Large Language Models for Robotics: Opportunities, Challenges, and Perspectives

Large language models (LLMs) have undergone significant expansion and have been increasingly integrated across various domains. Notably, in the realm of robot task planning, LLMs harness their advanced reasoning and language comprehension capabilities to formulate precise and efficient action plans based on natural language instructions. However, for embodied tasks, where robots interact with complex environments, text-only LLMs often face challenges due to a lack of compatibility with robotic visual perception. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs and multimodal LLMs into various robotic tasks. Additionally, we propose a framework that utilizes multimodal GPT-4V to enhance embodied task planning through the combination of natural language instructions and robot visual perceptions. Our results, based on diverse datasets, indicate that GPT-4V effectively enhances robot performance in embodied tasks. This extensive survey and evaluation of LLMs and multimodal LLMs across a variety of robotic tasks enriches the understanding of LLM-centric embodied intelligence and provides forward-looking insights toward bridging the gap in Human-Robot-Environment interaction.

Review of Large Vision Models and Visual Prompt Engineering

Visual prompt engineering is a fundamental technology in the field of visual and image Artificial General Intelligence, serving as a key component for achieving zero-shot capabilities. As the development of large vision models progresses, the importance of prompt engineering becomes increasingly evident. Designing suitable prompts for specific visual tasks has emerged as a meaningful research direction. This review aims to summarize the methods employed in the computer vision domain for large vision models and visual prompt engineering, exploring the latest advancements in visual prompt engineering. We present influential large models in the visual domain and a range of prompt engineering methods employed on these models. It is our hope that this review provides a comprehensive and systematic description of prompt engineering methods based on large visual models, offering valuable insights for future researchers in their exploration of this field.

Prompt Engineering for Healthcare: Methodologies and Applications

This review will introduce the latest advances in prompt engineering in the field of natural language processing (NLP) for the medical domain. First, we will provide a brief overview of the development of prompt engineering and emphasize its significant contributions to healthcare NLP applications such as question-answering systems, text summarization, and machine translation. With the continuous improvement of general large language models, the importance of prompt engineering in the healthcare domain is becoming increasingly prominent. The aim of this article is to provide useful resources and bridges for healthcare NLP researchers to better explore the application of prompt engineering in this field. We hope that this review can provide new ideas and inspire ample possibilities for research and application in medical NLP.

Towards Understanding Distributional Reinforcement Learning: Regularization, Optimization, Acceleration and Sinkhorn Algorithm

Distributional reinforcement learning~(RL) is a class of state-of-the-art algorithms that estimate the whole distribution of the total return rather than only its expectation. Despite the remarkable performance of distributional RL, a theoretical understanding of its advantages over expectation-based RL remains elusive. In this paper, we interpret distributional RL as entropy-regularized maximum likelihood estimation in the \textit{neural Z-fitted iteration} framework, and establish the connection of the resulting risk-aware regularization with maximum entropy RL. In addition, We shed light on the stability-promoting distributional loss with desirable smoothness properties in distributional RL, which can yield stable optimization and guaranteed generalization. We also analyze the acceleration behavior while optimizing distributional RL algorithms and show that an appropriate approximation to the true target distribution can speed up the convergence. From the perspective of representation, we find that distributional RL encourages state representation from the same action class classified by the policy in tighter clusters. Finally, we propose a class of \textit{Sinkhorn distributional RL} algorithm that interpolates between the Wasserstein distance and maximum mean discrepancy~(MMD). Experiments on a suite of Atari games reveal the competitive performance of our algorithm relative to existing state-of-the-art distributional RL algorithms.