Multi-task imitation learning (MTIL) has shown significant potential in robotic manipulation by enabling agents to perform various tasks using a single policy. It simplifies the policy deployment and enhances the agent's adaptability across different scenarios. However, key challenges remain, such as maintaining action reliability (e.g., avoiding abnormal action sequences that deviate from nominal task trajectories) and generalizing to unseen tasks with a few expert demonstrations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Foresight-Augmented Manipulation (FoAM) policy, a novel MTIL policy that pioneers the use of multi-modal goal conditions as input and introduces a foresight augmentation in addition to the general action reconstruction. FoAM enables the agent to reason about its actions' visual consequences (foresight) and to be guided by these more expressive representations during task execution. Extensive experiments on over 100 tasks in simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that FoAM significantly enhances MTIL policy performance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by up to 41% in success rate. We released our simulation suites that include over 80 challenging tasks across more than 10 scenarios designed for manipulation policy training and evaluation.

Social media data are used to enhance crisis management, as people widely adopt social media to share and acquire information to cope with uncertainties in crises. Identification and extraction of informative communications out of large volumes of data is critical for accurate situational awareness and timely response. Existing studies use conditions of geolocations, keywords, and topics separately or jointly to retrieve data that can be crisis related, but are not enough to filter subsets of data for different crisis management tasks. We propose that the crisis communication purposes of users can be detected to enhance data selection and prioritization for different crisis management tasks. A classification framework was built to identify three facets of a message: content type, audience type, and information source. The definitions of these categories are not dependent on a specific type of crises. So the classification framework can be potentially applied to different crisis scenarios. Machine learning models were created for the automatic classification of messages. Results showed the CNN-based model achieved the best accuracy (88.5%) for the classification of content type. The proposed Naive Bayes and logistic repression with predetermined features can best differentiate audience types and information source with an accuracy of 72.7% and 72.2%, respectively.