Dexterous Hand Manipulation via Efficient Imitation-Bootstrapped Online Reinforcement Learning

Dexterous hand manipulation in real-world scenarios presents considerable challenges due to its demands for both dexterity and precision. While imitation learning approaches have thoroughly examined these challenges, they still require a significant number of expert demonstrations and are limited by a constrained performance upper bound. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient Imitation-Bootstrapped Online Reinforcement Learning (IBORL) method tailored for robotic dexterous hand manipulation in real-world environments. Specifically, we pretrain the policy using a limited set of expert demonstrations and subsequently finetune this policy through direct reinforcement learning in the real world. To address the catastrophic forgetting issues that arise from the distribution shift between expert demonstrations and real-world environments, we design a regularization term that balances the exploration of novel behaviors with the preservation of the pretrained policy. Our experiments with real-world tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving an almost 100% success rate and a 23% improvement in cycle time. Furthermore, by finetuning with online reinforcement learning, our method surpasses expert demonstrations and uncovers superior policies. Our code and empirical results are available in https://hggforget.github.io/iborl.github.io/.

Prioritize Alignment in Dataset Distillation

Dataset Distillation aims to compress a large dataset into a significantly more compact, synthetic one without compromising the performance of the trained models. To achieve this, existing methods use the agent model to extract information from the target dataset and embed it into the distilled dataset. Consequently, the quality of extracted and embedded information determines the quality of the distilled dataset. In this work, we find that existing methods introduce misaligned information in both information extraction and embedding stages. To alleviate this, we propose Prioritize Alignment in Dataset Distillation (PAD), which aligns information from the following two perspectives. 1) We prune the target dataset according to the compressing ratio to filter the information that can be extracted by the agent model. 2) We use only deep layers of the agent model to perform the distillation to avoid excessively introducing low-level information. This simple strategy effectively filters out misaligned information and brings non-trivial improvement for mainstream matching-based distillation algorithms. Furthermore, built on trajectory matching, \textbf{PAD} achieves remarkable improvements on various benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Rethinking Human Evaluation Protocol for Text-to-Video Models: Enhancing Reliability,Reproducibility, and Practicality

Recent text-to-video (T2V) technology advancements, as demonstrated by models such as Gen2, Pika, and Sora, have significantly broadened its applicability and popularity. Despite these strides, evaluating these models poses substantial challenges. Primarily, due to the limitations inherent in automatic metrics, manual evaluation is often considered a superior method for assessing T2V generation. However, existing manual evaluation protocols face reproducibility, reliability, and practicality issues. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Text-to-Video Human Evaluation (T2VHE) protocol, a comprehensive and standardized protocol for T2V models. The T2VHE protocol includes well-defined metrics, thorough annotator training, and an effective dynamic evaluation module. Experimental results demonstrate that this protocol not only ensures high-quality annotations but can also reduce evaluation costs by nearly 50%. We will open-source the entire setup of the T2VHE protocol, including the complete protocol workflow, the dynamic evaluation component details, and the annotation interface code. This will help communities establish more sophisticated human assessment protocols.

Safeguarding Large Language Models: A Survey

In the burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), developing a robust safety mechanism, colloquially known as "safeguards" or "guardrails", has become imperative to ensure the ethical use of LLMs within prescribed boundaries. This article provides a systematic literature review on the current status of this critical mechanism. It discusses its major challenges and how it can be enhanced into a comprehensive mechanism dealing with ethical issues in various contexts. First, the paper elucidates the current landscape of safeguarding mechanisms that major LLM service providers and the open-source community employ. This is followed by the techniques to evaluate, analyze, and enhance some (un)desirable properties that a guardrail might want to enforce, such as hallucinations, fairness, privacy, and so on. Based on them, we review techniques to circumvent these controls (i.e., attacks), to defend the attacks, and to reinforce the guardrails. While the techniques mentioned above represent the current status and the active research trends, we also discuss several challenges that cannot be easily dealt with by the methods and present our vision on how to implement a comprehensive guardrail through the full consideration of multi-disciplinary approach, neural-symbolic method, and systems development lifecycle.

Continuous Geometry-Aware Graph Diffusion via Hyperbolic Neural PDE

While Hyperbolic Graph Neural Network (HGNN) has recently emerged as a powerful tool dealing with hierarchical graph data, the limitations of scalability and efficiency hinder itself from generalizing to deep models. In this paper, by envisioning depth as a continuous-time embedding evolution, we decouple the HGNN and reframe the information propagation as a partial differential equation, letting node-wise attention undertake the role of diffusivity within the Hyperbolic Neural PDE (HPDE). By introducing theoretical principles \textit{e.g.,} field and flow, gradient, divergence, and diffusivity on a non-Euclidean manifold for HPDE integration, we discuss both implicit and explicit discretization schemes to formulate numerical HPDE solvers. Further, we propose the Hyperbolic Graph Diffusion Equation (HGDE) -- a flexible vector flow function that can be integrated to obtain expressive hyperbolic node embeddings. By analyzing potential energy decay of embeddings, we demonstrate that HGDE is capable of modeling both low- and high-order proximity with the benefit of local-global diffusivity functions. Experiments on node classification and link prediction and image-text classification tasks verify the superiority of the proposed method, which consistently outperforms various competitive models by a significant margin.

Preferred-Action-Optimized Diffusion Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from previously collected datasets. Recently, due to their powerful representational capabilities, diffusion models have shown significant potential as policy models for offline RL issues. However, previous offline RL algorithms based on diffusion policies generally adopt weighted regression to improve the policy. This approach optimizes the policy only using the collected actions and is sensitive to Q-values, which limits the potential for further performance enhancement. To this end, we propose a novel preferred-action-optimized diffusion policy for offline RL. In particular, an expressive conditional diffusion model is utilized to represent the diverse distribution of a behavior policy. Meanwhile, based on the diffusion model, preferred actions within the same behavior distribution are automatically generated through the critic function. Moreover, an anti-noise preference optimization is designed to achieve policy improvement by using the preferred actions, which can adapt to noise-preferred actions for stable training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method provides competitive or superior performance compared to previous state-of-the-art offline RL methods, particularly in sparse reward tasks such as Kitchen and AntMaze. Additionally, we empirically prove the effectiveness of anti-noise preference optimization.

Empowering Embodied Manipulation: A Bimanual-Mobile Robot Manipulation Dataset for Household Tasks

As Embodied AI advances, it increasingly enables robots to handle the complexity of household manipulation tasks more effectively. However, the application of robots in these settings remains limited due to the scarcity of bimanual-mobile robot manipulation datasets. Existing datasets either focus solely on simple grasping tasks using single-arm robots without mobility, or collect sensor data limited to a narrow scope of sensory inputs. As a result, these datasets often fail to encapsulate the intricate and dynamic nature of real-world tasks that bimanual-mobile robots are expected to perform. To address these limitations, we introduce BRMData, a Bimanual-mobile Robot Manipulation Dataset designed specifically for household applications. The dataset includes 10 diverse household tasks, ranging from simple single-arm manipulation to more complex dual-arm and mobile manipulations. It is collected using multi-view and depth-sensing data acquisition strategies. Human-robot interactions and multi-object manipulations are integrated into the task designs to closely simulate real-world household applications. Moreover, we present a Manipulation Efficiency Score (MES) metric to evaluate both the precision and efficiency of robot manipulation methods. BRMData aims to drive the development of versatile robot manipulation technologies, specifically focusing on advancing imitation learning methods from human demonstrations. The dataset is now open-sourced and available at https://embodiedrobot.github.io/, enhancing research and development efforts in the field of Embodied Manipulation.

Towards Fairness-Aware Adversarial Learning

Although adversarial training (AT) has proven effective in enhancing the model's robustness, the recently revealed issue of fairness in robustness has not been well addressed, i.e. the robust accuracy varies significantly among different categories. In this paper, instead of uniformly evaluating the model's average class performance, we delve into the issue of robust fairness, by considering the worst-case distribution across various classes. We propose a novel learning paradigm, named Fairness-Aware Adversarial Learning (FAAL). As a generalization of conventional AT, we re-define the problem of adversarial training as a min-max-max framework, to ensure both robustness and fairness of the trained model. Specifically, by taking advantage of distributional robust optimization, our method aims to find the worst distribution among different categories, and the solution is guaranteed to obtain the upper bound performance with high probability. In particular, FAAL can fine-tune an unfair robust model to be fair within only two epochs, without compromising the overall clean and robust accuracies. Extensive experiments on various image datasets validate the superior performance and efficiency of the proposed FAAL compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Two Trades is not Baffled: Condensing Graph via Crafting Rational Gradient Matching

Training on large-scale graphs has achieved remarkable results in graph representation learning, but its cost and storage have raised growing concerns. As one of the most promising directions, graph condensation methods address these issues by employing gradient matching, aiming to condense the full graph into a more concise yet information-rich synthetic set. Though encouraging, these strategies primarily emphasize matching directions of the gradients, which leads to deviations in the training trajectories. Such deviations are further magnified by the differences between the condensation and evaluation phases, culminating in accumulated errors, which detrimentally affect the performance of the condensed graphs. In light of this, we propose a novel graph condensation method named \textbf{C}raf\textbf{T}ing \textbf{R}ationa\textbf{L} trajectory (\textbf{CTRL}), which offers an optimized starting point closer to the original dataset's feature distribution and a more refined strategy for gradient matching. Theoretically, CTRL can effectively neutralize the impact of accumulated errors on the performance of condensed graphs. We provide extensive experiments on various graph datasets and downstream tasks to support the effectiveness of CTRL. Code is released at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/CTRL.

Navigating Complexity: Toward Lossless Graph Condensation via Expanding Window Matching

Graph condensation aims to reduce the size of a large-scale graph dataset by synthesizing a compact counterpart without sacrificing the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) trained on it, which has shed light on reducing the computational cost for training GNNs. Nevertheless, existing methods often fall short of accurately replicating the original graph for certain datasets, thereby failing to achieve the objective of lossless condensation. To understand this phenomenon, we investigate the potential reasons and reveal that the previous state-of-the-art trajectory matching method provides biased and restricted supervision signals from the original graph when optimizing the condensed one. This significantly limits both the scale and efficacy of the condensed graph. In this paper, we make the first attempt toward \textit{lossless graph condensation} by bridging the previously neglected supervision signals. Specifically, we employ a curriculum learning strategy to train expert trajectories with more diverse supervision signals from the original graph, and then effectively transfer the information into the condensed graph with expanding window matching. Moreover, we design a loss function to further extract knowledge from the expert trajectories. Theoretical analysis justifies the design of our method and extensive experiments verify its superiority across different datasets. Code is released at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/GEOM.