RoboMorph: In-Context Meta-Learning for Robot Dynamics Modeling

The landscape of Deep Learning has experienced a major shift with the pervasive adoption of Transformer-based architectures, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Novel avenues for physical applications, such as solving Partial Differential Equations and Image Vision, have been explored. However, in challenging domains like robotics, where high non-linearity poses significant challenges, Transformer-based applications are scarce. While Transformers have been used to provide robots with knowledge about high-level tasks, few efforts have been made to perform system identification. This paper proposes a novel methodology to learn a meta-dynamical model of a high-dimensional physical system, such as the Franka robotic arm, using a Transformer-based architecture without prior knowledge of the system's physical parameters. The objective is to predict quantities of interest (end-effector pose and joint positions) given the torque signals for each joint. This prediction can be useful as a component for Deep Model Predictive Control frameworks in robotics. The meta-model establishes the correlation between torques and positions and predicts the output for the complete trajectory. This work provides empirical evidence of the efficacy of the in-context learning paradigm, suggesting future improvements in learning the dynamics of robotic systems without explicit knowledge of physical parameters. Code, videos, and supplementary materials can be found at project website. See https://sites.google.com/view/robomorph/

Realistic Extreme Behavior Generation for Improved AV Testing

This work introduces a framework to diagnose the strengths and shortcomings of Autonomous Vehicle (AV) collision avoidance technology with synthetic yet realistic potential collision scenarios adapted from real-world, collision-free data. Our framework generates counterfactual collisions with diverse crash properties, e.g., crash angle and velocity, between an adversary and a target vehicle by adding perturbations to the adversary's predicted trajectory from a learned AV behavior model. Our main contribution is to ground these adversarial perturbations in realistic behavior as defined through the lens of data-alignment in the behavior model's parameter space. Then, we cluster these synthetic counterfactuals to identify plausible and representative collision scenarios to form the basis of a test suite for downstream AV system evaluation. We demonstrate our framework using two state-of-the-art behavior prediction models as sources of realistic adversarial perturbations, and show that our scenario clustering evokes interpretable failure modes from a baseline AV policy under evaluation.

Promptable Closed-loop Traffic Simulation

Simulation stands as a cornerstone for safe and efficient autonomous driving development. At its core a simulation system ought to produce realistic, reactive, and controllable traffic patterns. In this paper, we propose ProSim, a multimodal promptable closed-loop traffic simulation framework. ProSim allows the user to give a complex set of numerical, categorical or textual prompts to instruct each agent's behavior and intention. ProSim then rolls out a traffic scenario in a closed-loop manner, modeling each agent's interaction with other traffic participants. Our experiments show that ProSim achieves high prompt controllability given different user prompts, while reaching competitive performance on the Waymo Sim Agents Challenge when no prompt is given. To support research on promptable traffic simulation, we create ProSim-Instruct-520k, a multimodal prompt-scenario paired driving dataset with over 10M text prompts for over 520k real-world driving scenarios. We will release code of ProSim as well as data and labeling tools of ProSim-Instruct-520k at https://ariostgx.github.io/ProSim.

OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction

We introduce OmniRe, a holistic approach for efficiently reconstructing high-fidelity dynamic urban scenes from on-device logs. Recent methods for modeling driving sequences using neural radiance fields or Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated the potential of reconstructing challenging dynamic scenes, but often overlook pedestrians and other non-vehicle dynamic actors, hindering a complete pipeline for dynamic urban scene reconstruction. To that end, we propose a comprehensive 3DGS framework for driving scenes, named OmniRe, that allows for accurate, full-length reconstruction of diverse dynamic objects in a driving log. OmniRe builds dynamic neural scene graphs based on Gaussian representations and constructs multiple local canonical spaces that model various dynamic actors, including vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, among many others. This capability is unmatched by existing methods. OmniRe allows us to holistically reconstruct different objects present in the scene, subsequently enabling the simulation of reconstructed scenarios with all actors participating in real-time (~60Hz). Extensive evaluations on the Waymo dataset show that our approach outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively by a large margin. We believe our work fills a critical gap in driving reconstruction.

Adapting a Foundation Model for Space-based Tasks

Foundation models, e.g., large language models, possess attributes of intelligence which offer promise to endow a robot with the contextual understanding necessary to navigate complex, unstructured tasks in the wild. In the future of space robotics, we see three core challenges which motivate the use of a foundation model adapted to space-based applications: 1) Scalability of ground-in-the-loop operations; 2) Generalizing prior knowledge to novel environments; and 3) Multi-modality in tasks and sensor data. Therefore, as a first-step towards building a foundation model for space-based applications, we automatically label the AI4Mars dataset to curate a language annotated dataset of visual-question-answer tuples. We fine-tune a pretrained LLaVA checkpoint on this dataset to endow a vision-language model with the ability to perform spatial reasoning and navigation on Mars' surface. In this work, we demonstrate that 1) existing vision-language models are deficient visual reasoners in space-based applications, and 2) fine-tuning a vision-language model on extraterrestrial data significantly improves the quality of responses even with a limited training dataset of only a few thousand samples.

Text2Interaction: Establishing Safe and Preferable Human-Robot Interaction

Adjusting robot behavior to human preferences can require intensive human feedback, preventing quick adaptation to new users and changing circumstances. Moreover, current approaches typically treat user preferences as a reward, which requires a manual balance between task success and user satisfaction. To integrate new user preferences in a zero-shot manner, our proposed Text2Interaction framework invokes large language models to generate a task plan, motion preferences as Python code, and parameters of a safe controller. By maximizing the combined probability of task completion and user satisfaction instead of a weighted sum of rewards, we can reliably find plans that fulfill both requirements. We find that 83% of users working with Text2Interaction agree that it integrates their preferences into the robot's plan, and 94% prefer Text2Interaction over the baseline. Our ablation study shows that Text2Interaction aligns better with unseen preferences than other baselines while maintaining a high success rate.

Diagnostic Runtime Monitoring with Martingales

Machine learning systems deployed in safety-critical robotics settings must be robust to distribution shifts. However, system designers must understand the cause of a distribution shift in order to implement the appropriate intervention or mitigation strategy and prevent system failure. In this paper, we present a novel framework for diagnosing distribution shifts in a streaming fashion by deploying multiple stochastic martingales simultaneously. We show that knowledge of the underlying cause of a distribution shift can lead to proper interventions over the lifecycle of a deployed system. Our experimental framework can easily be adapted to different types of distribution shifts, models, and datasets. We find that our method outperforms existing work on diagnosing distribution shifts in terms of speed, accuracy, and flexibility, and validate the efficiency of our model in both simulated and live hardware settings.

Wolf: Captioning Everything with a World Summarization Framework

We propose Wolf, a WOrLd summarization Framework for accurate video captioning. Wolf is an automated captioning framework that adopts a mixture-of-experts approach, leveraging complementary strengths of Vision Language Models (VLMs). By utilizing both image and video models, our framework captures different levels of information and summarizes them efficiently. Our approach can be applied to enhance video understanding, auto-labeling, and captioning. To evaluate caption quality, we introduce CapScore, an LLM-based metric to assess the similarity and quality of generated captions compared to the ground truth captions. We further build four human-annotated datasets in three domains: autonomous driving, general scenes, and robotics, to facilitate comprehensive comparisons. We show that Wolf achieves superior captioning performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches from the research community (VILA1.5, CogAgent) and commercial solutions (Gemini-Pro-1.5, GPT-4V). For instance, in comparison with GPT-4V, Wolf improves CapScore both quality-wise by 55.6% and similarity-wise by 77.4% on challenging driving videos. Finally, we establish a benchmark for video captioning and introduce a leaderboard, aiming to accelerate advancements in video understanding, captioning, and data alignment. Leaderboard: https://wolfv0.github.io/leaderboard.html.

$VILA^2$: VILA Augmented VILA

Visual language models (VLMs) have rapidly progressed, driven by the success of large language models (LLMs). While model architectures and training infrastructures advance rapidly, data curation remains under-explored. When data quantity and quality become a bottleneck, existing work either directly crawls more raw data from the Internet that does not have a guarantee of data quality or distills from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4V / Gemini) causing the performance upper bounded by that model. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that includes a self-augment step and a specialist-augment step to iteratively improve data quality and model performance. In the self-augment step, a VLM recaptions its own pretraining data to enhance data quality, and then retrains from scratch using this refined dataset to improve model performance. This process can iterate for several rounds. Once self-augmentation saturates, we employ several specialist VLMs finetuned from the self-augmented VLM with domain-specific expertise, to further infuse specialist knowledge into the generalist VLM through task-oriented recaptioning and retraining. With the combined self-augmented and specialist-augmented training, we introduce $VILA^2$ (VILA-augmented-VILA), a VLM family that consistently improves the accuracy on a wide range of tasks over prior art, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on MMMU leaderboard among open-sourced models.

Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Reactive Planning with Large Language Models

Foundation models, e.g., large language models (LLMs), trained on internet-scale data possess zero-shot generalization capabilities that make them a promising technology towards detecting and mitigating out-of-distribution failure modes of robotic systems. Fully realizing this promise, however, poses two challenges: (i) mitigating the considerable computational expense of these models such that they may be applied online, and (ii) incorporating their judgement regarding potential anomalies into a safe control framework. In this work, we present a two-stage reasoning framework: First is a fast binary anomaly classifier that analyzes observations in an LLM embedding space, which may then trigger a slower fallback selection stage that utilizes the reasoning capabilities of generative LLMs. These stages correspond to branch points in a model predictive control strategy that maintains the joint feasibility of continuing along various fallback plans to account for the slow reasoner's latency as soon as an anomaly is detected, thus ensuring safety. We show that our fast anomaly classifier outperforms autoregressive reasoning with state-of-the-art GPT models, even when instantiated with relatively small language models. This enables our runtime monitor to improve the trustworthiness of dynamic robotic systems, such as quadrotors or autonomous vehicles, under resource and time constraints. Videos illustrating our approach in both simulation and real-world experiments are available on this project page: https://sites.google.com/view/aesop-llm.