Tony Duan, Avati Anand, Daisy Yi Ding, Khanh K. Thai, Sanjay Basu, Andrew Ng, Alejandro Schuler

We present Natural Gradient Boosting (NGBoost), an algorithm for generic probabilistic prediction via gradient boosting. Typical regression models return a point estimate, conditional on covariates, but probabilistic regression models output a full probability distribution over the outcome space, conditional on the covariates. This allows for predictive uncertainty estimation - crucial in applications like healthcare and weather forecasting. NGBoost generalizes gradient boosting to probabilistic regression by treating the parameters of the conditional distribution as targets for a multiparameter boosting algorithm. Furthermore, we show how the Natural Gradient is required to correct the training dynamics of our multiparameter boosting approach. NGBoost can be used with any base learner, any family of distributions with continuous parameters, and any scoring rule. NGBoost matches or exceeds the performance of existing methods for probabilistic prediction while offering additional benefits in flexibility, scalability, and usability. An open-source implementation is available at github.com/stanfordmlgroup/ngboost.

Ruiqi Zhang, Xuezhou Zhang, Chengzhuo Ni, Mengdi Wang

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) serves as one of the cornerstones in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE) with various function approximators, especially deep neural networks, has gained practical success. While statistical analysis has proved FQE to be minimax-optimal with tabular, linear and several nonparametric function families, its practical performance with more general function approximator is less theoretically understood. We focus on FQE with general \textit{differentiable function approximators}, making our theory applicable to neural function approximations. We approach this problem using the Z-estimation theory and establish the following results: The FQE estimation error is asymptotically normal with explicit variance determined jointly by the tangent space of the function class at the ground truth, the reward structure, and the distribution shift due to off-policy learning; The finite-sample FQE error bound is dominated by the same variance term, and it can also be bounded by function class-dependent divergence, which measures how the off-policy distribution shift intertwines with the function approximator. In addition, we study bootstrapping FQE estimators for error distribution inference and estimating confidence intervals, accompanied by a Cramer-Rao lower bound that matches our upper bounds. The Z-estimation analysis provides a generalizable theoretical framework for studying off-policy estimation in RL and provides sharp statistical theory for FQE with differentiable function approximators.

Xuechao Zhang, Dong Wang, Sun Han, Weichuang Li, Bin Zhao, Zhigang Wang, Xiaoming Duan, Chongrong Fang, Xuelong Li, Jianping He

Grasping occluded objects in cluttered environments is an essential component in complex robotic manipulation tasks. In this paper, we introduce an AffordanCE-driven Next-Best-View planning policy (ACE-NBV) that tries to find a feasible grasp for target object via continuously observing scenes from new viewpoints. This policy is motivated by the observation that the grasp affordances of an occluded object can be better-measured under the view when the view-direction are the same as the grasp view. Specifically, our method leverages the paradigm of novel view imagery to predict the grasps affordances under previously unobserved view, and select next observation view based on the highest imagined grasp quality of the target object. The experimental results in simulation and on a real robot demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed affordance-driven next-best-view planning policy. Project page: https://sszxc.net/ace-nbv/.

Youngsun Wi, Mark Van der Merwe, Pete Florence, Andy Zeng, Nima Fazeli

Making contact with purpose is a central part of robot manipulation and remains essential for many household tasks – from sweeping dust into a dustpan, to wiping tables; from erasing whiteboards, to applying paint. In this work, we investigate learning language-conditioned, vision-based manipulation policies wherein the action representation is in fact, contact itself – predicting contact formations at which tools grasped by the robot should meet an observable surface. Our approach, Contact-Aware and Language conditioned spatial Action MApping for contact-RIch manipulation (CALAMARI), exhibits several advantages including (i) benefiting from existing visual-language models for pretrained spatial features, grounding instructions to behaviors, and for sim2real transfer; and (ii) factorizing perception and control over a natural boundary (i.e. contact) into two modules that synergize with each other, whereby action predictions can be aligned per pixel with image observations, and low-level controllers can optimize motion trajectories that maintain contact while avoiding penetration. Experiments show that CALAMARI outperforms existing state-of-the-art model architectures for a broad range of contact-rich tasks, and pushes new ground on embodiment-agnostic generalization to unseen objects with varying elasticity, geometry, and colors in both simulated and real-world settings.

Yuxiang Yang, Guanya Shi, Xiangyun Meng, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan, Byron Boots

We present CAJun, a novel hierarchical learning and control framework that enables legged robots to jump continuously with adaptive jumping distances. CAJun consists of a high-level centroidal policy and a low-level leg controller. In particular, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to train the centroidal policy, which specifies the gait timing, base velocity, and swing foot position for the leg controller. The leg controller optimizes motor commands for the swing and stance legs according to the gait timing to track the swing foot target and base velocity commands. Additionally, we reformulate the stance leg optimizer in the leg controller to speed up policy training by an order of magnitude. Our system combines the versatility of learning with the robustness of optimal control. We show that after 20 minutes of training on a single GPU, CAJun can achieve continuous, long jumps with adaptive distances on a Go1 robot with small sim-to-real gaps. Moreover, the robot can jump across gaps with a maximum width of 70cm, which is over $40$ wider than existing methods.

Kimon Antonakopoulos, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Georgios Piliouras, Xiao Wang

Adaptive first-order methods in optimization have widespread ML applications due to their ability to adapt to non-convex landscapes. However, their convergence guarantees are typically stated in terms of vanishing gradient norms, which leaves open the issue of converging to undesirable saddle points (or even local maxima). In this paper, we focus on the AdaGrad family of algorithms - from scalar to full-matrix preconditioning - and we examine the question of whether the method's trajectories avoid saddle points. A major challenge that arises here is that AdaGrad's step-size (or, more accurately, the method's preconditioner) evolves over time in a filtration-dependent way, i.e., as a function of all gradients observed in earlier iterations; as a result, avoidance results for methods with a constant or vanishing step-size do not apply. We resolve this challenge by combining a series of step-size stabilization arguments with a recursive representation of the AdaGrad preconditioner that allows us to employ center-stable techniques and ultimately show that the induced trajectories avoid saddle points from almost any initial condition.

Jun Han, Fan Ding, Xianglong Liu, Lorenzo Torresani, Jian Peng, Qiang Liu

Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) \cite{liu2016stein}, provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD can not be directly applied to discrete distributions. In this work, we fill this gap by proposing a simple general-purpose framework that transforms discrete distributions to equivalent piecewise continuous distribution, on which we apply gradient-free Stein variational gradient descent to perform efficient approximate inference. Our empirical results show that our method outperforms traditional algorithms such as Gibbs sampling and discontinuous Hamiltonian Monte Carlo on various challenging benchmarks of discrete graphical models. We demonstrate that our method provides a promising tool for learning ensembles of binarized neural network (BNN), outperforming other widely used ensemble methods on learning binarized AlexNet on CIFAR-10. In addition, such transform can be straightforwardly employed in gradient-free kernelized Stein discrepancy to perform goodness-of-fit (GOF) test on discrete distributions. Our proposed method outperforms existing GOF test methods for intractable discrete distributions.

Yaqi Duan, Zeyu Jia, Mengdi Wang

This paper studies the statistical theory of off-policy evaluation with function approximation in batch data reinforcement learning problem. We consider a regression-based fitted Q-iteration method, show that it is equivalent to a model-based method that estimates a conditional mean embedding of the transition operator, and prove that this method is information-theoretically optimal and has nearly minimal estimation error. In particular, by leveraging contraction property of Markov processes and martingale concentration, we establish a finite-sample instance-dependent error upper bound and a nearly-matching minimax lower bound. The policy evaluation error depends sharply on a restricted ${\chi }^2$-divergence over the function class between the long-term distribution of target policy and the distribution of past data. This restricted ${\chi }^2$-divergence characterizes the statistical limit of off-policy evaluation and is both instance-dependent and function-class-dependent. Further, we provide an easily computable confidence bound for the policy evaluator, which may be useful for optimistic planning and safe policy improvement.

Jonathan Heewon Yang, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn

Reusing large datasets is crucial to scale vision-based robotic manipulators to everyday scenarios due to the high cost of collecting robotic datasets. However, robotic platforms possess varying control schemes, camera viewpoints, kinematic configurations, and end-effector morphologies, posing significant challenges when transferring manipulation skills from one platform to another. To tackle this problem, we propose a set of key design decisions to train a single policy for deployment on multiple robotic platforms. Our framework first aligns the observation and action spaces of our policy across embodiments via utilizing wrist cameras and a unified, but modular codebase. To bridge the remaining domain shift, we align our policy’s internal representations across embodiments via contrastive learning. We evaluate our method on a dataset collected over 60 hours spanning 6 tasks and 3 robots with varying joint configurations and sizes: the WidowX 250S, Franka Emika Panda, and Sawyer. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in success rate and sample efficiency for our policy when using new task data collected on a different robot, validating our proposed design decisions. More details and videos can be found on our project website: https://sites.google.com/view/cradle-multirobot

Xi Zhang, Akshay Aravamudan, Georgios Anagnostopoulos

One important aspect of understanding behaviors of information cascades is to be able to accurately predict their popularity, that is, their message counts at any future time. Self-exciting Hawkes processes have been widely adopted for such tasks due to their success in describing cascading behaviors. In this paper, for general, marked Hawkes point processes, we present closed-form expressions for the mean and variance of future event counts, conditioned on observed events. Furthermore, these expressions allow us to develop a predictive approach, namely, Cascade Anytime Size Prediction via self-Exciting Regression model (CASPER), which is specifically tailored to popularity prediction, unlike existing generative approaches – based on point processes – for the same task. We showcase CASPER’s merits via experiments entailing both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate that it considerably improves upon prior works in terms of accuracy, especially for early-stage prediction.

Jayadev Acharya, Kallista Bonawitz, Peter Kairouz, Daniel Ramage, Ziteng Sun

Local differential privacy (LDP) is a strong notion of privacy that often leads to a significant drop in utility. The original definition of LDP assumes that all the elements in the data domain are equally sensitive. However, in many real-life applications, some elements are more sensitive than others. We propose a context-aware framework for LDP that allows the privacy level to vary across the data domain, enabling system designers to place privacy constraints where they matter without paying the cost where they do not. For binary data domains, we provide a universally optimal privatization scheme and highlight its connections to Warner’s randomized response and Mangat’s improved response. Motivated by geo-location and web search applications, for k-ary data domains, we consider two special cases of context-aware LDP: block-structured LDP and high-low LDP. We study minimax discrete distribution estimation under both cases and provide communication-efficient, sample-optimal schemes, and information-theoretic lower bounds. We show, using worst-case analyses and experiments on Gowalla’s 3.6 million check-ins to 43,750 locations, that context-aware LDP achieves a far better accuracy under the same number of samples.

Dawei Zhou, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao, Bo Han, Xiaoyu Wang, Yibing Zhan, Tongliang Liu

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are found to be vulnerable to adversarial noise. They are typically misled by adversarial samples to make wrong predictions. To alleviate this negative effect, in this paper, we investigate the dependence between outputs of the target model and input adversarial samples from the perspective of information theory, and propose an adversarial defense method. Specifically, we first measure the dependence by estimating the mutual information (MI) between outputs and the natural patterns of inputs (called natural MI) and MI between outputs and the adversarial patterns of inputs (called adversarial MI), respectively. We find that adversarial samples usually have larger adversarial MI and smaller natural MI compared with those w.r.t. natural samples. Motivated by this observation, we propose to enhance the adversarial robustness by maximizing the natural MI and minimizing the adversarial MI during the training process. In this way, the target model is expected to pay more attention to the natural pattern that contains objective semantics. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method could effectively improve the adversarial accuracy against multiple attacks.

Raghavendra Addanki, Shiva Kasiviswanathan, Andrew Mcgregor, Cameron Musco

We consider recovering a causal graph in presence of latent variables, where we seek to minimize the cost of interventions used in the recovery process. We consider two intervention cost models: (1) a linear cost model where the cost of an intervention on a subset of variables has a linear form, and (2) an identity cost model where the cost of an intervention is the same, regardless of what variables it is on, i.e., the goal is just to minimize the number of interventions. Under the linear cost model, we give an algorithm to identify the ancestral relations of the underlying causal graph, achieving within a $2$-factor of the optimal intervention cost. This approximation factor can be improved to $1+\text{eps}$ for any $\text{eps}>0$ under some mild restrictions. Under the identity cost model, we bound the number of interventions needed to recover the entire causal graph, including the latent variables, using a parameterization of the causal graph through a special type of colliders. In particular, we introduce the notion of $p$-colliders, that are colliders between pair of nodes arising from a specific type of conditioning in the causal graph, and provide an upper bound on the number of interventions as a function of the maximum number of $p$-colliders between any two nodes in the causal graph.

Irmak Guzey, Ben Evans, Soumith Chintala, Lerrel Pinto

Teaching dexterity to multi-fingered robots has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. Most prominent work in this area focuses on learning controllers or policies that either operate on visual observations or state estimates derived from vision. However, such methods perform poorly on fine-grained manipulation tasks that require reasoning about contact forces or about objects occluded by the hand itself. In this work, we present T-Dex, a new approach for tactile-based dexterity, that operates in two phases. In the first phase, we collect 2.5 hours of play data, which is used to train self-supervised tactile encoders. This is necessary to bring high-dimensional tactile readings to a lower-dimensional embedding. In the second phase, given a handful of demonstrations for a dexterous task, we learn non-parametric policies that combine the tactile observations with visual ones. Across five challenging dexterous tasks, we show that our tactile-based dexterity models outperform purely vision and torque-based models by an average of 1.7X. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis on factors critical to T-Dex including the importance of play data, architectures, and representation learning.

Zhutian Yang, Jiayuan Mao, Yilun Du, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling

This paper introduces an approach for learning to solve continuous constraint satisfaction problems (CCSP) in robotic reasoning and planning. Previous methods primarily rely on hand-engineering or learning generators for specific constraint types and then rejecting the value assignments when other constraints are violated. By contrast, our model, the compositional diffusion continuous constraint solver (Diffusion-CCSP) derives global solutions to CCSPs by representing them as factor graphs and combining the energies of diffusion models trained to sample for individual constraint types. Diffusion-CCSP exhibits strong generalization to novel combinations of known constraints, and it can be integrated into a task and motion planner to devise long-horizon plans that include actions with both discrete and continuous parameters.

Zidan Wang, Takeru Oba, Takuma Yoneda, Rui Shen, Matthew Walter, Bradly C. Stadie

Learning from demonstrations (LfD) has successfully trained robots to exhibit remarkable generalization capabilities. However, many powerful imitation techniques do not prioritize the feasibility of the robot behaviors they generate. In this work, we explore the feasibility of plans produced by LfD. As in prior work, we employ a temporal diffusion model with fixed start and goal states to facilitate imitation through in-painting. Unlike previous studies, we apply cold diffusion to ensure the optimization process is directed through the agent’s replay buffer of previously visited states. This routing approach increases the likelihood that the final trajectories will predominantly occupy the feasible region of the robot’s state space. We test this method in simulated robotic environments with obstacles and observe a significant improvement in the agent’s ability to avoid these obstacles during planning.

Xinyu Luo, Christopher Musco, Cas Widdershoven

Finding the mode of a high dimensional probability distribution $\mathcal{D}$ is a fundamental algorithmic problem in statistics and data analysis. There has been particular interest in efficient methods for solving the problem when $\mathcal{D}$ is represented as a mixture model or kernel density estimate, although few algorithmic results with worst-case approximation and runtime guarantees are known. In this work, we significantly generalize a result of (LeeLiMusco:2021) on mode approximation for Gaussian mixture models. We develop randomized dimensionality reduction methods for mixtures involving a broader class of kernels, including the popular logistic, sigmoid, and generalized Gaussian kernels. As in Lee et al.'s work, our dimensionality reduction results yield quasi-polynomial algorithms for mode finding with multiplicative accuracy $(1-ϵ)$ for any $ϵ>0$. Moreover, when combined with gradient descent, they yield efficient practical heuristics for the problem. In addition to our positive results, we prove a hardness result for box kernels, showing that there is no polynomial time algorithm for finding the mode of a kernel density estimate, unless $P=NP$. Obtaining similar hardness results for kernels used in practice (like Gaussian or logistic kernels) is an interesting future direction.

Alina Ene, Huy Nguyen

In this work, we give a new parallel algorithm for the problem of maximizing a non-monotone diminishing returns submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. For any desired accuracy $ϵ$, our algorithm achieves a $1/e-ϵ$ approximation using $O(\log n\log (1/ϵ)/{ϵ}^3)$ parallel rounds of function evaluations. The approximation guarantee nearly matches the best approximation guarantee known for the problem in the sequential setting and the number of parallel rounds is nearly-optimal for any constant $ϵ$. Previous algorithms achieve worse approximation guarantees using $\Omega ({\log }^{2}n)$ parallel rounds. Our experimental evaluation suggests that our algorithm obtains solutions whose objective value nearly matches the value obtained by the state of the art sequential algorithms, and it outperforms previous parallel algorithms in number of parallel rounds, iterations, and solution quality.

Anpeng Wu, Kun Kuang, Bo Li, Fei Wu

This paper considers the challenge of estimating treatment effects from observational data in the presence of unmeasured confounders. A popular way to address this challenge is to utilize an instrumental variable (IV) for two-stage regression, i.e., 2SLS and variants, but limited to the linear setting. Recently, many nonlinear IV regression variants were proposed to overcome it by regressing the treatment with IVs and observed confounders in stage 1, leading to the imbalance of the observed confounders in stage 2. In this paper, we propose a Confounder Balanced IV Regression (CB-IV) algorithm to jointly remove the bias from the unmeasured confounders and balance the observed confounders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine confounder balancing in IV regression for treatment effect estimation. Theoretically, we re-define and solve the inverse problems for the response-outcome function. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the existing approaches.

Han Xue, Yutong Li, Wenqiang Xu, Huanyu Li, Dongzhe Zheng, Cewu Lu

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.

Tianyu Li, Nadia Figueroa

Dynamical System (DS) based Learning from Demonstration (LfD) allows learning of reactive motion policies with stability and convergence guarantees from a few trajectories. Yet, current DS learning techniques lack the flexibility to generalize to new task instances as they overlook explicit task parameters that inherently change the underlying demonstrated trajectories. In this work, we propose Elastic-DS, a novel DS learning and generalization approach that embeds task parameters into the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) DS formulation. Central to our approach is the Elastic-GMM, a GMM constrained to SE(3) task-relevant frames. Given a new task instance/context, the Elastic-GMM is transformed with Laplacian Editing and used to re-estimate the LPV-DS policy. Elastic-DS is compositional in nature and can be used to construct flexible multi-step tasks. We showcase its strength on a myriad of simulated and real-robot experiments while preserving desirable control-theoretic guarantees.

Ben Adlam, Jeffrey Pennington

Modern deep learning models employ considerably more parameters than required to fit the training data. Whereas conventional statistical wisdom suggests such models should drastically overfit, in practice these models generalize remarkably well. An emerging paradigm for describing this unexpected behavior is in terms of a \emph{double descent} curve, in which increasing a model’s capacity causes its test error to first decrease, then increase to a maximum near the interpolation threshold, and then decrease again in the overparameterized regime. Recent efforts to explain this phenomenon theoretically have focused on simple settings, such as linear regression or kernel regression with unstructured random features, which we argue are too coarse to reveal important nuances of actual neural networks. We provide a precise high-dimensional asymptotic analysis of generalization under kernel regression with the Neural Tangent Kernel, which characterizes the behavior of wide neural networks optimized with gradient descent. Our results reveal that the test error has nonmonotonic behavior deep in the overparameterized regime and can even exhibit additional peaks and descents when the number of parameters scales quadratically with the dataset size.

Rishabh Agarwal, Dale Schuurmans, Mohammad Norouzi

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) using a fixed offline dataset of logged interactions is an important consideration in real world applications. This paper studies offline RL using the DQN replay dataset comprising the entire replay experience of a DQN agent on 60 Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that recent off-policy deep RL algorithms, even when trained solely on this fixed dataset, outperform the fully trained DQN agent. To enhance generalization in the offline setting, we present Random Ensemble Mixture (REM), a robust Q-learning algorithm that enforces optimal Bellman consistency on random convex combinations of multiple Q-value estimates. Offline REM trained on the DQN replay dataset surpasses strong RL baselines. Ablation studies highlight the role of offline dataset size and diversity as well as the algorithm choice in our positive results. Overall, the results here present an optimistic view that robust RL algorithms trained on sufficiently large and diverse offline datasets can lead to high quality policies. The DQN replay dataset can serve as an offline RL benchmark and is open-sourced.

Allen Z. Ren, Hongkai Dai, Benjamin Burchfiel, Anirudha Majumdar

Simulation parameter settings such as contact models and object geometry approximations are critical to training robust manipulation policies capable of transferring from simulation to real-world deployment. There is often an irreducible gap between simulation and reality: attempting to match the dynamics between simulation and reality may be infeasible and may not lead to policies that perform well in reality for a specific task. We propose AdaptSim, a new task-driven adaptation framework for sim-to-real transfer that aims to optimize task performance in target (real) environments. First, we meta-learn an adaptation policy in simulation using reinforcement learning for adjusting the simulation parameter distribution based on the current policy’s performance in a target environment. We then perform iterative real-world adaptation by inferring new simulation parameter distributions for policy training. Our extensive simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate AdaptSim achieving 1-3x asymptotic performance and 2x real data efficiency when adapting to different environments, compared to methods based on Sys-ID and directly training the task policy in target environments.

Xiaoyu Zhang, Saurabh Gupta

Autonomous agriculture applications (e.g., inspection, phenotyping, plucking fruits) require manipulating the plant foliage to look behind the leaves and the branches. Partial visibility, extreme clutter, thin structures, and unknown geometry and dynamics for plants make such manipulation challenging. We tackle these challenges through data-driven methods. We use self-supervision to train SRPNet, a neural network that predicts what space is revealed on execution of a candidate action on a given plant. We use SRPNet with the cross-entropy method to predict actions that are effective at revealing space beneath plant foliage. Furthermore, as SRPNet does not just predict how much space is revealed but also where it is revealed, we can execute a sequence of actions that incrementally reveal more and more space beneath the plant foliage. We experiment with a synthetic (vines) and a real plant (Dracaena) on a physical test-bed across 5 settings including 2 settings that test generalization to novel plant configurations. Our experiments reveal the effectiveness of our overall method, PPG, over a competitive hand-crafted exploration method, and the effectiveness of SRPNet over a hand-crafted dynamics model and relevant ablations. Project website with execution videos, code, data, and models: https://sites.google.com/view/pushingfoliage/.

Mengda Xu, Zhenjia Xu, Cheng Chi, Manuela Veloso, Shuran Song

Human demonstration videos are a widely available data source for robot learning and an intuitive user interface for expressing desired behavior. However, directly extracting reusable robot manipulation skills from unstructured human videos is challenging due to the big embodiment difference and unobserved action parameters. To bridge this embodiment gap, this paper introduces XSkill, an imitation learning framework that 1) discovers a cross-embodiment representation called skill prototypes purely from unlabeled human and robot manipulation videos, 2) transfers the skill representation to robot actions using conditional diffusion policy, and finally, 3) composes the learned skill to accomplish unseen tasks specified by a human prompt video. Our experiments in simulation and real-world environments show that the discovered skill prototypes facilitate both skill transfer and composition for unseen tasks, resulting in a more general and scalable imitation learning framework.

Jogendra Nath Kundu, Akshay Kulkarni, Suvaansh Bhambri, Deepesh Mehta, Shreyas Kulkarni, Varun Jampani, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan

Conventional domain adaptation (DA) techniques aim to improve domain transferability by learning domain-invariant representations; while concurrently preserving the task-discriminability knowledge gathered from the labeled source data. However, the requirement of simultaneous access to labeled source and unlabeled target renders them unsuitable for the challenging source-free DA setting. The trivial solution of realizing an effective original to generic domain mapping improves transferability but degrades task discriminability. Upon analyzing the hurdles from both theoretical and empirical standpoints, we derive novel insights to show that a mixup between original and corresponding translated generic samples enhances the discriminability-transferability trade-off while duly respecting the privacy-oriented source-free setting. A simple but effective realization of the proposed insights on top of the existing source-free DA approaches yields state-of-the-art performance with faster convergence. Beyond single-source, we also outperform multi-source prior-arts across both classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks.

Rohit Agrawal, Thibaut Horel

The families of f-divergences (e.g. the Kullback-Leibler divergence) and Integral Probability Metrics (e.g. total variation distance or maximum mean discrepancies) are commonly used in optimization and estimation. In this work, we systematically study the relationship between these two families from the perspective of convex duality. Starting from a tight variational representation of the f-divergence, we derive a generalization of the moment generating function, which we show exactly characterizes the best lower bound of the f-divergence as a function of a given IPM. Using this characterization, we obtain new bounds on IPMs defined by classes of unbounded functions, while also recovering in a unified manner well-known results for bounded and subgaussian functions (e.g. Pinsker’s inequality and Hoeffding’s lemma).

Wentao Yuan, Adithyavairavan Murali, Arsalan Mousavian, Dieter Fox

With the advent of large language models and large-scale robotic datasets, there has been tremendous progress in high-level decision-making for object manipulation. These generic models are able to interpret complex tasks using language commands, but they often have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution objects due to the inability of low-level action primitives. In contrast, existing task-specific models excel in low-level manipulation of unknown objects, but only work for a single type of action. To bridge this gap, we present M2T2, a single model that supplies different types of low-level actions that work robustly on arbitrary objects in cluttered scenes. M2T2 is a transformer model which reasons about contact points and predicts valid gripper poses for different action modes given a raw point cloud of the scene. Trained on a large-scale synthetic dataset with 128K scenes, M2T2 achieves zero-shot sim2real transfer on the real robot, outperforming the baseline system with state-of-the-art task-specific models by about $19$ in overall performance and $37.5$ in challenging scenes were the object needs to be re-oriented for collision-free placement. M2T2 also achieves state-of-the-art results on a subset of language conditioned tasks in RLBench. Videos of robot experiments on unseen objects in both real world and simulation are available at m2-t2.github.io.

Jana Pavlasek, Stanley Robert Lewis, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Fabio Ramos, Tucker Hermans

Many robotic tasks can have multiple and diverse solutions and, as such, are naturally expressed as goal sets. Examples include navigating to a room, finding a feasible placement location for an object, or opening a drawer enough to reach inside. Using a goal set as a planning objective requires that a model for the objective be explicitly given by the user. However, some goals are intractable to model, leading to uncertainty over the goal (e.g. stable grasping of an object). In this work, we propose a technique for planning directly to a set of sampled goal configurations. We formulate a planning as inference problem with a novel goal likelihood evaluated against the goal samples. To handle the intractable goal likelihood, we employ Generalized Bayesian Inference to approximate the trajectory distribution. The result is a fully differentiable cost which generalizes across a diverse range of goal set objectives for which samples can be obtained. We show that by considering all goal samples throughout the planning process, our method reliably finds plans on manipulation and navigation problems where heuristic approaches fail.

Ali Ahmaditeshnizi, Saber Salehkaleybar, Negar Kiyavash

The causal relationships among a set of random variables are commonly represented by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), where there is a directed edge from variable $X$ to variable $Y$ if $X$ is a direct cause of $Y$. From the purely observational data, the true causal graph can be identified up to a Markov Equivalence Class (MEC), which is a set of DAGs with the same conditional independencies between the variables. The size of an MEC is a measure of complexity for recovering the true causal graph by performing interventions. We propose a method for efficient iteration over possible MECs given intervention results. We utilize the proposed method for computing MEC sizes and experiment design in active and passive learning settings. Compared to previous work for computing the size of MEC, our proposed algorithm reduces the time complexity by a factor of $O(n)$ for sparse graphs where $n$ is the number of variables in the system. Additionally, integrating our approach with dynamic programming, we design an optimal algorithm for passive experiment design. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms for both computing the size of MEC and experiment design outperform the state of the art.

Yasasa Abeysirigoonawardena, Kevin Xie, Chuhan Chen, Salar Hosseini Khorasgani, Ruiting Chen, Ruiqi Wang, Florian Shkurti

Self-driving software pipelines include components that are learned from a significant number of training examples, yet it remains challenging to evaluate the overall system’s safety and generalization performance. Together with scaling up the real-world deployment of autonomous vehicles, it is of critical importance to automatically find simulation scenarios where the driving policies will fail. We propose a method that efficiently generates adversarial simulation scenarios for autonomous driving by solving an optimal control problem that aims to maximally perturb the policy from its nominal trajectory. Given an image-based driving policy, we show that we can inject new objects in a neural rendering representation of the deployment scene, and optimize their texture in order to generate adversarial sensor inputs to the policy. We demonstrate that adversarial scenarios discovered purely in the neural renderer (surrogate scene) can often be successfully transferred to the deployment scene, without further optimization. We demonstrate this transfer occurs both in simulated and real environments, provided the learned surrogate scene is sufficiently close to the deployment scene.

Pingcheng Jian, Easop Lee, Zachary Bell, Michael M. Zavlanos, Boyuan Chen

Training robots with reinforcement learning (RL) typically involves heavy interactions with the environment, and the acquired skills are often sensitive to changes in task environments and robot kinematics. Transfer RL aims to leverage previous knowledge to accelerate learning of new tasks or new body configurations. However, existing methods struggle to generalize to novel robot-task combinations and scale to realistic tasks due to complex architecture design or strong regularization that limits the capacity of the learned policy. We propose Policy Stitching, a novel framework that facilitates robot transfer learning for novel combinations of robots and tasks. Our key idea is to apply modular policy design and align the latent representations between the modular interfaces. Our method allows direct stitching of the robot and task modules trained separately to form a new policy for fast adaptation. Our simulated and real-world experiments on various 3D manipulation tasks demonstrate the superior zero-shot and few-shot transfer learning performances of our method.

Valentyn Melnychuk, Dennis Frauen, Stefan Feuerriegel

Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from observational data is relevant for many applications (e.g., personalized medicine). Yet, state-of-the-art methods build upon simple long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, thus rendering inferences for complex, long-range dependencies challenging. In this paper, we develop a novel Causal Transformer for estimating counterfactual outcomes over time. Our model is specifically designed to capture complex, long-range dependencies among time-varying confounders. For this, we combine three transformer subnetworks with separate inputs for time-varying covariates, previous treatments, and previous outcomes into a joint network with in-between cross-attentions. We further develop a custom, end-to-end training procedure for our Causal Transformer. Specifically, we propose a novel counterfactual domain confusion loss to address confounding bias: it aims to learn adversarial balanced representations, so that they are predictive of the next outcome but non-predictive of the current treatment assignment. We evaluate our Causal Transformer based on synthetic and real-world datasets, where it achieves superior performance over current baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing transformer-based architecture for estimating counterfactual outcomes from longitudinal data.

Xiyuan Wang, Muhan Zhang

Spectral Graph Neural Network is a kind of Graph Neural Network (GNN) based on graph signal filters. Some models able to learn arbitrary spectral filters have emerged recently. However, few works analyze the expressive power of spectral GNNs. This paper studies spectral GNNs’ expressive power theoretically. We first prove that even spectral GNNs without nonlinearity can produce arbitrary graph signals and give two conditions for reaching universality. They are: 1) no multiple eigenvalues of graph Laplacian, and 2) no missing frequency components in node features. We also establish a connection between the expressive power of spectral GNNs and Graph Isomorphism (GI) testing, the latter of which is often used to characterize spatial GNNs’ expressive power. Moreover, we study the difference in empirical performance among different spectral GNNs with the same expressive power from an optimization perspective, and motivate the use of an orthogonal basis whose weight function corresponds to the graph signal density in the spectrum. Inspired by the analysis, we propose JacobiConv, which uses Jacobi basis due to its orthogonality and flexibility to adapt to a wide range of weight functions. JacobiConv deserts nonlinearity while outperforming all baselines on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Laurence Aitchison

Recent work has argued that neural networks can be understood theoretically by taking the number of channels to infinity, at which point the outputs become Gaussian process (GP) distributed. However, we note that infinite Bayesian neural networks lack a key facet of the behaviour of real neural networks: the fixed kernel, determined only by network hyperparameters, implies that they cannot do any form of representation learning. The lack of representation or equivalently kernel learning leads to less flexibility and hence worse performance, giving a potential explanation for the inferior performance of infinite networks observed in the literature (e.g. Novak et al. 2019). We give analytic results characterising the prior over representations and representation learning in finite deep linear networks. We show empirically that the representations in SOTA architectures such as ResNets trained with SGD are much closer to those suggested by our deep linear results than by the corresponding infinite network. This motivates the introduction of a new class of network: infinite networks with bottlenecks, which inherit the theoretical tractability of infinite networks while at the same time allowing representation learning.

Michael Sander, Raja Giryes, Taiji Suzuki, Mathieu Blondel, Gabriel Peyré

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a simple next token prediction task, where sequences are generated as a first-order autoregressive process $s_{t+1}=W{s}_t$. We show how a trained Transformer predicts the next token by first learning $W$ in-context, then applying a prediction mapping. We call the resulting procedure *in-context autoregressive learning*. More precisely, focusing on commuting orthogonal matrices $W$, we first show that a trained one-layer linear Transformer implements one step of gradient descent for the minimization of an inner objective function, when considering augmented tokens. When the tokens are not augmented, we characterize the global minima of a one-layer diagonal linear multi-head Transformer. Importantly, we exhibit orthogonality between heads and show that positional encoding captures trigonometric relations in the data. On the experimental side, we consider the general case of non-commuting orthogonal matrices and generalize our theoretical findings.

Yevgen Chebotar, Quan Vuong, Karol Hausman, Fei Xia, Yao Lu, Alex Irpan, Aviral Kumar, Tianhe Yu, Alexander Herzog, Karl Pertsch, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Julian Ibarz, Ofir Nachum, Sumedh Anand Sontakke, Grecia Salazar, Huong T. Tran, Jodilyn Peralta, Clayton Tan, Deeksha Manjunath, Jaspiar Singh, Brianna Zitkovich, Tomas Jackson, Kanishka Rao, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine

In this work, we present a scalable reinforcement learning method for training multi-task policies from large offline datasets that can leverage both human demonstrations and autonomously collected data. Our method uses a Transformer to provide a scalable representation for Q-functions trained via offline temporal difference backups. We therefore refer to the method as Q-Transformer. By discretizing each action dimension and representing the Q-value of each action dimension as separate tokens, we can apply effective high-capacity sequence modeling techniques for Q-learning. We present several design decisions that enable good performance with offline RL training, and show that Q-Transformer outperforms prior offline RL algorithms and imitation learning techniques on a large diverse real-world robotic manipulation task suite.

Reda Alami, Odalric Maillard, Raphael Feraud

we consider the problem of sequential change-point detection where both the change-points and the distributions before and after the change are assumed to be unknown. For this problem of primary importance in statistical and sequential learning theory, we derive a variant of the Bayesian Online Change Point Detector proposed by \cite{fearnhead2007line} which is easier to analyze than the original version while keeping its powerful message-passing algorithm. We provide a non-asymptotic analysis of the false-alarm rate and the detection delay that matches the existing lower-bound. We further provide the first explicit high-probability control of the detection delay for such approach. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that this proposal outperforms the state-of-art change-point detection strategy, namely the Improved Generalized Likelihood Ratio (Improved GLR) while compares favorably with the original Bayesian Online Change Point Detection strategy.

Alexis Chevalier, Jiayi Geng, Alexander Wettig, Howard Chen, Sebastian Mizera, Toni Annala, Max Aragon, Arturo Fanlo, Simon Frieder, Simon Machado, Akshara P, Ellie Thieu, Jiachen Wang, Zirui Wang, Xindi Wu, Mengzhou Xia, Wenhan Xia, Jiatong Yu, Junjie Zhu, Zhiyong Ren, Sanjeev Arora, Danqi Chen

NLP has recently made exciting progress toward training language models (LMs) with strong scientific problem-solving skills. However, model development has not focused on real-life use-cases of LMs for science, including applications in education that require processing long scientific documents. To address this, we introduce TutorEval and TutorChat. TutorEval is a diverse question-answering benchmark consisting of questions about long chapters from STEM textbooks, written by experts. TutorEval helps measure real-life usability of LMs as scientific assistants, and it is the first benchmark combining long contexts, free-form generation, and multi-disciplinary scientific knowledge. Moreover, we show that fine-tuning base models with existing dialogue datasets leads to poor performance on TutorEval. Therefore, we create TutorChat, a dataset of 80,000 long synthetic dialogues about textbooks. We use TutorChat to fine-tune Llemma models with 7B and 34B parameters. These LM tutors specialized in math have a 32K-token context window, and they excel at TutorEval while performing strongly on GSM8K and MATH. Our datasets build on open-source materials, and we release our models, data, and evaluations publicly.

Jie ZHANG, Xiaosong Ma, Song Guo, Wenchao Xu

Federated Semi-supervised Learning (FedSSL) has emerged as a new paradigm for allowing distributed clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model over scarce labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, existing works for FedSSL rely on a closed-world assumption that all local training data and global testing data are from seen classes observed in the labeled dataset. It is crucial to go one step further: adapting FL models to an open-world setting, where unseen classes exist in the unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel **Fed**erated**o**pen-world **S**emi-**S**upervised **L**earning (**FedoSSL**) framework, which can solve the key challenge in distributed and open-world settings, i.e., the biased training process for heterogeneously distributed unseen classes. Specifically, since the advent of a certain unseen class depends on a client basis, the locally unseen classes (exist in multiple clients) are likely to receive differentiated superior aggregation effects than the globally unseen classes (exist only in one client). We adopt an uncertainty-aware suppressed loss to alleviate the biased training between locally unseen and globally unseen classes. Besides, we enable a calibration module supplementary to the global aggregation to avoid potential conflicting knowledge transfer caused by inconsistent data distribution among different clients. The proposed FedoSSL can be easily adapted to state-of-the-art FL methods, which is also validated via extensive experiments on benchmarks and real-world datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and CINIC-10).

Amr Alexandari, Anshul Kundaje, Avanti Shrikumar

Label shift refers to the phenomenon where the prior class probability p(y) changes between the training and test distributions, while the conditional probability p(x|y) stays fixed. Label shift arises in settings like medical diagnosis, where a classifier trained to predict disease given symptoms must be adapted to scenarios where the baseline prevalence of the disease is different. Given estimates of p(y|x) from a predictive model, Saerens et al. proposed an efficient maximum likelihood algorithm to correct for label shift that does not require model retraining, but a limiting assumption of this algorithm is that p(y|x) is calibrated, which is not true of modern neural networks. Recently, Black Box Shift Learning (BBSL) and Regularized Learning under Label Shifts (RLLS) have emerged as state-of-the-art techniques to cope with label shift when a classifier does not output calibrated probabilities, but both methods require model retraining with importance weights and neither has been benchmarked against maximum likelihood. Here we (1) show that combining maximum likelihood with a type of calibration we call bias-corrected calibration outperforms both BBSL and RLLS across diverse datasets and distribution shifts, (2) prove that the maximum likelihood objective is concave, and (3) introduce a principled strategy for estimating source-domain priors that improves robustness to poor calibration. This work demonstrates that the maximum likelihood with appropriate calibration is a formidable and efficient baseline for label shift adaptation; notebooks reproducing experiments available at https://github.com/kundajelab/labelshiftexperiments , video: https://youtu.be/ZBXjE9QTruE , blogpost: https://bit.ly/3kTds7J

Bibit Bianchini, Mathew Halm, Michael Posa

Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like complex joint friction lack clear first-principles models and are usually ignored by physics simulators. Further, numerically-stiff contact dynamics can make common model-building approaches struggle. We propose a method to simultaneously learn contact and continuous dynamics of a novel, possibly multi-link object by observing its motion through contact-rich trajectories. We formulate a system identification process with a loss that infers unmeasured contact forces, penalizing their violation of physical constraints and laws of motion given current model parameters. Our loss is unlike prediction-based losses used in differentiable simulation. Using a new dataset of real articulated object trajectories and an existing cube toss dataset, our method outperforms differentiable simulation and end-to-end alternatives with more data efficiency. See our project page for code, datasets, and media: https://sites.google.com/view/continuous-contact-nets/home

Alp Yurtsever, Suvrit Sra, Volkan Cevher

We propose a class of variance-reduced stochastic conditional gradient methods. By adopting the recent stochastic path-integrated differential estimator technique (SPIDER) of Fang et. al. (2018) for the classical Frank-Wolfe (FW) method, we introduce SPIDER-FW for finite-sum minimization as well as the more general expectation minimization problems. SPIDER-FW enjoys superior complexity guarantees in the non-convex setting, while matching the best known FW variants in the convex case. We also extend our framework a la conditional gradient sliding (CGS) of Lan & Zhou. (2016), and propose SPIDER-CGS.

Alnur Ali, Edgar Dobriban, Ryan Tibshirani

We study the implicit regularization of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent, when applied to the fundamental problem of least squares regression. We leverage a continuous-time stochastic differential equation having the same moments as stochastic gradient descent, which we call stochastic gradient flow. We give a bound on the excess risk of stochastic gradient flow at time $t$, over ridge regression with tuning parameter $\lambda =1/t$. The bound may be computed from explicit constants (e.g., the mini-batch size, step size, number of iterations), revealing precisely how these quantities drive the excess risk. Numerical examples show the bound can be small, indicating a tight relationship between the two estimators. We give a similar result relating the coefficients of stochastic gradient flow and ridge. These results hold under no conditions on the data matrix $X$, and across the entire optimization path (not just at convergence).

Peyman Afshani, Chris Schwiegelshohn

We investigate coresets for approximating the cost with respect to median queries. In this problem, we are given a set of points $P\subset {\mathbb{R}}^d$ and median queries are ${\sum }_{p\in P}||p-c||$ for any point $c\in {\mathbb{R}}^d$. Our goal is to compute a small weighted summary $S\subset P$ such that the cost of any median query is approximated within a multiplicative $(1\pm \epsilon )$ factor. We provide matching upper and lower bounds on the number of points contained in $S$ of the order $\tilde{\Theta }\left({\epsilon }^{-d/(d+1)}\right)$.

Ben Adcock, Juan Cardenas, Nick Dexter

This work considers the fundamental problem of learning an unknown object from training data using a given model class. We introduce a framework that allows for objects in arbitrary Hilbert spaces, general types of (random) linear measurements as training data and general types of nonlinear model classes. We establish a series of learning guarantees for this framework, which provide explicit relations between the amount of training data and the model class to ensure near-best generalization bounds. In doing so, we introduce the key notion of the *variation* of a model class with respect to a distribution of sampling operators. We show that this framework can accommodate many different types of well-known problems of interest, such as matrix sketching by random sampling, compressed sensing with isotropic vectors, active learning in regression and compressed sensing with generative models. In all cases, known results become straightforward corollaries of our general theory. Hence, this work provides a powerful framework for studying and analyzing many different types of learning problems.

Saadullah Amin, Stalin Varanasi, Katherine Ann Dunfield, Günter Neumann

Knowledge graphs are incomplete by nature, with only a limited number of observed facts from the world knowledge being represented as structured relations between entities. To partly address this issue, an important task in statistical relational learning is that of link prediction or knowledge graph completion. Both linear and non-linear models have been proposed to solve the problem. Bilinear models, while expressive, are prone to overfitting and lead to quadratic growth of parameters in number of relations. Simpler models have become more standard, with certain constraints on bilinear map as relation parameters. In this work, we propose a factorized bilinear pooling model, commonly used in multi-modal learning, for better fusion of entities and relations, leading to an efficient and constraint-free model. We prove that our model is fully expressive, providing bounds on the embedding dimensionality and factorization rank. Our model naturally generalizes Tucker decomposition based TuckER model, which has been shown to generalize other models, as efficient low-rank approximation without substantially compromising the performance. Due to low-rank approximation, the model complexity can be controlled by the factorization rank, avoiding the possible cubic growth of TuckER. Empirically, we evaluate on real-world datasets, reaching on par or state-of-the-art performance. At extreme low-ranks, model preserves the performance while staying parameter efficient.

Saeed Amizadeh, Hamid Palangi, Alex Polozov, Yichen Huang, Kazuhito Koishida

Visual reasoning tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) require an interplay of visual perception with reasoning about the question semantics grounded in perception. However, recent advances in this area are still primarily driven by perception improvements (e.g. scene graph generation) rather than reasoning. Neuro-symbolic models such as Neural Module Networks bring the benefits of compositional reasoning to VQA, but they are still entangled with visual representation learning, and thus neural reasoning is hard to improve and assess on its own. To address this, we propose (1) a framework to isolate and evaluate the reasoning aspect of VQA separately from its perception, and (2) a novel top-down calibration technique that allows the model to answer reasoning questions even with imperfect perception. To this end, we introduce a Differentiable First-Order Logic formalism for VQA that explicitly decouples question answering from visual perception. On the challenging GQA dataset, this framework is used to perform in-depth, disentangled comparisons between well-known VQA models leading to informative insights regarding the participating models as well as the task.

Keerti Anand, Rong Ge, Debmalya Panigrahi

A popular line of recent research incorporates ML advice in the design of online algorithms to improve their performance in typical instances. These papers treat the ML algorithm as a black-box, and redesign online algorithms to take advantage of ML predictions. In this paper, we ask the complementary question: can we redesign ML algorithms to provide better predictions for online algorithms? We explore this question in the context of the classic rent-or-buy problem, and show that incorporating optimization benchmarks in ML loss functions leads to significantly better performance, while maintaining a worst-case adversarial result when the advice is completely wrong. We support this finding both through theoretical bounds and numerical simulations.