Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is one key component to achieving flexible manufacturing to meet the different needs of customers. However, it is difficult to build intelligent robots that can proactively assist humans in a safe and efficient way due to several challenges.First, it is challenging to achieve efficient collaboration due to diverse human behaviors and data scarcity. Second, it is difficult to ensure interactive safety due to uncertainty in human behaviors. This paper presents an integrated framework for proactive HRC. A robust intention prediction module, which leverages prior task information and human-in-the-loop training, is learned to guide the robot for efficient collaboration. The proposed framework also uses robust safe control to ensure interactive safety under uncertainty. The developed framework is applied to a co-assembly task using a Kinova Gen3 robot. The experiment demonstrates that our solution is robust to environmental changes as well as different human preferences and behaviors. In addition, it improves task efficiency by approximately 15-20%. Moreover, the experiment demonstrates that our solution can guarantee interactive safety during proactive collaboration.
Leveraging sensory information to aid the millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-terahertz (sub-THz) beam selection process is attracting increasing interest. This sensory data, captured for example by cameras at the basestations, has the potential of significantly reducing the beam sweeping overhead and enabling highly-mobile applications. The solutions developed so far, however, have mainly considered single-candidate scenarios, i.e., scenarios with a single candidate user in the visual scene, and were evaluated using synthetic datasets. To address these limitations, this paper extensively investigates the sensing-aided beam prediction problem in a real-world multi-object vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) scenario and presents a comprehensive machine learning-based framework. In particular, this paper proposes to utilize visual and positional data to predict the optimal beam indices as an alternative to the conventional beam sweeping approaches. For this, a novel user (transmitter) identification solution has been developed, a key step in realizing sensing-aided multi-candidate and multi-user beam prediction solutions. The proposed solutions are evaluated on the large-scale real-world DeepSense $6$G dataset. Experimental results in realistic V2I communication scenarios indicate that the proposed solutions achieve close to $100\%$ top-5 beam prediction accuracy for the scenarios with single-user and close to $95\%$ top-5 beam prediction accuracy for multi-candidate scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed approach can identify the probable transmitting candidate with more than $93\%$ accuracy across the different scenarios. This highlights a promising approach for nearly eliminating the beam training overhead in mmWave/THz communication systems.
Facial expression recognition (FER) is an important task in computer vision, having practical applications in areas such as human-computer interaction, education, healthcare, and online monitoring. In this challenging FER task, there are three key issues especially prevalent: inter-class similarity, intra-class discrepancy, and scale sensitivity. While existing works typically address some of these issues, none have fully addressed all three challenges in a unified framework. In this paper, we propose a two-stream Pyramid crOss-fuSion TransformER network (POSTER), that aims to holistically solve all three issues. Specifically, we design a transformer-based cross-fusion method that enables effective collaboration of facial landmark features and image features to maximize proper attention to salient facial regions. Furthermore, POSTER employs a pyramid structure to promote scale invariance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our POSTER achieves new state-of-the-art results on RAF-DB (92.05%), FERPlus (91.62%), as well as AffectNet 7 class (67.31%) and 8 class (63.34%). The code is available at //github.com/zczcwh/POSTER.
In Task Oriented Dialogue (TOD) system, detecting and inducing new intents are two main challenges to apply the system in the real world. In this paper, we suggest the semantic multi-view model to resolve these two challenges: (1) SBERT for General Embedding (GE), (2) Multi Domain Batch (MDB) for dialogue domain knowledge, and (3) Proxy Gradient Transfer (PGT) for cluster-specialized semantic. MDB feeds diverse dialogue datasets to the model at once to tackle the multi-domain problem by learning the multiple domain knowledge. We introduce a novel method PGT, which employs the Siamese network to fine-tune the model with a clustering method directly.Our model can learn how to cluster dialogue utterances by using PGT. Experimental results demonstrate that our multi-view model with MDB and PGT significantly improves the Open Intent Induction performance compared to baseline systems.
Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) built on artificial intelligence (AI) are presented as latent mechanisms for actively detecting fresh attacks over a complex network. Although review papers are used the systematic review or simple methods to analyse and criticize the anomaly NIDS works, the current review uses a traditional way as a quantitative description to find current gaps by synthesizing and summarizing the data comparison without considering algorithms performance. This paper presents a systematic and meta-analysis study of AI for network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) focusing on deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) approaches in network security. Deep learning algorithms are explained in their structure, and data intrusion network is justified based on an infrastructure of networks and attack types. By conducting a meta-analysis and debating the validation of the DL and ML approach by effectiveness, used dataset, detected attacks, classification task, and time complexity, we offer a thorough benchmarking assessment of the current NIDS-based publications-based systematic approach. The proposed method is considered reviewing works for the anomaly-based network intrusion detection system (anomaly-NIDS) models. Furthermore, the effectiveness of proposed algorithms and selected datasets are discussed for the recent direction and improvements of ML and DL to the NIDS. The future trends for improving an anomaly-IDS for continuing detection in the evolution of cyberattacks are highlighted in several research studies.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) at low frame rates can reduce computational, storage and power overhead to better meet the constraints of edge devices. Many existing MOT methods suffer from significant performance degradation in low-frame-rate videos due to significant location and appearance changes between adjacent frames. To this end, we propose to explore collaborative tracking learning (ColTrack) for frame-rate-insensitive MOT in a query-based end-to-end manner. Multiple historical queries of the same target jointly track it with richer temporal descriptions. Meanwhile, we insert an information refinement module between every two temporal blocking decoders to better fuse temporal clues and refine features. Moreover, a tracking object consistency loss is proposed to guide the interaction between historical queries. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that in high-frame-rate videos, ColTrack obtains higher performance than state-of-the-art methods on large-scale datasets Dancetrack and BDD100K, and outperforms the existing end-to-end methods on MOT17. More importantly, ColTrack has a significant advantage over state-of-the-art methods in low-frame-rate videos, which allows it to obtain faster processing speeds by reducing frame-rate requirements while maintaining higher performance. Code will be released at //github.com/yolomax/ColTrack
Deep neural network (DNN) deployment has been confined to larger hardware devices due to their expensive computational requirements. This challenge has recently reached another scale with the emergence of large language models (LLMs). In order to reduce both their memory footprint and latency, a promising technique is quantization. It consists in converting floating point representations to low bit-width fixed point representations, usually by assuming a uniform mapping onto a regular grid. This process, referred to in the literature as uniform quantization, may however be ill-suited as most DNN weights and activations follow a bell-shaped distribution. This is even worse on LLMs whose weight distributions are known to exhibit large, high impact, outlier values. In this work, we propose an improvement over the most commonly adopted way to tackle this limitation in deep learning models quantization, namely, non-uniform quantization. NUPES leverages automorphisms to preserve the scalar multiplications. Such transformations are derived from power functions. However, the optimization of the exponent parameter and weight values remains a challenging and novel problem which could not be solved with previous post training optimization techniques which only learn to round up or down weight values in order to preserve the predictive function. We circumvent this limitation with a new paradigm: learning new quantized weights over the entire quantized space. Similarly, we enable the optimization of the power exponent, i.e. the optimization of the quantization operator itself during training by alleviating all the numerical instabilities. The resulting predictive function is compatible with integer-only low-bit inference. We show the ability of the method to achieve state-of-the-art compression rates in both, data-free and data-driven configurations.
Ultrasound (US) imaging is better suited for intraoperative settings because it is real-time and more portable than other imaging techniques, such as mammography. However, US images are characterized by lower spatial resolution noise-like artifacts. This research aims to address these limitations by providing surgeons with mammogram-like image quality in real-time from noisy US images. Unlike previous approaches for improving US image quality that aim to reduce artifacts by treating them as (speckle noise), we recognize their value as informative wave interference pattern (WIP). To achieve this, we utilize the Stride software to numerically solve the forward model, generating ultrasound images from mammograms images by solving wave-equations. Additionally, we leverage the power of domain adaptation to enhance the realism of the simulated ultrasound images. Then, we utilize generative adversarial networks (GANs) to tackle the inverse problem of generating mammogram-quality images from ultrasound images. The resultant images have considerably more discernible details than the original US images.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Hierarchical structures are popular in recent vision transformers, however, they require sophisticated designs and massive datasets to work well. In this paper, we explore the idea of nesting basic local transformers on non-overlapping image blocks and aggregating them in a hierarchical way. We find that the block aggregation function plays a critical role in enabling cross-block non-local information communication. This observation leads us to design a simplified architecture that requires minor code changes upon the original vision transformer. The benefits of the proposed judiciously-selected design are threefold: (1) NesT converges faster and requires much less training data to achieve good generalization on both ImageNet and small datasets like CIFAR; (2) when extending our key ideas to image generation, NesT leads to a strong decoder that is 8$\times$ faster than previous transformer-based generators; and (3) we show that decoupling the feature learning and abstraction processes via this nested hierarchy in our design enables constructing a novel method (named GradCAT) for visually interpreting the learned model. Source code is available //github.com/google-research/nested-transformer.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.