Learning Graphical Models
H$^2$R: Hierarchical Hindsight Reflection for Multi-Task LLM Agents
Ye, Shicheng, Yu, Chao, Ke, Kaiqiang, Xu, Chengdong, Wei, Yinqi
Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong potential in multi-task scenarios, owing to their ability to transfer knowledge across diverse tasks. However, existing approaches often treat prior experiences and knowledge as monolithic units, leading to inefficient and coarse-grained knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical memory architecture that enables fine-grained knowledge transfer by decoupling high-level planning memory from low-level execution memory. To construct and refine these hierarchical memories, we introduce Hierarchical Hindsight Reflection (H$^2$R), a mechanism that distills reusable and hierarchical knowledge from past agent-environment interactions. At test time, H$^2$R performs retrievals of high-level and low-level memories separately, allowing LLM-based agents to efficiently access and utilize task-relevant knowledge for new tasks.Experimental results across two benchmarks demonstrate that H$^2$R can improve generalization and decision-making performance, outperforming prior baselines such as Expel.
EmbeddedML: A New Optimized and Fast Machine Learning Library
Çalışkan, Halil Hüseyin, Koruk, Talha
Machine learning models and libraries can train datasets of different sizes and perform prediction and classification operations, but machine learning models and libraries cause slow and long training times on large datasets. This article introduces EmbeddedML, a training-time-optimized and mathematically enhanced machine learning library. The speed was increased by approximately times compared to scikit-learn without any loss in terms of accuracy in regression models such as Multiple Linear Regression. Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithms have been mathematically rewritten to reduce training time and increase accuracy in classification models. With the applied mathematical improvements, training time has been reduced by approximately 2 times for SVM on small datasets and by around 800 times on large datasets, and by approximately 4 times for Logistic Regression, compared to the scikit-learn implementation. In summary, the EmbeddedML library offers regression, classification, clustering, and dimensionality reduction algorithms that are mathematically rewritten and optimized to reduce training time.
Toward Ownership Understanding of Objects: Active Question Generation with Large Language Model and Probabilistic Generative Model
Hashimoto, Saki, Hasegawa, Shoichi, Ishikawa, Tomochika, Taniguchi, Akira, Hagiwara, Yoshinobu, Hafi, Lotfi El, Taniguchi, Tadahiro
Robots operating in daily life environments must understand object ownership to carry out instructions naturally given by users, such as "Bring me my cup." Without ownership knowledge, a robot cannot determine which object is being referred to when multiple similar objects exist. This problem is especially evident in kitchens, offices, or laboratories, where objects with similar appearances may belong to different individuals. Relying solely on perceptual features such as location or appearance is insufficient because ownership is inherently context-dependent and often determined by social conventions. Therefore, enabling robots to acquire ownership knowledge is a crucial step toward socially appropriate human-robot interaction. To enable robots to learn object ownership in daily life environments, it is essential to implement a question-generation mechanism that efficiently acquires necessary information. However, in real-world environments with large numbers of objects, this is impractical and imposes a heavy burden on users. Although robots can explore the environment to collect visual features of objects, it remains difficult to obtain ownership knowledge because it depends on users and context. Therefore, allowing robots to ask questions based on the current situation enables them to acquire ownership knowl-Saki Hashimoto is the presenter of this paper.
Force-Modulated Visual Policy for Robot-Assisted Dressing with Arm Motions
Hao, Alexis Yihong, Wang, Yufei, Ravie, Navin Sriram, Hegde, Bharath, Held, David, Erickson, Zackory
Robot-assisted dressing has the potential to significantly improve the lives of individuals with mobility impairments. To ensure an effective and comfortable dressing experience, the robot must be able to handle challenging deformable garments, apply appropriate forces, and adapt to limb movements throughout the dressing process. Prior work often makes simplifying assumptions -- such as static human limbs during dressing -- which limits real-world applicability. In this work, we develop a robot-assisted dressing system capable of handling partial observations with visual occlusions, as well as robustly adapting to arm motions during the dressing process. Given a policy trained in simulation with partial observations, we propose a method to fine-tune it in the real world using a small amount of data and multi-modal feedback from vision and force sensing, to further improve the policy's adaptability to arm motions and enhance safety. We evaluate our method in simulation with simplified articulated human meshes and in a real world human study with 12 participants across 264 dressing trials. Our policy successfully dresses two long-sleeve everyday garments onto the participants while being adaptive to various kinds of arm motions, and greatly outperforms prior baselines in terms of task completion and user feedback. Video are available at https://dressing-motion.github.io/.
Pre-trained Visual Representations Generalize Where it Matters in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Jones, Scott, Zhou, Liyou, Pattinson, Sebastian W.
In visuomotor policy learning, the control policy for the robotic agent is derived directly from visual inputs. The typical approach, where a policy and vision encoder are trained jointly from scratch, generalizes poorly to novel visual scene changes. Using pre-trained vision models (PVMs) to inform a policy network improves robustness in model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). Recent developments in Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) suggest that MBRL is more sample-efficient than MFRL. However, counterintuitively, existing work has found PVMs to be ineffective in MBRL. Here, we investigate PVM's effectiveness in MBRL, specifically on generalization under visual domain shifts. We show that, in scenarios with severe shifts, PVMs perform much better than a baseline model trained from scratch. We further investigate the effects of varying levels of fine-tuning of PVMs. Our results show that partial fine-tuning can maintain the highest average task performance under the most extreme distribution shifts. Our results demonstrate that PVMs are highly successful in promoting robustness in visual policy learning, providing compelling evidence for their wider adoption in model-based robotic learning applications.
Deriving the Scaled-Dot-Function via Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Maximum Entropy Approach
In this paper, we present a maximum likelihood estimation approach to determine the value vector in transformer models. We model the sequence of value vectors, key vectors, and the query vector as a sequence of Gaussian distributions. The variance in each Gaussian distribution depends on the time step, the corresponding key vector, and the query vector. The mean value in each Gaussian distribution depends on the time step, and the corresponding value vector. This analysis may offer a new explanation of the scaled-dot-product function or softmax function used in transformer architectures [1]. Another explanation, inspired by [4], is based on the maximum entropy approach in natural language processing [5]. In this approach, a query vector and key vectors are used to derive the feature functions for the maximum entropy model.
Strategic Concealment of Environment Representations in Competitive Games
Guan, Yue, Maity, Dipankar, Tsiotras, Panagiotis
This paper investigates the strategic concealment of environment representations used by players in competitive games. We consider a defense scenario in which one player (the Defender) seeks to infer and exploit the representation used by the other player (the Attacker). The interaction between the two players is modeled as a Bayesian game: the Defender infers the Attacker's representation from its trajectory and places barriers to obstruct the Attacker's path towards its goal, while the Attacker obfuscates its representation type to mislead the Defender. We solve for the Perfect Bayesian Nash Equilibrium via a bilinear program that integrates Bayesian inference, strategic planning, and belief manipulation. Simulations show that purposeful concealment naturally emerges: the Attacker randomizes its trajectory to manipulate the Defender's belief, inducing suboptimal barrier selections and thereby gaining a strategic advantage.
MMM: Clustering Multivariate Longitudinal Mixed-type Data
Amato, Francesco, Jacques, Julien
Multivariate longitudinal data of mixed-type are increasingly collected in many science domains. However, algorithms to cluster this kind of data remain scarce, due to the challenge to simultaneously model the within- and between-time dependence structures for multivariate data of mixed kind. We introduce the Mixture of Mixed-Matrices (MMM) model: reorganizing the data in a three-way structure and assuming that the non-continuous variables are observations of underlying latent continuous variables, the model relies on a mixture of matrix-variate normal distributions to perform clustering in the latent dimension. The MMM model is thus able to handle continuous, ordinal, binary, nominal and count data and to concurrently model the heterogeneity, the association among the responses and the temporal dependence structure in a parsimonious way and without assuming conditional independence. The inference is carried out through an MCMC-EM algorithm, which is detailed. An evaluation of the model through synthetic data shows its inference abilities. A real-world application on financial data is presented.
Some Robustness Properties of Label Cleaning
We demonstrate that learning procedures that rely on aggregated labels, e.g., label information distilled from noisy responses, enjoy robustness properties impossible without data cleaning. This robustness appears in several ways. In the context of risk consistency -- when one takes the standard approach in machine learning of minimizing a surrogate (typically convex) loss in place of a desired task loss (such as the zero-one mis-classification error) -- procedures using label aggregation obtain stronger consistency guarantees than those even possible using raw labels. And while classical statistical scenarios of fitting perfectly-specified models suggest that incorporating all possible information -- modeling uncertainty in labels -- is statistically efficient, consistency fails for ``standard'' approaches as soon as a loss to be minimized is even slightly mis-specified. Yet procedures leveraging aggregated information still converge to optimal classifiers, highlighting how incorporating a fuller view of the data analysis pipeline, from collection to model-fitting to prediction time, can yield a more robust methodology by refining noisy signals.
Approaches to Analysis and Design of AI-Based Autonomous Vehicles
Yan, Tao, Zhang, Zheyu, Jiang, Jingjing, Chen, Wen-Hua
Artificial intelligence (AI) models are becoming key components in an autonomous vehicle (AV), especially in handling complicated perception tasks. However, closing the loop through AI-based feedback may pose significant risks on reliability of autonomous driving due to very limited understanding about the mechanism of AI-driven perception processes. To overcome it, this paper aims to develop tools for modeling, analysis, and synthesis for a class of AI-based AV; in particular, their closed-loop properties, e.g., stability, robustness, and performance, are rigorously studied in the statistical sense. First, we provide a novel modeling means for the AI-driven perception processes by looking at their error characteristics. Specifically, three fundamental AI-induced perception uncertainties are recognized and modeled by Markov chains, Gaussian processes, and bounded disturbances, respectively. By means of that, the closed-loop stochastic stability (SS) is established in the sense of mean square, and then, an SS control synthesis method is presented within the framework of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Besides the SS properties, the robustness and performance of AI-based AVs are discussed in terms of a stochastic guaranteed cost, and criteria are given to test the robustness level of an AV when in the presence of AI-induced uncertainties. Furthermore, the stochastic optimal guaranteed cost control is investigated, and an efficient design procedure is developed innovatively based on LMI techniques and convex optimization. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness, the developed results are applied to an example of car following control, along with extensive simulation.