54,915 research outputs found
EC^2: Emergent Communication for Embodied Control
Embodied control requires agents to leverage multi-modal pre-training to
quickly learn how to act in new environments, where video demonstrations
contain visual and motion details needed for low-level perception and control,
and language instructions support generalization with abstract, symbolic
structures. While recent approaches apply contrastive learning to force
alignment between the two modalities, we hypothesize better modeling their
complementary differences can lead to more holistic representations for
downstream adaption. To this end, we propose Emergent Communication for
Embodied Control (EC^2), a novel scheme to pre-train video-language
representations for few-shot embodied control. The key idea is to learn an
unsupervised "language" of videos via emergent communication, which bridges the
semantics of video details and structures of natural language. We learn
embodied representations of video trajectories, emergent language, and natural
language using a language model, which is then used to finetune a lightweight
policy network for downstream control. Through extensive experiments in
Metaworld and Franka Kitchen embodied benchmarks, EC^2 is shown to consistently
outperform previous contrastive learning methods for both videos and texts as
task inputs. Further ablations confirm the importance of the emergent language,
which is beneficial for both video and language learning, and significantly
superior to using pre-trained video captions. We also present a quantitative
and qualitative analysis of the emergent language and discuss future directions
toward better understanding and leveraging emergent communication in embodied
tasks.Comment: Published in CVPR202
Design Fiction Diegetic Prototyping: A Research Framework for Visualizing Service Innovations
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Purpose: This paper presents a design fiction diegetic prototyping methodology and research framework for investigating service innovations that reflect future uses of new and emerging technologies.
Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on speculative fiction, we propose a methodology that positions service innovations within a six-stage research development framework. We begin by reviewing and critiquing designerly approaches that have traditionally been associated with service innovations and futures literature. In presenting our framework, we provide an example of its application to the Internet of Things (IoT), illustrating the central tenets proposed and key issues identified.
Findings: The research framework advances a methodology for visualizing future experiential service innovations, considering how realism may be integrated into a designerly approach.
Research limitations/implications: Design fiction diegetic prototyping enables researchers to express a range of âwhat ifâ or âwhat can it beâ research questions within service innovation contexts. However, the process encompasses degrees of subjectivity and relies on knowledge, judgment and projection.
Practical implications: The paper presents an approach to devising future service scenarios incorporating new and emergent technologies in service contexts. The proposed framework may be used as part of a range of research designs, including qualitative, quantitative and mixed method investigations.
Originality: Operationalizing an approach that generates and visualizes service futures from an experiential perspective contributes to the advancement of techniques that enables the exploration of new possibilities for service innovation research
Emerging Linguistic Functions in Early Infancy
This paper presents results from experimental
studies on early language acquisition in infants and
attempts to interpret the experimental results within
the framework of the Ecological Theory of
Language Acquisition (ETLA) recently proposed
by (Lacerda et al., 2004a). From this perspective,
the infantâs first steps in the acquisition of the
ambient language are seen as a consequence of the
infantâs general capacity to represent sensory input
and the infantâs interaction with other actors in its
immediate ecological environment. On the basis of
available experimental evidence, it will be argued
that ETLA offers a productive alternative to
traditional descriptive views of the language
acquisition process by presenting an operative
model of how early linguistic function may emerge
through interaction
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Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives
Emotional biosensing is rising in daily life: Data and categories claim to know how people feel and suggest what they should do about it, while CSCW explores new biosensing possibilities. Prevalent approaches to emotional biosensing are too limited, focusing on the individual, optimization, and normative categorization. Conceptual shifts can help explore alternatives: toward materiality, from representation toward performativity, inter-action to intra-action, shifting biopolitics, and shifting affect/desire. We contribute (1) synthesizing wide-ranging conceptual lenses, providing analysis connecting them to emotional biosensing design, (2) analyzing selected design exemplars to apply these lenses to design research, and (3) offering our own recommendations for designers and design researchers. In particular we suggest humility in knowledge claims with emotional biosensing, prioritizing care and affirmation over self- improvement, and exploring alternative desires. We call for critically questioning and generatively re- imagining the role of data in configuring sensing, feeling, âthe good life,â and everyday experience
Supporting reinterpretation in computer-aided conceptual design
This paper presents research that aims to inform the development of computational tools that better support design exploration and idea transformation - key objectives in conceptual design. Analyses of experimental data from two fields - product design and architecture - suggest that the interactions of designers with their sketches can be formalised according to a finite number of generalised shape rules defined within a shape grammar. Such rules can provide a basis for the generation of alternative design concepts and they have informed the development of a prototype shape synthesis system that supports dynamic reinterpretation of shapes in design activity. The notion of 'sub-shapes' is introduced and the significance of these to perception, recognition and the development of emergent structures is discussed. The paper concludes with some speculation on how such a system might find application in a range of design fields
Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion
A key challenge in scaling up robot learning to many skills and environments
is removing the need for human supervision, so that robots can collect their
own data and improve their own performance without being limited by the cost of
requesting human feedback. Model-based reinforcement learning holds the promise
of enabling an agent to learn to predict the effects of its actions, which
could provide flexible predictive models for a wide range of tasks and
environments, without detailed human supervision. We develop a method for
combining deep action-conditioned video prediction models with model-predictive
control that uses entirely unlabeled training data. Our approach does not
require a calibrated camera, an instrumented training set-up, nor precise
sensing and actuation. Our results show that our method enables a real robot to
perform nonprehensile manipulation -- pushing objects -- and can handle novel
objects not seen during training.Comment: ICRA 2017. Supplementary video:
https://sites.google.com/site/robotforesight
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