Large Language Model
Incremental Learning of Humanoid Robot Behavior from Natural Interaction and Large Language Models
Bärmann, Leonard, Kartmann, Rainer, Peller-Konrad, Fabian, Waibel, Alex, Asfour, Tamim
Natural-language dialog is key for intuitive human-robot interaction. It can be used not only to express humans' intents, but also to communicate instructions for improvement if a robot does not understand a command correctly. Of great importance is to endow robots with the ability to learn from such interaction experience in an incremental way to allow them to improve their behaviors or avoid mistakes in the future. In this paper, we propose a system to achieve incremental learning of complex behavior from natural interaction, and demonstrate its implementation on a humanoid robot. Building on recent advances, we present a system that deploys Large Language Models (LLMs) for high-level orchestration of the robot's behavior, based on the idea of enabling the LLM to generate Python statements in an interactive console to invoke both robot perception and action. The interaction loop is closed by feeding back human instructions, environment observations, and execution results to the LLM, thus informing the generation of the next statement. Specifically, we introduce incremental prompt learning, which enables the system to interactively learn from its mistakes. For that purpose, the LLM can call another LLM responsible for code-level improvements of the current interaction based on human feedback. The improved interaction is then saved in the robot's memory, and thus retrieved on similar requests. We integrate the system in the robot cognitive architecture of the humanoid robot ARMAR-6 and evaluate our methods both quantitatively (in simulation) and qualitatively (in simulation and real-world) by demonstrating generalized incrementally-learned knowledge.
Automating Behavioral Testing in Machine Translation
Ferrando, Javier, Sperber, Matthias, Setiawan, Hendra, Telaar, Dominic, Hasan, Saša
Behavioral testing in NLP allows fine-grained evaluation of systems by examining their linguistic capabilities through the analysis of input-output behavior. Unfortunately, existing work on behavioral testing in Machine Translation (MT) is currently restricted to largely handcrafted tests covering a limited range of capabilities and languages. To address this limitation, we propose to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate a diverse set of source sentences tailored to test the behavior of MT models in a range of situations. We can then verify whether the MT model exhibits the expected behavior through matching candidate sets that are also generated using LLMs. Our approach aims to make behavioral testing of MT systems practical while requiring only minimal human effort. In our experiments, we apply our proposed evaluation framework to assess multiple available MT systems, revealing that while in general pass-rates follow the trends observable from traditional accuracy-based metrics, our method was able to uncover several important differences and potential bugs that go unnoticed when relying only on accuracy.
LLM and Infrastructure as a Code use case
Chanus, Thibault, Aubertin, Michael
Cloud computing and the evolution of management methodologies such as Lean Management or Agile entail a profound transformation in both system construction and maintenance approaches. These practices are encompassed within the term "DevOps." This descriptive approach to an information system or application, alongside the configuration of its constituent components, has necessitated the development of descriptive languages paired with specialized engines for automating systems administration tasks. Among these, the tandem of Ansible (engine) and YAML (descriptive language) stands out as the two most prevalent tools in the market, facing notable competition mainly from Terraform. The current document presents an inquiry into a solution for generating and managing Ansible YAML roles and playbooks, utilizing Generative LLMs (Language Models) to translate human descriptions into code. Our efforts are focused on identifying plausible directions and outlining the potential industrial applications. Note: For the purpose of this experiment, we have opted against the use of Ansible Lightspeed. This is due to its reliance on an IBM Watson model, for which we have not found any publicly available references. Comprehensive information regarding this remarkable technology can be found [1] directly on our partner's website, RedHat.
Socratis: Are large multimodal models emotionally aware?
Deng, Katherine, Ray, Arijit, Tan, Reuben, Gabriel, Saadia, Plummer, Bryan A., Saenko, Kate
Existing emotion prediction benchmarks contain coarse emotion labels which do not consider the diversity of emotions that an image and text can elicit in humans due to various reasons. Learning diverse reactions to multimodal content is important as intelligent machines take a central role in generating and delivering content to society. To address this gap, we propose Socratis, a societal reactions benchmark, where each image-caption (IC) pair is annotated with multiple emotions and the reasons for feeling them. Socratis contains 18K free-form reactions for 980 emotions on 2075 image-caption pairs from 5 widely-read news and image-caption (IC) datasets. We benchmark the capability of state-of-the-art multimodal large language models to generate the reasons for feeling an emotion given an IC pair. Based on a preliminary human study, we observe that humans prefer human-written reasons over 2 times more often than machine-generated ones. This shows our task is harder than standard generation tasks because it starkly contrasts recent findings where humans cannot tell apart machine vs human-written news articles, for instance. We further see that current captioning metrics based on large vision-language models also fail to correlate with human preferences. We hope that these findings and our benchmark will inspire further research on training emotionally aware models.
Predict-AI-bility of how humans balance self-interest with the interest of others
Capraro, Valerio, Di Paolo, Roberto, Pizziol, Veronica
Generative artificial intelligence holds enormous potential to revolutionize decision-making processes, from everyday to high-stake scenarios. However, as many decisions carry social implications, for AI to be a reliable assistant for decision-making it is crucial that it is able to capture the balance between self-interest and the interest of others. We investigate the ability of three of the most advanced chatbots to predict dictator game decisions across 108 experiments with human participants from 12 countries. We find that only GPT-4 (not Bard nor Bing) correctly captures qualitative behavioral patterns, identifying three major classes of behavior: self-interested, inequity-averse, and fully altruistic. Nonetheless, GPT-4 consistently underestimates self-interest and inequity-aversion, while overestimating altruistic behavior. This bias has significant implications for AI developers and users.
VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models
Huang, Wenlong, Wang, Chen, Zhang, Ruohan, Li, Yunzhu, Wu, Jiajun, Fei-Fei, Li
Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, which remains a major bottleneck. In this work, we aim to synthesize robot trajectories, i.e., a dense sequence of 6-DoF end-effector waypoints, for a large variety of manipulation tasks given an open-set of instructions and an open-set of objects. We achieve this by first observing that LLMs excel at inferring affordances and constraints given a free-form language instruction. More importantly, by leveraging their code-writing capabilities, they can interact with a vision-language model (VLM) to compose 3D value maps to ground the knowledge into the observation space of the agent. The composed value maps are then used in a model-based planning framework to zero-shot synthesize closed-loop robot trajectories with robustness to dynamic perturbations. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit from online experiences by efficiently learning a dynamics model for scenes that involve contact-rich interactions. We present a large-scale study of the proposed method in both simulated and real-robot environments, showcasing the ability to perform a large variety of everyday manipulation tasks specified in free-form natural language. Videos and code at https://voxposer.github.io
Meta-Reasoning: Semantics-Symbol Deconstruction For Large Language Models
Wang, Yiming, Zhang, Zhuosheng, Wang, Rui
Neural-symbolic methods have shown their effectiveness in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on mapping natural languages to more syntactically complete formal languages (e.g., Python and SQL). Those approaches necessitate that reasoning tasks be convertible into programs, which cater more to the computer execution mindset and deviate from human reasoning habits. To expand the real-world applicability and flexibility of symbolic methods, we propose Meta-Reasoning from the scope of linguistics itself. This method empowers LLMs to deconstruct questions and effectively capture more generalized knowledge autonomously. We find that Meta-Reasoning achieves improved in-context learning efficiency, reasoning accuracy, and output stability in six arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks. In particular, when applied to symbolic reasoning tasks such as Tracking Shuffled Objects, GPT-3 (text-davinci-002) surpasses the few-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting approach (+37.7%), with 99% accuracy after a single demonstration of Meta-Reasoning.
AVIS: Autonomous Visual Information Seeking with Large Language Model Agent
Hu, Ziniu, Iscen, Ahmet, Sun, Chen, Chang, Kai-Wei, Sun, Yizhou, Ross, David A, Schmid, Cordelia, Fathi, Alireza
In this paper, we propose an autonomous information seeking visual question answering framework, AVIS. Our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically strategize the utilization of external tools and to investigate their outputs, thereby acquiring the indispensable knowledge needed to provide answers to the posed questions. Responding to visual questions that necessitate external knowledge, such as "What event is commemorated by the building depicted in this image?", is a complex task. This task presents a combinatorial search space that demands a sequence of actions, including invoking APIs, analyzing their responses, and making informed decisions. We conduct a user study to collect a variety of instances of human decision-making when faced with this task. This data is then used to design a system comprised of three components: an LLM-powered planner that dynamically determines which tool to use next, an LLM-powered reasoner that analyzes and extracts key information from the tool outputs, and a working memory component that retains the acquired information throughout the process. The collected user behavior serves as a guide for our system in two key ways. First, we create a transition graph by analyzing the sequence of decisions made by users. This graph delineates distinct states and confines the set of actions available at each state. Second, we use examples of user decision-making to provide our LLM-powered planner and reasoner with relevant contextual instances, enhancing their capacity to make informed decisions. We show that AVIS achieves state-of-the-art results on knowledge-intensive visual question answering benchmarks such as Infoseek and OK-VQA.
Demo2Code: From Summarizing Demonstrations to Synthesizing Code via Extended Chain-of-Thought
Wang, Huaxiaoyue, Gonzalez-Pumariega, Gonzalo, Sharma, Yash, Choudhury, Sanjiban
Language instructions and demonstrations are two natural ways for users to teach robots personalized tasks. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown impressive performance in translating language instructions into code for robotic tasks. However, translating demonstrations into task code continues to be a challenge due to the length and complexity of both demonstrations and code, making learning a direct mapping intractable. This paper presents Demo2Code, a novel framework that generates robot task code from demonstrations via an extended chain-of-thought and defines a common latent specification to connect the two. Our framework employs a robust two-stage process: (1) a recursive summarization technique that condenses demonstrations into concise specifications, and (2) a code synthesis approach that expands each function recursively from the generated specifications. We conduct extensive evaluation on various robot task benchmarks, including a novel game benchmark Robotouille, designed to simulate diverse cooking tasks in a kitchen environment.
Flover: A Temporal Fusion Framework for Efficient Autoregressive Model Parallel Inference
Yao, Jinghan, Alnaasan, Nawras, Chen, Tian, Shafi, Aamir, Subramoni, Hari, K., Dhabaleswar, Panda, null
Autoregressive models, despite their commendable performance in a myriad of generative tasks, face challenges stemming from their inherently sequential structure. Inference on these models, by design, harnesses a temporal dependency, where the current token's probability distribution is conditioned on preceding tokens. This inherent characteristic severely impedes computational efficiency during inference as a typical inference request can require more than thousands of tokens, where generating each token requires a load of entire model weights, making the inference more memory-bound. The large overhead becomes profound in real deployment where requests arrive randomly, necessitating various generation lengths. Existing solutions, such as dynamic batching and concurrent instances, introduce significant response delays and bandwidth contention, falling short of achieving optimal latency and throughput. To address these shortcomings, we propose Flover -- a temporal fusion framework for efficiently inferring multiple requests in parallel. We deconstruct the general generation pipeline into pre-processing and token generation, and equip the framework with a dedicated work scheduler for fusing the generation process temporally across all requests. By orchestrating the token-level parallelism, Flover exhibits optimal hardware efficiency and significantly spares the system resources. By further employing a fast buffer reordering algorithm that allows memory eviction of finished tasks, it brings over 11x inference speedup on GPT and 16x on LLAMA compared to the cutting-edge solutions provided by NVIDIA FasterTransformer. Crucially, by leveraging the advanced tensor parallel technique, Flover proves efficacious across diverse computational landscapes, from single-GPU setups to distributed scenarios, thereby offering robust performance optimization that adapts to variable use cases.