Real-life robot navigation involves more than just reaching a destination; it requires optimizing movements while addressing scenario-specific goals. An intuitive way for humans to express these goals is through abstract cues like verbal commands or rough sketches. Such human guidance may lack details or be noisy. Nonetheless, we expect robots to navigate as intended. For robots to interpret and execute these abstract instructions in line with human expectations, they must share a common understanding of basic navigation concepts with humans. To this end, we introduce CANVAS, a novel framework that combines visual and linguistic instructions for commonsense-aware navigation. Its success is driven by imitation learning, enabling the robot to learn from human navigation behavior. We present COMMAND, a comprehensive dataset with human-annotated navigation results, spanning over 48 hours and 219 km, designed to train commonsense-aware navigation systems in simulated environments. Our experiments show that CANVAS outperforms the strong rule-based system ROS NavStack across all environments, demonstrating superior performance with noisy instructions. Notably, in the orchard environment, where ROS NavStack records a 0% total success rate, CANVAS achieves a total success rate of 67%. CANVAS also closely aligns with human demonstrations and commonsense constraints, even in unseen environments. Furthermore, real-world deployment of CANVAS showcases impressive Sim2Real transfer with a total success rate of 69%, highlighting the potential of learning from human demonstrations in simulated environments for real-world applications.

As future superhuman models become increasingly complex, accurately supervising their behavior may exceed human capabilities. Recent works have demonstrated that in such scenarios, weak models can effectively supervise strong models, a phenomenon known as weak-to-strong generalization. However, we find that naive weak-to-strong generalization fails under distribution shifts, often leading to worse performance of the strong model than its weak supervisors. To address this, we propose RAVEN, a robust weak-to-strong generalization framework that dynamically learns the optimal combinations of weak models in addition to parameters of the strong model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RAVEN on image classification, text classification, and preference alignment tasks. RAVEN outperforms alternative baselines by over 30% on out-of-distribution tasks while matching or surpassing existing methods on in-distribution tasks. Moreover, our results show that RAVEN assigns higher weights to more accurate weak models, demonstrating its ability to automatically identify trustworthy supervision.

Residual connections are pivotal for deep neural networks, enabling greater depth by mitigating vanishing gradients. However, in standard residual updates, the module’s output is directly added to the input stream. This can lead to updates that predominantly reinforce or modulate the existing stream direction, potentially underutilizing the module’s capacity for learning entirely novel features. In this work, we introduce _Orthogonal Residual Update_: we decompose the module’s output relative to the input stream and add only the component orthogonal to this stream. This design aims to guide modules to contribute primarily new representa-tional directions, fostering richer feature learning while promoting more efficient training. We demonstrate that our orthogonal update strategy improves generalization accuracy and training stability across diverse architectures (ResNetV2, Vision Transformers) and datasets (CIFARs, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-1k), achieving, for instance, a +3.78 pp Acc@1 gain for ViT-B on ImageNet-1k. Code and models are available at https://github.com/BootsofLagrangian/ortho-residual.

While backpropagation (BP) has achieved widespread success in deep learning, it faces two prominent challenges: computational inefficiency and biological implausibility. In response to these challenges, local supervision, encompassing Local Learning (LL) and Forward Learning (FL), has emerged as a promising research direction. LL employs module-wise BP to achieve competitive results yet relies on module-wise auxiliary networks, which increase memory and parameter demands. Conversely, FL updates layer weights without BP and auxiliary networks but falls short of BP’s performance. This paper proposes a simple yet effective objective within a contrastive learning framework for local supervision without auxiliary networks. Given the insight that the existing contrastive learning framework for local supervision is susceptible to task-irrelevant information without auxiliary networks, we present DICTIONARY CONTRASTIVE LEARNING (DCL) that optimizes the similarity between local features and label embeddings. Our method using static label embeddings yields substantial performance improvements in the FL scenario, outperforming state-of-the-art FL approaches. Moreover, our method using adaptive label embeddings closely approaches the performance achieved by LL while achieving superior memory and parameter efficiency.