Deformable linear objects (DLOs), such as rods, cables, and ropes, play important roles in daily life. However, manipulation of DLOs is challenging as large geometrically nonlinear deformations may occur during the manipulation process. This problem is made even more difficult as the different deformation modes (e.g., stretching, bending, and twisting) may result in elastic instabilities during manipulation. In this paper, we formulate a physics-guided data-driven method to solve a challenging manipulation task -- accurately deploying a DLO (an elastic rod) onto a rigid substrate along various prescribed patterns. Our framework combines machine learning, scaling analysis, and physical simulations to develop a physics-based neural controller for deployment. We explore the complex interplay between the gravitational and elastic energies of the manipulated DLO and obtain a control method for DLO deployment that is robust against friction and material properties. Out of the numerous geometrical and material properties of the rod and substrate, we show that only three non-dimensional parameters are needed to describe the deployment process with physical analysis. Therefore, the essence of the controlling law for the manipulation task can be constructed with a low-dimensional model, drastically increasing the computation speed. The effectiveness of our optimal control scheme is shown through a comprehensive robotic case study comparing against a heuristic control method for deploying rods for a wide variety of patterns. In addition to this, we also showcase the practicality of our control scheme by having a robot accomplish challenging high-level tasks such as mimicking human handwriting, cable placement, and tying knots.
We consider ordinal online problems, i.e., tasks that only require pairwise comparisons between elements of the input. A classic example is the secretary problem and the game of googol, as well as its multiple combinatorial extensions such as $(J,K)$-secretary, $2$-sided game of googol, ordinal-competitive matroid secretary. A natural approach to these tasks is to use ordinal algorithms that at each step only consider relative ranking among the arrived elements, without looking at the numerical values of the input. We formally study the question of how cardinal algorithms can improve upon ordinal algorithms. We give first a universal construction of the input distribution for any ordinal online problem, such that the advantage of any cardinal algorithm over the ordinal algorithms is at most $1+\varepsilon$ for arbitrary small $\varepsilon> 0$. As an implication, previous lower bounds for the aforementioned variants of secretary problems hold not only against ordinal algorithms, but also against any online algorithm. However, the value range of the input elements in our construction is huge: $N=O\left(\frac{n^3\cdot n!\cdot n!}{\varepsilon}\right)\uparrow\uparrow(n-1)$ (tower of exponents) for an input sequence of length $n$. As a second result, we identify a class of natural ordinal problems and find cardinal algorithm with a matching advantage of $1+ \Omega \left(\frac{1}{\log^{(c)}N}\right),$ where $\log^{(c)}N=\log\ldots\log N$ with $c$ iterative logs and $c$ is an arbitrary constant. Further, we introduce the cardinal complexity for any given ordinal online task: the minimum size $N(\varepsilon)$ of different numerical values in the input such the advantage of cardinal over ordinal algorithms is at most $1+\varepsilon$. As a third result, we show that the game of googol has much lower cardinal complexity of $N=O\left(\left(\frac{n}{\varepsilon}\right)^n\right)$.
Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have demonstrated exceptional synthesis outcomes across various tasks. However, the current design landscape of the forward diffusion process remains largely untapped and often relies on physical heuristics or simplifying assumptions. Utilizing insights from the development of scalable Bayesian posterior samplers, we present a complete recipe for formulating forward processes in SGMs, ensuring convergence to the desired target distribution. Our approach reveals that several existing SGMs can be seen as specific manifestations of our framework. Building upon this method, we introduce Phase Space Langevin Diffusion (PSLD), which relies on score-based modeling within an augmented space enriched by auxiliary variables akin to physical phase space. Empirical results exhibit the superior sample quality and improved speed-quality trade-off of PSLD compared to various competing approaches on established image synthesis benchmarks. Remarkably, PSLD achieves sample quality akin to state-of-the-art SGMs (FID: 2.10 for unconditional CIFAR-10 generation). Lastly, we demonstrate the applicability of PSLD in conditional synthesis using pre-trained score networks, offering an appealing alternative as an SGM backbone for future advancements. Code and model checkpoints can be accessed at \url{//github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD}.
Purpose: Technology plays a pivotal role in shaping the fate of organizations, both positively and negatively. One of its detrimental consequences is the emergence of "Technostress," a form of destructive stress. This paper investigates the impact of technostress on Perceived Organizational Commitment (POC) through the lens of individual innovation. The objective is to provide valuable insights for organizational managers, enabling them to effectively mitigate the adverse effects of technostress within their teams. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study utilized a questionnaire survey conducted within an Engineering Consulting Company in Iran, with 147 individuals participating, selected according to Morgan's table. Findings: The research findings revealed three crucial insights: (1) Technostress significantly and negatively influences both POC and individual innovation. (2) Individual innovation positively and significantly impacts POC. (3) Individual innovation acts as a mediator between technostress and POC, alleviating the negative impact of technostress on organizational commitment. Research Implications: The study underscores the importance for managers to proactively address technostress-related challenges and promote individual innovation within their organizations. These efforts are vital in enhancing organizational commitment among employees. Originality/Value: This research makes a significant contribution to the field by illuminating the mediating role of individual innovation in the relationship between technostress and perceived organizational commitment. Given the close association of employees in engineering organizations with technology, this study sheds light on the specific challenges faced by this sector, thereby enhancing our understanding of technostress effects in the workplace.
Through Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies, a number of time-series data is collected across multiple individuals, continuously monitoring various items of emotional behavior. Such complex data is commonly analyzed in an individual level, using personalized models. However, it is believed that additional information of similar individuals is likely to enhance these models leading to better individuals' description. Thus, clustering is investigated with an aim to group together the most similar individuals, and subsequently use this information in group-based models in order to improve individuals' predictive performance. More specifically, two model-based clustering approaches are examined, where the first is using model-extracted parameters of personalized models, whereas the second is optimized on the model-based forecasting performance. Both methods are then analyzed using intrinsic clustering evaluation measures (e.g. Silhouette coefficients) as well as the performance of a downstream forecasting scheme, where each forecasting group-model is devoted to describe all individuals belonging to one cluster. Among these, clustering based on performance shows the best results, in terms of all examined evaluation measures. As another level of evaluation, those group-models' performance is compared to three baseline scenarios, the personalized, the all-in-one group and the random group-based concept. According to this comparison, the superiority of clustering-based methods is again confirmed, indicating that the utilization of group-based information could be effectively enhance the overall performance of all individuals' data.
Code search aims to retrieve the code snippet that highly matches the given query described in natural language. Recently, many code pre-training approaches have demonstrated impressive performance on code search. However, existing code search methods still suffer from two performance constraints: inadequate semantic representation and the semantic gap between natural language (NL) and programming language (PL). In this paper, we propose CPLCS, a contrastive prompt learning-based code search method based on the cross-modal interaction mechanism. CPLCS comprises:(1) PL-NL contrastive learning, which learns the semantic matching relationship between PL and NL representations; (2) a prompt learning design for a dual-encoder structure that can alleviate the problem of inadequate semantic representation; (3) a cross-modal interaction mechanism to enhance the fine-grained mapping between NL and PL. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world dataset across six programming languages. The experiment results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in improving semantic representation quality and mapping ability between PL and NL.
Designers need to consider not only perceptual effectiveness but also visual styles when creating an infographic. This process can be difficult and time consuming for professional designers, not to mention non-expert users, leading to the demand for automated infographics design. As a first step, we focus on timeline infographics, which have been widely used for centuries. We contribute an end-to-end approach that automatically extracts an extensible timeline template from a bitmap image. Our approach adopts a deconstruction and reconstruction paradigm. At the deconstruction stage, we propose a multi-task deep neural network that simultaneously parses two kinds of information from a bitmap timeline: 1) the global information, i.e., the representation, scale, layout, and orientation of the timeline, and 2) the local information, i.e., the location, category, and pixels of each visual element on the timeline. At the reconstruction stage, we propose a pipeline with three techniques, i.e., Non-Maximum Merging, Redundancy Recover, and DL GrabCut, to extract an extensible template from the infographic, by utilizing the deconstruction results. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we synthesize a timeline dataset (4296 images) and collect a real-world timeline dataset (393 images) from the Internet. We first report quantitative evaluation results of our approach over the two datasets. Then, we present examples of automatically extracted templates and timelines automatically generated based on these templates to qualitatively demonstrate the performance. The results confirm that our approach can effectively extract extensible templates from real-world timeline infographics.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
In Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC), one sample can belong to more than one class. It is observed that most MLTC tasks, there are dependencies or correlations among labels. Existing methods tend to ignore the relationship among labels. In this paper, a graph attention network-based model is proposed to capture the attentive dependency structure among the labels. The graph attention network uses a feature matrix and a correlation matrix to capture and explore the crucial dependencies between the labels and generate classifiers for the task. The generated classifiers are applied to sentence feature vectors obtained from the text feature extraction network (BiLSTM) to enable end-to-end training. Attention allows the system to assign different weights to neighbor nodes per label, thus allowing it to learn the dependencies among labels implicitly. The results of the proposed model are validated on five real-world MLTC datasets. The proposed model achieves similar or better performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art models.
Within the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT), numerous and diverse physical devices, Edge devices, Cloud infrastructure, and their quality of service requirements (QoS), need to be represented within a unified specification in order to enable rapid IoT application development, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration. But heterogeneities among different configuration knowledge representation models pose limitations for acquisition, discovery and curation of configuration knowledge for coordinated IoT applications. This paper proposes a unified data model to represent IoT resource configuration knowledge artifacts. It also proposes IoT-CANE (Context-Aware recommendatioN systEm) to facilitate incremental knowledge acquisition and declarative context driven knowledge recommendation.