Mitigating Outlier Activations in Low-Precision Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Low-precision fine-tuning of language models has gained prominence as a cost-effective and energy-efficient approach to deploying large-scale models in various applications. However, this approach is susceptible to the existence of outlier values in activation. The outlier values in the activation can negatively affect the performance of fine-tuning language models in the low-precision regime since they affect the scaling factor and thus make representing smaller values harder. This paper investigates techniques for mitigating outlier activation in low-precision integer fine-tuning of the language models. Our proposed novel approach enables us to represent the outlier activation values in 8-bit integers instead of floating-point (FP16) values. The benefit of using integers for outlier values is that it enables us to use operator tiling to avoid performing 16-bit integer matrix multiplication to address this problem effectively. We provide theoretical analysis and supporting experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the robustness and performance of low-precision fine-tuned language models.

Effectively Rearranging Heterogeneous Objects on Cluttered Tabletops

Effectively rearranging heterogeneous objects constitutes a high-utility skill that an intelligent robot should master. Whereas significant work has been devoted to the grasp synthesis of heterogeneous objects, little attention has been given to the planning for sequentially manipulating such objects. In this work, we examine the long-horizon sequential rearrangement of heterogeneous objects in a tabletop setting, addressing not just generating feasible plans but near-optimal ones. Toward that end, and building on previous methods, including combinatorial algorithms and Monte Carlo tree search-based solutions, we develop state-of-the-art solvers for optimizing two practical objective functions considering key object properties such as size and weight. Thorough simulation studies show that our methods provide significant advantages in handling challenging heterogeneous object rearrangement problems, especially in cluttered settings. Real robot experiments further demonstrate and confirm these advantages. Source code and evaluation data associated with this research will be available at https://github.com/arc-l/TRLB upon the publication of this manuscript.

MURAL: Meta-Learning Uncertainty-Aware Rewards for Outcome-Driven Reinforcement Learning

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the agent is provided with examples of successful outcomes? In this problem setting, the reward function can be obtained automatically by training a classifier to categorize states as successful or not. If trained properly, such a classifier can provide a well-shaped objective landscape that both promotes progress toward good states and provides a calibrated exploration bonus. In this work, we show that an uncertainty aware classifier can solve challenging reinforcement learning problems by both encouraging exploration and provided directed guidance towards positive outcomes. We propose a novel mechanism for obtaining these calibrated, uncertainty-aware classifiers based on an amortized technique for computing the normalized maximum likelihood (NML) distribution. To make this tractable, we propose a novel method for computing the NML distribution by using meta-learning. We show that the resulting algorithm has a number of intriguing connections to both count-based exploration methods and prior algorithms for learning reward functions, while also providing more effective guidance towards the goal. We demonstrate that our algorithm solves a number of challenging navigation and robotic manipulation tasks which prove difficult or impossible for prior methods.

Deep Multi-Modal Contact Estimation for Invariant Observer Design on Quadruped Robots

This work reports on developing a deep learning-based contact estimator for legged robots that bypasses the need for physical contact sensors and takes multi-modal proprioceptive sensory data from joint encoders, kinematics, and an inertial measurement unit as input. Unlike vision-based state estimators, proprioceptive state estimators are agnostic to perceptually degraded situations such as dark or foggy scenes. For legged robots, reliable kinematics and contact data are necessary to develop a proprioceptive state estimator. While some robots are equipped with dedicated contact sensors or springs to detect contact, some robots do not have dedicated contact sensors, and the addition of such sensors is non-trivial without redesigning the hardware. The trained deep network can accurately estimate contacts on different terrains and robot gaits and is deployed along a contact-aided invariant extended Kalman filter to generate odometry trajectories. The filter performs comparably to a state-of-the-art visual SLAM system.

Reset-Free Reinforcement Learning via Multi-Task Learning: Learning Dexterous Manipulation Behaviors without Human Intervention

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can in principle acquire complex robotic skills by learning from large amounts of data in the real world, collected via trial and error. However, most RL algorithms use a carefully engineered setup in order to collect data, requiring human supervision and intervention to provide episodic resets. This is particularly evident in challenging robotics problems, such as dexterous manipulation. To make data collection scalable, such applications require reset-free algorithms that are able to learn autonomously, without explicit instrumentation or human intervention. Most prior work in this area handles single-task learning. However, we might also want robots that can perform large repertoires of skills. At first, this would appear to only make the problem harder. However, the key observation we make in this work is that an appropriately chosen multi-task RL setting actually alleviates the reset-free learning challenge, with minimal additional machinery required. In effect, solving a multi-task problem can directly solve the reset-free problem since different combinations of tasks can serve to perform resets for other tasks. By learning multiple tasks together and appropriately sequencing them, we can effectively learn all of the tasks together reset-free. This type of multi-task learning can effectively scale reset-free learning schemes to much more complex problems, as we demonstrate in our experiments. We propose a simple scheme for multi-task learning that tackles the reset-free learning problem, and show its effectiveness at learning to solve complex dexterous manipulation tasks in both hardware and simulation without any explicit resets. This work shows the ability to learn dexterous manipulation behaviors in the real world with RL without any human intervention.

The Ingredients of Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning

The success of reinforcement learning for real world robotics has been, in many cases limited to instrumented laboratory scenarios, often requiring arduous human effort and oversight to enable continuous learning. In this work, we discuss the elements that are needed for a robotic learning system that can continually and autonomously improve with data collected in the real world. We propose a particular instantiation of such a system, using dexterous manipulation as our case study. Subsequently, we investigate a number of challenges that come up when learning without instrumentation. In such settings, learning must be feasible without manually designed resets, using only on-board perception, and without hand-engineered reward functions. We propose simple and scalable solutions to these challenges, and then demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed system on a set of dexterous robotic manipulation tasks, providing an in-depth analysis of the challenges associated with this learning paradigm. We demonstrate that our complete system can learn without any human intervention, acquiring a variety of vision-based skills with a real-world three-fingered hand. Results and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/realworld-rl/