Intelligent interaction with the real world requires robotic agents to jointly reason over high-level plans and low-level controls. Task and motion planning (TAMP) addresses this by combining symbolic planning and continuous trajectory generation. Recently, foundation model approaches to TAMP have presented impressive results, including fast planning times and the execution of natural language instructions. Yet, the optimal interface between high-level planning and low-level motion generation remains an open question: prior approaches are limited by either too much abstraction (e.g., chaining simplified skill primitives) or a lack thereof (e.g., direct joint angle prediction). Our method introduces a novel technique employing a form of meta-optimization to address these issues by: (i) using program search over trajectory optimization problems as an interface between a foundation model and robot control, and (ii) leveraging a zero-order method to optimize numerical parameters in the foundation model output. Results on challenging object manipulation and drawing tasks confirm that our proposed method improves over prior TAMP approaches.

[...] With the TelePhysicalOperation interface, the user can teleoperate the different capabilities of a robot (e.g., single/double arm manipulation, wheel/leg locomotion) by applying virtual forces on selected robot body parts. This approach emulates the intuitiveness of physical human-robot interaction, but at the same time it permits to teleoperate the robot from a safe distance, in a way that resembles a "Marionette" interface. The system is further enhanced with wearable haptic feedback functions to align better with the "Marionette" metaphor, and a user study has been conducted to validate its efficacy with and without the haptic channel enabled. Considering the importance of robot independence, the TelePhysicalOperation interface incorporates autonomy modules to face, for example, the teleoperation of dual-arm mobile base robots for bimanual object grasping and transportation tasks. With the laser-guided interface, the user can indicate points of interest to the robot through the utilization of a simple but effective laser emitter device. With a neural network-based vision system, the robot tracks the laser projection in real time, allowing the user to indicate not only fixed goals, like objects, but also paths to follow. With the implemented autonomous behavior, a mobile manipulator employs its locomanipulation abilities to follow the indicated goals. The behavior is modeled using Behavior Trees, exploiting their reactivity to promptly respond to changes in goal positions, and their modularity to adapt the motion planning to the task needs. The proposed laser interface has also been employed in an assistive scenario. In this case, users with upper limbs impairments can control an assistive manipulator by directing a head-worn laser emitter to the point of interests, to collaboratively address activities of everyday life. [...]

Per-example gradient clipping is a key algorithmic step that enables practical differential private (DP) training for deep learning models. The choice of clipping threshold R, however, is vital for achieving high accuracy under DP. We propose an easy-to-use replacement, called automatic clipping, that eliminates the need to tune R for any DP optimizers, including DP-SGD, DP-Adam, DP-LAMB and many others. The automatic variants are as private and computationally efficient as existing DP optimizers, but require no DP-specific hyperparameters and thus make DP training as amenable as the standard non-private training. We give a rigorous convergence analysis of automatic DP-SGD in the non-convex setting, showing that it can enjoy an asymptotic convergence rate that matches the standard SGD, under a symmetric gradient noise assumption of the per-sample gradients (commonly used in the non-DP literature). We demonstrate on various language and vision tasks that automatic clipping outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art, and can be easily employed with minimal changes to existing codebases.