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Xuanlin Li

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10 papers

2 author rows

ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models: Open X-Embodiment Collaboration

Abby O'Neill
Abdul Rehman
Abhiram Maddukuri
Abhishek Gupta 0004
Abhishek Padalkar
Abraham Lee
Acorn Pooley
Agrim Gupta

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train "generalist" X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. The project website is robotics-transformer-x. github.io.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

What to Say and When to Say it: Live Fitness Coaching as a Testbed for Situated Interaction

Sunny Panchal
Apratim Bhattacharyya
Guillaume Berger
Antoine Mercier
Cornelius Böhm
Florian Dietrichkeit
Reza Pourreza
Xuanlin Li

Vision-language models have shown impressive progress in recent years. However, existing models are largely limited to turn-based interactions, where each turn must be stepped (i. e. , prompted) by the user. Open-ended, asynchronous interactions, where an AI model may proactively deliver timely responses or feedback based on the unfolding situation in real-time, are an open challenge. In this work, we present the QEVD benchmark and dataset, which explores human-AI interaction in the challenging, yet controlled, real-world domain of fitness coaching – a task which intrinsically requires monitoring live user activity and providing immediate feedback. The benchmark requires vision-language models to recognize complex human actions, identify possible mistakes, and provide appropriate feedback in real-time. Our experiments reveal the limitations of existing state-of-the-art vision-language models for such asynchronous situated interactions. Motivated by this, we propose a simple end-to-end streaming baseline that can respond asynchronously to human actions with appropriate feedback at the appropriate time.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Deductive Verification of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Zhan Ling
Yunhao Fang
Xuanlin Li
Zhiao Huang
Mingu Lee
Roland Memisevic
Hao Su

Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly benefit from Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate reasoning steps can inadvertently introduce hallucinations and accumulated errors, thereby limiting models’ ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by how humans engage in careful and meticulous deductive logical reasoning processes to solve tasks, we seek to enable language models to perform explicit and rigorous deductive reasoning, and also ensure the trustworthiness of their reasoning process through self-verification. However, directly verifying the validity of an entire deductive reasoning process is challenging, even with advanced models like ChatGPT. In light of this, we propose to decompose a reasoning verification process into a series of step-by-step subprocesses, each only receiving their necessary context and premises. To facilitate this procedure, we propose Natural Program, a natural language-based deductive reasoning format. Our approach enables models to generate precise reasoning steps where subsequent steps are more rigorously grounded on prior steps. It also empowers language models to carry out reasoning self-verification in a step-by-step manner. By integrating this verification process into each deductive reasoning stage, we significantly enhance the rigor and trustfulness of generated reasoning steps. Along this process, we also improve the answer correctness on complex reasoning tasks.

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ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills

Jiayuan Gu
Fanbo Xiang
Xuanlin Li
Zhan Ling
Xiqiang Liu
Tongzhou Mu
Yihe Tang
Stone Tao

Generalizable manipulation skills, which can be composed to tackle long-horizon and complex daily chores, are one of the cornerstones of Embodied AI. However, existing benchmarks, mostly composed of a suite of simulatable environments, are insufficient to push cutting-edge research works because they lack object-level topological and geometric variations, are not based on fully dynamic simulation, or are short of native support for multiple types of manipulation tasks. To this end, we present ManiSkill2, the next generation of the SAPIEN ManiSkill benchmark, to address critical pain points often encountered by researchers when using benchmarks for generalizable manipulation skills. ManiSkill2 includes 20 manipulation task families with 2000+ object models and 4M+ demonstration frames, which cover stationary/mobile-base, single/dual-arm, and rigid/soft-body manipulation tasks with 2D/3D-input data simulated by fully dynamic engines. It defines a unified interface and evaluation protocol to support a wide range of algorithms (e.g., classic sense-plan-act, RL, IL), visual observations (point cloud, RGBD), and controllers (e.g., action type and parameterization). Moreover, it empowers fast visual input learning algorithms so that a CNN-based policy can collect samples at about 2000 FPS with 1 GPU and 16 processes on a regular workstation. It implements a render server infrastructure to allow sharing rendering resources across all environments, thereby significantly reducing memory usage. We open-source all codes of our benchmark (simulator, environments, and baselines) and host an online challenge open to interdisciplinary researchers.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

OpenShape: Scaling Up 3D Shape Representation Towards Open-World Understanding

Minghua Liu
Ruoxi Shi
Kaiming Kuang
Yinhao Zhu
Xuanlin Li
Shizhong Han
Hong Cai
Fatih Porikli

We introduce OpenShape, a method for learning multi-modal joint representations of text, image, and point clouds. We adopt the commonly used multi-modal contrastive learning framework for representation alignment, but with a specific focus on scaling up 3D representations to enable open-world 3D shape understanding. To achieve this, we scale up training data by ensembling multiple 3D datasets and propose several strategies to automatically filter and enrich noisy text descriptions. We also explore and compare strategies for scaling 3D backbone networks and introduce a novel hard negative mining module for more efficient training. We evaluate OpenShape on zero-shot 3D classification benchmarks and demonstrate its superior capabilities for open-world recognition. Specifically, OpenShape achieves a zero-shot accuracy of 46. 8% on the 1, 156-category Objaverse-LVIS benchmark, compared to less than 10% for existing methods. OpenShape also achieves an accuracy of 85. 3% on ModelNet40, outperforming previous zero-shot baseline methods by 20% and performing on par with some fully-supervised methods. Furthermore, we show that our learned embeddings encode a wide range of visual and semantic concepts (e. g. , subcategories, color, shape, style) and facilitate fine-grained text-3D and image-3D interactions. Due to their alignment with CLIP embeddings, our learned shape representations can also be integrated with off-the-shelf CLIP-based models for various applications, such as point cloud captioning and point cloud-conditioned image generation.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Reparameterized Policy Learning for Multimodal Trajectory Optimization

Zhiao Huang
Litian Liang
Zhan Ling
Xuanlin Li
Chuang Gan 0001
Hao Su 0001

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used Gaussian parameterization. To achieve this, we propose a principled framework that models the continuous RL policy as a generative model of optimal trajectories. By conditioning the policy on a latent variable, we derive a novel variational bound as the optimization objective, which promotes exploration of the environment. We then present a practical model-based RL method, called Reparameterized Policy Gradient (RPG), which leverages the multimodal policy parameterization and learned world model to achieve strong exploration capabilities and high data efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can help agents evade local optima in tasks with dense rewards and solve challenging sparse-reward environments by incorporating an object-centric intrinsic reward. Our method consistently outperforms previous approaches across a range of tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available on the project page https: //haosulab. github. io/RPG/

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Improving Policy Optimization with Generalist-Specialist Learning

Zhiwei Jia
Xuanlin Li
Zhan Ling
Shuang Liu
Yiran Wu
Hao Su 0001

Generalization in deep reinforcement learning over unseen environment variations usually requires policy learning over a large set of diverse training variations. We empirically observe that an agent trained on many variations (a generalist) tends to learn faster at the beginning, yet its performance plateaus at a less optimal level for a long time. In contrast, an agent trained only on a few variations (a specialist) can often achieve high returns under a limited computational budget. To have the best of both worlds, we propose a novel generalist-specialist training framework. Specifically, we first train a generalist on all environment variations; when it fails to improve, we launch a large population of specialists with weights cloned from the generalist, each trained to master a selected small subset of variations. We finally resume the training of the generalist with auxiliary rewards induced by demonstrations of all specialists. In particular, we investigate the timing to start specialist training and compare strategies to learn generalists with assistance from specialists. We show that this framework pushes the envelope of policy learning on several challenging and popular benchmarks including Procgen, Meta-World and ManiSkill.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Discovering Non-monotonic Autoregressive Orderings with Variational Inference

Xuanlin Li
Brandon Trabucco
Dong Huk Park
Michael Luo
Sheng Shen 0001
Trevor Darrell
Yang Gao 0029

The predominant approach for language modeling is to encode a sequence of tokens from left to right, but this eliminates a source of information: the order by which the sequence was naturally generated. One strategy to recover this information is to decode both the content and ordering of tokens. Some prior work supervises content and ordering with hand-designed loss functions to encourage specific orders or bootstraps from a predefined ordering. These approaches require domain-specific insight. Other prior work searches over valid insertion operations that lead to ground truth sequences during training, which has high time complexity and cannot be efficiently parallelized. We address these limitations with an unsupervised learner that can be trained in a fully-parallelizable manner to discover high-quality autoregressive orders in a data driven way without a domain-specific prior. The learner is a neural network that performs variational inference with the autoregressive ordering as a latent variable. Since the corresponding variational lower bound is not differentiable, we develop a practical algorithm for end-to-end optimization using policy gradients. Strong empirical results with our solution on sequence modeling tasks suggest that our algorithm is capable of discovering various autoregressive orders for different sequences that are competitive with or even better than fixed orders.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrations

Tongzhou Mu
Zhan Ling
Fanbo Xiang
Derek Yang
Xuanlin Li
Stone Tao
Zhiao Huang
Zhiwei Jia

Object manipulation from 3D visual inputs poses many challenges on building generalizable perception and policy models. However, 3D assets in existing benchmarks mostly lack the diversity of 3D shapes that align with real-world intra-class complexity in topology and geometry. Here we propose SAPIEN Manipulation Skill Benchmark (ManiSkill) to benchmark manipulation skills over diverse objects in a full-physics simulator. 3D assets in ManiSkill include large intra-class topological and geometric variations. Tasks are carefully chosen to cover distinct types of manipulation challenges. Latest progress in 3D vision also makes us believe that we should customize the benchmark so that the challenge is inviting to researchers working on 3D deep learning. To this end, we simulate a moving panoramic camera that returns ego-centric point clouds or RGB-D images. In addition, we would like ManiSkill to serve a broad set of researchers interested in manipulation research. Besides supporting the learning of policies from interactions, we also support learning-from-demonstrations (LfD) methods, by providing a large number of high-quality demonstrations (~36, 000 successful trajectories, ~1. 5M point cloud/RGB-D frames in total). We provide baselines using 3D deep learning and LfD algorithms. All code of our benchmark (simulator, environment, SDK, and baselines) is open-sourced (\href{https: //github. com/haosulab/ManiSkill}{Github repo}), and a challenge facing interdisciplinary researchers will be held based on the benchmark.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Regularization Matters in Policy Optimization - An Empirical Study on Continuous Control

Zhuang Liu 0003
Xuanlin Li
Bingyi Kang
Trevor Darrell

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$ regularization, dropout) have been largely ignored in RL methods, possibly because agents are typically trained and evaluated in the same environment, and because the deep RL community focuses more on high-level algorithm designs. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of regularization techniques with multiple policy optimization algorithms on continuous control tasks. Interestingly, we find conventional regularization techniques on the policy networks can often bring large improvement, especially on harder tasks. Our findings are shown to be robust against training hyperparameter variations. We also compare these techniques with the more widely used entropy regularization. In addition, we study regularizing different components and find that only regularizing the policy network is typically the best. We further analyze why regularization may help generalization in RL from four perspectives - sample complexity, reward distribution, weight norm, and noise robustness. We hope our study provides guidance for future practices in regularizing policy optimization algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuanlinli17/iclr2021_rlreg .

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