With the rapid development of robotics swarm technology, there are more tasks that require the swarm to pass through complicated environments safely and efficiently. Virtual tube technology is a novel way to achieve this goal. Virtual tubes are free spaces connecting two places that provide safety boundaries and direction of motion for swarm robotics. How to determine the design quality of a virtual tube is a fundamental problem. For such a purpose, this paper presents a degree of flowability (DOF) for two-dimensional virtual tubes according to a minimum energy principle. After that, methods to calculate DOF are proposed with a feasibility analysis. Simulations of swarm robotics in different kinds of two-dimensional virtual tubes are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method of calculating DOF.
The ability of a robot to plan complex behaviors with real-time computation, rather than adhering to predesigned or offline-learned routines, alleviates the need for specialized algorithms or training for each problem instance. Monte Carlo Tree Search is a powerful planning algorithm that strategically explores simulated future possibilities, but it requires a discrete problem representation that is irreconcilable with the continuous dynamics of the physical world. We present Spectral Expansion Tree Search (SETS), a real-time, tree-based planner that uses the spectrum of the locally linearized system to construct a low-complexity and approximately equivalent discrete representation of the continuous world. We prove SETS converges to a bound of the globally optimal solution for continuous, deterministic and differentiable Markov Decision Processes, a broad class of problems that includes underactuated nonlinear dynamics, non-convex reward functions, and unstructured environments. We experimentally validate SETS on drone, spacecraft, and ground vehicle robots and one numerical experiment, each of which is not directly solvable with existing methods. We successfully show SETS automatically discovers a diverse set of optimal behaviors and motion trajectories in real time.
The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily focused on their task-solving capabilities, with recent models even surpassing human performance in some areas. However, this focus often neglects whether machine-generated language matches the human level of diversity, in terms of vocabulary choice, syntactic construction, and expression of meaning, raising questions about whether the fundamentals of language generation have been fully addressed. This paper emphasizes the importance of examining the preservation of human linguistic richness by language models, given the concerning surge in online content produced or aided by LLMs. We propose a comprehensive framework for evaluating LLMs from various linguistic diversity perspectives including lexical, syntactic, and semantic dimensions. Using this framework, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs across all diversity dimensions, and conduct an in-depth case study for syntactic diversity. Finally, we analyze how different development and deployment choices impact the linguistic diversity of LLM outputs.
Autonomous robots are projected to augment the manual workforce, especially in repetitive and hazardous tasks. For a successful deployment of such robots in human environments, it is crucial to guarantee human safety. State-of-the-art approaches to ensure human safety are either too restrictive to permit a natural human-robot collaboration or make strong assumptions that do not hold when for autonomous robots, e.g., knowledge of a pre-defined trajectory. Therefore, we propose SaRA-shield, a power and force limiting framework for AI-based manipulation in human environments that gives formal safety guarantees while allowing for fast robot speeds. As recent studies have shown that unconstrained collisions allow for significantly higher contact forces than constrained collisions (clamping), we propose to classify contacts by their collision type using reachability analysis. We then verify that the kinetic energy of the robot is below pain and injury thresholds for the detected collision type of the respective human body part in contact. Our real-world experiments show that SaRA-shield can effectively reduce the speed of the robot to adhere to injury-preventing energy limits.
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, robotics, and Internet of Things, multi-robot systems are progressively acquiring human-like environmental perception and understanding capabilities, empowering them to complete complex tasks through autonomous decision-making and interaction. However, the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) faces significant challenges in terms of spectrum resources, sensing accuracy, communication latency, and energy supply. To address these issues, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided IoRT network is proposed to enhance the overall performance of robotic communication, sensing, computation, and energy harvesting. In the case studies, by jointly optimizing parameters such as transceiver beamforming, robot trajectories, and RIS coefficients, solutions based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and multi-objective optimization are proposed to solve problems such as beamforming design, path planning, target sensing, and data aggregation. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed solutions in improve communication quality, sensing accuracy, computation error, and energy efficiency of RIS-aided IoRT networks.
We introduce a new erasure decoder that applies to arbitrary quantum LDPC codes. Dubbed the cluster decoder, it generalizes the decomposition idea of Vertical-Horizontal (VH) decoding introduced by Connelly et al. in 2022. Like the VH decoder, the idea is to first run the peeling decoder and then post-process the resulting stopping set. The cluster decoder breaks the stopping set into a tree of clusters which can be solved sequentially via Gaussian Elimination (GE). By allowing clusters of unconstrained size, this decoder achieves maximum-likelihood (ML) performance with reduced complexity compared with full GE. When GE is applied only to clusters whose sizes are less than a constant, the performance is degraded but the complexity becomes linear in the block length. Our simulation results show that, for hypergraph product codes, the cluster decoder with constant cluster size achieves near-ML performance similar to VH decoding in the low-erasure-rate regime. For the general quantum LDPC codes we studied, the cluster decoder can be used to estimate the ML performance curve with reduced complexity over a wide range of erasure rates.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Intelligent transportation systems play a crucial role in modern traffic management and optimization, greatly improving traffic efficiency and safety. With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) technologies in the fields of image generation and natural language processing, generative AI has also played a crucial role in addressing key issues in intelligent transportation systems, such as data sparsity, difficulty in observing abnormal scenarios, and in modeling data uncertainty. In this review, we systematically investigate the relevant literature on generative AI techniques in addressing key issues in different types of tasks in intelligent transportation systems. First, we introduce the principles of different generative AI techniques, and their potential applications. Then, we classify tasks in intelligent transportation systems into four types: traffic perception, traffic prediction, traffic simulation, and traffic decision-making. We systematically illustrate how generative AI techniques addresses key issues in these four different types of tasks. Finally, we summarize the challenges faced in applying generative AI to intelligent transportation systems, and discuss future research directions based on different application scenarios.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Over the past few years, we have seen fundamental breakthroughs in core problems in machine learning, largely driven by advances in deep neural networks. At the same time, the amount of data collected in a wide array of scientific domains is dramatically increasing in both size and complexity. Taken together, this suggests many exciting opportunities for deep learning applications in scientific settings. But a significant challenge to this is simply knowing where to start. The sheer breadth and diversity of different deep learning techniques makes it difficult to determine what scientific problems might be most amenable to these methods, or which specific combination of methods might offer the most promising first approach. In this survey, we focus on addressing this central issue, providing an overview of many widely used deep learning models, spanning visual, sequential and graph structured data, associated tasks and different training methods, along with techniques to use deep learning with less data and better interpret these complex models --- two central considerations for many scientific use cases. We also include overviews of the full design process, implementation tips, and links to a plethora of tutorials, research summaries and open-sourced deep learning pipelines and pretrained models, developed by the community. We hope that this survey will help accelerate the use of deep learning across different scientific domains.