Kanishka Rao
Research Areas
Authored Publications
Sort By
Deep RL at Scale: Sorting Waste in Office Buildings with a Fleet of Mobile Manipulators
Jarek Rettinghouse
Daniel Ho
Julian Ibarz
Sangeetha Ramesh
Matt Bennice
Alexander Herzog
Chuyuan Kelly Fu
Adrian Li
Kim Kleiven
Jeff Bingham
Yevgen Chebotar
David Rendleman
Wenlong Lu
Mohi Khansari
Mrinal Kalakrishnan
Ying Xu
Noah Brown
Khem Holden
Justin Vincent
Peter Pastor Sampedro
Jessica Lin
David Dovo
Daniel Kappler
Mengyuan Yan
Sergey Levine
Jessica Lam
Jonathan Weisz
Paul Wohlhart
Karol Hausman
Cameron Lee
Bob Wei
Yao Lu
2023
Preview abstract
We describe a system for deep reinforcement learning of robotic manipulation skills applied to a large-scale real-world task: sorting recyclables and trash in office buildings. Real-world deployment of deep RL policies requires not only effective training algorithms, but the ability to bootstrap real-world training and enable broad generalization. To this end, our system combines scalable deep RL from real-world data with bootstrapping from training in simulation, and incorporates auxiliary inputs from existing computer vision systems as a way to boost generalization to novel objects, while retaining the benefits of end-to-end training. We analyze the tradeoffs of different design decisions in our system, and present a large-scale empirical validation that includes training on real-world data gathered over the course of 24 months of experimentation, across a fleet of 23 robots in three office buildings, with a total training set of 9527 hours of robotic experience. Our final validation also consists of 4800 evaluation trials across 240 waste station configurations, in order to evaluate in detail the impact of the design decisions in our system, the scaling effects of including more real-world data, and the performance of the method on novel objects.
View details
Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances
Alexander Herzog
Alexander Toshkov Toshev
Andy Zeng
Anthony Brohan
Brian Andrew Ichter
Byron David
Chelsea Finn
Clayton Tan
Diego Reyes
Dmitry Kalashnikov
Eric Victor Jang
Jarek Liam Rettinghouse
Jornell Lacanlale Quiambao
Julian Ibarz
Karol Hausman
Kyle Alan Jeffrey
Linda Luu
Mengyuan Yan
Michael Soogil Ahn
Nicolas Sievers
Noah Brown
Omar Eduardo Escareno Cortes
Peng Xu
Peter Pastor Sampedro
Rosario Jauregui Ruano
Sally Augusta Jesmonth
Sergey Levine
Steve Xu
Yao Lu
Yevgen Chebotar
Yuheng Kuang
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) (2022)
Preview abstract
Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could in principle be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language.
However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack contextual grounding, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given real-world context.
For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to perform this task in a particular environment.
We propose to provide this grounding by means of pretrained behaviors, which are used to condition the model to propose natural language actions that are both feasible and contextually appropriate.
The robot can act as the language model’s “hands and eyes,” while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task.
We show how low-level tasks can be combined with large language models so that the language model provides high-level knowledge about the procedures for performing complex and temporally extended instructions, while value functions associated with these tasks provide the grounding necessary to connect this knowledge to a particular physical environment.
We evaluate our method on a number of real-world robotic tasks, where we show that this approach is capable of executing long-horizon, abstract, natural-language tasks on a mobile manipulator.
The project's website and the video can be found at \url{say-can.github.io}.
View details
Preview abstract
Robots trained via reinforcement-learning (RL) requirecollecting and labeling many real-world episodes, whichmay be costly and time-consuming. Training models with alarge amount of simulation is a cheaper alternative. How-ever, simulations are not perfect and such models may nottransfer to the real world. Techniques developed to closethis simulation-to-reality (Sim2Real) gap typically applyrandomization to the simulated images or adapt them withan additional Sim2Real model. A Generative Adversar-ial network (GAN) may be used to adapt the pixels of thesimulated image to be more realistic before use by a deepRL model. We find the CycleGAN which enforces a cycleconsistency between Sim2Real and Real2Sim adaptationsproduces better images for RL than a GAN alone. Ulti-mately, we develop RL-CycleGAN which includes a Cycle-GAN which trains jointly with the deep RL model and en-forces that the RL model is consistent across all the adap-tations.We evaluate the RL-CycleGAN on two vision-based robotics grasping tasks and compare it to previoustechniques. With 580,000 real episodes and millions ofsimulated episodes adapted with RL-CycleGAN achievesxx% grasp success, while a previous GAN-based approach,GraspGAN, achieves xx% grasp success. With only 5,000real episodes, RL-CycleGAN and GraspGAN achieve xx%and xx% grasp success respectively. On a multi-bin grasp-ing task, we show RL-CycleGAN drastically improves dataefficiency requiring 1/xth the amount of real data to reachthe same grasping performance.
View details
Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction
Chloé M Kiddon
Hubert Eichner
(2019)
Preview abstract
We train a recurrent neural network language model using a distributed, on-device learning framework called federated learning for the purpose of next-word prediction in a virtual keyboard for smartphones. Server-based training using stochastic gradient descent is compared with training on client devices using the Federated Averaging algorithm. The federated algorithm, which enables training on a higher-quality dataset for this use case, is shown to achieve better prediction recall. This work demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of training language models on client devices without exporting sensitive user data to servers. The federated learning environment gives users greater control over their data and simplifies the task of incorporating privacy by default with distributed training and aggregation across a population of client devices.
View details
Preview abstract
We show that a word-level recurrent neural network can predict emoji from text typed on a mobile keyboard. We demonstrate the usefulness of transfer learning for predicting emoji by pretraining the model using a language modeling task. We also propose mechanisms to trigger emoji and tune the diversity of candidates. The model is trained using a distributed on-device learning framework called federated learning. The federated model is shown to achieve better performance than a server-trained model. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using federated learning to train production-quality models for natural language understanding tasks while keeping users' data on their devices.
View details
STREAMING END-TO-END SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR MOBILE DEVICES
Raziel Alvarez
Ding Zhao
David Rybach
Yonghui Wu
Ruoming Pang
Qiao Liang
Deepti Bhatia
Yuan Shangguan
ICASSP (2019)
Preview abstract
End-to-end (E2E) models, which directly predict output character sequences given input speech, are good candidates for on-device speech recognition. E2E models, however, present numerous challenges: In order to be truly useful, such models must decode speech utterances in a streaming fashion, in real time; they must be robust to the long tail of use cases; they must be able to leverage user-specific context (e.g., contact lists); and above all, they must be extremely accurate. In this work, we describe our efforts at building an E2E speech recognizer using a recurrent neural network transducer. In experimental evaluations, we find that the proposed approach can outperform a conventional CTC-based model in terms of both latency and accuracy in a number of evaluation categories.
View details
Multilingual Speech Recognition with a Single End-to-End Model
Shubham Toshniwal
Pedro Moreno
ICASSP (2018)
Preview abstract
Training a conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to support multiple languages is challenging because the sub-word unit, lexicon and word inventories are typically language specific. In contrast, sequence-to-sequence models are well suited for multilingual ASR because they encapsulate an acoustic, pronunciation and language model jointly in a single network. In this work we present a single sequence-to-sequence ASR model trained on 9 different Indian languages, which have very little overlap in their scripts. Specifically, we take a union of language-specific grapheme sets and train a grapheme-based sequence-to-sequence model jointly on data from all languages. We find that this model, which is not explicitly given any information about language identity, improves recognition performance by 21% relative compared to analogous sequence-to-sequence models trained on each language individually. By modifying the model to accept a language identifier as an additional input feature, we further improve performance by an additional 7% relative and eliminate confusion between different languages.
View details
State-of-the-art Speech Recognition With Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Chung-Cheng Chiu
Yonghui Wu
Patrick Nguyen
Katya Gonina
Navdeep Jaitly
Jan Chorowski
ICASSP (2018) (to appear)
Preview abstract
Attention-based encoder-decoder architectures such as Listen, Attend, and Spell (LAS), subsume the acoustic, pronunciation and language model components of a traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system into a single neural network. In our previous work, we have shown that such architectures are comparable to state-of-the-art ASR systems on dictation tasks, but it was not clear if such architectures would be practical for more challenging tasks such as voice search. In this work, we explore a variety of structural and optimization improvements to our LAS model which significantly improve performance. On the structural side, we show that word piece models can be used instead of graphemes. We introduce a multi-head attention architecture, which offers improvements over the commonly-used single-head attention. On the optimization side, we explore techniques such as synchronous training, scheduled sampling, label smoothing, and minimum word error rate optimization, which are all shown to improve accuracy. We present results with a unidirectional LSTM encoder for streaming recognition. On a 12,500 hour voice search task, we find that the proposed changes improve the WER of the LAS system from 9.2% to 5.6%, while the best conventional system achieve 6.7% WER. We also test both models on a dictation dataset, and our model provide 4.1% WER while the conventional system provides 5% WER.
View details
Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction
Chloé M Kiddon
Hubert Eichner
(2018)
Preview abstract
We train a recurrent neural network language model using a distributed, on-device learning framework called federated learning for the purpose of next-word prediction in a virtual keyboard for smartphones. Server-based training using stochastic gradient descent is compared with training on client devices using the FederatedAveraging algorithm. The federated algorithm, which enables training on a higher-quality dataset for this use case, is shown to achieve better prediction recall.
This work demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of training language models on client devices without exporting sensitive user data to servers. The federated learning environment gives users greater control over their data and simplifies the task of incorporating privacy by default with distributed training and aggregation across a population of client devices.
View details
Streaming Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting Using Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Wei Li
Anton Bakhtin
Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), 2017 IEEE Workshop on
Preview abstract
We develop streaming keyword spotting systems using a recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) model: an all-neural, end-to-end trained, sequence-to-sequence model which jointly learns acoustic and language model components. Our models are trained to predict either phonemes or graphemes as subword units, thus allowing us to detect arbitrary keyword phrases, without any out-of-vocabulary words. In order to adapt the models to the requirements of keyword spotting, we propose a novel technique which biases the RNN-T system towards a specific keyword of interest. Our systems are compared against a strong sequence-trained, connectionist temporal classification (CTC) based “keyword-filler” baseline, which is augmented with a separate phoneme language model. Overall, our RNN-T system with the proposed biasing technique significantly improves performance over the baseline system.
View details
