ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary

The literature review is an indispensable step in the research process. It provides the benefit of comprehending the research problem and understanding the current research situation while conducting a comparative analysis of prior works. However, literature summary is challenging and time consuming. The previous LLM-based studies on literature review mainly focused on the complete process, including literature retrieval, screening, and summarization. However, for the summarization step, simple CoT method often lacks the ability to provide extensive comparative summary. In this work, we firstly focus on the independent literature summarization step and introduce ChatCite, an LLM agent with human workflow guidance for comparative literature summary. This agent, by mimicking the human workflow, first extracts key elements from relevant literature and then generates summaries using a Reflective Incremental Mechanism. In order to better evaluate the quality of the generated summaries, we devised a LLM-based automatic evaluation metric, G-Score, in refer to the human evaluation criteria. The ChatCite agent outperformed other models in various dimensions in the experiments. The literature summaries generated by ChatCite can also be directly used for drafting literature reviews.

System-level Safety Guard: Safe Tracking Control through Uncertain Neural Network Dynamics Models

The Neural Network (NN), as a black-box function approximator, has been considered in many control and robotics applications. However, difficulties in verifying the overall system safety in the presence of uncertainties hinder the modular deployment of NN in safety-critical systems. In this paper, we leverage the NNs as predictive models for trajectory tracking of unknown dynamical systems. We consider controller design in the presence of both intrinsic uncertainty and uncertainties from other system modules. In this setting, we formulate the constrained trajectory tracking problem and show that it can be solved using Mixed-integer Linear Programming (MILP). The proposed MILP-based solution enjoys a provable safety guarantee for the overall system, and the approach is empirically demonstrated in robot navigation and obstacle avoidance through simulations. The demonstration videos are available at https://xiaolisean.github.io/publication/2023-11-01-L4DC2024.

Differentiable Fluid Physics Parameter Identification Via Stirring

Fluid interactions permeate daily human activities, with properties like density and viscosity playing pivotal roles in household tasks. While density estimation is straightforward through Archimedes' principle, viscosity poses a more intricate challenge, especially given the varied behaviors of Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. These fluids, which differ in their stress-strain relationships, are delineated by specific constitutive models such as the Carreau, Cross, and Herschel-Bulkley models, each possessing unique viscosity parameters. This study introduces a novel differentiable fitting framework, DiffStir, tailored to identify key physics parameters via the common daily operation of stirring. By employing a robotic arm for stirring and harnessing a differentiable Material Point Method (diffMPM)-based simulator, the framework can determine fluid parameters by matching observations from both the simulator and the real world. Recognizing the distinct preferences of the aforementioned constitutive models for specific fluids, an online strategy was adopted to adaptively select the most fitting model based on real-world data. Additionally, we propose a refining neural network to bridge the sim-to-real gap and mitigate sensor noise-induced inaccuracies. Comprehensive experiments were conducted to validate the efficacy of DiffStir, showcasing its precision in parameter estimation when benchmarked against reported literature values. More experiments and videos can be found in the supplementary materials and on the website: https://sites.google.com/view/diffstir.

Precise Robotic Needle-Threading with Tactile Perception and Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a novel tactile perception-based method, named T-NT, for performing the needle-threading task, an application of deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation. This task is divided into two main stages: Tail-end Finding and Tail-end Insertion. In the first stage, the agent traces the contour of the thread twice using vision-based tactile sensors mounted on the gripper fingers. The two-run tracing is to locate the tail-end of the thread. In the second stage, it employs a tactile-guided reinforcement learning (RL) model to drive the robot to insert the thread into the target needle eyelet. The RL model is trained in a Unity-based simulated environment. The simulation environment supports tactile rendering which can produce realistic tactile images and thread modeling. During insertion, the position of the poke point and the center of the eyelet are obtained through a pre-trained segmentation model, Grounded-SAM, which predicts the masks for both the needle eye and thread imprints. These positions are then fed into the reinforcement learning model, aiding in a smoother transition to real-world applications. Extensive experiments on real robots are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our method. More experiments and videos can be found in the supplementary materials and on the website: https://sites.google.com/view/tac-needlethreading.

UniFolding: Towards Sample-efficient, Scalable, and Generalizable Robotic Garment Folding

This paper explores the development of UniFolding, a sample-efficient, scalable, and generalizable robotic system for unfolding and folding various garments. UniFolding employs the proposed UFONet neural network to integrate unfolding and folding decisions into a single policy model that is adaptable to different garment types and states. The design of UniFolding is based on a garment's partial point cloud, which aids in generalization and reduces sensitivity to variations in texture and shape. The training pipeline prioritizes low-cost, sample-efficient data collection. Training data is collected via a human-centric process with offline and online stages. The offline stage involves human unfolding and folding actions via Virtual Reality, while the online stage utilizes human-in-the-loop learning to fine-tune the model in a real-world setting. The system is tested on two garment types: long-sleeve and short-sleeve shirts. Performance is evaluated on 20 shirts with significant variations in textures, shapes, and materials. More experiments and videos can be found in the supplementary materials and on the website: https://unifolding.robotflow.ai

Informative Path Planning of Autonomous Vehicle for Parking Occupancy Estimation

Parking occupancy estimation holds significant potential in facilitating parking resource management and mitigating traffic congestion. Existing approaches employ robotic systems to detect the occupancy status of individual parking spaces and primarily focus on enhancing detection accuracy through perception pipelines. However, these methods often overlook the crucial aspect of robot path planning, which can hinder the accurate estimation of the entire parking area. In light of these limitations, we introduce the problem of informative path planning for parking occupancy estimation using autonomous vehicles and formulate it as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) task. Then, we develop an occupancy state transition model and introduce a Bayes filter to estimate occupancy based on noisy sensor measurements. Subsequently, we propose the Monte Carlo Bayes Filter Tree, a computationally efficient algorithm that leverages progressive widening to generate informative paths. We demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the benchmark methods in diverse simulation environments, effectively striking a balance between optimality and computational efficiency.

GarmentTracking: Category-Level Garment Pose Tracking

Garments are important to humans. A visual system that can estimate and track the complete garment pose can be useful for many downstream tasks and real-world applications. In this work, we present a complete package to address the category-level garment pose tracking task: (1) A recording system VR-Garment, with which users can manipulate virtual garment models in simulation through a VR interface. (2) A large-scale dataset VR-Folding, with complex garment pose configurations in manipulation like flattening and folding. (3) An end-to-end online tracking framework GarmentTracking, which predicts complete garment pose both in canonical space and task space given a point cloud sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GarmentTracking achieves great performance even when the garment has large non-rigid deformation. It outperforms the baseline approach on both speed and accuracy. We hope our proposed solution can serve as a platform for future research. Codes and datasets are available in https://garment-tracking.robotflow.ai.

Is GPT-3 a Psychopath? Evaluating Large Language Models from a Psychological Perspective

Are large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 psychologically safe? In this work, we design unbiased prompts to evaluate LLMs systematically from a psychological perspective. Firstly, we test the personality traits of three different LLMs with Short Dark Triad (SD-3) and Big Five Inventory (BFI). We find all of them show higher scores on SD-3 than the human average, indicating a relatively darker personality. Furthermore, LLMs like InstructGPT and FLAN-T5, which are fine-tuned with safety metrics, do not necessarily have more positive personalities. They score higher on Machiavellianism and Narcissism than GPT-3. Secondly, we test the LLMs in GPT-3 series on well-being tests to study the impact of fine-tuning with more training data. Interestingly, we observe a continuous increase in well-being scores from GPT-3 to InstructGPT. Following the observations, we show that instruction-finetune FLAN-T5 with positive answers in BFI can effectively improve the model from a psychological perspective. Finally, we call on the community to evaluate and improve LLMs' safety systematically instead of at the sentence level only.

Safe Control and Learning Using Generalized Action Governor

This paper introduces the Generalized Action Governor, which is a supervisory scheme for augmenting a nominal closed-loop system with the capability of strictly handling constraints. After presenting its theory for general systems and introducing tailored design approaches for linear and discrete systems, we discuss its application to safe online learning, which aims to safely evolve control parameters using real-time data to improve performance for uncertain systems. In particular, we propose two safe learning algorithms based on integration of reinforcement learning/data-driven Koopman operator-based control with the generalized action governor. The developments are illustrated with a numerical example.

CurvPnP: Plug-and-play Blind Image Restoration with Deep Curvature Denoiser

Due to the development of deep learning-based denoisers, the plug-and-play strategy has achieved great success in image restoration problems. However, existing plug-and-play image restoration methods are designed for non-blind Gaussian denoising such as zhang et al (2022), the performance of which visibly deteriorate for unknown noises. To push the limits of plug-and-play image restoration, we propose a novel framework with blind Gaussian prior, which can deal with more complicated image restoration problems in the real world. More specifically, we build up a new image restoration model by regarding the noise level as a variable, which is implemented by a two-stage blind Gaussian denoiser consisting of a noise estimation subnetwork and a denoising subnetwork, where the noise estimation subnetwork provides the noise level to the denoising subnetwork for blind noise removal. We also introduce the curvature map into the encoder-decoder architecture and the supervised attention module to achieve a highly flexible and effective convolutional neural network. The experimental results on image denoising, deblurring and single-image super-resolution are provided to demonstrate the advantages of our deep curvature denoiser and the resulting plug-and-play blind image restoration method over the state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based methods. Our model is shown to be able to recover the fine image details and tiny structures even when the noise level is unknown for different image restoration tasks. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Duanlab123/CurvPnP.