VLN-Game: Vision-Language Equilibrium Search for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation

Following human instructions to explore and search for a specified target in an unfamiliar environment is a crucial skill for mobile service robots. Most of the previous works on object goal navigation have typically focused on a single input modality as the target, which may lead to limited consideration of language descriptions containing detailed attributes and spatial relationships. To address this limitation, we propose VLN-Game, a novel zero-shot framework for visual target navigation that can process object names and descriptive language targets effectively. To be more precise, our approach constructs a 3D object-centric spatial map by integrating pre-trained visual-language features with a 3D reconstruction of the physical environment. Then, the framework identifies the most promising areas to explore in search of potential target candidates. A game-theoretic vision language model is employed to determine which target best matches the given language description. Experiments conducted on the Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both object goal navigation and language-based navigation tasks. Moreover, we show that VLN-Game can be easily deployed on real-world robots. The success of VLN-Game highlights the promising potential of using game-theoretic methods with compact vision-language models to advance decision-making capabilities in robotic systems. The supplementary video and code can be accessed via the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/vln-game.

VidEgoThink: Assessing Egocentric Video Understanding Capabilities for Embodied AI

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened new avenues for applications in Embodied AI. Building on previous work, EgoThink, we introduce VidEgoThink, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating egocentric video understanding capabilities. To bridge the gap between MLLMs and low-level control in Embodied AI, we design four key interrelated tasks: video question-answering, hierarchy planning, visual grounding and reward modeling. To minimize manual annotation costs, we develop an automatic data generation pipeline based on the Ego4D dataset, leveraging the prior knowledge and multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o. Three human annotators then filter the generated data to ensure diversity and quality, resulting in the VidEgoThink benchmark. We conduct extensive experiments with three types of models: API-based MLLMs, open-source image-based MLLMs, and open-source video-based MLLMs. Experimental results indicate that all MLLMs, including GPT-4o, perform poorly across all tasks related to egocentric video understanding. These findings suggest that foundation models still require significant advancements to be effectively applied to first-person scenarios in Embodied AI. In conclusion, VidEgoThink reflects a research trend towards employing MLLMs for egocentric vision, akin to human capabilities, enabling active observation and interaction in the complex real-world environments.

Fairness without Sensitive Attributes via Knowledge Sharing

While model fairness improvement has been explored previously, existing methods invariably rely on adjusting explicit sensitive attribute values in order to improve model fairness in downstream tasks. However, we observe a trend in which sensitive demographic information becomes inaccessible as public concerns around data privacy grow. In this paper, we propose a confidence-based hierarchical classifier structure called "Reckoner" for reliable fair model learning under the assumption of missing sensitive attributes. We first present results showing that if the dataset contains biased labels or other hidden biases, classifiers significantly increase the bias gap across different demographic groups in the subset with higher prediction confidence. Inspired by these findings, we devised a dual-model system in which a version of the model initialised with a high-confidence data subset learns from a version of the model initialised with a low-confidence data subset, enabling it to avoid biased predictions. Our experimental results show that Reckoner consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in COMPAS dataset and New Adult dataset, considering both accuracy and fairness metrics.

Robust Decision Transformer: Tackling Data Corruption in Offline RL via Sequence Modeling

Learning policies from offline datasets through offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for scaling data-driven decision-making and avoiding unsafe and costly online interactions. However, real-world data collected from sensors or humans often contains noise and errors, posing a significant challenge for existing offline RL methods. Our study indicates that traditional offline RL methods based on temporal difference learning tend to underperform Decision Transformer (DT) under data corruption, especially when the amount of data is limited. This suggests the potential of sequential modeling for tackling data corruption in offline RL. To further unleash the potential of sequence modeling methods, we propose Robust Decision Transformer (RDT) by incorporating several robust techniques. Specifically, we introduce Gaussian weighted learning and iterative data correction to reduce the effect of corrupted data. Additionally, we leverage embedding dropout to enhance the model's resistance to erroneous inputs. Extensive experiments on MoJoCo, KitChen, and Adroit tasks demonstrate RDT's superior performance under diverse data corruption compared to previous methods. Moreover, RDT exhibits remarkable robustness in a challenging setting that combines training-time data corruption with testing-time observation perturbations. These results highlight the potential of robust sequence modeling for learning from noisy or corrupted offline datasets, thereby promoting the reliable application of offline RL in real-world tasks.

HumanVLA: Towards Vision-Language Directed Object Rearrangement by Physical Humanoid

Physical Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) plays a crucial role in numerous applications. However, existing HSI techniques are limited to specific object dynamics and privileged information, which prevents the development of more comprehensive applications. To address this limitation, we introduce HumanVLA for general object rearrangement directed by practical vision and language. A teacher-student framework is utilized to develop HumanVLA. A state-based teacher policy is trained first using goal-conditioned reinforcement learning and adversarial motion prior. Then, it is distilled into a vision-language-action model via behavior cloning. We propose several key insights to facilitate the large-scale learning process. To support general object rearrangement by physical humanoid, we introduce a novel Human-in-the-Room dataset encompassing various rearrangement tasks. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Self-playing Adversarial Language Game Enhances LLM Reasoning

We explore the self-play training procedure of large language models (LLMs) in a two-player adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo. In this game, an attacker and a defender communicate with respect to a target word only visible to the attacker. The attacker aims to induce the defender to utter the target word unconsciously, while the defender tries to infer the target word from the attacker's utterances. To win the game, both players should have sufficient knowledge about the target word and high-level reasoning ability to infer and express in this information-reserved conversation. Hence, we are curious about whether LLMs' reasoning ability can be further enhanced by Self-Play in this Adversarial language Game (SPAG). With this goal, we let LLMs act as the attacker and play with a copy of itself as the defender on an extensive range of target words. Through reinforcement learning on the game outcomes, we observe that the LLMs' performance uniformly improves on a broad range of reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, iteratively adopting this self-play process can continuously promote LLM's reasoning ability. The code is at https://github.com/Linear95/SPAG.

An Efficient Model-Based Approach on Learning Agile Motor Skills without Reinforcement

Learning-based methods have improved locomotion skills of quadruped robots through deep reinforcement learning. However, the sim-to-real gap and low sample efficiency still limit the skill transfer. To address this issue, we propose an efficient model-based learning framework that combines a world model with a policy network. We train a differentiable world model to predict future states and use it to directly supervise a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based policy network to imitate real animal behaviors. This significantly reduces the need for real interaction data and allows for rapid policy updates. We also develop a high-level network to track diverse commands and trajectories. Our simulated results show a tenfold sample efficiency increase compared to reinforcement learning methods such as PPO. In real-world testing, our policy achieves proficient command-following performance with only a two-minute data collection period and generalizes well to new speeds and paths.

Learning Highly Dynamic Behaviors for Quadrupedal Robots

Learning highly dynamic behaviors for robots has been a longstanding challenge. Traditional approaches have demonstrated robust locomotion, but the exhibited behaviors lack diversity and agility. They employ approximate models, which lead to compromises in performance. Data-driven approaches have been shown to reproduce agile behaviors of animals, but typically have not been able to learn highly dynamic behaviors. In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach to enable robots to learn highly dynamic behaviors from animal motion data. The learned controller is deployed on a quadrupedal robot and the results show that the controller is able to reproduce highly dynamic behaviors including sprinting, jumping and sharp turning. Various behaviors can be activated through human interaction using a stick with markers attached to it. Based on the motion pattern of the stick, the robot exhibits walking, running, sitting and jumping, much like the way humans interact with a pet.

HyperAgent: A Simple, Scalable, Efficient and Provable Reinforcement Learning Framework for Complex Environments

To solve complex tasks under resource constraints, reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be simple, efficient, and scalable with (1) large state space and (2) increasingly accumulated data of interactions. We propose the HyperAgent, a RL framework with hypermodel, index sampling schemes and incremental update mechanism, enabling computation-efficient sequential posterior approximation and data-efficient action selection under general value function approximation beyond conjugacy. The implementation of \HyperAgent is simple as it only adds one module and one line of code additional to DDQN. Practically, HyperAgent demonstrates its robust performance in large-scale deep RL benchmarks with significant efficiency gain in terms of both data and computation. Theoretically, among the practically scalable algorithms, HyperAgent is the first method to achieve provably scalable per-step computational complexity as well as sublinear regret under tabular RL. The core of our theoretical analysis is the sequential posterior approximation argument, made possible by the first analytical tool for sequential random projection, a non-trivial martingale extension of the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. This work bridges the theoretical and practical realms of RL, establishing a new benchmark for RL algorithm design.

Identification of Regulatory Requirements Relevant to Business Processes: A Comparative Study on Generative AI, Embedding-based Ranking, Crowd and Expert-driven Methods

Organizations face the challenge of ensuring compliance with an increasing amount of requirements from various regulatory documents. Which requirements are relevant depends on aspects such as the geographic location of the organization, its domain, size, and business processes. Considering these contextual factors, as a first step, relevant documents (e.g., laws, regulations, directives, policies) are identified, followed by a more detailed analysis of which parts of the identified documents are relevant for which step of a given business process. Nowadays the identification of regulatory requirements relevant to business processes is mostly done manually by domain and legal experts, posing a tremendous effort on them, especially for a large number of regulatory documents which might frequently change. Hence, this work examines how legal and domain experts can be assisted in the assessment of relevant requirements. For this, we compare an embedding-based NLP ranking method, a generative AI method using GPT-4, and a crowdsourced method with the purely manual method of creating relevancy labels by experts. The proposed methods are evaluated based on two case studies: an Australian insurance case created with domain experts and a global banking use case, adapted from SAP Signavio's workflow example of an international guideline. A gold standard is created for both BPMN2.0 processes and matched to real-world textual requirements from multiple regulatory documents. The evaluation and discussion provide insights into strengths and weaknesses of each method regarding applicability, automation, transparency, and reproducibility and provide guidelines on which method combinations will maximize benefits for given characteristics such as process usage, impact, and dynamics of an application scenario.