Robot Imitation Learning (IL) is a widely used method for training robots to perform manipulation tasks that involve mimicking human demonstrations to acquire skills. However, its practicality has been limited due to its requirement that users be trained in operating real robot arms to provide demonstrations. This paper presents an innovative solution: an Augmented Reality (AR)-assisted framework for demonstration collection, empowering non-roboticist users to produce demonstrations for robot IL using devices like the HoloLens 2. Our framework facilitates scalable and diverse demonstration collection for real-world tasks. We validate our approach with experiments on three classical robotics tasks: reach, push, and pick-and-place. The real robot performs each task successfully while replaying demonstrations collected via AR.
The Adversarial Markov Decision Process (AMDP) is a learning framework that deals with unknown and varying tasks in decision-making applications like robotics and recommendation systems. A major limitation of the AMDP formalism, however, is pessimistic regret analysis results in the sense that although the cost function can change from one episode to the next, the evolution in many settings is not adversarial. To address this, we introduce and study a new variant of AMDP, which aims to minimize regret while utilizing a set of cost predictors. For this setting, we develop a new policy search method that achieves a sublinear optimistic regret with high probability, that is a regret bound which gracefully degrades with the estimation power of the cost predictors. Establishing such optimistic regret bounds is nontrivial given that (i) as we demonstrate, the existing importance-weighted cost estimators cannot establish optimistic bounds, and (ii) the feedback model of AMDP is different (and more realistic) than the existing optimistic online learning works. Our result, in particular, hinges upon developing a novel optimistically biased cost estimator that leverages cost predictors and enables a high-probability regret analysis without imposing restrictive assumptions. We further discuss practical extensions of the proposed scheme and demonstrate its efficacy numerically.
Neural Ordinary Differential Equations typically struggle to generalize to new dynamical behaviors created by parameter changes in the underlying system, even when the dynamics are close to previously seen behaviors. The issue gets worse when the changing parameters are unobserved, i.e., their value or influence is not directly measurable when collecting data. We introduce Neural Context Flow (NCF), a framework that encodes said unobserved parameters in a latent context vector as input to a vector field. NCFs leverage differentiability of the vector field with respect to the parameters, along with first-order Taylor expansion to allow any context vector to influence trajectories from other parameters. We validate our method and compare it to established Multi-Task and Meta-Learning alternatives, showing competitive performance in mean squared error for in-domain and out-of-distribution evaluation on the Lotka-Volterra, Glycolytic Oscillator, and Gray-Scott problems. This study holds practical implications for foundational models in science and related areas that benefit from conditional neural ODEs. Our code is openly available at //github.com/ddrous/ncflow.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a key technique for training networks that can generalize well to diverse tasks without task-specific supervision. This property makes SSL desirable for computational pathology, the study of digitized images of tissues, as there are many target applications and often limited labeled training samples. However, SSL algorithms and models have been primarily developed in the field of natural images and whether their performance can be improved by adaptation to particular domains remains an open question. In this work, we present an investigation of modifications to SSL for pathology data, specifically focusing on the DINOv2 algorithm. We propose alternative augmentations, regularization functions, and position encodings motivated by the characteristics of pathology images. We evaluate the impact of these changes on several benchmarks to demonstrate the value of tailored approaches.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized learning paradigm, enabling parties to collaboratively train models while keeping their data confidential. Within autonomous driving, it brings the potential of reducing data storage costs, reducing bandwidth requirements, and to accelerate the learning. FL is, however, susceptible to poisoning attacks. In this paper, we introduce two novel poisoning attacks on FL tailored to regression tasks within autonomous driving: FLStealth and Off-Track Attack (OTA). FLStealth, an untargeted attack, aims at providing model updates that deteriorate the global model performance while appearing benign. OTA, on the other hand, is a targeted attack with the objective to change the global model's behavior when exposed to a certain trigger. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacks by conducting comprehensive experiments pertaining to the task of vehicle trajectory prediction. In particular, we show that, among five different untargeted attacks, FLStealth is the most successful at bypassing the considered defenses employed by the server. For OTA, we demonstrate the inability of common defense strategies to mitigate the attack, highlighting the critical need for new defensive mechanisms against targeted attacks within FL for autonomous driving.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
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.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.