Learning Generalizable 3D Manipulation With 10 Demonstrations

Learning robust and generalizable manipulation skills from demonstrations remains a key challenge in robotics, with broad applications in industrial automation and service robotics. While recent imitation learning methods have achieved impressive results, they often require large amounts of demonstration data and struggle to generalize across different spatial variants. In this work, we present a novel framework that learns manipulation skills from as few as 10 demonstrations, yet still generalizes to spatial variants such as different initial object positions and camera viewpoints. Our framework consists of two key modules: Semantic Guided Perception (SGP), which constructs task-focused, spatially aware 3D point cloud representations from RGB-D inputs; and Spatial Generalized Decision (SGD), an efficient diffusion-based decision-making module that generates actions via denoising. To effectively learn generalization ability from limited data, we introduce a critical spatially equivariant training strategy that captures the spatial knowledge embedded in expert demonstrations. We validate our framework through extensive experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world robotic systems. Our method demonstrates a 60 percent improvement in success rates over state-of-the-art approaches on a series of challenging tasks, even with substantial variations in object poses and camera viewpoints. This work shows significant potential for advancing efficient, generalizable manipulation skill learning in real-world applications.

Cs2K: Class-specific and Class-shared Knowledge Guidance for Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Incremental semantic segmentation endeavors to segment newly encountered classes while maintaining knowledge of old classes. However, existing methods either 1) lack guidance from class-specific knowledge (i.e., old class prototypes), leading to a bias towards new classes, or 2) constrain class-shared knowledge (i.e., old model weights) excessively without discrimination, resulting in a preference for old classes. In this paper, to trade off model performance, we propose the Class-specific and Class-shared Knowledge (Cs2K) guidance for incremental semantic segmentation. Specifically, from the class-specific knowledge aspect, we design a prototype-guided pseudo labeling that exploits feature proximity from prototypes to correct pseudo labels, thereby overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, we develop a prototype-guided class adaptation that aligns class distribution across datasets via learning old augmented prototypes. Moreover, from the class-shared knowledge aspect, we propose a weight-guided selective consolidation to strengthen old memory while maintaining new memory by integrating old and new model weights based on weight importance relative to old classes. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed Cs2K significantly improves segmentation performance and is plug-and-play.

MuseumMaker: Continual Style Customization without Catastrophic Forgetting

Pre-trained large text-to-image (T2I) models with an appropriate text prompt has attracted growing interests in customized images generation field. However, catastrophic forgetting issue make it hard to continually synthesize new user-provided styles while retaining the satisfying results amongst learned styles. In this paper, we propose MuseumMaker, a method that enables the synthesis of images by following a set of customized styles in a never-end manner, and gradually accumulate these creative artistic works as a Museum. When facing with a new customization style, we develop a style distillation loss module to extract and learn the styles of the training data for new image generation. It can minimize the learning biases caused by content of new training images, and address the catastrophic overfitting issue induced by few-shot images. To deal with catastrophic forgetting amongst past learned styles, we devise a dual regularization for shared-LoRA module to optimize the direction of model update, which could regularize the diffusion model from both weight and feature aspects, respectively. Meanwhile, to further preserve historical knowledge from past styles and address the limited representability of LoRA, we consider a task-wise token learning module where a unique token embedding is learned to denote a new style. As any new user-provided style come, our MuseumMaker can capture the nuances of the new styles while maintaining the details of learned styles. Experimental results on diverse style datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed MuseumMaker method, showcasing its robustness and versatility across various scenarios.

Marrying NeRF with Feature Matching for One-step Pose Estimation

Given the image collection of an object, we aim at building a real-time image-based pose estimation method, which requires neither its CAD model nor hours of object-specific training. Recent NeRF-based methods provide a promising solution by directly optimizing the pose from pixel loss between rendered and target images. However, during inference, they require long converging time, and suffer from local minima, making them impractical for real-time robot applications. We aim at solving this problem by marrying image matching with NeRF. With 2D matches and depth rendered by NeRF, we directly solve the pose in one step by building 2D-3D correspondences between target and initial view, thus allowing for real-time prediction. Moreover, to improve the accuracy of 2D-3D correspondences, we propose a 3D consistent point mining strategy, which effectively discards unfaithful points reconstruted by NeRF. Moreover, current NeRF-based methods naively optimizing pixel loss fail at occluded images. Thus, we further propose a 2D matches based sampling strategy to preclude the occluded area. Experimental results on representative datasets prove that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and improves inference efficiency by 90x, achieving real-time prediction at 6 FPS.

Never-Ending Embodied Robot Learning

Relying on large language models (LLMs), embodied robots could perform complex multimodal robot manipulation tasks from visual observations with powerful generalization ability. However, most visual behavior-cloning agents suffer from manipulation performance degradation and skill knowledge forgetting when adapting into a series of challenging unseen tasks. We here investigate the above challenge with NBCagent in embodied robots, a pioneering language-conditioned Never-ending Behavior-Cloning agent, which can continually learn observation knowledge of novel robot manipulation skills from skill-specific and skill-shared attributes. Specifically, we establish a skill-specific evolving planner to perform knowledge decoupling, which can continually embed novel skill-specific knowledge in our NBCagent agent from latent and low-rank space. Meanwhile, we propose a skill-shared semantics rendering module and a skill-shared representation distillation module to effectively transfer anti-forgetting skill-shared knowledge, further tackling catastrophic forgetting on old skills from semantics and representation aspects. Finally, we design a continual embodied robot manipulation benchmark, and several expensive experiments demonstrate the significant performance of our method. Visual results, code, and dataset are provided at: https://neragent.github.io.

Create Your World: Lifelong Text-to-Image Diffusion

Text-to-image generative models can produce diverse high-quality images of concepts with a text prompt, which have demonstrated excellent ability in image generation, image translation, etc. We in this work study the problem of synthesizing instantiations of a use's own concepts in a never-ending manner, i.e., create your world, where the new concepts from user are quickly learned with a few examples. To achieve this goal, we propose a Lifelong text-to-image Diffusion Model (L2DM), which intends to overcome knowledge "catastrophic forgetting" for the past encountered concepts, and semantic "catastrophic neglecting" for one or more concepts in the text prompt. In respect of knowledge "catastrophic forgetting", our L2DM framework devises a task-aware memory enhancement module and a elastic-concept distillation module, which could respectively safeguard the knowledge of both prior concepts and each past personalized concept. When generating images with a user text prompt, the solution to semantic "catastrophic neglecting" is that a concept attention artist module can alleviate the semantic neglecting from concept aspect, and an orthogonal attention module can reduce the semantic binding from attribute aspect. To the end, our model can generate more faithful image across a range of continual text prompts in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, when comparing with the related state-of-the-art models. The code will be released at https://wenqiliang.github.io/.

Heterogeneous Forgetting Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) has achieved remarkable successes in learning new classes consecutively while overcoming catastrophic forgetting on old categories. However, most existing CIL methods unreasonably assume that all old categories have the same forgetting pace, and neglect negative influence of forgetting heterogeneity among different old classes on forgetting compensation. To surmount the above challenges, we develop a novel Heterogeneous Forgetting Compensation (HFC) model, which can resolve heterogeneous forgetting of easy-to-forget and hard-to-forget old categories from both representation and gradient aspects. Specifically, we design a task-semantic aggregation block to alleviate heterogeneous forgetting from representation aspect. It aggregates local category information within each task to learn task-shared global representations. Moreover, we develop two novel plug-and-play losses: a gradient-balanced forgetting compensation loss and a gradient-balanced relation distillation loss to alleviate forgetting from gradient aspect. They consider gradient-balanced compensation to rectify forgetting heterogeneity of old categories and heterogeneous relation consistency. Experiments on several representative datasets illustrate effectiveness of our HFC model. The code is available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/HFC.

Gradient-Semantic Compensation for Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Incremental semantic segmentation aims to continually learn the segmentation of new coming classes without accessing the training data of previously learned classes. However, most current methods fail to address catastrophic forgetting and background shift since they 1) treat all previous classes equally without considering different forgetting paces caused by imbalanced gradient back-propagation; 2) lack strong semantic guidance between classes. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a Gradient-Semantic Compensation (GSC) model, which surmounts incremental semantic segmentation from both gradient and semantic perspectives. Specifically, to address catastrophic forgetting from the gradient aspect, we develop a step-aware gradient compensation that can balance forgetting paces of previously seen classes via re-weighting gradient backpropagation. Meanwhile, we propose a soft-sharp semantic relation distillation to distill consistent inter-class semantic relations via soft labels for alleviating catastrophic forgetting from the semantic aspect. In addition, we develop a prototypical pseudo re-labeling that provides strong semantic guidance to mitigate background shift. It produces high-quality pseudo labels for old classes in the background by measuring distances between pixels and class-wise prototypes. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, i.e., Pascal VOC 2012, ADE20K, and Cityscapes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed GSC model.

Self-paced Weight Consolidation for Continual Learning

Continual learning algorithms which keep the parameters of new tasks close to that of previous tasks, are popular in preventing catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning settings. However, 1) the performance for the new continual learner will be degraded without distinguishing the contributions of previously learned tasks; 2) the computational cost will be greatly increased with the number of tasks, since most existing algorithms need to regularize all previous tasks when learning new tasks. To address the above challenges, we propose a self-paced Weight Consolidation (spWC) framework to attain robust continual learning via evaluating the discriminative contributions of previous tasks. To be specific, we develop a self-paced regularization to reflect the priorities of past tasks via measuring difficulty based on key performance indicator (i.e., accuracy). When encountering a new task, all previous tasks are sorted from "difficult" to "easy" based on the priorities. Then the parameters of the new continual learner will be learned via selectively maintaining the knowledge amongst more difficult past tasks, which could well overcome catastrophic forgetting with less computational cost. We adopt an alternative convex search to iteratively update the model parameters and priority weights in the bi-convex formulation. The proposed spWC framework is plug-and-play, which is applicable to most continual learning algorithms (e.g., EWC, MAS and RCIL) in different directions (e.g., classification and segmentation). Experimental results on several public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively improve performance when compared with other popular continual learning algorithms.

Federated Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Federated learning-based semantic segmentation (FSS) has drawn widespread attention via decentralized training on local clients. However, most FSS models assume categories are fixed in advance, thus heavily undergoing forgetting on old categories in practical applications where local clients receive new categories incrementally while have no memory storage to access old classes. Moreover, new clients collecting novel classes may join in the global training of FSS, which further exacerbates catastrophic forgetting. To surmount the above challenges, we propose a Forgetting-Balanced Learning (FBL) model to address heterogeneous forgetting on old classes from both intra-client and inter-client aspects. Specifically, under the guidance of pseudo labels generated via adaptive class-balanced pseudo labeling, we develop a forgetting-balanced semantic compensation loss and a forgetting-balanced relation consistency loss to rectify intra-client heterogeneous forgetting of old categories with background shift. It performs balanced gradient propagation and relation consistency distillation within local clients. Moreover, to tackle heterogeneous forgetting from inter-client aspect, we propose a task transition monitor. It can identify new classes under privacy protection and store the latest old global model for relation distillation. Qualitative experiments reveal large improvement of our model against comparison methods. The code is available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/FISS.