Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Tasks

A practical navigation agent must be capable of handling a wide range of interaction demands, such as following instructions, searching objects, answering questions, tracking people, and more. Existing models for embodied navigation fall short of serving as practical generalists in the real world, as they are often constrained by specific task configurations or pre-defined maps with discretized waypoints. In this work, we present Uni-NaVid, the first video-based vision-language-action (VLA) model designed to unify diverse embodied navigation tasks and enable seamless navigation for mixed long-horizon tasks in unseen real-world environments. Uni-NaVid achieves this by harmonizing the input and output data configurations for all commonly used embodied navigation tasks and thereby integrating all tasks in one model. For training Uni-NaVid, we collect 3.6 million navigation data samples in total from four essential navigation sub-tasks and foster synergy in learning across them. Extensive experiments on comprehensive navigation benchmarks clearly demonstrate the advantages of unification modeling in Uni-NaVid and show it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, real-world experiments confirm the model's effectiveness and efficiency, shedding light on its strong generalizability.

DexGraspNet 2.0: Learning Generative Dexterous Grasping in Large-scale Synthetic Cluttered Scenes

Grasping in cluttered scenes remains highly challenging for dexterous hands due to the scarcity of data. To address this problem, we present a large-scale synthetic benchmark, encompassing 1319 objects, 8270 scenes, and 427 million grasps. Beyond benchmarking, we also propose a novel two-stage grasping method that learns efficiently from data by using a diffusion model that conditions on local geometry. Our proposed generative method outperforms all baselines in simulation experiments. Furthermore, with the aid of test-time-depth restoration, our method demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, attaining 90.7% real-world dexterous grasping success rate in cluttered scenes.

Random-coupled Neural Network

Improving the efficiency of current neural networks and modeling them in biological neural systems have become popular research directions in recent years. Pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) is a well applicated model for imitating the computation characteristics of the human brain in computer vision and neural network fields. However, differences between the PCNN and biological neural systems remain: limited neural connection, high computational cost, and lack of stochastic property. In this study, random-coupled neural network (RCNN) is proposed. It overcomes these difficulties in PCNN's neuromorphic computing via a random inactivation process. This process randomly closes some neural connections in the RCNN model, realized by the random inactivation weight matrix of link input. This releases the computational burden of PCNN, making it affordable to achieve vast neural connections. Furthermore, the image and video processing mechanisms of RCNN are researched. It encodes constant stimuli as periodic spike trains and periodic stimuli as chaotic spike trains, the same as biological neural information encoding characteristics. Finally, the RCNN is applicated to image segmentation, fusion, and pulse shape discrimination subtasks. It is demonstrated to be robust, efficient, and highly anti-noised, with outstanding performance in all applications mentioned above.

KG-Rank: Enhancing Large Language Models for Medical QA with Knowledge Graphs and Ranking Techniques

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced healthcare innovation on generation capabilities. However, their application in real clinical settings is challenging due to potential deviations from medical facts and inherent biases. In this work, we develop an augmented LLM framework, KG-Rank, which leverages a medical knowledge graph (KG) with ranking and re-ranking techniques, aiming to improve free-text question-answering (QA) in the medical domain. Specifically, upon receiving a question, we initially retrieve triplets from a medical KG to gather factual information. Subsequently, we innovatively apply ranking methods to refine the ordering of these triplets, aiming to yield more precise answers. To the best of our knowledge, KG-Rank is the first application of ranking models combined with KG in medical QA specifically for generating long answers. Evaluation of four selected medical QA datasets shows that KG-Rank achieves an improvement of over 18% in the ROUGE-L score. Moreover, we extend KG-Rank to open domains, where it realizes a 14% improvement in ROUGE-L, showing the effectiveness and potential of KG-Rank.

Everything Perturbed All at Once: Enabling Differentiable Graph Attacks

As powerful tools for representation learning on graphs, graph neural networks (GNNs) have played an important role in applications including social networks, recommendation systems, and online web services. However, GNNs have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can significantly degrade their effectiveness. Recent state-of-the-art approaches in adversarial attacks rely on gradient-based meta-learning to selectively perturb a single edge with the highest attack score until they reach the budget constraint. While effective in identifying vulnerable links, these methods are plagued by high computational costs. By leveraging continuous relaxation and parameterization of the graph structure, we propose a novel attack method called Differentiable Graph Attack (DGA) to efficiently generate effective attacks and meanwhile eliminate the need for costly retraining. Compared to the state-of-the-art, DGA achieves nearly equivalent attack performance with 6 times less training time and 11 times smaller GPU memory footprint on different benchmark datasets. Additionally, we provide extensive experimental analyses of the transferability of the DGA among different graph models, as well as its robustness against widely-used defense mechanisms.

Pulse shape discrimination based on the Tempotron: a powerful classifier on GPU

This study introduces the Tempotron, a powerful classifier based on a third-generation neural network model, for pulse shape discrimination. By eliminating the need for manual feature extraction, the Tempotron model can process pulse signals directly, generating discrimination results based on learned prior knowledge. The study performed experiments using GPU acceleration, resulting in over a 500 times speedup compared to the CPU-based model, and investigated the impact of noise augmentation on the Tempotron's performance. Experimental results showed that the Tempotron is a potent classifier capable of achieving high discrimination accuracy. Furthermore, analyzing the neural activity of Tempotron during training shed light on its learning characteristics and aided in selecting the Tempotron's hyperparameters. The dataset used in this study and the source code of the GPU-based Tempotron are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/HaoranLiu507/TempotronGPU.

Delving into Discrete Normalizing Flows on SO Manifold for Probabilistic Rotation Modeling

Normalizing flows (NFs) provide a powerful tool to construct an expressive distribution by a sequence of trackable transformations of a base distribution and form a probabilistic model of underlying data. Rotation, as an important quantity in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, can exhibit many ambiguities when occlusion and symmetry occur and thus demands such probabilistic models. Though much progress has been made for NFs in Euclidean space, there are no effective normalizing flows without discontinuity or many-to-one mapping tailored for SO(3) manifold. Given the unique non-Euclidean properties of the rotation manifold, adapting the existing NFs to SO(3) manifold is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose a novel normalizing flow on SO(3) by combining a Mobius transformation-based coupling layer and a quaternion affine transformation. With our proposed rotation normalizing flows, one can not only effectively express arbitrary distributions on SO(3), but also conditionally build the target distribution given input observations. Extensive experiments show that our rotation normalizing flows significantly outperform the baselines on both unconditional and conditional tasks.

UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy

In this work, we tackle the problem of learning universal robotic dexterous grasping from a point cloud observation under a table-top setting. The goal is to grasp and lift up objects in high-quality and diverse ways and generalize across hundreds of categories and even the unseen. Inspired by successful pipelines used in parallel gripper grasping, we split the task into two stages: 1) grasp proposal (pose) generation and 2) goal-conditioned grasp execution. For the first stage, we propose a novel probabilistic model of grasp pose conditioned on the point cloud observation that factorizes rotation from translation and articulation. Trained on our synthesized large-scale dexterous grasp dataset, this model enables us to sample diverse and high-quality dexterous grasp poses for the object in the point cloud. For the second stage, we propose to replace the motion planning used in parallel gripper grasping with a goal-conditioned grasp policy, due to the complexity involved in dexterous grasping execution. Note that it is very challenging to learn this highly generalizable grasp policy that only takes realistic inputs without oracle states. We thus propose several important innovations, including state canonicalization, object curriculum, and teacher-student distillation. Integrating the two stages, our final pipeline becomes the first to achieve universal generalization for dexterous grasping, demonstrating an average success rate of more than 60% on thousands of object instances, which significantly out performs all baselines, meanwhile showing only a minimal generalization gap.

FECAM: Frequency Enhanced Channel Attention Mechanism for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is a long-standing challenge due to the real-world information is in various scenario (e.g., energy, weather, traffic, economics, earthquake warning). However some mainstream forecasting model forecasting result is derailed dramatically from ground truth. We believe it's the reason that model's lacking ability of capturing frequency information which richly contains in real world datasets. At present, the mainstream frequency information extraction methods are Fourier transform(FT) based. However, use of FT is problematic due to Gibbs phenomenon. If the values on both sides of sequences differ significantly, oscillatory approximations are observed around both sides and high frequency noise will be introduced. Therefore We propose a novel frequency enhanced channel attention that adaptively modelling frequency interdependencies between channels based on Discrete Cosine Transform which would intrinsically avoid high frequency noise caused by problematic periodity during Fourier Transform, which is defined as Gibbs Phenomenon. We show that this network generalize extremely effectively across six real-world datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance, we further demonstrate that frequency enhanced channel attention mechanism module can be flexibly applied to different networks. This module can improve the prediction ability of existing mainstream networks, which reduces 35.99% MSE on LSTM, 10.01% on Reformer, 8.71% on Informer, 8.29% on Autoformer, 8.06% on Transformer, etc., at a slight computational cost ,with just a few line of code. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/Zero-coder/FECAM.

Gradient-Guided Importance Sampling for Learning Binary Energy-Based Models

Learning energy-based models (EBMs) is known to be difficult especially on discrete data where gradient-based learning strategies cannot be applied directly. Although ratio matching is a sound method to learn discrete EBMs, it suffers from expensive computation and excessive memory requirement, thereby resulting in difficulties for learning EBMs on high-dimensional data. Motivated from these limitations, in this study, we propose ratio matching with gradient-guided importance sampling (RMwGGIS). Particularly, we use the gradient of the energy function w.r.t. the discrete data space to approximately construct the provably optimal proposal distribution, which is subsequently used by importance sampling to efficiently estimate the original ratio matching objective. We perform experiments on density modeling over synthetic discrete data, graph generation, and training Ising models to evaluate our proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can significantly alleviate the limitations of ratio matching, perform more effectively in practice, and scale to high-dimensional problems. Our implementation is available at {https://github.com/divelab/RMwGGIS.