Liquid Neural Network Adapts drone flight on the Go

Recommendable! Impressive! Making e.g. autonomous vehicles a reality!

"... In recent research, they demonstrated the efficiency of a new kind of very small—20,000 parameter—machine-learning system called a liquid neural network. They showed that drones equipped with these excelled in navigating complex, new environments with precision, even edging out state-of-the art systems. The systems were able to make decisions that led them to a target in previously unexplored forests and city spaces, and they could do it in the presence of added noise and other difficulties. ...
Over and above their other advantages, liquid neural networks also offer explainability and interpretability. In other words, they open the proverbial black box of the system’s decision-making process.  ..."

From the abstract:

"Autonomous robots can learn to perform visual navigation tasks from offline human demonstrations and generalize well to online and unseen scenarios within the same environment they have been trained on. It is challenging for these agents to take a step further and robustly generalize to new environments with drastic scenery changes that they have never encountered. Here, we present a method to create robust flight navigation agents that successfully perform vision-based fly-to-target tasks beyond their training environment under drastic distribution shifts. To this end, we designed an imitation learning framework using liquid neural networks, a brain-inspired class of continuous-time neural models that are causal and adapt to changing conditions. We observed that liquid agents learn to distill the task they are given from visual inputs and drop irrelevant features. Thus, their learned navigation skills transferred to new environments. When compared with several other state-of-the-art deep agents, experiments showed that this level of robustness in decision-making is exclusive to liquid networks, both in their differential equation and closed-form representations."

“Liquid” Neural Network Adapts on the Go - IEEE Spectrum Drones equipped with liquid neural networks edged out other AI systems when navigating unknown territory

Robust flight navigation out of distribution with liquid neural networks (no public access)