Youngwoon Lee

Young-Woon Lee, Byung-Gyu Kim

As Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) displays and immersive media services become ubiquitous in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Consumer Electronics (CE) sectors, including 8K display and mobile devices, the demand for high-efficiency video coding is unprecedented. While Deep Learning-based Filtering (DLF) has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate compression artifacts inherent in standards like High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266), its deployment in CE devices is severely constrained by computational complexity, memory bandwidth, and power consumption. To bridge the gap between academic research and practical deployment, this paper presents a comprehensive, hardware-oriented survey of DLF techniques. We propose a systematic three-dimensional taxonomy classifying methods into (1) Integration Scheme within the Video Coding, (2) Coding Information Utilization, and (3) Network Design Strategy. Unlike prior reviews, this work critically analyzes the trade-offs between Rate-Distortion (RD) performance and hardware feasibility, highlighting the evolution from heavy, performance-oriented models to lightweight, hardware-friendly architectures targeting Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Furthermore, we incorporate the latest standardization activities from the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) on Neural Network-based Video Coding (NNVC) to provide realistic guidelines. We also identify open challenges such as real-time inference latency and error propagation, providing a roadmap toward robust, low-power intelligent video coding in next-generation CE vision endpoints.

Seohong Park, Kimin Lee, Youngwoon Lee et al.

One of the key capabilities of intelligent agents is the ability to discover useful skills without external supervision. However, the current unsupervised skill discovery methods are often limited to acquiring simple, easy-to-learn skills due to the lack of incentives to discover more complex, challenging behaviors. We introduce a novel unsupervised skill discovery method, Controllability-aware Skill Discovery (CSD), which actively seeks complex, hard-to-control skills without supervision. The key component of CSD is a controllability-aware distance function, which assigns larger values to state transitions that are harder to achieve with the current skills. Combined with distance-maximizing skill discovery, CSD progressively learns more challenging skills over the course of training as our jointly trained distance function reduces rewards for easy-to-achieve skills. Our experimental results in six robotic manipulation and locomotion environments demonstrate that CSD can discover diverse complex skills including object manipulation and locomotion skills with no supervision, significantly outperforming prior unsupervised skill discovery methods. Videos and code are available at https://seohong.me/projects/csd/

Amber Xie, Youngwoon Lee, Pieter Abbeel et al.

Contact is at the core of robotic manipulation. At times, it is desired (e.g. manipulation and grasping), and at times, it is harmful (e.g. when avoiding obstacles). However, traditional path planning algorithms focus solely on collision-free paths, limiting their applicability in contact-rich tasks. To address this limitation, we propose the domain of Language-Conditioned Path Planning, where contact-awareness is incorporated into the path planning problem. As a first step in this domain, we propose Language-Conditioned Collision Functions (LACO) a novel approach that learns a collision function using only a single-view image, language prompt, and robot configuration. LACO predicts collisions between the robot and the environment, enabling flexible, conditional path planning without the need for manual object annotations, point cloud data, or ground-truth object meshes. In both simulation and the real world, we demonstrate that LACO can facilitate complex, nuanced path plans that allow for interaction with objects that are safe to collide, rather than prohibiting any collision.

Lucy Xiaoyang Shi, Joseph J. Lim, Youngwoon Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a sample-efficient way of learning complex behaviors by leveraging a learned single-step dynamics model to plan actions in imagination. However, planning every action for long-horizon tasks is not practical, akin to a human planning out every muscle movement. Instead, humans efficiently plan with high-level skills to solve complex tasks. From this intuition, we propose a Skill-based Model-based RL framework (SkiMo) that enables planning in the skill space using a skill dynamics model, which directly predicts the skill outcomes, rather than predicting all small details in the intermediate states, step by step. For accurate and efficient long-term planning, we jointly learn the skill dynamics model and a skill repertoire from prior experience. We then harness the learned skill dynamics model to accurately simulate and plan over long horizons in the skill space, which enables efficient downstream learning of long-horizon, sparse reward tasks. Experimental results in navigation and manipulation domains show that SkiMo extends the temporal horizon of model-based approaches and improves the sample efficiency for both model-based RL and skill-based RL. Code and videos are available at https://clvrai.com/skimo

Shivin Dass, Karl Pertsch, Hejia Zhang et al.

Large-scale data is an essential component of machine learning as demonstrated in recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision research. However, collecting large-scale robotic data is much more expensive and slower as each operator can control only a single robot at a time. To make this costly data collection process efficient and scalable, we propose Policy Assisted TeleOperation (PATO), a system which automates part of the demonstration collection process using a learned assistive policy. PATO autonomously executes repetitive behaviors in data collection and asks for human input only when it is uncertain about which subtask or behavior to execute. We conduct teleoperation user studies both with a real robot and a simulated robot fleet and demonstrate that our assisted teleoperation system reduces human operators' mental load while improving data collection efficiency. Further, it enables a single operator to control multiple robots in parallel, which is a first step towards scalable robotic data collection. For code and video results, see https://clvrai.com/pato

Carmelo Sferrazza, Younggyo Seo, Hao Liu et al.

Humans rely on the synergy of their senses for most essential tasks. For tasks requiring object manipulation, we seamlessly and effectively exploit the complementarity of our senses of vision and touch. This paper draws inspiration from such capabilities and aims to find a systematic approach to fuse visual and tactile information in a reinforcement learning setting. We propose Masked Multimodal Learning (M3L), which jointly learns a policy and visual-tactile representations based on masked autoencoding. The representations jointly learned from vision and touch improve sample efficiency, and unlock generalization capabilities beyond those achievable through each of the senses separately. Remarkably, representations learned in a multimodal setting also benefit vision-only policies at test time. We evaluate M3L on three simulated environments with both visual and tactile observations: robotic insertion, door opening, and dexterous in-hand manipulation, demonstrating the benefits of learning a multimodal policy. Code and videos of the experiments are available at https://sferrazza.cc/m3l_site.

Carmelo Sferrazza, Dun-Ming Huang, Xingyu Lin et al.

Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly and fragile hardware setups. To accelerate algorithmic research in humanoid robots, we present a high-dimensional, simulated robot learning benchmark, HumanoidBench, featuring a humanoid robot equipped with dexterous hands and a variety of challenging whole-body manipulation and locomotion tasks. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with most tasks, whereas a hierarchical learning approach achieves superior performance when supported by robust low-level policies, such as walking or reaching. With HumanoidBench, we provide the robotics community with a platform to identify the challenges arising when solving diverse tasks with humanoid robots, facilitating prompt verification of algorithms and ideas. The open-source code is available at https://humanoid-bench.github.io.

Hye-Jin Park, Young-Ju Choi, Young-Woon Lee et al.

Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) has been an essential module for object detection models to consider various scales of an object. However, average precision (AP) on small objects is relatively lower than AP on medium and large objects. The reason is why the deeper layer of CNN causes information loss as feature extraction level. We propose a new scale sequence (S^2) feature extraction of FPN to strengthen feature information of small objects. We consider FPN structure as scale-space and extract scale sequence (S^2) feature by 3D convolution on the level axis of FPN. It is basically scale invariant feature and is built on high-resolution pyramid feature map for small objects. Furthermore, the proposed S^2 feature can be extended to most object detection models based on FPN. We demonstrate the proposed S2 feature can improve the performance of both one-stage and two-stage detectors on MS COCO dataset. Based on the proposed S2 feature, we achieve upto 1.3% and 1.1% of AP improvement for YOLOv4-P5 and YOLOv4-P6, respectively. For Faster RCNN and Mask R-CNN, we observe upto 2.0% and 1.6% of AP improvement with the suggested S^2 feature, respectively.

Vint Lee, Pieter Abbeel, Youngwoon Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we found that surprisingly, reward prediction is often a bottleneck of MBRL, especially for sparse rewards that are challenging (or even ambiguous) to predict. Motivated by the intuition that humans can learn from rough reward estimates, we propose a simple yet effective reward smoothing approach, DreamSmooth, which learns to predict a temporally-smoothed reward, instead of the exact reward at the given timestep. We empirically show that DreamSmooth achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-horizon sparse-reward tasks both in sample efficiency and final performance without losing performance on common benchmarks, such as Deepmind Control Suite and Atari benchmarks.

Junik Bae, Kwanyoung Park, Youngwoon Lee

Unsupervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a promising paradigm for developing diverse robotic skills without external supervision. However, existing unsupervised GCRL methods often struggle to cover a wide range of states in complex environments due to their limited exploration and sparse or noisy rewards for GCRL. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised GCRL method that leverages TemporaL Distance-aware Representations (TLDR). Based on temporal distance, TLDR selects faraway goals to initiate exploration and computes intrinsic exploration rewards and goal-reaching rewards. Specifically, our exploration policy seeks states with large temporal distances (i.e. covering a large state space), while the goal-conditioned policy learns to minimize the temporal distance to the goal (i.e. reaching the goal). Our results in six simulated locomotion environments demonstrate that TLDR significantly outperforms prior unsupervised GCRL methods in achieving a wide range of states.

Hanjung Kim, Jaehyun Kang, Hyolim Kang et al.

Mimicry is a fundamental learning mechanism in humans, enabling individuals to learn new tasks by observing and imitating experts. However, applying this ability to robots presents significant challenges due to the inherent differences between human and robot embodiments in both their visual appearance and physical capabilities. While previous methods bridge this gap using cross-embodiment datasets with shared scenes and tasks, collecting such aligned data between humans and robots at scale is not trivial. In this paper, we propose UniSkill, a novel framework that learns embodiment-agnostic skill representations from large-scale cross-embodiment video data without any labels, enabling skills extracted from human video prompts to effectively transfer to robot policies trained only on robot data. Our experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our cross-embodiment skills successfully guide robots in selecting appropriate actions, even with unseen video prompts. The project website can be found at: https://kimhanjung.github.io/UniSkill.

Kwanyoung Park, Youngwoon Lee

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a compelling approach that addresses the challenge of learning from limited, static data by generating imaginary trajectories using learned models. However, these approaches often struggle with inaccurate value estimation from model rollouts. In this paper, we introduce a novel model-based offline RL method, Lower Expectile Q-learning (LEQ), which provides a low-bias model-based value estimation via lower expectile regression of $λ$-returns. Our empirical results show that LEQ significantly outperforms previous model-based offline RL methods on long-horizon tasks, such as the D4RL AntMaze tasks, matching or surpassing the performance of model-free approaches and sequence modeling approaches. Furthermore, LEQ matches the performance of state-of-the-art model-based and model-free methods in dense-reward environments across both state-based tasks (NeoRL and D4RL) and pixel-based tasks (V-D4RL), showing that LEQ works robustly across diverse domains. Our ablation studies demonstrate that lower expectile regression, $λ$-returns, and critic training on offline data are all crucial for LEQ.

Alejandro Escontrela, Ademi Adeniji, Wilson Yan et al.

Specifying reward signals that allow agents to learn complex behaviors is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning. A promising approach is to extract preferences for behaviors from unlabeled videos, which are widely available on the internet. We present Video Prediction Rewards (VIPER), an algorithm that leverages pretrained video prediction models as action-free reward signals for reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first train an autoregressive transformer on expert videos and then use the video prediction likelihoods as reward signals for a reinforcement learning agent. VIPER enables expert-level control without programmatic task rewards across a wide range of DMC, Atari, and RLBench tasks. Moreover, generalization of the video prediction model allows us to derive rewards for an out-of-distribution environment where no expert data is available, enabling cross-embodiment generalization for tabletop manipulation. We see our work as starting point for scalable reward specification from unlabeled videos that will benefit from the rapid advances in generative modeling. Source code and datasets are available on the project website: https://escontrela.me/viper

Minho Heo, Youngwoon Lee, Doohyun Lee et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL), imitation learning (IL), and task and motion planning (TAMP) have demonstrated impressive performance across various robotic manipulation tasks. However, these approaches have been limited to learning simple behaviors in current real-world manipulation benchmarks, such as pushing or pick-and-place. To enable more complex, long-horizon behaviors of an autonomous robot, we propose to focus on real-world furniture assembly, a complex, long-horizon robot manipulation task that requires addressing many current robotic manipulation challenges to solve. We present FurnitureBench, a reproducible real-world furniture assembly benchmark aimed at providing a low barrier for entry and being easily reproducible, so that researchers across the world can reliably test their algorithms and compare them against prior work. For ease of use, we provide 200+ hours of pre-collected data (5000+ demonstrations), 3D printable furniture models, a robotic environment setup guide, and systematic task initialization. Furthermore, we provide FurnitureSim, a fast and realistic simulator of FurnitureBench. We benchmark the performance of offline RL and IL algorithms on our assembly tasks and demonstrate the need to improve such algorithms to be able to solve our tasks in the real world, providing ample opportunities for future research.

Youngwoon Lee, Joseph J. Lim, Anima Anandkumar et al.

Skill chaining is a promising approach for synthesizing complex behaviors by sequentially combining previously learned skills. Yet, a naive composition of skills fails when a policy encounters a starting state never seen during its training. For successful skill chaining, prior approaches attempt to widen the policy's starting state distribution. However, these approaches require larger state distributions to be covered as more policies are sequenced, and thus are limited to short skill sequences. In this paper, we propose to chain multiple policies without excessively large initial state distributions by regularizing the terminal state distributions in an adversarial learning framework. We evaluate our approach on two complex long-horizon manipulation tasks of furniture assembly. Our results have shown that our method establishes the first model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to solve these tasks; whereas prior skill chaining approaches fail. The code and videos are available at https://clvrai.com/skill-chaining

I-Chun Arthur Liu, Shagun Uppal, Gaurav S. Sukhatme et al.

Learning complex manipulation tasks in realistic, obstructed environments is a challenging problem due to hard exploration in the presence of obstacles and high-dimensional visual observations. Prior work tackles the exploration problem by integrating motion planning and reinforcement learning. However, the motion planner augmented policy requires access to state information, which is often not available in the real-world settings. To this end, we propose to distill a state-based motion planner augmented policy to a visual control policy via (1) visual behavioral cloning to remove the motion planner dependency along with its jittery motion, and (2) vision-based reinforcement learning with the guidance of the smoothed trajectories from the behavioral cloning agent. We evaluate our method on three manipulation tasks in obstructed environments and compare it against various reinforcement learning and imitation learning baselines. The results demonstrate that our framework is highly sample-efficient and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, coupled with domain randomization, our policy is capable of zero-shot transfer to unseen environment settings with distractors. Code and videos are available at https://clvrai.com/mopa-pd

Karl Pertsch, Youngwoon Lee, Yue Wu et al.

Demonstration-guided reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning complex behaviors by leveraging both reward feedback and a set of target task demonstrations. Prior approaches for demonstration-guided RL treat every new task as an independent learning problem and attempt to follow the provided demonstrations step-by-step, akin to a human trying to imitate a completely unseen behavior by following the demonstrator's exact muscle movements. Naturally, such learning will be slow, but often new behaviors are not completely unseen: they share subtasks with behaviors we have previously learned. In this work, we aim to exploit this shared subtask structure to increase the efficiency of demonstration-guided RL. We first learn a set of reusable skills from large offline datasets of prior experience collected across many tasks. We then propose Skill-based Learning with Demonstrations (SkiLD), an algorithm for demonstration-guided RL that efficiently leverages the provided demonstrations by following the demonstrated skills instead of the primitive actions, resulting in substantial performance improvements over prior demonstration-guided RL approaches. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on long-horizon maze navigation and complex robot manipulation tasks.

Grace Zhang, Linghan Zhong, Youngwoon Lee et al.

The ability to transfer a policy from one environment to another is a promising avenue for efficient robot learning in realistic settings where task supervision is not available. This can allow us to take advantage of environments well suited for training, such as simulators or laboratories, to learn a policy for a real robot in a home or office. To succeed, such policy transfer must overcome both the visual domain gap (e.g. different illumination or background) and the dynamics domain gap (e.g. different robot calibration or modelling error) between source and target environments. However, prior policy transfer approaches either cannot handle a large domain gap or can only address one type of domain gap at a time. In this paper, we propose a novel policy transfer method with iterative "environment grounding", IDAPT, that alternates between (1) directly minimizing both visual and dynamics domain gaps by grounding the source environment in the target environment domains, and (2) training a policy on the grounded source environment. This iterative training progressively aligns the domains between the two environments and adapts the policy to the target environment. Once trained, the policy can be directly executed on the target environment. The empirical results on locomotion and robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that our approach can effectively transfer a policy across visual and dynamics domain gaps with minimal supervision and interaction with the target environment. Videos and code are available at https://clvrai.com/idapt .

Young-Ju Choi, Young-Woon Lee, Byung-Gyu Kim

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to estimate a high-resolution (HR) frame from a low-resolution (LR) frames. The key challenge for VSR lies in the effective exploitation of spatial correlation in an intra-frame and temporal dependency between consecutive frames. However, most of the previous methods treat different types of the spatial features identically and extract spatial and temporal features from the separated modules. It leads to lack of obtaining meaningful information and enhancing the fine details. In VSR, there are three types of temporal modeling frameworks: 2D convolutional neural networks (CNN), 3D CNN, and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Among them, the RNN-based approach is suitable for sequential data. Thus the SR performance can be greatly improved by using the hidden states of adjacent frames. However, at each of time step in a recurrent structure, the RNN-based previous works utilize the neighboring features restrictively. Since the range of accessible motion per time step is narrow, there are still limitations to restore the missing details for dynamic or large motion. In this paper, we propose a group-based bi-directional recurrent wavelet neural networks (GBR-WNN) to exploit the sequential data and spatio-temporal information effectively for VSR. The proposed group-based bi-directional RNN (GBR) temporal modeling framework is built on the well-structured process with the group of pictures (GOP). We propose a temporal wavelet attention (TWA) module, in which attention is adopted for both spatial and temporal features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in both of quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Young-Jin Heo, Young-Ju Choi, Young-Woon Lee et al.

Deepfake is the manipulated video made with a generative deep learning technique such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Auto Encoder that anyone can utilize. Recently, with the increase of Deepfake videos, some classifiers consisting of the convolutional neural network that can distinguish fake videos as well as deepfake datasets have been actively created. However, the previous studies based on the CNN structure have the problem of not only overfitting, but also considerable misjudging fake video as real ones. In this paper, we propose a Vision Transformer model with distillation methodology for detecting fake videos. We design that a CNN features and patch-based positioning model learns to interact with all positions to find the artifact region for solving false negative problem. Through comparative analysis on Deepfake Detection (DFDC) Dataset, we verify that the proposed scheme with patch embedding as input outperforms the state-of-the-art using the combined CNN features. Without ensemble technique, our model obtains 0.978 of AUC and 91.9 of f1 score, while previous SOTA model yields 0.972 of AUC and 90.6 of f1 score on the same condition.

Karl Pertsch, Youngwoon Lee, Joseph J. Lim

Intelligent agents rely heavily on prior experience when learning a new task, yet most modern reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn every task from scratch. One approach for leveraging prior knowledge is to transfer skills learned on prior tasks to the new task. However, as the amount of prior experience increases, the number of transferable skills grows too, making it challenging to explore the full set of available skills during downstream learning. Yet, intuitively, not all skills should be explored with equal probability; for example information about the current state can hint which skills are promising to explore. In this work, we propose to implement this intuition by learning a prior over skills. We propose a deep latent variable model that jointly learns an embedding space of skills and the skill prior from offline agent experience. We then extend common maximum-entropy RL approaches to use skill priors to guide downstream learning. We validate our approach, SPiRL (Skill-Prior RL), on complex navigation and robotic manipulation tasks and show that learned skill priors are essential for effective skill transfer from rich datasets. Videos and code are available at https://clvrai.com/spirl.

Jun Yamada, Youngwoon Lee, Gautam Salhotra et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents are able to learn contact-rich manipulation tasks by maximizing a reward signal, but require large amounts of experience, especially in environments with many obstacles that complicate exploration. In contrast, motion planners use explicit models of the agent and environment to plan collision-free paths to faraway goals, but suffer from inaccurate models in tasks that require contacts with the environment. To combine the benefits of both approaches, we propose motion planner augmented RL (MoPA-RL) which augments the action space of an RL agent with the long-horizon planning capabilities of motion planners. Based on the magnitude of the action, our approach smoothly transitions between directly executing the action and invoking a motion planner. We evaluate our approach on various simulated manipulation tasks and compare it to alternative action spaces in terms of learning efficiency and safety. The experiments demonstrate that MoPA-RL increases learning efficiency, leads to a faster exploration, and results in safer policies that avoid collisions with the environment. Videos and code are available at https://clvrai.com/mopa-rl .

Youngwoon Lee, Edward S. Hu, Zhengyu Yang et al.

Learning from demonstrations is a useful way to transfer a skill from one agent to another. While most imitation learning methods aim to mimic an expert skill by following the demonstration step-by-step, imitating every step in the demonstration often becomes infeasible when the learner and its environment are different from the demonstration. In this paper, we propose a method that can imitate a demonstration composed solely of observations, which may not be reproducible with the current agent. Our method, dubbed selective imitation learning from observations (SILO), selects reachable states in the demonstration and learns how to reach the selected states. Our experiments on both simulated and real robot environments show that our method reliably performs a new task by following a demonstration. Videos and code are available at https://clvrai.com/silo .

Youngwoon Lee, Edward S. Hu, Zhengyu Yang et al.

The IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment is one of the first benchmarks for testing and accelerating the automation of complex manipulation tasks. The environment is designed to advance reinforcement learning from simple toy tasks to complex tasks requiring both long-term planning and sophisticated low-level control. Our environment supports over 80 different furniture models, Sawyer and Baxter robot simulation, and domain randomization. The IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment is a testbed for methods aiming to solve complex manipulation tasks. The environment is publicly available at https://clvrai.com/furniture