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1. ArraMon: A Joint Navigation-Assembly Instruction Interpretation Task in Dynamic Environments

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.348  

   Kim, Hyounghun ; Zala, Abhaysinh ; Burri, Graham ; Tan, Hao ; Bansal, Mohit ( November 2020 , Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020)

   For embodied agents, navigation is an important ability but not an isolated goal. Agents are also expected to perform specific tasks after reaching the target location, such as picking up objects and assembling them into a particular arrangement. We combine Vision-andLanguage Navigation, assembling of collected objects, and object referring expression comprehension, to create a novel joint navigation-and-assembly task, named ARRAMON. During this task, the agent (similar to a PokeMON GO player) is asked to find and collect different target objects one-by-one by navigating based on natural language (English) instructions in a complex, realistic outdoor environment, but then also ARRAnge the collected objects part-by-part in an egocentric grid-layout environment. To support this task, we implement a 3D dynamic environment simulator and collect a dataset with human-written navigation and assembling instructions, and the corresponding ground truth trajectories. We also filter the collected instructions via a verification stage, leading to a total of 7.7K task instances (30.8K instructions and paths). We present results for several baseline models (integrated and biased) and metrics (nDTW, CTC, rPOD, and PTC), and the large model-human performance gap demonstrates that our task is challenging and presents a wide scope for future work.
2. Hierarchical Task Learning from Language Instructions with Unified Transformers and Self-Monitoring

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.368  

   Zhang, Yichi ; Chai, Joyce ( January 2021 , ACL 2021, Findings.)

   Despite recent progress, learning new tasks through language instructions remains an extremely challenging problem. On the ALFRED benchmark for task learning, the published state-of-the-art system only achieves a task success rate of less than 10% in an unseen environment, compared to the human performance of over 90%. To address this issue, this paper takes a closer look at task learning. In a departure from a widely applied end-to-end architecture, we decomposed task learning into three sub-problems: sub-goal planning, scene navigation, and object manipulation; and developed a model HiTUT1 (stands for Hierarchical Tasks via Unified Transformers) that addresses each sub-problem in a unified manner to learn a hierarchical task structure. On the ALFRED benchmark, HiTUT has achieved the best performance with a remarkably higher generalization ability. In the unseen environment, HiTUT achieves over 160% performance gain in success rate compared to the previous state of the art. The explicit representation of task structures also enables an in-depth understanding of the nature of the problem and the ability of the agent, which provides insight for future benchmark development and evaluation.
3. Grounding Open-Domain Instructions to Automate Web Support Tasks

   Nancy Xu, Sam Masling ( June 2021 , 2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics)

   Grounding natural language instructions on the web to perform previously unseen tasks enables accessibility and automation. We introduce a task and dataset to train AI agents from open-domain, step-by-step instructions originally written for people. We build RUSS (Rapid Universal Support Service) to tackle this problem. RUSS consists of two models: First, a BERT-LSTM with pointers parses instructions to ThingTalk, a domain-specific language we design for grounding natural language on the web. Then, a grounding model retrieves the unique IDs of any webpage elements requested in ThingTalk. RUSS may interact with the user through a dialogue (e.g. ask for an address) or execute a web operation (e.g. click a button) inside the web runtime. To augment training, we synthesize natural language instructions mapped to ThingTalk. Our dataset consists of 80 different customer service problems from help websites, with a total of 741 step-by-step instructions and their corresponding actions. RUSS achieves 76.7% end-to-end accuracy predicting agent actions from single instructions. It outperforms state-of-the-art models that directly map instructions to actions without ThingTalk. Our user study shows that RUSS is preferred by actual users over web navigation.
4. Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning via f-Advantage Regression

   Yecheng Jason Ma ; Jason Yan ; Dinesh Jayaraman ; Osbert Bastani ( January 2022 , 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022))

   Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) promises general-purpose skill learning in the form of reaching diverse goals from purely offline datasets. We propose $\textbf{Go}$al-conditioned $f$-$\textbf{A}$dvantage $\textbf{R}$egression (GoFAR), a novel regression-based offline GCRL algorithm derived from a state-occupancy matching perspective; the key intuition is that the goal-reaching task can be formulated as a state-occupancy matching problem between a dynamics-abiding imitator agent and an expert agent that directly teleports to the goal. In contrast to prior approaches, GoFAR does not require any hindsight relabeling and enjoys uninterleaved optimization for its value and policy networks. These distinct features confer GoFAR with much better offline performance and stability as well as statistical performance guarantee that is unattainable for prior methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GoFAR's training objectives can be re-purposed to learn an agent-independent goal-conditioned planner from purely offline source-domain data, which enables zero-shot transfer to new target domains. Through extensive experiments, we validate GoFAR's effectiveness in various problem settings and tasks, significantly outperforming prior state-of-art. Notably, on a real robotic dexterous manipulation task, while no other method makes meaningful progress, GoFAR acquires complex manipulation behavior that successfully accomplishes diverse goals.
5. Real-Time Full-Chip Thermal Tracking: A Post-Silicon, Machine Learning Perspective

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2021.3086112  

   Sadiqbatcha, Sheriff I ; Zhang, Jinwei ; Amrouch, Hussam ; Tan, Sheldon X.-D. ( June 2021 , IEEE Transactions on Computers)

   In this work, we present a novel approach to real-time tracking of full-chip heatmaps for commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors based on machine-learning. The proposed post-silicon approach, named RealMaps, only uses the existing embedded temperature sensors and workload-independent utilization information, which are available in real-time. Moreover, RealMaps does not require any knowledge of the proprietary design details or manufacturing process-specific information of the chip. Consequently, the methods presented in this work can be implemented by either the original chip manufacturer or a third party alike, and is aimed at supplementing, rather than substituting, the temperature data sensed from the existing embedded sensors. The new approach starts with offline acquisition of accurate spatial and temporal heatmaps using an infrared thermal imaging setup while nominal working conditions are maintained on the chip. To build the dynamic thermal model, a temporal-aware long-short-term-memory (LSTM) neutral network is trained with system-level features such as chip frequency, instruction counts, and other high-level performance metrics as inputs. Instead of a pixel-wise heatmap estimation, we perform 2D spatial discrete cosine transformation (DCT) on the heatmaps so that they can be expressed with just a few dominant DCT coefficients. This allows for the model to be built to estimate just themore »dominant spatial features of the 2D heatmaps, rather than the entire heatmap images, making it significantly more efficient. Experimental results from two commercial chips show that RealMaps can estimate the full-chip heatmaps with 0.9C and 1.2C root-mean-square-error respectively and take only 0.4ms for each inference which suits well for real-time use. Compared to the state of the art pre-silicon approach, RealMaps shows similar accuracy, but with much less computational cost.« less