Bootstrapped Model Predictive Control

Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been demonstrated to be effective in continuous control tasks. When a world model and a value function are available, planning a sequence of actions ahead of time leads to a better policy. Existing methods typically obtain the value function and the corresponding policy in a model-free manner. However, we find that such an approach struggles with complex tasks, resulting in poor policy learning and inaccurate value estimation. To address this problem, we leverage the strengths of MPC itself. In this work, we introduce Bootstrapped Model Predictive Control (BMPC), a novel algorithm that performs policy learning in a bootstrapped manner. BMPC learns a network policy by imitating an MPC expert, and in turn, uses this policy to guide the MPC process. Combined with model-based TD-learning, our policy learning yields better value estimation and further boosts the efficiency of MPC. We also introduce a lazy reanalyze mechanism, which enables computationally efficient imitation learning. Our method achieves superior performance over prior works on diverse continuous control tasks. In particular, on challenging high-dimensional locomotion tasks, BMPC significantly improves data efficiency while also enhancing asymptotic performance and training stability, with comparable training time and smaller network sizes. Code is available at https://github.com/wertyuilife2/bmpc.

Enhancing Decision Transformer with Diffusion-Based Trajectory Branch Generation

Decision Transformer (DT) can learn effective policy from offline datasets by converting the offline reinforcement learning (RL) into a supervised sequence modeling task, where the trajectory elements are generated auto-regressively conditioned on the return-to-go (RTG).However, the sequence modeling learning approach tends to learn policies that converge on the sub-optimal trajectories within the dataset, for lack of bridging data to move to better trajectories, even if the condition is set to the highest RTG.To address this issue, we introduce Diffusion-Based Trajectory Branch Generation (BG), which expands the trajectories of the dataset with branches generated by a diffusion model.The trajectory branch is generated based on the segment of the trajectory within the dataset, and leads to trajectories with higher returns.We concatenate the generated branch with the trajectory segment as an expansion of the trajectory.After expanding, DT has more opportunities to learn policies to move to better trajectories, preventing it from converging to the sub-optimal trajectories.Empirically, after processing with BG, DT outperforms state-of-the-art sequence modeling methods on D4RL benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of adding branches to the dataset without further modifications.

Innovative Thinking, Infinite Humor: Humor Research of Large Language Models through Structured Thought Leaps

Humor is a culturally nuanced aspect of human language that presents challenges for understanding and generation, requiring participants to possess good creativity and strong associative thinking. Similar to reasoning tasks like solving math problems, humor generation requires continuous reflection and revision to foster creative thinking, rather than relying on a sudden flash of inspiration like Creative Leap-of-Thought (CLoT) paradigm. Although CLoT can realize the ability of remote association generation, this paradigm fails to generate humor content. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a systematic way of thinking about generating humor and based on it, we built Creative Leap of Structured Thought (CLoST) frame. First, a reward model is necessary achieve the purpose of being able to correct errors, since there is currently no expert model of humor and a usable rule to determine whether a piece of content is humorous. Judgement-oriented instructions are designed to improve the capability of a model, and we also propose an open-domain instruction evolutionary method to fully unleash the potential. Then, through reinforcement learning, the model learns to hone its rationales of the thought chain and refine the strategies it uses. Thus, it learns to recognize and correct its mistakes, and finally generate the most humorous and creative answer. These findings deepen our understanding of the creative capabilities of LLMs and provide ways to enhance LLMs' creative abilities for cross-domain innovative applications.

REGNet V2: End-to-End REgion-based Grasp Detection Network for Grippers of Different Sizes in Point Clouds

Grasping has been a crucial but challenging problem in robotics for many years. One of the most important challenges is how to make grasping generalizable and robust to novel objects as well as grippers in unstructured environments. We present \regnet, a robotic grasping system that can adapt to different parallel jaws to grasp diversified objects. To support different grippers, \regnet embeds the gripper parameters into point clouds, based on which it predicts suitable grasp configurations. It includes three components: Score Network (SN), Grasp Region Network (GRN), and Refine Network (RN). In the first stage, SN is used to filter suitable points for grasping by grasp confidence scores. In the second stage, based on the selected points, GRN generates a set of grasp proposals. Finally, RN refines the grasp proposals for more accurate and robust predictions. We devise an analytic policy to choose the optimal grasp to be executed from the predicted grasp set. To train \regnet, we construct a large-scale grasp dataset containing collision-free grasp configurations using different parallel-jaw grippers. The experimental results demonstrate that \regnet with the analytic policy achieves the highest success rate of $74.98\%$ in real-world clutter scenes with $20$ objects, significantly outperforming several state-of-the-art methods, including GPD, PointNetGPD, and S4G. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zhaobinglei/REGNet-V2.

Grounded Answers for Multi-agent Decision-making Problem through Generative World Model

Recent progress in generative models has stimulated significant innovations in many fields, such as image generation and chatbots. Despite their success, these models often produce sketchy and misleading solutions for complex multi-agent decision-making problems because they miss the trial-and-error experience and reasoning as humans. To address this limitation, we explore a paradigm that integrates a language-guided simulator into the multi-agent reinforcement learning pipeline to enhance the generated answer. The simulator is a world model that separately learns dynamics and reward, where the dynamics model comprises an image tokenizer as well as a causal transformer to generate interaction transitions autoregressively, and the reward model is a bidirectional transformer learned by maximizing the likelihood of trajectories in the expert demonstrations under language guidance. Given an image of the current state and the task description, we use the world model to train the joint policy and produce the image sequence as the answer by running the converged policy on the dynamics model. The empirical results demonstrate that this framework can improve the answers for multi-agent decision-making problems by showing superior performance on the training and unseen tasks of the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge benchmark. In particular, it can generate consistent interaction sequences and explainable reward functions at interaction states, opening the path for training generative models of the future.

DexDiff: Towards Extrinsic Dexterity Manipulation of Ungraspable Objects in Unrestricted Environments

Grasping large and flat objects (e.g. a book or a pan) is often regarded as an ungraspable task, which poses significant challenges due to the unreachable grasping poses. Previous works leverage Extrinsic Dexterity like walls or table edges to grasp such objects. However, they are limited to task-specific policies and lack task planning to find pre-grasp conditions. This makes it difficult to adapt to various environments and extrinsic dexterity constraints. Therefore, we present DexDiff, a robust robotic manipulation method for long-horizon planning with extrinsic dexterity. Specifically, we utilize a vision-language model (VLM) to perceive the environmental state and generate high-level task plans, followed by a goal-conditioned action diffusion (GCAD) model to predict the sequence of low-level actions. This model learns the low-level policy from offline data with the cumulative reward guided by high-level planning as the goal condition, which allows for improved prediction of robot actions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only effectively performs ungraspable tasks but also generalizes to previously unseen objects. It outperforms baselines by a 47% higher success rate in simulation and facilitates efficient deployment and manipulation in real-world scenarios.

Relation DETR: Exploring Explicit Position Relation Prior for Object Detection

This paper presents a general scheme for enhancing the convergence and performance of DETR (DEtection TRansformer). We investigate the slow convergence problem in transformers from a new perspective, suggesting that it arises from the self-attention that introduces no structural bias over inputs. To address this issue, we explore incorporating position relation prior as attention bias to augment object detection, following the verification of its statistical significance using a proposed quantitative macroscopic correlation (MC) metric. Our approach, termed Relation-DETR, introduces an encoder to construct position relation embeddings for progressive attention refinement, which further extends the traditional streaming pipeline of DETR into a contrastive relation pipeline to address the conflicts between non-duplicate predictions and positive supervision. Extensive experiments on both generic and task-specific datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Under the same configurations, Relation-DETR achieves a significant improvement (+2.0% AP compared to DINO), state-of-the-art performance (51.7% AP for 1x and 52.1% AP for 2x settings), and a remarkably faster convergence speed (over 40% AP with only 2 training epochs) than existing DETR detectors on COCO val2017. Moreover, the proposed relation encoder serves as a universal plug-in-and-play component, bringing clear improvements for theoretically any DETR-like methods. Furthermore, we introduce a class-agnostic detection dataset, SA-Det-100k. The experimental results on the dataset illustrate that the proposed explicit position relation achieves a clear improvement of 1.3% AP, highlighting its potential towards universal object detection. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/xiuqhou/Relation-DETR.

Imagine, Initialize, and Explore: An Effective Exploration Method in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Effective exploration is crucial to discovering optimal strategies for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in complex coordination tasks. Existing methods mainly utilize intrinsic rewards to enable committed exploration or use role-based learning for decomposing joint action spaces instead of directly conducting a collective search in the entire action-observation space. However, they often face challenges obtaining specific joint action sequences to reach successful states in long-horizon tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Imagine, Initialize, and Explore (IIE), a novel method that offers a promising solution for efficient multi-agent exploration in complex scenarios. IIE employs a transformer model to imagine how the agents reach a critical state that can influence each other's transition functions. Then, we initialize the environment at this state using a simulator before the exploration phase. We formulate the imagination as a sequence modeling problem, where the states, observations, prompts, actions, and rewards are predicted autoregressively. The prompt consists of timestep-to-go, return-to-go, influence value, and one-shot demonstration, specifying the desired state and trajectory as well as guiding the action generation. By initializing agents at the critical states, IIE significantly increases the likelihood of discovering potentially important under-explored regions. Despite its simplicity, empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms multi-agent exploration baselines on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) and SMACv2 environments. Particularly, IIE shows improved performance in the sparse-reward SMAC tasks and produces more effective curricula over the initialized states than other generative methods, such as CVAE-GAN and diffusion models.

SInViG: A Self-Evolving Interactive Visual Agent for Human-Robot Interaction

Linguistic ambiguity is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Previous works adopted interaction between robots and humans for language disambiguation. Nevertheless, when interactive robots are deployed in daily environments, there are significant challenges for natural human-robot interaction, stemming from complex and unpredictable visual inputs, open-ended interaction, and diverse user demands. In this paper, we present SInViG, which is a self-evolving interactive visual agent for human-robot interaction based on natural languages, aiming to resolve language ambiguity, if any, through multi-turn visual-language dialogues. It continuously and automatically learns from unlabeled images and large language models, without human intervention, to be more robust against visual and linguistic complexity. Benefiting from self-evolving, it sets new state-of-the-art on several interactive visual grounding benchmarks. Moreover, our human-robot interaction experiments show that the evolved models consistently acquire more and more preferences from human users. Besides, we also deployed our model on a Franka robot for interactive manipulation tasks. Results demonstrate that our model can follow diverse user instructions and interact naturally with humans in natural language, despite the complexity and disturbance of the environment.

Towards Unified Interactive Visual Grounding in The Wild

Interactive visual grounding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is challenging yet practical due to the inevitable ambiguity in natural languages. It requires robots to disambiguate the user input by active information gathering. Previous approaches often rely on predefined templates to ask disambiguation questions, resulting in performance reduction in realistic interactive scenarios. In this paper, we propose TiO, an end-to-end system for interactive visual grounding in human-robot interaction. Benefiting from a unified formulation of visual dialogue and grounding, our method can be trained on a joint of extensive public data, and show superior generality to diversified and challenging open-world scenarios. In the experiments, we validate TiO on GuessWhat?! and InViG benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art performance by a clear margin. Moreover, we conduct HRI experiments on the carefully selected 150 challenging scenes as well as real-robot platforms. Results show that our method demonstrates superior generality to diversified visual and language inputs with a high success rate. Codes and demos are available at https://github.com/jxu124/TiO.