While behavior learning has made impressive progress in recent times, it lags behind computer vision and natural language processing due to its inability to leverage large, human-generated datasets. Human behavior has a wide variance, multiple modes, and human demonstrations naturally do not come with reward labels. These properties limit the applicability of current methods in Offline RL and Behavioral Cloning to learn from large, pre-collected datasets. In this work, we present Behavior Transformer (BeT), a new technique to model unlabeled demonstration data with multiple modes. BeT retrofits standard transformer architectures with action discretization coupled with a multi-task action correction inspired by offset prediction in object detection.

This new real-time interpreter can change your language while cloning your voice--sort of. Live voice call translator raises the bar on these devices. Screen is tiny, making typing nearly impossible. Voice cloning feature is hit and miss. Real-time translation gadgets get another upgrade with Vasco's latest, a handheld translator with a feature that is decidedly cool, at least on paper: voice cloning technology.

Because we can observe the agent's thoughts, we can (1) more easily diagnose

This study explores voice cloning to generate synthetic speech replicating the unique patterns of individuals with dysarthria. Using the TORGO dataset, we address data scarcity and privacy challenges in speech-language pathology. Our contributions include demonstrating that voice cloning preserves dysarthric speech characteristics, analyzing differences between real and synthetic data, and discussing implications for diagnostics, rehabilitation, and communication. We cloned voices from dysarthric and control speakers using a commercial platform, ensuring gender-matched synthetic voices. A licensed speech-language pathologist (SLP) evaluated a subset for dysarthria, speaker gender, and synthetic indicators. The SLP correctly identified dysarthria in all cases and speaker gender in 95% but misclassified 30% of synthetic samples as real, indicating high realism. Our results suggest synthetic speech effectively captures disordered characteristics and that voice cloning has advanced to produce high-quality data resembling real speech, even to trained professionals. This has critical implications for healthcare, where synthetic data can mitigate data scarcity, protect privacy, and enhance AI-driven diagnostics. By enabling the creation of diverse, high-quality speech datasets, voice cloning can improve generalizable models, personalize therapy, and advance assistive technologies for dysarthria. We publicly release our synthetic dataset to foster further research and collaboration, aiming to develop robust models that improve patient outcomes in speech-language pathology.

In this study, we address the challenge of obstacle avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) through an innovative composite imitation learning approach that combines Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with Behavior Cloning (BC) and Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL), enriched by the integration of ray-tracing techniques. Our research underscores the significant role of ray-tracing in enhancing obstacle detection and avoidance capabilities. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating GAIL in coordinating the flight paths of two UAVs, showcasing improved collision avoidance capabilities. Extending our methodology, we apply our combined PPO, BC, GAIL, and ray-tracing framework to scenarios involving four UAVs, illustrating its scalability and adaptability to more complex scenarios. The findings indicate that our approach not only improves the reliability of basic PPO based obstacle avoidance but also paves the way for advanced autonomous UAV operations in crowded or dynamic environments.

Language is often considered a key aspect of human thinking, providing us with exceptional abilities to generalize, explore, plan, replan, and adapt to new situations. However, Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are far from human-level performance in any of these abilities. We hypothesize one reason for such cognitive deficiencies is that they lack the benefits of thinking in language and that we can improve AI agents by training them to think like humans do. We introduce a novel Imitation Learning framework, Thought Cloning, where the idea is to not just clone the behaviors of human demonstrators, but also the thoughts humans have as they perform these behaviors. While we expect Thought Cloning to truly shine at scale on internet-sized datasets of humans thinking out loud while acting (e.g. online videos with transcripts), here we conduct experiments in a domain where the thinking and action data are synthetically generated. Results reveal that Thought Cloning learns much faster than Behavioral Cloning and its performance advantage grows the further out of distribution test tasks are, highlighting its ability to better handle novel situations. Thought Cloning also provides important benefits for AI Safety and Interpretability, and makes it easier to debug and improve AI. Because we can observe the agent's thoughts, we can (1) more easily diagnose why things are going wrong, making it easier to fix the problem, (2) steer the agent by correcting its thinking, or (3) prevent it from doing unsafe things it plans to do. Overall, by training agents how to think as well as behave, Thought Cloning creates safer, more powerful agents.

Anecdotal accounts were already abound of people losing money to scammers cloning the voices of their relatives. Now, it's apparently become enough of a prevalent -- and serious -- issue that federal regulators feel the need to step in. On Monday, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a consumer alert on emerging voice cloning scams, warning people that their desperate friend or relative on the other end of the phone asking for money may actually be an AI simulacrum of their voice wielded by a scammer. "All [a scammer] needs is a short audio clip of your family member's voice -- which he could get from content posted online -- and a voice-cloning program," the FTC wrote. "When the scammer calls you, he'll sound just like your loved one."

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have succeeded in several challenging domains. Classic Online RL job schedulers can learn efficient scheduling strategies but often takes thousands of timesteps to explore the environment and adapt from a randomly initialized DNN policy. Existing RL schedulers overlook the importance of learning from historical data and improving upon custom heuristic policies. Offline reinforcement learning presents the prospect of policy optimization from pre-recorded datasets without online environment interaction. Following the recent success of data-driven learning, we explore two RL methods: 1) Behaviour Cloning and 2) Offline RL, which aim to learn policies from logged data without interacting with the environment. These methods address the challenges concerning the cost of data collection and safety, particularly pertinent to real-world applications of RL. Although the data-driven RL methods generate good results, we show that the performance is highly dependent on the quality of the historical datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that by effectively incorporating prior expert demonstrations to pre-train the agent, we short-circuit the random exploration phase to learn a reasonable policy with online training. We utilize Offline RL as a launchpad to learn effective scheduling policies from prior experience collected using Oracle or heuristic policies. Such a framework is effective for pre-training from historical datasets and well suited to continuous improvement with online data collection.

Offline learning is a key part of making reinforcement learning (RL) useable in real systems. Offline RL looks at scenarios where there is data from a system's operation, but no direct access to the system when learning a policy. Recent work on training RL policies from offline data has shown results both with model-free policies learned directly from the data, or with planning on top of learnt models of the data. Model-free policies tend to be more performant, but are more opaque, harder to command externally, and less easy to integrate into larger systems. We propose an offline learner that generates a model that can be used to control the system directly through planning. This allows us to have easily controllable policies directly from data, without ever interacting with the system. We show the performance of our algorithm, Model-Based Offline Planning (MBOP) on a series of robotics-inspired tasks, and demonstrate its ability leverage planning to respect environmental constraints. We are able to find near-optimal polices for certain simulated systems from as little as 50 seconds of real-time system interaction, and create zero-shot goal-conditioned policies on a series of environments.