In this letter, we introduce ViHOPE, a novel framework for estimating the 6D pose of an in-hand object using visuotactile perception. Our key insight is that the accuracy of the 6D object pose estimate can be improved by explicitly completing the shape of the object. To this end, we introduce a novel visuotactile shape completion module that uses a conditional Generative Adversarial Network to complete the shape of an in-hand object based on volumetric representation. This approach improves over prior works that directly regress visuotactile observations to a 6D pose. By explicitly completing the shape of the in-hand object and jointly optimizing the shape completion and pose estimation tasks, we improve the accuracy of the 6D object pose estimate. We train and test our model on a synthetic dataset and compare it with the state-of-the-art. In the visuotactile shape completion task, we outperform the state-of-the-art by 265% using the Intersection of Union metric and achieve 88% lower Chamfer Distance. In the visuotactile pose estimation task, we present results that suggest our framework reduces position and angular errors by 35% and 64%, respectively. Furthermore, we ablate our framework to confirm the gain on the 6D object pose estimate from explicitly completing the shape. Ultimately, we show that our framework produces models that are robust to sim-to-real transfer on a real-world robot platform.
In this paper, we introduce a novel generative model, Diffusion Layout Transformers without Autoencoder (Dolfin), which significantly improves the modeling capability with reduced complexity compared to existing methods. Dolfin employs a Transformer-based diffusion process to model layout generation. In addition to an efficient bi-directional (non-causal joint) sequence representation, we further propose an autoregressive diffusion model (Dolfin-AR) that is especially adept at capturing rich semantic correlations for the neighboring objects, such as alignment, size, and overlap. When evaluated against standard generative layout benchmarks, Dolfin notably improves performance across various metrics (fid, alignment, overlap, MaxIoU and DocSim scores), enhancing transparency and interoperability in the process. Moreover, Dolfin's applications extend beyond layout generation, making it suitable for modeling geometric structures, such as line segments. Our experiments present both qualitative and quantitative results to demonstrate the advantages of Dolfin.
Recent transformer-based approaches have demonstrated excellent performance in 3D human pose estimation. However, they have a holistic view and by encoding global relationships between all the joints, they do not capture the local dependencies precisely. In this paper, we present a novel Attention-GCNFormer (AGFormer) block that divides the number of channels by using two parallel transformer and GCNFormer streams. Our proposed GCNFormer module exploits the local relationship between adjacent joints, outputting a new representation that is complementary to the transformer output. By fusing these two representation in an adaptive way, AGFormer exhibits the ability to better learn the underlying 3D structure. By stacking multiple AGFormer blocks, we propose MotionAGFormer in four different variants, which can be chosen based on the speed-accuracy trade-off. We evaluate our model on two popular benchmark datasets: Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. MotionAGFormer-B achieves state-of-the-art results, with P1 errors of 38.4mm and 16.2mm, respectively. Remarkably, it uses a quarter of the parameters and is three times more computationally efficient than the previous leading model on Human3.6M dataset. Code and models are available at //github.com/TaatiTeam/MotionAGFormer.
In this paper, we exploit a fundamental principle of analog electronic circuitry, Kirchhoff's current law, to introduce a unique class of neural network models that we refer to as KirchhoffNet. KirchhoffNet establishes close connections with message passing neural networks and continuous-depth networks. We demonstrate that even in the absence of any traditional layers (such as convolution, pooling, or linear layers), KirchhoffNet attains 98.86% test accuracy on the MNIST dataset, comparable with state of the art (SOTA) results. What makes KirchhoffNet more intriguing is its potential in the realm of hardware. Contemporary deep neural networks are conventionally deployed on GPUs. In contrast, KirchhoffNet can be physically realized by an analog electronic circuit. Moreover, we justify that irrespective of the number of parameters within a KirchhoffNet, its forward calculation can always be completed within 1/f seconds, with f representing the hardware's clock frequency. This characteristic introduces a promising technology for implementing ultra-large-scale neural networks.
How to identify semantic relations among entities in a document when only a few labeled documents are available? Few-shot document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) is crucial for addressing the pervasive data scarcity problem in real-world scenarios. Metric-based meta-learning is an effective framework widely adopted for FSDLRE, which constructs class prototypes for classification. However, existing works often struggle to obtain class prototypes with accurate relational semantics: 1) To build prototype for a target relation type, they aggregate the representations of all entity pairs holding that relation, while these entity pairs may also hold other relations, thus disturbing the prototype. 2) They use a set of generic NOTA (none-of-the-above) prototypes across all tasks, neglecting that the NOTA semantics differs in tasks with different target relation types. In this paper, we propose a relation-aware prototype learning method for FSDLRE to strengthen the relational semantics of prototype representations. By judiciously leveraging the relation descriptions and realistic NOTA instances as guidance, our method effectively refines the relation prototypes and generates task-specific NOTA prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by average 2.61% $F_1$ across various settings of two FSDLRE benchmarks.
Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to identify and generate analogies by constructing a first-of-its-kind large-scale story-level analogy corpus, \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, which contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. We design a set of tests on \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, presenting the first evaluation of story-level analogy identification and generation. Interestingly, we find that the analogy identification tasks are incredibly difficult not only for sentence embedding models but also for the recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMa. ChatGPT, for example, only achieved around 30% accuracy in multiple-choice questions (compared to over 85% accuracy for humans). Furthermore, we observe that the data in \textsc{StoryAnalogy} can improve the quality of analogy generation in LLMs, where a fine-tuned FlanT5-xxl model achieves comparable performance to zero-shot ChatGPT.
We introduce Mysticeti-C a byzantine consensus protocol with low-latency and high resource efficiency. It leverages a DAG based on Threshold Clocks and incorporates innovations in pipelining and multiple leaders to reduce latency in the steady state and under crash failures. Mysticeti-FPC incorporates a fast commit path that has even lower latency. We prove the safety and liveness of the protocols in a byzantine context. We evaluate Mysticeti and compare it with state-of-the-art consensus and fast path protocols to demonstrate its low latency and resource efficiency, as well as more graceful degradation under crash failures. Mysticeti is the first byzantine protocol to achieve WAN latency of 0.5s for consensus commit, at a throughput of over 50k TPS that matches the state-of-the-art.
We present an implementation of a Web3 platform that leverages the Groth16 Zero-Knowledge Proof schema to verify the validity of questionnaire results within Smart Contracts. Our approach ensures that the answer key of the questionnaire remains undisclosed throughout the verification process, while ensuring that the evaluation is done fairly. To accomplish this, users respond to a series of questions, and their answers are encoded and securely transmitted to a hidden backend. The backend then performs an evaluation of the user's answers, generating the overall result of the questionnaire. Additionally, it generates a Zero-Knowledge Proof, attesting that the answers were appropriately evaluated against a valid set of constraints. Next, the user submits their result along with the proof to a Smart Contract, which verifies their validity and issues a non-fungible token (NFT) as an attestation of the user's test result. In this research, we implemented the Zero-Knowledge functionality using Circom 2 and deployed the Smart Contract using Solidity, thereby showcasing a practical and secure solution for questionnaire validity verification in the context of Smart Contracts.
3D perceptual representations are well suited for robot manipulation as they easily encode occlusions and simplify spatial reasoning. Many manipulation tasks require high spatial precision in end-effector pose prediction, which typically demands high-resolution 3D feature grids that are computationally expensive to process. As a result, most manipulation policies operate directly in 2D, foregoing 3D inductive biases. In this paper, we introduce Act3D, a manipulation policy transformer that represents the robot's workspace using a 3D feature field with adaptive resolutions dependent on the task at hand. The model lifts 2D pre-trained features to 3D using sensed depth, and attends to them to compute features for sampled 3D points. It samples 3D point grids in a coarse to fine manner, featurizes them using relative-position attention, and selects where to focus the next round of point sampling. In this way, it efficiently computes 3D action maps of high spatial resolution. Act3D sets a new state-of-the-art in RL-Bench, an established manipulation benchmark, where it achieves 10% absolute improvement over the previous SOTA 2D multi-view policy on 74 RLBench tasks and 22% absolute improvement with 3x less compute over the previous SOTA 3D policy. We quantify the importance of relative spatial attention, large-scale vision-language pre-trained 2D backbones, and weight tying across coarse-to-fine attentions in ablative experiments. Code and videos are available on our project website: //act3d.github.io/.
Diffusion-based methods have achieved prominent success in generating 2D media. However, accomplishing similar proficiencies for scene-level mesh texturing in 3D spatial applications, e.g., XR/VR, remains constrained, primarily due to the intricate nature of 3D geometry and the necessity for immersive free-viewpoint rendering. In this paper, we propose a novel indoor scene texturing framework, which delivers text-driven texture generation with enchanting details and authentic spatial coherence. The key insight is to first imagine a stylized 360{\deg} panoramic texture from the central viewpoint of the scene, and then propagate it to the rest areas with inpainting and imitating techniques. To ensure meaningful and aligned textures to the scene, we develop a novel coarse-to-fine panoramic texture generation approach with dual texture alignment, which both considers the geometry and texture cues of the captured scenes. To survive from cluttered geometries during texture propagation, we design a separated strategy, which conducts texture inpainting in confidential regions and then learns an implicit imitating network to synthesize textures in occluded and tiny structural areas. Extensive experiments and the immersive VR application on real-world indoor scenes demonstrate the high quality of the generated textures and the engaging experience on VR headsets. Project webpage: //ybbbbt.com/publication/dreamspace
We present Emu, a system that semantically enhances multilingual sentence embeddings. Our framework fine-tunes pre-trained multilingual sentence embeddings using two main components: a semantic classifier and a language discriminator. The semantic classifier improves the semantic similarity of related sentences, whereas the language discriminator enhances the multilinguality of the embeddings via multilingual adversarial training. Our experimental results based on several language pairs show that our specialized embeddings outperform the state-of-the-art multilingual sentence embedding model on the task of cross-lingual intent classification using only monolingual labeled data.