Diffusion models have risen as a powerful tool in robotics due to their flexibility and multi-modality. While some of these methods effectively address complex problems, they often depend heavily on inference-time obstacle detection and require additional equipment. Addressing these challenges, we present a method that, during inference time, simultaneously generates only reachable goals and plans motions that avoid obstacles, all from a single visual input. Central to our approach is the novel use of a collision-avoiding diffusion kernel for training. Through evaluations against behavior-cloning and classical diffusion models, our framework has proven its robustness. It is particularly effective in multi-modal environments, navigating toward goals and avoiding unreachable ones blocked by obstacles, while ensuring collision avoidance.
There has been a lot of work in question generation where different methods to provide target answers as input, have been employed. This experimentation has been mostly carried out for RNN based models. We use three different methods and their combinations for incorporating answer information and explore their effect on several automatic evaluation metrics. The methods that are used are answer prompting, using a custom product method using answer embeddings and encoder outputs, choosing sentences from the input paragraph that have answer related information, and using a separate cross-attention attention block in the decoder which attends to the answer. We observe that answer prompting without any additional modes obtains the best scores across rouge, meteor scores. Additionally, we use a custom metric to calculate how many of the generated questions have the same answer, as the answer which is used to generate them.
The following is a technical report to test the validity of the proposed Subspace Pyramid Fusion Module (SPFM) to capture multi-scale feature representations, which is more useful for semantic segmentation. In this investigation, we have proposed the Efficient Shuffle Attention Module(ESAM) to reconstruct the skip-connections paths by fusing multi-level global context features. Experimental results on two well-known semantic segmentation datasets, including Camvid and Cityscapes, show the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Precise hardware performance models play a crucial role in code optimizations. They can assist compilers in making heuristic decisions or aid autotuners in identifying the optimal configuration for a given program. For example, the autotuner for XLA, a machine learning compiler, discovered 10-20% speedup on state-of-the-art models serving substantial production traffic at Google. Although there exist a few datasets for program performance prediction, they target small sub-programs such as basic blocks or kernels. This paper introduces TpuGraphs, a performance prediction dataset on full tensor programs, represented as computational graphs, running on Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Each graph in the dataset represents the main computation of a machine learning workload, e.g., a training epoch or an inference step. Each data sample contains a computational graph, a compilation configuration, and the execution time of the graph when compiled with the configuration. The graphs in the dataset are collected from open-source machine learning programs, featuring popular model architectures, e.g., ResNet, EfficientNet, Mask R-CNN, and Transformer. TpuGraphs provides 25x more graphs than the largest graph property prediction dataset (with comparable graph sizes), and 770x larger graphs on average compared to existing performance prediction datasets on machine learning programs. This graph-level prediction task on large graphs introduces new challenges in learning, ranging from scalability, training efficiency, to model quality.
Visual inspection is a crucial yet time-consuming task across various industries. Numerous established methods employ machine learning in inspection tasks, necessitating specific training data that includes predefined inspection poses and training images essential for the training of models. The acquisition of such data and their integration into an inspection framework is challenging due to the variety in objects and scenes involved and due to additional bottlenecks caused by the manual collection of training data by humans, thereby hindering the automation of visual inspection across diverse domains. This work proposes a solution for automatic path planning using a single depth camera mounted on a robot manipulator. Point clouds obtained from the depth images are processed and filtered to extract object profiles and transformed to inspection target paths for the robot end-effector. The approach relies on the geometry of the object and generates an inspection path that follows the shape normal to the surface. Depending on the object size and shape, inspection paths can be defined as single or multi-path plans. Results are demonstrated in both simulated and real-world environments, yielding promising inspection paths for objects with varying sizes and shapes. Code and video are open-source available at: //github.com/CuriousLad1000/Auto-Path-Planner
Motion prediction has been an essential component of autonomous driving systems since it handles highly uncertain and complex scenarios involving moving agents of different types. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Granular TRansformer (MGTR) framework, an encoder-decoder network that exploits context features in different granularities for different kinds of traffic agents. To further enhance MGTR's capabilities, we leverage LiDAR point cloud data by incorporating LiDAR semantic features from an off-the-shelf LiDAR feature extractor. We evaluate MGTR on Waymo Open Dataset motion prediction benchmark and show that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance, ranking 1st on its leaderboard (//waymo.com/open/challenges/2023/motion-prediction/).
Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources, and accessibility around the clock, chatbots can be employed in vehicles too. Due to people's propensity to divert their attention away from the task of driving while engaging in other activities like calling, playing music, navigation, and getting updates on the weather forecast and latest news, road safety has declined and accidents have increased as a result. It would be advantageous to automate these tasks using voice commands rather than carrying them out manually. This paper focuses on the development of a voice-based smart assistance application for vehicles based on the RASA framework. The smart assistant provides functionalities like navigation, communication via calls, getting weather forecasts and the latest news updates, and music that are completely voice-based in nature.
Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role. To surmount these challenges, we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving. ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices. Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models' problem-solving abilities on three novel tasks requiring non-trivial planning or search: Game of 24, Creative Writing, and Mini Crosswords. For instance, in Game of 24, while GPT-4 with chain-of-thought prompting only solved 4% of tasks, our method achieved a success rate of 74%. Code repo with all prompts: //github.com/princeton-nlp/tree-of-thought-llm.
Our study assesses the adversarial robustness of LiDAR-camera fusion models in 3D object detection. We introduce an attack technique that, by simply adding a limited number of physically constrained adversarial points above a car, can make the car undetectable by the fusion model. Experimental results reveal that even without changes to the image data channel, the fusion model can be deceived solely by manipulating the LiDAR data channel. This finding raises safety concerns in the field of autonomous driving. Further, we explore how the quantity of adversarial points, the distance between the front-near car and the LiDAR-equipped car, and various angular factors affect the attack success rate. We believe our research can contribute to the understanding of multi-sensor robustness, offering insights and guidance to enhance the safety of autonomous driving.
Accurate hand gesture prediction is crucial for effective upper-limb prosthetic limbs control. As the high flexibility and multiple degrees of freedom exhibited by human hands, there has been a growing interest in integrating deep networks with high-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) grids to enhance gesture recognition capabilities. However, many existing methods fall short in fully exploit the specific spatial topology and temporal dependencies present in HD-sEMG data. Additionally, these studies are often limited number of gestures and lack generality. Hence, this study introduces a novel gesture recognition method, named STGCN-GR, which leverages spatio-temporal graph convolution networks for HD-sEMG-based human-machine interfaces. Firstly, we construct muscle networks based on functional connectivity between channels, creating a graph representation of HD-sEMG recordings. Subsequently, a temporal convolution module is applied to capture the temporal dependences in the HD-sEMG series and a spatial graph convolution module is employed to effectively learn the intrinsic spatial topology information among distinct HD-sEMG channels. We evaluate our proposed model on a public HD-sEMG dataset comprising a substantial number of gestures (i.e., 65). Our results demonstrate the remarkable capability of the STGCN-GR method, achieving an impressive accuracy of 91.07% in predicting gestures, which surpasses state-of-the-art deep learning methods applied to the same dataset.
We consider the task of weakly supervised one-shot detection. In this task, we attempt to perform a detection task over a set of unseen classes, when training only using weak binary labels that indicate the existence of a class instance in a given example. The model is conditioned on a single exemplar of an unseen class and a target example that may or may not contain an instance of the same class as the exemplar. A similarity map is computed by using a Siamese neural network to map the exemplar and regions of the target example to a latent representation space and then computing cosine similarity scores between representations. An attention mechanism weights different regions in the target example, and enables learning of the one-shot detection task using the weaker labels alone. The model can be applied to detection tasks from different domains, including computer vision object detection. We evaluate our attention Siamese networks on a one-shot detection task from the audio domain, where it detects audio keywords in spoken utterances. Our model considerably outperforms a baseline approach and yields a 42.6% average precision for detection across 10 unseen classes. Moreover, architectural developments from computer vision object detection models such as a region proposal network can be incorporated into the model architecture, and results show that performance is expected to improve by doing so.