We consider problems of sequential robot manipulation (aka. combined task and motion planning) where the objective is primarily given in terms of a cost function over the final geometric state, rather than a symbolic goal description. In this case we should leverage optimization methods to inform search over potential action sequences. We propose to formulate the problem holistically as a 1st-order logic extension of a mathematical program: a non-linear constrained program over the full world trajectory where the symbolic state-action sequence defines the (in-)equality constraints. We tackle the challenge of solving such programs by proposing three levels of approximation: The coarsest level introduces the concept of the effective end state kinematics, parametrically describing all possible end state configurations conditional to a given symbolic action sequence. Optimization on this level is fast and can inform symbolic search. The other two levels optimize over interaction keyframes and eventually over the full world trajectory across interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a problem of maximizing the height of a physically stable construction from an assortment of boards, cylinders and blocks.

We consider problems of sequential robot manipulation (aka. combined task and motion planning) where the objective is primarily given in terms of a cost function over the final geometric state, rather than a symbolic goal description. In this case we should leverage optimization methods to inform search over potential action sequences. We propose to formulate the problem holistically as a 1st-order logic extension of a mathematical program: a non-linear constrained program over the full world trajectory where the symbolic state-action sequence defines the (in-)equality constraints. We tackle the challenge of solving such programs by proposing three levels of approximation: The coarsest level introduces the concept of the effective end state kinematics, parametrically describing all possible end state configurations conditional to a given symbolic action sequence. Optimization on this level is fast and can inform symbolic search. The other two levels optimize over interaction keyframes and eventually over the full world trajectory across interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a problem of maximizing the height of a physically stable construction from an assortment of boards, cylinders and blocks.

We consider problems of sequential robot manipulation (aka. combined task and motion planning) where the objective is primarily given in terms of a cost function over the final geometric state, rather than a symbolic goal description. In this case we should leverage optimization methods to inform search over potential action sequences. We propose to formulate the problem holistically as a 1st-order logic extension of a mathematical program: a non-linear constrained program over the full world trajectory where the symbolic state-action sequence defines the (in-)equality constraints. We tackle the challenge of solving such programs by proposing three levels of approximation: The coarsest level introduces the concept of the effective end state kinematics, parametrically describing all possible end state configurations conditional to a given symbolic action sequence. Optimization on this level is fast and can inform symbolic search. The other two levels optimize over interaction keyframes and eventually over the full world trajectory across interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a problem of maximizing the height of a physically stable construction from an assortment of boards, cylinders and blocks.

However, by being autonomous, structure of the policy, which is often critical for understanding these approaches have the problem of discovering the demonstration, is unobserved. We unnatural hierarchies, which may be difficult to interpret and formulate this problem as active learning of Probabilistic communicate to people. State-Dependent Grammars (PSDGs) from In this paper, we study the problem of learning policies demonstrations. Given a set of expert demonstrations, with hierarchical structure from demonstrations of a teacher our approach learns a hierarchical policy by whose policy is structured hierarchically, with natural applications actively selecting demonstrations and using queries to problems such as tutoring arithmetic, cooking, and to explicate their intentional structure at selected furniture assembly. A key challenge in this problem is that the points. Our contributions include a new algorithm demonstrations do not reveal the hierarchical task structure of for imitation learning of hierarchical policies and the teacher. Rather, only ground states and teacher actions are principled heuristics for the selection of demonstrations directly observable. This can lead to significant ambiguity in and queries.

We consider problems of sequential robot manipulation (aka. combined task and motion planning) where the objective is primarily given in terms of a cost function over the final geometric state, rather than a symbolic goal description. In this case we should leverage optimization methods to inform search over potential action sequences. We propose to formulate the problem holistically as a 1st-order logic extension of a mathematical program: a non-linear constrained program over the full world trajectory where the symbolic state-action sequence defines the (in-)equality constraints. We tackle the challenge of solving such programs by proposing three levels of approximation: The coarsest level introduces the concept of the effective end state kinematics, parametrically describing all possible end state configurations conditional to a given symbolic action sequence. Optimization on this level is fast and can inform symbolic search. The other two levels optimize over interaction keyframes and eventually over the full world trajectory across interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a problem of maximizing the height of a physically stable construction from an assortment of boards, cylinders and blocks.

In this paper, we propose a Weakly Supervised Matrix Factorization (WSMF) approach to the problem of image parsing with noisy tags, i.e., segmenting noisily tagged images and then classifying the regions only with image-level labels. Instead of requiring clean but expensive pixel-level labels as strong supervision in the traditional image parsing methods, we take noisy image-level labels as weakly-supervised constraints. Specifically, we first over-segment all the images into multiple regions which are initially labeled based upon the image-level labels. Moreover, from a low-rank matrix factorization viewpoint, we formulate noisily tagged image parsing as a weakly supervised matrix factorization problem. Finally, we develop an efficient algorithm to solve the matrix factorization problem. Experimental results show the promising performance of the proposed WSMF algorithm in comparison with the state-of-the-arts.

Part deformation has been a longstanding challenge for object parsing, of which the primary difficulty lies in modeling the highly diverse object structures. To this end, we propose a novel structure parsing model to capture deformable object structures. The proposed model consists of two de-formable layers: the top layer is an undirected graph that incorporates inter-part deformations to infer object structures; the base layer is consisted of various independent nodes to characterize local intra-part deformations. To learn this two-layer model, we design a layer-wise learning algorithm,which employs matching pursuit and belief propagation for a low computational complexity inference. Specifically, active basis sparse coding is leveraged to build the nodes at the base layer, while the edge weights are estimated by a structural support vector machine. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets (i.e., faces and horses) demonstrate that the proposed model yields superior parsing performance over state-of-the-art models.

Compositionality is a fundamental notion in computation whereby complex abstractions can be constructed from simpler ones, but this property has so far escaped the paradigm of end-user programming from examples or natural language. Existing approaches restrict end users to only give holistic end-to-end specifications, which limits the expressivity and scalability of these approaches to relatively simple programs in very restricted domains. In this paper we propose a new approach to end-user program synthesis in which input can be given in a compositional manner through a combination of natural language and examples. We present a domain-agnostic program synthesis algorithm and demonstrate its application to an expressive string manipulation language. We evaluate on a range of complex examples from help forums that are beyond the scope of previous systems.

In this paper, we formulate a sparse optimization framework for extractive document summarization. The proposed framework has a decomposable convex objective function. We derive an efficient ADMM algorithm to solve it. To encourage diversity in the summaries, we explicitly introduce an additional sentence dissimilarity term in the optimization framework. We achieve significant improvement over previous related work under similar data reconstruction framework. We then generalize our formulation to the case of compressive summarization and derive a block coordinate descent algorithm to optimize the objective function. Performance on DUC 2006 and DUC 2007 datasets shows that our compressive summarization results are competitive against the state-of-the-art results while maintaining reasonable readability.

Cross-lingual induction aims to acquire for one language some linguistic structures resorting to annotations from another language. It works well for simple structured predication problems such as part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, but lacks of significant progress for more complicated problems such as constituency parsing and deep semantic parsing, mainly due to the structural non-isomorphism between languages. We propose a decomposed projection strategy for cross-lingual induction, where cross-lingual projection is performed in unit of fundamental decisions of the structured predication. Compared with the structured projection that projects the complete structures, decomposed projection achieves better adaptation of non-isomorphism between languages and efficiently acquires the structured information across languages, thus leading to better performance. For joint cross-lingual induction of constituency and dependency grammars, decomposed cross-lingual induction achieves very significant improvement in both constituency and dependency grammar induction.