Task-oriented grasping (TOG), which refers to the problem of synthesizing grasps on an object that are configurationally compatible with the downstream manipulation task, is the first milestone towards tool manipulation. Analogous to the activation of two brain regions responsible for semantic and geometric reasoning during cognitive processes, modeling the complex relationship between objects, tasks, and grasps requires rich prior knowledge about objects and tasks. Existing methods typically limit the prior knowledge to a closed-set scope and cannot support the generalization to novel objects and tasks out of the training set. To address such a limitation, we propose FoundationGrasp, a foundation model-based TOG framework that leverages the open-ended knowledge from foundation models to learn generalizable TOG skills. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the contributed Language and Vision Augmented TaskGrasp (LaViA-TaskGrasp) dataset, demonstrating the superiority of FoudationGrasp over existing methods when generalizing to novel object instances, object classes, and tasks out of the training set. Furthermore, the effectiveness of FoudationGrasp is validated in real-robot grasping and manipulation experiments on a 7 DoF robotic arm. Our code, data, appendix, and video are publicly available at //sites.google.com/view/foundationgrasp.
Stochastic optimization algorithms implemented on distributed computing architectures are increasingly used to tackle large-scale machine learning applications. A key bottleneck in such distributed systems is the communication overhead for exchanging information such as stochastic gradients between different workers. Sparse communication with memory and the adaptive aggregation methodology are two successful frameworks among the various techniques proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we exploit the advantages of Sparse communication and Adaptive aggregated Stochastic Gradients to design a communication-efficient distributed algorithm named SASG. Specifically, we determine the workers who need to communicate with the parameter server based on the adaptive aggregation rule and then sparsify the transmitted information. Therefore, our algorithm reduces both the overhead of communication rounds and the number of communication bits in the distributed system. We define an auxiliary sequence and provide convergence results of the algorithm with the help of Lyapunov function analysis. Experiments on training deep neural networks show that our algorithm can significantly reduce the communication overhead compared to the previous methods, with little impact on training and testing accuracy.
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to critique and refine their reasoning is crucial for their application in evaluation, feedback provision, and self-improvement. This paper introduces CriticBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess LLMs' abilities to critique and rectify their reasoning across a variety of tasks. CriticBench encompasses five reasoning domains: mathematical, commonsense, symbolic, coding, and algorithmic. It compiles 15 datasets and incorporates responses from three LLM families. Utilizing CriticBench, we evaluate and dissect the performance of 17 LLMs in generation, critique, and correction reasoning, i.e., GQC reasoning. Our findings reveal: (1) a linear relationship in GQC capabilities, with critique-focused training markedly enhancing performance; (2) a task-dependent variation in correction effectiveness, with logic-oriented tasks being more amenable to correction; (3) GQC knowledge inconsistencies that decrease as model size increases; and (4) an intriguing inter-model critiquing dynamic, where stronger models are better at critiquing weaker ones, while weaker models can surprisingly surpass stronger ones in their self-critique. We hope these insights into the nuanced critique-correct reasoning of LLMs will foster further research in LLM critique and self-improvement.
Recently, tool learning with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for augmenting the capabilities of LLMs to tackle highly complex problems. Despite growing attention and rapid advancements in this field, the existing literature remains fragmented and lacks systematic organization, posing barriers to entry for newcomers. This gap motivates us to conduct a comprehensive survey of existing works on tool learning with LLMs. In this survey, we focus on reviewing existing literature from the two primary aspects (1) why tool learning is beneficial and (2) how tool learning is implemented, enabling a comprehensive understanding of tool learning with LLMs. We first explore the "why" by reviewing both the benefits of tool integration and the inherent benefits of the tool learning paradigm from six specific aspects. In terms of "how", we systematically review the literature according to a taxonomy of four key stages in the tool learning workflow: task planning, tool selection, tool calling, and response generation. Additionally, we provide a detailed summary of existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, categorizing them according to their relevance to different stages. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outline potential future directions, aiming to inspire both researchers and industrial developers to further explore this emerging and promising area.
The objective of traffic prediction is to accurately forecast and analyze the dynamics of transportation patterns, considering both space and time. However, the presence of distribution shift poses a significant challenge in this field, as existing models struggle to generalize well when faced with test data that significantly differs from the training distribution. To tackle this issue, this paper introduces a simple and universal spatio-temporal prompt-tuning framework-FlashST, which adapts pre-trained models to the specific characteristics of diverse downstream datasets, improving generalization in diverse traffic prediction scenarios. Specifically, the FlashST framework employs a lightweight spatio-temporal prompt network for in-context learning, capturing spatio-temporal invariant knowledge and facilitating effective adaptation to diverse scenarios. Additionally, we incorporate a distribution mapping mechanism to align the data distributions of pre-training and downstream data, facilitating effective knowledge transfer in spatio-temporal forecasting. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our FlashST across different spatio-temporal prediction tasks using diverse urban datasets. Code is available at //github.com/HKUDS/FlashST.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse settings, but still struggle as the length and complexity of the context increases. To address this challenge, we propose Thinking Recursively and Dynamically (ThReaD). THREAD frames model generation as a thread of execution that, based on the context, can run to completion or dynamically spawn new threads. By spawning, threads can offload work (e.g., thinking, retrieving information) to child threads, which only return tokens needed for the parent thread to do its work. In effect, this enables the model to adapt, as needed, the amount of intermediate work used to produce tokens. We apply THREAD in the settings of LLM task solving and question answering, where the dynamic threading allows the model to recursively decompose the given task or question into progressively simpler sub-problems that can be solved by separate child threads. We test THREAD, implemented using a few-shot learning approach, on diverse benchmarks for agent tasks and data-grounded question answering. THREAD achieves state-of-the-art performance with GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 on these benchmarks, including ALFWorld, TextCraft, and WebShop, along with two new benchmarks, DataCommons QA and MIMIC-III ICU QA. In addition, THREAD outperforms existing frameworks by 10% to 50% absolute points with smaller models, including Llama-3-8b and CodeLlama-7b.
Deep models have recently emerged as a promising tool to solve partial differential equations (PDEs), known as neural PDE solvers. While neural solvers trained from either simulation data or physics-informed loss can solve the PDEs reasonably well, they are mainly restricted to a specific set of PDEs, e.g. a certain equation or a finite set of coefficients. This bottleneck limits the generalizability of neural solvers, which is widely recognized as its major advantage over numerical solvers. In this paper, we present the Universal PDE solver (Unisolver) capable of solving a wide scope of PDEs by leveraging a Transformer pre-trained on diverse data and conditioned on diverse PDEs. Instead of simply scaling up data and parameters, Unisolver stems from the theoretical analysis of the PDE-solving process. Our key finding is that a PDE solution is fundamentally under the control of a series of PDE components, e.g. equation symbols, coefficients, and initial and boundary conditions. Inspired by the mathematical structure of PDEs, we define a complete set of PDE components and correspondingly embed them as domain-wise (e.g. equation symbols) and point-wise (e.g. boundaries) conditions for Transformer PDE solvers. Integrating physical insights with recent Transformer advances, Unisolver achieves consistent state-of-the-art results on three challenging large-scale benchmarks, showing impressive gains and endowing favorable generalizability and scalability.
Deep learning has shown great potential for modeling the physical dynamics of complex particle systems such as fluids (in Lagrangian descriptions). Existing approaches, however, require the supervision of consecutive particle properties, including positions and velocities. In this paper, we consider a partially observable scenario known as fluid dynamics grounding, that is, inferring the state transitions and interactions within the fluid particle systems from sequential visual observations of the fluid surface. We propose a differentiable two-stage network named NeuroFluid. Our approach consists of (i) a particle-driven neural renderer, which involves fluid physical properties into the volume rendering function, and (ii) a particle transition model optimized to reduce the differences between the rendered and the observed images. NeuroFluid provides the first solution to unsupervised learning of particle-based fluid dynamics by training these two models jointly. It is shown to reasonably estimate the underlying physics of fluids with different initial shapes, viscosity, and densities. It is a potential alternative approach to understanding complex fluid mechanics, such as turbulence, that are difficult to model using traditional methods of mathematical physics.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
Pre-trained language representation models, such as BERT, capture a general language representation from large-scale corpora, but lack domain-specific knowledge. When reading a domain text, experts make inferences with relevant knowledge. For machines to achieve this capability, we propose a knowledge-enabled language representation model (K-BERT) with knowledge graphs (KGs), in which triples are injected into the sentences as domain knowledge. However, too much knowledge incorporation may divert the sentence from its correct meaning, which is called knowledge noise (KN) issue. To overcome KN, K-BERT introduces soft-position and visible matrix to limit the impact of knowledge. K-BERT can easily inject domain knowledge into the models by equipped with a KG without pre-training by-self because it is capable of loading model parameters from the pre-trained BERT. Our investigation reveals promising results in twelve NLP tasks. Especially in domain-specific tasks (including finance, law, and medicine), K-BERT significantly outperforms BERT, which demonstrates that K-BERT is an excellent choice for solving the knowledge-driven problems that require experts.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.