaworld} and high dimensional visual environments, with an improvement of more than 70\% in sample efficiency in comparison to current SOTA baselines. This showcases our approach's effectiveness in aligning reward functions with true behavioral intentions, setting a new benchmark in the field.
Forecasting vehicular motions in autonomous driving requires a deep understanding of agent interactions and the preservation of motion equivariance under Euclidean geometric transformations. Traditional models often lack the sophistication needed to handle the intricate dynamics inherent to autonomous vehicles and the interaction relationships among agents in the scene. As a result, these models have a lower model capacity, which then leads to higher prediction errors and lower training efficiency. In our research, we employ EqMotion, a leading equivariant particle, and human prediction model that also accounts for invariant agent interactions, for the task of multi-agent vehicle motion forecasting. In addition, we use a multi-modal prediction mechanism to account for multiple possible future paths in a probabilistic manner. By leveraging EqMotion, our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with fewer parameters (1.2 million) and a significantly reduced training time (less than 2 hours).
Multi-modal semantic segmentation significantly enhances AI agents' perception and scene understanding, especially under adverse conditions like low-light or overexposed environments. Leveraging additional modalities (X-modality) like thermal and depth alongside traditional RGB provides complementary information, enabling more robust and reliable segmentation. In this work, we introduce Sigma, a Siamese Mamba network for multi-modal semantic segmentation, utilizing the Selective Structured State Space Model, Mamba. Unlike conventional methods that rely on CNNs, with their limited local receptive fields, or Vision Transformers (ViTs), which offer global receptive fields at the cost of quadratic complexity, our model achieves global receptive fields coverage with linear complexity. By employing a Siamese encoder and innovating a Mamba fusion mechanism, we effectively select essential information from different modalities. A decoder is then developed to enhance the channel-wise modeling ability of the model. Our method, Sigma, is rigorously evaluated on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth segmentation tasks, demonstrating its superiority and marking the first successful application of State Space Models (SSMs) in multi-modal perception tasks. Code is available at //github.com/zifuwan/Sigma.
This study aims to address the pervasive challenge of quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) without logit-access. Conformal Prediction (CP), known for its model-agnostic and distribution-free features, is a desired approach for various LLMs and data distributions. However, existing CP methods for LLMs typically assume access to the logits, which are unavailable for some API-only LLMs. In addition, logits are known to be miscalibrated, potentially leading to degraded CP performance. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel CP method that (1) is tailored for API-only LLMs without logit-access; (2) minimizes the size of prediction sets; and (3) ensures a statistical guarantee of the user-defined coverage. The core idea of this approach is to formulate nonconformity measures using both coarse-grained (i.e., sample frequency) and fine-grained uncertainty notions (e.g., semantic similarity). Experimental results on both close-ended and open-ended Question Answering tasks show our approach can mostly outperform the logit-based CP baselines.
The difficulty of the information extraction task lies in dealing with the task-specific label schemas and heterogeneous data structures. Recent work has proposed methods based on large language models to uniformly model different information extraction tasks. However, these existing methods are deficient in their information extraction capabilities for Chinese languages other than English. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end chat-enhanced instruction tuning framework for universal information extraction (YAYI-UIE), which supports both Chinese and English. Specifically, we utilize dialogue data and information extraction data to enhance the information extraction performance jointly. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on Chinese datasets while also achieving comparable performance on English datasets under both supervised settings and zero-shot settings.
Inter-agent relative localization is critical for many multi-robot systems operating in the absence of external positioning infrastructure or prior environmental knowledge. We propose a novel inter-agent relative 3D pose estimation system where each participating agent is equipped with several ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging tags. Prior work typically supplements noisy UWB range measurements with additional continuously transmitted data (e.g., odometry) leading to potential scaling issues with increased team size and/or decreased communication network capability. By equipping each agent with multiple UWB antennas, our approach addresses these concerns by using only locally collected UWB range measurements, a priori state constraints, and event-based detections of when said constraints are violated. The addition of our learned mean ranging bias correction improves our approach by an additional 19% positional error, and gives us an overall experimental mean absolute position and heading errors of 0.24m and 9.5 degrees respectively. When compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, our work demonstrates improved performance over similar systems, while remaining competitive with methods that have significantly higher communication costs. Additionally, we make our datasets available.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
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 cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.