Publications

Ant Colony Sampling with GFlowNets for Combinatorial Optimization
Minsu Kim
Sanghyeok Choi
Jiwoo Son
Hyeon-Seob Kim
Jinkyoo Park
Beyond A*: Better Planning with Transformers via Search Dynamics Bootstrapping
Lucas Lehnert
Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Paul McVay
Yuandong Tian
While Transformers have enabled tremendous progress in various application settings, such architectures still lag behind traditional symboli… (see more)c planners for solving complex decision making tasks. In this work, we demonstrate how to train Transformers to solve complex planning tasks. This is accomplished by training an encoder-decoder Transformer model to predict the _search dynamics_ of the
Improving and Generalizing Flow-Based Generative Models with Minibatch Optimal Transport
Alexander Tong
Nikolay Malkin
Guillaume Huguet
Yanlei Zhang
Jarrid Rector-Brooks
Kilian FATRAS
Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) are an attractive generative modeling technique, but they have been held back by limitations in their si… (see more)mulation-based maximum likelihood training. We introduce the generalized \textit{conditional flow matching} (CFM) technique, a family of simulation-free training objectives for CNFs. CFM features a stable regression objective like that used to train the stochastic flow in diffusion models but enjoys the efficient inference of deterministic flow models. In contrast to both diffusion models and prior CNF training algorithms, CFM does not require the source distribution to be Gaussian or require evaluation of its density. A variant of our objective is optimal transport CFM (OT-CFM), which creates simpler flows that are more stable to train and lead to faster inference, as evaluated in our experiments. Furthermore, OT-CFM is the first method to compute dynamic OT in a simulation-free way. Training CNFs with CFM improves results on a variety of conditional and unconditional generation tasks, such as inferring single cell dynamics, unsupervised image translation, and Schrödinger bridge inference.
IntentGPT: Few-shot Intent Discovery with Large Language Models
Juan A. Rodriguez
Nicholas Botzer
David Vazquez
Marco Pedersoli
Issam Hadj Laradji
Investigating Robot Influence on Human Behaviour By Leveraging Entrainment Effects
Lixiao Zhu
Language-guided Skill Learning with Temporal Variational Inference
Haotian Fu
Pratyusha Sharma
Elias Stengel-Eskin
George Konidaris
Marc-Alexandre Côté
Xingdi Yuan
We present an algorithm for skill discovery from expert demonstrations. The algorithm first utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to propose… (see more) an initial segmentation of the trajectories. Following that, a hierarchical variational inference framework incorporates the LLM-generated segmentation information to discover reusable skills by merging trajectory segments. To further control the trade-off between compression and reusability, we introduce a novel auxiliary objective based on the Minimum Description Length principle that helps guide this skill discovery process. We test our system on BabyAI, a grid world navigation environment, as well as ALFRED, a household simulation environment.Our results demonstrate that agents equipped with our method can discover skills that help accelerate learning and outperform baseline skill learning approaches on new long-horizon tasks.
Language-guided Skill Learning with Temporal Variational Inference
Haotian Fu
Pratyusha Sharma
Elias Stengel-Eskin
George Konidaris
Marc-Alexandre Côté
Xingdi Yuan
Perspectives on Robotic Systems for the Visually Impaired
Christopher Yee Wong
Rahatul Amin Ananto
Tanaka Akiyama
Joseph Paul Nemargut
Prioritizing Safeguarding Over Autonomy: Risks of LLM Agents for Science
Xiangru Tang
Qiao Jin
Kunlun Zhu
Tongxin Yuan
Yichi Zhang
Wangchunshu Zhou
Meng Qu
Yilun Zhao
Zhuosheng Zhang
Arman Cohan
Zhiyong Lu
Mark Gerstein
Stealing Part of a Production Language Model
Nicholas Carlini
Daniel Paleka
Krishnamurthy Dvijotham
Thomas Steinke
Jonathan Hayase
A. Feder Cooper
Katherine Lee
Matthew Jagielski
Milad Nasr
Arthur Conmy
Eric Wallace
Florian Tramèr
Stochastic gradient descent-based inference for dynamic network models with attractors
Hancong Pan
Xiaojing Zhu
Cantay Caliskan
Dino P. Christenson
Konstantinos Spiliopoulos
Dylan Walker
WebLINX: Real-World Website Navigation with Multi-Turn Dialogue
Xing Han Lu
Zdeněk Kasner
We propose the problem of conversational web navigation, where a digital agent controls a web browser and follows user instructions to solve… (see more) real-world tasks in a multi-turn dialogue fashion. To support this problem, we introduce WebLINX - a large-scale benchmark of 100K interactions across 2300 expert demonstrations of conversational web navigation. Our benchmark covers a broad range of patterns on over 150 real-world websites and can be used to train and evaluate agents in diverse scenarios. Due to the magnitude of information present, Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot process entire web pages in real-time. To solve this bottleneck, we design a retrieval-inspired model that efficiently prunes HTML pages by ranking relevant elements. We use the selected elements, along with screenshots and action history, to assess a variety of models for their ability to replicate human behavior when navigating the web. Our experiments span from small text-only to proprietary multimodal LLMs. We find that smaller finetuned decoders surpass the best zero-shot LLMs (including GPT-4V), but also larger finetuned multimodal models which were explicitly pretrained on screenshots. However, all finetuned models struggle to generalize to unseen websites. Our findings highlight the need for large multimodal models that can generalize to novel settings. Our code, data and models are available for research: https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/weblinx.