Soft robots present unique capabilities, but have been limited by the lack of scalable technologies for construction and the complexity of algorithms for efficient control and motion, which depend on soft-body dynamics, high-dimensional actuation patterns, and external/on-board forces. This paper presents scalable methods and platforms to study the impact of weight distribution and actuation patterns on fully untethered modular soft robots. An extendable Vibrating Intelligent Piezo-Electric Robot (eViper), together with an open-source Simulation Framework for Electroactive Robotic Sheet (SFERS) implemented in PyBullet, was developed as a platform to study the sophisticated weight-locomotion interaction. By integrating the power electronics, sensors, actuators, and batteries on-board, the eViper platform enables rapid design iteration and evaluation of different weight distribution and control strategies for the actuator arrays, supporting both physics-based modeling and data-driven modeling via on-board automatic data-acquisition capabilities. We show that SFERS can provide useful guidelines for optimizing the weight distribution and actuation patterns of the eViper to achieve the maximum speed or minimum cost-of-transportation (COT).
This paper presents policy-based motion planning for robotic systems. The motion planning literature has been mostly focused on open-loop trajectory planning which is followed by tracking online. In contrast, we solve the problem of path planning and controller synthesis simultaneously by solving the related feedback control problem. We present a novel incremental policy (iPolicy) algorithm for motion planning, which integrates sampling-based methods and set-valued optimal control methods to compute feedback controllers for the robotic system. In particular, we use sampling to incrementally construct the state space of the system. Asynchronous value iterations are performed on the sampled state space to synthesize the incremental policy feedback controller. We show the convergence of the estimates to the optimal value function in continuous state space. Numerical results with various different dynamical systems (including nonholonomic systems) verify the optimality and effectiveness of iPolicy.
Online contextual reasoning and association across consecutive video frames are critical to perceive instances in visual tracking. However, most current top-performing trackers persistently lean on sparse temporal relationships between reference and search frames via an offline mode. Consequently, they can only interact independently within each image-pair and establish limited temporal correlations. To alleviate the above problem, we propose a simple, flexible and effective video-level tracking pipeline, named \textbf{ODTrack}, which densely associates the contextual relationships of video frames in an online token propagation manner. ODTrack receives video frames of arbitrary length to capture the spatio-temporal trajectory relationships of an instance, and compresses the discrimination features (localization information) of a target into a token sequence to achieve frame-to-frame association. This new solution brings the following benefits: 1) the purified token sequences can serve as prompts for the inference in the next video frame, whereby past information is leveraged to guide future inference; 2) the complex online update strategies are effectively avoided by the iterative propagation of token sequences, and thus we can achieve more efficient model representation and computation. ODTrack achieves a new \textit{SOTA} performance on seven benchmarks, while running at real-time speed. Code and models are available at \url{//github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/ODTrack}.
Autonomous systems (AS) often use Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers to allow them to operate in complex, high-dimensional, non-linear, and dynamically changing environments. Due to the complexity of these environments, DNN classifiers may output misclassifications during operation when they face domains not identified during development. Removing a system from operation for retraining becomes impractical as the number of such AS increases. To increase AS reliability and overcome this limitation, DNN classifiers need to have the ability to adapt during operation when faced with different operational domains using a few samples (e.g. 2 to 100 samples). However, retraining DNNs on a few samples is known to cause catastrophic forgetting and poor generalisation. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Incremental Regularised Adaptation (DIRA), an approach for dynamic operational domain adaption of DNNs using regularisation techniques. We show that DIRA improves on the problem of forgetting and achieves strong gains in performance when retraining using a few samples from the target domain. Our approach shows improvements on different image classification benchmarks aimed at evaluating robustness to distribution shifts (e.g.CIFAR-10C/100C, ImageNet-C), and produces state-of-the-art performance in comparison with other methods from the literature.
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.
More than one hundred benchmarks have been developed to test the commonsense knowledge and commonsense reasoning abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, these benchmarks are often flawed and many aspects of common sense remain untested. Consequently, we do not currently have any reliable way of measuring to what extent existing AI systems have achieved these abilities. This paper surveys the development and uses of AI commonsense benchmarks. We discuss the nature of common sense; the role of common sense in AI; the goals served by constructing commonsense benchmarks; and desirable features of commonsense benchmarks. We analyze the common flaws in benchmarks, and we argue that it is worthwhile to invest the work needed ensure that benchmark examples are consistently high quality. We survey the various methods of constructing commonsense benchmarks. We enumerate 139 commonsense benchmarks that have been developed: 102 text-based, 18 image-based, 12 video based, and 7 simulated physical environments. We discuss the gaps in the existing benchmarks and aspects of commonsense reasoning that are not addressed in any existing benchmark. We conclude with a number of recommendations for future development of commonsense AI benchmarks.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models, which is crucial to their responsible deployment. Fulfilling this goal requires both that the explanations generated by these methods are correct and that people can easily and reliably understand them. While the former has been addressed in prior work, the latter is often overlooked, resulting in informal model understanding derived from a handful of local explanations. In this paper, we introduce explanation summary (ExSum), a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding, and propose metrics for its quality assessment. On two domains, ExSum highlights various limitations in the current practice, helps develop accurate model understanding, and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. We also connect understandability to other properties of explanations such as human alignment, robustness, and counterfactual minimality and plausibility.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
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.