By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer.github.io

大型语言模型可以编码有关世界的大量语义知识。这种知识对于旨在采取自然语言表达的高级，时间扩展的指示的机器人可能非常有用。但是，语言模型的一个重大弱点是，它们缺乏现实世界的经验，这使得很难利用它们在给定的体现中进行决策。例如，要求语言模型描述如何清洁溢出物可能会导致合理的叙述，但是它可能不适用于需要在特定环境中执行此任务的特定代理商（例如机器人）。我们建议通过预处理的技能来提供现实世界的基础，这些技能用于限制模型以提出可行且在上下文上适当的自然语言动作。机器人可以充当语​​言模型的“手和眼睛”，而语言模型可以提供有关任务的高级语义知识。我们展示了如何将低级技能与大语言模型结合在一起，以便语言模型提供有关执行复杂和时间扩展说明的过程的高级知识，而与这些技能相关的价值功能则提供了连接必要的基础了解特定的物理环境。我们在许多现实世界的机器人任务上评估了我们的方法，我们表明了对现实世界接地的需求，并且这种方法能够在移动操纵器上完成长远，抽象的自然语言指令。该项目的网站和视频可以在https://say-can.github.io/上找到。

安全探索对于使用风险敏感环境中的强化学习（RL）至关重要。最近的工作了解衡量违反限制概率的风险措施，然后可以使用安全性来实现安全性。然而，学习这种风险措施需要与环境的重大互动，从而在学习期间违反违规程度过多。此外，这些措施不易转移到新环境。我们将安全探索作为离线Meta RL问题，目的是利用一系列环境中的安全和不安全行为的例子，以快速将学习风险措施与以前看不见的动态的新环境。然后，我们向安全适应（MESA）提出元学习，这是一个荟萃学习安全RL的风险措施的方法。跨5个连续控制域的仿真实验表明，MESA可以从一系列不同的环境中利用脱机数据，以减少未经调整环境中的约束违规，同时保持任务性能。有关代码和补充材料，请参阅https://tinyurl.com/safe-meta-rl。

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects.

Feedforward fully convolutional neural networks currently dominate in semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds. Despite their great success, they suffer from the loss of local information at low-level layers, posing significant challenges to accurate scene segmentation and precise object boundary delineation. Prior works either address this issue by post-processing or jointly learn object boundaries to implicitly improve feature encoding of the networks. These approaches often require additional modules which are difficult to integrate into the original architecture. To improve the segmentation near object boundaries, we propose a boundary-aware feature propagation mechanism. This mechanism is achieved by exploiting a multi-task learning framework that aims to explicitly guide the boundaries to their original locations. With one shared encoder, our network outputs (i) boundary localization, (ii) prediction of directions pointing to the object's interior, and (iii) semantic segmentation, in three parallel streams. The predicted boundaries and directions are fused to propagate the learned features to refine the segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on the S3DIS and SensatUrban datasets against various baseline methods, demonstrating that our proposed approach yields consistent improvements by reducing boundary errors. Our code is available at https://github.com/shenglandu/PushBoundary.

Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.

Pre-training is an effective technique for ensuring robust performance on a variety of machine learning tasks. It typically depends on large-scale crawled corpora that can result in toxic or biased models. Such data can also be problematic with respect to copyright, attribution, and privacy. Pre-training with synthetic tasks and data is a promising way of alleviating such concerns since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our goal in this paper is to understand what makes for a good pre-trained model when using synthetic resources. We answer this question in the context of neural machine translation by considering two novel approaches to translation model pre-training. Our first approach studies the effect of pre-training on obfuscated data derived from a parallel corpus by mapping words to a vocabulary of 'nonsense' tokens. Our second approach explores the effect of pre-training on procedurally generated synthetic parallel data that does not depend on any real human language corpus. Our empirical evaluation on multiple language pairs shows that, to a surprising degree, the benefits of pre-training can be realized even with obfuscated or purely synthetic parallel data. In our analysis, we consider the extent to which obfuscated and synthetic pre-training techniques can be used to mitigate the issue of hallucinated model toxicity.

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose MatCha (Math reasoning and Chart derendering pretraining) to enhance visual language models' capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. Specifically, we propose several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are the key capabilities in visual language modeling. We perform the MatCha pretraining starting from Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, the MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as nearly 20%. We also examine how well MatCha pretraining transfers to domains such as screenshots, textbook diagrams, and document figures and observe overall improvement, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.