To achieve safe legged locomotion, it is important to generate motion in real-time considering various constraints in robots and environments. In this study, we propose a lightweight real-time perspective motion control system for the newly developed six-wheeled-telescopic-legged robot, Tachyon 3. In the proposed method, analytically smoothed constraints including Smooth Separating Axis Theorem (Smooth SAT) as a novel higher order differentiable collision detection for 3D shapes is applied to the Control Barrier Function (CBF). The proposed system integrating the CBF achieves online motion generation in a short control cycle of 1 ms that satisfies joint limitations, environmental collision avoidance and safe convex foothold constraints. The efficiency of Smooth SAT is shown from the collision detection time of 1 us or less and the CBF constraint computation time for Tachyon3 of several us. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed system is verified through the stair-climbing motion, integrating online recognition in a simulation and a real machine.
The deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has faced hurdles due to the dominance of rare but critical corner cases within the long-tail distribution of driving scenarios, which negatively affects their overall performance. To address this challenge, adversarial generation methods have emerged as a class of efficient approaches to synthesize safety-critical scenarios for AV testing. However, these generated scenarios are often underutilized for AV training, resulting in the potential for continual AV policy improvement remaining untapped, along with a deficiency in the closed-loop design needed to achieve it. Therefore, we tailor the Stackelberg Driver Model (SDM) to accurately characterize the hierarchical nature of vehicle interaction dynamics, facilitating iterative improvement by engaging background vehicles (BVs) and AV in a sequential game-like interaction paradigm. With AV acting as the leader and BVs as followers, this leader-follower modeling ensures that AV would consistently refine its policy, always taking into account the additional information that BVs play the best response to challenge AV. Extensive experiments have shown that our algorithm exhibits superior performance compared to several baselines especially in higher dimensional scenarios, leading to substantial advancements in AV capabilities while continually generating progressively challenging scenarios. Code is available at //github.com/BlueCat-de/SDM.
Electronically tunable metasurfaces, or Intelligent Reflective Surfaces (IRSs), are a popular technology for achieving high spectral efficiency in modern wireless systems by shaping channels using a multitude of tunable passive reflective elements. Capitalizing on key practical limitations of IRS-aided beamforming pertaining to system modeling and channel sensing/estimation, we propose a novel, fully data-driven Zeroth-order Stochastic Gradient Ascent (ZoSGA) algorithm for general two-stage (i.e., short/long-term), fully-passive IRS-aided stochastic utility maximization. ZoSGA learns long-term optimal IRS beamformers jointly with short-term optimal precoders (e.g., WMMSE-based) via minimal zeroth-order reinforcement and in a strictly model-free fashion, relying solely on the \textit{effective} compound channels observed at the terminals, while being independent of channel models or network/IRS configurations. Another remarkable feature of ZoSGA is being amenable to analysis, enabling us to establish a state-of-the-art (SOTA) convergence rate of the order of $\boldsymbol{O}(\sqrt{S}\epsilon^{-4})$ under minimal assumptions, where $S$ is the total number of IRS elements, and $\epsilon$ is a desired suboptimality target. Our numerical results on a standard MISO downlink IRS-aided sumrate maximization setting establish SOTA empirical behavior of ZoSGA as well, consistently and substantially outperforming standard fully model-based baselines. Lastly, we demonstrate that ZoSGA can in fact operate \textit{in the field}, by directly optimizing the capacitances of a varactor-based electromagnetic IRS model (unknown to ZoSGA) on a multiple user/IRS, compute-heavy network setting, with essentially no computational overheads or performance degradation.
Outflow boundaries play an important role in multiphase fluid dynamics simulations that involve transition between liquid and vapor phases. These flows are dominated by low Weber numbers and a sharp jump in pressure, velocity, and temperature. Inadequate treatment of these jumps at the outlet generates undesirable fluid disturbances that propagate upstream and lead to instabilities within the computational domain. To mitigate these disturbances, we introduce a forcing term that can be applied to incompressible Navier-Stokes equations to enforce stability in the numerical solution. The forcing term acts as a damping mechanism to control vortices that are generated by droplet/bubbles in multiphase flows, and is designed to be a general formulation that can be coupled with a fixed pressure outflow boundary condition to simulate a variety of multiphase flow problems. We demonstrate its applicability to simulate pool and flow boiling problems, where bubble-induced vortices during evaporation and condensation present a challenge at the outflow. Validation and verification cases are chosen to quantify accuracy and stability of the proposed method in comparison to established benchmarks and reference solutions, along with detailed performance analysis for three-dimensional simulations on leadership supercomputing platforms. Computational experiments are performed using Flash-X, which is a composable open-source software instrument designed for multiscale fluid dynamics simulations on heterogeneous architectures.
Melody harmonization, which involves generating a chord progression that complements a user-provided melody, continues to pose a significant challenge. A chord progression must not only be in harmony with the melody, but also interdependent on its rhythmic pattern. While previous neural network-based systems have been successful in producing chord progressions for given melodies, they have not adequately addressed controllable melody harmonization, nor have they focused on generating harmonic rhythms with flexibility in the rates or patterns of chord changes. This paper presents AutoHarmonizer, a novel system for harmonic density-controllable melody harmonization with such a flexible harmonic rhythm. AutoHarmonizer is equipped with an extensive vocabulary of 1,462 chord types and can generate chord progressions that vary in harmonic density for a given melody. Experimental results indicate that the AutoHarmonizer-generated chord progressions exhibit a diverse range of harmonic rhythms and that the system's controllable harmonic density is effective.
Traditional partial differential equation (PDE) solvers can be computationally expensive, which motivates the development of faster methods, such as reduced-order-models (ROMs). We present GPLaSDI, a hybrid deep-learning and Bayesian ROM. GPLaSDI trains an autoencoder on full-order-model (FOM) data and simultaneously learns simpler equations governing the latent space. These equations are interpolated with Gaussian Processes, allowing for uncertainty quantification and active learning, even with limited access to the FOM solver. Our framework is able to achieve up to 100,000 times speed-up and less than 7% relative error on fluid mechanics problems.
As discussions around 6G begin, it is important to carefully quantify the spectral efficiency gains actually realized by deployed 5G networks as compared to 4G through various enhancements such as higher modulation, beamforming, and MIMO. This will inform the design of future cellular systems, especially in the mid-bands, which provide a good balance between bandwidth and propagation. Similar to 4G, 5G also utilizes low-band (<1 GHz) and mid-band spectrum (1 to 6 GHz), and hence comparing the performance of 4G and 5G in these bands will provide insights into how further improvements can be attained. In this work, we address a crucial question: is the performance boost in 5G compared to 4G primarily a result of increased bandwidth, or do the other enhancements play significant roles, and if so, under what circumstances? Hence, we conduct city-wide measurements of 4G and 5G cellular networks deployed in low- and mid-bands in Chicago and Minneapolis, and carefully quantify the contributions of different aspects of 5G advancements to its improved throughput performance. Our analyses show that (i) compared to 4G, the throughput improvement in 5G today is mainly influenced by the wider channel bandwidth, both from single channels and channel aggregation, (ii) in addition to wider channels, improved 5G throughput requires better signal conditions, which can be delivered by denser deployment and/or use of beamforming in mid-bands, (iii) the channel rank in real-world environments rarely supports the full 4 layers of 4x4 MIMO and (iv) advanced features such as MU-MIMO and higher order modulation such as 1024-QAM have yet to be widely deployed. These observations and conclusions lead one to consider designing the next generation of cellular systems to have wider channels, perhaps with improved channel aggregation, dense deployment with more beams.
Human activity recognition (HAR) is a key challenge in pervasive computing and its solutions have been presented based on various disciplines. Specifically, for HAR in a smart space without privacy and accessibility issues, data streams generated by deployed pervasive sensors are leveraged. In this paper, we focus on a group activity by which a group of users perform a collaborative task without user identification and propose an efficient group activity recognition scheme which extracts causality patterns from pervasive sensor event sequences generated by a group of users to support as good recognition accuracy as the state-of-the-art graphical model. To filter out irrelevant noise events from a given data stream, a set of rules is leveraged to highlight causally related events. Then, a pattern-tree algorithm extracts frequent causal patterns by means of a growing tree structure. Based on the extracted patterns, a weighted sum-based pattern matching algorithm computes the likelihoods of stored group activities to the given test event sequence by means of matched event pattern counts for group activity recognition. We evaluate the proposed scheme using the data collected from our testbed and CASAS datasets where users perform their tasks on a daily basis and validate its effectiveness in a real environment. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme performs higher recognition accuracy and with a small amount of runtime overhead than the existing schemes.
Musculoskeletal diseases and cognitive impairments in patients lead to difficulties in movement as well as negative effects on their psychological health. Clinical gait analysis, a vital tool for early diagnosis and treatment, traditionally relies on expensive optical motion capture systems. Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have opened the door to more accessible and cost-effective alternatives. This paper introduces a novel spatio-temporal Transformer network to estimate critical gait parameters from RGB videos captured by a single-view camera. Empirical evaluations on a public dataset of cerebral palsy patients indicate that the proposed framework surpasses current state-of-the-art approaches and show significant improvements in predicting general gait parameters (including Walking Speed, Gait Deviation Index - GDI, and Knee Flexion Angle at Maximum Extension), while utilizing fewer parameters and alleviating the need for manual feature extraction.
With the rapid development of facial forgery techniques, forgery detection has attracted more and more attention due to security concerns. Existing approaches attempt to use frequency information to mine subtle artifacts under high-quality forged faces. However, the exploitation of frequency information is coarse-grained, and more importantly, their vanilla learning process struggles to extract fine-grained forgery traces. To address this issue, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework to exploit both the RGB and fine-grained frequency clues. Specifically, we perform a fine-grained decomposition of RGB images to completely decouple the real and fake traces in the frequency space. Subsequently, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework based on a two-branch network, combined with self-enhancement and mutual-enhancement modules. The self-enhancement module captures the traces in different input spaces based on spatial noise enhancement and channel attention. The Mutual-enhancement module concurrently enhances RGB and frequency features by communicating in the shared spatial dimension. The progressive enhancement process facilitates the learning of discriminative features with fine-grained face forgery clues. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art face forgery detection methods.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.