Autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) in marine environments with current flows is challenging, and few prior works have addressed the sensorbased navigation problem in such environments under no prior knowledge of the current flow and obstacles. We propose a Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) based local path planner that learns return distributions which capture the uncertainty of action outcomes, and an adaptive algorithm that automatically tunes the level of sensitivity to the risk in the environment. The proposed planner achieves a more stable learning performance and converges to safer policies than a traditional RL based planner. Computational experiments demonstrate that comparing to a traditional RL based planner and classical local planning methods such as Artificial Potential Fields and the Bug Algorithm, the proposed planner is robust against environmental flows, and is able to plan trajectories that are superior in safety, time and energy consumption.
Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have made it possible to reconstruct and reanimate dynamic portrait scenes with control over head-pose, facial expressions and viewing direction. However, training such models assumes photometric consistency over the deformed region e.g. the face must be evenly lit as it deforms with changing head-pose and facial expression. Such photometric consistency across frames of a video is hard to maintain, even in studio environments, thus making the created reanimatable neural portraits prone to artifacts during reanimation. In this work, we propose CoDyNeRF, a system that enables the creation of fully controllable 3D portraits in real-world capture conditions. CoDyNeRF learns to approximate illumination dependent effects via a dynamic appearance model in the canonical space that is conditioned on predicted surface normals and the facial expressions and head-pose deformations. The surface normals prediction is guided using 3DMM normals that act as a coarse prior for the normals of the human head, where direct prediction of normals is hard due to rigid and non-rigid deformations induced by head-pose and facial expression changes. Using only a smartphone-captured short video of a subject for training, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on free view synthesis of a portrait scene with explicit head pose and expression controls, and realistic lighting effects. The project page can be found here: //shahrukhathar.github.io/2023/08/22/CoDyNeRF.html
Marine debris poses a significant threat to the survival of marine wildlife, often leading to entanglement and starvation, ultimately resulting in death. Therefore, removing debris from the ocean is crucial to restore the natural balance and allow marine life to thrive. Instance segmentation is an advanced form of object detection that identifies objects and precisely locates and separates them, making it an essential tool for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to navigate and interact with their underwater environment effectively. AUVs use image segmentation to analyze images captured by their cameras to navigate underwater environments. In this paper, we use instance segmentation to calculate the area of individual objects within an image, we use YOLOV7 in Roboflow to generate a set of bounding boxes for each object in the image with a class label and a confidence score for every detection. A segmentation mask is then created for each object by applying a binary mask to the object's bounding box. The masks are generated by applying a binary threshold to the output of a convolutional neural network trained to segment objects from the background. Finally, refining the segmentation mask for each object is done by applying post-processing techniques such as morphological operations and contour detection, to improve the accuracy and quality of the mask. The process of estimating the area of instance segmentation involves calculating the area of each segmented instance separately and then summing up the areas of all instances to obtain the total area. The calculation is carried out using standard formulas based on the shape of the object, such as rectangles and circles. In cases where the object is complex, the Monte Carlo method is used to estimate the area. This method provides a higher degree of accuracy than traditional methods, especially when using a large number of samples.
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in crowded environments presents a challenging problem in motion planning, aiming to find collision-free paths for all agents in the system. MAPF finds a wide range of applications in various domains, including aerial swarms, autonomous warehouse robotics, and self-driving vehicles. The current approaches for MAPF can be broadly categorized into two main categories: centralized and decentralized planning. Centralized planning suffers from the curse of dimensionality and thus does not scale well in large and complex environments. On the other hand, decentralized planning enables agents to engage in real-time path planning within a partially observable environment, demonstrating implicit coordination. However, they suffer from slow convergence and performance degradation in dense environments. In this paper, we introduce CRAMP, a crowd-aware decentralized approach to address this problem by leveraging reinforcement learning guided by a boosted curriculum-based training strategy. We test CRAMP on simulated environments and demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralized methods for MAPF on various metrics. CRAMP improves the solution quality up to 58% measured in makespan and collision count, and up to 5% in success rate in comparison to previous methods.
The majority of prior work on information retrieval (IR) assumes that the corpus is static, whereas in the real world, the documents are continually updated. In this paper, we incorporate often overlooked dynamic nature of knowledge into the retrieval systems. Our work treats retrieval not as static archives but as dynamic knowledge bases better aligned with real-world environments. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of dual encoders and generative retrieval, utilizing the StreamingQA benchmark designed for the temporal knowledge updates. Our initial results show that while generative retrieval outperforms dual encoders in static settings, the opposite is true in dynamic settings. Surprisingly, however, when we utilize a parameter-efficient pre-training method to enhance adaptability of generative retrieval to new corpora, our resulting model, Dynamic Generative Retrieval (DynamicGR), exhibits unexpected findings. It (1) efficiently compresses new knowledge in their internal index, attaining a remarkable storage capacity due to its fully parametric architecture and (2) outperforms dual encoders not only in static settings but in dynamic scenarios with a 5% margin in hit@5, requiring 4 times less training time.
Deep Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (deep NMF) has recently emerged as a valuable technique for extracting multiple layers of features across different scales. However, all existing deep NMF models and algorithms have primarily centered their evaluation on the least squares error, which may not be the most appropriate metric for assessing the quality of approximations on diverse datasets. For instance, when dealing with data types such as audio signals and documents, it is widely acknowledged that $\beta$-divergences offer a more suitable alternative. In this paper, we develop new models and algorithms for deep NMF using $\beta$-divergences. Subsequently, we apply these techniques to the extraction of facial features, the identification of topics within document collections, and the identification of materials within hyperspectral images.
Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of head Computed Tomography (CT) images elucidates the intricate spatial relationships of tissue structures, thereby assisting in accurate diagnosis. Nonetheless, securing an optimal head CT scan without deviation is challenging in clinical settings, owing to poor positioning by technicians, patient's physical constraints, or CT scanner tilt angle restrictions. Manual formatting and reconstruction not only introduce subjectivity but also strain time and labor resources. To address these issues, we propose an efficient automatic head CT images 3D reconstruction method, improving accuracy and repeatability, as well as diminishing manual intervention. Our approach employs a deep learning-based object detection algorithm, identifying and evaluating orbitomeatal line landmarks to automatically reformat the images prior to reconstruction. Given the dearth of existing evaluations of object detection algorithms in the context of head CT images, we compared ten methods from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. By exploring their precision, efficiency, and robustness, we singled out the lightweight YOLOv8 as the aptest algorithm for our task, with an mAP of 92.77% and impressive robustness against class imbalance. Our qualitative evaluation of standardized reconstruction results demonstrates the clinical practicability and validity of our method.
The goal of Feature Selection - comprising filter, wrapper, and embedded approaches - is to find the optimal feature subset for designated downstream tasks. Nevertheless, current feature selection methods are limited by: 1) the selection criteria of these methods are varied for different domains, making them hard to generalize; 2) the selection performance of these approaches drops significantly when processing high-dimensional feature space coupled with small sample size. In light of these challenges, we pose the question: can selected feature subsets be more robust, accurate, and input dimensionality agnostic? In this paper, we reformulate the feature selection problem as a deep differentiable optimization task and propose a new research perspective: conceptualizing discrete feature subsetting as continuous embedding space optimization. We introduce a novel and principled framework that encompasses a sequential encoder, an accuracy evaluator, a sequential decoder, and a gradient ascent optimizer. This comprehensive framework includes four important steps: preparation of features-accuracy training data, deep feature subset embedding, gradient-optimized search, and feature subset reconstruction. Specifically, we utilize reinforcement feature selection learning to generate diverse and high-quality training data and enhance generalization. By optimizing reconstruction and accuracy losses, we embed feature selection knowledge into a continuous space using an encoder-evaluator-decoder model structure. We employ a gradient ascent search algorithm to find better embeddings in the learned embedding space. Furthermore, we reconstruct feature selection solutions using these embeddings and select the feature subset with the highest performance for downstream tasks as the optimal subset.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) with their impressive language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their performance may be suboptimal for long-tail or domain-specific tasks due to limited exposure to domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary. Additionally, the lack of transparency of most state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, which can only be accessed via APIs, impedes further fine-tuning with custom data. Moreover, data privacy is a significant concern. To address these challenges, we propose the novel Parametric Knowledge Guiding (PKG) framework, which equips LLMs with a knowledge-guiding module to access relevant knowledge at runtime without altering the LLMs' parameters. Our PKG is based on open-source "white-box" small language models, allowing offline storage of any knowledge that LLMs require. We demonstrate that our PKG framework can enhance the performance of "black-box" LLMs on a range of long-tail and domain-specific downstream tasks requiring factual, tabular, medical, and multimodal knowledge.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is believed to be a crucial step towards natural language understanding and has been widely studied. Recent years, end-to-end SRL with recurrent neural networks (RNN) has gained increasing attention. However, it remains a major challenge for RNNs to handle structural information and long range dependencies. In this paper, we present a simple and effective architecture for SRL which aims to address these problems. Our model is based on self-attention which can directly capture the relationships between two tokens regardless of their distance. Our single model achieves F$_1=83.4$ on the CoNLL-2005 shared task dataset and F$_1=82.7$ on the CoNLL-2012 shared task dataset, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art results by $1.8$ and $1.0$ F$_1$ score respectively. Besides, our model is computationally efficient, and the parsing speed is 50K tokens per second on a single Titan X GPU.