Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners

Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can scale and generalize. To address these challenges, we present Generative Value Learning (\GVL), a universal value function estimator that leverages the world knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs) to predict task progress. Naively asking a VLM to predict values for a video sequence performs poorly due to the strong temporal correlation between successive frames. Instead, GVL poses value estimation as a temporal ordering problem over shuffled video frames; this seemingly more challenging task encourages VLMs to more fully exploit their underlying semantic and temporal grounding capabilities to differentiate frames based on their perceived task progress, consequently producing significantly better value predictions. Without any robot or task specific training, GVL can in-context zero-shot and few-shot predict effective values for more than 300 distinct real-world tasks across diverse robot platforms, including challenging bimanual manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GVL permits flexible multi-modal in-context learning via examples from heterogeneous tasks and embodiments, such as human videos. The generality of GVL enables various downstream applications pertinent to visuomotor policy learning, including dataset filtering, success detection, and advantage-weighted regression -- all without any model training or finetuning.

AutoGameUI: Constructing High-Fidelity Game UIs via Multimodal Learning and Interactive Web-Based Tool

We introduce an innovative system, AutoGameUI, for efficiently constructing cohesive user interfaces in game development. Our system is the first to address the coherence issue arising from integrating inconsistent UI and UX designs, typically leading to mismatches and inefficiencies. We propose a two-stage multimodal learning pipeline to obtain comprehensive representations of both UI and UX designs, and to establish their correspondences. Through the correspondences, a cohesive user interface is automatically constructed from pairwise designs. To achieve high-fidelity effects, we introduce a universal data protocol for precise design descriptions and cross-platform applications. We also develop an interactive web-based tool for game developers to facilitate the use of our system. We create a game UI dataset from actual game projects and combine it with a public dataset for training and evaluation. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in maintaining coherence between the constructed interfaces and the original designs.

IPPON: Common Sense Guided Informative Path Planning for Object Goal Navigation

Navigating efficiently to an object in an unexplored environment is a critical skill for general-purpose intelligent robots. Recent approaches to this object goal navigation problem have embraced a modular strategy, integrating classical exploration algorithms-notably frontier exploration-with a learned semantic mapping/exploration module. This paper introduces a novel informative path planning and 3D object probability mapping approach. The mapping module computes the probability of the object of interest through semantic segmentation and a Bayes filter. Additionally, it stores probabilities for common objects, which semantically guides the exploration based on common sense priors from a large language model. The planner terminates when the current viewpoint captures enough voxels identified with high confidence as the object of interest. Although our planner follows a zero-shot approach, it achieves state-of-the-art performance as measured by the Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) and Soft SPL in the Habitat ObjectNav Challenge 2023, outperforming other works by more than 20%. Furthermore, we validate its effectiveness on real robots. Project webpage: https://ippon-paper.github.io/

BioMistral-NLU: Towards More Generalizable Medical Language Understanding through Instruction Tuning

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are fine-tuned on large and diverse instruction-following corpora, and can generalize to new tasks. However, those instruction-tuned LLMs often perform poorly in specialized medical natural language understanding (NLU) tasks that require domain knowledge, granular text comprehension, and structured data extraction. To bridge the gap, we: (1) propose a unified prompting format for 7 important NLU tasks, % through span extraction and multi-choice question-answering (QA), (2) curate an instruction-tuning dataset, MNLU-Instruct, utilizing diverse existing open-source medical NLU corpora, and (3) develop BioMistral-NLU, a generalizable medical NLU model, through fine-tuning BioMistral on MNLU-Instruct. We evaluate BioMistral-NLU in a zero-shot setting, across 6 important NLU tasks, from two widely adopted medical NLU benchmarks: Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (BLUE) and Biomedical Language Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark (BLURB). Our experiments show that our BioMistral-NLU outperforms the original BioMistral, as well as the proprietary LLMs - ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our dataset-agnostic prompting strategy and instruction tuning step over diverse NLU tasks enhance LLMs' generalizability across diverse medical NLU tasks. Our ablation experiments show that instruction-tuning on a wider variety of tasks, even when the total number of training instances remains constant, enhances downstream zero-shot generalization.

Does Data Contamination Detection Work (Well) for LLMs? A Survey and Evaluation on Detection Assumptions

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great performance across various benchmarks, showing potential as general-purpose task solvers. However, as LLMs are typically trained on vast amounts of data, a significant concern in their evaluation is data contamination, where overlap between training data and evaluation datasets inflates performance assessments. While multiple approaches have been developed to identify data contamination, these approaches rely on specific assumptions that may not hold universally across different settings. To bridge this gap, we systematically review 47 papers on data contamination detection, categorize the underlying assumptions, and assess whether they have been rigorously validated. We identify and analyze eight categories of assumptions and test three of them as case studies. Our analysis reveals that when classifying instances used for pretraining LLMs, detection approaches based on these three assumptions perform close to random guessing, suggesting that current LLMs learn data distributions rather than memorizing individual instances. Overall, this work underscores the importance of approaches clearly stating their underlying assumptions and testing their validity across various scenarios.

DrivingDojo Dataset: Advancing Interactive and Knowledge-Enriched Driving World Model

Driving world models have gained increasing attention due to their ability to model complex physical dynamics. However, their superb modeling capability is yet to be fully unleashed due to the limited video diversity in current driving datasets. We introduce DrivingDojo, the first dataset tailor-made for training interactive world models with complex driving dynamics. Our dataset features video clips with a complete set of driving maneuvers, diverse multi-agent interplay, and rich open-world driving knowledge, laying a stepping stone for future world model development. We further define an action instruction following (AIF) benchmark for world models and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dataset for generating action-controlled future predictions.

Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation

How can robot manipulation policies generalize to novel tasks involving unseen object types and new motions? In this paper, we provide a solution in terms of predicting motion information from web data through human video generation and conditioning a robot policy on the generated video. Instead of attempting to scale robot data collection which is expensive, we show how we can leverage video generation models trained on easily available web data, for enabling generalization. Our approach Gen2Act casts language-conditioned manipulation as zero-shot human video generation followed by execution with a single policy conditioned on the generated video. To train the policy, we use an order of magnitude less robot interaction data compared to what the video prediction model was trained on. Gen2Act doesn't require fine-tuning the video model at all and we directly use a pre-trained model for generating human videos. Our results on diverse real-world scenarios show how Gen2Act enables manipulating unseen object types and performing novel motions for tasks not present in the robot data. Videos are at https://homangab.github.io/gen2act/

CACER: Clinical Concept Annotations for Cancer Events and Relations

Clinical notes contain unstructured representations of patient histories, including the relationships between medical problems and prescription drugs. To investigate the relationship between cancer drugs and their associated symptom burden, we extract structured, semantic representations of medical problem and drug information from the clinical narratives of oncology notes. We present Clinical Concept Annotations for Cancer Events and Relations (CACER), a novel corpus with fine-grained annotations for over 48,000 medical problems and drug events and 10,000 drug-problem and problem-problem relations. Leveraging CACER, we develop and evaluate transformer-based information extraction (IE) models such as BERT, Flan-T5, Llama3, and GPT-4 using fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL). In event extraction, the fine-tuned BERT and Llama3 models achieved the highest performance at 88.2-88.0 F1, which is comparable to the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) of 88.4 F1. In relation extraction, the fine-tuned BERT, Flan-T5, and Llama3 achieved the highest performance at 61.8-65.3 F1. GPT-4 with ICL achieved the worst performance across both tasks. The fine-tuned models significantly outperformed GPT-4 in ICL, highlighting the importance of annotated training data and model optimization. Furthermore, the BERT models performed similarly to Llama3. For our task, LLMs offer no performance advantage over the smaller BERT models. The results emphasize the need for annotated training data to optimize models. Multiple fine-tuned transformer models achieved performance comparable to IAA for several extraction tasks.

Global-Local Collaborative Inference with LLM for Lidar-Based Open-Vocabulary Detection

Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) is the task of detecting all interesting objects in a given scene without predefined object classes. Extensive work has been done to deal with the OVD for 2D RGB images, but the exploration of 3D OVD is still limited. Intuitively, lidar point clouds provide 3D information, both object level and scene level, to generate trustful detection results. However, previous lidar-based OVD methods only focus on the usage of object-level features, ignoring the essence of scene-level information. In this paper, we propose a Global-Local Collaborative Scheme (GLIS) for the lidar-based OVD task, which contains a local branch to generate object-level detection result and a global branch to obtain scene-level global feature. With the global-local information, a Large Language Model (LLM) is applied for chain-of-thought inference, and the detection result can be refined accordingly. We further propose Reflected Pseudo Labels Generation (RPLG) to generate high-quality pseudo labels for supervision and Background-Aware Object Localization (BAOL) to select precise object proposals. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D demonstrate the superiority of our methods. Code is released at https://github.com/GradiusTwinbee/GLIS.

Mobility VLA: Multimodal Instruction Navigation with Long-Context VLMs and Topological Graphs

An elusive goal in navigation research is to build an intelligent agent that can understand multimodal instructions including natural language and image, and perform useful navigation. To achieve this, we study a widely useful category of navigation tasks we call Multimodal Instruction Navigation with demonstration Tours (MINT), in which the environment prior is provided through a previously recorded demonstration video. Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown a promising path in achieving this goal as it demonstrates capabilities in perceiving and reasoning about multimodal inputs. However, VLMs are typically trained to predict textual output and it is an open research question about how to best utilize them in navigation. To solve MINT, we present Mobility VLA, a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) navigation policy that combines the environment understanding and common sense reasoning power of long-context VLMs and a robust low-level navigation policy based on topological graphs. The high-level policy consists of a long-context VLM that takes the demonstration tour video and the multimodal user instruction as input to find the goal frame in the tour video. Next, a low-level policy uses the goal frame and an offline constructed topological graph to generate robot actions at every timestep. We evaluated Mobility VLA in a 836m^2 real world environment and show that Mobility VLA has a high end-to-end success rates on previously unsolved multimodal instructions such as "Where should I return this?" while holding a plastic bin.