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 task adaptation


Incremental Learning of Retrievable Skills For Efficient Continual Task Adaptation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Continual Imitation Learning (CiL) involves extracting and accumulating task knowledge from demonstrations across multiple stages and tasks to achieve a multi-task policy. With recent advancements in foundation models, there has been a growing interest in adapter-based CiL approaches, where adapters are established parameter-efficiently for tasks newly demonstrated. While these approaches isolate parameters for specific tasks and tend to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, they limit knowledge sharing among different demonstrations. We introduce IsCiL, an adapter-based CiL framework that addresses this limitation of knowledge sharing by incrementally learning shareable skills from different demonstrations, thus enabling sample-efficient task adaptation using the skills particularly in non-stationary CiL environments. In IsCiL, demonstrations are mapped into the state embedding space, where proper skills can be retrieved upon input states through prototype-based memory. These retrievable skills are incrementally learned on their corresponding adapters. Our CiL experiments with complex tasks in the Franka-Kitchen and Meta-World demonstrate the robust performance of IsCiL in both task adaptation and sample-efficiency. We also show a simple extension of IsCiL for task unlearning scenarios.



1e04b969bf040acd252e1faafb51f829-Paper.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Updating onlythese task-specific modules thenallowsthe model to be adapted to low-data tasks for as many steps as necessary without risking overfitting. Unfortunately, existing meta-learning methods either do not scale to long adaptation or else rely on handcrafted task-specific architectures. Here, we propose ameta-learning approach that obviates the need for this often sub-optimal hand-selection.



Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

This appendix contains the supplementary material for the main text. In Appendix B, we provide details of the derivation of the implicit gradients in Eqs. We first establish here this result. This negative result illustrates the need for alternative estimators. In Appendix A.2.3, we analyze the behavior of Lemma 1 Alternatively, we can follow the approach described in Section 4.2 to estimate both From Eq. (10), we follow the same derivation as Eq.



Robust Fine-Tuning from Non-Robust Pretrained Models: Mitigating Suboptimal Transfer With Adversarial Scheduling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Fine-tuning pretrained models is a standard and effective workflow in modern machine learning. However, robust fine-tuning (RFT), which aims to simultaneously achieve adaptation to a downstream task and robustness to adversarial examples, remains challenging. Despite the abundance of non-robust pretrained models in open-source repositories, their potential for RFT is less understood. We address this knowledge gap by systematically examining RFT from such non-robust models. Our experiments reveal that fine-tuning non-robust models with a robust objective, even under small perturbations, can lead to poor performance, a phenomenon that we dub \emph{suboptimal transfer}. In challenging scenarios (eg, difficult tasks, high perturbation), the resulting performance can be so low that it may be considered a transfer failure. We find that fine-tuning using a robust objective impedes task adaptation at the beginning of training and eventually prevents optimal transfer. However, we propose a novel heuristic, \emph{Epsilon-Scheduling}, a schedule over perturbation strength used during training that promotes optimal transfer. Additionally, we introduce \emph{expected robustness}, a metric that captures performance across a range of perturbations, providing a more comprehensive evaluation of the accuracy-robustness trade-off for diverse models at test time. Extensive experiments on a wide range of configurations (six pretrained models and five datasets) show that \emph{Epsilon-Scheduling} successfully prevents \emph{suboptimal transfer} and consistently improves expected robustness.


Reliable Few-shot Learning under Dual Noises

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in model pre-training give rise to task adaptation-based few-shot learning (FSL), where the goal is to adapt a pre-trained task-agnostic model for capturing task-specific knowledge with a few-labeled support samples of the target task.Nevertheless, existing approaches may still fail in the open world due to the inevitable in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) noise from both support and query samples of the target task. With limited support samples available, i) the adverse effect of the dual noises can be severely amplified during task adaptation, and ii) the adapted model can produce unreliable predictions on query samples in the presence of the dual noises. In this work, we propose DEnoised Task Adaptation (DETA++) for reliable FSL. DETA++ uses a Contrastive Relevance Aggregation (CoRA) module to calculate image and region weights for support samples, based on which a clean prototype loss and a noise entropy maximization loss are proposed to achieve noise-robust task adaptation. Additionally,DETA++ employs a memory bank to store and refine clean regions for each inner-task class, based on which a Local Nearest Centroid Classifier (LocalNCC) is devised to yield noise-robust predictions on query samples. Moreover, DETA++ utilizes an Intra-class Region Swapping (IntraSwap) strategy to rectify ID class prototypes during task adaptation, enhancing the model's robustness to the dual noises. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of DETA++.


Multi-Dimensional Reconfigurable, Physically Composable Hybrid Diffractive Optical Neural Network

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Diffractive optical neural networks (DONNs), leveraging free-space light wave propagation for ultra-parallel, high-efficiency computing, have emerged as promising artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. However, their inherent lack of reconfigurability due to fixed optical structures post-fabrication hinders practical deployment in the face of dynamic AI workloads and evolving applications. To overcome this challenge, we introduce, for the first time, a multi-dimensional reconfigurable hybrid diffractive ONN system (MDR-HDONN), a physically composable architecture that unlocks a new degree of freedom and unprecedented versatility in DONNs. By leveraging full-system learnability, MDR-HDONN repurposes fixed fabricated optical hardware, achieving exponentially expanded functionality and superior task adaptability through the differentiable learning of system variables. Furthermore, MDR-HDONN adopts a hybrid optical/photonic design, combining the reconfigurability of integrated photonics with the ultra-parallelism of free-space diffractive systems. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MDR-HDONN has digital-comparable accuracy on various task adaptations with 74x faster speed and 194x lower energy. Compared to prior DONNs, MDR-HDONN shows exponentially larger functional space with 5x faster training speed, paving the way for a new paradigm of versatile, composable, hybrid optical/photonic AI computing. We will open-source our codes.


Task Adaptation in Industrial Human-Robot Interaction: Leveraging Riemannian Motion Policies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In real-world industrial environments, modern robots often rely on human operators for crucial decision-making and mission synthesis from individual tasks. Effective and safe collaboration between humans and robots requires systems that can adjust their motion based on human intentions, enabling dynamic task planning and adaptation. Addressing the needs of industrial applications, we propose a motion control framework that (i) removes the need for manual control of the robot's movement; (ii) facilitates the formulation and combination of complex tasks; and (iii) allows the seamless integration of human intent recognition and robot motion planning. For this purpose, we leverage a modular and purely reactive approach for task parametrization and motion generation, embodied by Riemannian Motion Policies. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated, evaluated, and compared to \remove{state-of-the-art approaches}\add{a representative state-of-the-art approach} in experimental scenarios inspired by realistic industrial Human-Robot Interaction settings.