procedural knowledge
LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning
Lifelong learning offers a promising paradigm of building a generalist agent that learns and adapts over its lifespan. Unlike traditional lifelong learning problems in image and text domains, which primarily involve the transfer of declarative knowledge of entities and concepts, lifelong learning in decision-making (LLDM) also necessitates the transfer of procedural knowledge, such as actions and behaviors. To advance research in LLDM, we introduce LIBERO, a novel benchmark of lifelong learning for robot manipulation. Specifically, LIBERO highlights five key research topics in LLDM: 1) how to efficiently transfer declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, or the mixture of both; 2) how to design effective policy architectures and 3) effective algorithms for LLDM; 4) the robustness of a lifelong learner with respect to task ordering; and 5) the effect of model pretraining for LLDM. We develop an extendible procedural generation pipeline that can in principle generate infinitely many tasks. For benchmarking purpose, we create four task suites (130 tasks in total) that we use to investigate the above-mentioned research topics. To support sample-efficient learning, we provide high-quality human-teleoperated demonstration data for all tasks. Our extensive experiments present several insightful or even unexpected discoveries: sequential finetuning outperforms existing lifelong learning methods in forward transfer, no single visual encoder architecture excels at all types of knowledge transfer, and naive supervised pretraining can hinder agents' performance in the subsequent LLDM.
Towards Ecologically Valid LLM Benchmarks: Understanding and Designing Domain-Centered Evaluations for Journalism Practitioners
Li, Charlotte, Hagar, Nick, Nishal, Sachita, Gilbert, Jeremy, Diakopoulos, Nick
Benchmarks play a significant role in how researchers and the public understand generative AI systems. However, the widespread use of benchmark scores to communicate about model capabilities has led to criticisms of validity, especially whether benchmarks test what they claim to test (i.e. construct validity) and whether benchmark evaluations are representative of how models are used in the wild (i.e. ecological validity). In this work we explore how to create an LLM benchmark that addresses these issues by taking a human-centered approach. We focus on designing a domain-oriented benchmark for journalism practitioners, drawing on insights from a workshop of 23 journalism professionals. Our workshop findings surface specific challenges that inform benchmark design opportunities, which we instantiate in a case study that addresses underlying criticisms and specific domain concerns. Through our findings and design case study, this work provides design guidance for developing benchmarks that are better tuned to specific domains.
Memory Transfer Planning: LLM-driven Context-Aware Code Adaptation for Robot Manipulation
Kagaya, Tomoyuki, Lakshmi, Subramanian, Lou, Yuxuan, Yuan, Thong Jing, Karlekar, Jayashree, Pranata, Sugiri, Murakami, Natsuki, Kinose, Akira, You, Yang
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored in robot manipulation, but many existing methods struggle to adapt to new environments. Many systems require either environment-specific policy training or depend on fixed prompts and single-shot code generation, leading to limited transferability and manual re-tuning. We introduce Memory Transfer Planning (MTP), a framework that leverages successful control-code examples from different environments as procedural knowledge, using them as in-context guidance for LLM-driven planning. Specifically, MTP (i) generates an initial plan and code using LLMs, (ii) retrieves relevant successful examples from a code memory, and (iii) contextually adapts the retrieved code to the target setting for re-planning without updating model parameters. We evaluate MTP on RLBench, CALVIN, and a physical robot, demonstrating effectiveness beyond simulation. Across these settings, MTP consistently improved success rate and adaptability compared with fixed-prompt code generation, naive retrieval, and memory-free re-planning. Furthermore, in hardware experiments, leveraging a memory constructed in simulation proved effective. MTP provides a practical approach that exploits procedural knowledge to realize robust LLM-based planning across diverse robotic manipulation scenarios, enhancing adaptability to novel environments and bridging simulation and real-world deployment.
Beyond prior knowledge: The predictive role of knowledge-building in Tutor Learning
Shahriar, Tasmia, Ameen, Mia, Mallavarapu, Aditi, Jiang, Shiyan, Matsuda, Noboru
When adopting the role of a teacher in learning-by-teaching environments, students often struggle to engage in knowledge-building activities, such as providing explanations and addressing misconceptions. Instead, they frequently default to knowledge-telling behaviors, where they simply dictate what they already know or what to do without deeper reflection, thereby limiting learning. Teachable agents, particularly those capable of posing persistent follow-up questions, have been shown to encourage students (tutors) to shift from knowledge-telling to knowledge-building and enhance tutor learning. Tutor learning encompasses two interrelated types of knowledge: conceptual and procedural knowledge. Research has established a bidirectional relationship between these knowledge types, where improvements in one reinforce the other. This study investigates the role of knowledge-building in mediating the bidirectional relationship between procedural and conceptual learning. Our findings revealed a stable bidirectional relationship between procedural and conceptual knowledge, with higher post-test scores observed among students who engaged in knowledge-building, regardless of their procedural and conceptual pre-test performance. This suggests that knowledge-building serves as a crucial mechanism bridging the gap between students with low prior knowledge and higher conceptual and procedural learning gain.
A New Approach for Knowledge Generation Using Active Inference
Ghasimi, Jamshid, Movarraei, Nazanin
There are various models proposed on how knowledge is generated in the human brain including the semantic networks model. Although this model has been widely studied and even computational models are presented, but, due to various limits and inefficiencies in the generation of different types of knowledge, its application is limited to semantic knowledge because of has been formed according to semantic memory and declarative knowledge and has many limits in explaining various procedural and conditional knowledge. Given the importance of providing an appropriate model for knowledge generation, especially in the areas of improving human cognitive functions or building intelligent machines, improving existing models in knowledge generation or providing more comprehensive models is of great importance. In the current study, based on the free energy principle of the brain, is the researchers proposed a model for generating three types of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge. While explaining different types of knowledge, this model is capable to compute and generate concepts from stimuli based on probabilistic mathematics and the action-perception process (active inference). The proposed model is unsupervised learning that can update itself using a combination of different stimuli as a generative model can generate new concepts of unsupervised received stimuli. In this model, the active inference process is used in the generation of procedural and conditional knowledge and the perception process is used to generate declarative knowledge.
LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning
Lifelong learning offers a promising paradigm of building a generalist agent that learns and adapts over its lifespan. Unlike traditional lifelong learning problems in image and text domains, which primarily involve the transfer of declarative knowledge of entities and concepts, lifelong learning in decision-making (LLDM) also necessitates the transfer of procedural knowledge, such as actions and behaviors. To advance research in LLDM, we introduce LIBERO, a novel benchmark of lifelong learning for robot manipulation. Specifically, LIBERO highlights five key research topics in LLDM: 1) how to efficiently transfer declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, or the mixture of both; 2) how to design effective policy architectures and 3) effective algorithms for LLDM; 4) the robustness of a lifelong learner with respect to task ordering; and 5) the effect of model pretraining for LLDM. We develop an extendible procedural generation pipeline that can in principle generate infinitely many tasks. For benchmarking purpose, we create four task suites (130 tasks in total) that we use to investigate the above-mentioned research topics.