Ad hoc teamwork poses a challenging problem, requiring the design of an agent to collaborate with teammates without prior coordination or joint training. Open ad hoc teamwork further complicates this challenge by considering environments with a changing number of teammates, referred to as open teams. One promising solution to this problem is leveraging the generalizability of graph neural networks to handle an unrestricted number of agents and effectively address open teams, named graph-based policy learning (GPL). However, its joint Q-value representation over a coordination graph lacks convincing explanations. In this paper, we establish a new theory to understand the joint Q-value representation from the perspective of cooperative game theory, and validate its learning paradigm in open team settings. Building on our theory, we propose a novel algorithm named CIAO compatible with GPL framework, with additional provable implementation tricks that can facilitate learning. The demo of experiments is available on //sites.google.com/view/ciao2024, and the code of experiments is published on //github.com/hsvgbkhgbv/CIAO.
Unleashing the synergies among rapidly evolving mobility technologies in a multi-stakeholder setting presents unique challenges and opportunities for addressing urban transportation problems. This paper introduces a novel synthetic participatory method that critically leverages large language models (LLMs) to create digital avatars representing diverse stakeholders to plan shared automated electric mobility systems (SAEMS). These calibratable agents collaboratively identify objectives, envision and evaluate SAEMS alternatives, and strategize implementation under risks and constraints. The results of a Montreal case study indicate that a structured and parameterized workflow provides outputs with higher controllability and comprehensiveness on an SAEMS plan than that generated using a single LLM-enabled expert agent. Consequently, this approach provides a promising avenue for cost-efficiently improving the inclusivity and interpretability of multi-objective transportation planning, suggesting a paradigm shift in how we envision and strategize for sustainable transportation systems.
Intermediate step methodologies like chain of thoughts (COT) have demonstrated effectiveness in enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on code generation. This study explores the utilization of intermediate languages, including various programming languages, natural language solutions, and pseudo-code, and systematically evaluates their impact on the performance of LLMs in code generation tasks. Our experiments encompass eleven models across the CodeLlama, GPT, and Mistral families, as well as newly released smaller models. Our findings reveal that intermediate languages generally exhibit greater efficacy in larger models that have not yet achieved state-of-the-art performance. Natural language consistently emerges as the most effective intermediate representation across all target languages. However, we observe no universally effective intermediate formal language across different models and target languages. Furthermore, we uncover a weak correlation between the correctness of intermediate solutions and final generation, suggesting that improvements may stem from the chain-of-thought effect rather than language-specific transfer. Interestingly, we discover that for GPT family models, prompting multiple times without explicit self-correction instructions yields performance gains across the studied languages.
Vision-based occupancy prediction, also known as 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC), presents a significant challenge in computer vision. Previous methods, confined to onboard processing, struggle with simultaneous geometric and semantic estimation, continuity across varying viewpoints, and single-view occlusion. Our paper introduces OccFiner, a novel offboard framework designed to enhance the accuracy of vision-based occupancy predictions. OccFiner operates in two hybrid phases: 1) a multi-to-multi local propagation network that implicitly aligns and processes multiple local frames for correcting onboard model errors and consistently enhancing occupancy accuracy across all distances. 2) the region-centric global propagation, focuses on refining labels using explicit multi-view geometry and integrating sensor bias, especially to increase the accuracy of distant occupied voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccFiner improves both geometric and semantic accuracy across various types of coarse occupancy, setting a new state-of-the-art performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset. Notably, OccFiner elevates vision-based SSC models to a level even surpassing that of LiDAR-based onboard SSC models. Furthermore, OccFiner is the first to achieve automatic annotation of SSC in a purely vision-based approach. Quantitative experiments prove that OccFiner successfully facilitates occupancy data loop-closure in autonomous driving. Additionally, we quantitatively and qualitatively validate the superiority of the offboard approach on city-level SSC static maps. The source code will be made publicly available at //github.com/MasterHow/OccFiner.
Important tasks such as reasoning and planning are fundamentally algorithmic, meaning that solving them robustly requires acquiring true reasoning or planning algorithms, rather than shortcuts. Large Language Models lack true algorithmic ability primarily because of the limitations of neural network optimization algorithms, their optimization data and optimization objective, but also due to architectural inexpressivity. To solve this, our paper proposes augmenting LLMs with a library of fundamental operations and sophisticated differentiable programs, so that common algorithms do not need to be learned from scratch. We add memory, registers, basic operations, and adaptive recurrence to a transformer architecture built on LLaMA3. Then, we define a method for directly compiling algorithms into a differentiable starting library, which is used natively and propagates gradients for optimization. In this preliminary study, we explore the feasability of augmenting LLaMA3 with a differentiable computer, for instance by fine-tuning small transformers on simple algorithmic tasks with variable computational depth.
Generative models have shown significant achievements in audio generation tasks. However, existing models struggle with complex and detailed prompts, leading to potential performance degradation. We hypothesize that this problem stems from the low quality and relatively small quantity of training data. In this work, we aim to create a large-scale audio dataset with rich captions for improving audio generation models. We develop an automated pipeline to generate detailed captions for audio-visual datasets by transforming predicted visual captions, audio captions, and tagging labels into comprehensive descriptions using a Large Language Model (LLM). We introduce Sound-VECaps, a dataset comprising 1.66M high-quality audio-caption pairs with enriched details including audio event orders, occurred places and environment information. We demonstrate that training with Sound-VECaps significantly enhances the capability of text-to-audio generation models to comprehend and generate audio from complex input prompts, improving overall system performance. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies of Sound-VECaps across several audio-language tasks, suggesting its potential in advancing audio-text representation learning. Our dataset and models are available online.
In safety-critical robot planning or control, manually specifying safety constraints or learning them from demonstrations can be challenging. In this paper, we propose a certifiable alignment method for a robot to learn a safety constraint in its model predictive control (MPC) policy with human online directional feedback. To our knowledge, it is the first method to learn safety constraints from human feedback. The proposed method is based on an empirical observation: human directional feedback, when available, tends to guide the robot toward safer regions. The method only requires the direction of human feedback to update the learning hypothesis space. It is certifiable, providing an upper bound on the total number of human feedback in the case of successful learning of safety constraints, or declaring the misspecification of the hypothesis space, i.e., the true implicit safety constraint cannot be found within the specified hypothesis space. We evaluated the proposed method using numerical examples and user studies in two developed simulation games. Additionally, we implemented and tested the proposed method on a real-world Franka robot arm performing mobile water-pouring tasks in a user study. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our method, showing that it enables a robot to successfully learn safety constraints with a small handful (tens) of human directional corrections.
Serialized Output Training (SOT) has showcased state-of-the-art performance in multi-talker speech recognition by sequentially decoding the speech of individual speakers. To address the challenging label-permutation issue, prior methods have relied on either the Permutation Invariant Training (PIT) or the time-based First-In-First-Out (FIFO) rule. This study presents a model-based serialization strategy that incorporates an auxiliary module into the Attention Encoder-Decoder architecture, autonomously identifying the crucial factors to order the output sequence of the speech components in multi-talker speech. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech and LibriMix databases reveal that our approach significantly outperforms the PIT and FIFO baselines in both 2-mix and 3-mix scenarios. Further analysis shows that the serialization module identifies dominant speech components in a mixture by factors including loudness and gender, and orders speech components based on the dominance score.
Model reuse techniques can reduce the resource requirements for training high-performance deep neural networks (DNNs) by leveraging existing models. However, unauthorized reuse and replication of DNNs can lead to copyright infringement and economic loss to the model owner. This underscores the need to analyze the reuse relation between DNNs and develop copyright protection techniques to safeguard intellectual property rights. Existing white-box testing-based approaches cannot address the common heterogeneous reuse case where the model architecture is changed, and DNN fingerprinting approaches heavily rely on generating adversarial examples with good transferability, which is known to be challenging in the black-box setting. To bridge the gap, we propose NFARD, a Neuron Functionality Analysis-based Reuse Detector, which only requires normal test samples to detect reuse relations by measuring the models' differences on a newly proposed model characterization, i.e., neuron functionality (NF). A set of NF-based distance metrics is designed to make NFARD applicable to both white-box and black-box settings. Moreover, we devise a linear transformation method to handle heterogeneous reuse cases by constructing the optimal projection matrix for dimension consistency, significantly extending the application scope of NFARD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first adversarial example-free method that exploits neuron functionality for DNN copyright protection. As a side contribution, we constructed a reuse detection benchmark named Reuse Zoo that covers various practical reuse techniques and popular datasets. Extensive evaluations on this comprehensive benchmark show that NFARD achieves F1 scores of 0.984 and 1.0 for detecting reuse relationships in black-box and white-box settings, respectively, while generating test suites 2 ~ 99 times faster than previous methods.
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.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.