51 accepted papers
Bagging-based ensembles, most notably Adaptive Random Forests, are among the strongest performers for learning from data streams. A common denominator across these methods is their reliance on Hoeffding Trees as base learners, which grow incrementally by testing whether a candidate split is signific…
Training data detection is critical for enforcing copyright and data licensing, as Large Language Models (LLM) are trained on massive text corpora scraped from the internet. We present SPECTRA, a watermarking approach that makes training data reliably detectable even when it comprises less than 0.00
State-of-the-art multimodal web agents, powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), can autonomously execute many web tasks by processing user instructions and interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Current strategies for building web agents rely on (i) the generalizability of u…
Conditional demographic parity (CDP) is a measure of the demographic parity of a predictive model or decision process when conditioning on an additional feature or set of features. Many algorithmic fairness techniques exist to target demographic parity, but CDP is much harder to achieve, particularl…
We present DexUMI - a data collection and policy learning framework that uses the human hand as the natural interface to transfer dexterous manipulation skills to various robot hands. DexUMI incorporates hardware and software adaptations to minimize the embodiment gap between the human hand and vari…
Adversarially robust optimization (ARO) has emerged as the *de facto* standard for training models that hedge against adversarial attacks in the test stage. While these models are robust against adversarial attacks, they tend to suffer severely from overfitting. To address this issue, some successfu
As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful, the computation required to run these models is increasingly outsourced to a third-party cloud. While this saves clients' computation, it risks leaking the clients' LLM queries to the cloud provider. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) presents a…
Reward models (RMs) are a crucial component in the alignment of large language models’ (LLMs) outputs with human values. RMs approximate human preferences over possible LLM responses to the same prompt by predicting and comparing reward scores. However, as they are typically modified versions of LLM…
Legal contracts in the custody and fund services domain govern critical aspects such as key provider responsibilities, fee schedules, and indemnification rights. However, it is challenging for an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM) to ingest these contracts due to the lengthy unstructured strea…
Recent advancements in language modeling have shown promising results when applied to time series data. In particular, fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for time series classification tasks has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on standard benchmarks. However, these LLM…
Time series with missing or irregularly sampled data are a persistent challenge in machine learning. Many methods operate on the frequency-domain, relying on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) which assumes uniform sampling, therefore requiring prior interpolation that can distort the spectra. To addr…
In recent years, mixup regularization has gained popularity as an effective way to improve the generalization performance of deep learning models by training on convex combinations of training data. While many mixup variants have been explored, the proper adoption of the technique to conditional den
We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually tuned steering strengths, often resulting in under or overstee…
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often struggle with automating high-mix, low-volume (HMLV) manufacturing due to the inflexibility and high cost of traditional automation solutions. This paper presents a novel approach to robotic manipulation for HMLV environments that leverages vibrotactil
Discrete optimization belongs to the set of N P-hard problems, spanning fields such as mixed-integer programming and combinatorial optimization. A current standard approach to solving convex discrete optimization problems is the use of cutting-plane algorithms, which reach optimal solutions by itera…
We introduce **T-CREx**, a novel model-agnostic method for local and global counterfactual explanation (CE), which summarises recourse options for both individuals and groups in the form of generalised rules. It leverages tree-based surrogate models to learn the counterfactual rules, alongside *meta…
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential for automatic time series analysis and reporting, which is a critical task across many domains, spanning healthcare, finance, climate, energy, and many more. In this paper, we propose a framework for rigorously evaluating the capabilities of LLMs on t…
Data distillation and coresets have emerged as popular approaches to generate a smaller representative set of samples for downstream learning tasks to handle large-scale datasets. At the same time, machine learning is being increasingly applied to decision-making processes at a societal level, makin…
Recent years have seen a surge of machine learning approaches aimed at reducing disparities in model outputs across different subgroups. In many settings, training data may be used in multiple downstream applications by different users, which means it may be most effective to intervene on the traini…
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 embodime…
This paper proposes Progressive inference--a framework to explain the predictions of decoder-only transformer models trained to perform sequence classification tasks. Our work is based on the insight that the classification head of a decoder-only model can be used to make intermediate predictions by…
We introduce a novel approach for detecting distribution shifts that negatively impact the performance of machine learning models in continuous production environments, which requires no access to ground truth data labels. It builds upon the work of Podkopaev and Ramdas [2022], who address scenarios…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) has kindled a need for prompt-response, document-based datasets. As annotating new datasets from scratch is labor-intensive, the existing literature has generated prompt-response datasets from available resource…
Creation of a synthetic dataset that faithfully represents the data distribution and simultaneously preserves privacy is a major research challenge. Many space partitioning based approaches have emerged in recent years for answering statistical queries in a differentially private manner. However, fo…
A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries…
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 un…
We introduce ASPiRe (Adaptive Skill Prior for RL), a new approach that leverages prior experience to accelerate reinforcement learning. Unlike existing methods that learn a single skill prior from a large and diverse dataset, our framework learns a library of different distinction skill priors (i.e.…
Intelligent robots need to generate and execute plans. In order to deal with the complexity of real environments, planning makes some assumptions about the world. When executing plans, the assumptions are usually not met. Most works have focused on the negative impact of this fact and the use of rep…
Current work in explainable reinforcement learning generally produces policies in the form of a decision tree over the state space. Such policies can be used for formal safety verification, agent behavior prediction, and manual inspection of important features. However, existing approaches fit a dec…
We focus on long-sighted planning for a class of problems with multiple independent tasks that are partially observable and evolve over time. An example problem that falls into this class is a robot waiting multiple tables, referred to as tasks, in a restaurant where customers' satisfaction is parti
Agent control among pedestrians is often approached in one of the three following ways: using predefined behaviors for agent navigation, learning navigation behaviors from data, or search-based planning on a graph where each edge is a feasible action chosen from a set of predefined actions. While th…
Tactile sensors are used in robot manipulation to reduce uncertainty regarding hand-object pose estimation. However, existing sensor technologies tend to be bulky and provide signals that are difficult to interpret into actionable changes. Here, we achieve wireless tactile sensing with soft and conf…
We explore using reinforcement learning on single and multi-agent systems such that after learning is finished we can apply a policy zero-shot to new environment sizes, as well as different number of agents and entities. Building off previous work, we show how to map back and forth between the state…
Achieving effective task performance on real mobile robots is a great challenge when hand-coding algorithms, both due to the amount of effort involved and manually tuned parameters required for each skill. Learning algorithms instead have the potential to lighten up this challenge by using one singl…
For autonomous multi-robot teams, the individual team members are tasked with completing their assigned tasks as defined by a team plan provided by a centralized team planner. However in complex dynamic domains, the team plans are generated by the team planner with assumptions due to the complexity…
Kinesthetic learning is a type of learning from demonstration in which the teacher manually moves the robot through the demonstrated trajectory. It shows great promise in the area of assistive robotics since it enables a caretaker who is not an expert in computer programming to communicate a novel t…
Despite the recent success of state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms in object recognition, when these are deployed as-is on a mobile service robot, we observed that they failed to recognize many objects in real human environments. In this paper, we introduce a learning algorithm in which robots…
Teaching a robot to predict and mimic how a human moves or acts in the near future by observing a series of historical human movements is a crucial first step in human-robot interaction and collaboration. In this paper, we instrument a robot with such a prediction ability by leveraging recent deep l…
This paper addresses the problem of human-robot collaboration in scenarios where a robot assists a human by executing a complex motion involving the manipulation of an object. We focus on tasks in which success in the task depends on reaching a target pose that is controlled by the human. We contrib…
Individual team members are the building blocks of successful multi-robot teams in dynamic competitive domains. The current approach to designing a team is to divide the planning into a hierarchy by separating team coordination and task assignment - global planning - from task planning and execution…
We proposed a multimodal end-to-end policy based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that leverages sensor fusion to reduced performance drops in noisy environment from 50% to 10% compared with the baseline and makes the policy functional even in the face of partial sensor failure by using a novel
A robot performs a sequence of motions to animate a given input, e.g., dancing to music or telling a story. Each input is pre-processed to determine labels, e.g., emotions of the music or words in the story. Each label corresponds to multiple motions, and each motion has multiple labels. Therefore,…
Autonomous mobile robots continuously perceive the world, plan or replan to achieve objectives, and execute the selected actions. Videos of autonomous robots are often naturally used to aid in replaying and demonstrating robot performance. However, plain videos contain no information about the ongoi…
A labeled motion library, in which robot motions are associated with semantic meanings, e.g., words, is useful for human-robot interaction, as a robot can use it to autonomously select motions to support its non-verbal communication. Manually assigning labels to new motions to a motion library is ti…
We introduce in this paper visibility maps for robots of any shape, representing the reachability limit of the robot's motion and sensing in a 2D gridmap with obstacles. The brute-force approach to determine the optimal visibility map is computationally expensive, and prohibitive with dynamic obstac…
Global localization is a widely studied problem, and in essence corresponds to the online robot pose estimation based on a given map with landmarks, an odometry model, and real robot sensory observations and motion. In most approaches, the map provides the position of visible objects, which are then…
We consider the problem of indoor human trajectory identification using odometry data from smartphone sensors. Given a segmented trajectory, a simplified map of the environment, and a set of error thresholds, we implement a map-matching algorithm in a urban setting and analyze the accuracy of the re…
In this paper, we consider several autonomous robots with separate tasks that require coordination, but not a coupling at every decision step. We assume that each robot separately acquires its task, possibly from different providers. We address the problem of multiple robots incrementally acquiring…
Modeling the effects of actions based on the state of the world enables robots to make intelligent decisions in different situations. However, it is often infeasible to have globally accurate models. Task performance is often hindered by discrepancies between models and the real world, since the tru…
Robot table tennis is a challenging domain in both robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In terms of robotics, it requires fast and reliable perception and control; in terms of artificial intelligence, it requires fast decision making to determine the best motion to hit the ball; i…
Most wireless solutions today are centered around people-centric devices like laptops and cell phones that are insufficient for mobile robots. The key difference is that people-centric devices use wireless connectivity in bursts under primarily stationary settings while mobile robots continuously tr…