HiMemFormer: Hierarchical Memory-Aware Transformer for Multi-Agent Action Anticipation

Understanding and predicting human actions has been a long-standing challenge and is a crucial measure of perception in robotics AI. While significant progress has been made in anticipating the future actions of individual agents, prior work has largely overlooked a key aspect of real-world human activity -- interactions. To address this gap in human-like forecasting within multi-agent environments, we present the Hierarchical Memory-Aware Transformer (HiMemFormer), a transformer-based model for online multi-agent action anticipation. HiMemFormer integrates and distributes global memory that captures joint historical information across all agents through a transformer framework, with a hierarchical local memory decoder that interprets agent-specific features based on these global representations using a coarse-to-fine strategy. In contrast to previous approaches, HiMemFormer uniquely hierarchically applies the global context with agent-specific preferences to avoid noisy or redundant information in multi-agent action anticipation. Extensive experiments on various multi-agent scenarios demonstrate the significant performance of HiMemFormer, compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

LogiCity: Advancing Neuro-Symbolic AI with Abstract Urban Simulation

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Neuro-Symbolic (NeSy) AI systems, which integrate symbolic reasoning into deep neural networks. However, most of the existing benchmarks for NeSy AI fail to provide long-horizon reasoning tasks with complex multi-agent interactions. Furthermore, they are usually constrained by fixed and simplistic logical rules over limited entities, making them far from real-world complexities. To address these crucial gaps, we introduce LogiCity, the first simulator based on customizable first-order logic (FOL) for an urban-like environment with multiple dynamic agents. LogiCity models diverse urban elements using semantic and spatial concepts, such as IsAmbulance(X) and IsClose(X, Y). These concepts are used to define FOL rules that govern the behavior of various agents. Since the concepts and rules are abstractions, they can be universally applied to cities with any agent compositions, facilitating the instantiation of diverse scenarios. Besides, a key feature of LogiCity is its support for user-configurable abstractions, enabling customizable simulation complexities for logical reasoning. To explore various aspects of NeSy AI, LogiCity introduces two tasks, one features long-horizon sequential decision-making, and the other focuses on one-step visual reasoning, varying in difficulty and agent behaviors. Our extensive evaluation reveals the advantage of NeSy frameworks in abstract reasoning. Moreover, we highlight the significant challenges of handling more complex abstractions in long-horizon multi-agent scenarios or under high-dimensional, imbalanced data. With its flexible design, various features, and newly raised challenges, we believe LogiCity represents a pivotal step forward in advancing the next generation of NeSy AI. All the code and data are open-sourced at our website.

Dual Prototype Evolving for Test-Time Generalization of Vision-Language Models

Test-time adaptation, which enables models to generalize to diverse data with unlabeled test samples, holds significant value in real-world scenarios. Recently, researchers have applied this setting to advanced pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), developing approaches such as test-time prompt tuning to further extend their practical applicability. However, these methods typically focus solely on adapting VLMs from a single modality and fail to accumulate task-specific knowledge as more samples are processed. To address this, we introduce Dual Prototype Evolving (DPE), a novel test-time adaptation approach for VLMs that effectively accumulates task-specific knowledge from multi-modalities. Specifically, we create and evolve two sets of prototypes--textual and visual--to progressively capture more accurate multi-modal representations for target classes during test time. Moreover, to promote consistent multi-modal representations, we introduce and optimize learnable residuals for each test sample to align the prototypes from both modalities. Extensive experimental results on 15 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed DPE consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods while also exhibiting competitive computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/DPE-CLIP.

VC Theory for Inventory Policies

Advances in computational power and AI have increased interest in reinforcement learning approaches to inventory management. This paper provides a theoretical foundation for these approaches and investigates the benefits of restricting to policy structures that are well-established by decades of inventory theory. In particular, we prove generalization guarantees for learning several well-known classes of inventory policies, including base-stock and (s, S) policies, by leveraging the celebrated Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) theory. We apply the concepts of the Pseudo-dimension and Fat-shattering dimension from VC theory to determine the generalizability of inventory policies, that is, the difference between an inventory policy's performance on training data and its expected performance on unseen data. We focus on a classical setting without contexts, but allow for an arbitrary distribution over demand sequences and do not make any assumptions such as independence over time. We corroborate our supervised learning results using numerical simulations. Managerially, our theory and simulations translate to the following insights. First, there is a principle of "learning less is more" in inventory management: depending on the amount of data available, it may be beneficial to restrict oneself to a simpler, albeit suboptimal, class of inventory policies to minimize overfitting errors. Second, the number of parameters in a policy class may not be the correct measure of overfitting error: in fact, the class of policies defined by T time-varying base-stock levels exhibits a generalization error comparable to that of the two-parameter (s, S) policy class. Finally, our research suggests situations in which it could be beneficial to incorporate the concepts of base-stock and inventory position into black-box learning machines, instead of having these machines directly learn the order quantity actions.

Sigma: Siamese Mamba Network for Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation

Multi-modal semantic segmentation significantly enhances AI agents' perception and scene understanding, especially under adverse conditions like low-light or overexposed environments. Leveraging additional modalities (X-modality) like thermal and depth alongside traditional RGB provides complementary information, enabling more robust and reliable segmentation. In this work, we introduce Sigma, a Siamese Mamba network for multi-modal semantic segmentation, utilizing the Selective Structured State Space Model, Mamba. Unlike conventional methods that rely on CNNs, with their limited local receptive fields, or Vision Transformers (ViTs), which offer global receptive fields at the cost of quadratic complexity, our model achieves global receptive fields coverage with linear complexity. By employing a Siamese encoder and innovating a Mamba fusion mechanism, we effectively select essential information from different modalities. A decoder is then developed to enhance the channel-wise modeling ability of the model. Our method, Sigma, is rigorously evaluated on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth segmentation tasks, demonstrating its superiority and marking the first successful application of State Space Models (SSMs) in multi-modal perception tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zifuwan/Sigma.

MUGC: Machine Generated versus User Generated Content Detection

As advanced modern systems like deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative AI continue to enhance their capabilities in producing convincing and realistic content, the need to distinguish between user-generated and machine generated content is becoming increasingly evident. In this research, we undertake a comparative evaluation of eight traditional machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between machine-generated and human-generated data across three diverse datasets: Poems, Abstracts, and Essays. Our results indicate that traditional methods demonstrate a high level of accuracy in identifying machine-generated data, reflecting the documented effectiveness of popular pre-trained models like RoBERT. We note that machine-generated texts tend to be shorter and exhibit less word variety compared to human-generated content. While specific domain-related keywords commonly utilized by humans, albeit disregarded by current LLMs (Large Language Models), may contribute to this high detection accuracy, we show that deeper word representations like word2vec can capture subtle semantic variances. Furthermore, readability, bias, moral, and affect comparisons reveal a discernible contrast between machine-generated and human generated content. There are variations in expression styles and potentially underlying biases in the data sources (human and machine-generated). This study provides valuable insights into the advancing capacities and challenges associated with machine-generated content across various domains.

ShapeGrasp: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping with Large Language Models through Geometric Decomposition

Task-oriented grasping of unfamiliar objects is a necessary skill for robots in dynamic in-home environments. Inspired by the human capability to grasp such objects through intuition about their shape and structure, we present a novel zero-shot task-oriented grasping method leveraging a geometric decomposition of the target object into simple, convex shapes that we represent in a graph structure, including geometric attributes and spatial relationships. Our approach employs minimal essential information - the object's name and the intended task - to facilitate zero-shot task-oriented grasping. We utilize the commonsense reasoning capabilities of large language models to dynamically assign semantic meaning to each decomposed part and subsequently reason over the utility of each part for the intended task. Through extensive experiments on a real-world robotics platform, we demonstrate that our grasping approach's decomposition and reasoning pipeline is capable of selecting the correct part in 92% of the cases and successfully grasping the object in 82% of the tasks we evaluate. Additional videos, experiments, code, and data are available on our project website: https://shapegrasp.github.io/.

Negative Yields Positive: Unified Dual-Path Adapter for Vision-Language Models

Recently, large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated great potential in learning open-world visual representations, and exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks through efficient fine-tuning. In this work, we innovatively introduce the concept of dual learning into fine-tuning VLMs, i.e., we not only learn what an image is, but also what an image isn't. Building on this concept, we introduce a novel DualAdapter approach to enable dual-path adaptation of VLMs from both positive and negative perspectives with only limited annotated samples. In the inference stage, our DualAdapter performs unified predictions by simultaneously conducting complementary positive selection and negative exclusion across target classes, thereby enhancing the overall recognition accuracy of VLMs in downstream tasks. Our extensive experimental results across 15 datasets validate that the proposed DualAdapter outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both few-shot learning and domain generalization tasks while achieving competitive computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/DualAdapter.

HiKER-SGG: Hierarchical Knowledge Enhanced Robust Scene Graph Generation

Being able to understand visual scenes is a precursor for many downstream tasks, including autonomous driving, robotics, and other vision-based approaches. A common approach enabling the ability to reason over visual data is Scene Graph Generation (SGG); however, many existing approaches assume undisturbed vision, i.e., the absence of real-world corruptions such as fog, snow, smoke, as well as non-uniform perturbations like sun glare or water drops. In this work, we propose a novel SGG benchmark containing procedurally generated weather corruptions and other transformations over the Visual Genome dataset. Further, we introduce a corresponding approach, Hierarchical Knowledge Enhanced Robust Scene Graph Generation (HiKER-SGG), providing a strong baseline for scene graph generation under such challenging setting. At its core, HiKER-SGG utilizes a hierarchical knowledge graph in order to refine its predictions from coarse initial estimates to detailed predictions. In our extensive experiments, we show that HiKER-SGG does not only demonstrate superior performance on corrupted images in a zero-shot manner, but also outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on uncorrupted SGG tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/HiKER-SGG.

Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis

Building general-purpose robots that can operate seamlessly, in any environment, with any object, and utilizing various skills to complete diverse tasks has been a long-standing goal in Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, however, most existing robotic systems have been constrained - having been designed for specific tasks, trained on specific datasets, and deployed within specific environments. These systems usually require extensively-labeled data, rely on task-specific models, have numerous generalization issues when deployed in real-world scenarios, and struggle to remain robust to distribution shifts. Motivated by the impressive open-set performance and content generation capabilities of web-scale, large-capacity pre-trained models (i.e., foundation models) in research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), we devote this survey to exploring (i) how these existing foundation models from NLP and CV can be applied to the field of robotics, and also exploring (ii) what a robotics-specific foundation model would look like. We begin by providing an overview of what constitutes a conventional robotic system and the fundamental barriers to making it universally applicable. Next, we establish a taxonomy to discuss current work exploring ways to leverage existing foundation models for robotics and develop ones catered to robotics. Finally, we discuss key challenges and promising future directions in using foundation models for enabling general-purpose robotic systems. We encourage readers to view our living GitHub repository of resources, including papers reviewed in this survey as well as related projects and repositories for developing foundation models for robotics.