Planning robotic manipulation tasks, especially those that involve interaction between deformable and rigid objects, is challenging due to the complexity in predicting such interactions. We introduce SPONGE, a sequence planning pipeline powered by a deep learning-based contact prediction model for contacts between deformable and rigid bodies under interactions. The contact prediction model is trained on synthetic data generated by a developed simulation environment to learn the mapping from point-cloud observation of a rigid target object and the pose of a deformable tool, to 3D representation of the contact points between the two bodies. We experimentally evaluated the proposed approach for a dish cleaning task both in simulation and on a real \panda with real-world objects. The experimental results demonstrate that in both scenarios the proposed planning pipeline is capable of generating high-quality trajectories that can accomplish the task by achieving more than 90\% area coverage on different objects of varying sizes and curvatures while minimizing travel distance. Code and video are available at: \url{//irobotics.aalto.fi/sponge/}.
Event extraction aims to recognize pre-defined event triggers and arguments from texts, which suffer from the lack of high-quality annotations. In most NLP applications, involving a large scale of synthetic training data is a practical and effective approach to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. However, when applying to the task of event extraction, recent data augmentation methods often neglect the problem of grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting, leading to unsatisfactory performances. In order to solve these problems, we propose a denoised structure-to-text augmentation framework for event extraction DAEE, which generates additional training data through the knowledge-based structure-to-text generation model and selects the effective subset from the generated data iteratively with a deep reinforcement learning agent. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extraction and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art.
Medical image segmentation is a critical step in computer-aided diagnosis, and convolutional neural networks are popular segmentation networks nowadays. However, the inherent local operation characteristics make it difficult to focus on the global contextual information of lesions with different positions, shapes, and sizes. Semi-supervised learning can be used to learn from both labeled and unlabeled samples, alleviating the burden of manual labeling. However, obtaining a large number of unlabeled images in medical scenarios remains challenging. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-level Global Context Cross-consistency (MGCC) framework that uses images generated by a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) as unlabeled images for semi-supervised learning. The framework involves of two stages. In the first stage, a LDM is used to generate synthetic medical images, which reduces the workload of data annotation and addresses privacy concerns associated with collecting medical data. In the second stage, varying levels of global context noise perturbation are added to the input of the auxiliary decoder, and output consistency is maintained between decoders to improve the representation ability. Experiments conducted on open-source breast ultrasound and private thyroid ultrasound datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in bridging the probability distribution and the semantic representation of the medical image. Our approach enables the effective transfer of probability distribution knowledge to the segmentation network, resulting in improved segmentation accuracy. The code is available at //github.com/FengheTan9/Multi-Level Global-Context-Cross-Consistency.
Due to its ability to generate millions of particles, massively detailed scenes and confusing artificial illumination with reality, the version 5 of Unreal Engine promises unprecedented industrial applications. The paradigms and aims of Unreal Engine contrast with the industrial simulators typically used by the scientific community. The visual quality and performance of its rendering engine increase the opportunities, especially for industries and simulation business: where interoperability and scalability are required. The study of the following issue `` Which architecture should we implement to integrate real-world data, in an Unreal Engine 5 simulator and in a mixed-reality environment? '' offers a point of view. The topic is reexamined in an innovative and conceptual way, such as the generalization of mixedreality technologies, Internet of Things, digital twins, Big Data but providing a solution for simple and actual use cases. This paper gives a detailed analysis of the issue, at both theoretical and operational level. Then, the document goes deep into Unreal Engine's operation in order to extract the vanilla capabilities. Next, the C++ Plugin system is reviewed in details as well as the third-party library integration: pitfalls to be avoided are shown. Finally, the last chapter proposes a generic architecture, useful in large-scale industrial 3D applications, such as collaborative work or hyper-connected simulators. This document might be of interest to an Unreal Engine expert who would like to discover about server architectures. Conversely, it could be relevant for an expert in backend servers who wants to learn about Unreal Engine capabilities. This research concludes that Unreal Engine's modularity enables integration with almost any protocol. The features to integrate external real data are numerous but depend on use cases. Distributed systems for Big Data require a scalable architecture, possibly without the use of the Unreal Engine dedicated server. Environments, which require sub-second latency need to implement direct connections, bypassing any intermediate servers.
Online surgical phase recognition plays a significant role towards building contextual tools that could quantify performance and oversee the execution of surgical workflows. Current approaches are limited since they train spatial feature extractors using frame-level supervision that could lead to incorrect predictions due to similar frames appearing at different phases, and poorly fuse local and global features due to computational constraints which can affect the analysis of long videos commonly encountered in surgical interventions. In this paper, we present a two-stage method, called Long Video Transformer (LoViT) for fusing short- and long-term temporal information that combines a temporally-rich spatial feature extractor and a multi-scale temporal aggregator consisting of two cascaded L-Trans modules based on self-attention, followed by a G-Informer module based on ProbSparse self-attention for processing global temporal information. The multi-scale temporal head then combines local and global features and classifies surgical phases using phase transition-aware supervision. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Cholec80 and AutoLaparo datasets consistently. Compared to Trans-SVNet, LoViT achieves a 2.39 pp (percentage point) improvement in video-level accuracy on Cholec80 and a 3.14 pp improvement on AutoLaparo. Moreover, it achieves a 5.25 pp improvement in phase-level Jaccard on AutoLaparo and a 1.55 pp improvement on Cholec80. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving state-of-the-art performance of surgical phase recognition on two datasets of different surgical procedures and temporal sequencing characteristics whilst introducing mechanisms that cope with long videos.
A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through some illustrative example conversations.
Predicting how a drug-like molecule binds to a specific protein target is a core problem in drug discovery. An extremely fast computational binding method would enable key applications such as fast virtual screening or drug engineering. Existing methods are computationally expensive as they rely on heavy candidate sampling coupled with scoring, ranking, and fine-tuning steps. We challenge this paradigm with EquiBind, an SE(3)-equivariant geometric deep learning model performing direct-shot prediction of both i) the receptor binding location (blind docking) and ii) the ligand's bound pose and orientation. EquiBind achieves significant speed-ups and better quality compared to traditional and recent baselines. Further, we show extra improvements when coupling it with existing fine-tuning techniques at the cost of increased running time. Finally, we propose a novel and fast fine-tuning model that adjusts torsion angles of a ligand's rotatable bonds based on closed-form global minima of the von Mises angular distance to a given input atomic point cloud, avoiding previous expensive differential evolution strategies for energy minimization.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
We present self-supervised geometric perception (SGP), the first general framework to learn a feature descriptor for correspondence matching without any ground-truth geometric model labels (e.g., camera poses, rigid transformations). Our first contribution is to formulate geometric perception as an optimization problem that jointly optimizes the feature descriptor and the geometric models given a large corpus of visual measurements (e.g., images, point clouds). Under this optimization formulation, we show that two important streams of research in vision, namely robust model fitting and deep feature learning, correspond to optimizing one block of the unknown variables while fixing the other block. This analysis naturally leads to our second contribution -- the SGP algorithm that performs alternating minimization to solve the joint optimization. SGP iteratively executes two meta-algorithms: a teacher that performs robust model fitting given learned features to generate geometric pseudo-labels, and a student that performs deep feature learning under noisy supervision of the pseudo-labels. As a third contribution, we apply SGP to two perception problems on large-scale real datasets, namely relative camera pose estimation on MegaDepth and point cloud registration on 3DMatch. We demonstrate that SGP achieves state-of-the-art performance that is on-par or superior to the supervised oracles trained using ground-truth labels.
Triple extraction is an essential task in information extraction for natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. In this paper, we revisit the end-to-end triple extraction task for sequence generation. Since generative triple extraction may struggle to capture long-term dependencies and generate unfaithful triples, we introduce a novel model, contrastive triple extraction with a generative transformer. Specifically, we introduce a single shared transformer module for encoder-decoder-based generation. To generate faithful results, we propose a novel triplet contrastive training object. Moreover, we introduce two mechanisms to further improve model performance (i.e., batch-wise dynamic attention-masking and triple-wise calibration). Experimental results on three datasets (i.e., NYT, WebNLG, and MIE) show that our approach achieves better performance than that of baselines.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.