Related papers: On the Learning Mechanisms in Physical Reasoning

Language models (LMs) have yielded impressive results on many language reasoning tasks, but their unexpected errors raise doubts about their reasoning abilities. In light of this, there is growing interest in finetuning/prompting LMs with…

Intelligent agents need a physical understanding of the world to predict the impact of their actions in the future. While learning-based models of the environment dynamics have contributed to significant improvements in sample efficiency…

Quadrupedal locomotion plays a critical role in enabling agile, versatile movement across complex terrains. Understanding and estimating the underlying physical dynamics are essential for achieving efficient and stable quadrupedal…

Humans are interactive agents driven to seek out situations with interesting physical dynamics. Here we formalize the functional form of physical intrinsic motivation. We first collect ratings of how interesting humans find a variety of…

When solving optimization problems under uncertainty with contextual data, utilizing machine learning to predict the uncertain parameters' values is a popular and effective approach. Decision-focused learning (DFL) aims at learning a…

Feature discovery from complex unstructured data is fundamentally a reasoning problem: it requires identifying abstractions that are predictive of a target outcome while avoiding leakage, proxies, and post-outcome signals. With the…

Pre-trained foundation models, due to their enormous capacity and exposure to vast amounts of data during pre-training, are known to have learned plenty of real-world concepts. An important step in making these pre-trained models effective…

The ability to accurately predict the surrounding environment is a foundational principle of intelligence in biological and artificial agents. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been proposed for learning to predict the physical…

Predicting the evolution of systems that exhibit spatio-temporal dynamics in response to external stimuli is a key enabling technology fostering scientific innovation. Traditional equations-based approaches leverage first principles to…

Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…

Foundation models have demonstrated strong reasoning and generalization capabilities in driving-related tasks, including scene understanding, planning, and control. However, they still face challenges in hallucinations, uncertainty, and…

Motion trajectories offer reliable references for physics-based motion learning but suffer from sparsity, particularly in regions that lack sufficient data coverage. To address this challenge, we introduce a self-supervised, structured…

Federated learning algorithms perform reasonably well on independent and identically distributed (IID) data. They, on the other hand, suffer greatly from heterogeneous environments, i.e., Non-IID data. Despite the fact that many research…

Neural network models become increasingly popular as dynamic modeling tools in the control community. They have many appealing features including nonlinear structures, being able to approximate any functions. While most researchers hold…

Latent state space models are a fundamental and widely used tool for modeling dynamical systems. However, they are difficult to learn from data and learned models often lack performance guarantees on inference tasks such as filtering and…

The mainstream paradigm behind continual learning has been to adapt the model parameters to non-stationary data distributions, where catastrophic forgetting is the central challenge. Typical methods rely on a rehearsal buffer or known task…

Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. Developmental…

Despite strong performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on multimodal tasks, predicting whether and why an image is persuasive remains challenging. We first show that prompting MLLMs to reason before prediction does not…

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular approach to endowing robots with skills without having to program them by hand. Typically, LfD relies on human demonstrations in clutter-free environments. This prevents the demonstrations from…

Physical dynamical systems can be viewed as natural information processors: their systems preserve, transform, and disperse input information. This perspective motivates learning not only from data generated by such systems, but also how to…