Small Scale Data-Free Knowledge Distillation

Data-free knowledge distillation is able to utilize the knowledge learned by a large teacher network to augment the training of a smaller student network without accessing the original training data, avoiding privacy, security, and proprietary risks in real applications. In this line of research, existing methods typically follow an inversion-and-distillation paradigm in which a generative adversarial network on-the-fly trained with the guidance of the pre-trained teacher network is used to synthesize a large-scale sample set for knowledge distillation. In this paper, we reexamine this common data-free knowledge distillation paradigm, showing that there is considerable room to improve the overall training efficiency through a lens of ``small-scale inverted data for knowledge distillation". In light of three empirical observations indicating the importance of how to balance class distributions in terms of synthetic sample diversity and difficulty during both data inversion and distillation processes, we propose Small Scale Data-free Knowledge Distillation SSD-KD. In formulation, SSD-KD introduces a modulating function to balance synthetic samples and a priority sampling function to select proper samples, facilitated by a dynamic replay buffer and a reinforcement learning strategy. As a result, SSD-KD can perform distillation training conditioned on an extremely small scale of synthetic samples (e.g., 10X less than the original training data scale), making the overall training efficiency one or two orders of magnitude faster than many mainstream methods while retaining superior or competitive model performance, as demonstrated on popular image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/OSVAI/SSD-KD.

OMPO: A Unified Framework for RL under Policy and Dynamics Shifts

Training reinforcement learning policies using environment interaction data collected from varying policies or dynamics presents a fundamental challenge. Existing works often overlook the distribution discrepancies induced by policy or dynamics shifts, or rely on specialized algorithms with task priors, thus often resulting in suboptimal policy performances and high learning variances. In this paper, we identify a unified strategy for online RL policy learning under diverse settings of policy and dynamics shifts: transition occupancy matching. In light of this, we introduce a surrogate policy learning objective by considering the transition occupancy discrepancies and then cast it into a tractable min-max optimization problem through dual reformulation. Our method, dubbed Occupancy-Matching Policy Optimization (OMPO), features a specialized actor-critic structure equipped with a distribution discriminator and a small-size local buffer. We conduct extensive experiments based on the OpenAI Gym, Meta-World, and Panda Robots environments, encompassing policy shifts under stationary and nonstationary dynamics, as well as domain adaption. The results demonstrate that OMPO outperforms the specialized baselines from different categories in all settings. We also find that OMPO exhibits particularly strong performance when combined with domain randomization, highlighting its potential in RL-based robotics applications

Offline-Boosted Actor-Critic: Adaptively Blending Optimal Historical Behaviors in Deep Off-Policy RL

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in tackling many complex real-world tasks, by leveraging previously collected data for policy learning. However, most existing off-policy RL algorithms fail to maximally exploit the information in the replay buffer, limiting sample efficiency and policy performance. In this work, we discover that concurrently training an offline RL policy based on the shared online replay buffer can sometimes outperform the original online learning policy, though the occurrence of such performance gains remains uncertain. This motivates a new possibility of harnessing the emergent outperforming offline optimal policy to improve online policy learning. Based on this insight, we present Offline-Boosted Actor-Critic (OBAC), a model-free online RL framework that elegantly identifies the outperforming offline policy through value comparison, and uses it as an adaptive constraint to guarantee stronger policy learning performance. Our experiments demonstrate that OBAC outperforms other popular model-free RL baselines and rivals advanced model-based RL methods in terms of sample efficiency and asymptotic performance across 53 tasks spanning 6 task suites.

Vidu4D: Single Generated Video to High-Fidelity 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic Gaussian Surfels

Video generative models are receiving particular attention given their ability to generate realistic and imaginative frames. Besides, these models are also observed to exhibit strong 3D consistency, significantly enhancing their potential to act as world simulators. In this work, we present Vidu4D, a novel reconstruction model that excels in accurately reconstructing 4D (i.e., sequential 3D) representations from single generated videos, addressing challenges associated with non-rigidity and frame distortion. This capability is pivotal for creating high-fidelity virtual contents that maintain both spatial and temporal coherence. At the core of Vidu4D is our proposed Dynamic Gaussian Surfels (DGS) technique. DGS optimizes time-varying warping functions to transform Gaussian surfels (surface elements) from a static state to a dynamically warped state. This transformation enables a precise depiction of motion and deformation over time. To preserve the structural integrity of surface-aligned Gaussian surfels, we design the warped-state geometric regularization based on continuous warping fields for estimating normals. Additionally, we learn refinements on rotation and scaling parameters of Gaussian surfels, which greatly alleviates texture flickering during the warping process and enhances the capture of fine-grained appearance details. Vidu4D also contains a novel initialization state that provides a proper start for the warping fields in DGS. Equipping Vidu4D with an existing video generative model, the overall framework demonstrates high-fidelity text-to-4D generation in both appearance and geometry.

Soft Contact Simulation and Manipulation Learning of Deformable Objects with Vision-based Tactile Sensor

Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic deformation. In this paper, we describe a new deformable object manipulation method including soft contact simulation, manipulation learning, and sim-to-real transfer. We propose a novel approach utilizing Vision-Based Tactile Sensors (VBTSs) as the end-effector in simulation to produce observations like relative position, squeezed area, and object contour, which are transferable to real robots. For a more realistic contact simulation, a new simulation environment including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic deformations is created. We utilize RL strategies to train agents in the simulation, and expert demonstrations are applied for challenging tasks. Finally, we build a real experimental platform to complete the sim-to-real transfer and achieve a 90% success rate on difficult tasks such as cylinder and sphere. To test the robustness of our method, we use plasticine of different hardness and sizes to repeat the tasks including cylinder and sphere. The experimental results show superior performances of deformable object manipulation with the proposed method.

Simulation of Optical Tactile Sensors Supporting Slip and Rotation using Path Tracing and IMPM

Optical tactile sensors are extensively utilized in intelligent robot manipulation due to their ability to acquire high-resolution tactile information at a lower cost. However, achieving adequate reality and versatility in simulating optical tactile sensors is challenging. In this paper, we propose a simulation method and validate its effectiveness through experiments. We utilize path tracing for image rendering, achieving higher similarity to real data than the baseline method in simulating pressing scenarios. Additionally, we apply the improved Material Point Method(IMPM) algorithm to simulate the relative rest between the object and the elastomer surface when the object is in motion, enabling more accurate simulation of complex manipulations such as slip and rotation.

What Foundation Models can Bring for Robot Learning in Manipulation : A Survey

The realization of universal robots is an ultimate goal of researchers. However, a key hurdle in achieving this goal lies in the robots' ability to manipulate objects in their unstructured surrounding environments according to different tasks. The learning-based approach is considered an effective way to address generalization. The impressive performance of foundation models in the fields of computer vision and natural language suggests the potential of embedding foundation models into manipulation tasks as a viable path toward achieving general manipulation capability. However, we believe achieving general manipulation capability requires an overarching framework akin to auto driving. This framework should encompass multiple functional modules, with different foundation models assuming distinct roles in facilitating general manipulation capability. This survey focuses on the contributions of foundation models to robot learning for manipulation. We propose a comprehensive framework and detail how foundation models can address challenges in each module of the framework. What's more, we examine current approaches, outline challenges, suggest future research directions, and identify potential risks associated with integrating foundation models into this domain.

Intriguing Properties of Positional Encoding in Time Series Forecasting

Transformer-based methods have made significant progress in time series forecasting (TSF). They primarily handle two types of tokens, i.e., temporal tokens that contain all variables of the same timestamp, and variable tokens that contain all input time points for a specific variable. Transformer-based methods rely on positional encoding (PE) to mark tokens' positions, facilitating the model to perceive the correlation between tokens. However, in TSF, research on PE remains insufficient. To address this gap, we conduct experiments and uncover intriguing properties of existing PEs in TSF: (i) The positional information injected by PEs diminishes as the network depth increases; (ii) Enhancing positional information in deep networks is advantageous for improving the model's performance; (iii) PE based on the similarity between tokens can improve the model's performance. Motivated by these findings, we introduce two new PEs: Temporal Position Encoding (T-PE) for temporal tokens and Variable Positional Encoding (V-PE) for variable tokens. Both T-PE and V-PE incorporate geometric PE based on tokens' positions and semantic PE based on the similarity between tokens but using different calculations. To leverage both the PEs, we design a Transformer-based dual-branch framework named T2B-PE. It first calculates temporal tokens' correlation and variable tokens' correlation respectively and then fuses the dual-branch features through the gated unit. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior robustness and effectiveness of T2B-PE. The code is available at: \href{https://github.com/jlu-phyComputer/T2B-PE}{https://github.com/jlu-phyComputer/T2B-PE}.

Equivariant Local Reference Frames for Unsupervised Non-rigid Point Cloud Shape Correspondence

Unsupervised non-rigid point cloud shape correspondence underpins a multitude of 3D vision tasks, yet itself is non-trivial given the exponential complexity stemming from inter-point degree-of-freedom, i.e., pose transformations. Based on the assumption of local rigidity, one solution for reducing complexity is to decompose the overall shape into independent local regions using Local Reference Frames (LRFs) that are invariant to SE(3) transformations. However, the focus solely on local structure neglects global geometric contexts, resulting in less distinctive LRFs that lack crucial semantic information necessary for effective matching. Furthermore, such complexity introduces out-of-distribution geometric contexts during inference, thus complicating generalization. To this end, we introduce 1) EquiShape, a novel structure tailored to learn pair-wise LRFs with global structural cues for both spatial and semantic consistency, and 2) LRF-Refine, an optimization strategy generally applicable to LRF-based methods, aimed at addressing the generalization challenges. Specifically, for EquiShape, we employ cross-talk within separate equivariant graph neural networks (Cross-GVP) to build long-range dependencies to compensate for the lack of semantic information in local structure modeling, deducing pair-wise independent SE(3)-equivariant LRF vectors for each point. For LRF-Refine, the optimization adjusts LRFs within specific contexts and knowledge, enhancing the geometric and semantic generalizability of point features. Our overall framework surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on three benchmarks. Code and models will be publicly available.

Isotropic3D: Image-to-3D Generation Based on a Single CLIP Embedding

Encouraged by the growing availability of pre-trained 2D diffusion models, image-to-3D generation by leveraging Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) is making remarkable progress. Most existing methods combine novel-view lifting from 2D diffusion models which usually take the reference image as a condition while applying hard L2 image supervision at the reference view. Yet heavily adhering to the image is prone to corrupting the inductive knowledge of the 2D diffusion model leading to flat or distorted 3D generation frequently. In this work, we reexamine image-to-3D in a novel perspective and present Isotropic3D, an image-to-3D generation pipeline that takes only an image CLIP embedding as input. Isotropic3D allows the optimization to be isotropic w.r.t. the azimuth angle by solely resting on the SDS loss. The core of our framework lies in a two-stage diffusion model fine-tuning. Firstly, we fine-tune a text-to-3D diffusion model by substituting its text encoder with an image encoder, by which the model preliminarily acquires image-to-image capabilities. Secondly, we perform fine-tuning using our Explicit Multi-view Attention (EMA) which combines noisy multi-view images with the noise-free reference image as an explicit condition. CLIP embedding is sent to the diffusion model throughout the whole process while reference images are discarded once after fine-tuning. As a result, with a single image CLIP embedding, Isotropic3D is capable of generating multi-view mutually consistent images and also a 3D model with more symmetrical and neat content, well-proportioned geometry, rich colored texture, and less distortion compared with existing image-to-3D methods while still preserving the similarity to the reference image to a large extent. The project page is available at https://isotropic3d.github.io/. The code and models are available at https://github.com/pkunliu/Isotropic3D.