FindingDory: A Benchmark to Evaluate Memory in Embodied Agents

Large vision-language models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in planning and control tasks, driving interest in their application to real-world robotics. However, deploying these models for reasoning in embodied contexts is limited by their ability to incorporate long-term experience collected across multiple days and represented by vast collections of images. Current VLMs typically struggle to process more than a few hundred images concurrently, highlighting the need for more efficient mechanisms to handle long-term memory in embodied settings. To effectively evaluate these models for long-horizon control, a benchmark must specifically target scenarios where memory is crucial for success. Existing long-video QA benchmarks overlook embodied challenges like object manipulation and navigation, which demand low-level skills and fine-grained reasoning over past interactions. Moreover, effective memory integration in embodied agents involves both recalling relevant historical information and executing actions based on that information, making it essential to study these aspects together rather than in isolation. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for long-range embodied tasks in the Habitat simulator. This benchmark evaluates memory-based capabilities across 60 tasks requiring sustained engagement and contextual awareness in an environment. The tasks can also be procedurally extended to longer and more challenging versions, enabling scalable evaluation of memory and reasoning. We also present baselines that integrate state-of-the-art VLMs with low level navigation policies, assessing their performance on these memory-intensive tasks and highlight areas for improvement.

Reducing LLM Hallucinations using Epistemic Neural Networks

Reducing and detecting hallucinations in large language models is an open research problem. In this project, we attempt to leverage recent advances in the field of uncertainty estimation to reduce hallucinations in frozen large language models. Epistemic neural networks have recently been proposed to improve output joint distributions for large pre-trained models. ENNs are small networks attached to large, frozen models to improve the model's joint distributions and uncertainty estimates. In this work, we train an epistemic neural network on top of the Llama-2 7B model combined with a contrastive decoding feature enhancement technique. We are the first to train an ENN for the next token prediction task and explore the efficacy of this method in reducing hallucinations on the TruthfulQA dataset. In essence, we provide a method that leverages a pre-trained model's latent embeddings to reduce hallucinations.