Integrating contact-awareness into a soft snake robot and efficiently controlling its locomotion in response to contact information present significant challenges. This paper aims to solve contact-aware locomotion problem of a soft snake robot through developing bio-inspired contact-aware locomotion controllers. To provide effective contact information for the controllers, we develop a scale covered sensor structure mimicking natural snakes' \textit{scale sensilla}. In the design of control framework, our core contribution is the development of a novel sensory feedback mechanism of the Matsuoka central pattern generator (CPG) network. This mechanism allows the Matsuoka CPG system to work like a "spine cord" in the whole contact-aware control scheme, which simultaneously takes the stimuli including tonic input signals from the "brain" (a goal-tracking locomotion controller) and sensory feedback signals from the "reflex arc" (the contact reactive controller), and generate rhythmic signals to effectively actuate the soft snake robot to slither through densely allocated obstacles. In the design of the "reflex arc", we develop two types of reactive controllers -- 1) a reinforcement learning (RL) sensor regulator that learns to manipulate the sensory feedback inputs of the CPG system, and 2) a local reflexive sensor-CPG network that directly connects sensor readings and the CPG's feedback inputs in a special topology. These two reactive controllers respectively facilitate two different contact-aware locomotion control schemes. The two control schemes are tested and evaluated in the soft snake robot, showing promising performance in the contact-aware locomotion tasks. The experimental results also further verify the benefit of Matsuoka CPG system in bio-inspired robot controller design.
Despite outstanding performance in many tasks, language models are notoriously inclined to make factual errors in tasks requiring arithmetic computation. We address this deficiency by creating Calc-X, a collection of datasets that demonstrates the appropriate use of a calculator in reasoning chains. Calc-X is suitable for teaching language models to offload computations to a symbolic system. We survey and unify several existing chain-of-thought datasets into a proposed format, resulting in a standard collection of over 300,000 samples requiring arithmetic reasoning. Finally, we use the new Calc-X collection to train open-source calculator-using models we call Calcformers and show that these models approximately double the accuracy of generating correct results compared to vanilla language model baselines. We make all Calc-X datasets, source code and Calcformers models publicly available.
Radar has stronger adaptability in adverse scenarios for autonomous driving environmental perception compared to widely adopted cameras and LiDARs. Compared with commonly used 3D radars, the latest 4D radars have precise vertical resolution and higher point cloud density, making it a highly promising sensor for autonomous driving in complex environmental perception. However, due to the much higher noise than LiDAR, manufacturers choose different filtering strategies, resulting in an inverse ratio between noise level and point cloud density. There is still a lack of comparative analysis on which method is beneficial for deep learning-based perception algorithms in autonomous driving. One of the main reasons is that current datasets only adopt one type of 4D radar, making it difficult to compare different 4D radars in the same scene. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel large-scale multi-modal dataset featuring, for the first time, two types of 4D radars captured simultaneously. This dataset enables further research into effective 4D radar perception algorithms.Our dataset consists of 151 consecutive series, most of which last 20 seconds and contain 10,007 meticulously synchronized and annotated frames. Moreover, our dataset captures a variety of challenging driving scenarios, including many road conditions, weather conditions, nighttime and daytime with different lighting intensities and periods. Our dataset annotates consecutive frames, which can be applied to 3D object detection and tracking, and also supports the study of multi-modal tasks. We experimentally validate our dataset, providing valuable results for studying different types of 4D radars. This dataset is released on //github.com/adept-thu/Dual-Radar.
Passage retrieval is a fundamental task in many information systems, such as web search and question answering, where both efficiency and effectiveness are critical concerns. In recent years, neural retrievers based on pre-trained language models (PLM), such as dual-encoders, have achieved huge success. Yet, studies have found that the performance of dual-encoders are often limited due to the neglecting of the interaction information between queries and candidate passages. Therefore, various interaction paradigms have been proposed to improve the performance of vanilla dual-encoders. Particularly, recent state-of-the-art methods often introduce late-interaction during the model inference process. However, such late-interaction based methods usually bring extensive computation and storage cost on large corpus. Despite their effectiveness, the concern of efficiency and space footprint is still an important factor that limits the application of interaction-based neural retrieval models. To tackle this issue, we incorporate implicit interaction into dual-encoders, and propose I^3 retriever. In particular, our implicit interaction paradigm leverages generated pseudo-queries to simulate query-passage interaction, which jointly optimizes with query and passage encoders in an end-to-end manner. It can be fully pre-computed and cached, and its inference process only involves simple dot product operation of the query vector and passage vector, which makes it as efficient as the vanilla dual encoders. We conduct comprehensive experiments on MSMARCO and TREC2019 Deep Learning Datasets, demonstrating the I^3 retriever's superiority in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, the proposed implicit interaction is compatible with special pre-training and knowledge distillation for passage retrieval, which brings a new state-of-the-art performance.
Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems have gained significant interest because of their ability to jointly and efficiently access, utilize, and manage the scarce electromagnetic spectrum. The co-existence approach toward ISAC focuses on the receiver processing of overlaid radar and communications signals coming from independent transmitters. A specific ISAC coexistence problem is dual-blind deconvolution (DBD), wherein the transmit signals and channels of both radar and communications are unknown to the receiver. Prior DBD works ignore the evolution of the signal model over time. In this work, we consider a dynamic DBD scenario using a linear state space model (LSSM) such that, apart from the transmit signals and channels of both systems, the LSSM parameters are also unknown. We employ a factor graph representation to model these unknown variables. We avoid the conventional matrix inversion approach to estimate the unknown variables by using an efficient expectation-maximization algorithm, where each iteration employs a Gaussian message passing over the factor graph structure. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accurate estimation of radar and communications channels, including in the presence of noise.
Aerial robots are required to remain operational even in the event of system disturbances, damages, or failures to ensure resilient and robust task completion and safety. One common failure case is propeller damage, which presents a significant challenge in both quantification and compensation. We propose a novel adaptive control scheme capable of detecting and compensating for multi-rotor propeller damages, ensuring safe and robust flight performances. Our control scheme includes an L1 adaptive controller for damage inference and compensation of single or dual propellers, with the capability to seamlessly transition to a fault-tolerant solution in case the damage becomes severe. We experimentally identify the conditions under which the L1 adaptive solution remains preferable over a fault-tolerant alternative. Experimental results validate the proposed approach, demonstrating its effectiveness in running the adaptive strategy in real time on a quadrotor even in case of damage to multiple propellers.
Recent parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) techniques aim to improve over the considerable cost of fully finetuning large pretrained language models (PLM). As different PEFT techniques proliferate, it is becoming difficult to compare them, in particular in terms of (i) the structure and functionality they add to the PLM, (ii) the different types and degrees of efficiency improvements achieved, (iii) performance at different downstream tasks, and (iv) how differences in structure and functionality relate to efficiency and task performance. To facilitate such comparisons, this paper presents a reference architecture which standardises aspects shared by different PEFT techniques, while isolating differences to specific locations and interactions with the standard components. Through this process of standardising and isolating differences, a modular view of PEFT techniques emerges, supporting not only direct comparison of different techniques and their efficiency and task performance, but also systematic exploration of reusability and composability of the different types of finetuned modules. We demonstrate how the reference architecture can be applied to understand properties and relative advantages of PEFT techniques, hence to inform selection of techniques for specific tasks, and design choices for new PEFT techniques.
We address the challenge of training a large supernet for the object detection task, using a relatively small amount of training data. Specifically, we propose an efficient supernet-based neural architecture search (NAS) method that uses search space pruning. The search space defined by the supernet is pruned by removing candidate models that are predicted to perform poorly. To effectively remove the candidates over a wide range of resource constraints, we particularly design a performance predictor for supernet, called path filter, which is conditioned by resource constraints and can accurately predict the relative performance of the models that satisfy similar resource constraints. Hence, supernet training is more focused on the best-performing candidates. Our path filter handles prediction for paths with different resource budgets. Compared to once-for-all, our proposed method reduces the computational cost of the optimal network architecture by 30% and 63%, while yielding better accuracy-floating point operations Pareto front (0.85 and 0.45 points of improvement on average precision for Pascal VOC and COCO, respectively).
Privacy policies inform users about the data management practices of organizations. Yet, their complexity often renders them largely incomprehensible to the average user, necessitating the development of privacy assistants. With the advent of generative AI (genAI) technologies, there is an untapped potential to enhance privacy assistants in answering user queries effectively. However, the reliability of genAI remains a concern due to its propensity for generating incorrect or misleading information. This study introduces GenAIPABench, a novel benchmarking framework designed to evaluate the performance of Generative AI-based Privacy Assistants (GenAIPAs). GenAIPABench comprises: 1) A comprehensive set of questions about an organization's privacy policy and a data protection regulation, along with annotated answers for several organizations and regulations; 2) A robust set of evaluation metrics for assessing the accuracy, relevance, and consistency of the generated responses; and 3) An evaluation tool that generates appropriate prompts to introduce the system to the privacy document and different variations of the privacy questions to evaluate its robustness. We use GenAIPABench to assess the potential of three leading genAI systems in becoming GenAIPAs: ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing AI. Our results demonstrate significant promise in genAI capabilities in the privacy domain while also highlighting challenges in managing complex queries, ensuring consistency, and verifying source accuracy.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Most existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness, which can be alleviated by inferring missing links based on known facts. One popular way to accomplish this is to generate low-dimensional embeddings of entities and relations, and use these to make inferences. ConvE, a recently proposed approach, applies convolutional filters on 2D reshapings of entity and relation embeddings in order to capture rich interactions between their components. However, the number of interactions that ConvE can capture is limited. In this paper, we analyze how increasing the number of these interactions affects link prediction performance, and utilize our observations to propose InteractE. InteractE is based on three key ideas -- feature permutation, a novel feature reshaping, and circular convolution. Through extensive experiments, we find that InteractE outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional link prediction baselines on FB15k-237. Further, InteractE achieves an MRR score that is 9%, 7.5%, and 23% better than ConvE on the FB15k-237, WN18RR and YAGO3-10 datasets respectively. The results validate our central hypothesis -- that increasing feature interaction is beneficial to link prediction performance. We make the source code of InteractE available to encourage reproducible research.