This study presents a control framework leveraging vision language models (VLMs) for multiple tasks and robots. Notably, existing control methods using VLMs have achieved high performance in various tasks and robots in the training environment. However, these methods incur high costs for learning control policies for tasks and robots other than those in the training environment. Considering the application of industrial and household robots, learning in novel environments where robots are introduced is challenging. To address this issue, we propose a control framework that does not require learning control policies. Our framework combines the vision-language CLIP model with a randomized control. CLIP computes the similarity between images and texts by embedding them in the feature space. This study employs CLIP to compute the similarity between camera images and text representing the target state. In our method, the robot is controlled by a randomized controller that simultaneously explores and increases the similarity gradients. Moreover, we fine-tune the CLIP to improve the performance of the proposed method. Consequently, we confirm the effectiveness of our approach through a multitask simulation and a real robot experiment using a two-wheeled robot and robot arm.

Endowing machines with abstract reasoning ability has been a long-term research topic in artificial intelligence. Raven's Progressive Matrix (RPM) is widely used to probe abstract visual reasoning in machine intelligence, where models need to understand the underlying rules and select the missing bottom-right images out of candidate sets to complete image matrices. The participators can display powerful reasoning ability by inferring the underlying attribute-changing rules and imagining the missing images at arbitrary positions. However, existing solvers can hardly manifest such an ability in realistic RPM problems. In this paper, we propose a conditional generative model to solve answer generation problems through Rule AbstractIon and SElection (RAISE) in the latent space. RAISE encodes image attributes as latent concepts and decomposes underlying rules into atomic rules by means of concepts, which are abstracted as global learnable parameters. When generating the answer, RAISE selects proper atomic rules out of the global knowledge set for each concept and composes them into the integrated rule of an RPM. In most configurations, RAISE outperforms the compared generative solvers in tasks of generating bottom-right and arbitrary-position answers. We test RAISE in the odd-one-out task and two held-out configurations to demonstrate how learning decoupled latent concepts and atomic rules helps find the image breaking the underlying rules and handle RPMs with unseen combinations of rules and attributes.

On-device learning remains a formidable challenge, especially when dealing with resource-constrained devices that have limited computational capabilities. This challenge is primarily rooted in two key issues: first, the memory available on embedded devices is typically insufficient to accommodate the memory-intensive back-propagation algorithm, which often relies on floating-point precision. Second, the development of learning algorithms on models with extreme quantization levels, such as Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), is critical due to the drastic reduction in bit representation. In this study, we propose a solution that combines recent advancements in the field of Continual Learning (CL) and Binary Neural Networks to enable on-device training while maintaining competitive performance. Specifically, our approach leverages binary latent replay (LR) activations and a novel quantization scheme that significantly reduces the number of bits required for gradient computation. The experimental validation demonstrates a significant accuracy improvement in combination with a noticeable reduction in memory requirement, confirming the suitability of our approach in expanding the practical applications of deep learning in real-world scenarios.

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract environment dynamics are successful in solving difficult problems and provide theoretical guarantees for optimality. These methods however cannot scale to tasks where environment dynamics increase in complexity i.e. the temporally abstract transition relations depend on larger number of variables. On the other hand, other efforts have tried to use spatial abstraction to mitigate the previous issues. Their limitations include scalability to high dimensional environments and dependency on prior knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel three-layer HRL algorithm that introduces, at different levels of the hierarchy, both a spatial and a temporal goal abstraction. We provide a theoretical study of the regret bounds of the learned policies. We evaluate the approach on complex continuous control tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of spatial and temporal abstractions learned by this approach.

Simulation technologies have been widely utilized in many scientific research fields such as weather forecasting, fluid mechanics and biological populations. It is the best tool to handle problems in complex systems, where closed-form expressions are unavailable and the target distribution in the representation space is too complex to be fully represented by a deep learning (DL) model. We believe that the development of simulation technologies is consistent with scientific paradigms. This paper induces the evolution of scientific paradigms from the perspective of data, algorithms, and computational power. Building upon this perspective, we divide simulation technologies into three stages aligning with the emergence of new paradigms, and find that advanced simulation technologies are typical instances of paradigms integration. Moreover, we propose the concept of behavioral simulation (BS), specifically sophisticated behavioral simulation (SBS), representing a higher degree of paradigms integration based on foundation models to simulate complex social systems involving sophisticated human strategies and behaviors. BS and further SBS are designed to tackle challenges concerning the complex human system that surpasses the capacity of traditional agent-based modeling simulation (ABMS), which can be regarded as a possible next paradigm for science. Through this work, we look forward to more powerful BS and SBS applications in scientific research branches within social science.

To enhance the domain-specific capabilities of large language models, continued pre-training on a domain-specific corpus is a prevalent method. Recent work demonstrates that adapting models using reading comprehension data formatted by regex-based patterns can significantly improve performance on domain-specific tasks. However, regex-based patterns are incapable of parsing raw corpora using domain-specific knowledge. Furthermore, the question and answer pairs are extracted directly from the corpus in predefined formats offers limited context. To address this limitation, we improve reading comprehension via LLM and clustering. LLM focuses on leveraging domain knowledge within the corpus to refine comprehension stage, while clustering supplies relevant knowledge by extending the context to enrich reading stage. Additionally, our method incorporates parameter-efficient fine-tuning to improve the efficiency of domain adaptation. In comparison to AdaptLLM, our method achieves an improvement exceeding 5% in domain-specific tasks. Our code will available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

Strong Artificial Intelligence (Strong AI) or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with abstract reasoning ability is the goal of next-generation AI. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), along with the emerging field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks and applications. Particularly, various MLLMs, each with distinct model architectures, training data, and training stages, have been evaluated across a broad range of MLLM benchmarks. These studies have, to varying degrees, revealed different aspects of the current capabilities of MLLMs. However, the reasoning abilities of MLLMs have not been systematically investigated. In this survey, we comprehensively review the existing evaluation protocols of multimodal reasoning, categorize and illustrate the frontiers of MLLMs, introduce recent trends in applications of MLLMs on reasoning-intensive tasks, and finally discuss current practices and future directions. We believe our survey establishes a solid base and sheds light on this important topic, multimodal reasoning.

Predicting the collaboration likelihood and measuring cognitive trust to AI systems is more important than ever. To do that, previous research mostly focus solely on the model features (e.g., accuracy, confidence) and ignore the human factor. To address that, we propose several decision-making similarity measures based on divergence metrics (e.g., KL, JSD) calculated over the labels acquired from humans and a wide range of models. We conduct a user study on a textual entailment task, where the users are provided with soft labels from various models and asked to pick the closest option to them. The users are then shown the similarities/differences to their most similar model and are surveyed for their likelihood of collaboration and cognitive trust to the selected system. Finally, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the relation between the proposed decision-making similarity measures and the survey results. We find that people tend to collaborate with their most similar models -- measured via JSD -- yet this collaboration does not necessarily imply a similar level of cognitive trust. We release all resources related to the user study (e.g., design, outputs), models, and metrics at our repo.

Automatically generating scripts (i.e. sequences of key steps described in text) from video demonstrations and reasoning about the subsequent steps are crucial to the modern AI virtual assistants to guide humans to complete everyday tasks, especially unfamiliar ones. However, current methods for generative script learning rely heavily on well-structured preceding steps described in text and/or images or are limited to a certain domain, resulting in a disparity with real-world user scenarios. To address these limitations, we present a new benchmark challenge -- MultiScript, with two new tasks on task-oriented multimodal script learning: (1) multimodal script generation, and (2) subsequent step prediction. For both tasks, the input consists of a target task name and a video illustrating what has been done to complete the target task, and the expected output is (1) a sequence of structured step descriptions in text based on the demonstration video, and (2) a single text description for the subsequent step, respectively. Built from WikiHow, MultiScript covers multimodal scripts in videos and text descriptions for over 6,655 human everyday tasks across 19 diverse domains. To establish baseline performance on MultiScript, we propose two knowledge-guided multimodal generative frameworks that incorporate the task-related knowledge prompted from large language models such as Vicuna. Experimental results show that our proposed approaches significantly improve over the competitive baselines.

An AI from Google DeepMind can solve some International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) questions on geometry almost as well as the best human contestants. How does ChatGPT work and do AI-powered chatbots "think" like us? "The results of AlphaGeometry are stunning and breathtaking," says Gregor Dolinar, the IMO president. "It seems that AI will win the IMO gold medal much sooner than was thought even a few months ago." The IMO, aimed at secondary school students, is one of the most difficult maths competitions in the world. Answering questions correctly requires mathematical creativity that AI systems have long struggled with.