Motion-Conditioned Image Animation for Video Editing

We introduce MoCA, a Motion-Conditioned Image Animation approach for video editing. It leverages a simple decomposition of the video editing problem into image editing followed by motion-conditioned image animation. Furthermore, given the lack of robust evaluation datasets for video editing, we introduce a new benchmark that measures edit capability across a wide variety of tasks, such as object replacement, background changes, style changes, and motion edits. We present a comprehensive human evaluation of the latest video editing methods along with MoCA, on our proposed benchmark. MoCA establishes a new state-of-the-art, demonstrating greater human preference win-rate, and outperforming notable recent approaches including Dreamix (63%), MasaCtrl (75%), and Tune-A-Video (72%), with especially significant improvements for motion edits.

AlberDICE: Addressing Out-Of-Distribution Joint Actions in Offline Multi-Agent RL via Alternating Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation

One of the main challenges in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the distribution shift that arises from the learned policy deviating from the data collection policy. This is often addressed by avoiding out-of-distribution (OOD) actions during policy improvement as their presence can lead to substantial performance degradation. This challenge is amplified in the offline Multi-Agent RL (MARL) setting since the joint action space grows exponentially with the number of agents. To avoid this curse of dimensionality, existing MARL methods adopt either value decomposition methods or fully decentralized training of individual agents. However, even when combined with standard conservatism principles, these methods can still result in the selection of OOD joint actions in offline MARL. To this end, we introduce AlberDICE, an offline MARL algorithm that alternatively performs centralized training of individual agents based on stationary distribution optimization. AlberDICE circumvents the exponential complexity of MARL by computing the best response of one agent at a time while effectively avoiding OOD joint action selection. Theoretically, we show that the alternating optimization procedure converges to Nash policies. In the experiments, we demonstrate that AlberDICE significantly outperforms baseline algorithms on a standard suite of MARL benchmarks.

DreamSmooth: Improving Model-based Reinforcement Learning via Reward Smoothing

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we found that surprisingly, reward prediction is often a bottleneck of MBRL, especially for sparse rewards that are challenging (or even ambiguous) to predict. Motivated by the intuition that humans can learn from rough reward estimates, we propose a simple yet effective reward smoothing approach, DreamSmooth, which learns to predict a temporally-smoothed reward, instead of the exact reward at the given timestep. We empirically show that DreamSmooth achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon sparse-reward tasks both in sample efficiency and final performance without losing performance on common benchmarks, such as Deepmind Control Suite and Atari benchmarks.

Tensor Trust: Interpretable Prompt Injection Attacks from an Online Game

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in real-world applications, they remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks: malicious third party prompts that subvert the intent of the system designer. To help researchers study this problem, we present a dataset of over 126,000 prompt injection attacks and 46,000 prompt-based "defenses" against prompt injection, all created by players of an online game called Tensor Trust. To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the largest dataset of human-generated adversarial examples for instruction-following LLMs. The attacks in our dataset have a lot of easily interpretable stucture, and shed light on the weaknesses of LLMs. We also use the dataset to create a benchmark for resistance to two types of prompt injection, which we refer to as prompt extraction and prompt hijacking. Our benchmark results show that many models are vulnerable to the attack strategies in the Tensor Trust dataset. Furthermore, we show that some attack strategies from the dataset generalize to deployed LLM-based applications, even though they have a very different set of constraints to the game. We release all data and source code at https://tensortrust.ai/paper

The Power of the Senses: Generalizable Manipulation from Vision and Touch through Masked Multimodal Learning

Humans rely on the synergy of their senses for most essential tasks. For tasks requiring object manipulation, we seamlessly and effectively exploit the complementarity of our senses of vision and touch. This paper draws inspiration from such capabilities and aims to find a systematic approach to fuse visual and tactile information in a reinforcement learning setting. We propose Masked Multimodal Learning (M3L), which jointly learns a policy and visual-tactile representations based on masked autoencoding. The representations jointly learned from vision and touch improve sample efficiency, and unlock generalization capabilities beyond those achievable through each of the senses separately. Remarkably, representations learned in a multimodal setting also benefit vision-only policies at test time. We evaluate M3L on three simulated environments with both visual and tactile observations: robotic insertion, door opening, and dexterous in-hand manipulation, demonstrating the benefits of learning a multimodal policy. Code and videos of the experiments are available at https://sferrazza.cc/m3l_site.

Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress

In this short consensus paper, we outline risks from upcoming, advanced AI systems. We examine large-scale social harms and malicious uses, as well as an irreversible loss of human control over autonomous AI systems. In light of rapid and continuing AI progress, we propose priorities for AI R&D and governance.

Video Language Planning

We are interested in enabling visual planning for complex long-horizon tasks in the space of generated videos and language, leveraging recent advances in large generative models pretrained on Internet-scale data. To this end, we present video language planning (VLP), an algorithm that consists of a tree search procedure, where we train (i) vision-language models to serve as both policies and value functions, and (ii) text-to-video models as dynamics models. VLP takes as input a long-horizon task instruction and current image observation, and outputs a long video plan that provides detailed multimodal (video and language) specifications that describe how to complete the final task. VLP scales with increasing computation budget where more computation time results in improved video plans, and is able to synthesize long-horizon video plans across different robotics domains: from multi-object rearrangement, to multi-camera bi-arm dexterous manipulation. Generated video plans can be translated into real robot actions via goal-conditioned policies, conditioned on each intermediate frame of the generated video. Experiments show that VLP substantially improves long-horizon task success rates compared to prior methods on both simulated and real robots (across 3 hardware platforms).

Interactive Task Planning with Language Models

An interactive robot framework accomplishes long-horizon task planning and can easily generalize to new goals or distinct tasks, even during execution. However, most traditional methods require predefined module design, which makes it hard to generalize to different goals. Recent large language model based approaches can allow for more open-ended planning but often require heavy prompt engineering or domain-specific pretrained models. To tackle this, we propose a simple framework that achieves interactive task planning with language models. Our system incorporates both high-level planning and low-level function execution via language. We verify the robustness of our system in generating novel high-level instructions for unseen objectives and its ease of adaptation to different tasks by merely substituting the task guidelines, without the need for additional complex prompt engineering. Furthermore, when the user sends a new request, our system is able to replan accordingly with precision based on the new request, task guidelines and previously executed steps. Please check more details on our https://wuphilipp.github.io/itp_site and https://youtu.be/TrKLuyv26_g.

Exploration with Principles for Diverse AI Supervision

Training large transformers using next-token prediction has given rise to groundbreaking advancements in AI. While this generative AI approach has produced impressive results, it heavily leans on human supervision. Even state-of-the-art AI models like ChatGPT depend on fine-tuning through human demonstrations, demanding extensive human input and domain expertise. This strong reliance on human oversight poses a significant hurdle to the advancement of AI innovation. To address this limitation, we propose a novel paradigm termed Exploratory AI (EAI) aimed at autonomously generating high-quality training data. Drawing inspiration from unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) pretraining, EAI achieves exploration within the natural language space. We accomplish this by harnessing large language models to assess the novelty of generated content. Our approach employs two key components: an actor that generates novel content following exploration principles and a critic that evaluates the generated content, offering critiques to guide the actor. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that EAI significantly boosts model performance on complex reasoning tasks, addressing the limitations of human-intensive supervision.

Ring Attention with Blockwise Transformers for Near-Infinite Context

Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability to handle long sequences, thereby creating challenges for tasks involving extended sequences or long-term dependencies. We present a distinct approach, Ring Attention, which leverages blockwise computation of self-attention to distribute long sequences across multiple devices while overlapping the communication of key-value blocks with the computation of blockwise attention. Ring Attention enables training and inference of sequences that are up to device count times longer than those of prior memory-efficient Transformers, effectively eliminating the memory constraints imposed by individual devices. Extensive experiments on language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Ring Attention in allowing large sequence input size and improving performance.