Education
Mobile Robot Manipulation using Pure Object Detection
This paper addresses the problem of mobile robot manipulation using object detection. Our approach uses detection and control as complimentary functions that learn from real-world interactions. We develop an end-to-end manipulation method based solely on detection and introduce Task-focused Few-shot Object Detection (TFOD) to learn new objects and settings. Our robot collects its own training data and automatically determines when to retrain detection to improve performance across various subtasks (e.g., grasping). Notably, detection training is low-cost, and our robot learns to manipulate new objects using as few as four clicks of annotation. In physical experiments, our robot learns visual control from a single click of annotation and a novel update formulation, manipulates new objects in clutter and other mobile settings, and achieves state-of-the-art results on an existing visual servo control and depth estimation benchmark. Finally, we develop a TFOD Benchmark to support future object detection research for robotics: https://github.com/griffbr/tfod.
Learning Fast and Slow for Online Time Series Forecasting
Pham, Quang, Liu, Chenghao, Sahoo, Doyen, Hoi, Steven C. H.
The fast adaptation capability of deep neural networks in non-stationary environments is critical for online time series forecasting. Successful solutions require handling changes to new and recurring patterns. However, training deep neural forecaster on the fly is notoriously challenging because of their limited ability to adapt to non-stationary environments and the catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge. In this work, inspired by the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory, we propose Fast and Slow learning Networks (FSNet), a holistic framework for online time-series forecasting to simultaneously deal with abrupt changing and repeating patterns. Particularly, FSNet improves the slowly-learned backbone by dynamically balancing fast adaptation to recent changes and retrieving similar old knowledge. FSNet achieves this mechanism via an interaction between two complementary components of an adapter to monitor each layer's contribution to the lost, and an associative memory to support remembering, updating, and recalling repeating events. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets validate FSNet's efficacy and robustness to both new and recurring patterns. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/salesforce/fsnet}.
A GPU-specialized Inference Parameter Server for Large-Scale Deep Recommendation Models
Wei, Yingcan, Langer, Matthias, Yu, Fan, Lee, Minseok, Liu, Kingsley, Shi, Jerry, Wang, Joey
Recommendation systems are of crucial importance for a variety of modern apps and web services, such as news feeds, social networks, e-commerce, search, etc. To achieve peak prediction accuracy, modern recommendation models combine deep learning with terabyte-scale embedding tables to obtain a fine-grained representation of the underlying data. Traditional inference serving architectures require deploying the whole model to standalone servers, which is infeasible at such massive scale. In this paper, we provide insights into the intriguing and challenging inference domain of online recommendation systems. We propose the HugeCTR Hierarchical Parameter Server (HPS), an industry-leading distributed recommendation inference framework, that combines a high-performance GPU embedding cache with an hierarchical storage architecture, to realize low-latency retrieval of embeddings for online model inference tasks. Among other things, HPS features (1) a redundant hierarchical storage system, (2) a novel high-bandwidth cache to accelerate parallel embedding lookup on NVIDIA GPUs, (3) online training support and (4) light-weight APIs for easy integration into existing large-scale recommendation workflows. To demonstrate its capabilities, we conduct extensive studies using both synthetically engineered and public datasets. We show that our HPS can dramatically reduce end-to-end inference latency, achieving 5~62x speedup (depending on the batch size) over CPU baseline implementations for popular recommendation models. Through multi-GPU concurrent deployment, the HPS can also greatly increase the inference QPS.
Vision-Language Pre-training: Basics, Recent Advances, and Future Trends
Gan, Zhe, Li, Linjie, Li, Chunyuan, Wang, Lijuan, Liu, Zicheng, Gao, Jianfeng
This paper surveys vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods for multimodal intelligence that have been developed in the last few years. We group these approaches into three categories: ($i$) VLP for image-text tasks, such as image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, and visual grounding; ($ii$) VLP for core computer vision tasks, such as (open-set) image classification, object detection, and segmentation; and ($iii$) VLP for video-text tasks, such as video captioning, video-text retrieval, and video question answering. For each category, we present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art methods, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies. In addition, for each category, we discuss advanced topics being actively explored in the research community, such as big foundation models, unified modeling, in-context few-shot learning, knowledge, robustness, and computer vision in the wild, to name a few.
Multi-Agent Automated Machine Learning
Wang, Zhaozhi, Su, Kefan, Zhang, Jian, Jia, Huizhu, Ye, Qixiang, Xie, Xiaodong, Lu, Zongqing
In this paper, we propose multi-agent automated machine learning (MA2ML) with the aim to effectively handle joint optimization of modules in automated machine learning (AutoML). MA2ML takes each machine learning module, such as data augmentation (AUG), neural architecture search (NAS), or hyper-parameters (HPO), as an agent and the final performance as the reward, to formulate a multi-agent reinforcement learning problem. MA2ML explicitly assigns credit to each agent according to its marginal contribution to enhance cooperation among modules, and incorporates off-policy learning to improve search efficiency. Theoretically, MA2ML guarantees monotonic improvement of joint optimization. Extensive experiments show that MA2ML yields the state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy on ImageNet under constraints of computational cost, e.g., $79.7\%/80.5\%$ with FLOPs fewer than 600M/800M. Extensive ablation studies verify the benefits of credit assignment and off-policy learning of MA2ML.
Knowledge Distillation Transfer Sets and their Impact on Downstream NLU Tasks
Peris, Charith, Tan, Lizhen, Gueudre, Thomas, Gojayev, Turan, Wei, Pan, Oz, Gokmen
Teacher-student knowledge distillation is a popular technique for compressing today's prevailing large language models into manageable sizes that fit low-latency downstream applications. Both the teacher and the choice of transfer set used for distillation are crucial ingredients in creating a high quality student. Yet, the generic corpora used to pretrain the teacher and the corpora associated with the downstream target domain are often significantly different, which raises a natural question: should the student be distilled over the generic corpora, so as to learn from high-quality teacher predictions, or over the downstream task corpora to align with finetuning? Our study investigates this trade-off using Domain Classification (DC) and Intent Classification/Named Entity Recognition (ICNER) as downstream tasks. We distill several multilingual students from a larger multilingual LM with varying proportions of generic and task-specific datasets, and report their performance after finetuning on DC and ICNER. We observe significant improvements across tasks and test sets when only task-specific corpora is used. We also report on how the impact of adding task-specific data to the transfer set correlates with the similarity between generic and task-specific data. Our results clearly indicate that, while distillation from a generic LM benefits downstream tasks, students learn better using target domain data even if it comes at the price of noisier teacher predictions. In other words, target domain data still trumps teacher knowledge.
Flipped Classroom: Effective Teaching for Time Series Forecasting
Teutsch, Philipp, Mรคder, Patrick
Sequence-to-sequence models based on LSTM and GRU are a most popular choice for forecasting time series data reaching state-of-the-art performance. Training such models can be delicate though. The two most common training strategies within this context are teacher forcing (TF) and free running (FR). TF can be used to help the model to converge faster but may provoke an exposure bias issue due to a discrepancy between training and inference phase. FR helps to avoid this but does not necessarily lead to better results, since it tends to make the training slow and unstable instead. Scheduled sampling was the first approach tackling these issues by picking the best from both worlds and combining it into a curriculum learning (CL) strategy. Although scheduled sampling seems to be a convincing alternative to FR and TF, we found that, even if parametrized carefully, scheduled sampling may lead to premature termination of the training when applied for time series forecasting. To mitigate the problems of the above approaches we formalize CL strategies along the training as well as the training iteration scale. We propose several new curricula, and systematically evaluate their performance in two experimental sets. For our experiments, we utilize six datasets generated from prominent chaotic systems. We found that the newly proposed increasing training scale curricula with a probabilistic iteration scale curriculum consistently outperforms previous training strategies yielding an NRMSE improvement of up to 81% over FR or TF training. For some datasets we additionally observe a reduced number of training iterations. We observed that all models trained with the new curricula yield higher prediction stability allowing for longer prediction horizons.
You Only Live Once: Single-Life Reinforcement Learning
Chen, Annie S., Sharma, Archit, Levine, Sergey, Finn, Chelsea
Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed to learn a performant policy that can repeatedly and autonomously complete a task, usually starting from scratch. However, in many real-world situations, the goal might not be to learn a policy that can do the task repeatedly, but simply to perform a new task successfully once in a single trial. For example, imagine a disaster relief robot tasked with retrieving an item from a fallen building, where it cannot get direct supervision from humans. It must retrieve this object within one test-time trial, and must do so while tackling unknown obstacles, though it may leverage knowledge it has of the building before the disaster. We formalize this problem setting, which we call single-life reinforcement learning (SLRL), where an agent must complete a task within a single episode without interventions, utilizing its prior experience while contending with some form of novelty. SLRL provides a natural setting to study the challenge of autonomously adapting to unfamiliar situations, and we find that algorithms designed for standard episodic reinforcement learning often struggle to recover from out-of-distribution states in this setting. Motivated by this observation, we propose an algorithm, $Q$-weighted adversarial learning (QWALE), which employs a distribution matching strategy that leverages the agent's prior experience as guidance in novel situations. Our experiments on several single-life continuous control problems indicate that methods based on our distribution matching formulation are 20-60% more successful because they can more quickly recover from novel states.
Classification of animal sounds in a hyperdiverse rainforest using Convolutional Neural Networks
Sun, Yuren, Maeda, Tatiana Midori, Solis-Lemus, Claudia, Pimentel-Alarcon, Daniel, Burivalova, Zuzana
To protect tropical forest biodiversity, we need to be able to detect it reliably, cheaply, and at scale. Automated species detection from passively recorded soundscapes via machine-learning approaches is a promising technique towards this goal, but it is constrained by the necessity of large training data sets. Using soundscapes from a tropical forest in Borneo and a Convolutional Neural Network model (CNN) created with transfer learning, we investigate i) the minimum viable training data set size for accurate prediction of call types ('sonotypes'), and ii) the extent to which data augmentation can overcome the issue of small training data sets. We found that even relatively high sample sizes (> 80 per call type) lead to mediocre accuracy, which however improves significantly with data augmentation, including at extremely small sample sizes, regardless of taxonomic group or call characteristics. Our results suggest that transfer learning and data augmentation can make the use of CNNs to classify species' vocalizations feasible even for small soundscape-based projects with many rare species. Retraining our open-source model requires only basic programming skills which makes it possible for individual conservation initiatives to match their local context, in order to enable more evidence-informed management of biodiversity.