Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis

Building general-purpose robots that can operate seamlessly, in any environment, with any object, and utilizing various skills to complete diverse tasks has been a long-standing goal in Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, however, most existing robotic systems have been constrained - having been designed for specific tasks, trained on specific datasets, and deployed within specific environments. These systems usually require extensively-labeled data, rely on task-specific models, have numerous generalization issues when deployed in real-world scenarios, and struggle to remain robust to distribution shifts. Motivated by the impressive open-set performance and content generation capabilities of web-scale, large-capacity pre-trained models (i.e., foundation models) in research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), we devote this survey to exploring (i) how these existing foundation models from NLP and CV can be applied to the field of robotics, and also exploring (ii) what a robotics-specific foundation model would look like. We begin by providing an overview of what constitutes a conventional robotic system and the fundamental barriers to making it universally applicable. Next, we establish a taxonomy to discuss current work exploring ways to leverage existing foundation models for robotics and develop ones catered to robotics. Finally, we discuss key challenges and promising future directions in using foundation models for enabling general-purpose robotic systems. We encourage readers to view our living GitHub repository of resources, including papers reviewed in this survey as well as related projects and repositories for developing foundation models for robotics.

Fine-tuning vision foundation model for crack segmentation in civil infrastructures

Large-scale foundation models have become the mainstream deep learning method, while in civil engineering, the scale of AI models is strictly limited. In this work, a vision foundation model is introduced for crack segmentation. Two parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, adapter and low-rank adaptation, are adopted to fine-tune the foundation model in semantic segmentation: the Segment Anything Model (SAM). The fine-tuned CrackSAM model is much larger than all the existing crack segmentation models but shows excellent performance. To test the zero-shot performance of the proposed method, two unique datasets related to road and exterior wall cracks are collected, annotated and open-sourced, for a total of 810 images. Comparative experiments are conducted with twelve mature semantic segmentation models. On datasets with artificial noise and previously unseen datasets, the performance of CrackSAM far exceeds that of all state-of-the-art models. CrackSAM exhibits remarkable superiority, particularly under challenging conditions such as dim lighting, shadows, road markings, construction joints, and other interference factors. These cross-scenario results demonstrate the outstanding zero-shot capability of foundation models and provide new ideas for developing vision models in civil engineering.

Fine-tune vision foundation model for crack segmentation in civil infrastructures

Large-scale foundation models have become the mainstream method in the field of deep learning, while in civil engineering, the scale of AI models is strictly limited. In this work, vision foundation model is introduced for crack segmentation. Two Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, adapter and low-rank adaptation, are adopted to fine-tune the foundation model in the field of semantic segmentation: Segment Anything Model (SAM). The fine-tuned model CrackSAM is much larger than all the existing crack segmentation models, but shows excellent performance. To test the zero-shot performance of the proposed method, two unique datasets related to road and exterior wall cracks are collected, annotated and open-sourced, in total 810 images. Comparative experiments are conducted with twelve mature semantic segmentation models. On datasets with artificial noise and previously unseen datasets, the performance of CrackSAM far exceeds that of all state-of-the-art models. CrackSAM exhibits remarkable superiority, particularly in challenging conditions such as dim lighting, shadows, road markings, construction joints, and other interference factors. Such cross-scenario results demonstrate the outstanding zero-shot capability of foundation models, and provide new ideas for the development of vision models in civil engineering.

iMatching: Imperative Correspondence Learning

Learning feature correspondence is a foundational task in computer vision, holding immense importance for downstream applications such as visual odometry and 3D reconstruction. Despite recent progress in data-driven models, feature correspondence learning is still limited by the lack of accurate per-pixel correspondence labels. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a new self-supervised scheme, imperative learning (IL), for training feature correspondence. It enables correspondence learning on arbitrary uninterrupted videos without any camera pose or depth labels, heralding a new era for self-supervised correspondence learning. Specifically, we formulated the problem of correspondence learning as a bilevel optimization, which takes the reprojection error from bundle adjustment as a supervisory signal for the model. To avoid large memory and computation overhead, we leverage the stationary point to effectively back-propagate the implicit gradients through bundle adjustment. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate superior performance on tasks including feature matching and pose estimation, in which we obtained an average of 30% accuracy gain over the state-of-the-art matching models.

Multimodality-guided Image Style Transfer using Cross-modal GAN Inversion

Image Style Transfer (IST) is an interdisciplinary topic of computer vision and art that continuously attracts researchers' interests. Different from traditional Image-guided Image Style Transfer (IIST) methods that require a style reference image as input to define the desired style, recent works start to tackle the problem in a text-guided manner, i.e., Text-guided Image Style Transfer (TIST). Compared to IIST, such approaches provide more flexibility with text-specified styles, which are useful in scenarios where the style is hard to define with reference images. Unfortunately, many TIST approaches produce undesirable artifacts in the transferred images. To address this issue, we present a novel method to achieve much improved style transfer based on text guidance. Meanwhile, to offer more flexibility than IIST and TIST, our method allows style inputs from multiple sources and modalities, enabling MultiModality-guided Image Style Transfer (MMIST). Specifically, we realize MMIST with a novel cross-modal GAN inversion method, which generates style representations consistent with specified styles. Such style representations facilitate style transfer and in principle generalize any IIST methods to MMIST. Large-scale experiments and user studies demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on TIST task. Furthermore, comprehensive qualitative results confirm the effectiveness of our method on MMIST task and cross-modal style interpolation.

Multi-view Graph Convolution for Participant Recommendation

Social networks have become essential for people's lives. The proliferation of web services further expands social networks at an unprecedented scale, leading to immeasurable commercial value for online platforms. Recently, the group buying (GB) business mode is prevalent and also becoming more popular in E-commerce. GB explicitly forms groups of users with similar interests to secure better discounts from the merchants, often operating within social networks. It is a novel way to further unlock the commercial value by explicitly utilizing the online social network in E-commerce. Participant recommendation, a fundamental problem emerging together with GB, aims to find the participants for a launched group buying process with an initiator and a target item to increase the GB success rate. This paper proposes Multi-View Graph Convolution for Participant Recommendation (MVPRec) to tackle this problem. To differentiate the roles of users (Initiator/Participant) within the GB process, we explicitly reconstruct historical GB data into initiator-view and participant-view graphs. Together with the social graph, we obtain a multi-view user representation with graph encoders. Then MVPRec fuses the GB and social representation with an attention module to obtain the user representation and learns a matching score with the initiator's social friends via a multi-head attention mechanism. Social friends with the Top-k matching score are recommended for the corresponding GB process. Experiments on three datasets justify the effectiveness of MVPRec in the emerging participant recommendation problem.

Group-Aware Interest Disentangled Dual-Training for Personalized Recommendation

Personalized recommender systems aim to predict users' preferences for items. It has become an indispensable part of online services. Online social platforms enable users to form groups based on their common interests. The users' group participation on social platforms reveals their interests and can be utilized as side information to mitigate the data sparsity and cold-start problem in recommender systems. Users join different groups out of different interests. In this paper, we generate group representation from the user's interests and propose IGRec (Interest-based Group enhanced Recommendation) to utilize the group information accurately. It consists of four modules. (1) Interest disentangler via self-gating that disentangles users' interests from their initial embedding representation. (2) Interest aggregator that generates the interest-based group representation by Gumbel-Softmax aggregation on the group members' interests. (3) Interest-based group aggregation that fuses user's representation with the participated group representation. (4) A dual-trained rating prediction module to utilize both user-item and group-item interactions. We conduct extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets. Results show IGRec can effectively alleviate the data sparsity problem and enhance the recommender system with interest-based group representation. Experiments on the group recommendation task further show the informativeness of interest-based group representation.

NOIR: Neural Signal Operated Intelligent Robots for Everyday Activities

We present Neural Signal Operated Intelligent Robots (NOIR), a general-purpose, intelligent brain-robot interface system that enables humans to command robots to perform everyday activities through brain signals. Through this interface, humans communicate their intended objects of interest and actions to the robots using electroencephalography (EEG). Our novel system demonstrates success in an expansive array of 20 challenging, everyday household activities, including cooking, cleaning, personal care, and entertainment. The effectiveness of the system is improved by its synergistic integration of robot learning algorithms, allowing for NOIR to adapt to individual users and predict their intentions. Our work enhances the way humans interact with robots, replacing traditional channels of interaction with direct, neural communication. Project website: https://noir-corl.github.io/.

Unified Pretraining for Recommendation via Task Hypergraphs

Although pretraining has garnered significant attention and popularity in recent years, its application in graph-based recommender systems is relatively limited. It is challenging to exploit prior knowledge by pretraining in widely used ID-dependent datasets. On one hand, user-item interaction history in one dataset can hardly be transferred to other datasets through pretraining, where IDs are different. On the other hand, pretraining and finetuning on the same dataset leads to a high risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose a novel multitask pretraining framework named Unified Pretraining for Recommendation via Task Hypergraphs. For a unified learning pattern to handle diverse requirements and nuances of various pretext tasks, we design task hypergraphs to generalize pretext tasks to hyperedge prediction. A novel transitional attention layer is devised to discriminatively learn the relevance between each pretext task and recommendation. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets verify the superiority of UPRTH. Additional detailed investigations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Knowledge Graph Context-Enhanced Diversified Recommendation

The field of Recommender Systems (RecSys) has been extensively studied to enhance accuracy by leveraging users' historical interactions. Nonetheless, this persistent pursuit of accuracy frequently engenders diminished diversity, culminating in the well-recognized "echo chamber" phenomenon. Diversified RecSys has emerged as a countermeasure, placing diversity on par with accuracy and garnering noteworthy attention from academic circles and industry practitioners. This research explores the realm of diversified RecSys within the intricate context of knowledge graphs (KG). These KGs act as repositories of interconnected information concerning entities and items, offering a propitious avenue to amplify recommendation diversity through the incorporation of insightful contextual information. Our contributions include introducing an innovative metric, Entity Coverage, and Relation Coverage, which effectively quantifies diversity within the KG domain. Additionally, we introduce the Diversified Embedding Learning (DEL) module, meticulously designed to formulate user representations that possess an innate awareness of diversity. In tandem with this, we introduce a novel technique named Conditional Alignment and Uniformity (CAU). It adeptly encodes KG item embeddings while preserving contextual integrity. Collectively, our contributions signify a substantial stride towards augmenting the panorama of recommendation diversity within the realm of KG-informed RecSys paradigms.