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Robot Learns to See in 30 Minutes (2022)
- stoniejohnson 4y agoVia simulation + meta-learning they can make a blind robot walk over arbitrary terrains solely via proprioception. They add a visual component, which with 30 minutes of real world data, through a technique called Cross-Modal Supervision (CMS), is able to improve walking performance significantly! They can even distort its vision (turn the camera) and it learns to adapt! Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03785 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03785 Advisor Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6fDpKDxpL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6fDpKDxpL0 Note: This is not my work; I originally found the presentation above.
- EGreg 4y agoWhen one robot learns, millions of them learn When millions of cars learn, they all can send data back to the mothership which crunches the numbers and they all improve Even without AI, this is how technology has always advanced. Humans simply improved things and copied it to all the implementations. So basically, when it comes to competing with robots or software, it is a losing proposition in the long run. No biological animal can evolve faster than this.
- labster 4y agoAnd yet our politicians ban human cloning and designer babies. Along with climate change, it’s like our politicians want human extinction.
- coldtea 4y agoThe same hubris behind "let's clone humans" brought climate change. And the development of AGI is a similar self-destruct bet. The extinction will be premised on those things being allowed, not on them being banned.
- vt85 4y ago[dead]
- andsoitis 4y agobuilding on your thinking... what if humans are merely a point on an unfurling of intelligence/hacking, which will eventually reach its natural end, as all things do? just like the universe will as well; it couldn't foresee how its processes will yield its end
- jacquesm 4y agoWe don't exactly know the nature of 'The Great Filter'. But maybe we'll find out.
- coldtea 4y agoSure, but what about it? As the member of a species being extinct, I wouldn't like it and just "roll with it". Same way a race being told that they're there to serve, and if needed, be extinct to bring forward some other entity wouldn't. Until we reach that "natural end" we shouldn't go "gently into that good night".
- andsoitis 4y ago> we shouldn't go "gently into that good night concur. the challenge in front of us (and always has been) to surf the waves we can find in this universe
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 4y agoOne of me is quite enough.
- jacquesm 4y agoIt's not you that I'm particularly worried about. It's Bill Gates VII and Elon Musk XIV that I'm worried about.
- p1esk 4y agoNot the worst people to have more of.
- jacquesm 4y agoI strongly disagree with that.
- p1esk 4y agoOh, so you would rather clone Hitler and Stalin than Musk and Gates?
- jkestner 4y agoWhy not neither?
- jacquesm 4y agoThat's got to be the mother of all false dichotomies.
- ben_w 4y agoGodwin aside, the point is valid. When I look at Musk? Sure, he's overrated, acts like a nerdy teenager who never grew up — "Rockets are cool! Sports cars are cool! I know, I'll put a sports car on a rocket!" — but even where I think he's surrounded himself with sycophants (IMO Boring Company, Neuralink, based purely on what I'm told by civil engineers and brain scientists) not really evil. Misaligned and powerful, so an easy example of how an AI can go wrong; but you don't have to reach for Auschwitz or the Holodomor to find people much worse to clone than him. As for Gates? The worst true thing I've heard about him was Internet Explorer. And possibly Clippy.
- andsoitis 4y agoBorgdom awaits
- ChatGTP 4y agoNo biological animal can evolve faster than this. What’s the point of evolution for something which isn’t alive and has no will to live and no environment that it really needs to be part of for survival? I think about this when we talk about bots that continually improve? Continually improve to where ? To what end ? I’m asking out of curiosity not out of malice btw, it’s just an interesting thing to think about. I’m hoping that we eventually realise that life is pretty awesome albeit slower and learn that even a bird is really an amazing thing.
- muyuu 4y agoThere is no point to evolution in the technical sense of the word. Evolution is just a dynamic. Dynamics don't seek purpose. The thing that makes evolution a special dynamic is that everything that exists and you get to perceive is either the result of evolution, or compatible with it. Will to life is effectively an artifact of evolution. Things with ways to express some form of persistence and reproduction have an implicit will to live. Leaving aside whatever goals AIs may be programmed for, if at some point a dynamic for persistence and reproduction appears it will dominate any competing systems that don't have it on that basis alone. Systems that incorporate and propagate useful features for their survival will have capabilities to adapt and persist that are very limited in known lifeforms.
- ChatGTP 4y agoThis is assuming that evolving at 1 million times faster than other life is actually possible or advantageous. There may actually be a reason why faster != better. Of course there is a point to evolution, which is to utilise the environment to preserve your genes and pass them onto the next generation. Evolve to slow though and you die, evolve too fast, you’re no longer compatible with your environment and also die.
- ben_w 4y agoBacteria can reproduce in about 30 minutes, I think. That's in the order of 1,000,000 times faster than a human. As I'm not a biologist, I would only be guessing if that corresponds to evolving 1 million times faster, or if the relative complexity of the organisms makes it either more or less than that.
- csomar 4y ago> No biological animal can evolve faster than this. Are you sure? The robot is limited by its gears. However, animals have cells that can adapt and change through a super sophisticated mechanism called DNA. We are still way far from reaching living organisms complexity. All stuff we make is very fragile compared to that. Once we are able to modify real humans, you'll know we have the real deal.
- totetsu 4y agoAlso Bios have millions of years of pre-trained reservoir DNA to put into use as/when needed.
- fennecfoxy 4y agoI'd say that usually holds us back more than anything else. Pretty much 99.99% of crime is related to our evolutionary process, imo. The edge cases of mentally ill people etc are low, but otherwise racist/homophobic/theft crimes are all just tribalism/being afraid of the other/resource contention at the end of the day; society and its rules are just a patch on top of millennia of forming small groups and marching over to hit other neighbouring small groups with rocks. Sentient life would be both impressive & scary in that it can theoretically optimise itself far, far beyond what we can. Then again it could go the other way too: aggressive nanobots that start disassembling humans getting into tribal-like wars with other groups of nanobots to fight over resources aka humans to melt down.
- psychoslave 4y agoWhat is preventing robots to incorporate all that information in their own models?
- totetsu 4y agoIts all undocumented legacy code?
- cryptonector 4y ago> The robot is limited by its gears. Wait till they hook up the robots to other robots including 3D printers.
- Rhapso 4y ago> No biological animal can evolve faster than this. Sure one does. Us. When one human learns something, they communicate about it and often, they all do. As always, robotics and automation doesn't enable any fundimental new capacity other than what required many humans to do, now requires less humans to do. This just gives more control to the humans who own the robots. The AGI apocalypse is just the fear that capitalist entities and morales will spread and grow faster than humans can compete with. AI already exists to further their reach. We already have profit maximizing paperclip runaway super intelligence. We call them tech companies, and they flounder occasionally but they learn and adapt efficiently enough.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoIt's not the learning that's the magic. It can be 30 minutes or 30 days. It hardly matters. Where the sparks fly is that learning can he transfered in .3 seconds to 300,000 other robots. And then updated as needed. Now compare the to humans.
- kzrdude 4y agoIt's that learning is local and quick that makes it able to be fully general. New environment? It can learn that.
- margorczynski 4y agoOr you can train multiple ones with a kind of evolutionary approach - e.g. you train 100 at the same time and after a day you take the one with the best results, overwrite the rest with it's weights/config/etc. and repeat until satisfied.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoRight. But it's not the learning. It's the ability to scale what's learned. Humans learns one by one by one effectively in silos. Robots? There's no comparison.
- stoniejohnson 4y agoThe fact that it is learning online in fractions of a second to prevent falling (I would say) is pretty magic!
- ChatGTP 4y agoCan’t humans do this with…the internet ?
- Sharlin 4y agoLearn to walk?
- 4y ago
- extrememacaroni 4y agook, which jobs is this one going to steal now?
- fernly 4y agoPuts pack mules out to pasture. (Non-trivial application.)
- Turskarama 4y agoDog walker.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoDepends on whether or not the right people have seen the right Black Mirror episode.
- the_gipsy 4y agodogs
- coldtea 4y agoGuards for human cattle
- margorczynski 4y agoI can't find it in the paper - is the inference ran on the robot directly or remotely on a more powerful computer?
- erwincoumans 4y agoLikely local: "We build a custom model to predict the future to allow inference on limited compute."
- seventytwo 4y agoI think the RealSense line has been discontinued, but a different company called Luxonis has kind of taken its place using the same Intel/Movidius platform.
- stathibus 4y agorealsense still exists. Please google stuff before dropping misinfo in the comments.
- spiritplumber 4y agoWe did something similar but much simpler in 2009 where the robot learned where its sensors where and which way its motors moved it, and how to use them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk-H--e6PUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk-H--e6PUs
- pfd1986 4y agoLast author, J Malik, has made many important contributions to computer vision. One I'm very grateful for is spectral manifolds.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoHumans not only "learn to see". They learn sensor fusion, which is the aggregation of your senses. Read about vertigo and the ear, mirror box therapy, etc.
- vessenes 4y agoWhat seems clever to me is the super cool hack of getting sensor data while the video data is captured, then training a model on realtime video and backward time-shifted sensor data; result is a network that can predict sensor data 30 seconds ahead of time with visual data. This is then used to feed the walking model. That's the sort of super 'dumb' thing ML folks can do now; that task would have taken many many person years of work before, now, I speculate thinking of the idea to testing a network would be under a week. Verry cool.
- fwlr 4y agoI often think of this as the corollary to the bitter lesson: it is enough just to break some particular relationship between two things, and then throw compute at it. In the process of trying to recover that relationship, the model learns about the underlying real relationship - sometimes it even learns about each thing itself.
- stormfather 4y ago> training a model on realtime video and backward time-shifted sensor data Do you mean forward time shifted sensor data? I.e. using sensor data 30 seconds from the future as a label, and real time video as input?
- vessenes 4y agoI think we're saying the same thing. Training pair at t0 is video_t0, sensor_t30. So we have shifted sensor data back 30 seconds, or put your way, we look to sensor data 30 seconds in the future.
- stormfather 4y agoOh yeah you're right, thank you. I think the way you phrased it makes the most sense now.
- fwlr 4y ago“After training our robot on a large set of terrains in the Berkeley campus, we verified generalization of the visual policy in the Stanford campus.” Sublime. Almost a koan for meditating on AI research.
- AiaAidan 4y agoMeanwhile, it takes the human brain months to adapt to visual input after blindness: "This research suggests that the brain is able to adapt to getting visual input, even after 10 years of blindness. That said, it takes a little while before this ability to really process the images kicks in. Right after the second surgery, patients are getting input to the brain from their retinas, but their visual memory is still poor. After about a month, though, the brain has found ways to process this visual information, and, a year later, their brains do just about as well as those of people who had sight from birth." Source: https://psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/202210/what-happens-when-blind-people-get-vision-correction https://psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/202210/....
- skybrian 4y agoAnother good example: apparently it took 10 days of wearing upside-down goggles for a researcher to see things normally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable...
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoI liked the example in the article of teachers learning to read documents upside down (presumably because they do this a lot when students are in front of them).
- KronisLV 4y ago> "After about a month, though, the brain has found ways to process this visual information, and, a year later, their brains do just about as well as those of people who had sight from birth." Hey, that's still pretty impressive! The brain starting to receive a signal that it hasn't before and still being able to eventually adapt and figure it out is wonderful!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- precompute 4y ago>This work was supported by the DARPA Machine Common Sense program Coming soon to a neighbourhood near you!
- mrnonchalant 4y agoLooking forward to seeing the code! Any sense how soon “soon” might be?