Government
Spatio-Temporal Motion Retargeting for Quadruped Robots
Yoon, Taerim, Kang, Dongho, Kim, Seungmin, Ahn, Minsung, Coros, Stelian, Choi, Sungjoon
This work introduces a motion retargeting approach for legged robots, which aims to create motion controllers that imitate the fine behavior of animals. Our approach, namely spatio-temporal motion retargeting (STMR), guides imitation learning procedures by transferring motion from source to target, effectively bridging the morphological disparities by ensuring the feasibility of imitation on the target system. Our STMR method comprises two components: spatial motion retargeting (SMR) and temporal motion retargeting (TMR). On the one hand, SMR tackles motion retargeting at the kinematic level by generating kinematically feasible whole-body motions from keypoint trajectories. On the other hand, TMR aims to retarget motion at the dynamic level by optimizing motion in the temporal domain. We showcase the effectiveness of our method in facilitating Imitation Learning (IL) for complex animal movements through a series of simulation and hardware experiments. In these experiments, our STMR method successfully tailored complex animal motions from various media, including video captured by a hand-held camera, to fit the morphology and physical properties of the target robots. This enabled RL policy training for precise motion tracking, while baseline methods struggled with highly dynamic motion involving flying phases. Moreover, we validated that the control policy can successfully imitate six different motions in two quadruped robots with different dimensions and physical properties in real-world settings.
LLM Agents can Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities
Fang, Richard, Bindu, Rohan, Gupta, Akul, Kang, Daniel
LLMs have becoming increasingly powerful, both in their benign and malicious uses. With the increase in capabilities, researchers have been increasingly interested in their ability to exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In particular, recent work has conducted preliminary studies on the ability of LLM agents to autonomously hack websites. However, these studies are limited to simple vulnerabilities. In this work, we show that LLM agents can autonomously exploit one-day vulnerabilities in real-world systems. To show this, we collected a dataset of 15 one-day vulnerabilities that include ones categorized as critical severity in the CVE description. When given the CVE description, GPT-4 is capable of exploiting 87% of these vulnerabilities compared to 0% for every other model we test (GPT-3.5, open-source LLMs) and open-source vulnerability scanners (ZAP and Metasploit). Fortunately, our GPT-4 agent requires the CVE description for high performance: without the description, GPT-4 can exploit only 7% of the vulnerabilities. Our findings raise questions around the widespread deployment of highly capable LLM agents.
Concept Induction using LLMs: a user experiment for assessment
Barua, Adrita, Widmer, Cara, Hitzler, Pascal
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) poses a significant challenge in providing transparent and understandable insights into complex AI models. Traditional post-hoc algorithms, while useful, often struggle to deliver interpretable explanations. Concept-based models offer a promising avenue by incorporating explicit representations of concepts to enhance interpretability. However, existing research on automatic concept discovery methods is often limited by lower-level concepts, costly human annotation requirements, and a restricted domain of background knowledge. In this study, we explore the potential of a Large Language Model (LLM), specifically GPT-4, by leveraging its domain knowledge and common-sense capability to generate high-level concepts that are meaningful as explanations for humans, for a specific setting of image classification. We use minimal textual object information available in the data via prompting to facilitate this process. To evaluate the output, we compare the concepts generated by the LLM with two other methods: concepts generated by humans and the ECII heuristic concept induction system. Since there is no established metric to determine the human understandability of concepts, we conducted a human study to assess the effectiveness of the LLM-generated concepts. Our findings indicate that while human-generated explanations remain superior, concepts derived from GPT-4 are more comprehensible to humans compared to those generated by ECII.
Pretraining Billion-scale Geospatial Foundational Models on Frontier
Tsaris, Aristeidis, Dias, Philipe Ambrozio, Potnis, Abhishek, Yin, Junqi, Wang, Feiyi, Lunga, Dalton
As AI workloads increase in scope, generalization capability becomes challenging for small task-specific models and their demand for large amounts of labeled training samples increases. On the contrary, Foundation Models (FMs) are trained with internet-scale unlabeled data via self-supervised learning and have been shown to adapt to various tasks with minimal fine-tuning. Although large FMs have demonstrated significant impact in natural language processing and computer vision, efforts toward FMs for geospatial applications have been restricted to smaller size models, as pretraining larger models requires very large computing resources equipped with state-of-the-art hardware accelerators. Current satellite constellations collect 100+TBs of data a day, resulting in images that are billions of pixels and multimodal in nature. Such geospatial data poses unique challenges opening up new opportunities to develop FMs. We investigate billion scale FMs and HPC training profiles for geospatial applications by pretraining on publicly available data. We studied from end-to-end the performance and impact in the solution by scaling the model size. Our larger 3B parameter size model achieves up to 30% improvement in top1 scene classification accuracy when comparing a 100M parameter model. Moreover, we detail performance experiments on the Frontier supercomputer, America's first exascale system, where we study different model and data parallel approaches using PyTorch's Fully Sharded Data Parallel library. Specifically, we study variants of the Vision Transformer architecture (ViT), conducting performance analysis for ViT models with size up to 15B parameters. By discussing throughput and performance bottlenecks under different parallelism configurations, we offer insights on how to leverage such leadership-class HPC resources when developing large models for geospatial imagery applications.
Do Counterfactual Examples Complicate Adversarial Training?
Yeats, Eric, Darwin, Cameron, Ortega, Eduardo, Liu, Frank, Li, Hai
We leverage diffusion models to study the robustness-performance tradeoff of robust classifiers. Our approach introduces a simple, pretrained diffusion method to generate low-norm counterfactual examples (CEs): semantically altered data which results in different true class membership. We report that the confidence and accuracy of robust models on their clean training data are associated with the proximity of the data to their CEs. Moreover, robust models perform very poorly when evaluated on the CEs directly, as they become increasingly invariant to the low-norm, semantic changes brought by CEs. The results indicate a significant overlap between non-robust and semantic features, countering the common assumption that non-robust features are not interpretable.
Open-Ended Wargames with Large Language Models
Hogan, Daniel P., Brennen, Andrea
Wargames are a powerful tool for understanding and rehearsing real-world decision making. Automated play of wargames using artificial intelligence (AI) enables possibilities beyond those of human-conducted games, such as playing the game many times over to see a range of possible outcomes. There are two categories of wargames: quantitative games, with discrete types of moves, and qualitative games, which revolve around open-ended responses. Historically, automation efforts have focused on quantitative games, but large language models (LLMs) make it possible to automate qualitative wargames. We introduce "Snow Globe," an LLM-powered multi-agent system for playing qualitative wargames. With Snow Globe, every stage of a text-based qualitative wargame from scenario preparation to post-game analysis can be optionally carried out by AI, humans, or a combination thereof. We describe its software architecture conceptually and release an open-source implementation alongside this publication. As case studies, we simulate a tabletop exercise about an AI incident response and a political wargame about a geopolitical crisis. We discuss potential applications of the approach and how it fits into the broader wargaming ecosystem.
A Novel ICD Coding Framework Based on Associated and Hierarchical Code Description Distillation
ICD(International Classification of Diseases) coding involves assigning ICD codes to patients visit based on their medical notes. ICD coding is a challenging multilabel text classification problem due to noisy medical document inputs. Recent advancements in automated ICD coding have enhanced performance by integrating additional data and knowledge bases with the encoding of medical notes and codes. However, most of them ignore the code hierarchy, leading to improper code assignments. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework based on associated and hierarchical code description distillation (AHDD) for better code representation learning and avoidance of improper code assignment.we utilize the code description and the hierarchical structure inherent to the ICD codes. Therefore, in this paper, we leverage the code description and the hierarchical structure inherent to the ICD codes. The code description is also applied to aware the attention layer and output layer. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset show the superiority of the proposed framework over several state-of-the-art baselines.
Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues
Ou, Jiao, Wu, Jiayu, Liu, Che, Zhang, Fuzheng, Zhang, Di, Gai, Kun
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations requires high-quality instructional dialogues, which can be achieved by raising diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions that deepen interactions. Existing methods target instructions from real instruction dialogues as a learning goal and fine-tune a user simulator for posing instructions. However, the user simulator struggles to implicitly model complex dialogue flows and pose high-quality instructions. In this paper, we take inspiration from the cognitive abilities inherent in human learning and propose the explicit modeling of complex dialogue flows through instructional strategy reuse. Specifically, we first induce high-level strategies from various real instruction dialogues. These strategies are applied to new dialogue scenarios deductively, where the instructional strategies facilitate high-quality instructions. Experimental results show that our method can generate diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions for a given dialogue history. The constructed multi-turn instructional dialogues can outperform competitive baselines on the downstream chat model.
Virtual Foundry Graphnet for Metal Sintering Deformation Prediction
Rachel, null, Chen, null, Lee, Juheon, Gan, Chuang, Yang, Zijiang, Nabian, Mohammad Amin, Zeng, Jun
Metal Sintering is a necessary step for Metal Injection Molded parts and binder jet such as HP's metal 3D printer. The metal sintering process introduces large deformation varying from 25 to 50% depending on the green part porosity. In this paper, we use a graph-based deep learning approach to predict the part deformation, which can speed up the deformation simulation substantially at the voxel level. Running a well-trained Metal Sintering inferencing engine only takes a range of seconds to obtain the final sintering deformation value. The tested accuracy on example complex geometry achieves 0.7um mean deviation for a 63mm testing part.
Hybrid Navigation Acceptability and Safety
Clement, Benoit, Dubromel, Marie, Santos, Paulo E., Sammut, Karl, Oppert, Michelle, Dayoub, Feras
Autonomous vessels have emerged as a prominent and accepted solution, particularly in the naval defence sector. However, achieving full autonomy for marine vessels demands the development of robust and reliable control and guidance systems that can handle various encounters with manned and unmanned vessels while operating effectively under diverse weather and sea conditions. A significant challenge in this pursuit is ensuring the autonomous vessels' compliance with the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs). These regulations present a formidable hurdle for the human-level understanding by autonomous systems as they were originally designed from common navigation practices created since the mid-19th century. Their ambiguous language assumes experienced sailors' interpretation and execution, and therefore demands a high-level (cognitive) understanding of language and agent intentions. These capabilities surpass the current state-of-the-art in intelligent systems. This position paper highlights the critical requirements for a trustworthy control and guidance system, exploring the complexity of adapting COLREGs for safe vessel-on-vessel encounters considering autonomous maritime technology competing and/or cooperating with manned vessels.