pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Hardware Fault Tolerance in Machines with Reinforcement Learning Policy Gradient Algorithms
Authors: Sheila Schoepp, Mehran Taghian, Shotaro Miwa, Yoshihiro Mitsuka, Shadan Golestan, Osmar Zaïane
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, OpenAI Gym, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Industry is rapidly moving towards fully autonomous and interconnected systems that can detect and adapt to changing conditions, including machine hardware faults. Traditional methods for adding hardware fault tolerance to machines involve duplicating components and algorithmically reconfiguring a machine's processes when a fault occurs. However, the growing interest in reinforcement learning-based robotic control offers a new perspective on achieving hardware fault tolerance. However, limited research has explored the potential of these approaches for hardware fault tolerance in machines. This paper investigates the potential of two state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), to enhance hardware fault tolerance into machines. We assess the performance of these algorithms in two OpenAI Gym simulated environments, Ant-v2 and FetchReach-v1. Robot models in these environments are subjected to six simulated hardware faults. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to determine the optimal method for transferring an agent's knowledge, acquired through learning in a normal (pre-fault) environment, to a (post-)fault environment in a continual learning setting. Our results demonstrate that reinforcement learning-based approaches can enhance hardware fault tolerance in simulated machines, with adaptation occurring within minutes. Specifically, PPO exhibits the fastest adaptation when retaining the knowledge within its models, while SAC performs best when discarding all acquired knowledge. Overall, this study highlights the potential of reinforcement learning-based approaches, such as PPO and SAC, for hardware fault tolerance in machines. These findings pave the way for the development of robust and adaptive machines capable of effectively operating in real-world scenarios.
Genetic Algorithm to Optimize Design of Micro-Surgical Scissors
Authors: Fatemeh Norouziani, Veerash Palanichamy, Shivam Gupta, Onaizah Onaizah
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00

Microrobotics is an attractive area of research as small-scale robots have the potential to improve the precision and dexterity offered by minimally invasive surgeries. One example of such a tool is a pair of micro-surgical scissors that was developed for cutting of tumors or cancerous tissues present deep inside the body such as in the brain. This task is often deemed difficult or impossible with conventional robotic tools due to their size and dexterity. The scissors are designed with two magnets placed a specific distance apart to maximize deflection and generate cutting forces. However, remote actuation and size requirements of the micro-surgical scissors limits the force that can be generated to puncture the tissue. To address the limitation of small output forces, we use an evolutionary algorithm to further optimize the performance of the scissors. In this study, the design of the previously developed untethered micro-surgical scissors has been modified and their performance is enhanced by determining the optimal position of the magnets as well as the direction of each magnetic moment. The developed algorithm is successfully applied to a 4-magnet configuration which results in increased net torque. This improvement in net torque is directly translated into higher cutting forces. The new configuration generates a cutting force of 58 mN from 80 generations of the evolutionary algorithm which is a 1.65 times improvement from the original design. Furthermore, the developed algorithm has the advantage that it can be deployed with minor modifications to other microrobotic tools and systems, opening up new possibilities for various medical procedures and applications.
Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interface
Authors: Mengda Xu, Zhenjia Xu, Yinghao Xu, Cheng Chi, Gordon Wetzstein, Manuela Veloso, Shuran Song
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

We present Im2Flow2Act, a scalable learning framework that enables robots to acquire real-world manipulation skills without the need of real-world robot training data. The key idea behind Im2Flow2Act is to use object flow as the manipulation interface, bridging domain gaps between different embodiments (i.e., human and robot) and training environments (i.e., real-world and simulated). Im2Flow2Act comprises two components: a flow generation network and a flow-conditioned policy. The flow generation network, trained on human demonstration videos, generates object flow from the initial scene image, conditioned on the task description. The flow-conditioned policy, trained on simulated robot play data, maps the generated object flow to robot actions to realize the desired object movements. By using flow as input, this policy can be directly deployed in the real world with a minimal sim-to-real gap. By leveraging real-world human videos and simulated robot play data, we bypass the challenges of teleoperating physical robots in the real world, resulting in a scalable system for diverse tasks. We demonstrate Im2Flow2Act's capabilities in a variety of real-world tasks, including the manipulation of rigid, articulated, and deformable objects.
FFHFlow: A Flow-based Variational Approach for Learning Diverse Dexterous Grasps with Shape-Aware Introspection
Authors: Qian Feng, Jianxiang Feng, Zhaopeng Chen, Rudolph Triebel, Alois Knoll
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00

Synthesizing diverse dexterous grasps from uncertain partial observation is an important yet challenging task for physically intelligent embodiments. Previous works on generative grasp synthesis fell short of precisely capturing the complex grasp distribution and reasoning about shape uncertainty in the unstructured and often partially perceived reality. In this work, we introduce a novel model that can generate diverse grasps for a multi-fingered hand while introspectively handling perceptual uncertainty and recognizing unknown object geometry to avoid performance degradation. Specifically, we devise a Deep Latent Variable Model (DLVM) based on Normalizing Flows (NFs), facilitating hierarchical and expressive latent representation for modeling versatile grasps. Our model design counteracts typical pitfalls of its popular alternative in generative grasping, i.e., conditional Variational Autoencoders (cVAEs) whose performance is limited by mode collapse and miss-specified prior issues. Moreover, the resultant feature hierarchy and the exact flow likelihood computation endow our model with shape-aware introspective capabilities, enabling it to quantify the shape uncertainty of partial point clouds and detect objects of novel geometry. We further achieve performance gain by fusing this information with a discriminative grasp evaluator, facilitating a novel hybrid way for grasp evaluation. Comprehensive simulated and real-world experiments show that the proposed idea gains superior performance and higher run-time efficiency against strong baselines, including diffusion models. We also demonstrate substantial benefits of greater diversity for grasping objects in clutter and a confined workspace in the real world.
MaxMI: A Maximal Mutual Information Criterion for Manipulation Concept Discovery
Authors: Pei Zhou, Yanchao Yang
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00

We aim to discover manipulation concepts embedded in the unannotated demonstrations, which are recognized as key physical states. The discovered concepts can facilitate training manipulation policies and promote generalization. Current methods relying on multimodal foundation models for deriving key states usually lack accuracy and semantic consistency due to limited multimodal robot data. In contrast, we introduce an information-theoretic criterion to characterize the regularities that signify a set of physical states. We also develop a framework that trains a concept discovery network using this criterion, thus bypassing the dependence on human semantics and alleviating costly human labeling. The proposed criterion is based on the observation that key states, which deserve to be conceptualized, often admit more physical constraints than non-key states. This phenomenon can be formalized as maximizing the mutual information between the putative key state and its preceding state, i.e., Maximal Mutual Information (MaxMI). By employing MaxMI, the trained key state localization network can accurately identify states of sufficient physical significance, exhibiting reasonable semantic compatibility with human perception. Furthermore, the proposed framework produces key states that lead to concept-guided manipulation policies with higher success rates and better generalization in various robotic tasks compared to the baselines, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed criterion.
Adapt2Reward: Adapting Video-Language Models to Generalizable Robotic Rewards via Failure Prompts
Authors: Yanting Yang, Minghao Chen, Qibo Qiu, Jiahao Wu, Wenxiao Wang, Binbin Lin, Ziyu Guan, Xiaofei He
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

For a general-purpose robot to operate in reality, executing a broad range of instructions across various environments is imperative. Central to the reinforcement learning and planning for such robotic agents is a generalizable reward function. Recent advances in vision-language models, such as CLIP, have shown remarkable performance in the domain of deep learning, paving the way for open-domain visual recognition. However, collecting data on robots executing various language instructions across multiple environments remains a challenge. This paper aims to transfer video-language models with robust generalization into a generalizable language-conditioned reward function, only utilizing robot video data from a minimal amount of tasks in a singular environment. Unlike common robotic datasets used for training reward functions, human video-language datasets rarely contain trivial failure videos. To enhance the model's ability to distinguish between successful and failed robot executions, we cluster failure video features to enable the model to identify patterns within. For each cluster, we integrate a newly trained failure prompt into the text encoder to represent the corresponding failure mode. Our language-conditioned reward function shows outstanding generalization to new environments and new instructions for robot planning and reinforcement learning.
CrowdMAC: Masked Crowd Density Completion for Robust Crowd Density Forecasting
Authors: Ryo Fujii, Ryo Hachiuma, Hideo Saito
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness

A crowd density forecasting task aims to predict how the crowd density map will change in the future from observed past crowd density maps. However, the past crowd density maps are often incomplete due to the miss-detection of pedestrians, and it is crucial to develop a robust crowd density forecasting model against the miss-detection. This paper presents a MAsked crowd density Completion framework for crowd density forecasting (CrowdMAC), which is simultaneously trained to forecast future crowd density maps from partially masked past crowd density maps (i.e., forecasting maps from past maps with miss-detection) while reconstructing the masked observation maps (i.e., imputing past maps with miss-detection). Additionally, we propose Temporal-Density-aware Masking (TDM), which non-uniformly masks tokens in the observed crowd density map, considering the sparsity of the crowd density maps and the informativeness of the subsequent frames for the forecasting task. Moreover, we introduce multi-task masking to enhance training efficiency. In the experiments, CrowdMAC achieves state-of-the-art performance on seven large-scale datasets, including SDD, ETH-UCY, inD, JRDB, VSCrowd, FDST, and croHD. We also demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method against both synthetic and realistic miss-detections. The code is released at https://fujiry0.github.io/CrowdMAC-project-page.
Online learning of Koopman operator using streaming data from different dynamical regimes
Authors: Kartik Loya, Phanindra Tallapragada
Date: 2024-07-18 00:00:00

The paper presents a framework for online learning of the Koopman operator using streaming data. Many complex systems for which data-driven modeling and control are sought provide streaming sensor data, the abundance of which can present computational challenges but cannot be ignored. Streaming data can intermittently sample dynamically different regimes or rare events which could be critical to model and control. Using ideas from subspace identification, we present a method where the Grassmannian distance between the subspace of an extended observability matrix and the streaming segment of data is used to assess the `novelty' of the data. If this distance is above a threshold, it is added to an archive and the Koopman operator is updated if not it is discarded. Therefore, our method identifies data from segments of trajectories of a dynamical system that are from different dynamical regimes, prioritizes minimizing the amount of data needed in updating the Koopman model and furthermore reduces the number of basis functions by learning them adaptively. Therefore, by dynamically adjusting the amount of data used and learning basis functions, our method optimizes the model's accuracy and the system order.
Towards Automated Functional Equation Proving: A Benchmark Dataset and A Domain-Specific In-Context Agent
Authors: Mahdi Buali, Robert Hoehndorf
Date: 2024-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Theorem Proving, In-Context Learning

Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) faces challenges due to its complexity and computational demands. Recent work has explored using Large Language Models (LLMs) for ATP action selection, but these methods can be resource-intensive. This study introduces FEAS, an agent that enhances the COPRA in-context learning framework within Lean. FEAS refines prompt generation, response parsing, and incorporates domain-specific heuristics for functional equations. It introduces FunEq, a curated dataset of functional equation problems with varying difficulty. FEAS outperforms baselines on FunEq, particularly with the integration of domain-specific heuristics. The results demonstrate FEAS's effectiveness in generating and formalizing high-level proof strategies into Lean proofs, showcasing the potential of tailored approaches for specific ATP challenges.
dMel: Speech Tokenization made Simple
Authors: Richard He Bai, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Ruixiang Zhang, Zijin Gu, Zakaria Aldeneh, Navdeep Jaitly
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Speech Tokenization

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing by leveraging self-supervised pretraining on vast textual data. Inspired by this success, researchers have investigated various compression-based speech tokenization methods to discretize continuous speech signals, enabling the application of language modeling techniques to discrete tokens. However, audio compressor introduces additional complexity and computational cost, and often fail on out-of-domain audio signals. In this work, we introduce a novel speech representation (dmel) that discretizes mel-filterbank channels into intensity bins, creating a simpler yet more effective representation compared to existing speech tokenization methods. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in preserving audio content, robustness to out-of-domain data, and offers a training-free, natural, and streamable representation. To address the high-dimensional nature of log-mel spectrograms, we propose an efficient parallel encoding and decoding method for high-dimensional tokens using an LM-style transformer architecture. This innovation enables us to develop RichTTS and RichASR, two models sharing the same architecture while achieving comparable or better results than specialized existing methods. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of dmel in achieving high performance on both speech synthesis and recognition tasks within a unified framework, paving the way for efficient and effective joint modeling of speech and text.
J-CHAT: Japanese Large-scale Spoken Dialogue Corpus for Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling
Authors: Wataru Nakata, Kentaro Seki, Hitomi Yanaka, Yuki Saito, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Hiroshi Saruwatari
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Spoken dialogue plays a crucial role in human-AI interactions, necessitating dialogue-oriented spoken language models (SLMs). To develop versatile SLMs, large-scale and diverse speech datasets are essential. Additionally, to ensure hiqh-quality speech generation, the data must be spontaneous like in-wild data and must be acoustically clean with noise removed. Despite the critical need, no open-source corpus meeting all these criteria has been available. This study addresses this gap by constructing and releasing a large-scale spoken dialogue corpus, named Japanese Corpus for Human-AI Talks (J-CHAT), which is publicly accessible. Furthermore, this paper presents a language-independent method for corpus construction and describes experiments on dialogue generation using SLMs trained on J-CHAT. Experimental results indicate that the collected data from multiple domains by our method improve the naturalness and meaningfulness of dialogue generation.
Generating Sample-Based Musical Instruments Using Neural Audio Codec Language Models
Authors: Shahan Nercessian, Johannes Imort, Ninon Devis, Frederik Blang
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose and investigate the use of neural audio codec language models for the automatic generation of sample-based musical instruments based on text or reference audio prompts. Our approach extends a generative audio framework to condition on pitch across an 88-key spectrum, velocity, and a combined text/audio embedding. We identify maintaining timbral consistency within the generated instruments as a major challenge. To tackle this issue, we introduce three distinct conditioning schemes. We analyze our methods through objective metrics and human listening tests, demonstrating that our approach can produce compelling musical instruments. Specifically, we introduce a new objective metric to evaluate the timbral consistency of the generated instruments and adapt the average Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) score for the text-to-instrument case, noting that its naive application is unsuitable for assessing this task. Our findings reveal a complex interplay between timbral consistency, the quality of generated samples, and their correspondence to the input prompt.
DSP-informed bandwidth extension using locally-conditioned excitation and linear time-varying filter subnetworks
Authors: Shahan Nercessian, Alexey Lukin, Johannes Imort
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Bandwidth Extension, Inductive Bias

In this paper, we propose a dual-stage architecture for bandwidth extension (BWE) increasing the effective sampling rate of speech signals from 8 kHz to 48 kHz. Unlike existing end-to-end deep learning models, our proposed method explicitly models BWE using excitation and linear time-varying (LTV) filter stages. The excitation stage broadens the spectrum of the input, while the filtering stage properly shapes it based on outputs from an acoustic feature predictor. To this end, an acoustic feature loss term can implicitly promote the excitation subnetwork to produce white spectra in the upper frequency band to be synthesized. Experimental results demonstrate that the added inductive bias provided by our approach can improve upon BWE results using the generators from both SEANet or HiFi-GAN as exciters, and that our means of adapting processing with acoustic feature predictions is more effective than that used in HiFi-GAN-2. Secondary contributions include extensions of the SEANet model to accommodate local conditioning information, as well as the application of HiFi-GAN-2 for the BWE problem.
Annealed Multiple Choice Learning: Overcoming limitations of Winner-takes-all with annealing
Authors: David Perera, Victor Letzelter, Théo Mariotte, Adrien Cortés, Mickael Chen, Slim Essid, Gaël Richard
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Diversity, Multiple-choice, Speech Separation

We introduce Annealed Multiple Choice Learning (aMCL) which combines simulated annealing with MCL. MCL is a learning framework handling ambiguous tasks by predicting a small set of plausible hypotheses. These hypotheses are trained using the Winner-takes-all (WTA) scheme, which promotes the diversity of the predictions. However, this scheme may converge toward an arbitrarily suboptimal local minimum, due to the greedy nature of WTA. We overcome this limitation using annealing, which enhances the exploration of the hypothesis space during training. We leverage insights from statistical physics and information theory to provide a detailed description of the model training trajectory. Additionally, we validate our algorithm by extensive experiments on synthetic datasets, on the standard UCI benchmark, and on speech separation.
Rational-Exponent Filters with Applications to Generalized Exponent Filters
Authors: Samiya A Alkhairy
Date: 2024-04-05 00:00:00

We present filters with rational exponents in order to provide a continuum of filter behavior not classically achievable. We discuss their stability, the flexibility they afford, and various representations useful for analysis, design and implementations. We do this for a generalization of second-order filters which we refer to as rational-exponent Generalized Exponent Filters (GEFs) that are useful for a diverse array of applications. We present equivalent representations for rational-exponent GEFs in the time and frequency domains: transfer functions, impulse responses, and integral expressions - the last of which allows for efficient real-time processing without preprocessing requirements. Rational-exponent filters enable filter characteristics to be on a continuum rather than limiting them to discrete values thereby resulting in greater flexibility in the behavior of these filters without additional complexity in causality and stability analyses compared with classical filters. In the case of GEFs, this allows for having arbitrary continuous rather than discrete values for filter characteristics such as (1) the ratio of 3dB quality factor to maximum group delay - particularly important for filterbanks which have simultaneous requirements on frequency selectivity and synchronization; and (2) the ratio of 3dB to 15dB quality factors that dictates the shape of the frequency response magnitude.