For the simulation-based design of fiber melt spinning processes, the accurate modeling of the processed polymer with regard to its material behavior is crucial. In this work, we develop a high-speed elongational rheometer for Carreau-type materials, making use of process simulations and fiber diameter measurements. The procedure is based on a unified formulation of the fiber spinning model for all material types (Newtonian and non-Newtonian), whose material laws are strictly monotone in the strain rate. The parametrically described material law for the elongational viscosity implies a nonlinear optimization problem for the parameter identification, for which we propose an efficient, robust gradient-based method. The work can be understood as a proof of concept, a generalization to other, more complex materials is possible.
There is a growing interest in applying large language models (LLMs) in robotic tasks, due to their remarkable reasoning ability and extensive knowledge learned from vast training corpora. Grounding LLMs in the physical world remains an open challenge as they can only process textual input. Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have enabled a more comprehensive understanding of the physical world by incorporating visual input, which provides richer contextual information than language alone. In this work, we proposed a novel paradigm that leveraged GPT-4V(ision), the state-of-the-art LVLM by OpenAI, to enable embodied agents to perceive liquid objects via image-based environmental feedback. Specifically, we exploited the physical understanding of GPT-4V to interpret the visual representation (e.g., time-series plot) of non-visual feedback (e.g., F/T sensor data), indirectly enabling multimodal perception beyond vision and language using images as proxies. We evaluated our method using 10 common household liquids with containers of various geometry and material. Without any training or fine-tuning, we demonstrated that our method can enable the robot to indirectly perceive the physical response of liquids and estimate their viscosity. We also showed that by jointly reasoning over the visual and physical attributes learned through interactions, our method could recognize liquid objects in the absence of strong visual cues (e.g., container labels with legible text or symbols), increasing the accuracy from 69.0% -- achieved by the best-performing vision-only variant -- to 86.0%.
Expert parallelism has been introduced as a strategy to distribute the computational workload of sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) models across multiple computing devices, facilitating the execution of these increasingly large-scale models. However, the All-to-All communication intrinsic to expert parallelism constitutes a significant overhead, diminishing the MoE models' efficiency. Current optimization approaches offer some relief, yet they are constrained by the sequential interdependence of communication and computation operations. To address this limitation, we present a novel shortcut-connected MoE architecture with overlapping parallel strategy, designated as ScMoE, which effectively decouples communication from its conventional sequence, allowing for a substantial overlap of 70% to 100% with computation. When compared with the prevalent top-2 MoE architecture, ScMoE demonstrates training speed improvements of 30% and 11%, and inference improvements of 40% and 15%, in our PCIe and NVLink hardware environments, respectively, where communication constitutes 60% and 15% of the total MoE time consumption. On the other hand, extensive experiments and theoretical analyses indicate that ScMoE not only achieves comparable but in some instances surpasses the model quality of existing approaches in vision and language tasks.
Accurate utterance classification in motivational interviews is crucial to automatically understand the quality and dynamics of client-therapist interaction, and it can serve as a key input for systems mediating such interactions. Motivational interviews exhibit three important characteristics. First, there are two distinct roles, namely client and therapist. Second, they are often highly emotionally charged, which can be expressed both in text and in prosody. Finally, context is of central importance to classify any given utterance. Previous works did not adequately incorporate all of these characteristics into utterance classification approaches for mental health dialogues. In contrast, we present M3TCM, a Multi-modal, Multi-task Context Model for utterance classification. Our approach for the first time employs multi-task learning to effectively model both joint and individual components of therapist and client behaviour. Furthermore, M3TCM integrates information from the text and speech modality as well as the conversation context. With our novel approach, we outperform the state of the art for utterance classification on the recently introduced AnnoMI dataset with a relative improvement of 20% for the client- and by 15% for therapist utterance classification. In extensive ablation studies, we quantify the improvement resulting from each contribution.
Neuromorphic computing leverages the sparsity of temporal data to reduce processing energy by activating a small subset of neurons and synapses at each time step. When deployed for split computing in edge-based systems, remote neuromorphic processing units (NPUs) can reduce the communication power budget by communicating asynchronously using sparse impulse radio (IR) waveforms. This way, the input signal sparsity translates directly into energy savings both in terms of computation and communication. However, with IR transmission, the main contributor to the overall energy consumption remains the power required to maintain the main radio on. This work proposes a novel architecture that integrates a wake-up radio mechanism within a split computing system consisting of remote, wirelessly connected, NPUs. A key challenge in the design of a wake-up radio-based neuromorphic split computing system is the selection of thresholds for sensing, wake-up signal detection, and decision making. To address this problem, as a second contribution, this work proposes a novel methodology that leverages the use of a digital twin (DT), i.e., a simulator, of the physical system, coupled with a sequential statistical testing approach known as Learn Then Test (LTT) to provide theoretical reliability guarantees. The proposed DT-LTT methodology is broadly applicable to other design problems, and is showcased here for neuromorphic communications. Experimental results validate the design and the analysis, confirming the theoretical reliability guarantees and illustrating trade-offs among reliability, energy consumption, and informativeness of the decisions.
Scenario-based testing of automated driving functions has become a promising method to reduce time and cost compared to real-world testing. In scenario-based testing automated functions are evaluated in a set of pre-defined scenarios. These scenarios provide information about vehicle behaviors, environmental conditions, or road characteristics using parameters. To create realistic scenarios, parameters and parameter dependencies have to be fitted utilizing real-world data. However, due to the large variety of intersections and movement constellations found in reality, data may not be available for certain scenarios. This paper proposes a methodology to systematically analyze relations between parameters of scenarios. Bayesian networks are utilized to analyze causal dependencies in order to decrease the amount of required data and to transfer causal patterns creating unseen scenarios. Thereby, infrastructural influences on movement patterns are investigated to generate realistic scenarios on unobserved intersections. For evaluation, scenarios and underlying parameters are extracted from the inD dataset. Movement patterns are estimated, transferred and checked against recorded data from those initially unseen intersections.
With the aim of further enabling the exploitation of intentional impacts in robotic manipulation, a control framework is presented that directly tackles the challenges posed by tracking control of robotic manipulators that are tasked to perform nominally simultaneous impacts. This framework is an extension of the reference spreading control framework, in which overlapping ante- and post-impact references that are consistent with impact dynamics are defined. In this work, such a reference is constructed starting from a teleoperation-based approach. By using the corresponding ante- and post-impact control modes in the scope of a quadratic programming control approach, peaking of the velocity error and control inputs due to impacts is avoided while maintaining high tracking performance. With the inclusion of a novel interim mode, we aim to also avoid input peaks and steps when uncertainty in the environment causes a series of unplanned single impacts to occur rather than the planned simultaneous impact. This work in particular presents for the first time an experimental evaluation of reference spreading control on a robotic setup, showcasing its robustness against uncertainty in the environment compared to three baseline control approaches.
We study the behavior of optimal ridge regularization and optimal ridge risk for out-of-distribution prediction, where the test distribution deviates arbitrarily from the train distribution. We establish general conditions that determine the sign of the optimal regularization level under covariate and regression shifts. These conditions capture the alignment between the covariance and signal structures in the train and test data and reveal stark differences compared to the in-distribution setting. For example, a negative regularization level can be optimal under covariate shift or regression shift, even when the training features are isotropic or the design is underparameterized. Furthermore, we prove that the optimally-tuned risk is monotonic in the data aspect ratio, even in the out-of-distribution setting and when optimizing over negative regularization levels. In general, our results do not make any modeling assumptions for the train or the test distributions, except for moment bounds, and allow for arbitrary shifts and the widest possible range of (negative) regularization levels.
3D modeling of biological structures is an inherently complex process, necessitating both biological and geometric understanding. Additionally, the complexity of user interfaces of 3D modeling tools and the associated steep learning curve further exacerbate the difficulty of authoring a 3D model. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework to address the challenge of using 3D modeling software by converting users' textual inputs into modeling actions within an interactive procedural modeling system. The framework incorporates a code generator of a novel code format and a corresponding code interpreter. The major technical innovation includes the user-refinement mechanism that captures the degree of user dissatisfaction with the modeling outcome, offers an interactive revision, and leverages this feedback for future improved 3D modeling. This entire framework is powered by large language models and eliminates the need for a traditional training process. We develop a prototype tool named Chat Modeling, offering both automatic and step-by-step 3D modeling approaches. Our evaluation of the framework with structural biologists highlights the potential of our approach being utilized in their scientific workflows. All supplemental materials are available at //osf.io/x4qb7/.
Due to their inherent capability in semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied for aspect-based sentiment classification. However, these models lack a mechanism to account for relevant syntactical constraints and long-range word dependencies, and hence may mistakenly recognize syntactically irrelevant contextual words as clues for judging aspect sentiment. To tackle this problem, we propose to build a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over the dependency tree of a sentence to exploit syntactical information and word dependencies. Based on it, a novel aspect-specific sentiment classification framework is raised. Experiments on three benchmarking collections illustrate that our proposed model has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models, and further demonstrate that both syntactical information and long-range word dependencies are properly captured by the graph convolution structure.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.