Reliable Robotic Task Execution in the Face of Anomalies

Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying policies without the ability to recognise and react to failures may lead to unreliable and unsafe robot behaviour. In this paper, we present a framework that couples a learned policy with a method to detect visual anomalies during policy deployment and to perform recovery behaviours when necessary, thereby aiming to prevent failures. Specifically, we train an anomaly detection model using data collected during nominal executions of a trained policy. This model is then integrated into the online policy execution process, so that deviations from the nominal execution can trigger a three-level sequential recovery process that consists of (i) pausing the execution temporarily, (ii) performing a local perturbation of the robot's state, and (iii) resetting the robot to a safe state by sampling from a learned execution success model. We verify our proposed method in two different scenarios: (i) a door handle reaching task with a Kinova Gen3 arm using a policy trained in simulation and transferred to the real robot, and (ii) an object placing task with a UFactory xArm 6 using a general-purpose policy model. Our results show that integrating policy execution with anomaly detection and recovery increases the execution success rate in environments with various anomalies, such as trajectory deviations and adversarial human interventions.

GG-BBQ: German Gender Bias Benchmark for Question Answering

Within the context of Natural Language Processing (NLP), fairness evaluation is often associated with the assessment of bias and reduction of associated harm. In this regard, the evaluation is usually carried out by using a benchmark dataset, for a task such as Question Answering, created for the measurement of bias in the model's predictions along various dimensions, including gender identity. In our work, we evaluate gender bias in German Large Language Models (LLMs) using the Bias Benchmark for Question Answering by Parrish et al. (2022) as a reference. Specifically, the templates in the gender identity subset of this English dataset were machine translated into German. The errors in the machine translated templates were then manually reviewed and corrected with the help of a language expert. We find that manual revision of the translation is crucial when creating datasets for gender bias evaluation because of the limitations of machine translation from English to a language such as German with grammatical gender. Our final dataset is comprised of two subsets: Subset-I, which consists of group terms related to gender identity, and Subset-II, where group terms are replaced with proper names. We evaluate several LLMs used for German NLP on this newly created dataset and report the accuracy and bias scores. The results show that all models exhibit bias, both along and against existing social stereotypes.