Ma, Lin
DataPlatter: Boosting Robotic Manipulation Generalization with Minimal Costly Data
Zheng, Liming, Yan, Feng, Liu, Fanfan, Feng, Chengjian, Zhong, Yufeng, Huang, Yiyang, Ma, Lin
The growing adoption of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in embodied AI intensifies the demand for diverse manipulation demonstrations. However, high costs associated with data collection often result in insufficient data coverage across all scenarios, which limits the performance of the models. It is observed that the spatial reasoning phase (SRP) in large workspace dominates the failure cases. F ortunately, this data can be collected with low cost, underscoring the potential of leveraging inexpensive data to improve model performance. In this paper, we introduce the DataPlatter method, a framework that decouples training trajectories into distinct task stages and leverages abundant easily collectible SRP data to enhance VLA model's generalization. Through analysis we demonstrate that sub-task-specific training with additional SRP data with proper proportion can act as a performance catalyst for robot manipulation, maximizing the utilization of costly physical interaction phase (PIP) data. Experiments show that through introducing large proportion of cost-effective SRP trajectories into a limited set of PIP data, we can achieve a maximum improvement of 41% on success rate in zero-shot scenes, while with the ability to transfer manipulation skill to novel targets.
P3Nav: A Unified Framework for Embodied Navigation Integrating Perception, Planning, and Prediction
Zhong, Yufeng, Feng, Chengjian, Yan, Feng, Liu, Fanfan, Zheng, Liming, Ma, Lin
In language-guided visual navigation, agents locate target objects in unseen environments using natural language instructions. For reliable navigation in unfamiliar scenes, agents must possess strong perception, planning, and prediction capabilities. Additionally, when agents revisit previously explored areas during long-term navigation, they may retain irrelevant and redundant historical perceptions, leading to suboptimal results. In this work, we introduce \textbf{P3Nav}, a unified framework that integrates \textbf{P}erception, \textbf{P}lanning, and \textbf{P}rediction capabilities through \textbf{Multitask Collaboration} on navigation and embodied question answering (EQA) tasks, thereby enhancing navigation performance. Furthermore, P3Nav employs an \textbf{Adaptive 3D-aware History Sampling} strategy to effectively and efficiently utilize historical observations. By leveraging the large language models (LLM), P3Nav comprehends diverse commands and complex visual scenes, resulting in appropriate navigation actions. P3Nav achieves a 75\% success rate in object goal navigation on the $\mathrm{CHORES}$-$\mathbb{S}$ benchmark, setting a new state-of-the-art performance.
Mitigating Hallucination for Large Vision Language Model by Inter-Modality Correlation Calibration Decoding
Li, Jiaming, Zhang, Jiacheng, Jie, Zequn, Ma, Lin, Li, Guanbin
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in visual-language understanding for downstream multi-modal tasks. Despite their success, LVLMs still suffer from generating hallucinations in complex generation tasks, leading to inconsistencies between visual inputs and generated content. To address this issue, some approaches have introduced inference-time interventions, such as contrastive decoding and attention rectification, to reduce overreliance on language priors. However, these approaches overlook hallucinations stemming from spurious inter-modality correlations. In this paper, we propose an Inter-Modality Correlation Calibration Decoding (IMCCD) method to mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs in a training-free manner. In this method, we design a Cross-Modal Value-Enhanced Decoding(CMVED) module to alleviate hallucination by a novel contrastive decoding mechanism. During the estimation of distorted distribution, CMVED masks the value vectors associated with significant cross-modal attention weights, which address both uni-modality overreliance and misleading inter-modality correlations. Additionally, a Content-Driven Attention Refinement(CDAR) module refines cross-modal attention weights, guiding LVLMs to focus on important visual content. Experimental results on diverse hallucination benchmarks validate the superiority of our method over existing state-of-the-art techniques in reducing hallucinations in LVLM text generation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lijm48/IMCCD.
Scalable Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Hyper Scale Multi-Robot Task Planning
Zhou, Xuan, Shi, Xiang, Zhang, Lele, Chen, Chen, Li, Hongbo, Ma, Lin, Deng, Fang, Chen, Jie
To improve the efficiency of warehousing system and meet huge customer orders, we aim to solve the challenges of dimension disaster and dynamic properties in hyper scale multi-robot task planning (MRTP) for robotic mobile fulfillment system (RMFS). Existing research indicates that hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is an effective method to reduce these challenges. Based on that, we construct an efficient multi-stage HRL-based multi-robot task planner for hyper scale MRTP in RMFS, and the planning process is represented with a special temporal graph topology. To ensure optimality, the planner is designed with a centralized architecture, but it also brings the challenges of scaling up and generalization that require policies to maintain performance for various unlearned scales and maps. To tackle these difficulties, we first construct a hierarchical temporal attention network (HTAN) to ensure basic ability of handling inputs with unfixed lengths, and then design multi-stage curricula for hierarchical policy learning to further improve the scaling up and generalization ability while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we notice that policies with hierarchical structure suffer from unfair credit assignment that is similar to that in multi-agent reinforcement learning, inspired of which, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm with counterfactual rollout baseline to improve learning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our planner outperform other state-of-the-art methods on various MRTP instances in both simulated and real-world RMFS. Also, our planner can successfully scale up to hyper scale MRTP instances in RMFS with up to 200 robots and 1000 retrieval racks on unlearned maps while keeping superior performance over other methods.
DriveMM: All-in-One Large Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving
Huang, Zhijian, Feng, Chengjian, Yan, Feng, Xiao, Baihui, Jie, Zequn, Zhong, Yujie, Liang, Xiaodan, Ma, Lin
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated exceptional comprehension and interpretation capabilities in Autonomous Driving (AD) by incorporating large language models. Despite the advancements, current data-driven AD approaches tend to concentrate on a single dataset and specific tasks, neglecting their overall capabilities and ability to generalize. To bridge these gaps, we propose DriveMM, a general large multimodal model designed to process diverse data inputs, such as images and multi-view videos, while performing a broad spectrum of AD tasks, including perception, prediction, and planning. Initially, the model undergoes curriculum pre-training to process varied visual signals and perform basic visual comprehension and perception tasks. Subsequently, we augment and standardize various AD-related datasets to fine-tune the model, resulting in an all-in-one LMM for autonomous driving. To assess the general capabilities and generalization ability, we conduct evaluations on six public benchmarks and undertake zero-shot transfer on an unseen dataset, where DriveMM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks. We hope DriveMM as a promising solution for future end-to-end autonomous driving applications in the real world. Project page with code: https://github.com/zhijian11/DriveMM.
Flash Communication: Reducing Tensor Parallelization Bottleneck for Fast Large Language Model Inference
Li, Qingyuan, Zhang, Bo, Ye, Liang, Zhang, Yifan, Wu, Wei, Sun, Yerui, Ma, Lin, Xie, Yuchen
The ever-increasing sizes of large language models necessitate distributed solutions for fast inference that exploit multi-dimensional parallelism, where computational loads are split across various accelerators such as GPU clusters. However, this approach often introduces significant communication overhead, especially on devices with limited bandwidth. In this paper, we introduce Flash Communication, a novel low-bit compression technique designed to alleviate the tensor-parallelism communication bottleneck during inference. Our method substantially boosts intra-node communication speed by more than 3x and reduces the time-to-first-token by 2x, with nearly no sacrifice in model accuracy. Extensive experiments on various up-to-date LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
RoboMM: All-in-One Multimodal Large Model for Robotic Manipulation
Yan, Feng, Liu, Fanfan, Zheng, Liming, Zhong, Yufeng, Huang, Yiyang, Guan, Zechao, Feng, Chengjian, Ma, Lin
In recent years, robotics has advanced significantly through the integration of larger models and large-scale datasets. However, challenges remain in applying these models to 3D spatial interactions and managing data collection costs. To address these issues, we propose the multimodal robotic manipulation model, RoboMM, along with the comprehensive dataset, RoboData. RoboMM enhances 3D perception through camera parameters and occupancy supervision. Building on OpenFlamingo, it incorporates Modality-Isolation-Mask and multimodal decoder blocks, improving modality fusion and fine-grained perception. RoboData offers the complete evaluation system by integrating several well-known datasets, achieving the first fusion of multi-view images, camera parameters, depth maps, and actions, and the space alignment facilitates comprehensive learning from diverse robotic datasets. Equipped with RoboData and the unified physical space, RoboMM is the generalist policy that enables simultaneous evaluation across all tasks within multiple datasets, rather than focusing on limited selection of data or tasks. Its design significantly enhances robotic manipulation performance, increasing the average sequence length on the CALVIN from 1.7 to 3.3 and ensuring cross-embodiment capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets.
ROSE: A Reward-Oriented Data Selection Framework for LLM Task-Specific Instruction Tuning
Wu, Yang, Zhang, Huayi, Jiao, Yizheng, Ma, Lin, Liu, Xiaozhong, Yu, Jinhong, Zhang, Dongyu, Yu, Dezhi, Xu, Wei
Instruction tuning has underscored the significant potential of large language models (LLMs) in producing more human-controllable and effective outputs in various domains. In this work, we focus on the data selection problem for task-specific instruction tuning of LLMs. Prevailing methods primarily rely on the crafted similarity metrics to select training data that aligns with the test data distribution. The goal is to minimize instruction tuning loss on the test data, ultimately improving performance on the target task. However, it has been widely observed that instruction tuning loss (i.e., cross-entropy loss for next token prediction) in LLMs often fails to exhibit a monotonic relationship with actual task performance. This misalignment undermines the effectiveness of current data selection methods for task-specific instruction tuning. To address this issue, we introduce ROSE, a novel Reward-Oriented inStruction data sElection method which leverages pairwise preference loss as a reward signal to optimize data selection for task-specific instruction tuning. Specifically, ROSE adapts an influence formulation to approximate the influence of training data points relative to a few-shot preference validation set to select the most task-related training data points. Experimental results show that by selecting just 5% of the training data using ROSE, our approach can achieve competitive results compared to fine-tuning with the full training dataset, and it surpasses other state-of-the-art data selection methods for task-specific instruction tuning. Our qualitative analysis further confirms the robust generalizability of our method across multiple benchmark datasets and diverse model architectures.
TimeMarker: A Versatile Video-LLM for Long and Short Video Understanding with Superior Temporal Localization Ability
Chen, Shimin, Lan, Xiaohan, Yuan, Yitian, Jie, Zequn, Ma, Lin
Rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal large language models (LMMs), particularly in vision-language tasks. However, existing video-language models often overlook precise temporal localization and struggle with videos of varying lengths. We introduce TimeMarker, a versatile Video-LLM designed for high-quality dialogue based on video content, emphasizing temporal localization. TimeMarker integrates Temporal Separator Tokens to enhance temporal awareness, accurately marking specific moments within videos. It employs the AnyLength mechanism for dynamic frame sampling and adaptive token merging, enabling effective handling of both short and long videos. Additionally, TimeMarker utilizes diverse datasets, including further transformed temporal-related video QA datasets, to bolster its temporal understanding capabilities. Image and interleaved data are also employed to further enhance the model's semantic perception ability. Evaluations demonstrate that TimeMarker achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, excelling in both short and long video categories. Our project page is at \url{https://github.com/TimeMarker-LLM/TimeMarker/}.
RoboUniView: Visual-Language Model with Unified View Representation for Robotic Manipulaiton
Liu, Fanfan, Yan, Feng, Zheng, Liming, Feng, Chengjian, Huang, Yiyang, Ma, Lin
Utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robotic manipulation represents a novel paradigm, aiming to enhance the model's ability to generalize to new objects and instructions. However, due to variations in camera specifications and mounting positions, existing methods exhibit significant performance disparities across different robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose RoboUniView in this paper, an innovative approach that decouples visual feature extraction from action learning. We first learn a unified view representation from multi-perspective views by pre-training on readily accessible data, and then derive actions from this unified view representation to control robotic manipulation. This unified view representation more accurately mirrors the physical world and is not constrained by the robotic platform's camera parameters. Thanks to this methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the demanding CALVIN benchmark, enhancing the success rate in the $D \to D$ setting from 93.0% to 96.2%, and in the $ABC \to D$ setting from 92.2% to 94.2%. Moreover, our model exhibits outstanding adaptability and flexibility: it maintains high performance under unseen camera parameters, can utilize multiple datasets with varying camera parameters, and is capable of joint cross-task learning across datasets. Code is provided for re-implementation. https://github.com/liufanfanlff/RoboUniview