Education
Dear Care and Feeding: A Mom at My Daycare Job Is Randomly Trying to Get Me Fired
Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? I'm currently attending college, and to help pay for various expenses I got a summer job at a daycare. A few weeks ago, a parent accused me of making an inappropriate hand gesture at them during pick up. I didn't do it; I've never had so much as a conversation with this woman.
[FREE] Modern Reinforcement-learning Using Deep Learning
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MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning
Li, Quanyi, Peng, Zhenghao, Feng, Lan, Zhang, Qihang, Xue, Zhenghai, Zhou, Bolei
Driving safely requires multiple capabilities from human and intelligent agents, such as the generalizability to unseen environments, the safety awareness of the surrounding traffic, and the decision-making in complex multi-agent settings. Despite the great success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), most of the RL research works investigate each capability separately due to the lack of integrated environments. In this work, we develop a new driving simulation platform called MetaDrive to support the research of generalizable reinforcement learning algorithms for machine autonomy. MetaDrive is highly compositional, which can generate an infinite number of diverse driving scenarios from both the procedural generation and the real data importing. Based on MetaDrive, we construct a variety of RL tasks and baselines in both single-agent and multi-agent settings, including benchmarking generalizability across unseen scenes, safe exploration, and learning multi-agent traffic. The generalization experiments conducted on both procedurally generated scenarios and real-world scenarios show that increasing the diversity and the size of the training set leads to the improvement of the RL agent's generalizability. We further evaluate various safe reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms in MetaDrive environments and provide the benchmarks. Source code, documentation, and demo video are available at \url{ https://metadriverse.github.io/metadrive}.
Online Continual Learning for Embedded Devices
Hayes, Tyler L., Kanan, Christopher
Real-time on-device continual learning is needed for new applications such as home robots, user personalization on smartphones, and augmented/virtual reality headsets. However, this setting poses unique challenges: embedded devices have limited memory and compute capacity and conventional machine learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when updated on non-stationary data streams. While several online continual learning models have been developed, their effectiveness for embedded applications has not been rigorously studied. In this paper, we first identify criteria that online continual learners must meet to effectively perform real-time, on-device learning. We then study the efficacy of several online continual learning methods when used with mobile neural networks. Continual machine learning systems have the ability to learn from ever-growing data streams (Parisi et al., 2019). In contrast, conventional machine learning algorithms typically assume that there is a static training and evaluation dataset. Continual learning has emerged as a popular research area. One of the most critical applications for continual learning is using it on embedded devices such as mobile phones, virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) headsets, robots, vehicles, and smart appliances. VR headsets use continual learning to localize the position of the wearer within the boundary that the user has established so that the user does not collide with obstacles (O'Hagan & Williamson, 2020). AR headsets require continual learning to identify relevant objects and regions in the field of view to appropriately position virtual perceptual information. Household robotic devices need to learn the identity of the individuals, pets, and objects in the house. Typically, inference for these applications must be done within embedded devices to minimize latency, but continual on-device learning is critical to preserving privacy and security of the user. Conventional machine learning systems trained with empirical risk minimization assume that the data is independent and identically distributed (iid), which is typically enforced by shuffling the data. In continual learning, this assumption is violated, which results in catastrophic forgetting (French, 1999; Parisi et al., 2019). Hence, the continual learning research community has focused on solving this catastrophic forgetting problem in a variety of scenarios. However, most of these scenarios do not match the conditions an agent would face for embedded applications.
Printable Flexible Robots for Remote Learning
Kendre, Savita V., Teran, Gus. T., Whiteside, Lauryn, Looney, Tyler, Wheelock, Ryley, Ghai, Surya, Nemitz, Markus P.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the importance of digital fabrication to enable online learning, which remains a challenge for robotics courses. We introduce a teaching methodology that allows students to participate remotely in a hands-on robotics course involving the design and fabrication of robots. Our methodology employs 3D printing techniques with flexible filaments to create innovative soft robots; robots are made from flexible, as opposed to rigid, materials. Students design flexible robotic components such as actuators, sensors, and controllers using CAD software, upload their designs to a remote 3D printing station, monitor the print with a web camera, and inspect the components with lab staff before being mailed for testing and assembly. At the end of the course, students will have iterated through several designs and created fluidically-driven soft robots. Our remote teaching methodology enables educators to utilize 3D printing resources to teach soft robotics and cultivate creativity among students to design novel and innovative robots. Our methodology seeks to democratize robotics engineering by decoupling hands-on learning experiences from expensive equipment in the learning environment.
Heuristic-free Optimization of Force-Controlled Robot Search Strategies in Stochastic Environments
Alt, Benjamin, Katic, Darko, Jรคkel, Rainer, Beetz, Michael
In both industrial and service domains, a central benefit of the use of robots is their ability to quickly and reliably execute repetitive tasks. However, even relatively simple peg-in-hole tasks are typically subject to stochastic variations, requiring search motions to find relevant features such as holes. While search improves robustness, it comes at the cost of increased runtime: More exhaustive search will maximize the probability of successfully executing a given task, but will significantly delay any downstream tasks. This trade-off is typically resolved by human experts according to simple heuristics, which are rarely optimal. This paper introduces an automatic, data-driven and heuristic-free approach to optimize robot search strategies. By training a neural model of the search strategy on a large set of simulated stochastic environments, conditioning it on few real-world examples and inverting the model, we can infer search strategies which adapt to the time-variant characteristics of the underlying probability distributions, while requiring very few real-world measurements. We evaluate our approach on two different industrial robots in the context of spiral and probe search for THT electronics assembly.
Data-Efficient Learning via Minimizing Hyperspherical Energy
Cao, Xiaofeng, Liu, Weiyang, Tsang, Ivor W.
Deep learning on large-scale data is dominant nowadays. The unprecedented scale of data has been arguably one of the most important driving forces for the success of deep learning. However, there still exist scenarios where collecting data or labels could be extremely expensive, e.g., medical imaging and robotics. To fill up this gap, this paper considers the problem of data-efficient learning from scratch using a small amount of representative data. First, we characterize this problem by active learning on homeomorphic tubes of spherical manifolds. This naturally generates feasible hypothesis class. With homologous topological properties, we identify an important connection -- finding tube manifolds is equivalent to minimizing hyperspherical energy (MHE) in physical geometry. Inspired by this connection, we propose a MHE-based active learning (MHEAL) algorithm, and provide comprehensive theoretical guarantees for MHEAL, covering convergence and generalization analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of MHEAL in a wide range of applications on data-efficient learning, including deep clustering, distribution matching, version space sampling and deep active learning.
Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding
Ju, Chen, Han, Tengda, Zheng, Kunhao, Zhang, Ya, Xie, Weidi
Image-based visual-language (I-VL) pre-training has shown great success for learning joint visual-textual representations from large-scale web data, revealing remarkable ability for zero-shot generalisation. This paper presents a simple but strong baseline to efficiently adapt the pre-trained I-VL model, and exploit its powerful ability for resource-hungry video understanding tasks, with minimal training. Specifically, we propose to optimise a few random vectors, termed as continuous prompt vectors, that convert video-related tasks into the same format as the pre-training objectives. In addition, to bridge the gap between static images and videos, temporal information is encoded with lightweight Transformers stacking on top of frame-wise visual features. Experimentally, we conduct extensive ablation studies to analyse the critical components. On 10 public benchmarks of action recognition, action localisation, and text-video retrieval, across closed-set, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios, we achieve competitive or state-of-the-art performance to existing methods, despite optimising significantly fewer parameters.
Reasoning about Actions over Visual and Linguistic Modalities: A Survey
Sampat, Shailaja Keyur, Patel, Maitreya, Das, Subhasish, Yang, Yezhou, Baral, Chitta
As pointed out by [Davis and Marcus, 2015], 'Actions' play a vital role in how humans interact imagine a guest asks a robot for a glass of wine; if the robot with the world and enable them to achieve desired sees that the glass is broken or has a dead cockroach inside, it goals. As a result, most common sense (CS) knowledge should not pour the wine and serve it. Similarly, if a cat runs for humans revolves around actions. While in front of a house-cleaning robot, the robot should neither'Reasoning about Actions & Change' (RAC) has run it over nor sweep it up nor put it away on a shelf. Hence, been widely studied in the Knowledge Representation the ability of artificial agents to perform reasoning and integrate community, it has recently piqued the interest CS knowledge about actions is highly desirable.
Feature Learning in Infinite-Width Neural Networks
As its width tends to infinity, a deep neural network's behavior under gradient descent can become simplified and predictable (e.g. given by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)), if it is parametrized appropriately (e.g. the NTK parametrization). However, we show that the standard and NTK parametrizations of a neural network do not admit infinite-width limits that can learn features, which is crucial for pretraining and transfer learning such as with BERT. We propose simple modifications to the standard parametrization to allow for feature learning in the limit. Using the *Tensor Programs* technique, we derive explicit formulas for such limits. On Word2Vec and few-shot learning on Omniglot via MAML, two canonical tasks that rely crucially on feature learning, we compute these limits exactly. We find that they outperform both NTK baselines and finite-width networks, with the latter approaching the infinite-width feature learning performance as width increases. More generally, we classify a natural space of neural network parametrizations that generalizes standard, NTK, and Mean Field parametrizations. We show 1) any parametrization in this space either admits feature learning or has an infinite-width training dynamics given by kernel gradient descent, but not both; 2) any such infinite-width limit can be computed using the Tensor Programs technique. Code for our experiments can be found at github.com/edwardjhu/TP4.