Abstract:Transformer-based models have demonstrated superior performance in various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. However, their enormous model size and high demands in computation, memory, and communication limit their deployment to edge platforms for local, secure inference. Binary transformers offer a compact, low-complexity solution for edge deployment with reduced bandwidth needs and acceptable accuracy. However, existing binary transformers perform inefficiently on current hardware due to the lack of binary specific optimizations. To address this, we introduce COBRA, an algorithm-architecture co-optimized binary Transformer accelerator for edge computing. COBRA features a real 1-bit binary multiplication unit, enabling matrix operations with -1, 0, and +1 values, surpassing ternary methods. With further hardware-friendly optimizations in the attention block, COBRA achieves up to 3,894.7 GOPS throughput and 448.7 GOPS/Watt energy efficiency on edge FPGAs, delivering a 311x energy efficiency improvement over GPUs and a 3.5x throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art binary accelerator, with only negligible inference accuracy degradation.
Abstract:Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge platforms is challenged by their high computational and memory demands. Although recent low-bit quantization methods (e.g., BitNet, DeepSeek) compress weights to as little as 1.58 bits with minimal accuracy loss, edge deployment is still constrained by limited on-chip resources, power budgets, and the often-neglected latency of the prefill phase. We present TeLLMe, the first ternary LLM accelerator for low-power FPGAs (e.g., AMD KV260) that fully supports both prefill and autoregressive decoding using 1.58-bit weights and 8-bit activations. Our contributions include: (1) a table-lookup matrix engine for ternary matmul that merges grouped activations with online precomputation to minimize resource use; (2) a fused, bandwidth-efficient attention module featuring a reversed reordering scheme to accelerate prefill; and (3) a tightly integrated normalization and quantization--dequantization unit optimized for ultra-low-bit inference. Under a 7W power budget, TeLLMe delivers up to 9 tokens/s throughput over 1,024-token contexts and prefill latencies of 0.55--1.15 s for 64--128 token prompts, marking a significant energy-efficiency advance and establishing a new edge FPGA benchmark for generative AI.
Abstract:Automatically generating training supervision for embodied tasks is crucial, as manual designing is tedious and not scalable. While prior works use large language models (LLMs) or vision-language models (VLMs) to generate rewards, these approaches are largely limited to simple tasks with well-defined rewards, such as pick-and-place. This limitation arises because LLMs struggle to interpret complex scenes compressed into text or code due to their restricted input modality, while VLM-based rewards, though better at visual perception, remain limited by their less expressive output modality. To address these challenges, we leverage the imagination capability of general-purpose video generation models. Given an initial simulation frame and a textual task description, the video generation model produces a video demonstrating task completion with correct semantics. We then extract rich supervisory signals from the generated video, including 6D object pose sequences, 2D segmentations, and estimated depth, to facilitate task learning in simulation. Our approach significantly improves supervision quality for complex embodied tasks, enabling large-scale training in simulators.
Abstract:Robotic assembly remains a significant challenge due to complexities in visual perception, functional grasping, contact-rich manipulation, and performing high-precision tasks. Simulation-based learning and sim-to-real transfer have led to recent success in solving assembly tasks in the presence of object pose variation, perception noise, and control error; however, the development of a generalist (i.e., multi-task) agent for a broad range of assembly tasks has been limited by the need to manually curate assembly assets, which greatly constrains the number and diversity of assembly problems that can be used for policy learning. Inspired by recent success of using generative AI to scale up robot learning, we propose MatchMaker, a pipeline to automatically generate diverse, simulation-compatible assembly asset pairs to facilitate learning assembly skills. Specifically, MatchMaker can 1) take a simulation-incompatible, interpenetrating asset pair as input, and automatically convert it into a simulation-compatible, interpenetration-free pair, 2) take an arbitrary single asset as input, and generate a geometrically-mating asset to create an asset pair, 3) automatically erode contact surfaces from (1) or (2) according to a user-specified clearance parameter to generate realistic parts. We demonstrate that data generated by MatchMaker outperforms previous work in terms of diversity and effectiveness for downstream assembly skill learning. For videos and additional details, please see our project website: https://wangyian-me.github.io/MatchMaker/.
Abstract:3D articulated objects modeling has long been a challenging problem, since it requires to capture both accurate surface geometries and semantically meaningful and spatially precise structures, parts, and joints. Existing methods heavily depend on training data from a limited set of handcrafted articulated object categories (e.g., cabinets and drawers), which restricts their ability to model a wide range of articulated objects in an open-vocabulary context. To address these limitations, we propose Articulate Anymesh, an automated framework that is able to convert any rigid 3D mesh into its articulated counterpart in an open-vocabulary manner. Given a 3D mesh, our framework utilizes advanced Vision-Language Models and visual prompting techniques to extract semantic information, allowing for both the segmentation of object parts and the construction of functional joints. Our experiments show that Articulate Anymesh can generate large-scale, high-quality 3D articulated objects, including tools, toys, mechanical devices, and vehicles, significantly expanding the coverage of existing 3D articulated object datasets. Additionally, we show that these generated assets can facilitate the acquisition of new articulated object manipulation skills in simulation, which can then be transferred to a real robotic system. Our Github website is https://articulate-anymesh.github.io.
Abstract:Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. Despite their utility in advancing digital automation, a critical bottleneck persists: collecting high-quality trajectory data for training. Common practices for collecting such data rely on human supervision or synthetic data generation through executing pre-defined tasks, which are either resource-intensive or unable to guarantee data quality. Moreover, these methods suffer from limited data diversity and significant gaps between synthetic data and real-world environments. To address these challenges, we propose OS-Genesis, a novel GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverses the conventional trajectory collection process. Instead of relying on pre-defined tasks, OS-Genesis enables agents first to perceive environments and perform step-wise interactions, then retrospectively derive high-quality tasks to enable trajectory-level exploration. A trajectory reward model is then employed to ensure the quality of the generated trajectories. We demonstrate that training GUI agents with OS-Genesis significantly improves their performance on highly challenging online benchmarks. In-depth analysis further validates OS-Genesis's efficiency and its superior data quality and diversity compared to existing synthesis methods. Our codes, data, and checkpoints are available at \href{https://qiushisun.github.io/OS-Genesis-Home/}{OS-Genesis Homepage}.
Abstract:It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training, simulating soft materials presents considerable challenges. Specifically, it is significantly more costly than simulating rigid objects in terms of simulation speed and storage requirements. These limitations typically restrict the scope of studies on soft materials to small and bounded areas, thereby hindering the learning of skills in broader spaces. To address this issue, we introduce UBSoft, a new simulation platform designed to support unbounded soft environments for robot skill acquisition. Our platform utilizes spatially adaptive resolution scales, where simulation resolution dynamically adjusts based on proximity to active robotic agents. Our framework markedly reduces the demand for extensive storage space and computation costs required for large-scale scenarios involving soft materials. We also establish a set of benchmark tasks in our platform, including both locomotion and manipulation tasks, and conduct experiments to evaluate the efficacy of various reinforcement learning algorithms and trajectory optimization techniques, both gradient-based and sampling-based. Preliminary results indicate that sampling-based trajectory optimization generally achieves better results for obtaining one trajectory to solve the task. Additionally, we conduct experiments in real-world environments to demonstrate that advancements made in our UBSoft simulator could translate to improved robot interactions with large-scale soft material. More videos can be found at https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/ubsoft/.
Abstract:Creating large-scale interactive 3D environments is essential for the development of Robotics and Embodied AI research. Current methods, including manual design, procedural generation, diffusion-based scene generation, and large language model (LLM) guided scene design, are hindered by limitations such as excessive human effort, reliance on predefined rules or training datasets, and limited 3D spatial reasoning ability. Since pre-trained 2D image generative models better capture scene and object configuration than LLMs, we address these challenges by introducing Architect, a generative framework that creates complex and realistic 3D embodied environments leveraging diffusion-based 2D image inpainting. In detail, we utilize foundation visual perception models to obtain each generated object from the image and leverage pre-trained depth estimation models to lift the generated 2D image to 3D space. Our pipeline is further extended to a hierarchical and iterative inpainting process to continuously generate placement of large furniture and small objects to enrich the scene. This iterative structure brings the flexibility for our method to generate or refine scenes from various starting points, such as text, floor plans, or pre-arranged environments.
Abstract:Image Matching Challenge 2024 is a competition focused on building 3D maps from diverse image sets, requiring participants to solve fundamental computer vision challenges in image matching across varying angles, lighting, and seasonal changes. This project develops a Pipeline method that combines multiple advanced techniques: using pre-trained EfficientNet-B7 for initial feature extraction and cosine distance-based image pair filtering, employing both KeyNetAffNetHardNet and SuperPoint for keypoint feature extraction, utilizing AdaLAM and SuperGlue for keypoint matching, and finally applying Pycolmap for 3D spatial analysis. The methodology achieved an excellent score of 0.167 on the private leaderboard, with experimental results demonstrating that the combination of KeyNetAffNetHardNet and SuperPoint provides significant advantages in keypoint detection and matching, particularly when dealing with challenging variations in surface texture and environmental conditions that typically degrade traditional algorithm performance.
Abstract:Existing efforts in building GUI agents heavily rely on the availability of robust commercial Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as GPT-4o and GeminiProVision. Practitioners are often reluctant to use open-source VLMs due to their significant performance lag compared to their closed-source counterparts, particularly in GUI grounding and Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios. To facilitate future research in this area, we developed OS-Atlas - a foundational GUI action model that excels at GUI grounding and OOD agentic tasks through innovations in both data and modeling. We have invested significant engineering effort in developing an open-source toolkit for synthesizing GUI grounding data across multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and the web. Leveraging this toolkit, we are releasing the largest open-source cross-platform GUI grounding corpus to date, which contains over 13 million GUI elements. This dataset, combined with innovations in model training, provides a solid foundation for OS-Atlas to understand GUI screenshots and generalize to unseen interfaces. Through extensive evaluation across six benchmarks spanning three different platforms (mobile, desktop, and web), OS-Atlas demonstrates significant performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art models. Our evaluation also uncovers valuable insights into continuously improving and scaling the agentic capabilities of open-source VLMs.