When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

Recent work in sim2real has successfully enabled robots to act in physical environments by training in simulation with a diverse ''population'' of environments (i.e. domain randomization). In this work, we focus on enabling generalization in assistive tasks: tasks in which the robot is acting to assist a user (e.g. helping someone with motor impairments with bathing or with scratching an itch). Such tasks are particularly interesting relative to prior sim2real successes because the environment now contains a human who is also acting. This complicates the problem because the diversity of human users (instead of merely physical environment parameters) is more difficult to capture in a population, thus increasing the likelihood of encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) human policies at test time. We advocate that generalization to such OOD policies benefits from (1) learning a good latent representation for human policies that test-time humans can accurately be mapped to, and (2) making that representation adaptable with test-time interaction data, instead of relying on it to perfectly capture the space of human policies based on the simulated population only. We study how to best learn such a representation by evaluating on purposefully constructed OOD test policies. We find that sim2real methods that encode environment (or population) parameters and work well in tasks that robots do in isolation, do not work well in assistance. In assistance, it seems crucial to train the representation based on the history of interaction directly, because that is what the robot will have access to at test time. Further, training these representations to then predict human actions not only gives them better structure, but also enables them to be fine-tuned at test-time, when the robot observes the partner act. https://adaptive-caregiver.github.io.

In this paper we examine the problem of determining demonstration sufficiency for AI agents that learn from demonstrations: how can an AI agent self-assess whether it has received enough demonstrations from an expert to ensure a desired level of performance? To address this problem we propose a novel self-assessment approach based on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and value-at-risk to enable agents that learn from demonstrations to compute high-confidence bounds on their performance and use these bounds to determine when they have a sufficient number of demonstrations. We propose and evaluate two definitions of sufficiency: (1) normalized expected value difference, which measures regret with respect to the expert's unobserved reward function, and (2) improvement over a baseline policy. We demonstrate how to formulate high-confidence bounds on both of these metrics. We evaluate our approach in simulation and demonstrate the feasibility of developing an AI system that can accurately evaluate whether it has received sufficient training data to guarantee, with high confidence, that it can match an expert's performance or surpass the performance of a baseline policy within some desired safety threshold.

当从人类行为中推断出奖励功能（无论是演示，比较，物理校正或电子停靠点）时，它已证明对人类进行建模作为做出嘈杂的理性选择，并具有“合理性系数”，以捕获多少噪声或熵我们希望看到人类的行为。无论人类反馈的类型或质量如何，许多现有作品都选择修复此系数。但是，在某些情况下，进行演示可能要比回答比较查询要困难得多。在这种情况下，我们应该期望在示范中看到比比较中更多的噪音或次级临时性，并且应该相应地解释反馈。在这项工作中，我们提倡，将每种反馈类型的实际数据中的理性系数扎根，而不是假设默认值，对奖励学习具有重大的积极影响。我们在模拟反馈以及用户研究的实验中测试了这一点。我们发现，从单一反馈类型中学习时，高估人类理性可能会对奖励准确性和遗憾产生可怕的影响。此外，我们发现合理性层面会影响每种反馈类型的信息性：令人惊讶的是，示威并不总是最有用的信息 - 当人类的行为非常卑鄙时，即使在合理性水平相同的情况下，比较实际上就变得更加有用。 。此外，当机器人确定要要求的反馈类型时，它可以通过准确建模每种类型的理性水平来获得很大的优势。最终，我们的结果强调了关注假定理性级别的重要性，不仅是在从单个反馈类型中学习时，尤其是当代理商从多种反馈类型中学习时，尤其是在学习时。

模拟到现实的转移已成为一种流行且非常成功的方法，用于培训各种任务的机器人控制政策。但是，确定在模拟中训练的政策何时准备将其转移到物理世界通常是一个挑战。部署经过很少的模拟数据训练的策略可能会导致物理硬件的不可靠和危险行为。另一方面，模拟中的过度训练会导致策略过度拟合模拟器的视觉外观和动力学。在这项工作中，我们研究了自动确定在模拟中训练的策略何时可以可靠地转移到物理机器人的策略。我们在机器人织物操纵的背景下专门研究了这些思想，因为成功建模织物的动力学和视觉外观的困难，成功的SIM2Real转移尤其具有挑战性。导致织物平滑任务表明我们的切换标准与实际的性能很好地相关。特别是，我们基于信心的切换标准在培训总预算的55-60％之内达到了87.2-93.7％的平均最终面料覆盖率。有关代码和补充材料，请参见https://tinyurl.com/lsc-case。

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

我们的目标是使机器人能够以情感方式执行功能任务，无论是响应用户的情绪状态还是表达其信心水平。先前的工作已经提出了从用户反馈中每个目标情绪的学习独立成本功能，以便机器人可以在遇到的任何情况下将其与任务和环境特定目标一起优化。但是，在建模多种情绪并且无法推广到新的情绪时，这种方法效率低下。在这项工作中，我们利用了一个事实，即情绪并非彼此独立：它们是通过价值占主导地位的潜在空间（VAD）相关的。我们的关键想法是学习一个模型，以使用用户标签映射到VAD上。考虑到轨迹的映射和目标VAD之间的距离，可以使该单个模型代表所有情绪的成本功能。结果1）所有用户反馈都可以促进学习每一个情绪； 2）机器人可以为空间中的任何情感生成轨迹，而不仅仅是少数预定义的轨迹； 3）机器人可以通过将其映射到目标VAD来对用户生成的自然语言进行情感响应。我们介绍了一种交互式学习将轨迹映射到该潜在空间并在模拟和用户研究中对其进行测试的方法。在实验中，我们使用一个简单的真空机器人以及Cassie Biped。

以前的工作定义了探索性抓握，其中一个机器人迭代地抓住并丢弃一个未知的复杂多面体物体，以发现一组稳定的掌握对象的每个识别的不同稳定的姿势。最近的工作用来了一个多武装强盗模型，每种姿势一小组候选麦克风;但是，对于具有少数成功Grasps的物体，该组可能不包括最强大的掌握。我们展示了学习高效的掌握装置（腿），这是一种算法，可以通过构建大型有希望的掌握的小型活跃的掌握，并使用学习的信心范围来确定何时何时置信，它可以停止探索对象。实验表明，腿可以比不学习活动集的现有算法更有效地识别高质量的掌握。在仿真实验中，我们测量腿部和基线所识别的最佳掌握的成功概率与真正最强大的掌握的最佳差距。经过3000个探索步骤后，腿部优于14个Dex-Net对手的10个中的基线算法和39 egad的25个！对象。然后，我们开发一个自我监督的掌握系统，机器人探讨了人类干预最小的掌握。 3对象的物理实验表明，腿将从基线收敛到高性能的GRASPS比基线更快。有关补充材料和视频，请参阅\ url {https://sites.google.com/view/legs-exp-grasping}。

Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information into the foreground detection learning process. The main goal is to provide a method capable of generating an accurate foreground detection given a grayscale video. Experiments conducted on the Change Detection 2014 and on the private dataset PetrobrasROUTES from Petrobras support the effectiveness of the proposed approach concerning some state-of-the-art video segmentation techniques, with overall F-measures of $\mathbf{0.9535}$ and $\mathbf{0.9636}$ in the Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets, respectively. Such a result places the proposed technique amongst the top 3 state-of-the-art video segmentation methods, besides comprising approximately seven times less parameters than its top one counterpart.

Scene change detection is an image processing problem related to partitioning pixels of a digital image into foreground and background regions. Mostly, visual knowledge-based computer intelligent systems, like traffic monitoring, video surveillance, and anomaly detection, need to use change detection techniques. Amongst the most prominent detection methods, there are the learning-based ones, which besides sharing similar training and testing protocols, differ from each other in terms of their architecture design strategies. Such architecture design directly impacts on the quality of the detection results, and also in the device resources capacity, like memory. In this work, we propose a novel Multiscale Cascade Residual Convolutional Neural Network that integrates multiscale processing strategy through a Residual Processing Module, with a Segmentation Convolutional Neural Network. Experiments conducted on two different datasets support the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving average overall $\boldsymbol{F\text{-}measure}$ results of $\boldsymbol{0.9622}$ and $\boldsymbol{0.9664}$ over Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets respectively, besides comprising approximately eight times fewer parameters. Such obtained results place the proposed technique amongst the top four state-of-the-art scene change detection methods.