With the increasing demand for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles, several approaches for long-term robot navigation have been proposed. Among these techniques, ground segmentation and traversability estimation play important roles in perception and path planning, respectively. Even though these two techniques appear similar, their objectives are different. Ground segmentation divides data into ground and non-ground elements; thus, it is used as a preprocessing stage to extract objects of interest by rejecting ground points. In contrast, traversability estimation identifies and comprehends areas in which robots can move safely. Nevertheless, some researchers use these terms without clear distinction, leading to misunderstanding the two concepts. Therefore, in this study, we survey related literature and clearly distinguish ground and traversable regions considering four aspects: a) maneuverability of robot platforms, b) position of a robot in the surroundings, c) subset relation of negative obstacles, and d) subset relation of deformable objects.
Adaptive experimental design (AED) methods are increasingly being used in industry as a tool to boost testing throughput or reduce experimentation cost relative to traditional A/B/N testing methods. However, the behavior and guarantees of such methods are not well-understood beyond idealized stationary settings. This paper shares lessons learned regarding the challenges of naively using AED systems in industrial settings where non-stationarity is prevalent, while also providing perspectives on the proper objectives and system specifications in such settings. We developed an AED framework for counterfactual inference based on these experiences, and tested it in a commercial environment.
Recent advancements in robotics enable robots to accomplish complex assembly tasks. However, designing an assembly requires a non-trivial effort since a slight variation in the design could significantly affect the task feasibility. It is critical to ensure the physical feasibility of the assembly design so that the assembly task can be successfully executed. To address the challenge, this paper studies the physical stability of assembly structures, in particular, block stacking assembly, where people use cubic blocks to build 3D structures (e.g., Lego constructions). The paper proposes a new optimization formulation, which optimizes over force balancing equations, for inferring the structural stability of 3D block-stacking structures. The proposed stability analysis is tested and verified on hand-crafted Lego examples. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed stability analysis can correctly predict whether the structure is stable. In addition, it outperforms the existing methods since it can locate the weakest parts in the design, and more importantly, solve any given assembly structure. To further validate the proposed analysis formulation, we provide StableLego: a comprehensive dataset including more than 50k 3D objects with their Lego layouts. We test the proposed stability analysis and include the stability inference for each corresponding object in StableLego. Our code and the dataset are available at //github.com/intelligent-control-lab/StableLego.
Code generation models have increasingly become integral to aiding software development, offering assistance in tasks such as code completion, debugging, and code translation. Although current research has thoroughly examined the correctness of code produced by code generation models, a vital aspect, i.e., the efficiency of the generated code, has often been neglected. This paper presents EffiBench, a benchmark with 1,000 efficiency-critical coding problems for assessing the efficiency of code generated by code generation models. EffiBench contains a diverse set of LeetCode coding problems. Each problem is paired with an executable human-written canonical solution. With EffiBench, we empirically examine the capability of 21 Large Language Models (13 open-sourced and 8 closed-sourced) in generating efficient code. The results demonstrate that GPT-4-turbo generates the most efficient code, significantly outperforming Palm-2-chat-bison, Claude-instant-1, Gemini-pro, GPT-4, and GPT-3.5. Nevertheless, its code efficiency is still worse than the efficiency of human-written canonical solutions. In particular, the average and worst execution time of GPT-4-turbo generated code is 1.69 and 45.49 times that of the canonical solutions.
Anomaly detection is a critical challenge across various research domains, aiming to identify instances that deviate from normal data distributions. This paper explores the application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in fraud detection, comparing their advantages with traditional methods. GANs, a type of Artificial Neural Network (ANN), have shown promise in modeling complex data distributions, making them effective tools for anomaly detection. The paper systematically describes the principles of GANs and their derivative models, emphasizing their application in fraud detection across different datasets. And by building a collection of adversarial verification graphs, we will effectively prevent fraud caused by bots or automated systems and ensure that the users in the transaction are real. The objective of the experiment is to design and implement a fake face verification code and fraud detection system based on Generative Adversarial network (GANs) algorithm to enhance the security of the transaction process.The study demonstrates the potential of GANs in enhancing transaction security through deep learning techniques.
SMS phishing, also known as "smishing", is a growing threat that tricks users into disclosing private information or clicking into URLs with malicious content through fraudulent mobile text messages. In recent past, we have also observed a rapid advancement of conversational generative AI chatbot services (e.g., OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's BARD), which are powered by pre-trained large language models (LLMs). These AI chatbots certainly have a lot of utilities but it is not systematically understood how they can play a role in creating threats and attacks. In this paper, we propose AbuseGPT method to show how the existing generative AI-based chatbot services can be exploited by attackers in real world to create smishing texts and eventually lead to craftier smishing campaigns. To the best of our knowledge, there is no pre-existing work that evidently shows the impacts of these generative text-based models on creating SMS phishing. Thus, we believe this study is the first of its kind to shed light on this emerging cybersecurity threat. We have found strong empirical evidences to show that attackers can exploit ethical standards in the existing generative AI-based chatbot services by crafting prompt injection attacks to create newer smishing campaigns. We also discuss some future research directions and guidelines to protect the abuse of generative AI-based services and safeguard users from smishing attacks.
Foundations models are presented as generalists that often perform well over a myriad of tasks. Fine-tuning these models, even on limited data, provides an additional boost in task-specific performance but often at the cost of their wider generalization, an effect termed catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we analyze the relation between task difficulty in the CLIP model and the performance of several simple parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods through the lens of domain generalization and catastrophic forgetting. We provide evidence that the silhouette score of the zero-shot image and text embeddings is a better measure of task difficulty than the average cosine similarity of correct image/label embeddings, and discuss observable relationships between task difficulty, fine-tuning method, domain generalization, and catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, the averaged results across tasks and performance measures demonstrate that a simplified method that trains only a subset of attention weights, which we call A-CLIP, yields a balance between domain generalization and catastrophic forgetting.
Safe operation of multi-robot systems is critical, especially in communication-degraded environments such as underwater for seabed mapping, underground caves for navigation, and in extraterrestrial missions for assembly and construction. We address safety of networked autonomous systems where the information exchanged between robots incurs communication delays. We formalize a notion of distributed control barrier function (CBF) for multi-robot systems, a safety certificate amenable to a distributed implementation, which provides formal ground to using graph neural networks to learn safe distributed controllers. Further, we observe that learning a distributed controller ignoring delays can severely degrade safety. Our main contribution is a predictor-based framework to train a safe distributed controller under communication delays, where the current state of nearby robots is predicted from received data and age-of-information. Numerical experiments on multi-robot collision avoidance show that our predictor-based approach can significantly improve the safety of a learned distributed controller under communication delays
In research of manufacturing systems and autonomous robots, the term capability is used for a machine-interpretable specification of a system function. Approaches in this research area develop information models that capture all information relevant to interpret the requirements, effects and behavior of functions. These approaches are intended to overcome the heterogeneity resulting from the various types of processes and from the large number of different vendors. However, these models and associated methods do not offer solutions for automated process planning, i.e. finding a sequence of individual capabilities required to manufacture a certain product or to accomplish a mission using autonomous robots. Instead, this is a typical task for AI planning approaches, which unfortunately require a high effort to create the respective planning problem descriptions. In this paper, we present an approach that combines these two topics: Starting from a semantic capability model, an AI planning problem is automatically generated. The planning problem is encoded using Satisfiability Modulo Theories and uses an existing solver to find valid capability sequences including required parameter values. The approach also offers possibilities to integrate existing human expertise and to provide explanations for human operators in order to help understand planning decisions.
Recommender systems are important and powerful tools for various personalized services. Traditionally, these systems use data mining and machine learning techniques to make recommendations based on correlations found in the data. However, relying solely on correlation without considering the underlying causal mechanism may lead to various practical issues such as fairness, explainability, robustness, bias, echo chamber and controllability problems. Therefore, researchers in related area have begun incorporating causality into recommendation systems to address these issues. In this survey, we review the existing literature on causal inference in recommender systems. We discuss the fundamental concepts of both recommender systems and causal inference as well as their relationship, and review the existing work on causal methods for different problems in recommender systems. Finally, we discuss open problems and future directions in the field of causal inference for recommendations.
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.