174 accepted papers
Reasoning is not just about solving problems---it is also about evaluating which problems are worth solving at all. Evaluations of artificial intelligence (AI) systems primarily focused on problem solving, historically by studying how models play games such as chess and Go. In this paper, we advocat…
Long‑horizon embodied planning is challenging because the world does not only change through an agent’s actions: exogenous processes (e.g., water heating, dominoes cascading) unfold concurrently with the agent's actions. We propose a framework for abstract world models that jointly learns (i) symbol…
Human visual perception offers valuable insights for understanding computational principles of motion-based scene interpretation. Humans robustly detect and segment moving entities that constitute independently moveable chunks of matter, whether observing sparse moving dots, textured surfaces, or na
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI systems? We present a computational framework that models huma…
Automatically generating interactive 3D environments is crucial for scaling up robotic data collection in simulation. While prior work has primarily focused on 3D asset placement, it often overlooks the physical relationships between objects (e.g., contact, support, balance, and containment), which…
Many high-stakes applications of AI require forming data-driven hypotheses and making targeted guesses; e.g., in scientific and diagnostic settings. Given limited resources, to what extent do agents based on language models (LMs) act rationally? We develop methods to benchmark and enhance agentic in…
Against the backdrop of enthusiasm for large language models (LLMs), there is a growing need to scientifically assess their capabilities and shortcomings. This is nontrivial in part because it is difficult to find tasks which the models have not encountered during training. Utilizing symbolic graphi…
Generalization to novel object configurations and instances across diverse tasks and environments is a critical challenge in robotics. Keypoint-based representations have been proven effective as a succinct representation for capturing essential object features, and for establishing a reference fram
Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) model decision making under uncertainty. While there are many approaches to approximately solving POMDPs, we aim to address the problem of learning such models. In particular, we are interested in a subclass of POMDPs wherein the components of…
Drawing real world social inferences usually requires taking into account information from multiple modalities. Language is a particularly powerful source of information in social settings, especially in novel situations where language can provide both abstract information about the environment dyna
Previous research has explored the expressivity of Transformer models in simulating Boolean circuits or Turing machines. However, the efficient learnability of Transformers from data has remained an open question. Our study addresses this gap by providing the first polynomial-time learnability resu…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in recent years but are fundamentally limited by the underlying training data. To improve models beyond the training data, recent works have explored how LLMs can be used to generate synthetic data for autonomous self-improvement. How…
Language use is shaped by pragmatics—i.e., reasoning about communicative goals and norms in context. As language models (LMs) are increasingly used as conversational agents, it becomes ever more important to understand their pragmatic reasoning abilities. We propose an evaluation framework derived f
We present a novel approach, MAGIC (manipulation analogies for generalizable intelligent contacts), for one-shot learning of manipulation strategies with fast and extensive generalization to novel objects. By leveraging a reference action trajectory, MAGIC effectively identifies similar contact poin
Pre-trained vision language models still fall short of human visual cognition. In an effort to improve visual cognition and align models with human behavior, we introduce visual stimuli and human judgments on visual cognition tasks, allowing us to systematically evaluate performance across cognitive…
Studies of the functional role of the primate ventral visual stream have traditionally focused on object categorization, often ignoring -- despite much prior evidence -- its role in estimating "spatial" latents such as object position and pose. Most leading ventral stream models are derived by optim…
Broadly intelligent agents should form task-specific abstractions that selectively expose the essential elements of a task, while abstracting away the complexity of the raw sensorimotor space. In this work, we present Neuro-Symbolic Predicates, a first-order abstraction language that combines the st…
A unique aspect of human visual understanding is the ability to flexibly interpret abstract concepts: acquiring lifted rules explaining what they symbolize, grounding them across familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and making predictions or reasoning about them. While off-the-shelf vision-language mod…
In this work, we address challenging multi-agent cooperation problems with decentralized control, raw sensory observations, costly communication, and multi-objective tasks instantiated in various embodied environments. While previous research either presupposes a cost-free communication channel or r…
Given an image of a natural scene, we are able to quickly decompose it into a set of components such as objects, lighting, shadows, and foreground. We can then envision a scene where we combine certain components with those from other images, for instance a set of objects from our bedroom and animal…
For robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, they require a 3D representation of the world that is semantically rich, yet compact and efficient for task-driven perception and planning. Recent approaches have attempted to leverage features from large vision-language models to encode semantics in 3D…
We introduce the Continuum Physical Dataset (ContPhy), a novel benchmark for assessing machine physical commonsense. ContPhy complements existing physical reasoning benchmarks by encompassing the inference of diverse physical properties, such as mass and density, across various scenarios and predict…
Recent years have seen a significant progress in the general-purpose problem solving abilities of large vision and language models (LVLMs), such as ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.; some of these breakthroughs even seem to enable AI models to outperform human abilities in varied tasks that demand higher-order…
We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considera…
Learning the intents of an agent, defined by its goals or motion style, is often extremely challenging from just a few examples. We refer to this problem as task concept learning and present our approach, Few-Shot Task Learning through Inverse Generative Modeling (FTL-IGM), which learns new task con…
Verbal communication plays a crucial role in human cooperation, particularly when the partners only have incomplete information about the task, environment, and each other’s mental state. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative communication framework, Goal-Oriented Mental Alignment (GOMA). GO…
Recent work has considered whether large language models (LLMs) can function as planners: given a task, generate a plan. We investigate whether LLMs can serve as generalized planners: given a domain and training tasks, generate a program that efficiently produces plans for other tasks in the domain.…
Recent advances in high-fidelity virtual environments serve as one of the major driving forces for building intelligent embodied agents to perceive, reason and interact with the physical world. Typically, these environments remain unchanged unless agents interact with them. However, in real-world sc…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language generation, understanding, and few-shot learning in recent years. An extensive body of work has explored how their performance may be further improved through the tools of prompting, ranging from verification, self-co…
While large language models (LLMs) now excel at code generation, a key aspect of software development is the art of refactoring: consolidating code into libraries of reusable and readable programs. In this paper, we introduce LILO, a neurosymbolic framework that iteratively synthesizes, compresses,…
Large Language Models have recently gained significant attention in scientific discovery for their extensive knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities. However, they encounter challenges in effectively simulating observational feedback and grounding it with language to propel advancements in phy…
Effective planning in the real world requires not only world knowledge, but the ability to leverage that knowledge to build the right representation of the task at hand. Decades of hierarchical planning techniques have used domain-specific temporal action abstractions to support efficient and accura…
We introduce iterative reasoning through energy diffusion (IRED), a novel framework for learning to reason for a variety of tasks by formulating reasoning and decision-making problems with energy-based optimization. IRED learns energy functions to represent the constraints between input conditions a…
In this work, we present an approach to construct a video-based robot policy capable of reliably executing diverse tasks across different robots and environments from few video demonstrations without using any action annotations. Our method leverages images as a task-agnostic representation, encodin…
Modeling and analyzing object and shape has been well studied in the past. However, manipulation of these complex tools and articulated objects remains difficult for autonomous agents. Our human hands, however, are dexterous and adaptive. We can easily adapt a manipulation skill on one object to all…
Multi-agent interactions, such as communication, teaching, and bluffing, often rely on higher-order social inference, i.e., understanding how others infer oneself. Such intricate reasoning can be effectively modeled through nested multi-agent reasoning. Nonetheless, the computational complexity esca…
Integrated task and motion planning (TAMP) has proven to be a valuable approach to generalizable long-horizon robotic manipulation and navigation problems. However, the typical TAMP problem formulation assumes full observability and deterministic action effects. These assumptions limit the ability o…
We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction meth…
Reconstructing compositional 3D representations of scenes, where each object is represented with its own 3D model, is a highly desirable capability in robotics and augmented reality. However, most existing methods rely heavily on strong appearance priors for object discovery, therefore only working…
Effective motion planning in high dimensional spaces is a long-standing open problem in robotics. One class of traditional motion planning algorithms corresponds to potential-based motion planning. An advantage of potential based motion planning is composability -- different motion constraints can e…
Large text-to-video models trained on internet-scale data have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generating high-fidelity videos from arbitrary textual descriptions. However, similar to proprietary language models, large text-to-video models are often black boxes whose weight parameters are n…
Precise perception of contact interactions is essential for fine-grained manipulation skills for robots. In this paper, we present the design of feedback skills for robots that must learn to stack complex-shaped objects on top of each other (see Fig. 1). To design such a system, a robot should be ab…
We are interested in enabling visual planning for complex long-horizon tasks in the space of generated videos and language, leveraging recent advances in large generative models pretrained on Internet-scale data. To this end, we present video language planning (VLP), an algorithm that consists of a…
Humans are able to accurately reason in 3D by gathering multi-view observations of the surrounding world. Inspired by this insight, we introduce a new large-scale benchmark for 3D multi-view visual question answering (3DMV-VQA). This dataset is collected by an embodied agent actively moving and capt…
The ability to perceive and understand 3D scenes is crucial for many applications in computer vision and robotics. Inverse graphics is an appealing approach to 3D scene understanding that aims to infer the 3D scene structure from 2D images. In this paper, we introduce probabilistic modeling to the i…
Given a visual scene, humans have strong intuitions about how a scene can evolve over time under given actions. The intuition, often termed visual intuitive physics, is a critical ability that allows us to make effective plans to manipulate the scene to achieve desired outcomes without relying on ex…
Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of applications of deep neural networks towards solving tasks that require superior cognitive abilities, e.g., playing Go, generating art, question answering (such as ChatGPT), etc. Such a dramatic progress raises the question: how generalizable are n…
Large pre-trained models exhibit distinct and complementary capabilities dependent on the data they are trained on. Language models such as GPT-3 are capable of textual reasoning but cannot understand visual information, while vision models such as DALL-E can generate photorealistic photos but fail…
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 c…
To make effective decisions in novel environments with long-horizon goals, it is crucial to engage in hierarchical reasoning across spatial and temporal scales. This entails planning abstract subgoal sequences, visually reasoning about the underlying plans, and executing actions in accordance with t…
In this work, we aim to learn dexterous manipulation of deformable objects using multi-fingered hands. Reinforcement learning approaches for dexterous rigid object manipulation would struggle in this setting due to the complexity of physics interaction with deformable objects. At the same time, prev…
Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in silico shows promise for applications in physical soft rob…
Denoising diffusion models are a powerful type of generative models used to capture complex distributions of real-world signals. However, their applicability is limited to scenarios where training samples are readily available, which is not always the case in real-world applications. For example, in…
The world is filled with articulated objects that are difficult to determine how to use from vision alone, e.g., a door might open inwards or outwards. Humans handle these objects with strategic trial-and-error: first pushing a door then pulling if that doesn't work. We enable these capabilities in…
People are adept at learning a wide variety of structured patterns from small amounts of data, presenting a conundrum from the standpoint of the bias-variance tradeoff: what kinds of representations and algorithms support the joint flexibility and data-paucity of human learning? One possibility is t…
Systems consisting of interacting agents are prevalent in the world, ranging from dynamical systems in physics to complex biological networks. To build systems which can interact robustly in the real world, it is thus important to be able to infer the precise interactions governing such systems. Exi…
A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex sequences of past and future events from a *static snapshot*…
Recent improvements in conditional generative modeling have made it possible to generate high-quality images from language descriptions alone. We investigate whether these methods can directly address the problem of sequential decision-making. We view decision-making not through the lens of reinforc…
Logical reasoning, i.e., deductively inferring the truth value of a conclusion from a set of premises, is an important task for artificial intelligence with wide potential impacts on science, mathematics, and society. While many prompting-based strategies have been proposed to enable Large Language…
We propose a hybrid neural network (NN) and PDE approach for learning generalizable PDE dynamics from motion observations. Many NN approaches learn an end-to-end model that implicitly models both the governing PDE and constitutive models (or material models). Without explicit PDE knowledge, these ap…
We present a framework for learning useful subgoals that support efficient long-term planning to achieve novel goals. At the core of our framework is a collection of rational subgoals (RSGs), which are essentially binary classifiers over the environmental states. RSGs can be learned from weakly-anno…
Humans demonstrate an impressive ability to acquire and generalize manipulation "tricks." Even from a single demonstration, such as using soup ladles to reach for distant objects, we can apply this skill to new scenarios involving different object positions, sizes, and categories (e.g., forks and ha…
A goal of artificial intelligence is to construct an agent that can solve a wide variety of tasks. Recent progress in text-guided image synthesis has yielded models with an impressive ability to generate complex novel images, exhibiting combinatorial generalization across domains. Motivated by this…
In this work, we study how to build socially intelligent robots to assist people in their homes. In particular, we focus on assistance with online goal inference, where robots must simultaneously infer humans' goals and how to help them achieve those goals. Prior assistance methods either lack the a…
We present a method to map 2D image observations of a scene to a persistent 3D scene representation, enabling novel view synthesis and disentangled representation of the movable and immovable components of the scene. Motivated by the bird’s-eye-view (BEV) representation commonly used in vision and r…
We examine concept generalization at a large scale in the natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (*i.e.*, rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated, focusing on confined and abstract problem spaces. In this work, we study these two modes when the *problem space…
Existing large language model-based code generation pipelines typically use beam search or sampling algorithms during the decoding process. Although the programs they generate achieve high token-matching-based scores, they often fail to compile or generate incorrect outputs. The main reason is that…
Recent works have shown that language modeling can be effectively used to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies. However, the success of applying existing language models to planning, in which we wish to obtain a trajectory of actions to reach some goal, is less straightforward. The typical aut…
Efficient planning in continuous state and action spaces is fundamentally hard, even when the transition model is deterministic and known. One way to alleviate this challenge is to perform bilevel planning with abstractions, where a high-level search for abstract plans is used to guide planning in t…
Since their introduction, diffusion models have quickly become the prevailing approach to generative modeling in many domains. They can be interpreted as learning the gradients of a time-varying sequence of log-probability density functions. This interpretation has motivated classifier-based and cla…
While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations. In order to more fully understand inherent design and perfo…
Text-to-image generative models have enabled high-resolution image synthesis across different domains, but require users to specify the content they wish to generate. In this paper, we consider the inverse problem - given a collection of different images, can we discover the generative concepts that…
Humans possess a versatile mechanism for extracting structured representations of our visual world. When looking at an image, we can decompose the scene into entities and their parts as well as obtain the dependencies between them. To mimic such capability, we propose Visual Dependency Transformers…
Goal-conditioned policies are generally understood to be "feed-forward" circuits, in the form of neural networks that map from the current state and the goal specification to the next action to take. However, under what circumstances such a policy can be learned and how efficient the policy will be…
Recent works such as VisProg and ViperGPT have smartly composed foundation models for visual reasoning—using large language models (LLMs) to produce programs that can be executed by pre-trained vision-language models. However, they operate in limited domains, such as 2D images, not fully exploiting…
Humans and animals engage in rich social interactions. It is often theorized that a relatively small number of basic social interactions give rise to the full range of behavior observed. But no computational theory explaining how social interactions combine together has been proposed before. We do s…
In this paper, we address the challenging problem of 3D concept grounding (i.e., segmenting and learning visual concepts) by looking at RGBD images and reasoning about paired questions and answers. Existing visual reasoning approaches typically utilize supervised methods to extract 2D segmentation m…
Objects' motions in nature are governed by complex interactions and their properties. While some properties, such as shape and material, can be identified via the object's visual appearances, others like mass and electric charge are not directly visible. The compositionality between the visible and…
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a set of procedural tasks that tests an agent's ability to flexibly solve novel problems. While most ARC tasks are easy for humans, they are challenging for state-of-the-art AI. What makes building intelligent systems that can generalize to novel situati…
"Large text-guided diffusion models, such as DALLE-2, are able to generate stunning photorealistic images given natural language descriptions. While such models are highly flexible, they struggle to understand the composition of certain concepts, such as confusing the attributes of different objects…
Differentiable physics has recently been shown as a powerful tool for solving soft-body manipulation tasks. However, the differentiable physics solver often gets stuck when the initial contact points of the end effectors are sub-optimal or when performing multi-stage tasks that require contact point…
Visual servoing enables robotic systems to perform accurate closed-loop control, which is required in many applications. However, existing methods require either precise calibration of the robot kinematic model and cameras or use neural architectures that require large amounts of data to train. In t…
We consider the problem of sequential robotic manipulation of deformable objects using tools. Previous works have shown that differentiable physics simulators provide gradients to the environment state and help trajectory optimization to converge orders of magnitude faster than model-free reinforcem…
Generalized planning accelerates classical planning by finding an algorithm-like policy that solves multiple instances of a task. A generalized plan can be learned from a few training examples and applied to an entire domain of problems. Generalized planning approaches perform well in discrete AI pl…
Learning general-purpose representations from perceptual inputs is a hallmark of human intelligence. For example, people can write out numbers or characters, or even draw doodles, by characterizing these tasks as different instantiations of the same generic underlying process---compositional arrange…
Humans, even at a very early age, can learn visual concepts and understand geometry and layout through active interaction with the environment, and generalize their compositions to complete tasks described by natural languages in novel scenes. To mimic such capability, we propose Embodied Concept Le…
We present a meta-learning framework for learning new visual concepts quickly, from just one or a few examples, guided by multiple naturally occurring data streams: simultaneously looking at images, reading sentences that describe the objects in the scene, and interpreting supplemental sentences tha…
The way an object looks and sounds provide complementary reflections of its physical properties. In many settings cues from vision and audition arrive asynchronously but must be integrated, as when we hear an object dropped on the floor and then must find it. In this paper, we introduce a setting in…
This paper studies the problem of fixing malfunctional 3D objects. While previous works focus on building passive perception models to learn the functionality from static 3D objects, we argue that functionality is reckoned with respect to the physical interactions between the object and the user. Gi…
We introduce HandMeThat, a benchmark for a holistic evaluation of instruction understanding and following in physical and social environments. While previous datasets primarily focused on language grounding and planning, HandMeThat considers the resolution of human instructions with ambiguities base…
Modeling complex phenomena typically involves the use of both discrete and continuous variables. Such a setting applies across a wide range of problems, from identifying trends in time-series data to performing effective compositional scene understanding in images. Here, we propose Hybrid Memoised W…
Much of what we do as humans is engage socially with other agents, a skill that robots must also eventually possess. We demonstrate that a rich theory of social interactions originating from microsociology can be formalized by extending a nested MDP where agents reason about arbitrary functions of e…
Our environment is filled with rich and dynamic acoustic information. When we walk into a cathedral, the reverberations as much as appearance inform us of the sanctuary's wide open space. Similarly, as an object moves around us, we expect the sound emitted to also exhibit this movement. While recent…
In robotic domains, learning and planning are complicated by continuous state spaces, continuous action spaces, and long task horizons. In this work, we address these challenges with Neuro-Symbolic Relational Transition Models (NSRTs), a novel class of models that are data-efficient to learn, compat…
Decision-making is challenging in robotics environments with continuous object-centric states, continuous actions, long horizons, and sparse feedback. Hierarchical approaches, such as task and motion planning (TAMP), address these challenges by decomposing decision-making into two or more levels of…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a prevailing tool for learning physical dynamics. However, they still encounter several challenges: 1) Physical laws abide by symmetry, which is a vital inductive bias accounting for model generalization and should be incorporated into the model design. Exis…
The study of language emergence aims to understand how human languages are shaped by perceptual grounding and communicative intent. Computational approaches to emergent communication (EC) predominantly consider referential games in limited domains and analyze the learned protocol within the game fra…
Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have led to remarkable achievements in face image synthesis. While methods that use style-based GANs can generate strikingly photorealistic face images, it is often difficult to control the characteristics of the generated faces in a meaningf…
Humans are expert explorers and foragers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this capability can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new environments by inferring the structure of unob…
We present Neural Descriptor Fields (NDFs), an object representation that encodes both points and relative poses between an object and a target (such as a robot gripper or a rack used for hanging) via category-level descriptors. We employ this representation for object manipulation, where given a ta…
Humans integrate multiple sensory modalities (e.g., visual and audio) to build a causal understanding of the physical world. In this work, we propose a novel type of intrinsic motivation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that encourages the agent to understand the causal effect of its actions through…
This paper studies a model learning and online planning approach towards building flexible and general robots. Specifically, we investigate how to exploit the locality and sparsity structures in the underlying environmental transition model to improve model generalization, data-efficiency, and runti…
This work considers identifying parameters characterizing a physical system's dynamic motion directly from a video whose rendering configurations are inaccessible. Existing solutions require massive training data or lack generalizability to unknown rendering configurations. We propose a novel approa…
The ability to reason about changes in the environment is crucial for robots operating over extended periods of time. Agents are expected to capture changes during operation so that actions can be followed to ensure a smooth progression of the working session. However, varying viewing angles and acc…
We introduce a visually-guided task-and-motion planning benchmark, which we call the ThreeDWorld Trans-port Challenge. In this challenge, an embodied agent is spawned randomly in a simulated physical home environment and required to transport a small set of objects scattered around the house with co…
"Self-supervised, category-agnostic segmentation of real-world images is a challenging open problem in computer vision. Here, we show how to learn static grouping priors from motion self-supervision by building on the cognitive science concept of a Spelke Object: a set of physical stuff that moves t…
AI systems are becoming increasingly intertwined with human life. In order to effectively collaborate with humans and ensure safety, AI systems need to be able to understand, interpret and predict human moral judgments and decisions. Human moral judgments are often guided by rules, but not always. A…
We present 3DP3, a framework for inverse graphics that uses inference in a structured generative model of objects, scenes, and images. 3DP3 uses (i) voxel models to represent the 3D shape of objects, (ii) hierarchical scene graphs to decompose scenes into objects and the contacts between them, and (…
Humans can reason about intuitive physics in fully or partially observed environments even after being exposed to a very limited set of observations. This sample-efficient intuitive physical reasoning is considered a core domain of human common sense knowledge. One hypothesis to explain this remarka…
Humans can abstract prior knowledge from very little data and use it to boost skill learning. In this paper, we propose routine-augmented policy learning (RAPL), which discovers routines composed of primitive actions from a single demonstration and uses discovered routines to augment policy learning…
Humans quickly solve tasks in novel systems with complex dynamics, without requiring much interaction. While deep reinforcement learning algorithms have achieved tremendous success in many complex tasks, these algorithms need a large number of samples to learn meaningful policies. In this letter, we
Tactile sensing is critical for humans to perform everyday tasks. While significant progress has been made in analyzing object grasping from vision, it remains unclear how we can utilize tactile sensing to reason about and model the dynamics of hand-object interactions. In this work, we employ a hig…
In this work, we propose a unified framework, called Visual Reasoning with Differ-entiable Physics (VRDP), that can jointly learn visual concepts and infer physics models of objects and their interactions from videos and language. This is achieved by seamlessly integrating three components: a visual…
We address the problem of efficient exploration for transition model learning in the relational model-based reinforcement learning setting without extrinsic goals or rewards. Inspired by human curiosity, we propose goal-literal babbling (GLIB), a simple and general method for exploration in such pro…
We present Grammar-Based Grounded Language Learning (G2L2), a lexicalist approach toward learning a compositional and grounded meaning representation of language from grounded data, such as paired images and texts. At the core of G2L2 is a collection of lexicon entries, which map each word to a tupl…
We study the problem of dynamic visual reasoning on raw videos. This is a challenging problem; currently, state-of-the-art models often require dense supervision on physical object properties and events from simulation, which are impractical to obtain in real life. In this paper, we present the Dyna…
Human reasoning can be understood as an interplay between two systems: the intuitive and associative ("System 1") and the deliberative and logical ("System 2"). Neural sequence models---which have been increasingly successful at performing complex, structured tasks---exhibit the advantages and failu…
Deep neural networks have been used widely to learn the latent structure of datasets, across modalities such as images, shapes, and audio signals. However, existing models are generally modality-dependent, requiring custom architectures and objectives to process different classes of signals. We leve…
Many complex real-world tasks are composed of several levels of subtasks. Humans leverage these hierarchical structures to accelerate the learning process and achieve better generalization. In this work, we study the inductive bias and propose Ordered Memory Policy Network (OMPN) to discover subtask…
The visual world around us can be described as a structured set of objects and their associated relations. An image of a room may be conjured given only the description of the underlying objects and their associated relations. While there has been significant work on designing deep neural networks w…
A key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) consists of learning in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. In contrast to current RL methods, humans are able to learn new skills with little or no reward by using various forms of intrinsic motivation. We propose AMIGo, a novel agent incorpor…
Inferring representations of 3D scenes from 2D observations is a fundamental problem of computer graphics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. Emerging 3D-structured neural scene representations are a promising approach to 3D scene understanding. In this work, we propose a novel neural sce…
We present a method, Neural Radiance Flow (NeRFlow), to learn a 4D spatial-temporal representation of a dynamic scene from a set of RGB images. Key to our approach is the use of a neural implicit representation that learns to capture the 3D occupancy, radiance, and dynamics of the scene. By enforcin…
Progress in machine learning (ML) stems from a combination of data availability, computational resources, and an appropriate encoding of inductive biases. Useful biases often exploit symmetries in the prediction problem, such as convolutional networks relying on translation equivariance. Automatical…
Humans have mental models that allow them to plan, experiment, and reason in the physical world. How should an intelligent agent go about learning such models? In this paper, we will study if models of the world learned in an open-ended physics environment, without any specific tasks, can be reused…
The ability to perceive and reason about social interactions in the context of physical environments is core to human social intelligence and human-machine cooperation. However, no prior dataset or benchmark has systematically evaluated physically grounded perception of complex social interactions t…
A critical aspect of human visual perception is the ability to parse visual scenes into individual objects and further into object parts, forming part-whole hierarchies. Such composite structures could induce a rich set of semantic concepts and relations, thus playing an important role in the interp…
While current vision algorithms excel at many challenging tasks, it is unclear how well they understand the physical dynamics of real-world environments. Here we introduce Physion, a dataset and benchmark for rigorously evaluating the ability to predict how physical scenarios will evolve over time.…
Real-world planning problems often involve hundreds or even thousands of objects, straining the limits of modern planners. In this work, we address this challenge by learning to predict a small set of objects that, taken together, would be sufficient for finding a plan. We propose a graph neural net…
Simulated virtual environments serve as one of the main driving forces behind developing and evaluating skill learning algorithms. However, existing environments typically only simulate rigid body physics. Additionally, the simulation process usually does not provide gradients that might be useful f…
Synthesizing programs from examples requires searching over a vast, combinatorial space of possible programs. In this search process, a key challenge is representing the behavior of a partially written program before it can be executed, to judge if it is on the right track and predict where to searc…
Reasoning in the real world is not divorced from situations. How to capture the present knowledge from surrounding situations and perform reasoning accordingly is crucial and challenging for machine intelligence. This paper introduces a new benchmark that evaluates the situated reasoning ability via…
We introduce a novel scene reconstruction method to infer a fully editable and re-renderable model of a 3D road scene from a single image. We represent movable objects separately from the immovable background, and recover a full 3D model of each distinct object as well as their spatial relations in…
We present Temporal and Object Quantification Networks (TOQ-Nets), a new class of neuro-symbolic networks with a structural bias that enables them to learn to recognize complex relational-temporal events. This is done by including reasoning layers that implement finite-domain quantification over obj…
We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables the simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include real-time near-photo-realistic image ren…
We study the problem of unsupervised physical object discovery. While existing frameworks aim to decompose scenes into 2D segments based off each object's appearance, we explore how physics, especially object interactions, facilitates disentangling of 3D geometry and position of objects from video,…
Humans are able to rapidly understand scenes by utilizing concepts extracted from prior experience. Such concepts are diverse, and include global scene descriptors, such as the weather or lighting, as well as local scene descriptors, such as the color or size of a particular object. So far, unsuperv…
In this paper, we introduce Watch-And-Help (WAH), a challenge for testing social intelligence in agents. In WAH, an AI agent needs to help a human-like agent perform a complex household task efficiently. To succeed, the AI agent needs to i) understand the underlying goal of the task by watching a si…
In this paper, we bring together two divergent strands of research: photometric face capture and statistical 3D face appearance modelling. We propose a novel lightstage capture and processing pipeline for acquiring ear-to-ear, truly intrinsic diffuse and specular albedo maps that fully factor out th…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing contact-based tasks often suffers from low accuracy. We pres…
The ability to reason about temporal and causal events from videos lies at the core of human intelligence. Most video reasoning benchmarks, however, focus on pattern recognition from complex visual and language input, instead of on causal structure. We study the complementary problem, exploring the…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel in image recognition and generation. Among many efforts to explain their effectiveness, experiments show that CNNs carry strong inductive biases that capture natural image priors. Do deep networks also have inductive biases for audio signals? In this paper,…
A major difficulty of solving continuous POMDPs is to infer the multi-modal distribution of the unobserved true states and to make the planning algorithm dependent on the perceived uncertainty. We cast POMDP filtering and planning problems as two closely related Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) processe…
We propose an end-to-end variational generative model for scene layout synthesis conditioned on scene graphs. Unlike unconditional scene layout generation, we use scene graphs as an abstract but general representation to guide the synthesis of diverse scene layouts that satisfy relationships include…
In this paper, we introduce Foley Music, a system that can synthesize plausible music for a silent video clip about people playing musical instruments. We first identify two key intermediate representations for a successful video to music generator: body keypoints from videos and MIDI events from au…
A crucial ability of mobile intelligent agents is to integrate the evidence from multiple sensory inputs in an environment and to make a sequence of actions to reach their goals. In this paper, we attempt to approach the problem of Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation, the task of planning the shortest…
Recent deep learning approaches have achieved impressive performance on visual sound separation tasks. However, these approaches are mostly built on appearance and optical flow like motion feature representations, which exhibit limited abilities to find the correlations between audio signals and vis…
We study the inverse graphics problem of inferring a holistic representation for natural images. Given an input image, our goal is to induce a neuro-symbolic, program-like representation that jointly models camera poses, object locations, and global scene structures. Such high-level, holistic scene…
We study a new research problem of probabilistic future frames prediction from a sequence of noisy inputs, which is useful because it is difficult to guarantee the quality of input frames in practical spatiotemporal prediction applications. It is also challenging because it involves two levels of un…
The focus of recent meta-learning research has been on the development of learning algorithms that can quickly adapt to test time tasks with limited data and low computational cost. Few-shot learning is widely used as one of the standard benchmarks in meta-learning. In this work, we show that a simp…
Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning.…
Physics engines play an important role in robot planning and control; however, many real-world control problems involve complex contact dynamics that cannot be characterized analytically. Most physics engines therefore employ approximations that lead to a loss in precision. In this paper, we propose…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, and many GAN variants have emerged with improvements in sample quality and training stability. However, visualization and understanding of GANs is largely missing. How does a GAN repres…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been developed to model the dynamics of these complex scenes; how…
Human scene perception goes beyond recognizing a collection of objects and their pairwise relations. We understand higher-level, abstract regularities within the scene such as symmetry and repetition. Current vision recognition modules and scene representations fall short in this dimension. In this…
Human perception of 3D shapes goes beyond reconstructing them as a set of points or a composition of geometric primitives: we also effortlessly understand higher-level shape structure such as the repetition and reflective symmetry of object parts. In contrast, recent advances in 3D shape sensing foc…
Humans are capable of building holistic representations for images at various levels, from local objects, to pairwise relations, to global structures. The interpretation of structures involves reasoning over repetition and symmetry of the objects in the image. In this paper, we present the Program-G…
There has been an increasing interest in learning dynamics simulators for model-based control. Compared with off-the-shelf physics engines, a learnable simulator can quickly adapt to unseen objects, scenes, and tasks. However, existing models like interaction networks only work for fully observable…
Object-based factorizations provide a useful level of abstraction for interacting with the world. Building explicit object representations, however, often requires supervisory signals that are difficult to obtain in practice. We present a paradigm for learning object-centric representations for phys…
We present a method which learns to integrate temporal information, from a learned dynamics model, with ambiguous visual information, from a learned vision model, in the context of interacting agents. Our method is based on a graph-structured variational recurrent neural network, which is trained en…
We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them; instead, our model learns by simply looking at images and reading paired questions and answers. Our model builds an object…
Humans easily recognize object parts and their hierarchical structure by watching how they move; they can then predict how each part moves in the future. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation that simultaneously learns a hierarchical, disentangled object representation and a dynamics model f…
Perceiving accurate 3D object shape is important for robots to interact with the physical world. Current research along this direction has been primarily relying on visual observations. Vision, however useful, has inherent limitations due to occlusions and the 2D-3D ambiguities, especially for perce…
An efficient, generalizable physical simulator with universal uncertainty estimates has wide applications in robot state estimation, planning, and control. In this paper, we build such a simulator for two scenarios, planar pushing and ball bouncing, by augmenting an analytical rigid-body simulator w…
The problem of single-view 3D shape completion or reconstruction is challenging, because among the many possible shapes that explain an observation, most are implausible and do not correspond to natural objects. Recent research in the field has tackled this problem by exploiting the expressiveness o…
In few-shot classification, we are interested in learning algorithms that train a classifier from only a handful of labeled examples. Recent progress in few-shot classification has featured meta-learning, in which a parameterized model for a learning algorithm is defined and trained on episodes repr…
Objects are made of parts, each with distinct geometry, physics, functionality, and affordances. Developing such a distributed, physical, interpretable representation of objects will facilitate intelligent agents to better explore and interact with the world. In this paper, we study physical primiti…
We study 3D shape modeling from a single image and make contributions to it in three aspects. First, we present Pix3D, a large-scale benchmark of diverse image-shape pairs with pixel-level 2D-3D alignment. Pix3D has wide applications in shape-related tasks including reconstruction, retrieval, viewpo…
Humans recognize object structure from both their appearance and motion; often, motion helps to resolve ambiguities in object structure that arise when we observe object appearance only. There are particular scenarios, however, where neither appearance nor spatial-temporal motion signals are informa…
Humans infer rich knowledge of objects from both auditory and visual cues. Building a machine of such competency, however, is very challenging, due to the great difficulty in capturing large-scale, clean data of objects with both their appearance and the sound they make. In this paper, we present a…
e study the problem of holistic scene understanding. We would like to obtain a compact, expressive, and interpretable representation of scenes that encodes information such as the number of objects and their categories, poses, positions, etc. Such a representation would allow us to reason about and…
We study the problem of learning generative models of 3D shapes. Voxels or 3D parts have been widely used as the underlying representations to build complex 3D shapes; however, voxel-based representations suffer from high memory requirements, and parts-based models require a large collection of cach…
This paper presents a method which allows robots to infer a human's hierarchical intent from partially observed RGBD videos by imagining how the human will behave in the future. This capability is critical for creating robots which can interact socially or collaboratively with humans. We represent i…
Recent progress on probabilistic modeling and statistical learning, coupled with the availability of large training datasets, has led to remarkable progress in computer vision. Generative probabilistic models, or analysis-by-synthesis approaches, can capture rich scene structure but have been less w…