Safe and successful deployment of robots requires not only the ability to generate complex plans but also the capacity to frequently replan and correct execution errors. This paper addresses the challenge of long-horizon trajectory planning under temporally extended objectives in a receding horizon manner. To this end, we propose DOPPLER, a data-driven hierarchical framework that generates and updates plans based on instruction specified by linear temporal logic (LTL). Our method decomposes temporal tasks into chain of options with hierarchical reinforcement learning from offline non-expert datasets. It leverages diffusion models to generate options with low-level actions. We devise a determinantal-guided posterior sampling technique during batch generation, which improves the speed and diversity of diffusion generated options, leading to more efficient querying. Experiments on robot navigation and manipulation tasks demonstrate that DOPPLER can generate sequences of trajectories that progressively satisfy the specified formulae for obstacle avoidance and sequential visitation. Demonstration videos are available online at: //philiptheother.github.io/doppler/.
Deep learning technology has brought convenience and advanced developments but has become untrustworthy due to its sensitivity to adversarial attacks. Attackers may utilize this sensitivity to manipulate predictions. To defend against such attacks, existing anti-adversarial methods typically counteract adversarial perturbations post-attack, while we have devised a proactive strategy that preempts by safeguarding media upfront, effectively neutralizing potential adversarial effects before the third-party attacks occur. This strategy, dubbed Fast Preemption, provides an efficient transferable preemptive defense by using different models for labeling inputs and learning crucial features. A forward-backward cascade learning algorithm is used to compute protective perturbations, starting with forward propagation optimization to achieve rapid convergence, followed by iterative backward propagation learning to alleviate overfitting. This strategy offers state-of-the-art transferability and protection across various systems. With the running of only three steps, our Fast Preemption framework outperforms benchmark training-time, test-time, and preemptive adversarial defenses. We have also devised the first, to our knowledge, effective white-box adaptive reversion attack and demonstrate that the protection added by our defense strategy is irreversible unless the backbone model, algorithm, and settings are fully compromised. This work provides a new direction to developing proactive defenses against adversarial attacks.
Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, yet their ability to handle long documents is constrained by computational limitations. Traditional approaches, such as truncating inputs, sparse self-attention, and chunking, attempt to mitigate these issues, but they often lead to information loss and hinder the model's ability to capture long-range dependencies. In this paper, we introduce ChuLo, a novel chunk representation method for long document classification that addresses these limitations. Our ChuLo groups input tokens using unsupervised keyphrase extraction, emphasizing semantically important keyphrase based chunk to retain core document content while reducing input length. This approach minimizes information loss and improves the efficiency of Transformer-based models. Preserving all tokens in long document understanding, especially token classification tasks, is especially important to ensure that fine-grained annotations, which depend on the entire sequence context, are not lost. We evaluate our method on multiple long document classification tasks and long document token classification tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analyses.
Despite advancements in robotic-assisted surgery, automating complex tasks like suturing remain challenging due to the need for adaptability and precision. Learning-based approaches, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL), require realistic simulation environments for efficient data collection. However, current platforms often include only relatively simple, non-dexterous manipulations and lack the flexibility required for effective learning and generalization. We introduce SurgicAI, a novel platform for development and benchmarking addressing these challenges by providing the flexibility to accommodate both modular subtasks and more importantly task decomposition in RL-based surgical robotics. Compatible with the da Vinci Surgical System, SurgicAI offers a standardized pipeline for collecting and utilizing expert demonstrations. It supports deployment of multiple RL and IL approaches, and the training of both singular and compositional subtasks in suturing scenarios, featuring high dexterity and modularization. Meanwhile, SurgicAI sets clear metrics and benchmarks for the assessment of learned policies. We implemented and evaluated multiple RL and IL algorithms on SurgicAI. Our detailed benchmark analysis underscores SurgicAI's potential to advance policy learning in surgical robotics. Details: \url{//github.com/surgical-robotics-ai/SurgicAI
Design and manufacturing of integrated circuits predominantly use a globally distributed semiconductor supply chain involving diverse entities. The modern semiconductor supply chain has been designed to boost production efficiency, but is filled with major security concerns such as malicious modifications (hardware Trojans), reverse engineering (RE), and cloning. While being deployed, digital systems are also subject to a plethora of threats such as power, timing, and electromagnetic (EM) side channel attacks. Many Design-for-Security (DFS) solutions have been proposed to deal with these vulnerabilities, and such solutions (DFS) relays on strategic modifications (e.g., logic locking, side channel resilient masking, and dummy logic insertion) of the digital designs for ensuring a higher level of security. However, most of these DFS strategies lack robust formalism, are often not human-understandable, and require an extensive amount of human expert effort during their development/use. All of these factors make it difficult to keep up with the ever growing number of microelectronic vulnerabilities. In this work, we propose X-DFS, an explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI) guided DFS solution-space exploration approach that can dramatically cut down the mitigation strategy development/use time while enriching our understanding of the vulnerability by providing human-understandable decision rationale. We implement X-DFS and comprehensively evaluate it for reverse engineering threats (SAIL, SWEEP, and OMLA) and formalize a generalized mechanism for applying X-DFS to defend against other threats such as hardware Trojans, fault attacks, and side channel attacks for seamless future extensions.
Graph-based patterns are extensively employed and favored by practitioners within industrial companies due to their capacity to represent the behavioral attributes and topological relationships among users, thereby offering enhanced interpretability in comparison to black-box models commonly utilized for classification and recognition tasks. For instance, within the scenario of transaction risk management, a graph pattern that is characteristic of a particular risk category can be readily employed to discern transactions fraught with risk, delineate networks of criminal activity, or investigate the methodologies employed by fraudsters. Nonetheless, graph data in industrial settings is often characterized by its massive scale, encompassing data sets with millions or even billions of nodes, making the manual extraction of graph patterns not only labor-intensive but also necessitating specialized knowledge in particular domains of risk. Moreover, existing methodologies for mining graph patterns encounter significant obstacles when tasked with analyzing large-scale attributed graphs. In this work, we introduce GraphRPM, an industry-purpose parallel and distributed risk pattern mining framework on large attributed graphs. The framework incorporates a novel edge-involved graph isomorphism network alongside optimized operations for parallel graph computation, which collectively contribute to a considerable reduction in computational complexity and resource expenditure. Moreover, the intelligent filtration of efficacious risky graph patterns is facilitated by the proposed evaluation metrics. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on real-world datasets of varying sizes substantiate the capability of GraphRPM to adeptly address the challenges inherent in mining patterns from large-scale industrial attributed graphs, thereby underscoring its substantial value for industrial deployment.
An efficient data structure is fundamental to meeting the growing demands in dynamic graph processing. However, the dual requirements for graph computation efficiency (with contiguous structures) and graph update efficiency (with linked list-like structures) present a conflict in the design principles of graph structures. After experimental studies of existing state-of-the-art dynamic graph structures, we observe that the overhead of cache misses accounts for a major portion of the graph computation time. This paper presents GastCoCo, a system with graph storage and coroutine-based prefetch co-design. By employing software prefetching via stackless coroutines and introducing a prefetch-friendly data structure CBList, GastCoCo significantly alleviates the performance degradation caused by cache misses. Our results show that GastCoCo outperforms state-of-the-art graph storage systems by 1.3x - 180x in graph updates and 1.4x - 41.1x in graph computation.
Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct. Different from typical variational autoencoders assuming I.I.D. representations (a data point's representation is not directly affected by other data points), our VIR borrows data with similar regression labels to compute the latent representation's variational distribution; furthermore, different from deterministic regression models producing point estimates, VIR predicts the entire normal-inverse-gamma distributions and modulates the associated conjugate distributions to impose probabilistic reweighting on the imbalanced data, thereby providing better uncertainty estimation. Experiments in several real-world datasets show that our VIR can outperform state-of-the-art imbalanced regression models in terms of both accuracy and uncertainty estimation. Code will soon be available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/variational-imbalanced-regression.
Developing robust drone detection systems is often constrained by the limited availability of large-scale annotated training data and the high costs associated with real-world data collection. However, leveraging synthetic data generated via game engine-based simulations provides a promising and cost-effective solution to overcome this issue. Therefore, we present SynDroneVision, a synthetic dataset specifically designed for RGB-based drone detection in surveillance applications. Featuring diverse backgrounds, lighting conditions, and drone models, SynDroneVision offers a comprehensive training foundation for deep learning algorithms. To evaluate the dataset's effectiveness, we perform a comparative analysis across a selection of recent YOLO detection models. Our findings demonstrate that SynDroneVision is a valuable resource for real-world data enrichment, achieving notable enhancements in model performance and robustness, while significantly reducing the time and costs of real-world data acquisition. SynDroneVision will be publicly released upon paper acceptance.
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.
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.