Language-conditioned robotic manipulation represents a cutting-edge area of research, enabling seamless communication and cooperation between humans and robotic agents. This field focuses on teaching robotic systems to comprehend and execute instructions conveyed in natural language. To achieve this, the development of robust language understanding models capable of extracting actionable insights from textual input is essential. In this comprehensive survey, we systematically explore recent advancements in language-conditioned approaches within the context of robotic manipulation. We analyze these approaches based on their learning paradigms, which encompass reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and the integration of foundational models, such as large language models and vision-language models. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth comparative analysis, considering aspects like semantic information extraction, environment & evaluation, auxiliary tasks, and task representation. Finally, we outline potential future research directions in the realm of language-conditioned learning for robotic manipulation, with the topic of generalization capabilities and safety issues. The GitHub repository of this paper can be found at https://github.com/hk-zh/language-conditioned-robot-manipulation-models

Generative model-based deep clustering frameworks excel in classifying complex data, but are limited in handling dynamic and complex features because they require prior knowledge of the number of clusters. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric deep clustering framework that employs an infinite mixture of Gaussians as a prior. Our framework utilizes a memoized online variational inference method that enables the "birth" and "merge" moves of clusters, allowing our framework to cluster data in a "dynamic-adaptive" manner, without requiring prior knowledge of the number of features. We name the framework as DIVA, a Dirichlet Process-based Incremental deep clustering framework via Variational Auto-Encoder. Our framework, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, exhibits superior performance in classifying complex data with dynamically changing features, particularly in the case of incremental features. We released our source code implementation at: https://github.com/Ghiara/diva

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has achieved significant success in large-scale AI systems and big-data applications such as smart grids, surveillance, etc. Existing advancements in MARL algorithms focus on improving the rewards obtained by introducing various mechanisms for inter-agent cooperation. However, these optimizations are usually compute- and memory-intensive, thus leading to suboptimal speed performance in end-to-end training time. In this work, we analyze the speed performance (i.e., latency-bounded throughput) as the key metric in MARL implementations. Specifically, we first introduce a taxonomy of MARL algorithms from an acceleration perspective categorized by (1) training scheme and (2) communication method. Using our taxonomy, we identify three state-of-the-art MARL algorithms - Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG), Target-oriented Multi-agent Communication and Cooperation (ToM2C), and Networked Multi-Agent RL (NeurComm) - as target benchmark algorithms, and provide a systematic analysis of their performance bottlenecks on a homogeneous multi-core CPU platform. We justify the need for MARL latency-bounded throughput to be a key performance metric in future literature while also addressing opportunities for parallelization and acceleration.

Although syntactic information is beneficial for many NLP tasks, combining it with contextual information between words to solve the coreference resolution problem needs to be further explored. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end parser that combines pre-trained BERT with a Syntactic Relation Graph Attention Network (RGAT) to take a deeper look into the role of syntactic dependency information for the coreference resolution task. In particular, the RGAT model is first proposed, then used to understand the syntactic dependency graph and learn better task-specific syntactic embeddings. An integrated architecture incorporating BERT embeddings and syntactic embeddings is constructed to generate blending representations for the downstream task. Our experiments on a public Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns (GAP) dataset show that with the supervision learning of the syntactic dependency graph and without fine-tuning the entire BERT, we increased the F1-score of the previous best model (RGCN-with-BERT) from 80.3% to 82.5%, compared to the F1-score by single BERT embeddings from 78.5% to 82.5%. Experimental results on another public dataset - OntoNotes 5.0 demonstrate that the performance of the model is also improved by incorporating syntactic dependency information learned from RGAT.

Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a significant challenge in developing planning and control algorithms, due to the precise and continuous control required to effectively manipulate the deformable nature of these objects. In this paper, we propose a new framework to control and maintain the shape of deformable linear objects with two robot manipulators utilizing environmental contacts. The framework is composed of a shape planning algorithm which automatically generates appropriate positions to place fixtures, and an object-centered skill engine which includes task and motion planning to control the motion and force of both robots based on the object status. The status of the deformable linear object is estimated online utilizing visual as well as force information. The framework manages to handle a cable routing task in real-world experiments with two Panda robots and especially achieves contact-aware and flexible clip fixing with challenging fixtures.

Granger causality analysis, as one of the most popular time series causality methods, has been widely used in the economics, neuroscience. However, unobserved confounders is a fundamental problem in the observational studies, which is still not solved for the non-linear Granger causality. The application works often deal with this problem in virtue of the proxy variables, who can be treated as a measure of the confounder with noise. But the proxy variables has been proved to be unreliable, because of the bias it may induce. In this paper, we try to "recover" the unobserved confounders for the Granger causality. We use a generative model with latent variable to build the relationship between the unobserved confounders and the observed variables(tested variable and the proxy variables). The posterior distribution of the latent variable is adopted to represent the confounders distribution, which can be sampled to get the estimated confounders. We adopt the variational autoencoder to estimate the intractable posterior distribution. The recurrent neural network is applied to build the temporal relationship in the data. We evaluate our method in the synthetic and semi-synthetic dataset. The result shows our estimated confounders has a better performance than the proxy variables in the non-linear Granger causality with multiple proxies in the semi-synthetic dataset. But the performances of the synthetic dataset and the different noise level of proxy seem terrible. Any advice can really help.