In various service-oriented applications such as distributed autonomous delivery, healthcare, tourism, transportation, and many others, where service agents need to perform serial and time-bounded tasks to achieve their goals, quality of service must constantly be assured. In addition to safety requirements, such agents also need to fulfill performance requirements in order to satisfy their quality of service. This paper proposes the novel quality-aware time window temporal logic (QTWTL) by extending the traditional time window temporal logic (TWTL) with two operators for counting and aggregation operations. We also propose offline runtime monitoring algorithms for the performance monitoring of QTWTL specifications. To analyze the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed approach, we generate a large number of traces using the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission Trip Record data, formalize their performance requirements using QTWTL, and monitor them using the proposed algorithms. The obtained results show that the monitoring algorithm has a linear space and time complexity with respect to the number of traces monitored.
The research community has witnessed the powerful potential of self-supervised Masked Image Modeling (MIM), which enables the models capable of learning visual representation from unlabeled data.In this paper, to incorporate both the crucial global structural information and local details for dense prediction tasks, we alter the perspective to the frequency domain and present a new MIM-based framework named FreMIM for self-supervised pre-training to better accomplish medical image segmentation task. Based on the observations that the detailed structural information mainly lies in the high-frequency components and the high-level semantics are abundant in the low-frequency counterparts, we further incorporate multi-stage supervision to guide the representation learning during the pre-training phase. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the superior advantage of our FreMIM over previous state-of-the-art MIM methods. Compared with various baselines trained from scratch, our FreMIM could consistently bring considerable improvements to model performance. The code will be made publicly available.
Neural fields, a category of neural networks trained to represent high-frequency signals, have gained significant attention in recent years due to their impressive performance in modeling complex 3D data, especially large neural signed distance (SDFs) or radiance fields (NeRFs) via a single multi-layer perceptron (MLP). However, despite the power and simplicity of representing signals with an MLP, these methods still face challenges when modeling large and complex temporal signals due to the limited capacity of MLPs. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to address this limitation by incorporating temporal residual layers into neural fields, dubbed ResFields, a novel class of networks specifically designed to effectively represent complex temporal signals. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the properties of ResFields and propose a matrix factorization technique to reduce the number of trainable parameters and enhance generalization capabilities. Importantly, our formulation seamlessly integrates with existing techniques and consistently improves results across various challenging tasks: 2D video approximation, dynamic shape modeling via temporal SDFs, and dynamic NeRF reconstruction. Lastly, we demonstrate the practical utility of ResFields by showcasing its effectiveness in capturing dynamic 3D scenes from sparse sensory inputs of a lightweight capture system.
Discovering potential failures of an autonomous system is important prior to deployment. Falsification-based methods are often used to assess the safety of such systems, but the cost of running many accurate simulation can be high. The validation can be accelerated by identifying critical failure scenarios for the system under test and by reducing the simulation runtime. We propose a Bayesian approach that integrates meta-learning strategies with a multi-armed bandit framework. Our method involves learning distributions over scenario parameters that are prone to triggering failures in the system under test, as well as a distribution over fidelity settings that enable fast and accurate simulations. In the spirit of meta-learning, we also assess whether the learned fidelity settings distribution facilitates faster learning of the scenario parameter distributions for new scenarios. We showcase our methodology using a cutting-edge 3D driving simulator, incorporating 16 fidelity settings for an autonomous vehicle stack that includes camera and lidar sensors. We evaluate various scenarios based on an autonomous vehicle pre-crash typology. As a result, our approach achieves a significant speedup, up to 18 times faster compared to traditional methods that solely rely on a high-fidelity simulator.
Since real-world machine systems are running in non-stationary environments, Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) task is proposed to adapt the pre-trained model to continually changing target domains. Recently, existing methods mainly focus on model-based adaptation, which aims to leverage a self-training manner to extract the target domain knowledge. However, pseudo labels can be noisy and the updated model parameters are unreliable under dynamic data distributions, leading to error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting in the continual adaptation process. To tackle these challenges and maintain the model plasticity, we tactfully design a Visual Domain Adapter (ViDA) for CTTA, explicitly handling both domain-specific and domain-shared knowledge. Specifically, we first comprehensively explore the different domain representations of the adapters with trainable high-rank or low-rank embedding spaces. Then we inject ViDAs into the pre-trained model, which leverages high-rank and low-rank features to adapt the current domain distribution and maintain the continual domain-shared knowledge, respectively. To exploit the low-rank and high-rank ViDAs more effectively, we further propose a Homeostatic Knowledge Allotment (HKA) strategy, which adaptively combines different knowledge from each ViDA. Extensive experiments conducted on four widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks. Note that, our method can be regarded as a novel transfer paradigm for large-scale models, delivering promising results in adaptation to continually changing distributions.
Clinical predictive models often rely on patients' electronic health records (EHR), but integrating medical knowledge to enhance predictions and decision-making is challenging. This is because personalized predictions require personalized knowledge graphs (KGs), which are difficult to generate from patient EHR data. To address this, we propose \textsc{GraphCare}, an open-world framework that uses external KGs to improve EHR-based predictions. Our method extracts knowledge from large language models (LLMs) and external biomedical KGs to build patient-specific KGs, which are then used to train our proposed Bi-attention AugmenTed (BAT) graph neural network (GNN) for healthcare predictions. On two public datasets, MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, \textsc{GraphCare} surpasses baselines in four vital healthcare prediction tasks: mortality, readmission, length of stay (LOS), and drug recommendation. On MIMIC-III, it boosts AUROC by 17.6\% and 6.6\% for mortality and readmission, and F1-score by 7.9\% and 10.8\% for LOS and drug recommendation, respectively. Notably, \textsc{GraphCare} demonstrates a substantial edge in scenarios with limited data availability. Our findings highlight the potential of using external KGs in healthcare prediction tasks and demonstrate the promise of \textsc{GraphCare} in generating personalized KGs for promoting personalized medicine.
Anticipating the motion of all humans in dynamic environments such as homes and offices is critical to enable safe and effective robot navigation. Such spaces remain challenging as humans do not follow strict rules of motion and there are often multiple occluded entry points such as corners and doors that create opportunities for sudden encounters. In this work, we present a Transformer based architecture to predict human future trajectories in human-centric environments from input features including human positions, head orientations, and 3D skeletal keypoints from onboard in-the-wild sensory information. The resulting model captures the inherent uncertainty for future human trajectory prediction and achieves state-of-the-art performance on common prediction benchmarks and a human tracking dataset captured from a mobile robot adapted for the prediction task. Furthermore, we identify new agents with limited historical data as a major contributor to error and demonstrate the complementary nature of 3D skeletal poses in reducing prediction error in such challenging scenarios.
Problematic smartphone use negatively affects physical and mental health. Despite the wide range of prior research, existing persuasive techniques are not flexible enough to provide dynamic persuasion content based on users' physical contexts and mental states. We first conduct a Wizard-of-Oz study (N=12) and an interview study (N=10) to summarize the mental states behind problematic smartphone use: boredom, stress, and inertia. This informs our design of four persuasion strategies: understanding, comforting, evoking, and scaffolding habits. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to enable the automatic and dynamic generation of effective persuasion content. We develop MindShift, a novel LLM-powered problematic smartphone use intervention technique. MindShift takes users' in-the-moment physical contexts, mental states, app usage behaviors, users' goals & habits as input, and generates high-quality and flexible persuasive content with appropriate persuasion strategies. We conduct a 5-week field experiment (N=25) to compare MindShift with baseline techniques. The results show that MindShift significantly improves intervention acceptance rates by 17.8-22.5% and reduces smartphone use frequency by 12.1-14.4%. Moreover, users have a significant drop in smartphone addiction scale scores and a rise in self-efficacy. Our study sheds light on the potential of leveraging LLMs for context-aware persuasion in other behavior change domains.
Robust and accurate tracking and localization of road users like pedestrians and cyclists is crucial to ensure safe and effective navigation of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), particularly so in urban driving scenarios with complex vehicle-pedestrian interactions. Existing datasets that are useful to investigate vehicle-pedestrian interactions are mostly image-centric and thus vulnerable to vision failures. In this paper, we investigate Ultra-wideband (UWB) as an additional modality for road users' localization to enable a better understanding of vehicle-pedestrian interactions. We present WiDEVIEW, the first multimodal dataset that integrates LiDAR, three RGB cameras, GPS/IMU, and UWB sensors for capturing vehicle-pedestrian interactions in an urban autonomous driving scenario. Ground truth image annotations are provided in the form of 2D bounding boxes and the dataset is evaluated on standard 2D object detection and tracking algorithms. The feasibility of UWB is evaluated for typical traffic scenarios in both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions using LiDAR as ground truth. We establish that UWB range data has comparable accuracy with LiDAR with an error of 0.19 meters and reliable anchor-tag range data for up to 40 meters in line-of-sight conditions. UWB performance for non-line-of-sight conditions is subjective to the nature of the obstruction (trees vs. buildings). Further, we provide a qualitative analysis of UWB performance for scenarios susceptible to intermittent vision failures. The dataset can be downloaded via //github.com/unmannedlab/UWB_Dataset.
A large number of real-world graphs or networks are inherently heterogeneous, involving a diversity of node types and relation types. Heterogeneous graph embedding is to embed rich structural and semantic information of a heterogeneous graph into low-dimensional node representations. Existing models usually define multiple metapaths in a heterogeneous graph to capture the composite relations and guide neighbor selection. However, these models either omit node content features, discard intermediate nodes along the metapath, or only consider one metapath. To address these three limitations, we propose a new model named Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network (MAGNN) to boost the final performance. Specifically, MAGNN employs three major components, i.e., the node content transformation to encapsulate input node attributes, the intra-metapath aggregation to incorporate intermediate semantic nodes, and the inter-metapath aggregation to combine messages from multiple metapaths. Extensive experiments on three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets for node classification, node clustering, and link prediction show that MAGNN achieves more accurate prediction results than state-of-the-art baselines.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.