LLM3:Large Language Model-based Task and Motion Planning with Motion Failure Reasoning

Conventional Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) approaches rely on manually crafted interfaces connecting symbolic task planning with continuous motion generation. These domain-specific and labor-intensive modules are limited in addressing emerging tasks in real-world settings. Here, we present LLM^3, a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based TAMP framework featuring a domain-independent interface. Specifically, we leverage the powerful reasoning and planning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs to propose symbolic action sequences and select continuous action parameters for motion planning. Crucially, LLM^3 incorporates motion planning feedback through prompting, allowing the LLM to iteratively refine its proposals by reasoning about motion failure. Consequently, LLM^3 interfaces between task planning and motion planning, alleviating the intricate design process of handling domain-specific messages between them. Through a series of simulations in a box-packing domain, we quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM^3 in solving TAMP problems and the efficiency in selecting action parameters. Ablation studies underscore the significant contribution of motion failure reasoning to the success of LLM^3. Furthermore, we conduct qualitative experiments on a physical manipulator, demonstrating the practical applicability of our approach in real-world settings.

GeoGalactica: A Scientific Large Language Model in Geoscience

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved huge success for their general knowledge and ability to solve a wide spectrum of tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Due to their impressive abilities, LLMs have shed light on potential inter-discipline applications to foster scientific discoveries of a specific domain by using artificial intelligence (AI for science, AI4S). In the meantime, utilizing NLP techniques in geoscience research and practice is wide and convoluted, contributing from knowledge extraction and document classification to question answering and knowledge discovery. In this work, we take the initial step to leverage LLM for science, through a rather straightforward approach. We try to specialize an LLM into geoscience, by further pre-training the model with a vast amount of texts in geoscience, as well as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) the resulting model with our custom collected instruction tuning dataset. These efforts result in a model GeoGalactica consisting of 30 billion parameters. To our best knowledge, it is the largest language model for the geoscience domain. More specifically, GeoGalactica is from further pre-training of Galactica. We train GeoGalactica over a geoscience-related text corpus containing 65 billion tokens curated from extensive data sources in the big science project Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), preserving as the largest geoscience-specific text corpus. Then we fine-tune the model with 1 million pairs of instruction-tuning data consisting of questions that demand professional geoscience knowledge to answer. In this technical report, we will illustrate in detail all aspects of GeoGalactica, including data collection, data cleaning, base model selection, pre-training, SFT, and evaluation. We open-source our data curation tools and the checkpoints of GeoGalactica during the first 3/4 of pre-training.

A Multimodal Ecological Civilization Pattern Recommendation Method Based on Large Language Models and Knowledge Graph

The Ecological Civilization Pattern Recommendation System (ECPRS) aims to recommend suitable ecological civilization patterns for target regions, promoting sustainable development and reducing regional disparities. However, the current representative recommendation methods are not suitable for recommending ecological civilization patterns in a geographical context. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, regions have spatial heterogeneity, and the (ECPRS)needs to consider factors like climate, topography, vegetation, etc., to recommend civilization patterns adapted to specific ecological environments, ensuring the feasibility and practicality of the recommendations. Secondly, the abstract features of the ecological civilization patterns in the real world have not been fully utilized., resulting in poor richness in their embedding representations and consequently, lower performance of the recommendation system. Considering these limitations, we propose the ECPR-MML method. Initially, based on the novel method UGPIG, we construct a knowledge graph to extract regional representations incorporating spatial heterogeneity features. Following that, inspired by the significant progress made by Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we employ Large LLMs to generate multimodal features for ecological civilization patterns in the form of text and images. We extract and integrate these multimodal features to obtain semantically rich representations of ecological civilization. Through extensive experiments, we validate the performance of our ECPR-MML model. Our results show that F1@5 is 2.11% higher compared to state-of-the-art models, 2.02% higher than NGCF, and 1.16% higher than UGPIG. Furthermore, multimodal data can indeed enhance recommendation performance. However, the data generated by LLM is not as effective as real data to a certain extent.

Hybrid Reinforcement Learning for Optimizing Pump Sustainability in Real-World Water Distribution Networks

This article addresses the pump-scheduling optimization problem to enhance real-time control of real-world water distribution networks (WDNs). Our primary objectives are to adhere to physical operational constraints while reducing energy consumption and operational costs. Traditional optimization techniques, such as evolution-based and genetic algorithms, often fall short due to their lack of convergence guarantees. Conversely, reinforcement learning (RL) stands out for its adaptability to uncertainties and reduced inference time, enabling real-time responsiveness. However, the effective implementation of RL is contingent on building accurate simulation models for WDNs, and prior applications have been limited by errors in simulation training data. These errors can potentially cause the RL agent to learn misleading patterns and actions and recommend suboptimal operational strategies. To overcome these challenges, we present an improved "hybrid RL" methodology. This method integrates the benefits of RL while anchoring it in historical data, which serves as a baseline to incrementally introduce optimal control recommendations. By leveraging operational data as a foundation for the agent's actions, we enhance the explainability of the agent's actions, foster more robust recommendations, and minimize error. Our findings demonstrate that the hybrid RL agent can significantly improve sustainability, operational efficiency, and dynamically adapt to emerging scenarios in real-world WDNs.

Unveiling Optimal SDG Pathways: An Innovative Approach Leveraging Graph Pruning and Intent Graph for Effective Recommendations

The recommendation of appropriate development pathways, also known as ecological civilization patterns for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (namely, sustainable development patterns), are of utmost importance for promoting ecological, economic, social, and resource sustainability in a specific region. To achieve this, the recommendation process must carefully consider the region's natural, environmental, resource, and economic characteristics. However, current recommendation algorithms in the field of computer science fall short in adequately addressing the spatial heterogeneity related to environment and sparsity of regional historical interaction data, which limits their effectiveness in recommending sustainable development patterns. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a method called User Graph after Pruning and Intent Graph (UGPIG). Firstly, we utilize the high-density linking capability of the pruned User Graph to address the issue of spatial heterogeneity neglect in recommendation algorithms. Secondly, we construct an Intent Graph by incorporating the intent network, which captures the preferences for attributes including environmental elements of target regions. This approach effectively alleviates the problem of sparse historical interaction data in the region. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that UGPIG outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms like KGCN, KGAT, and KGIN in sustainable development pattern recommendations, with a maximum improvement of 9.61% in Top-3 recommendation performance.

Compensating Removed Frequency Components: Thwarting Voice Spectrum Reduction Attacks

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) provides diverse audio-to-text services for humans to communicate with machines. However, recent research reveals ASR systems are vulnerable to various malicious audio attacks. In particular, by removing the non-essential frequency components, a new spectrum reduction attack can generate adversarial audios that can be perceived by humans but cannot be correctly interpreted by ASR systems. It raises a new challenge for content moderation solutions to detect harmful content in audio and video available on social media platforms. In this paper, we propose an acoustic compensation system named ACE to counter the spectrum reduction attacks over ASR systems. Our system design is based on two observations, namely, frequency component dependencies and perturbation sensitivity. First, since the Discrete Fourier Transform computation inevitably introduces spectral leakage and aliasing effects to the audio frequency spectrum, the frequency components with similar frequencies will have a high correlation. Thus, considering the intrinsic dependencies between neighboring frequency components, it is possible to recover more of the original audio by compensating for the removed components based on the remaining ones. Second, since the removed components in the spectrum reduction attacks can be regarded as an inverse of adversarial noise, the attack success rate will decrease when the adversarial audio is replayed in an over-the-air scenario. Hence, we can model the acoustic propagation process to add over-the-air perturbations into the attacked audio. We implement a prototype of ACE and the experiments show ACE can effectively reduce up to 87.9% of ASR inference errors caused by spectrum reduction attacks. Also, by analyzing residual errors, we summarize six general types of ASR inference errors and investigate the error causes and potential mitigation solutions.

Liver Tumor Screening and Diagnosis in CT with Pixel-Lesion-Patient Network

Liver tumor segmentation and classification are important tasks in computer aided diagnosis. We aim to address three problems: liver tumor screening and preliminary diagnosis in non-contrast computed tomography (CT), and differential diagnosis in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT. A novel framework named Pixel-Lesion-pAtient Network (PLAN) is proposed. It uses a mask transformer to jointly segment and classify each lesion with improved anchor queries and a foreground-enhanced sampling loss. It also has an image-wise classifier to effectively aggregate global information and predict patient-level diagnosis. A large-scale multi-phase dataset is collected containing 939 tumor patients and 810 normal subjects. 4010 tumor instances of eight types are extensively annotated. On the non-contrast tumor screening task, PLAN achieves 95% and 96% in patient-level sensitivity and specificity. On contrast-enhanced CT, our lesion-level detection precision, recall, and classification accuracy are 92%, 89%, and 86%, outperforming widely used CNN and transformers for lesion segmentation. We also conduct a reader study on a holdout set of 250 cases. PLAN is on par with a senior human radiologist, showing the clinical significance of our results.

Asymmetric Patch Sampling for Contrastive Learning

Asymmetric appearance between positive pair effectively reduces the risk of representation degradation in contrastive learning. However, there are still a mass of appearance similarities between positive pair constructed by the existing methods, which inhibits the further representation improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric patch sampling strategy for contrastive learning, to further boost the appearance asymmetry for better representations. Specifically, dual patch sampling strategies are applied to the given image, to obtain asymmetric positive pairs. First, sparse patch sampling is conducted to obtain the first view, which reduces spatial redundancy of image and allows a more asymmetric view. Second, a selective patch sampling is proposed to construct another view with large appearance discrepancy relative to the first one. Due to the inappreciable appearance similarity between positive pair, the trained model is encouraged to capture the similarity on semantics, instead of low-level ones. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the existing self-supervised methods on both ImageNet-1K and CIFAR dataset, e.g., 2.5% finetune accuracy improvement on CIFAR100. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on downstream tasks, object detection and instance segmentation on COCO.Additionally, compared to other self-supervised methods, our method is more efficient on both memory and computation during training. The source code is available at https://github.com/visresearch/aps.

T-NGA: Temporal Network Grafting Algorithm for Learning to Process Spiking Audio Sensor Events

Spiking silicon cochlea sensors encode sound as an asynchronous stream of spikes from different frequency channels. The lack of labeled training datasets for spiking cochleas makes it difficult to train deep neural networks on the outputs of these sensors. This work proposes a self-supervised method called Temporal Network Grafting Algorithm (T-NGA), which grafts a recurrent network pretrained on spectrogram features so that the network works with the cochlea event features. T-NGA training requires only temporally aligned audio spectrograms and event features. Our experiments show that the accuracy of the grafted network was similar to the accuracy of a supervised network trained from scratch on a speech recognition task using events from a software spiking cochlea model. Despite the circuit non-idealities of the spiking silicon cochlea, the grafted network accuracy on the silicon cochlea spike recordings was only about 5% lower than the supervised network accuracy using the N-TIDIGITS18 dataset. T-NGA can train networks to process spiking audio sensor events in the absence of large labeled spike datasets.

Joint Mind Modeling for Explanation Generation in Complex Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

Human collaborators can effectively communicate with their partners to finish a common task by inferring each other's mental states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and desires). Such mind-aware communication minimizes the discrepancy among collaborators' mental states, and is crucial to the success in human ad-hoc teaming. We believe that robots collaborating with human users should demonstrate similar pedagogic behavior. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel explainable AI (XAI) framework for achieving human-like communication in human-robot collaborations, where the robot builds a hierarchical mind model of the human user and generates explanations of its own mind as a form of communications based on its online Bayesian inference of the user's mental state. To evaluate our framework, we conduct a user study on a real-time human-robot cooking task. Experimental results show that the generated explanations of our approach significantly improves the collaboration performance and user perception of the robot. Code and video demos are available on our project website: https://xfgao.github.io/xCookingWeb/.