ALDM-Grasping: Diffusion-aided Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer for Robot Grasping

To tackle the "reality gap" encountered in Sim-to-Real transfer, this study proposes a diffusion-based framework that minimizes inconsistencies in grasping actions between the simulation settings and realistic environments. The process begins by training an adversarial supervision layout-to-image diffusion model(ALDM). Then, leverage the ALDM approach to enhance the simulation environment, rendering it with photorealistic fidelity, thereby optimizing robotic grasp task training. Experimental results indicate this framework outperforms existing models in both success rates and adaptability to new environments through improvements in the accuracy and reliability of visual grasping actions under a variety of conditions. Specifically, it achieves a 75\% success rate in grasping tasks under plain backgrounds and maintains a 65\% success rate in more complex scenarios. This performance demonstrates this framework excels at generating controlled image content based on text descriptions, identifying object grasp points, and demonstrating zero-shot learning in complex, unseen scenarios.

LLMs for Coding and Robotics Education

Large language models and multimodal large language models have revolutionized artificial intelligence recently. An increasing number of regions are now embracing these advanced technologies. Within this context, robot coding education is garnering increasing attention. To teach young children how to code and compete in robot challenges, large language models are being utilized for robot code explanation, generation, and modification. In this paper, we highlight an important trend in robot coding education. We test several mainstream large language models on both traditional coding tasks and the more challenging task of robot code generation, which includes block diagrams. Our results show that GPT-4V outperforms other models in all of our tests but struggles with generating block diagram images.

Revolutionizing Finance with LLMs: An Overview of Applications and Insights

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have seen considerable advancements and have been applied in diverse fields. Built on the Transformer architecture, these models are trained on extensive datasets, enabling them to understand and generate human language effectively. In the financial domain, the deployment of LLMs is gaining momentum. These models are being utilized for automating financial report generation, forecasting market trends, analyzing investor sentiment, and offering personalized financial advice. Leveraging their natural language processing capabilities, LLMs can distill key insights from vast financial data, aiding institutions in making informed investment choices and enhancing both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. In this study, we provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs into various financial tasks. Additionally, we conducted holistic tests on multiple financial tasks through the combination of natural language instructions. Our findings show that GPT-4 effectively follow prompt instructions across various financial tasks. This survey and evaluation of LLMs in the financial domain aim to deepen the understanding of LLMs' current role in finance for both financial practitioners and LLM researchers, identify new research and application prospects, and highlight how these technologies can be leveraged to solve practical challenges in the finance industry.

Generative Dense Retrieval: Memory Can Be a Burden

Generative Retrieval (GR), autoregressively decoding relevant document identifiers given a query, has been shown to perform well under the setting of small-scale corpora. By memorizing the document corpus with model parameters, GR implicitly achieves deep interaction between query and document. However, such a memorizing mechanism faces three drawbacks: (1) Poor memory accuracy for fine-grained features of documents; (2) Memory confusion gets worse as the corpus size increases; (3) Huge memory update costs for new documents. To alleviate these problems, we propose the Generative Dense Retrieval (GDR) paradigm. Specifically, GDR first uses the limited memory volume to achieve inter-cluster matching from query to relevant document clusters. Memorizing-free matching mechanism from Dense Retrieval (DR) is then introduced to conduct fine-grained intra-cluster matching from clusters to relevant documents. The coarse-to-fine process maximizes the advantages of GR's deep interaction and DR's scalability. Besides, we design a cluster identifier constructing strategy to facilitate corpus memory and a cluster-adaptive negative sampling strategy to enhance the intra-cluster mapping ability. Empirical results show that GDR obtains an average of 3.0 R@100 improvement on NQ dataset under multiple settings and has better scalability.

Escape Sky-high Cost: Early-stopping Self-Consistency for Multi-step Reasoning

Self-consistency (SC) has been a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning. Despite bringing significant performance improvements across a variety of multi-step reasoning tasks, it is a high-cost method that requires multiple sampling with the preset size. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable sampling process, \textbf{E}arly-Stopping \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{C}onsistency (ESC), to greatly reduce the cost of SC without sacrificing performance. On this basis, one control scheme for ESC is further derivated to dynamically choose the performance-cost balance for different tasks and models. To demonstrate ESC's effectiveness, we conducted extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning over language models with varying scales. The empirical results show that ESC reduces the average number of sampling of chain-of-thought reasoning by a significant margin on six benchmarks, including MATH (-33.8%), GSM8K (-80.1%), StrategyQA (-76.8%), CommonsenseQA (-78.5%), Coin Flip (-84.2%) and Last Letters (-67.4%), while attaining comparable performances.

Assessing Large Language Models in Mechanical Engineering Education: A Study on Mechanics-Focused Conceptual Understanding

This study is a pioneering endeavor to investigate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in addressing conceptual questions within the domain of mechanical engineering with a focus on mechanics. Our examination involves a manually crafted exam encompassing 126 multiple-choice questions, spanning various aspects of mechanics courses, including Fluid Mechanics, Mechanical Vibration, Engineering Statics and Dynamics, Mechanics of Materials, Theory of Elasticity, and Continuum Mechanics. Three LLMs, including ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), ChatGPT (GPT-4), and Claude (Claude-2.1), were subjected to evaluation against engineering faculties and students with or without mechanical engineering background. The findings reveal GPT-4's superior performance over the other two LLMs and human cohorts in answering questions across various mechanics topics, except for Continuum Mechanics. This signals the potential future improvements for GPT models in handling symbolic calculations and tensor analyses. The performances of LLMs were all significantly improved with explanations prompted prior to direct responses, underscoring the crucial role of prompt engineering. Interestingly, GPT-3.5 demonstrates improved performance with prompts covering a broader domain, while GPT-4 excels with prompts focusing on specific subjects. Finally, GPT-4 exhibits notable advancements in mitigating input bias, as evidenced by guessing preferences for humans. This study unveils the substantial potential of LLMs as highly knowledgeable assistants in both mechanical pedagogy and scientific research.

Large Language Models for Robotics: Opportunities, Challenges, and Perspectives

Large language models (LLMs) have undergone significant expansion and have been increasingly integrated across various domains. Notably, in the realm of robot task planning, LLMs harness their advanced reasoning and language comprehension capabilities to formulate precise and efficient action plans based on natural language instructions. However, for embodied tasks, where robots interact with complex environments, text-only LLMs often face challenges due to a lack of compatibility with robotic visual perception. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs and multimodal LLMs into various robotic tasks. Additionally, we propose a framework that utilizes multimodal GPT-4V to enhance embodied task planning through the combination of natural language instructions and robot visual perceptions. Our results, based on diverse datasets, indicate that GPT-4V effectively enhances robot performance in embodied tasks. This extensive survey and evaluation of LLMs and multimodal LLMs across a variety of robotic tasks enriches the understanding of LLM-centric embodied intelligence and provides forward-looking insights toward bridging the gap in Human-Robot-Environment interaction.

BatchEval: Towards Human-like Text Evaluation

Significant progress has been made in automatic text evaluation with the introduction of large language models (LLMs) as evaluators. However, current sample-wise evaluation paradigm suffers from the following issues: (1) Sensitive to prompt design; (2) Poor resistance to noise; (3) Inferior ensemble performance with static reference. Inspired by the fact that humans treat both criterion definition and inter sample comparison as references for evaluation, we propose BatchEval, a paradigm that conducts batch-wise evaluation iteratively to alleviate the above problems. We explore variants under this paradigm and confirm the optimal settings are two stage procedure with heterogeneous batch composition strategy and decimal scoring format. Comprehensive experiments across 3 LLMs on 4 text evaluation tasks demonstrate that BatchEval outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 10.5% on Pearson correlations with only 64% API cost on average. Further analyses have been conducted to verify the robustness, generalization, and working mechanism of BatchEval.

On the Promises and Challenges of Multimodal Foundation Models for Geographical, Environmental, Agricultural, and Urban Planning Applications

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has heightened interest in their potential for multimodal applications that integrate language and vision. This paper explores the capabilities of GPT-4V in the realms of geography, environmental science, agriculture, and urban planning by evaluating its performance across a variety of tasks. Data sources comprise satellite imagery, aerial photos, ground-level images, field images, and public datasets. The model is evaluated on a series of tasks including geo-localization, textual data extraction from maps, remote sensing image classification, visual question answering, crop type identification, disease/pest/weed recognition, chicken behavior analysis, agricultural object counting, urban planning knowledge question answering, and plan generation. The results indicate the potential of GPT-4V in geo-localization, land cover classification, visual question answering, and basic image understanding. However, there are limitations in several tasks requiring fine-grained recognition and precise counting. While zero-shot learning shows promise, performance varies across problem domains and image complexities. The work provides novel insights into GPT-4V's capabilities and limitations for real-world geospatial, environmental, agricultural, and urban planning challenges. Further research should focus on augmenting the model's knowledge and reasoning for specialized domains through expanded training. Overall, the analysis demonstrates foundational multimodal intelligence, highlighting the potential of multimodal foundation models (FMs) to advance interdisciplinary applications at the nexus of computer vision and language.

Turning Dust into Gold: Distilling Complex Reasoning Capabilities from LLMs by Leveraging Negative Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed well on various reasoning tasks, but their inaccessibility and numerous parameters hinder wide application in practice. One promising way is distilling the reasoning ability from LLMs to small models by the generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths. In some cases, however, LLMs may produce incorrect reasoning chains, especially when facing complex mathematical problems. Previous studies only transfer knowledge from positive samples and drop the synthesized data with wrong answers. In this work, we illustrate the merit of negative data and propose a model specialization framework to distill LLMs with negative samples besides positive ones. The framework consists of three progressive steps, covering from training to inference stages, to absorb knowledge from negative data. We conduct extensive experiments across arithmetic reasoning tasks to demonstrate the role of negative data in distillation from LLM.