Reinforcement Learning for Blind Stair Climbing with Legged and Wheeled-Legged Robots

In recent years, legged and wheeled-legged robots have gained prominence for tasks in environments predominantly created for humans across various domains. One significant challenge faced by many of these robots is their limited capability to navigate stairs, which hampers their functionality in multi-story environments. This study proposes a method aimed at addressing this limitation, employing reinforcement learning to develop a versatile controller applicable to a wide range of robots. In contrast to the conventional velocity-based controllers, our approach builds upon a position-based formulation of the RL task, which we show to be vital for stair climbing. Furthermore, the methodology leverages an asymmetric actor-critic structure, enabling the utilization of privileged information from simulated environments during training while eliminating the reliance on exteroceptive sensors during real-world deployment. Another key feature of the proposed approach is the incorporation of a boolean observation within the controller, enabling the activation or deactivation of a stair-climbing mode. We present our results on different quadrupeds and bipedal robots in simulation and showcase how our method allows the balancing robot Ascento to climb 15cm stairs in the real world, a task that was previously impossible for this robot.

LitLLM: A Toolkit for Scientific Literature Review

Conducting literature reviews for scientific papers is essential for understanding research, its limitations, and building on existing work. It is a tedious task which makes an automatic literature review generator appealing. Unfortunately, many existing works that generate such reviews using Large Language Models (LLMs) have significant limitations. They tend to hallucinate-generate non-actual information-and ignore the latest research they have not been trained on. To address these limitations, we propose a toolkit that operates on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) principles, specialized prompting and instructing techniques with the help of LLMs. Our system first initiates a web search to retrieve relevant papers by summarizing user-provided abstracts into keywords using an off-the-shelf LLM. Authors can enhance the search by supplementing it with relevant papers or keywords, contributing to a tailored retrieval process. Second, the system re-ranks the retrieved papers based on the user-provided abstract. Finally, the related work section is generated based on the re-ranked results and the abstract. There is a substantial reduction in time and effort for literature review compared to traditional methods, establishing our toolkit as an efficient alternative. Our open-source toolkit is accessible at https://github.com/shubhamagarwal92/LitLLM and Huggingface space (https://huggingface.co/spaces/shubhamagarwal92/LitLLM) with the video demo at https://youtu.be/E2ggOZBAFw0.

Capture the Flag: Uncovering Data Insights with Large Language Models

The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. However, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a "capture the flag" principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.

StarVector: Generating Scalable Vector Graphics Code from Images

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) have become integral in modern image rendering applications due to their infinite scalability in resolution, versatile usability, and editing capabilities. SVGs are particularly popular in the fields of web development and graphic design. Existing approaches for SVG modeling using deep learning often struggle with generating complex SVGs and are restricted to simpler ones that require extensive processing and simplification. This paper introduces StarVector, a multimodal SVG generation model that effectively integrates Code Generation Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) and vision models. Our approach utilizes a CLIP image encoder to extract visual representations from pixel-based images, which are then transformed into visual tokens via an adapter module. These visual tokens are pre-pended to the SVG token embeddings, and the sequence is modeled by the StarCoder model using next-token prediction, effectively learning to align the visual and code tokens. This enables StarVector to generate unrestricted SVGs that accurately represent pixel images. To evaluate StarVector's performance, we present SVG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating SVG methods across multiple datasets and relevant metrics. Within this benchmark, we introduce novel datasets including SVG-Stack, a large-scale dataset of real-world SVG examples, and use it to pre-train StarVector as a large foundation model for SVGs. Our results demonstrate significant enhancements in visual quality and complexity handling over current methods, marking a notable advancement in SVG generation technology. Code and models: https://github.com/joanrod/star-vector

Goal-conditioned GFlowNets for Controllable Multi-Objective Molecular Design

In recent years, in-silico molecular design has received much attention from the machine learning community. When designing a new compound for pharmaceutical applications, there are usually multiple properties of such molecules that need to be optimised: binding energy to the target, synthesizability, toxicity, EC50, and so on. While previous approaches have employed a scalarization scheme to turn the multi-objective problem into a preference-conditioned single objective, it has been established that this kind of reduction may produce solutions that tend to slide towards the extreme points of the objective space when presented with a problem that exhibits a concave Pareto front. In this work we experiment with an alternative formulation of goal-conditioned molecular generation to obtain a more controllable conditional model that can uniformly explore solutions along the entire Pareto front.

Block-State Transformer

State space models (SSMs) have shown impressive results on tasks that require modeling long-range dependencies and efficiently scale to long sequences owing to their subquadratic runtime complexity. Originally designed for continuous signals, SSMs have shown superior performance on a plethora of tasks, in vision and audio; however, SSMs still lag Transformer performance in Language Modeling tasks. In this work, we propose a hybrid layer named Block-State Transformer (BST), that internally combines an SSM sublayer for long-range contextualization, and a Block Transformer sublayer for short-term representation of sequences. We study three different, and completely parallelizable, variants that integrate SSMs and block-wise attention. We show that our model outperforms similar Transformer-based architectures on language modeling perplexity and generalizes to longer sequences. In addition, the Block-State Transformer demonstrates more than tenfold increase in speed at the layer level compared to the Block-Recurrent Transformer when model parallelization is employed.

Improving Generalization in Task-oriented Dialogues with Workflows and Action Plans

Task-oriented dialogue is difficult in part because it involves understanding user intent, collecting information from the user, executing API calls, and generating helpful and fluent responses. However, for complex tasks one must also correctly do all of these things over multiple steps, and in a specific order. While large pre-trained language models can be fine-tuned end-to-end to create multi-step task-oriented dialogue agents that generate fluent text, our experiments confirm that this approach alone cannot reliably perform new multi-step tasks that are unseen during training. To address these limitations, we augment the dialogue contexts given to \textmd{text2text} transformers with known \textit{valid workflow names} and \textit{action plans}. Action plans consist of sequences of actions required to accomplish a task, and are encoded as simple sequences of keywords (e.g. verify-identity, pull-up-account, reset-password, etc.). We perform extensive experiments on the Action-Based Conversations Dataset (ABCD) with T5-small, base and large models, and show that such models: a) are able to more readily generalize to unseen workflows by following the provided plan, and b) are able to generalize to executing unseen actions if they are provided in the plan. In contrast, models are unable to fully accomplish new multi-step tasks when they are not provided action plan information, even when given new valid workflow names.

Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlike discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative evaluation of high-level phenomena such as compositionality. Towards this goal, we perform two innovations. First, we transform diffusion-based models (in our case, Stable Diffusion) for any image-text matching (ITM) task using a novel method called DiffusionITM. Second, we introduce the Generative-Discriminative Evaluation Benchmark (GDBench) benchmark with 7 complex vision-and-language tasks, bias evaluation and detailed analysis. We find that Stable Diffusion + DiffusionITM is competitive on many tasks and outperforms CLIP on compositional tasks like like CLEVR and Winoground. We further boost its compositional performance with a transfer setup by fine-tuning on MS-COCO while retaining generative capabilities. We also measure the stereotypical bias in diffusion models, and find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 is, for the most part, less biased than Stable Diffusion 1.5. Overall, our results point in an exciting direction bringing discriminative and generative model evaluation closer. We will release code and benchmark setup soon.

Conservative objective models are a special kind of contrastive divergence-based energy model

In this work we theoretically show that conservative objective models (COMs) for offline model-based optimisation (MBO) are a special kind of contrastive divergence-based energy model, one where the energy function represents both the unconditional probability of the input and the conditional probability of the reward variable. While the initial formulation only samples modes from its learned distribution, we propose a simple fix that replaces its gradient ascent sampler with a Langevin MCMC sampler. This gives rise to a special probabilistic model where the probability of sampling an input is proportional to its predicted reward. Lastly, we show that better samples can be obtained if the model is decoupled so that the unconditional and conditional probabilities are modelled separately.

Score-based Diffusion Models in Function Space

Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful framework for generative modeling. They consist of a forward process that perturbs input data with Gaussian white noise and a reverse process that learns a score function to generate samples by denoising. Despite their tremendous success, they are mostly formulated on finite-dimensional spaces, e.g. Euclidean, limiting their applications to many domains where the data has a functional form such as in scientific computing and 3D geometric data analysis. In this work, we introduce a mathematically rigorous framework called Denoising Diffusion Operators (DDOs) for training diffusion models in function space. In DDOs, the forward process perturbs input functions gradually using a Gaussian process. The generative process is formulated by integrating a function-valued Langevin dynamic. Our approach requires an appropriate notion of the score for the perturbed data distribution, which we obtain by generalizing denoising score matching to function spaces that can be infinite-dimensional. We show that the corresponding discretized algorithm generates accurate samples at a fixed cost that is independent of the data resolution. We theoretically and numerically verify the applicability of our approach on a set of problems, including generating solutions to the Navier-Stokes equation viewed as the push-forward distribution of forcings from a Gaussian Random Field (GRF).