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 Wang, Xiaolong


PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Clouds

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a profound impact on natural language processing but are yet to fully embrace the realm of 3D understanding. This paper introduces PointLLM, a preliminary effort to fill this gap, enabling LLMs to understand point clouds and offering a new avenue beyond 2D visual data. PointLLM understands colored object point clouds with human instructions and generates contextually appropriate responses, illustrating its grasp of point clouds and common sense. Specifically, it leverages a point cloud encoder with a powerful LLM to effectively fuse geometric, appearance, and linguistic information. We collect a novel dataset comprising 660K simple and 70K complex point-text instruction pairs to enable a two-stage training strategy: aligning latent spaces and subsequently instruction-tuning the unified model. To rigorously evaluate the perceptual and generalization capabilities of PointLLM, we establish two benchmarks: Generative 3D Object Classification and 3D Object Captioning, assessed through three different methods, including human evaluation, GPT-4/ChatGPT evaluation, and traditional metrics. Experimental results reveal PointLLM's superior performance over existing 2D and 3D baselines, with a notable achievement in human-evaluated object captioning tasks where it surpasses human annotators in over 50% of the samples. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/PointLLM .


Investigating and Mitigating the Side Effects of Noisy Views for Self-Supervised Clustering Algorithms in Practical Multi-View Scenarios

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims at exploring category structures among multi-view data in self-supervised manners. Multiple views provide more information than single views and thus existing MVC methods can achieve satisfactory performance. However, their performance might seriously degenerate when the views are noisy in practical multi-view scenarios. In this paper, we first formally investigate the drawback of noisy views and then propose a theoretically grounded deep MVC method (namely MVCAN) to address this issue. Specifically, we propose a novel MVC objective that enables un-shared parameters and inconsistent clustering predictions across multiple views to reduce the side effects of noisy views. Furthermore, a two-level multi-view iterative optimization is designed to generate robust learning targets for refining individual views' representation learning. Theoretical analysis reveals that MVCAN works by achieving the multi-view consistency, complementarity, and noise robustness. Finally, experiments on extensive public datasets demonstrate that MVCAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is robust against the existence of noisy views.


TD-MPC2: Scalable, Robust World Models for Continuous Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

TD-MPC is a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that performs local trajectory optimization in the latent space of a learned implicit (decoder-free) world model. In this work, we present TD-MPC2: a series of improvements upon the TD-MPC algorithm. We demonstrate that TD-MPC2 improves significantly over baselines across 104 online RL tasks spanning 4 diverse task domains, achieving consistently strong results with a single set of hyperparameters. We further show that agent capabilities increase with model and data size, and successfully train a single 317M parameter agent to perform 80 tasks across multiple task domains, embodiments, and action spaces. We conclude with an account of lessons, opportunities, and risks associated with large TD-MPC2 agents. Explore videos, models, data, code, and more at https://nicklashansen.github.io/td-mpc2


Finetuning Offline World Models in the Real World

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously data-inefficient, which makes training on a real robot difficult. While model-based RL algorithms (world models) improve data-efficiency to some extent, they still require hours or days of interaction to learn skills. Recently, offline RL has been proposed as a framework for training RL policies on pre-existing datasets without any online interaction. However, constraining an algorithm to a fixed dataset induces a state-action distribution shift between training and inference, and limits its applicability to new tasks. In this work, we seek to get the best of both worlds: we consider the problem of pretraining a world model with offline data collected on a real robot, and then finetuning the model on online data collected by planning with the learned model. To mitigate extrapolation errors during online interaction, we propose to regularize the planner at test-time by balancing estimated returns and (epistemic) model uncertainty. We evaluate our method on a variety of visuo-motor control tasks in simulation and on a real robot, and find that our method enables few-shot finetuning to seen and unseen tasks even when offline data is limited. Videos, code, and data are available at https://yunhaifeng.com/FOWM .


Elastic Decision Transformer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper introduces Elastic Decision Transformer (EDT), a significant advancement over the existing Decision Transformer (DT) and its variants. Although DT purports to generate an optimal trajectory, empirical evidence suggests it struggles with trajectory stitching, a process involving the generation of an optimal or near-optimal trajectory from the best parts of a set of sub-optimal trajectories. The proposed EDT differentiates itself by facilitating trajectory stitching during action inference at test time, achieved by adjusting the history length maintained in DT. Further, the EDT optimizes the trajectory by retaining a longer history when the previous trajectory is optimal and a shorter one when it is sub-optimal, enabling it to "stitch" with a more optimal trajectory. Extensive experimentation demonstrates EDT's ability to bridge the performance gap between DT-based and Q Learning-based approaches. In particular, the EDT outperforms Q Learning-based methods in a multi-task regime on the D4RL locomotion benchmark and Atari games. Videos are available at: https://kristery.github.io/edt/.


Generalized Animal Imitator: Agile Locomotion with Versatile Motion Prior

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The agility of animals, particularly in complex activities such as running, turning, jumping, and backflipping, stands as an exemplar for robotic system design. Transferring this suite of behaviors to legged robotic systems introduces essential inquiries: How can a robot be trained to learn multiple locomotion behaviors simultaneously? How can the robot execute these tasks with a smooth transition? And what strategies allow for the integrated application of these skills? This paper introduces the Versatile Instructable Motion prior (VIM) - a Reinforcement Learning framework designed to incorporate a range of agile locomotion tasks suitable for advanced robotic applications. Our framework enables legged robots to learn diverse agile low-level skills by imitating animal motions and manually designed motions with Functionality reward and Stylization reward. While the Functionality reward guides the robot's ability to adopt varied skills, the Stylization reward ensures performance alignment with reference motions. Our evaluations of the VIM framework span both simulation environments and real-world deployment. To our understanding, this is the first work that allows a robot to concurrently learn diverse agile locomotion tasks using a singular controller. Further details and supportive media can be found at our project site: https://rchalyang.github.io/VIM .


3D Reconstruction with Generalizable Neural Fields using Scene Priors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction has been substantially advanced by recent progress in neural fields. However, most existing methods train a separate network from scratch for each individual scene. This is not scalable, inefficient, and unable to yield good results given limited views. While learning-based multi-view stereo methods alleviate this issue to some extent, their multi-view setting makes it less flexible to scale up and to broad applications. Instead, we introduce training generalizable Neural Fields incorporating scene Priors (NFPs). The NFP network maps any single-view RGB-D image into signed distance and radiance values. A complete scene can be reconstructed by merging individual frames in the volumetric space WITHOUT a fusion module, which provides better flexibility. The scene priors can be trained on large-scale datasets, allowing for fast adaptation to the reconstruction of a new scene with fewer views. NFP not only demonstrates SOTA scene reconstruction performance and efficiency, but it also supports single-image novel-view synthesis, which is underexplored in neural fields. More qualitative results are available at: https://oasisyang.github.io/neural-prior


Dynamic Handover: Throw and Catch with Bimanual Hands

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Humans throw and catch objects all the time. However, such a seemingly common skill introduces a lot of challenges for robots to achieve: The robots need to operate such dynamic actions at high-speed, collaborate precisely, and interact with diverse objects. In this paper, we design a system with two multi-finger hands attached to robot arms to solve this problem. We train our system using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in simulation and perform Sim2Real transfer to deploy on the real robots. To overcome the Sim2Real gap, we provide multiple novel algorithm designs including learning a trajectory prediction model for the object. Such a model can help the robot catcher has a real-time estimation of where the object will be heading, and then react accordingly. We conduct our experiments with multiple objects in the real-world system, and show significant improvements over multiple baselines. Our project page is available at \url{https://binghao-huang.github.io/dynamic_handover/}.


SHAPE: A Sample-adaptive Hierarchical Prediction Network for Medication Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effectively medication recommendation with complex multimorbidity conditions is a critical task in healthcare. Most existing works predicted medications based on longitudinal records, which assumed the information transmitted patterns of learning longitudinal sequence data are stable and intra-visit medical events are serialized. However, the following conditions may have been ignored: 1) A more compact encoder for intra-relationship in the intra-visit medical event is urgent; 2) Strategies for learning accurate representations of the variable longitudinal sequences of patients are different. In this paper, we proposed a novel Sample-adaptive Hierarchical medicAtion Prediction nEtwork, termed SHAPE, to tackle the above challenges in the medication recommendation task. Specifically, we design a compact intra-visit set encoder to encode the relationship in the medical event for obtaining visit-level representation and then develop an inter-visit longitudinal encoder to learn the patient-level longitudinal representation efficiently. To endow the model with the capability of modeling the variable visit length, we introduce a soft curriculum learning method to assign the difficulty of each sample automatically by the visit length. Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset verify the superiority of our model compared with several state-of-the-art baselines.


Exploring Large Language Models for Communication Games: An Empirical Study on Werewolf

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Communication games, which we refer to as incomplete information games that heavily depend on natural language communication, hold significant research value in fields such as economics, social science, and artificial intelligence. In this work, we explore the problem of how to engage large language models (LLMs) in communication games, and in response, propose a tuning-free framework. Our approach keeps LLMs frozen, and relies on the retrieval and reflection on past communications and experiences for improvement. An empirical study on the representative and widely-studied communication game, ``Werewolf'', demonstrates that our framework can effectively play Werewolf game without tuning the parameters of the LLMs. More importantly, strategic behaviors begin to emerge in our experiments, suggesting that it will be a fruitful journey to engage LLMs in communication games and associated domains.