96 accepted papers
Alignment training has tradeoffs: it helps language models (LMs) gain in reasoning and instruction following but might lose out on skills such as creativity and calibration, where unaligned base models are better at. We aim to make the best of both worlds through model collaboration, where different…
Reasoning post-training with GRPO is typically built on *static uniformity*: uniform prompt sampling and a fixed number of rollouts per prompt. For heterogeneous, heavy-tailed reasoning data, this wastes compute on already-solved patterns while under-training the long tail of hard problems. We cast …
We introduce **MotionEdit**, a novel dataset for motion-centric image editing--the task of modifying subject actions and interactions while preserving identity, structure, and physical plausibility.Unlike existing image editing datasets that focus on static appearance changes or contain only sparse,
Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging. Existing methods mainly rely on supervised fine-t…
Personalization has become a pivotal field of study in contemporary intelligent systems. While large language models (LLMs) excel at general knowledge tasks, they often struggle with personalization, i.e., adapting their outputs to individual user expectations. Existing approaches that steer LLM beh…
Token-level reweighting is a simple yet effective mechanism for controlling supervised fine-tuning, but common indicators are largely one-dimensional: the ground-truth probability reflects downstream alignment, while token entropy reflects intrinsic uncertainty induced by the pre-training prior. Ign…
Self-evolving Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable path toward super-intelligence by autonomously generating, refining, and learning from their own experiences. However, existing methods for training such models still rely heavily on vast human-curated tasks and labels, typically via fine-t…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable code generation capabilities but falter when adapting to frequent updates in external library APIs. This critical limitation, stemming from reliance on outdated API knowledge from their training data, even with access to current documentation, impedes
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often suffer from visual hallucinations – generating things that are not consistent with visual inputs – and language shortcuts, where they skip the visual part and just rely on text priors. These issues arise because most post-training methods for VLMs rely on simple v…
3D Large Vision-Language Models (3D LVLMs) built upon Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across various multimodal tasks. However, their inherited position-dependent modeling mechanism, Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), remains suboptimal for 3D multimodal understanding.
We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic motions over long horizons, which is challenging for existing ap
Task automation has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) via Python code, where the tasks range from software engineering development to general-purpose reasoning. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can solve tasks using programs like human develop…
Learning to perform manipulation tasks from human videos is a promising approach for teaching robots. However, many manipulation tasks require changing control parameters during task execution, such as force, which visual data alone cannot capture. In this work, we leverage sensing devices such as a
We introduce Cognitive Kernel, an open-source agent system towards the goal of generalist autopilots. Unlike copilot systems, which primarily rely on users to provide essential state information, autopilot systems complete tasks from start to finish independently. This requires the system to acquire…
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive language/vision reasoning abilities, igniting the recent trend of building agents for targeted applications such as shopping assistants or AI software engineers. Recently, many data science benchmarks…
Retrosynthesis prediction focuses on identifying reactants capable of synthesizing a target product. Typically, the retrosynthesis prediction involves two phases: Reaction Center Identification and Reactant Generation. However, we argue that most existing methods suffer from two limitations in the t…
Quadrupedal robots have demonstrated impressive locomotion capabilities in complex environments, but equipping them with autonomous versatile manipulation skills in a scalable way remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce a system that integrates data collection and imitation learn…
Quadrupedal robots have demonstrated remarkable agility and robustness in traversing complex terrains. However, they struggle with dynamic object interactions, where contact must be precisely sensed and controlled. To bridge this gap, we present LocoTouch, a system that equips quadrupedal robots wit…
Recent large language model (LLM)-driven chat assistant systems have integrated memory components to track user-assistant chat histories, enabling more accurate and personalized responses. However, their long-term memory capabilities in sustained interactions remain underexplored. We introduce LongM…
The rapid extension of context windows in large vision-language models has given rise to long-context vision-language models (LCVLMs), which are capable of handling hundreds of images with interleaved text tokens in a single forward pass. In this work, we introduce MMLongBench, the first benchmark c…
The advancement of foundation models has laid the groundwork for building autonomous agents for complex tasks such as web navigation. Recent efforts have also tried to equip the agent with the ability to explore environments and continuously improve over time. However, existing works only focused on…
Manipulating human poses based on natural language is an emerging research field that has traditionally focused on coarse commands such as “walking” or “dancing.” However, fine-grained pose manipulation, like instructing “put both hands in front of the stomach,” remains underexplored. In this paper,…
When operating at their full capacity, quadrupedal robots can produce loud footstep noise, which can be disruptive in human-centered environments like homes, offices, and hospitals. As a result, balancing locomotion performance with noise constraints is crucial for the successful real-world deployme
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in code generation yet struggle with modern AI software engineering tasks. Unlike traditional function-level or file-level coding tasks, AI software engineering requires not only basic coding proficiency but also advanced skills in managing and interacting with co…
GUI agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) show promise in automating complex digital tasks. However, their effectiveness in real-world applications is often limited by scarce training data and the inherent complexity of these tasks, which frequently require long-tailed knowledge covering r
Learning visuomotor policy from human demonstrations serves as an effective method for robots to acquire complex tasks. However, data collection on mobile platforms such as drones is extremely challenging, resulting in most research being conducted with robots in stationary conditions for data colle…
Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can s…
Agent self-improvement, where agents autonomously train their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) on self-sampled trajectories, shows promising results but often stagnates in web environments due to limited exploration and under-utilization of pretrained web knowledge. To improve the performance o
Retrieval-augmented language model (RALM) represents a significant advancement in mitigating factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed, and the retrieval of irrelevant data can mislead the response g…
We present CoNVOI, a novel method for autonomous robot navigation in real-world indoor and outdoor environments using Vision Language Models (VLMs). We employ VLMs in two ways: first, we leverage their zero-shot image classification capability to identify the context or scenario (e.g., indoor corrid
Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document,…
Despite the impressive recent advances in learning-based robot control, ensuring robustness to out-of-distribution conditions remains an open challenge. Safety filters can, in principle, keep arbitrary control policies from incurring catastrophic failures by overriding unsafe actions, but existing s…
We present IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal (I2O), an end-to-end learned visual navigation approach, trained solely in simulated short-range indoor environments, and demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to the outdoors for long-range navigation on the Spot robot. Our method uses zero real-world experi
The conditional diffusion model has been demonstrated as an efficient tool for learning robot policies, owing to its advancement to accurately model the conditional distribution of policies. The intricate nature of real-world scenarios, characterized by dynamic obstacles and maze-like structures, un…
Supervised fine-tuning enhances the problem-solving abilities of language models across various mathematical reasoning tasks. To maximize such benefits, existing research focuses on *broadening* the training set with various data augmentation techniques, which is effective for standard single-round…
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit a wide range of capabilities, such as writing robot code from language commands -- enabling non-experts to direct robot behaviors, modify them based on feedback, or compose them to perform new tasks. However, these capabilities (driven by in-co…
Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the robot’s inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation tasks. However, these configurations may limit the robot’s operat…
An elusive goal in navigation research is to build an intelligent agent that can understand multimodal instructions including natural language and image, and perform useful navigation. To achieve this, we study a widely useful category of navigation tasks we call Multimodal Instruction Navigation wi…
Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to train a policy that satisfies con- straints using a pre-collected dataset. Most current methods struggle with the mismatch between imperfect demonstrations and the desired safe and rewarding performance. In this paper, we mitigate this issue from a da…
Vision language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of tasks, from logical reasoning to visual understanding. This opens the door to richer interaction with the world, for example robotic control. However, VLMs produce only textual outputs, while robotic control and oth…
Instruction tuning has remarkably advanced large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to diverse human instructions. Despite the success in high-resource languages, its application in lower-resource ones faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across d…
Robot navigation using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown great potential in improving the performance of mobile robots. Nevertheless, most existing DRL-based navigation methods primarily focus on training a policy that directly commands the robot with low-level controls, like linear and an…
Generalization remains one of the most important desiderata for robust robot learning systems. While recently proposed approaches show promise in generalization to novel objects, semantic concepts, or visual distribution shifts, generalization to new tasks remains challenging. For example, a languag…
We introduce sub-sentence encoder, a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. In contrast to the standard practice with sentence embeddings, where the meaning of an entire sequence of text is encoded into a fixed-length vector, the sub-senten…
In this paper, we describe the design of the Barkour benchmark for measuring robot agility in navigating complex environments. Despite the growing interest in developing agile robot locomotion skills, the field lacks systematic benchmarks to measure the performance of robotic control systems and har…
Hexapod robots are potentially suitable for carrying out tasks in cluttered environments since they are stable, compact, and light weight. They also have multi-joint legs and variable height bodies that make them good candidates for tasks such as stairs climbing and squeezing under objects in a typi…
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to a new era marked by the development of autonomous applications in real-world scenarios, which drives innovation in creating advanced web agents. Existing web agents typically only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in sim…
Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems in language has garnered…
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an efficient computational tool for solving nonlinear optimal control problems. It was originally designed as a single shooting method and thus is sensitive to the initial guess supplied. This work considers the extension of DDP to multiple shooting (MS), im…
Logical reasoning over text is an important ability that requires understanding the semantics of the text and reasoning through them to arrive at correct inferences. Prior works on pretraining language models to improve the logical reasoning ability require complex processing of training data (e.g.,…
Large language models (LLMs) can perform a wide range of tasks by following natural language instructions, without the necessity of task-specific fine-tuning. Unfortunately, the performance of LLMs is greatly influenced by the quality of these instructions, and manually writing effective instruction…
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 centr…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem from a novel multi-objective optimization perspective and pr…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on training reward-maximizing agents subject to pre-defined safety constraints. Yet, learning versatile safe policies that can adapt to varying safety constraint requirements during deployment without retraining remains a largely unexplored and challenging ar…
Knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering (QA), require access to a large amount of world or domain knowledge. A common approach for knowledge-intensive tasks is to employ a retrieve-then-read pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant contextual documents from an ex…
Recent studies have shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) exhibit strong biases towards the node degree: they usually perform satisfactorily on high-degree nodes with rich neighbor information but struggle with low-degree nodes. Existing works tackle this problem by deriving either designated GNN…
Although counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, the lack of large-scale counterfactual open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate and improve models on this ability. To address this void, we introduce the first such dataset, named IfQA, w…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exciting progress in acquiring diverse new capabilities through in-context learning, ranging from logical reasoning to code-writing. Robotics researchers have also explored using LLMs to advance the capabilities of robotic control. However, since low-le…
Document retrieval is a key stage of standard Web search engines. Existing dual-encoder dense retrievers obtain representations for questions and documents independently, allowing for only shallow interactions between them. To overcome this limitation, recent autoregressive search engines replace th…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for distilling math word problem solving capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Our approach is designed to consider the student model's weaknesses and foster a tailored learning experience by generating…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) for graph neural networks (GNNs) has attracted increasing attention from the graph machine learning community in recent years, owing to its capability to learn performant node embeddings without costly label information. One weakness of conventional SSL frameworks for…
Attics are one of the largest sources of energy loss in residential homes, but they are uncomfortable and dangerous for human workers to conduct air sealing and insulation. Hexapod robots are potentially suitable for carrying out those tasks in tight attic spaces since they are stable, compact, and…
Comparative reasoning is a process of comparing objects, concepts, or entities to draw conclusions, which constitutes a fundamental cognitive ability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to pre-train language models for enhancing their abilities of comparative reasoning over texts. While the…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to perform high-level planning. Yet, it remains a challenge for LLMs to comprehend low-level commands, such as joint angle targets or motor torques. This paper proposes an approach to use foot contact patterns as an interface that bridges…
This paper explores the principles for transforming a quadrupedal robot into a guide robot for individuals with visual impairments. A guide robot has great potential to resolve the limited availability of guide animals that are accessible to only two to three percent of the potential blind or visual…
Specialized motions such as jumping are often achieved on quadruped robots by solving a trajectory optimization problem once and executing the trajectory using a tracking controller. This approach is in parallel with Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategies that commonly control regular gaits via o…
Entities, as important carriers of real-world knowledge, play a key role in many NLP tasks.We focus on incorporating entity knowledge into an encoder-decoder framework for informative text generation. Existing approaches tried to index, retrieve, and read external documents as evidence, but they suf…
Training a high-dimensional simulated agent with an under-specified reward function often leads the agent to learn physically infeasible strategies that are ineffective when deployed in the real world. To mitigate these unnatural behaviors, reinforcement learning practitioners often utilize complex…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) aim to learn universal language representations by conducting self-supervised training tasks on large-scale corpora. Since PLMs capture word semantics in different contexts, the quality of word representations highly depends on word frequency, which usually follows…
Generative commonsense reasoning (GCR) in natural language is to reason about the commonsense while generating coherent text. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, these approaches have seldom investigated diversi…
Answering open-domain questions requires world knowledge about in-context entities. As pre-trained Language Models (LMs) lack the power to store all required knowledge, external knowledge sources, such as knowledge graphs, are often used to augment LMs. In this work, we propose knOwledge REasOning e…
A common thread of open-domain question answering (QA) models employs a retriever-reader pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant passages from Wikipedia and then peruses the passages to produce an answer. However, even state-of-the-art readers fail to capture the complex relationships be…
Current Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) models typically include a retrieving module and a reading module, where the retriever selects potentially relevant passages from open-source documents for a given question, and the reader produces an answer based on the retrieved passages. The recently…
The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from perception for quadrupedal robots, such that the robot can trave…
Learning to predict missing links is important for many graph-based applications. Existing methods were designed to learn the association between observed graph structure and existence of link between a pair of nodes. However, the causal relationship between the two variables was largely ignored for…
Evolution Strategy (ES) algorithms have shown promising results in training complex robotic control policies due to their massive parallelism capability, simple implementation, effective parameter-space exploration, and fast training time. However, a key limitation of ES is its scalability to large…
A common thread of retrieval-augmented methods in the existing literature focuses on retrieving encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, which facilitates well-defined entity and relation spaces that can be modeled. However, applying such methods to commonsense reasoning tasks faces two unique cha…
Designing control policies for legged locomotion11In this work, we specifically consider quadruped locomotion. is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of a…
Leveraging task-aware annotated data as supervised signals to assist with self-supervised learning on large-scale unlabeled data has become a new trend in pre-training language models. Existing studies show that multi-task learning with large-scale supervised tasks suffers from negative effects acro…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has witnessed great strides for quadruped locomotion, with continued progress in the reliable sim-to-real transfer of policies. However, it remains a challenge to reuse a policy on another robot, which could save time for retraining. In this work, we present a framework f…
General contact-rich manipulation problems are long-standing challenges in robotics due to the difficulty of understanding complicated contact physics. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in solving robot manipulation tasks. However, existing RL policies have limited adaptabil…
Recent successes in deep generative modeling have led to significant advances in natural language generation (NLG). Incorporating entities into neural generation models has demonstrated great improvements by assisting to infer the summary topic and to generate coherent content. To enhance the role o…
Transferring reinforcement learning policies trained in physics simulation to the real hardware remains a challenge, known as the "sim-to-real" gap. Domain randomization is a simple yet effective technique to address dynamics discrepancies across source and target domains, but its success generally…
Being able to transfer existing skills to new situations is a key capability when training robots to operate in unpredictable real-world environments. A successful transfer algorithm should not only minimize the number of samples that the robot needs to collect in the new environment, but also preve…
Generating paragraphs of diverse contents is important in many applications. Existing generation models produce similar contents from homogenized contexts due to the fixed left-to-right sentence order. Our idea is permuting the sentence orders to improve the content diversity of multi-sentence parag…
Building automatic technical support system is an important yet challenge task. Conceptually, to answer a user question on a technical forum, a human expert has to first retrieve relevant documents, and then read them carefully to identify the answer snippet. Despite huge success the researchers hav…
Vision is one of the most important perception modalities for legged robots to safely and efficiently navigate uneven terrains, such as stairs and stepping stones. However, training robots to effectively understand high-dimensional visual input for locomotion is a challenging problem. In this work,…
The ability to walk in new scenarios is a key milestone on the path toward real-world applications of legged robots. In this work, we introduce Meta Strategy Optimization, a metalearning algorithm for training policies with latent variable inputs that can quickly adapt to new scenarios with a handfu
In this work, we present a reinforcement learning algorithm that can find a variety of policies (novel policies) for a task that is given by a task reward function. Our method does this by creating a second reward function that recognizes previously seen state sequences and rewards those by novelty,…
Computer simulation provides an automatic and safe way for training robotic control policies to achieve complex tasks such as locomotion. However, a policy trained in simulation usually does not transfer directly to the real hardware due to the differences between the two environments. Transfer lear…
We present a new approach for transfer of dynamic robot control policies such as biped locomotion from simulation to real hardware. Key to our approach is to perform system identification of the model parameters μ of the hardware (e.g. friction, center-of-mass) in two distinct stages, before policy…
There is a considerable need for assistive dressing among people with disabilities, and robots have the potential to fulfill this need. However, training such a robot would require extensive trials in order to learn the skills of assistive dressing. Such training would be time-consuming and require…
We present a controller that allows an armlike manipulator to navigate deformable cloth garments in simulation through the use of haptic information. The main challenge of such a controller is to avoid getting tangled in, tearing or punching through the deforming cloth. Our controller aggregates for…
We present a new method of learning control policies that successfully operate under unknown dynamic models. We create such policies by leveraging a large number of training examples that are generated using a physical simulator. Our system is made of two components: a Universal Policy (UP) and a…
During robot-assisted dressing, a robot manipulates a garment in contact with a person's body. Inferring the forces applied to the person's body by the garment might enable a robot to provide more effective assistance and give the robot insight into what the person feels. However, complex mechanics…