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Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Publications and source records attributed to Joshua B. Tenenbaum.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Evaluating Language Models for Mathematics through Interactions

There is much excitement about the opportunity to harness the power of large language models (LLMs) when building problem-solving assistants. However, the standard methodology of evaluating LLMs relies on static pairs of inputs and outputs, and is insufficient for making an informed decision about which LLMs and under which assistive settings can they be sensibly used. Static assessment fails to account for the essential interactive element in LLM deployment, and therefore limits how we understand language model capabilities. We introduce CheckMate, an adaptable prototype platform for humans to interact with and evaluate LLMs. We conduct a study with CheckMate to evaluate three language models (InstructGPT, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) as assistants in proving undergraduate-level mathematics, with a mixed cohort of participants from undergraduate students to professors of mathematics. We release the resulting interaction and rating dataset, MathConverse. By analysing MathConverse, we derive a taxonomy of human behaviours and uncover that despite a generally positive correlation, there are notable instances of divergence between correctness and perceived helpfulness in LLM generations, amongst other findings. Further, we garner a more granular understanding of GPT-4 mathematical problem-solving through a series of case studies, contributed by expert mathematicians. We conclude with actionable takeaways for ML practitioners and mathematicians: models that communicate uncertainty respond well to user corrections, and are more interpretable and concise may constitute better assistants. Interactive evaluation is a promising way to navigate the capability of these models; humans should be aware of language models' algebraic fallibility and discern where they are appropriate to use.

cs.LG↗

Physion++: Evaluating Physical Scene Understanding that Requires Online Inference of Different Physical Properties

General physical scene understanding requires more than simply localizing and recognizing objects -- it requires knowledge that objects can have different latent properties (e.g., mass or elasticity), and that those properties affect the outcome of physical events. While there has been great progress in physical and video prediction models in recent years, benchmarks to test their performance typically do not require an understanding that objects have individual physical properties, or at best test only those properties that are directly observable (e.g., size or color). This work proposes a novel dataset and benchmark, termed Physion++, that rigorously evaluates visual physical prediction in artificial systems under circumstances where those predictions rely on accurate estimates of the latent physical properties of objects in the scene. Specifically, we test scenarios where accurate prediction relies on estimates of properties such as mass, friction, elasticity, and deformability, and where the values of those properties can only be inferred by observing how objects move and interact with other objects or fluids. We evaluate the performance of a number of state-of-the-art prediction models that span a variety of levels of learning vs. built-in knowledge, and compare that performance to a set of human predictions. We find that models that have been trained using standard regimes and datasets do not spontaneously learn to make inferences about latent properties, but also that models that encode objectness and physical states tend to make better predictions. However, there is still a huge gap between all models and human performance, and all models' predictions correlate poorly with those made by humans, suggesting that no state-of-the-art model is learning to make physical predictions in a human-like way. Project page: https://dingmyu.github.io/physion_v2/

cs.CV↗

What's Left? Concept Grounding with Logic-Enhanced Foundation Models

Recent works such as VisProg and ViperGPT have smartly composed foundation models for visual reasoning-using large language models (LLMs) to produce programs that can be executed by pre-trained vision-language models. However, they operate in limited domains, such as 2D images, not fully exploiting the generalization of language: abstract concepts like "left" can also be grounded in 3D, temporal, and action data, as in moving to your left. This limited generalization stems from these inference-only methods' inability to learn or adapt pre-trained models to a new domain. We propose the Logic-Enhanced Foundation Model (LEFT), a unified framework that learns to ground and reason with concepts across domains with a differentiable, domain-independent, first-order logic-based program executor. LEFT has an LLM interpreter that outputs a program represented in a general, logic-based reasoning language, which is shared across all domains and tasks. LEFT's executor then executes the program with trainable domain-specific grounding modules. We show that LEFT flexibly learns concepts in four domains: 2D images, 3D scenes, human motions, and robotic manipulation. It exhibits strong reasoning ability in a wide variety of tasks, including those that are complex and not seen during training, and can be easily applied to new domains.

cs.CV↗

ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping

Building 3D maps of the environment is central to robot navigation, planning, and interaction with objects in a scene. Most existing approaches that integrate semantic concepts with 3D maps largely remain confined to the closed-set setting: they can only reason about a finite set of concepts, pre-defined at training time. Further, these maps can only be queried using class labels, or in recent work, using text prompts. We address both these issues with ConceptFusion, a scene representation that is (1) fundamentally open-set, enabling reasoning beyond a closed set of concepts and (ii) inherently multimodal, enabling a diverse range of possible queries to the 3D map, from language, to images, to audio, to 3D geometry, all working in concert. ConceptFusion leverages the open-set capabilities of today's foundation models pre-trained on internet-scale data to reason about concepts across modalities such as natural language, images, and audio. We demonstrate that pixel-aligned open-set features can be fused into 3D maps via traditional SLAM and multi-view fusion approaches. This enables effective zero-shot spatial reasoning, not needing any additional training or finetuning, and retains long-tailed concepts better than supervised approaches, outperforming them by more than 40% margin on 3D IoU. We extensively evaluate ConceptFusion on a number of real-world datasets, simulated home environments, a real-world tabletop manipulation task, and an autonomous driving platform. We showcase new avenues for blending foundation models with 3D open-set multimodal mapping. For more information, visit our project page https://concept-fusion.github.io or watch our 5-minute explainer video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkXgws8fiDs

cs.CV↗

Inferring Relational Potentials in Interacting Systems

Systems consisting of interacting agents are prevalent in the world, ranging from dynamical systems in physics to complex biological networks. To build systems which can interact robustly in the real world, it is thus important to be able to infer the precise interactions governing such systems. Existing approaches typically discover such interactions by explicitly modeling the feed-forward dynamics of the trajectories. In this work, we propose Neural Interaction Inference with Potentials (NIIP) as an alternative approach to discover such interactions that enables greater flexibility in trajectory modeling: it discovers a set of relational potentials, represented as energy functions, which when minimized reconstruct the original trajectory. NIIP assigns low energy to the subset of trajectories which respect the relational constraints observed. We illustrate that with these representations NIIP displays unique capabilities in test-time. First, it allows trajectory manipulation, such as interchanging interaction types across separately trained models, as well as trajectory forecasting. Additionally, it allows adding external hand-crafted potentials at test-time. Finally, NIIP enables the detection of out-of-distribution samples and anomalies without explicit training. Website: https://energy-based-model.github.io/interaction-potentials.

cs.LG↗

AI for Mathematics: A Cognitive Science Perspective

Mathematics is one of the most powerful conceptual systems developed and used by the human species. Dreams of automated mathematicians have a storied history in artificial intelligence (AI). Rapid progress in AI, particularly propelled by advances in large language models (LLMs), has sparked renewed, widespread interest in building such systems. In this work, we reflect on these goals from a \textit{cognitive science} perspective. We call attention to several classical and ongoing research directions from cognitive science, which we believe are valuable for AI practitioners to consider when seeking to build truly human (or superhuman)-level mathematical systems. We close with open discussions and questions that we believe necessitate a multi-disciplinary perspective -- cognitive scientists working in tandem with AI researchers and mathematicians -- as we move toward better mathematical AI systems which not only help us push the frontier of the mathematics, but also offer glimpses into how we as humans are even capable of such great cognitive feats.

q-bio.NC↗

Video Language Planning

We are interested in enabling visual planning for complex long-horizon tasks in the space of generated videos and language, leveraging recent advances in large generative models pretrained on Internet-scale data. To this end, we present video language planning (VLP), an algorithm that consists of a tree search procedure, where we train (i) vision-language models to serve as both policies and value functions, and (ii) text-to-video models as dynamics models. VLP takes as input a long-horizon task instruction and current image observation, and outputs a long video plan that provides detailed multimodal (video and language) specifications that describe how to complete the final task. VLP scales with increasing computation budget where more computation time results in improved video plans, and is able to synthesize long-horizon video plans across different robotics domains: from multi-object rearrangement, to multi-camera bi-arm dexterous manipulation. Generated video plans can be translated into real robot actions via goal-conditioned policies, conditioned on each intermediate frame of the generated video. Experiments show that VLP substantially improves long-horizon task success rates compared to prior methods on both simulated and real robots (across 3 hardware platforms).

cs.CV↗

Learning to Act from Actionless Videos through Dense Correspondences

In this work, we present an approach to construct a video-based robot policy capable of reliably executing diverse tasks across different robots and environments from few video demonstrations without using any action annotations. Our method leverages images as a task-agnostic representation, encoding both the state and action information, and text as a general representation for specifying robot goals. By synthesizing videos that ``hallucinate'' robot executing actions and in combination with dense correspondences between frames, our approach can infer the closed-formed action to execute to an environment without the need of any explicit action labels. This unique capability allows us to train the policy solely based on RGB videos and deploy learned policies to various robotic tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in learning policies on table-top manipulation and navigation tasks. Additionally, we contribute an open-source framework for efficient video modeling, enabling the training of high-fidelity policy models with four GPUs within a single day.

cs.RO↗

HandMeThat: Human-Robot Communication in Physical and Social Environments

We introduce HandMeThat, a benchmark for a holistic evaluation of instruction understanding and following in physical and social environments. While previous datasets primarily focused on language grounding and planning, HandMeThat considers the resolution of human instructions with ambiguities based on the physical (object states and relations) and social (human actions and goals) information. HandMeThat contains 10,000 episodes of human-robot interactions. In each episode, the robot first observes a trajectory of human actions towards her internal goal. Next, the robot receives a human instruction and should take actions to accomplish the subgoal set through the instruction. In this paper, we present a textual interface for our benchmark, where the robot interacts with a virtual environment through textual commands. We evaluate several baseline models on HandMeThat, and show that both offline and online reinforcement learning algorithms perform poorly on HandMeThat, suggesting significant room for future work on physical and social human-robot communications and interactions.

cs.AI↗

ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning

For robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, they require a 3D representation of the world that is semantically rich, yet compact and efficient for task-driven perception and planning. Recent approaches have attempted to leverage features from large vision-language models to encode semantics in 3D representations. However, these approaches tend to produce maps with per-point feature vectors, which do not scale well in larger environments, nor do they contain semantic spatial relationships between entities in the environment, which are useful for downstream planning. In this work, we propose ConceptGraphs, an open-vocabulary graph-structured representation for 3D scenes. ConceptGraphs is built by leveraging 2D foundation models and fusing their output to 3D by multi-view association. The resulting representations generalize to novel semantic classes, without the need to collect large 3D datasets or finetune models. We demonstrate the utility of this representation through a number of downstream planning tasks that are specified through abstract (language) prompts and require complex reasoning over spatial and semantic concepts. (Project page: https://concept-graphs.github.io/ Explainer video: https://youtu.be/mRhNkQwRYnc )

cs.RO↗

Are Deep Neural Networks SMARTer than Second Graders?

Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of applications of deep neural networks towards solving tasks that require superior cognitive abilities, e.g., playing Go, generating art, ChatGPT, etc. Such a dramatic progress raises the question: how generalizable are neural networks in solving problems that demand broad skills? To answer this question, we propose SMART: a Simple Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning Task and the associated SMART-101 dataset, for evaluating the abstraction, deduction, and generalization abilities of neural networks in solving visuo-linguistic puzzles designed specifically for children in the 6--8 age group. Our dataset consists of 101 unique puzzles; each puzzle comprises a picture and a question, and their solution needs a mix of several elementary skills, including arithmetic, algebra, and spatial reasoning, among others. To scale our dataset towards training deep neural networks, we programmatically generate entirely new instances for each puzzle, while retaining their solution algorithm. To benchmark performances on SMART-101, we propose a vision and language meta-learning model using varied state-of-the-art backbones. Our experiments reveal that while powerful deep models offer reasonable performances on puzzles in a supervised setting, they are not better than random accuracy when analyzed for generalization. We also evaluate the recent ChatGPT and other large language models on a subset of SMART-101 and find that while these models show convincing reasoning abilities, the answers are often incorrect.

cs.AI↗

3D Neural Embedding Likelihood: Probabilistic Inverse Graphics for Robust 6D Pose Estimation

The ability to perceive and understand 3D scenes is crucial for many applications in computer vision and robotics. Inverse graphics is an appealing approach to 3D scene understanding that aims to infer the 3D scene structure from 2D images. In this paper, we introduce probabilistic modeling to the inverse graphics framework to quantify uncertainty and achieve robustness in 6D pose estimation tasks. Specifically, we propose 3D Neural Embedding Likelihood (3DNEL) as a unified probabilistic model over RGB-D images, and develop efficient inference procedures on 3D scene descriptions. 3DNEL effectively combines learned neural embeddings from RGB with depth information to improve robustness in sim-to-real 6D object pose estimation from RGB-D images. Performance on the YCB-Video dataset is on par with state-of-the-art yet is much more robust in challenging regimes. In contrast to discriminative approaches, 3DNEL's probabilistic generative formulation jointly models multiple objects in a scene, quantifies uncertainty in a principled way, and handles object pose tracking under heavy occlusion. Finally, 3DNEL provides a principled framework for incorporating prior knowledge about the scene and objects, which allows natural extension to additional tasks like camera pose tracking from video.

cs.CV↗

Compositional Diffusion-Based Continuous Constraint Solvers

This paper introduces an approach for learning to solve continuous constraint satisfaction problems (CCSP) in robotic reasoning and planning. Previous methods primarily rely on hand-engineering or learning generators for specific constraint types and then rejecting the value assignments when other constraints are violated. By contrast, our model, the compositional diffusion continuous constraint solver (Diffusion-CCSP) derives global solutions to CCSPs by representing them as factor graphs and combining the energies of diffusion models trained to sample for individual constraint types. Diffusion-CCSP exhibits strong generalization to novel combinations of known constraints, and it can be integrated into a task and motion planner to devise long-horizon plans that include actions with both discrete and continuous parameters. Project site: https://diffusion-ccsp.github.io/

cs.RO↗

Grammar-Based Grounded Lexicon Learning

We present Grammar-Based Grounded Lexicon Learning (G2L2), a lexicalist approach toward learning a compositional and grounded meaning representation of language from grounded data, such as paired images and texts. At the core of G2L2 is a collection of lexicon entries, which map each word to a tuple of a syntactic type and a neuro-symbolic semantic program. For example, the word shiny has a syntactic type of adjective; its neuro-symbolic semantic program has the symbolic form λx. filter(x, SHINY), where the concept SHINY is associated with a neural network embedding, which will be used to classify shiny objects. Given an input sentence, G2L2 first looks up the lexicon entries associated with each token. It then derives the meaning of the sentence as an executable neuro-symbolic program by composing lexical meanings based on syntax. The recovered meaning programs can be executed on grounded inputs. To facilitate learning in an exponentially-growing compositional space, we introduce a joint parsing and expected execution algorithm, which does local marginalization over derivations to reduce the training time. We evaluate G2L2 on two domains: visual reasoning and language-driven navigation. Results show that G2L2 can generalize from small amounts of data to novel compositions of words.

cs.CL↗

PDSketch: Integrated Planning Domain Programming and Learning

This paper studies a model learning and online planning approach towards building flexible and general robots. Specifically, we investigate how to exploit the locality and sparsity structures in the underlying environmental transition model to improve model generalization, data-efficiency, and runtime-efficiency. We present a new domain definition language, named PDSketch. It allows users to flexibly define high-level structures in the transition models, such as object and feature dependencies, in a way similar to how programmers use TensorFlow or PyTorch to specify kernel sizes and hidden dimensions of a convolutional neural network. The details of the transition model will be filled in by trainable neural networks. Based on the defined structures and learned parameters, PDSketch automatically generates domain-independent planning heuristics without additional training. The derived heuristics accelerate the performance-time planning for novel goals.

cs.AI↗

Neural Amortized Inference for Nested Multi-agent Reasoning

Multi-agent interactions, such as communication, teaching, and bluffing, often rely on higher-order social inference, i.e., understanding how others infer oneself. Such intricate reasoning can be effectively modeled through nested multi-agent reasoning. Nonetheless, the computational complexity escalates exponentially with each level of reasoning, posing a significant challenge. However, humans effortlessly perform complex social inferences as part of their daily lives. To bridge the gap between human-like inference capabilities and computational limitations, we propose a novel approach: leveraging neural networks to amortize high-order social inference, thereby expediting nested multi-agent reasoning. We evaluate our method in two challenging multi-agent interaction domains. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is computationally efficient while exhibiting minimal degradation in accuracy.

cs.AI↗

Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable

Groups coordinate more effectively when individuals are able to learn from others' successes. But acquiring such knowledge is not always easy, especially in real-world environments where success is hidden from public view. We suggest that social inference capacities may help bridge this gap, allowing individuals to update their beliefs about others' underlying knowledge and success from observable trajectories of behavior. We compared our social inference model against simpler heuristics in three studies of human behavior in a collective sensing task. In Experiment 1, we found that average performance improves as a function of group size at a rate greater than predicted by non-inferential models. Experiment 2 introduced artificial agents to evaluate how individuals selectively rely on social information. Experiment 3 generalized these findings to a more complex reward landscape. Taken together, our findings provide insight into the relationship between individual social cognition and the flexibility of collective behavior.

cs.MA↗

Unsupervised Compositional Concepts Discovery with Text-to-Image Generative Models

Text-to-image generative models have enabled high-resolution image synthesis across different domains, but require users to specify the content they wish to generate. In this paper, we consider the inverse problem -- given a collection of different images, can we discover the generative concepts that represent each image? We present an unsupervised approach to discover generative concepts from a collection of images, disentangling different art styles in paintings, objects, and lighting from kitchen scenes, and discovering image classes given ImageNet images. We show how such generative concepts can accurately represent the content of images, be recombined and composed to generate new artistic and hybrid images, and be further used as a representation for downstream classification tasks.

cs.CV↗