Rapid Motor Adaptation for Robotic Manipulator Arms

Developing generalizable manipulation skills is a core challenge in embodied AI. This includes generalization across diverse task configurations, encompassing variations in object shape, density, friction coefficient, and external disturbances such as forces applied to the robot. Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA) offers a promising solution to this challenge. It posits that essential hidden variables influencing an agent's task performance, such as object mass and shape, can be effectively inferred from the agent's action and proprioceptive history. Drawing inspiration from RMA in locomotion and in-hand rotation, we use depth perception to develop agents tailored for rapid motor adaptation in a variety of manipulation tasks. We evaluated our agents on four challenging tasks from the Maniskill2 benchmark, namely pick-and-place operations with hundreds of objects from the YCB and EGAD datasets, peg insertion with precise position and orientation, and operating a variety of faucets and handles, with customized environment variations. Empirical results demonstrate that our agents surpass state-of-the-art methods like automatic domain randomization and vision-based policies, obtaining better generalization performance and sample efficiency.

Learning to Infer 3D Shape Programs with Differentiable Renderer

Given everyday artifacts, such as tables and chairs, humans recognize high-level regularities within them, such as the symmetries of a table, the repetition of its legs, while possessing low-level priors of their geometries, e.g., surfaces are smooth and edges are sharp. This kind of knowledge constitutes an important part of human perceptual understanding and reasoning. Representations of and how to reason in such knowledge, and the acquisition thereof, are still open questions in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. Building on the previous proposal of the \emph{3D shape programs} representation alone with the accompanying neural generator and executor from \citet{tian2019learning}, we propose an analytical yet differentiable executor that is more faithful and controllable in interpreting shape programs (particularly in extrapolation) and more sample efficient (requires no training). These facilitate the generator's learning when ground truth programs are not available, and should be especially useful when new shape-program components are enrolled either by human designers or -- in the context of library learning -- algorithms themselves. Preliminary experiments on using it for adaptation illustrate the aforesaid advantages of the proposed module, encouraging similar methods being explored in building machines that learn to reason with the kind of knowledge described above, and even learn this knowledge itself.

Transition-based Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing with Contextual Embeddings

The ability to understand and generate languages sets human cognition apart from other known life forms'. We study a way of combing two of the most successful routes to meaning of language--statistical language models and symbolic semantics formalisms--in the task of semantic parsing. Building on a transition-based, Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parser, AmrEager, we explore the utility of incorporating pretrained context-aware word embeddings--such as BERT and RoBERTa--in the problem of AMR parsing, contributing a new parser we dub as AmrBerger. Experiments find these rich lexical features alone are not particularly helpful in improving the parser's overall performance as measured by the SMATCH score when compared to the non-contextual counterpart, while additional concept information empowers the system to outperform the baselines. Through lesion study, we found the use of contextual embeddings helps to make the system more robust against the removal of explicit syntactical features. These findings expose the strength and weakness of the contextual embeddings and the language models in the current form, and motivate deeper understanding thereof.

Drawing out of Distribution with Neuro-Symbolic Generative Models

Learning general-purpose representations from perceptual inputs is a hallmark of human intelligence. For example, people can write out numbers or characters, or even draw doodles, by characterizing these tasks as different instantiations of the same generic underlying process -- compositional arrangements of different forms of pen strokes. Crucially, learning to do one task, say writing, implies reasonable competence at another, say drawing, on account of this shared process. We present Drawing out of Distribution (DooD), a neuro-symbolic generative model of stroke-based drawing that can learn such general-purpose representations. In contrast to prior work, DooD operates directly on images, requires no supervision or expensive test-time inference, and performs unsupervised amortised inference with a symbolic stroke model that better enables both interpretability and generalization. We evaluate DooD on its ability to generalise across both data and tasks. We first perform zero-shot transfer from one dataset (e.g. MNIST) to another (e.g. Quickdraw), across five different datasets, and show that DooD clearly outperforms different baselines. An analysis of the learnt representations further highlights the benefits of adopting a symbolic stroke model. We then adopt a subset of the Omniglot challenge tasks, and evaluate its ability to generate new exemplars (both unconditionally and conditionally), and perform one-shot classification, showing that DooD matches the state of the art. Taken together, we demonstrate that DooD does indeed capture general-purpose representations across both data and task, and takes a further step towards building general and robust concept-learning systems.