Cheng, An-Chieh
NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation
Cheng, An-Chieh, Ji, Yandong, Yang, Zhaojing, Zou, Xueyan, Kautz, Jan, Bıyık, Erdem, Yin, Hongxu, Liu, Sifei, Wang, Xiaolong
Stop when you are very close to the trash can. Walk to the other end of the room, turn left and find a toy kitchen set. Move forward out of the room. Proceed to the grass and stop in front of the soccers. Walk forward, when seeing the stair bars, turn right and walk around the stairs until reaching the hallway. Turn right and walk along the hallway, stop in front of a bathroom. Walk forward along the way. Turn a little left and keep going straight. Move forward along the way. Turn left at the yellow fire hydrant. Go forward along the slope and stop in front of the door. Figure 1: Real-world demonstration of NaVILA: Upon receiving human instructions, NaVILA uses a visionlanguage model to process RGB video frames and employs locomotion skills to execute the task on a robot. The robot successfully handles long-horizon navigation tasks and operates safely in challenging environments. This paper proposes to solve the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation with legged robots, which not only provides a flexible way for humans to command but also allows the robot to navigate through more challenging and cluttered scenes. However, it is non-trivial to translate human language instructions all the way to low-level leg joint actions.
InstaNAS: Instance-aware Neural Architecture Search
Cheng, An-Chieh, Lin, Chieh Hubert, Juan, Da-Cheng, Wei, Wei, Sun, Min
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims at finding one "single" architecture that achieves the best accuracy for a given task such as image recognition.In this paper, we study the instance-level variation,and demonstrate that instance-awareness is an important yet currently missing component of NAS. Based on this observation, we propose InstaNAS for searching toward instance-level architectures;the controller is trained to search and form a "distribution of architectures" instead of a single final architecture. Then during the inference phase, the controller selects an architecture from the distribution, tailored for each unseen image to achieve both high accuracy and short latency. The experimental results show that InstaNAS reduces the inference latency without compromising classification accuracy. On average, InstaNAS achieves 48.9% latency reduction on CIFAR-10 and 40.2% latency reduction on CIFAR-100 with respect to MobileNetV2 architecture.
Searching Toward Pareto-Optimal Device-Aware Neural Architectures
Cheng, An-Chieh, Dong, Jin-Dong, Hsu, Chi-Hung, Chang, Shu-Huan, Sun, Min, Chang, Shih-Chieh, Pan, Jia-Yu, Chen, Yu-Ting, Wei, Wei, Juan, Da-Cheng
Recent breakthroughs in Neural Architectural Search (NAS) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many tasks such as image classification and language understanding. However, most existing works only optimize for model accuracy and largely ignore other important factors imposed by the underlying hardware and devices, such as latency and energy, when making inference. In this paper, we first introduce the problem of NAS and provide a survey on recent works. Then we deep dive into two recent advancements on extending NAS into multiple-objective frameworks: MONAS and DPP-Net. Both MONAS and DPP-Net are capable of optimizing accuracy and other objectives imposed by devices, searching for neural architectures that can be best deployed on a wide spectrum of devices: from embedded systems and mobile devices to workstations. Experimental results are poised to show that architectures found by MONAS and DPP-Net achieves Pareto optimality w.r.t the given objectives for various devices.