Continuous Versatile Jumping Using Learned Action Residuals

Jumping is essential for legged robots to traverse through difficult terrains. In this work, we propose a hierarchical framework that combines optimal control and reinforcement learning to learn continuous jumping motions for quadrupedal robots. The core of our framework is a stance controller, which combines a manually designed acceleration controller with a learned residual policy. As the acceleration controller warm starts policy for efficient training, the trained policy overcomes the limitation of the acceleration controller and improves the jumping stability. In addition, a low-level whole-body controller converts the body pose command from the stance controller to motor commands. After training in simulation, our framework can be deployed directly to the real robot, and perform versatile, continuous jumping motions, including omni-directional jumps at up to 50cm high, 60cm forward, and jump-turning at up to 90 degrees. Please visit our website for more results: https://sites.google.com/view/learning-to-jump.

Constrained Decision Transformer for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem from a novel multi-objective optimization perspective and propose the $\epsilon$-reducible concept to characterize problem difficulties. The inherent trade-offs between safety and task performance inspire us to propose the constrained decision transformer (CDT) approach, which can dynamically adjust the trade-offs during deployment. Extensive experiments show the advantages of the proposed method in learning an adaptive, safe, robust, and high-reward policy. CDT outperforms its variants and strong offline safe RL baselines by a large margin with the same hyperparameters across all tasks, while keeping the zero-shot adaptation capability to different constraint thresholds, making our approach more suitable for real-world RL under constraints.

A Survey of Deep Learning for Mathematical Reasoning

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.

APOLLO: A Simple Approach for Adaptive Pretraining of Language Models for Logical Reasoning

Logical reasoning of text is an important ability that requires understanding the information present in the text, their interconnections, and then reasoning through them to infer new conclusions. Prior works on improving the logical reasoning ability of language models require complex processing of training data (e.g., aligning symbolic knowledge to text), yielding task-specific data augmentation solutions that restrict the learning of general logical reasoning skills. In this work, we propose APOLLO, an adaptively pretrained language model that has improved logical reasoning abilities. We select a subset of Wikipedia, based on a set of logical inference keywords, for continued pretraining of a language model. We use two self-supervised loss functions: a modified masked language modeling loss where only specific parts-of-speech words, that would likely require more reasoning than basic language understanding, are masked, and a sentence-level classification loss that teaches the model to distinguish between entailment and contradiction types of sentences. The proposed training paradigm is both simple and independent of task formats. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APOLLO by comparing it with prior baselines on two logical reasoning datasets. APOLLO performs comparably on ReClor and outperforms baselines on LogiQA.

Efficient Learning of Voltage Control Strategies via Model-based Deep Reinforcement Learning

This article proposes a model-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method to design emergency control strategies for short-term voltage stability problems in power systems. Recent advances show promising results in model-free DRL-based methods for power systems, but model-free methods suffer from poor sample efficiency and training time, both critical for making state-of-the-art DRL algorithms practically applicable. DRL-agent learns an optimal policy via a trial-and-error method while interacting with the real-world environment. And it is desirable to minimize the direct interaction of the DRL agent with the real-world power grid due to its safety-critical nature. Additionally, state-of-the-art DRL-based policies are mostly trained using a physics-based grid simulator where dynamic simulation is computationally intensive, lowering the training efficiency. We propose a novel model-based-DRL framework where a deep neural network (DNN)-based dynamic surrogate model, instead of a real-world power-grid or physics-based simulation, is utilized with the policy learning framework, making the process faster and sample efficient. However, stabilizing model-based DRL is challenging because of the complex system dynamics of large-scale power systems. We solved these issues by incorporating imitation learning to have a warm start in policy learning, reward-shaping, and multi-step surrogate loss. Finally, we achieved 97.5% sample efficiency and 87.7% training efficiency for an application to the IEEE 300-bus test system.

Empowering Language Models with Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Question Answering

Answering open-domain questions requires world knowledge about in-context entities. As pre-trained Language Models (LMs) lack the power to store all required knowledge, external knowledge sources, such as knowledge graphs, are often used to augment LMs. In this work, we propose knOwledge REasOning empowered Language Model (OREO-LM), which consists of a novel Knowledge Interaction Layer that can be flexibly plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. In this way, LM guides KG to walk towards the desired answer, while the retrieved knowledge improves LM. By adopting OREO-LM to RoBERTa and T5, we show significant performance gain, achieving state-of-art results in the Closed-Book setting. The performance enhancement is mainly from the KG reasoning's capacity to infer missing relational facts. In addition, OREO-LM provides reasoning paths as rationales to interpret the model's decision.

SOTIF Entropy: Online SOTIF Risk Quantification and Mitigation for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving confronts great challenges in complex traffic scenarios, where the risk of Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) can be triggered by the dynamic operational environment and system insufficiencies. The SOTIF risk is reflected not only intuitively in the collision risk with objects outside the autonomous vehicles (AVs), but also inherently in the performance limitation risk of the implemented algorithms themselves. How to minimize the SOTIF risk for autonomous driving is currently a critical, difficult, and unresolved issue. Therefore, this paper proposes the "Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System" as a systematic approach to online minimize the SOTIF risk, which aims to provide a systematic solution for monitoring, quantification, and mitigation of inherent and external risks. The core of this system is the risk monitoring of the implemented artificial intelligence algorithms within the AV. As a demonstration of the Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System, the risk monitoring of the perception algorithm, i.e., YOLOv5 is highlighted. Moreover, the inherent perception algorithm risk and external collision risk are jointly quantified via SOTIF entropy, which is then propagated downstream to the decision-making module and mitigated. Finally, several challenging scenarios are demonstrated, and the Hardware-in-the-Loop experiments are conducted to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the system. The results demonstrate that the Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System enables dependable online monitoring, quantification, and mitigation of SOTIF risk in real-time critical traffic environments.

Retrieval Augmentation for Commonsense Reasoning: A Unified Approach

A common thread of retrieval-augmented methods in the existing literature focuses on retrieving encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, which facilitates well-defined entity and relation spaces that can be modeled. However, applying such methods to commonsense reasoning tasks faces two unique challenges, i.e., the lack of a general large-scale corpus for retrieval and a corresponding effective commonsense retriever. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to leverage commonsense knowledge retrieval to improve commonsense reasoning tasks. We proposed a unified framework of retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning (called RACo), including a newly constructed commonsense corpus with over 20 million documents and novel strategies for training a commonsense retriever. We conducted experiments on four different commonsense reasoning tasks. Extensive evaluation results showed that our proposed RACo can significantly outperform other knowledge-enhanced method counterparts, achieving new SoTA performance on the CommonGen and CREAK leaderboards.

Task Compass: Scaling Multi-task Pre-training with Task Prefix

Leveraging task-aware annotated data as supervised signals to assist with self-supervised learning on large-scale unlabeled data has become a new trend in pre-training language models. Existing studies show that multi-task learning with large-scale supervised tasks suffers from negative effects across tasks. To tackle the challenge, we propose a task prefix guided multi-task pre-training framework to explore the relationships among tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on 40 datasets, which show that our model can not only serve as the strong foundation backbone for a wide range of tasks but also be feasible as a probing tool for analyzing task relationships. The task relationships reflected by the prefixes align transfer learning performance between tasks. They also suggest directions for data augmentation with complementary tasks, which help our model achieve human-parity results on commonsense reasoning leaderboards. Code is available at https://github.com/cooelf/CompassMTL

Grape: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Passage Reader for Open-domain Question Answering

A common thread of open-domain question answering (QA) models employs a retriever-reader pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant passages from Wikipedia and then peruses the passages to produce an answer. However, even state-of-the-art readers fail to capture the complex relationships between entities appearing in questions and retrieved passages, leading to answers that contradict the facts. In light of this, we propose a novel knowledge Graph enhanced passage reader, namely Grape, to improve the reader performance for open-domain QA. Specifically, for each pair of question and retrieved passage, we first construct a localized bipartite graph, attributed to entity embeddings extracted from the intermediate layer of the reader model. Then, a graph neural network learns relational knowledge while fusing graph and contextual representations into the hidden states of the reader model. Experiments on three open-domain QA benchmarks show Grape can improve the state-of-the-art performance by up to 2.2 exact match score with a negligible overhead increase, with the same retriever and retrieved passages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jumxglhf/GRAPE.