Long-horizon tasks in unstructured environments are notoriously challenging for robots because they require the prediction of extensive action plans with thousands of steps while adapting to ever-changing conditions by reasoning among multimodal sensing spaces. Humans can efficiently tackle such compound problems by breaking them down into easily reachable abstract sub-goals, significantly reducing complexity. Inspired by this ability, we explore how we can enable robots to acquire sub-goal formulation skills for long-horizon tasks and generalize them to novel situations and environments. To address these challenges, we propose the Zero-shot Abstract Sub-goal Framework (ZAS-F), which empowers robots to decompose overarching action plans into transferable abstract sub-goals, thereby providing zero-shot capability in new task conditions. ZAS-F is an imitation-learning-based method that efficiently learns a task policy from a few demonstrations. The learned policy extracts abstract features from multimodal and extensive temporal observations and subsequently uses these features to predict task-agnostic sub-goals by reasoning about their latent relations. We evaluated ZAS-F in radio frequency identification (RFID) inventory tasks across various dynamic environments, a typical long-horizon task requiring robots to handle unpredictable conditions, including unseen objects and structural layouts. Ourexperiments demonstrated that ZAS-F achieves a learning efficiency 30 times higher than previous methods, requiring only 8k demonstrations. Compared to prior approaches, ZAS-F achieves a 98.3% scanning accuracy while significantly reducing the training data requirement. Further, ZAS-F demonstrated strong generalization, maintaining a scan success rate of 99.4% in real-world deployment without additional finetuning. In long-term operations spanning 100 rooms, ZAS-F maintained consistent performance compared to short-term tasks, highlighting its robustness against compounding errors. These results establish ZAS-F as an efficient and adaptable solution for long-horizon robotic tasks in unstructured environments.
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F-FADE: Frequency Factorization for Anomaly Detection in Edge Streams
Edge streams are commonly used to capture interactions in dynamic networks, such as email, social, or computer networks. The problem of detecting anomalies or rare events in edge streams has a wide range of applications. However, it presents many challenges due to lack of labels, a highly dynamic nature of interactions, and the entanglement of temporal and structural changes in the network. Current methods are limited in their ability to address the above challenges and to efficiently process a large number of interactions. Here, we propose F-FADE, a new approach for detection of anomalies in edge streams, which uses a novel frequency-factorization technique to efficiently model the time-evolving distributions of frequencies of interactions between node-pairs. The anomalies are then determined based on the likelihood of the observed frequency of each incoming interaction. F-FADE is able to handle in an online streaming setting a broad variety of anomalies with temporal and structural changes, while requiring only constant memory. Our experiments on one synthetic and six real-world dynamic networks show that F-FADE achieves state of the art performance and may detect anomalies that previous methods are unable to find.
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- PAR ID:
- 10300283
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- WSDM '21: Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 589 to 597
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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