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.

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.

Accelerating Online Mapping and Behavior Prediction via Direct BEV Feature Attention

Understanding road geometry is a critical component of the autonomous vehicle (AV) stack. While high-definition (HD) maps can readily provide such information, they suffer from high labeling and maintenance costs. Accordingly, many recent works have proposed methods for estimating HD maps online from sensor data. The vast majority of recent approaches encode multi-camera observations into an intermediate representation, e.g., a bird's eye view (BEV) grid, and produce vector map elements via a decoder. While this architecture is performant, it decimates much of the information encoded in the intermediate representation, preventing downstream tasks (e.g., behavior prediction) from leveraging them. In this work, we propose exposing the rich internal features of online map estimation methods and show how they enable more tightly integrating online mapping with trajectory forecasting. In doing so, we find that directly accessing internal BEV features yields up to 73% faster inference speeds and up to 29% more accurate predictions on the real-world nuScenes dataset.

Tokenize the World into Object-level Knowledge to Address Long-tail Events in Autonomous Driving

The autonomous driving industry is increasingly adopting end-to-end learning from sensory inputs to minimize human biases in system design. Traditional end-to-end driving models, however, suffer from long-tail events due to rare or unseen inputs within their training distributions. To address this, we propose TOKEN, a novel Multi-Modal Large Language Model (MM-LLM) that tokenizes the world into object-level knowledge, enabling better utilization of LLM's reasoning capabilities to enhance autonomous vehicle planning in long-tail scenarios. TOKEN effectively alleviates data scarcity and inefficient tokenization by leveraging a traditional end-to-end driving model to produce condensed and semantically enriched representations of the scene, which are optimized for LLM planning compatibility through deliberate representation and reasoning alignment training stages. Our results demonstrate that TOKEN excels in grounding, reasoning, and planning capabilities, outperforming existing frameworks with a 27% reduction in trajectory L2 error and a 39% decrease in collision rates in long-tail scenarios. Additionally, our work highlights the importance of representation alignment and structured reasoning in sparking the common-sense reasoning capabilities of MM-LLMs for effective planning.

Locomotion as Manipulation with ReachBot

Caves and lava tubes on the Moon and Mars are sites of geological and astrobiological interest but consist of terrain that is inaccessible with traditional robot locomotion. To support the exploration of these sites, we present ReachBot, a robot that uses extendable booms as appendages to manipulate itself with respect to irregular rock surfaces. The booms terminate in grippers equipped with microspines and provide ReachBot with a large workspace, allowing it to achieve force closure in enclosed spaces such as the walls of a lava tube. To propel ReachBot, we present a contact-before-motion planner for non-gaited legged locomotion that utilizes internal force control, similar to a multi-fingered hand, to keep its long, slender booms in tension. Motion planning also depends on finding and executing secure grips on rock features. We use a Monte Carlo simulation to inform gripper design and predict grasp strength and variability. Additionally, we use a two-step perception system to identify possible grasp locations. To validate our approach and mechanisms under realistic conditions, we deployed a single ReachBot arm and gripper in a lava tube in the Mojave Desert. The field test confirmed that ReachBot will find many targets for secure grasps with the proposed kinematic design.

NAVSIM: Data-Driven Non-Reactive Autonomous Vehicle Simulation and Benchmarking

Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

Martian Exploration of Lava Tubes (MELT) with ReachBot: Scientific Investigation and Concept of Operations

As natural access points to the subsurface, lava tubes and other caves have become premier targets of planetary missions for astrobiological analyses. Few existing robotic paradigms, however, are able to explore such challenging environments. ReachBot is a robot that enables navigation in planetary caves by using extendable and retractable limbs to locomote. This paper outlines the potential science return and mission operations for a notional mission that deploys ReachBot to a martian lava tube. In this work, the motivating science goals and science traceability matrix are provided to guide payload selection. A Concept of Operations (ConOps) is also developed for ReachBot, providing a framework for deployment and activities on Mars, analyzing mission risks, and developing mitigation strategies