Subconscious Robotic Imitation Learning

Although robotic imitation learning (RIL) is promising for embodied intelligent robots, existing RIL approaches rely on computationally intensive multi-model trajectory predictions, resulting in slow execution and limited real-time responsiveness. Instead, human beings subconscious can constantly process and store vast amounts of information from their experiences, perceptions, and learning, allowing them to fulfill complex actions such as riding a bike, without consciously thinking about each. Inspired by this phenomenon in action neurology, we introduced subconscious robotic imitation learning (SRIL), wherein cognitive offloading was combined with historical action chunkings to reduce delays caused by model inferences, thereby accelerating task execution. This process was further enhanced by subconscious downsampling and pattern augmented learning policy wherein intent-rich information was addressed with quantized sampling techniques to improve manipulation efficiency. Experimental results demonstrated that execution speeds of the SRIL were 100\% to 200\% faster over SOTA policies for comprehensive dual-arm tasks, with consistently higher success rates.

Deliberation in Latent Space via Differentiable Cache Augmentation

Techniques enabling large language models (LLMs) to "think more" by generating and attending to intermediate reasoning steps have shown promise in solving complex problems. However, the standard approaches generate sequences of discrete tokens immediately before responding, and so they can incur significant latency costs and be challenging to optimize. In this work, we demonstrate that a frozen LLM can be augmented with an offline coprocessor that operates on the model's key-value (kv) cache. This coprocessor augments the cache with a set of latent embeddings designed to improve the fidelity of subsequent decoding. We train this coprocessor using the language modeling loss from the decoder on standard pretraining data, while keeping the decoder itself frozen. This approach enables the model to learn, in an end-to-end differentiable fashion, how to distill additional computation into its kv-cache. Because the decoder remains unchanged, the coprocessor can operate offline and asynchronously, and the language model can function normally if the coprocessor is unavailable or if a given cache is deemed not to require extra computation. We show experimentally that when a cache is augmented, the decoder achieves lower perplexity on numerous subsequent tokens. Furthermore, even without any task-specific training, our experiments demonstrate that cache augmentation consistently reduces perplexity and improves performance across a range of reasoning-intensive tasks.

Slender Object Scene Segmentation in Remote Sensing Image Based on Learnable Morphological Skeleton with Segment Anything Model

Morphological methods play a crucial role in remote sensing image processing, due to their ability to capture and preserve small structural details. However, most of the existing deep learning models for semantic segmentation are based on the encoder-decoder architecture including U-net and Segment Anything Model (SAM), where the downsampling process tends to discard fine details. In this paper, we propose a new approach that integrates learnable morphological skeleton prior into deep neural networks using the variational method. To address the difficulty in backpropagation in neural networks caused by the non-differentiability presented in classical morphological operations, we provide a smooth representation of the morphological skeleton and design a variational segmentation model integrating morphological skeleton prior by employing operator splitting and dual methods. Then, we integrate this model into the network architecture of SAM, which is achieved by adding a token to mask decoder and modifying the final sigmoid layer, ensuring the final segmentation results preserve the skeleton structure as much as possible. Experimental results on remote sensing datasets, including buildings and roads, demonstrate that our method outperforms the original SAM on slender object segmentation and exhibits better generalization capability.

Large Language Model for Multi-Domain Translation: Benchmarking and Domain CoT Fine-tuning

Achieving consistent high-quality machine translation (MT) across diverse domains remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the limited and imbalanced parallel training data available in various domains. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive general understanding and generation abilities, their potential in multi-domain MT is under-explored. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for multi-domain translation, featuring 25 German$\Leftrightarrow$English and 22 Chinese$\Leftrightarrow$English test sets respectively covering 15 domains. Our evaluation of prominent LLMs reveals a discernible performance gap against traditional MT systems, highlighting domain overfitting and catastrophic forgetting issues after fine-tuning on domain-limited corpora. To mitigate this, we propose a domain Chain of Thought (CoT) fine-tuning technique that utilizes the intrinsic multi-domain intelligence of LLMs to improve translation performance. This method inspires the LLM to perceive domain information from the source text, which then serves as a helpful hint to guide the translation process. Despite being trained on a small dataset of four domains, our CoT fine-tune approach achieves notable enhancements in translation accuracy and domain robustness than traditional fine-tuning, as evidenced by an average 1.53 BLEU score increase in over 20 German$\rightarrow$English distinct out-of-domain tests.

Cross-Dataset Gaze Estimation by Evidential Inter-intra Fusion

Achieving accurate and reliable gaze predictions in complex and diverse environments remains challenging. Fortunately, it is straightforward to access diverse gaze datasets in real-world applications. We discover that training these datasets jointly can significantly improve the generalization of gaze estimation, which is overlooked in previous works. However, due to the inherent distribution shift across different datasets, simply mixing multiple dataset decreases the performance in the original domain despite gaining better generalization abilities. To address the problem of ``cross-dataset gaze estimation'', we propose a novel Evidential Inter-intra Fusion EIF framework, for training a cross-dataset model that performs well across all source and unseen domains. Specifically, we build independent single-dataset branches for various datasets where the data space is partitioned into overlapping subspaces within each dataset for local regression, and further create a cross-dataset branch to integrate the generalizable features from single-dataset branches. Furthermore, evidential regressors based on the Normal and Inverse-Gamma (NIG) distribution are designed to additionally provide uncertainty estimation apart from predicting gaze. Building upon this foundation, our proposed framework achieves both intra-evidential fusion among multiple local regressors within each dataset and inter-evidential fusion among multiple branches by Mixture \textbfof Normal Inverse-Gamma (MoNIG distribution. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves notable improvements in both source domains and unseen domains.

RLPF: Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback for User Summarization with LLMs

LLM-powered personalization agent systems employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict users' behavior from their past activities. However, their effectiveness often hinges on the ability to effectively leverage extensive, long user historical data due to its inherent noise and length of such data. Existing pretrained LLMs may generate summaries that are concise but lack the necessary context for downstream tasks, hindering their utility in personalization systems. To address these challenges, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Prediction Feedback (RLPF). RLPF fine-tunes LLMs to generate concise, human-readable user summaries that are optimized for downstream task performance. By maximizing the usefulness of the generated summaries, RLPF effectively distills extensive user history data while preserving essential information for downstream tasks. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in both extrinsic downstream task utility and intrinsic summary quality, surpassing baseline methods by up to 22% on downstream task performance and achieving an up to 84.59% win rate on Factuality, Abstractiveness, and Readability. RLPF also achieves a remarkable 74% reduction in context length while improving performance on 16 out of 19 unseen tasks and/or datasets, showcasing its generalizability. This approach offers a promising solution for enhancing LLM personalization by effectively transforming long, noisy user histories into informative and human-readable representations.

UserSumBench: A Benchmark Framework for Evaluating User Summarization Approaches

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in generating user summaries from a long list of raw user activity data. These summaries capture essential user information such as preferences and interests, and therefore are invaluable for LLM-based personalization applications, such as explainable recommender systems. However, the development of new summarization techniques is hindered by the lack of ground-truth labels, the inherent subjectivity of user summaries, and human evaluation which is often costly and time-consuming. To address these challenges, we introduce \UserSumBench, a benchmark framework designed to facilitate iterative development of LLM-based summarization approaches. This framework offers two key components: (1) A reference-free summary quality metric. We show that this metric is effective and aligned with human preferences across three diverse datasets (MovieLens, Yelp and Amazon Review). (2) A novel robust summarization method that leverages time-hierarchical summarizer and self-critique verifier to produce high-quality summaries while eliminating hallucination. This method serves as a strong baseline for further innovation in summarization techniques.

Constrained Behavior Cloning for Robotic Learning

Behavior cloning (BC) is a popular supervised imitation learning method in the societies of robotics, autonomous driving, etc., wherein complex skills can be learned by direct imitation from expert demonstrations. Despite its rapid development, it is still affected by limited field of view where accumulation of sensors and joint noise bring compounding errors. In this paper, we introduced geometrically and historically constrained behavior cloning (GHCBC) to dominantly consider high-level state information inspired by neuroscientists, wherein the geometrically constrained behavior cloning were used to geometrically constrain predicting poses, and the historically constrained behavior cloning were utilized to temporally constrain action sequences. The synergy between these two types of constrains enhanced the BC performance in terms of robustness and stability. Comprehensive experimental results showed that success rates were improved by 29.73% in simulation and 39.4% in real robot experiments in average, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art BC method, especially in long-term operational scenes, indicating great potential of using the GHCBC for robotic learning.

PCIE_LAM Solution for Ego4D Looking At Me Challenge

This report presents our team's 'PCIE_LAM' solution for the Ego4D Looking At Me Challenge at CVPR2024. The main goal of the challenge is to accurately determine if a person in the scene is looking at the camera wearer, based on a video where the faces of social partners have been localized. Our proposed solution, InternLSTM, consists of an InternVL image encoder and a Bi-LSTM network. The InternVL extracts spatial features, while the Bi-LSTM extracts temporal features. However, this task is highly challenging due to the distance between the person in the scene and the camera movement, which results in significant blurring in the face image. To address the complexity of the task, we implemented a Gaze Smoothing filter to eliminate noise or spikes from the output. Our approach achieved the 1st position in the looking at me challenge with 0.81 mAP and 0.93 accuracy rate. Code is available at https://github.com/KanokphanL/Ego4D_LAM_InternLSTM

User-LLM: Efficient LLM Contextualization with User Embeddings

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. However, effectively incorporating complex and potentially noisy user interaction data remains a challenge. To address this, we propose User-LLM, a novel framework that leverages user embeddings to contextualize LLMs. These embeddings, distilled from diverse user interactions using self-supervised pretraining, capture latent user preferences and their evolution over time. We integrate these user embeddings with LLMs through cross-attention and soft-prompting, enabling LLMs to dynamically adapt to user context. Our comprehensive experiments on MovieLens, Amazon Review, and Google Local Review datasets demonstrate significant performance gains across various tasks. Notably, our approach outperforms text-prompt-based contextualization on long sequence tasks and tasks that require deep user understanding while being computationally efficient. We further incorporate Perceiver layers to streamline the integration between user encoders and LLMs, reducing computational demands.