MMRo: Are Multimodal LLMs Eligible as the Brain for In-Home Robotics?

It is fundamentally challenging for robots to serve as useful assistants in human environments because this requires addressing a spectrum of sub-problems across robotics, including perception, language understanding, reasoning, and planning. The recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated their exceptional abilities in solving complex mathematical problems, mastering commonsense and abstract reasoning. This has led to the recent utilization of MLLMs as the brain in robotic systems, enabling these models to conduct high-level planning prior to triggering low-level control actions for task execution. However, it remains uncertain whether existing MLLMs are reliable in serving the brain role of robots. In this study, we introduce the first benchmark for evaluating Multimodal LLM for Robotic (MMRo) benchmark, which tests the capability of MLLMs for robot applications. Specifically, we identify four essential capabilities perception, task planning, visual reasoning, and safety measurement that MLLMs must possess to qualify as the robot's central processing unit. We have developed several scenarios for each capability, resulting in a total of 14 metrics for evaluation. We present experimental results for various MLLMs, including both commercial and open-source models, to assess the performance of existing systems. Our findings indicate that no single model excels in all areas, suggesting that current MLLMs are not yet trustworthy enough to serve as the cognitive core for robots. Our data can be found in https://mm-robobench.github.io/.

Mipha: A Comprehensive Overhaul of Multimodal Assistant with Small Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased impressive skills in tasks related to visual understanding and reasoning. Yet, their widespread application faces obstacles due to the high computational demands during both the training and inference phases, restricting their use to a limited audience within the research and user communities. In this paper, we investigate the design aspects of Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) and propose an efficient multimodal assistant named Mipha, which is designed to create synergy among various aspects: visual representation, language models, and optimization strategies. We show that without increasing the volume of training data, our Mipha-3B outperforms the state-of-the-art large MLLMs, especially LLaVA-1.5-13B, on multiple benchmarks. Through detailed discussion, we provide insights and guidelines for developing strong MSLMs that rival the capabilities of MLLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuyiche/Mipha.

Language-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation with Fast and Slow Thinking

The language-conditioned robotic manipulation aims to transfer natural language instructions into executable actions, from simple pick-and-place to tasks requiring intent recognition and visual reasoning. Inspired by the dual process theory in cognitive science, which suggests two parallel systems of fast and slow thinking in human decision-making, we introduce Robotics with Fast and Slow Thinking (RFST), a framework that mimics human cognitive architecture to classify tasks and makes decisions on two systems based on instruction types. Our RFST consists of two key components: 1) an instruction discriminator to determine which system should be activated based on the current user instruction, and 2) a slow-thinking system that is comprised of a fine-tuned vision language model aligned with the policy networks, which allows the robot to recognize user intention or perform reasoning tasks. To assess our methodology, we built a dataset featuring real-world trajectories, capturing actions ranging from spontaneous impulses to tasks requiring deliberate contemplation. Our results, both in simulation and real-world scenarios, confirm that our approach adeptly manages intricate tasks that demand intent recognition and reasoning. The project is available at https://jlm-z.github.io/RSFT/

Visual Robotic Manipulation with Depth-Aware Pretraining

Recent work on visual representation learning has shown to be efficient for robotic manipulation tasks. However, most existing works pretrained the visual backbone solely on 2D images or egocentric videos, ignoring the fact that robots learn to act in 3D space, which is hard to learn from 2D observation. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of pretraining for vision backbone with public-available large-scale 3D data to improve manipulation policy learning. Our method, namely Depth-aware Pretraining for Robotics (DPR), enables an RGB-only backbone to learn 3D scene representations from self-supervised contrastive learning, where depth information serves as auxiliary knowledge. No 3D information is necessary during manipulation policy learning and inference, making our model enjoy both efficiency and effectiveness in 3D space manipulation. Furthermore, we introduce a new way to inject robots' proprioception into the policy networks that makes the manipulation model robust and generalizable. We demonstrate in experiments that our proposed framework improves performance on unseen objects and visual environments for various robotics tasks on both simulated and real robots.

Object-Centric Instruction Augmentation for Robotic Manipulation

Humans interpret scenes by recognizing both the identities and positions of objects in their observations. For a robot to perform tasks such as \enquote{pick and place}, understanding both what the objects are and where they are located is crucial. While the former has been extensively discussed in the literature that uses the large language model to enrich the text descriptions, the latter remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce the \textit{Object-Centric Instruction Augmentation (OCI)} framework to augment highly semantic and information-dense language instruction with position cues. We utilize a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) to weave knowledge of object locations into natural language instruction, thus aiding the policy network in mastering actions for versatile manipulation. Additionally, we present a feature reuse mechanism to integrate the vision-language features from off-the-shelf pre-trained MLLM into policy networks. Through a series of simulated and real-world robotic tasks, we demonstrate that robotic manipulator imitation policies trained with our enhanced instructions outperform those relying solely on traditional language instructions.

Exploring Gradient Explosion in Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) stands as a cornerstone approach in imitation learning. This paper investigates the gradient explosion in two types of GAIL: GAIL with deterministic policy (DE-GAIL) and GAIL with stochastic policy (ST-GAIL). We begin with the observation that the training can be highly unstable for DE-GAIL at the beginning of the training phase and end up divergence. Conversely, the ST-GAIL training trajectory remains consistent, reliably converging. To shed light on these disparities, we provide an explanation from a theoretical perspective. By establishing a probabilistic lower bound for GAIL, we demonstrate that gradient explosion is an inevitable outcome for DE-GAIL due to occasionally large expert-imitator policy disparity, whereas ST-GAIL does not have the issue with it. To substantiate our assertion, we illustrate how modifications in the reward function can mitigate the gradient explosion challenge. Finally, we propose CREDO, a simple yet effective strategy that clips the reward function during the training phase, allowing the GAIL to enjoy high data efficiency and stable trainability.

PMNN:Physical Model-driven Neural Network for solving time-fractional differential equations

In this paper, an innovative Physical Model-driven Neural Network (PMNN) method is proposed to solve time-fractional differential equations. It establishes a temporal iteration scheme based on physical model-driven neural networks which effectively combines deep neural networks (DNNs) with interpolation approximation of fractional derivatives. Specifically, once the fractional differential operator is discretized, DNNs are employed as a bridge to integrate interpolation approximation techniques with differential equations. On the basis of this integration, we construct a neural-based iteration scheme. Subsequently, by training DNNs to learn this temporal iteration scheme, approximate solutions to the differential equations can be obtained. The proposed method aims to preserve the intrinsic physical information within the equations as far as possible. It fully utilizes the powerful fitting capability of neural networks while maintaining the efficiency of the difference schemes for fractional differential equations. Moreover, we validate the efficiency and accuracy of PMNN through several numerical experiments.

Recognizable Information Bottleneck

Information Bottlenecks (IBs) learn representations that generalize to unseen data by information compression. However, existing IBs are practically unable to guarantee generalization in real-world scenarios due to the vacuous generalization bound. The recent PAC-Bayes IB uses information complexity instead of information compression to establish a connection with the mutual information generalization bound. However, it requires the computation of expensive second-order curvature, which hinders its practical application. In this paper, we establish the connection between the recognizability of representations and the recent functional conditional mutual information (f-CMI) generalization bound, which is significantly easier to estimate. On this basis we propose a Recognizable Information Bottleneck (RIB) which regularizes the recognizability of representations through a recognizability critic optimized by density ratio matching under the Bregman divergence. Extensive experiments on several commonly used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in regularizing the model and estimating the generalization gap.

CP$^3$: Channel Pruning Plug-in for Point-based Networks

Channel pruning can effectively reduce both computational cost and memory footprint of the original network while keeping a comparable accuracy performance. Though great success has been achieved in channel pruning for 2D image-based convolutional networks (CNNs), existing works seldom extend the channel pruning methods to 3D point-based neural networks (PNNs). Directly implementing the 2D CNN channel pruning methods to PNNs undermine the performance of PNNs because of the different representations of 2D images and 3D point clouds as well as the network architecture disparity. In this paper, we proposed CP$^3$, which is a Channel Pruning Plug-in for Point-based network. CP$^3$ is elaborately designed to leverage the characteristics of point clouds and PNNs in order to enable 2D channel pruning methods for PNNs. Specifically, it presents a coordinate-enhanced channel importance metric to reflect the correlation between dimensional information and individual channel features, and it recycles the discarded points in PNN's sampling process and reconsiders their potentially-exclusive information to enhance the robustness of channel pruning. Experiments on various PNN architectures show that CP$^3$ constantly improves state-of-the-art 2D CNN pruning approaches on different point cloud tasks. For instance, our compressed PointNeXt-S on ScanObjectNN achieves an accuracy of 88.52% with a pruning rate of 57.8%, outperforming the baseline pruning methods with an accuracy gain of 1.94%.

Label-Guided Auxiliary Training Improves 3D Object Detector

Detecting 3D objects from point clouds is a practical yet challenging task that has attracted increasing attention recently. In this paper, we propose a Label-Guided auxiliary training method for 3D object detection (LG3D), which serves as an auxiliary network to enhance the feature learning of existing 3D object detectors. Specifically, we propose two novel modules: a Label-Annotation-Inducer that maps annotations and point clouds in bounding boxes to task-specific representations and a Label-Knowledge-Mapper that assists the original features to obtain detection-critical representations. The proposed auxiliary network is discarded in inference and thus has no extra computational cost at test time. We conduct extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets to verify the effectiveness of our approach. For example, our proposed LG3D improves VoteNet by 2.5% and 3.1% mAP on the SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2 datasets, respectively.