We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a bilevel formulation that separates collision detection and contact simulation. These approaches are unreliable in realistic contact simulation scenarios because isolating the collision detection problem introduces contact location non-uniqueness. Our approach combines contact simulation and collision detection into a unified single-level optimization problem. This disambiguates the collision detection problem in a physics-informed manner. Compared to previous differentiable simulation approaches, our formulation features improved simulation robustness and a reduction in computational complexity by more than an order of magnitude. We illustrate the contact and collision differentiability on a robotic manipulation task requiring optimization-through-contact. We provide a numerically efficient implementation of our formulation in the Julia language called Silico.jl.

Object-goal navigation (Object-nav) entails searching, recognizing and navigating to a target object. Object-nav has been extensively studied by the Embodied-AI community, but most solutions are often restricted to considering static objects (e.g., television, fridge, etc.). We propose a modular framework for object-nav that is able to efficiently search indoor environments for not just static objects but also movable objects (e.g. fruits, glasses, phones, etc.) that frequently change their positions due to human intervention. Our contextual-bandit agent efficiently explores the environment by showing optimism in the face of uncertainty and learns a model of the likelihood of spotting different objects from each navigable location. The likelihoods are used as rewards in a weighted minimum latency solver to deduce a trajectory for the robot. We evaluate our algorithms in two simulated environments and a real-world setting, to demonstrate high sample efficiency and reliability.

尽管进行了数十年的研究，但现有的导航系统在野外部署时仍然面临现实世界中的挑战，例如在混乱的家庭环境或人类占领的公共场所中。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一类新的隐式控制政策，将模仿学习的好处与模型预测控制（MPC）的系统约束的强大处理结合在一起。我们的方法称为Performer-MPC，使用了通过表演者提供的视觉上下文嵌入的学习成本函数（一种低级隐式意见变压器）。我们共同训练成本函数并构建依靠它的控制器，有效地端到端解决相应的双层优化问题。我们表明，由此产生的策略通过利用一些在不同挑战的现实世界情景中利用一些专家演示来提高标准MPC绩效。与标准的MPC政策相比，表演者MPC在混乱的环境中实现了40％的目标，而在人类浏览时，社交指标的目标> 65％。

我们提出了一系列新的结构化强化学习政策 - 构造，即隐含的两塔（ITT）策略，其中根据其可学习潜在表示的注意力分数选择了这些动作。通过明确将行动与政策堆栈中的国家处理相关，我们实现了两个主要目标：实质性的计算增长和更好的绩效。我们的体系结构都与：离散和连续的动作空间兼容。通过对OpenAI Gym和DeepMind Control Suite的15个环境进行测试，我们表明ITT构造特别适合黑盒/进化优化，相应的政策培训算法优于其无结构的隐式对应物以及常用的明确政策。我们通过展示诸如哈希和懒惰的塔更新等技术如何依赖于ITT的两个较高的ITT结构等技术来补充我们的分析，以获得其他计算改进。

我们为双级轨迹优化提供了一个框架，其中系统的动态被编码为对受约束优化问题的解决方案，并且将该较低级别问题的平滑梯度传递给上限轨迹优化器。基于优化的动态表示可实现约束处理，附加变量和非平滑行为，以便远离上层优化器，并允许经典的无约束优化器合成用于更复杂的系统的轨迹。我们提供了一种路径，以便有效地评估受限的动态，并利用隐式功能定理来计算此表示的平滑梯度。我们通过从机器人，航空航天和操纵域建模系统展示了框架，包括：杂志，带有联合限制，卡车杆受到库仑摩擦，Raibert Hopper，火箭落地的推力限制，以及基于优化的动态的平面推送任务然后使用迭代LQR优化轨迹。

机器人操纵可以配制成诱导一系列空间位移：其中移动的空间可以包括物体，物体的一部分或末端执行器。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个简单的模型架构，它重新排列了深度功能，以从视觉输入推断出可视输入的空间位移 - 这可以参数化机器人操作。它没有对象的假设（例如规范姿势，模型或关键点），它利用空间对称性，并且比我们学习基于视觉的操纵任务的基准替代方案更高的样本效率，并且依赖于堆叠的金字塔用看不见的物体组装套件;从操纵可变形的绳索，以将堆积的小物体推动，具有闭环反馈。我们的方法可以表示复杂的多模态策略分布，并推广到多步顺序任务，以及6dof拾取器。 10个模拟任务的实验表明，它比各种端到端基线更快地学习并概括，包括使用地面真实对象姿势的政策。我们在现实世界中使用硬件验证我们的方法。实验视频和代码可在https://transporternets.github.io获得

Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique for training deep neural networks where additional samples are generated by linearly interpolating pairs of inputs and their labels. This technique is known to improve the generalization performance in many learning paradigms and applications. In this work, we first analyze Mixup and show that it implicitly regularizes infinitely many directional derivatives of all orders. We then propose a new method to improve Mixup based on the novel insight. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments across various domains such as images, tabular data, speech, and graphs. Our results show that the proposed method improves Mixup across various datasets using a variety of architectures, for instance, exhibiting an improvement over Mixup by 0.8% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy.

Fusing camera with LiDAR is a promising technique to improve the accuracy of 3D detection due to the complementary physical properties. While most existing methods focus on fusing camera features directly with raw LiDAR point clouds or shallow 3D features, it is observed that direct deep 3D feature fusion achieves inferior accuracy due to feature misalignment. The misalignment that originates from the feature aggregation across large receptive fields becomes increasingly severe for deep network stages. In this paper, we propose PathFusion to enable path-consistent LiDAR-camera deep feature fusion. PathFusion introduces a path consistency loss between shallow and deep features, which encourages the 2D backbone and its fusion path to transform 2D features in a way that is semantically aligned with the transform of the 3D backbone. We apply PathFusion to the prior-art fusion baseline, Focals Conv, and observe more than 1.2\% mAP improvements on the nuScenes test split consistently with and without testing-time augmentations. Moreover, PathFusion also improves KITTI AP3D (R11) by more than 0.6% on moderate level.

Emerging real-time multi-model ML (RTMM) workloads such as AR/VR and drone control often involve dynamic behaviors in various levels; task, model, and layers (or, ML operators) within a model. Such dynamic behaviors are new challenges to the system software in an ML system because the overall system load is unpredictable unlike traditional ML workloads. Also, the real-time processing requires to meet deadlines, and multi-model workloads involve highly heterogeneous models. As RTMM workloads often run on resource-constrained devices (e.g., VR headset), developing an effective scheduler is an important research problem. Therefore, we propose a new scheduler, SDRM3, that effectively handles various dynamicity in RTMM style workloads targeting multi-accelerator systems. To make scheduling decisions, SDRM3 quantifies the unique requirements for RTMM workloads and utilizes the quantified scores to drive scheduling decisions, considering the current system load and other inference jobs on different models and input frames. SDRM3 has tunable parameters that provide fast adaptivity to dynamic workload changes based on a gradient descent-like online optimization, which typically converges within five steps for new workloads. In addition, we also propose a method to exploit model level dynamicity based on Supernet for exploiting the trade-off between the scheduling effectiveness and model performance (e.g., accuracy), which dynamically selects a proper sub-network in a Supernet based on the system loads. In our evaluation on five realistic RTMM workload scenarios, SDRM3 reduces the overall UXCost, which is a energy-delay-product (EDP)-equivalent metric for real-time applications defined in the paper, by 37.7% and 53.2% on geometric mean (up to 97.6% and 97.1%) compared to state-of-the-art baselines, which shows the efficacy of our scheduling methodology.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for point cloud generation. A key component that drives the impressive performance for generating high-quality samples from noise is iteratively denoise for thousands of steps. While beneficial, the complexity of learning steps has limited its applications to many 3D real-world. To address this limitation, we propose Point Straight Flow (PSF), a model that exhibits impressive performance using one step. Our idea is based on the reformulation of the standard diffusion model, which optimizes the curvy learning trajectory into a straight path. Further, we develop a distillation strategy to shorten the straight path into one step without a performance loss, enabling applications to 3D real-world with latency constraints. We perform evaluations on multiple 3D tasks and find that our PSF performs comparably to the standard diffusion model, outperforming other efficient 3D point cloud generation methods. On real-world applications such as point cloud completion and training-free text-guided generation in a low-latency setup, PSF performs favorably.