In this paper, a set of tools is introduced that simplifies the synthesis and rapid-prototyping of single-loop rational kinematic chains. It allows the user to perform rational motion interpolation of up to four given poses and yields the design parameters of a linkage that can execute this motion. The package also provides a visualization of the output and performs a self-collision analysis with the possibility to adapt the design parameters. The results can be imported into CAD-systems for fast 3D printing.
Modeling the kinematics and dynamics of robotics systems with suspended loads using dual quaternions has not been explored so far. This paper introduces a new innovative control strategy using dual quaternions for UAVs with cable-suspended loads, focusing on the sling load lifting and tracking problems. By utilizing the mathematical efficiency and compactness of dual quaternions, a unified representation of the UAV and its suspended load's dynamics and kinematics is achieved, facilitating the realization of load lifting and trajectory tracking. The simulation results have tested the proposed strategy's accuracy, efficiency, and robustness. This study makes a substantial contribution to present this novel control strategy that harnesses the benefits of dual quaternions for cargo UAVs. Our work also holds promise for inspiring future innovations in under-actuated systems control using dual quaternions.
End-to-End paradigms use a unified framework to implement multi-tasks in an autonomous driving system. Despite simplicity and clarity, the performance of end-to-end autonomous driving methods on sub-tasks is still far behind the single-task methods. Meanwhile, the widely used dense BEV features in previous end-to-end methods make it costly to extend to more modalities or tasks. In this paper, we propose a Sparse query-centric paradigm for end-to-end Autonomous Driving (SparseAD), where the sparse queries completely represent the whole driving scenario across space, time and tasks without any dense BEV representation. Concretely, we design a unified sparse architecture for perception tasks including detection, tracking, and online mapping. Moreover, we revisit motion prediction and planning, and devise a more justifiable motion planner framework. On the challenging nuScenes dataset, SparseAD achieves SOTA full-task performance among end-to-end methods and significantly narrows the performance gap between end-to-end paradigms and single-task methods. Codes will be released soon.
Deep learning models have become a powerful tool in knee angle estimation for lower limb prostheses, owing to their adaptability across various gait phases and locomotion modes. Current methods utilize Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP), Long-Short Term Memory Networks (LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), predominantly analyzing motion information from the thigh. Contrary to these approaches, our study introduces a holistic perspective by integrating whole-body movements as inputs. We propose a transformer-based probabilistic framework, termed the Angle Estimation Probabilistic Model (AEPM), that offers precise angle estimations across extensive scenarios beyond walking. AEPM achieves an overall RMSE of 6.70 degrees, with an RMSE of 3.45 degrees in walking scenarios. Compared to the state of the art, AEPM has improved the prediction accuracy for walking by 11.31%. Our method can achieve seamless adaptation between different locomotion modes. Also, this model can be utilized to analyze the synergy between the knee and other joints. We reveal that the whole body movement has valuable information for knee movement, which can provide insights into designing sensors for prostheses. The code is available at //github.com/penway/Beyond-Gait-AEPM.
Ongoing advances in force field and computer hardware development enable the use of molecular dynamics (MD) to simulate increasingly complex systems with the ultimate goal of reaching cellular complexity. At the same time, rational design by high-throughput (HT) simulations is another forefront of MD. In these areas, the Martini coarse-grained force field, especially the latest version (i.e. v3), is being actively explored because it offers enhanced spatial-temporal resolution. However, the automation tools for preparing simulations with the Martini force field, accompanying the previous version, were not designed for HT simulations or studies of complex cellular systems. Therefore, they become a major limiting factor. To address these shortcomings, we present the open-source vermouth python library. Vermouth is designed to become the unified framework for developing programs, which prepare, run, and analyze Martini simulations of complex systems. To demonstrate the power of the vermouth library, the martinize2 program is showcased as a generalization of the martinize script, originally aimed to set up simulations of proteins. In contrast to the previous version, martinize2 automatically handles protonation states in proteins and post-translation modifications, offers more options to fine-tune structural biases such as the elastic network, and can convert non-protein molecules such as ligands. Finally, martinize2 is used in two high-complexity benchmarks. The entire I-TASSER protein template database as well as a subset of 200,000 structures from the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database are converted to CG resolution and we illustrate how the checks on input structure quality can safeguard HT applications.
With the advancement of diffusion models (DMs) and the substantially increased computational requirements, quantization emerges as a practical solution to obtain compact and efficient low-bit DMs. However, the highly discrete representation leads to severe accuracy degradation, hindering the quantization of diffusion models to ultra-low bit-widths. In this paper, we propose BinaryDM, a novel accurate quantization-aware training approach to push the weights of diffusion models towards the limit of 1-bit. Firstly, we present a Learnable Multi-basis Binarizer (LMB) to recover the representations generated by the binarized DM, which improves the information in details of representations crucial to the DM. Secondly, a Low-rank Representation Mimicking (LRM) is applied to enhance the binarization-aware optimization of the DM, alleviating the optimization direction ambiguity caused by fine-grained alignment. Moreover, a progressive initialization strategy is applied to training DMs to avoid convergence difficulties. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that BinaryDM achieves significant accuracy and efficiency gains compared to SOTA quantization methods of DMs under ultra-low bit-widths. As the first binarization method for diffusion models, BinaryDM achieves impressive 16.0 times FLOPs and 27.1 times storage savings with 1-bit weight and 4-bit activation, showcasing its substantial advantages and potential for deploying DMs on resource-limited scenarios.
The field of visually rich document understanding (VRDU) aims to solve a multitude of well-researched NLP tasks in a multi-modal domain. Several datasets exist for research on specific tasks of VRDU such as document classification (DC), key entity extraction (KEE), entity linking, visual question answering (VQA), inter alia. These datasets cover documents like invoices and receipts with sparse annotations such that they support one or two co-related tasks (e.g., entity extraction and entity linking). Unfortunately, only focusing on a single specific of documents or task is not representative of how documents often need to be processed in the wild - where variety in style and requirements is expected. In this paper, we introduce BuDDIE (Business Document Dataset for Information Extraction), the first multi-task dataset of 1,665 real-world business documents that contains rich and dense annotations for DC, KEE, and VQA. Our dataset consists of publicly available business entity documents from US state government websites. The documents are structured and vary in their style and layout across states and types (e.g., forms, certificates, reports, etc.). We provide data variety and quality metrics for BuDDIE as well as a series of baselines for each task. Our baselines cover traditional textual, multi-modal, and large language model approaches to VRDU.
The task of motion prediction is pivotal for autonomous driving systems, providing crucial data to choose a vehicle behavior strategy within its surroundings. Existing motion prediction techniques primarily focus on predicting the future trajectory of each agent in the scene individually, utilizing its past trajectory data. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end neural network methodology designed to predict the future behaviors of all dynamic objects in the environment. This approach leverages the occupancy map and the scene's motion flow. We are investigatin various alternatives for constructing a deep encoder-decoder model called OFMPNet. This model uses a sequence of bird's-eye-view road images, occupancy grid, and prior motion flow as input data. The encoder of the model can incorporate transformer, attention-based, or convolutional units. The decoder considers the use of both convolutional modules and recurrent blocks. Additionally, we propose a novel time-weighted motion flow loss, whose application has shown a substantial decrease in end-point error. Our approach has achieved state-of-the-art results on the Waymo Occupancy and Flow Prediction benchmark, with a Soft IoU of 52.1% and an AUC of 76.75% on Flow-Grounded Occupancy.
Mil2 pushes the performance of high-resolution cloth simulation, making the simulation interactive (in milliseconds) for models with one million degrees of freedom (DOFs) while keeping every triangle untangled. The guarantee of being penetration-free is inspired by the interior-point method, which converts the inequality constraints to barrier potentials. Nevertheless, we propose a major overhaul of this modality by defining a novel and simple barrier formulation which does not depend on the distance between mesh primitives. Such a non-distance barrier model allows a new way to integrate collision detection into the simulation pipeline. Another contributor to the performance boost comes from the so-called subspace reuse strategy. This is based on the observation that low-frequency strain vibrations are near orthogonal to the deformation induced by collisions or self-collisions, often of high frequency. Subspace reuse then takes care of low-frequency residuals, while high-frequency residuals can also be effectively smoothed by GPU-based iterative solvers. We show that our method outperforms existing fast cloth simulators by nearly one order while keeping the entire simulation penetration-free and producing high-equality animations of high-resolution models.
We propose a novel neural architecture for computer vision -- WaveMix -- that is resource-efficient and yet generalizable and scalable. While using fewer trainable parameters, GPU RAM, and computations, WaveMix networks achieve comparable or better accuracy than the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, and token mixers for several tasks. This efficiency can translate to savings in time, cost, and energy. To achieve these gains we used multi-level two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT) in WaveMix blocks, which has the following advantages: (1) It reorganizes spatial information based on three strong image priors -- scale-invariance, shift-invariance, and sparseness of edges -- (2) in a lossless manner without adding parameters, (3) while also reducing the spatial sizes of feature maps, which reduces the memory and time required for forward and backward passes, and (4) expanding the receptive field faster than convolutions do. The whole architecture is a stack of self-similar and resolution-preserving WaveMix blocks, which allows architectural flexibility for various tasks and levels of resource availability. WaveMix establishes new benchmarks for segmentation on Cityscapes; and for classification on Galaxy 10 DECals, Places-365, five EMNIST datasets, and iNAT-mini and performs competitively on other benchmarks. Our code and trained models are publicly available.
The design of deep graph models still remains to be investigated and the crucial part is how to explore and exploit the knowledge from different hops of neighbors in an efficient way. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN-like deep graph neural network architecture by incorporating AdaBoost into the computation of network; and the proposed graph convolutional network called AdaGCN~(AdaBoosting Graph Convolutional Network) has the ability to efficiently extract knowledge from high-order neighbors and integrate knowledge from different hops of neighbors into the network in an AdaBoost way. We also present the architectural difference between AdaGCN and existing graph convolutional methods to show the benefits of our proposal. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art prediction performance and the computational advantage of our approach AdaGCN.