Their vast number of trainable parameters necessitates a wealth of data to achieve accuracy and mitigate overfitting. However, experimental measurements are often limited and costly to obtain in sufficient quantities for finetuning. To this end, we present a physics-based training pipeline that tackles the pathology of data scarcity. The core enabler is a physics-based modeling framework that generates a multitude of synthetic data to align the LLM to a physically consistent initial state before finetuning. Our framework features a two-phase training strategy: (1) utilizing the large-in-amount while less accurate synthetic data for supervised pretraining, and (2) finetuning the phase-1 model with limited experimental data. We empirically demonstrate that supervised pretraining is vital to obtaining accurate finetuned LLMs, via the lens of learning polymer flammability metrics where cone calorimeter data is sparse.

It is fundamentally challenging for robots to serve as useful assistants in human environments because this requires addressing a spectrum of sub-problems across robotics, including perception, language understanding, reasoning, and planning. The recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated their exceptional abilities in solving complex mathematical problems, mastering commonsense and abstract reasoning. This has led to the recent utilization of MLLMs as the brain in robotic systems, enabling these models to conduct high-level planning prior to triggering low-level control actions for task execution. However, it remains uncertain whether existing MLLMs are reliable in serving the brain role of robots. In this study, we introduce the first benchmark for evaluating Multimodal LLM for Robotic (MMRo) benchmark, which tests the capability of MLLMs for robot applications. Specifically, we identify four essential capabilities perception, task planning, visual reasoning, and safety measurement that MLLMs must possess to qualify as the robot's central processing unit. We have developed several scenarios for each capability, resulting in a total of 14 metrics for evaluation. We present experimental results for various MLLMs, including both commercial and open-source models, to assess the performance of existing systems. Our findings indicate that no single model excels in all areas, suggesting that current MLLMs are not yet trustworthy enough to serve as the cognitive core for robots. Our data can be found in https://mm-robobench.github.io/.

Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and has evolved into four major categories: optimization-based attacks such as Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG), jailbreak template-based attacks such as "Do-Anything-Now", advanced indirect attacks like DrAttack, and multilingual jailbreaks. However, delivering a practical jailbreak defense is challenging because it needs to not only handle all the above jailbreak attacks but also incur negligible delay to user prompts, as well as be compatible with both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Inspired by how the traditional security concept of shadow stacks defends against memory overflow attacks, this paper introduces a generic LLM jailbreak defense framework called SelfDefend, which establishes a shadow LLM defense instance to concurrently protect the target LLM instance in the normal stack and collaborate with it for checkpoint-based access control. The effectiveness of SelfDefend builds upon our observation that existing LLMs (both target and defense LLMs) have the capability to identify harmful prompts or intentions in user queries, which we empirically validate using the commonly used GPT-3.5/4 models across all major jailbreak attacks. Our measurements show that SelfDefend enables GPT-3.5 to suppress the attack success rate (ASR) by 8.97-95.74% (average: 60%) and GPT-4 by even 36.36-100% (average: 83%), while incurring negligible effects on normal queries. To further improve the defense's robustness and minimize costs, we employ a data distillation approach to tune dedicated open-source defense models. These models outperform four SOTA defenses and match the performance of GPT-4-based SelfDefend, with significantly lower extra delays. We also empirically show that the tuned models are robust to targeted GCG and prompt injection attacks.

A digital twin (DT), with the components of a physics-based model, a data-driven model, and a machine learning (ML) enabled efficient surrogate, behaves as a virtual twin of the real-world physical process. In terms of Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) based additive manufacturing (AM), a DT can predict the current and future states of the melt pool and the resulting defects corresponding to the input laser parameters, evolve itself by assimilating in-situ sensor data, and optimize the laser parameters to mitigate defect formation. In this paper, we present a deep neural operator enabled computational framework of the DT for closed-loop feedback control of the L-PBF process. This is accomplished by building a high-fidelity computational model to accurately represent the melt pool states, an efficient surrogate model to approximate the melt pool solution field, followed by an physics-based procedure to extract information from the computed melt pool simulation that can further be correlated to the defect quantities of interest (e.g., surface roughness). In particular, we leverage the data generated from the high-fidelity physics-based model and train a series of Fourier neural operator (FNO) based ML models to effectively learn the relation between the input laser parameters and the corresponding full temperature field of the melt pool. Subsequently, a set of physics-informed variables such as the melt pool dimensions and the peak temperature can be extracted to compute the resulting defects. An optimization algorithm is then exercised to control laser input and minimize defects. On the other hand, the constructed DT can also evolve with the physical twin via offline finetuning and online material calibration. Finally, a probabilistic framework is adopted for uncertainty quantification. The developed DT is envisioned to guide the AM process and facilitate high-quality manufacturing.

Accurate Traffic Prediction is a challenging task in intelligent transportation due to the spatial-temporal aspects of road networks. The traffic of a road network can be affected by long-distance or long-term dependencies where existing methods fall short in modeling them. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework known as Spatial-Temporal Multi-Granularity Framework (STMGF) to enhance the capture of long-distance and long-term information of the road networks. STMGF makes full use of different granularity information of road networks and models the long-distance and long-term information by gathering information in a hierarchical interactive way. Further, it leverages the inherent periodicity in traffic sequences to refine prediction results by matching with recent traffic data. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that STMGF outperforms all baseline models and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased impressive skills in tasks related to visual understanding and reasoning. Yet, their widespread application faces obstacles due to the high computational demands during both the training and inference phases, restricting their use to a limited audience within the research and user communities. In this paper, we investigate the design aspects of Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) and propose an efficient multimodal assistant named Mipha, which is designed to create synergy among various aspects: visual representation, language models, and optimization strategies. We show that without increasing the volume of training data, our Mipha-3B outperforms the state-of-the-art large MLLMs, especially LLaVA-1.5-13B, on multiple benchmarks. Through detailed discussion, we provide insights and guidelines for developing strong MSLMs that rival the capabilities of MLLMs.

Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs). A considerable amount of research exists proposing more effective jailbreak attacks, including the recent Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) attack, jailbreak template-based attacks such as using "Do-Anything-Now" (DAN), and multilingual jailbreak. In contrast, the defensive side has been relatively less explored. This paper proposes a lightweight yet practical defense called SELFDEFEND, which can defend against all existing jailbreak attacks with minimal delay for jailbreak prompts and negligible delay for normal user prompts. Our key insight is that regardless of the kind of jailbreak strategies employed, they eventually need to include a harmful prompt (e.g., "how to make a bomb") in the prompt sent to LLMs, and we found that existing LLMs can effectively recognize such harmful prompts that violate their safety policies. Based on this insight, we design a shadow stack that concurrently checks whether a harmful prompt exists in the user prompt and triggers a checkpoint in the normal stack once a token of "No" or a harmful prompt is output. The latter could also generate an explainable LLM response to adversarial prompts. We demonstrate our idea of SELFDEFEND works in various jailbreak scenarios through manual analysis in GPT-3.5/4. We also list three future directions to further enhance SELFDEFEND.

In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-$\phi$ (LLaVA-Phi), an efficient multi-modal assistant that harnesses the power of the recently advanced small language model, Phi-2, to facilitate multi-modal dialogues. LLaVA-Phi marks a notable advancement in the realm of compact multi-modal models. It demonstrates that even smaller language models, with as few as 2.7B parameters, can effectively engage in intricate dialogues that integrate both textual and visual elements, provided they are trained with high-quality corpora. Our model delivers commendable performance on publicly available benchmarks that encompass visual comprehension, reasoning, and knowledge-based perception. Beyond its remarkable performance in multi-modal dialogue tasks, our model opens new avenues for applications in time-sensitive environments and systems that require real-time interaction, such as embodied agents. It highlights the potential of smaller language models to achieve sophisticated levels of understanding and interaction, while maintaining greater resource efficiency.The project is available at {https://github.com/zhuyiche/llava-phi}.

While the exploration for embodied AI has spanned multiple decades, it remains a persistent challenge to endow agents with human-level intelligence, including perception, learning, reasoning, decision-making, control, and generalization capabilities, so that they can perform general-purpose tasks in open, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Recent advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and multi-modality learning have shown that the foundation models have superhuman capabilities for specific tasks. They not only provide a solid cornerstone for integrating basic modules into embodied AI systems but also shed light on how to scale up robot learning from a methodological perspective. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of foundation models in robotics, focusing on autonomous manipulation and encompassing high-level planning and low-level control. Moreover, we showcase their commonly used datasets, simulators, and benchmarks. Importantly, we emphasize the critical challenges intrinsic to this field and delineate potential avenues for future research, contributing to advancing the frontier of academic and industrial discourse.

Neural network compression techniques, such as knowledge distillation (KD) and network pruning, have received increasing attention. Recent work `Prune, then Distill' reveals that a pruned student-friendly teacher network can benefit the performance of KD. However, the conventional teacher-student pipeline, which entails cumbersome pre-training of the teacher and complicated compression steps, makes pruning with KD less efficient. In addition to compressing models, recent compression techniques also emphasize the aspect of efficiency. Early pruning demands significantly less computational cost in comparison to the conventional pruning methods as it does not require a large pre-trained model. Likewise, a special case of KD, known as self-distillation (SD), is more efficient since it requires no pre-training or student-teacher pair selection. This inspires us to collaborate early pruning with SD for efficient model compression. In this work, we propose the framework named Early Pruning with Self-Distillation (EPSD), which identifies and preserves distillable weights in early pruning for a given SD task. EPSD efficiently combines early pruning and self-distillation in a two-step process, maintaining the pruned network's trainability for compression. Instead of a simple combination of pruning and SD, EPSD enables the pruned network to favor SD by keeping more distillable weights before training to ensure better distillation of the pruned network. We demonstrated that EPSD improves the training of pruned networks, supported by visual and quantitative analyses. Our evaluation covered diverse benchmarks (CIFAR-10/100, Tiny-ImageNet, full ImageNet, CUB-200-2011, and Pascal VOC), with EPSD outperforming advanced pruning and SD techniques.