Depth estimation plays an important role in the robotic perception system. Self-supervised monocular paradigm has gained significant attention since it can free training from the reliance on depth annotations. Despite recent advancements, existing self-supervised methods still underutilize the available training data, limiting their generalization ability. In this paper, we take two data augmentation techniques, namely Resizing-Cropping and Splitting-Permuting, to fully exploit the potential of training datasets. Specifically, the original image and the generated two augmented images are fed into the training pipeline simultaneously and we leverage them to conduct self-distillation. Additionally, we introduce the detail-enhanced DepthNet with an extra full-scale branch in the encoder and a grid decoder to enhance the restoration of fine details in depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark, with both raw ground truth and improved ground truth. Moreover, our models also show superior generalization performance when transferring to Make3D and NYUv2 datasets. Our codes are available at //github.com/Sauf4896/BDEdepth.
Incorporating fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) into the inference process of a convolutional neural network (CNN) draws enormous attention as a viable approach for achieving private inference (PI). FHE allows delegating the entire computation process to the server while ensuring the confidentiality of sensitive client-side data. However, practical FHE implementation of a CNN faces significant hurdles, primarily due to FHE's substantial computational and memory overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a set of optimizations, which includes GPU/ASIC acceleration, an efficient activation function, and an optimized packing scheme. We evaluate our method using the ResNet models on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, achieving several orders of magnitude improvement compared to prior work and reducing the latency of the encrypted CNN inference to 1.4 seconds on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. We also show that the latency drops to a mere 0.03 seconds with a custom hardware design.
Model predictive control (MPC) may provide local motion planning for mobile robotic platforms. The challenging aspect is the analytic representation of collision cost for the case when both the obstacle map and robot footprint are arbitrary. We propose a Neural Potential Field: a neural network model that returns a differentiable collision cost based on robot pose, obstacle map, and robot footprint. The differentiability of our model allows its usage within the MPC solver. It is computationally hard to solve problems with a very high number of parameters. Therefore, our architecture includes neural image encoders, which transform obstacle maps and robot footprints into embeddings, which reduce problem dimensionality by two orders of magnitude. The reference data for network training are generated based on algorithmic calculation of a signed distance function. Comparative experiments showed that the proposed approach is comparable with existing local planners: it provides trajectories with outperforming smoothness, comparable path length, and safe distance from obstacles. Experiment on Husky UGV mobile robot showed that our approach allows real-time and safe local planning. The code for our approach is presented at //github.com/cog-isa/NPField together with demo video.
Soft robotic manipulators with many degrees of freedom can carry out complex tasks safely around humans. However, manufacturing of soft robotic hands with several degrees of freedom requires a complex multi-step manual process, which significantly increases their cost. We present a design of a multi-material 15 DoF robotic hand with five fingers including an opposable thumb. Our design has 15 pneumatic actuators based on a series of hollow chambers that are driven by an external pressure system. The thumb utilizes rigid joints and the palm features internal rigid structure and soft skin. The design can be directly 3D printed using a multi-material additive manufacturing process without any assembly process and therefore our hand can be manufactured for less than 300 dollars. We test the hand in conjunction with a low-cost vision-based teleoperation system on different tasks.
Neural Module Networks (NMN) are a compelling method for visual question answering, enabling the translation of a question into a program consisting of a series of reasoning sub-tasks that are sequentially executed on the image to produce an answer. NMNs provide enhanced explainability compared to integrated models, allowing for a better understanding of the underlying reasoning process. To improve the effectiveness of NMNs we propose to exploit features obtained by a large-scale cross-modal encoder. Also, the current training approach of NMNs relies on the propagation of module outputs to subsequent modules, leading to the accumulation of prediction errors and the generation of false answers. To mitigate this, we introduce an NMN learning strategy involving scheduled teacher guidance. Initially, the model is fully guided by the ground-truth intermediate outputs, but gradually transitions to an autonomous behavior as training progresses. This reduces error accumulation, thus improving training efficiency and final performance.We demonstrate that by incorporating cross-modal features and employing more effective training techniques for NMN, we achieve a favorable balance between performance and transparency in the reasoning process.
Remotely controlled mobile robots are important examples of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). Recently, these robots are being deployed in many safety critical applications. Therefore, ensuring their cyber-security is of paramount importance. Different control schemes that have been proposed to secure such systems against sophisticated cyber-attacks require the exchange of secret messages between their smart actuators and the remote controller. Thus, these schemes require pre-shared secret keys, or an established Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that allows for key agreement. Such cryptographic approaches might not always be suitable for the deployment environments of such remotely mobile robots. To address this problem, in this paper, we consider a control theoretic approach for establishing a secret key between the remotely controlled robot and the networked controller without resorting to traditional cryptographic techniques. Our key agreement scheme leverages a nonlinear unknown input observer and an error correction code mechanism to allow the robot to securely agree on a secret key with its remote controller. To validate the proposed scheme, we implement it using a Khepera-IV differential drive robot and evaluate its efficiency and the additional control cost acquired by it. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed key establishment scheme.
Prompt Tuning is emerging as a scalable and cost-effective method to fine-tune Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), which are often referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs). This study benchmarks the performance and computational efficiency of Prompt Tuning and baselines for multi-label text classification. This is applied to the challenging task of classifying companies into an investment firm's proprietary industry taxonomy, supporting their thematic investment strategy. Text-to-text classification is frequently reported to outperform task-specific classification heads, but has several limitations when applied to a multi-label classification problem where each label consists of multiple tokens: (a) Generated labels may not match any label in the label taxonomy; (b) The fine-tuning process lacks permutation invariance and is sensitive to the order of the provided labels; (c) The model provides binary decisions rather than appropriate confidence scores. Limitation (a) is addressed by applying constrained decoding using Trie Search, which slightly improves classification performance. All limitations (a), (b), and (c) are addressed by replacing the PLM's language head with a classification head, which is referred to as Prompt Tuned Embedding Classification (PTEC). This improves performance significantly, while also reducing computational costs during inference. In our industrial application, the training data is skewed towards well-known companies. We confirm that the model's performance is consistent across both well-known and less-known companies. Our overall results indicate the continuing need to adapt state-of-the-art methods to domain-specific tasks, even in the era of PLMs with strong generalization abilities. We release our codebase and a benchmarking dataset at //github.com/EQTPartners/PTEC.
Estimating the trajectories of multi-objects poses a significant challenge due to data association ambiguity, which leads to a substantial increase in computational requirements. To address such problems, a divide-and-conquer manner has been employed with parallel computation. In this strategy, distinguished objects that have unique labels are grouped based on their statistical dependencies, the intersection of predicted measurements. Several geometry approaches have been used for label grouping since finding all intersected label pairs is clearly infeasible for large-scale tracking problems. This paper proposes an efficient implementation of label grouping for label-partitioned generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli filter framework using a secondary partitioning technique. This allows for parallel computation in the label graph indexing step, avoiding generating and eliminating duplicate comparisons. Additionally, we compare the performance of the proposed technique with several efficient spatial searching algorithms. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach on large-scale data sets, enabling scalable trajectory estimation.
Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) is a popular method for comparing Bayesian models based on their estimated predictive performance on new, unseen, data. As leave-one-out cross-validation is based on finite observed data, there is uncertainty about the expected predictive performance on new data. By modeling this uncertainty when comparing two models, we can compute the probability that one model has a better predictive performance than the other. Modeling this uncertainty well is not trivial, and for example, it is known that the commonly used standard error estimate is often too small. We study the properties of the Bayesian LOO-CV estimator and the related uncertainty estimates when comparing two models. We provide new results of the properties both theoretically in the linear regression case and empirically for multiple different models and discuss the challenges of modeling the uncertainty. We show that problematic cases include: comparing models with similar predictions, misspecified models, and small data. In these cases, there is a weak connection in the skewness of the individual leave-one-out terms and the distribution of the error of the Bayesian LOO-CV estimator. We show that it is possible that the problematic skewness of the error distribution, which occurs when the models make similar predictions, does not fade away when the data size grows to infinity in certain situations. Based on the results, we also provide practical recommendations for the users of Bayesian LOO-CV for model comparison.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing annotations by considering global features and local image consistency. The SC score also serves as the penalty cost in a second order Markov random field (MRF) cost function optimized using graph cuts to derive the final consensus label. Graph cut obtains a global maximum without an iterative procedure. Experimental results on synthetic images, real data of Crohn's disease patients and retinal images show our final segmentation to be accurate and more consistent than competing methods.