Publications

PhotoBot: Reference-Guided Interactive Photography via Natural Language
Oliver Limoyo
Jimmy Li
Dmitriy Rivkin
Jonathan Kelly
Gregory Dudek
We introduce PhotoBot, a framework for fully automated photo acquisition based on an interplay between high-level human language guidance an… (see more)d a robot photographer. We propose to communicate photography suggestions to the user via reference images that are selected from a curated gallery. We leverage a visual language model (VLM) and an object detector to characterize the reference images via textual descriptions and then use a large language model (LLM) to retrieve relevant reference images based on a user's language query through text-based reasoning. To correspond the reference image and the observed scene, we exploit pre-trained features from a vision transformer capable of capturing semantic similarity across marked appearance variations. Using these features, we compute pose adjustments for an RGB-D camera by solving a perspective-n-point (PnP) problem. We demonstrate our approach using a manipulator equipped with a wrist camera. Our user studies show that photos taken by PhotoBot are often more aesthetically pleasing than those taken by users themselves, as measured by human feedback. We also show that PhotoBot can generalize to other reference sources such as paintings.
2024-01-19
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Deployable Reinforcement Learning with Variable Control Rate
Dong Wang
Giovanni Beltrame
2024-01-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
METhodological RadiomICs Score (METRICS): a quality scoring tool for radiomics research endorsed by EuSoMII
Burak Kocak
Tugba Akinci D’Antonoli
Nathaniel Mercaldo
Angel Alberich-Bayarri
Bettina Baessler
Ilaria Ambrosini
Anna E. Andreychenko
Spyridon Bakas
Regina G. H. Beets-Tan
Keno Bressem
Irene Buvat
Roberto Cannella
Luca Alessandro Cappellini
Armando Ugo Cavallo
Leonid L. Chepelev
Linda Chi Hang Chu
Aydin Demircioglu
Nandita M. deSouza
Matthias Dietzel
Salvatore Claudio Fanni … (see 40 more)
Andrey Fedorov
Laure S. Fournier
Valentina Giannini
Rossano Girometti
Kevin B. W. Groot Lipman
Georgios Kalarakis
Brendan S. Kelly
Michail E. Klontzas
Dow-Mu Koh
Elmar Kotter
Ho Yun Lee
Mario Maas
Luis Marti-Bonmati
Henning Müller
Nancy Obuchowski
Fanny Orlhac
Nikolaos Papanikolaou
Ekaterina Petrash
Elisabeth Pfaehler
Daniel Pinto dos Santos
Andrea Ponsiglione
Sebastià Sabater
Francesco Sardanelli
Philipp Seeböck
Nanna M. Sijtsema
Arnaldo Stanzione
Alberto Traverso
Lorenzo Ugga
Martin Vallières
Lisanne V. van Dijk
Joost J. M. van Griethuysen
Robbert W. van Hamersvelt
Peter van Ooijen
Federica Vernuccio
Alan Wang
Stuart Williams
Jan Witowski
Zhongyi Zhang
Alex Zwanenburg
Renato Cuocolo
2024-01-17
Insights into Imaging (published)
doi.org
Amortizing intractable inference in large language models
Edward J Hu
Moksh J. Jain
Eric Elmoznino
Younesse Kaddar
Guillaume Lajoie
Yoshua Bengio
Nikolay Malkin
Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) compress knowledge from their training data through next-token conditional distributions. This l… (see more)imits tractable querying of this knowledge to start-to-end autoregressive sampling. However, many tasks of interest -- including sequence continuation, infilling, and other forms of constrained generation -- involve sampling from intractable posterior distributions. We address this limitation by using amortized Bayesian inference to sample from these intractable posteriors. Such amortization is algorithmically achieved by fine-tuning LLMs via diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms: generative flow networks (GFlowNets). We empirically demonstrate that this distribution-matching paradigm of LLM fine-tuning can serve as an effective alternative to maximum-likelihood training and reward-maximizing policy optimization. As an important application, we interpret chain-of-thought reasoning as a latent variable modeling problem and demonstrate that our approach enables data-efficient adaptation of LLMs to tasks that require multi-step rationalization and tool use.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (oral)
doi.org
openreview.net
Balancing Act: Constraining Disparate Impact in Sparse Models
Meraj Hashemizadeh
Juan Ramirez
Rohan Sukumaran
Golnoosh Farnadi
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Jose Gallego-Posada
Model pruning is a popular approach to enable the deployment of large deep learning models on edge devices with restricted computational or … (see more)storage capacities. Although sparse models achieve performance comparable to that of their dense counterparts at the level of the entire dataset, they exhibit high accuracy drops for some data sub-groups. Existing methods to mitigate this disparate impact induced by pruning (i) rely on surrogate metrics that address the problem indirectly and have limited interpretability; or (ii) scale poorly with the number of protected sub-groups in terms of computational cost. We propose a constrained optimization approach that directly addresses the disparate impact of pruning: our formulation bounds the accuracy change between the dense and sparse models, for each sub-group. This choice of constraints provides an interpretable success criterion to determine if a pruned model achieves acceptable disparity levels. Experimental results demonstrate that our technique scales reliably to problems involving large models and hundreds of protected sub-groups.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Bridging State and History Representations: Understanding Self-Predictive RL
Tianwei Ni
Benjamin Eysenbach
Erfan SeyedSalehi
Michel Ma
Clement Gehring
Aditya Mahajan
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Representations are at the core of all deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods for both Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially obse… (see more)rvable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Many representation learning methods and theoretical frameworks have been developed to understand what constitutes an effective representation. However, the relationships between these methods and the shared properties among them remain unclear. In this paper, we show that many of these seemingly distinct methods and frameworks for state and history abstractions are, in fact, based on a common idea of self-predictive abstraction. Furthermore, we provide theoretical insights into the widely adopted objectives and optimization, such as the stop-gradient technique, in learning self-predictive representations. These findings together yield a minimalist algorithm to learn self-predictive representations for states and histories. We validate our theories by applying our algorithm to standard MDPs, MDPs with distractors, and POMDPs with sparse rewards. These findings culminate in a set of preliminary guidelines for RL practitioners.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Closing the Gap between TD Learning and Supervised Learning - A Generalisation Point of View
Raj Ghugare
Matthieu Geist
Glen Berseth
Benjamin Eysenbach
Some reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can stitch pieces of experience to solve a task never seen before during training. This oft-soug… (see more)ht property is one of the few ways in which RL methods based on dynamic-programming differ from RL methods based on supervised-learning (SL). Yet, certain RL methods based on off-the-shelf SL algorithms achieve excellent results without an explicit mechanism for stitching; it remains unclear whether those methods forgo this important stitching property. This paper studies this question for the problems of achieving a target goal state and achieving a target return value. Our main result is to show that the stitching property corresponds to a form of combinatorial generalization: after training on a distribution of (state, goal) pairs, one would like to evaluate on (state, goal) pairs not seen together in the training data. Our analysis shows that this sort of generalization is different from i.i.d. generalization. This connection between stitching and generalisation reveals why we should not expect SL-based RL methods to perform stitching, even in the limit of large datasets and models. Based on this analysis, we construct new datasets to explicitly test for this property, revealing that SL-based methods lack this stitching property and hence fail to perform combinatorial generalization. Nonetheless, the connection between stitching and combinatorial generalisation also suggests a simple remedy for improving generalisation in SL: data augmentation. We propose a temporal data augmentation and demonstrate that adding it to SL-based methods enables them to successfully complete tasks not seen together during training. On a high level, this connection illustrates the importance of combinatorial generalization for data efficiency in time-series data beyond tasks beyond RL, like audio, video, or text.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Closing the Gap between TD Learning and Supervised Learning -- A Generalisation Point of View.
Raj Ghugare
Matthieu Geist
Glen Berseth
Benjamin Eysenbach
Some reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have the capability of recombining together pieces of previously seen experience to solve a task… (see more) never seen before during training. This oft-sought property is one of the few ways in which dynamic programming based RL algorithms are considered different from supervised learning (SL) based RL algorithms. Yet, recent RL methods based on off-the-shelf SL algorithms achieve excellent results without an explicit mechanism for stitching; it remains unclear whether those methods forgo this important stitching property. This paper studies this question in the setting of goal-reaching problems. We show that the desirable stitching property corresponds to a form of generalization: after training on a distribution of (state, goal) pairs, one would like to evaluate on (state, goal) pairs not seen \emph{together} in the training data. Our analysis shows that this sort of generalization is different from \emph{i.i.d.} generalization. This connection between stitching and generalization reveals why we should not expect existing RL methods based on SL to perform stitching, even in the limit of large datasets and models. We experimentally validate this result on carefully constructed datasets. This connection suggests a simple remedy, the same remedy for improving generalization in supervised learning: data augmentation. We propose a naive \emph{temporal} data augmentation approach and demonstrate that adding it to RL methods based on SL enables them to stitch together experience so that they succeed in navigating between states and goals unseen together during training.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Consciousness-Inspired Spatio-Temporal Abstractions for Better Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Harry Zhao
Harry Zhao 0001
Mingde Zhao
Safa Alver
Harm van Seijen
Romain Laroche
Doina Precup
Yoshua Bengio
Inspired by human conscious planning, we propose Skipper, a model-based reinforcement learning framework utilizing spatio-temporal abstracti… (see more)ons to generalize better in novel situations. It automatically decomposes the given task into smaller, more manageable subtasks, and thus enables sparse decision-making and focused computation on the relevant parts of the environment. The decomposition relies on the extraction of an abstracted proxy problem represented as a directed graph, in which vertices and edges are learned end-to-end from hindsight. Our theoretical analyses provide performance guarantees under appropriate assumptions and establish where our approach is expected to be helpful. Generalization-focused experiments validate Skipper’s significant advantage in zero-shot generalization, compared to some existing state-of-the-art hierarchical planning methods.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Course Correcting Koopman Representations
Mahan Fathi
Clement Gehring
Jonathan Pilault
David Kanaa
Pierre-Luc Bacon
Ross Goroshin
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Cycle Consistency Driven Object Discovery
Aniket Rajiv Didolkar
Anirudh Goyal
Yoshua Bengio
Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. … (see more)Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
A Data-Driven Measure of Relative Uncertainty for Misclassification Detection
Eduardo Dadalto Câmara Gomes
Marco Romanelli
Georg Pichler
Pablo Piantanida
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net