Out-of-Distribution Recovery with Object-Centric Keypoint Inverse Policy For Visuomotor Imitation Learning

We propose an object-centric recovery policy framework to address the challenges of out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios in visuomotor policy learning. Previous behavior cloning (BC) methods rely heavily on a large amount of labeled data coverage, failing in unfamiliar spatial states. Without relying on extra data collection, our approach learns a recovery policy constructed by an inverse policy inferred from object keypoint manifold gradient in the original training data. The recovery policy serves as a simple add-on to any base visuomotor BC policy, agnostic to a specific method, guiding the system back towards the training distribution to ensure task success even in OOD situations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our object-centric framework in both simulation and real robot experiments, achieving an improvement of $\textbf{77.7\%}$ over the base policy in OOD. Project Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ocr-penn

Fish-Speech: Leveraging Large Language Models for Advanced Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems face ongoing challenges in processing complex linguistic features, handling polyphonic expressions, and producing natural-sounding multilingual speech - capabilities that are crucial for future AI applications. In this paper, we present Fish-Speech, a novel framework that implements a serial fast-slow Dual Autoregressive (Dual-AR) architecture to enhance the stability of Grouped Finite Scalar Vector Quantization (GFSQ) in sequence generation tasks. This architecture improves codebook processing efficiency while maintaining high-fidelity outputs, making it particularly effective for AI interactions and voice cloning. Fish-Speech leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for linguistic feature extraction, eliminating the need for traditional grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion and thereby streamlining the synthesis pipeline and enhancing multilingual support. Additionally, we developed FF-GAN through GFSQ to achieve superior compression ratios and near 100\% codebook utilization. Our approach addresses key limitations of current TTS systems while providing a foundation for more sophisticated, context-aware speech synthesis. Experimental results show that Fish-Speech significantly outperforms baseline models in handling complex linguistic scenarios and voice cloning tasks, demonstrating its potential to advance TTS technology in AI applications. The implementation is open source at \href{https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech}{https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech}.

LLM-GAN: Construct Generative Adversarial Network Through Large Language Models For Explainable Fake News Detection

Explainable fake news detection predicts the authenticity of news items with annotated explanations. Today, Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their powerful natural language understanding and explanation generation abilities. However, presenting LLMs for explainable fake news detection remains two main challenges. Firstly, fake news appears reasonable and could easily mislead LLMs, leaving them unable to understand the complex news-faking process. Secondly, utilizing LLMs for this task would generate both correct and incorrect explanations, which necessitates abundant labor in the loop. In this paper, we propose LLM-GAN, a novel framework that utilizes prompting mechanisms to enable an LLM to become Generator and Detector and for realistic fake news generation and detection. Our results demonstrate LLM-GAN's effectiveness in both prediction performance and explanation quality. We further showcase the integration of LLM-GAN to a cloud-native AI platform to provide better fake news detection service in the cloud.

Constraint-Aware Intent Estimation for Dynamic Human-Robot Object Co-Manipulation

Constraint-aware estimation of human intent is essential for robots to physically collaborate and interact with humans. Further, to achieve fluid collaboration in dynamic tasks intent estimation should be achieved in real-time. In this paper, we present a framework that combines online estimation and control to facilitate robots in interpreting human intentions, and dynamically adjust their actions to assist in dynamic object co-manipulation tasks while considering both robot and human constraints. Central to our approach is the adoption of a Dynamic Systems (DS) model to represent human intent. Such a low-dimensional parameterized model, along with human manipulability and robot kinematic constraints, enables us to predict intent using a particle filter solely based on past motion data and tracking errors. For safe assistive control, we propose a variable impedance controller that adapts the robot's impedance to offer assistance based on the intent estimation confidence from the DS particle filter. We validate our framework on a challenging real-world human-robot co-manipulation task and present promising results over baselines. Our framework represents a significant step forward in physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC), ensuring that robot cooperative interactions with humans are both feasible and effective.

DMM: Disparity-guided Multispectral Mamba for Oriented Object Detection in Remote Sensing

Multispectral oriented object detection faces challenges due to both inter-modal and intra-modal discrepancies. Recent studies often rely on transformer-based models to address these issues and achieve cross-modal fusion detection. However, the quadratic computational complexity of transformers limits their performance. Inspired by the efficiency and lower complexity of Mamba in long sequence tasks, we propose Disparity-guided Multispectral Mamba (DMM), a multispectral oriented object detection framework comprised of a Disparity-guided Cross-modal Fusion Mamba (DCFM) module, a Multi-scale Target-aware Attention (MTA) module, and a Target-Prior Aware (TPA) auxiliary task. The DCFM module leverages disparity information between modalities to adaptively merge features from RGB and IR images, mitigating inter-modal conflicts. The MTA module aims to enhance feature representation by focusing on relevant target regions within the RGB modality, addressing intra-modal variations. The TPA auxiliary task utilizes single-modal labels to guide the optimization of the MTA module, ensuring it focuses on targets and their local context. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle and VEDAI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining computational efficiency. Code will be available at https://github.com/Another-0/DMM.

Seed-ASR: Understanding Diverse Speech and Contexts with LLM-based Speech Recognition

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is required to accurately transcribe diverse speech signals (from different domains, languages, accents, etc) given the specific contextual information in various application scenarios. Classic end-to-end models fused with extra language models perform well, but mainly in data matching scenarios and are gradually approaching a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce Seed-ASR, a large language model (LLM) based speech recognition model. Seed-ASR is developed based on the framework of audio conditioned LLM (AcLLM), leveraging the capabilities of LLMs by inputting continuous speech representations together with contextual information into the LLM. Through stage-wise large-scale training and the elicitation of context-aware capabilities in LLM, Seed-ASR demonstrates significant improvement over end-to-end models on comprehensive evaluation sets, including multiple domains, accents/dialects and languages. Additionally, Seed-ASR can be further deployed to support specific needs in various scenarios without requiring extra language models. Compared to recently released large ASR models, Seed-ASR achieves 10%-40% reduction in word (or character, for Chinese) error rates on Chinese and English public test sets, further demonstrating its powerful performance.

A Radiometric Correction based Optical Modeling Approach to Removing Reflection Noise in TLS Point Clouds of Urban Scenes

Point clouds are vital in computer vision tasks such as 3D reconstruction, autonomous driving, and robotics. However, TLS-acquired point clouds often contain virtual points from reflective surfaces, causing disruptions. This study presents a reflection noise elimination algorithm for TLS point clouds. Our innovative reflection plane detection algorithm, based on geometry-optical models and physical properties, identifies and categorizes reflection points per optical reflection theory. We've adapted the LSFH feature descriptor to retain reflection features, mitigating interference from symmetrical architectural structures. By incorporating the Hausdorff feature distance, the algorithm enhances resilience to ghosting and deformation, improving virtual point detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on the 3DRN benchmark dataset, featuring diverse urban environments with virtual TLS reflection noise, show our algorithm improves precision and recall rates for 3D points in reflective regions by 57.03\% and 31.80\%, respectively. Our method achieves a 9.17\% better outlier detection rate and 5.65\% higher accuracy than leading methods. Access the 3DRN dataset at (https://github.com/Tsuiky/3DRN).

NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking

Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

A Finite Difference Informed Graph Network for Solving Steady-State Incompressible Flows on Block-Structured Grids

Recently, advancements in deep learning have enabled physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Numerical differentiation (ND) using the finite difference (FD) method is efficient in physics-constrained designs, even in parameterized settings, often employing body-fitted block-structured grids for complex flow cases. However, convolution operators in CNNs for finite differences are typically limited to single-block grids. To address this, we use graphs and graph networks (GNs) to learn flow representations across multi-block structured grids. We propose a graph convolution-based finite difference method (GC-FDM) to train GNs in a physics-constrained manner, enabling differentiable finite difference operations on graph unstructured outputs. Our goal is to solve parametric steady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for flows around a backward-facing step, a circular cylinder, and double cylinders, using multi-block structured grids. Comparing our method to a CFD solver under various boundary conditions, we demonstrate improved training efficiency and accuracy, achieving a minimum relative error of $10^{-3}$ in velocity field prediction and a 20\% reduction in training cost compared to PINNs.

Language Guided Skill Discovery

Skill discovery methods enable agents to learn diverse emergent behaviors without explicit rewards. To make learned skills useful for unknown downstream tasks, obtaining a semantically diverse repertoire of skills is essential. While some approaches introduce a discriminator to distinguish skills and others aim to increase state coverage, no existing work directly addresses the "semantic diversity" of skills. We hypothesize that leveraging the semantic knowledge of large language models (LLMs) can lead us to improve semantic diversity of resulting behaviors. In this sense, we introduce Language Guided Skill Discovery (LGSD), a skill discovery framework that aims to directly maximize the semantic diversity between skills. LGSD takes user prompts as input and outputs a set of semantically distinctive skills. The prompts serve as a means to constrain the search space into a semantically desired subspace, and the generated LLM outputs guide the agent to visit semantically diverse states within the subspace. We demonstrate that LGSD enables legged robots to visit different user-intended areas on a plane by simply changing the prompt. Furthermore, we show that language guidance aids in discovering more diverse skills compared to five existing skill discovery methods in robot-arm manipulation environments. Lastly, LGSD provides a simple way of utilizing learned skills via natural language.