Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise those inputs need to be -- by recognizing what the human wants (e.g., a fork) and assisting for that task (e.g., moving towards the fork). Prior research has largely focused on learning the human's task and providing meaningful assistance. But as the robot learns and assists, we also need to ensure that the human understands the robot's intent (e.g., does the human know the robot is reaching for a fork?). In this paper, we study the effects of communicating learned assistance from the robot back to the human operator. We do not focus on the specific interfaces used for communication. Instead, we develop experimental and theoretical models of a) how communication changes the way humans interact with assistive robot arms, and b) how robots can harness these changes to better align with the human's intent. We first conduct online and in-person user studies where participants operate robots that provide partial assistance, and we measure how the human's inputs change with and without communication. With communication, we find that humans are more likely to intervene when the robot incorrectly predicts their intent, and more likely to release control when the robot correctly understands their task. We then use these findings to modify an established robot learning algorithm so that the robot can correctly interpret the human's inputs when communication is present. Our results from a second in-person user study suggest that this combination of communication and learning outperforms assistive systems that isolate either learning or communication.
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Aggregated HPC resources have rigid allocation systems and programming models which struggle to adapt to diverse and changing workloads. Consequently, HPC systems fail to efficiently use the large pools of unused memory and increase the utilization of idle computing resources. Prior work attempted to increase the throughput and efficiency of supercomputing systems through workload co-location and resource disaggregation. However, these methods fall short of providing a solution that can be applied to existing systems without major hardware modifications and performance losses. In this paper, we improve the utilization of supercomputers by employing the new cloud paradigm of serverless computing. We show how serverless functions provide fine-grained access to the resources of batch-managed cluster nodes. We present an HPC-oriented Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) that satisfies the requirements of high-performance applications. We demonstrate a software resource disaggregation approach where placing functions on unallocated and underutilized nodes allows idle cores and accelerators to be utilized while retaining near-native performance.
The use of automatic short answer grading (ASAG) models may help alleviate the time burden of grading while encouraging educators to frequently incorporate open-ended items in their curriculum. However, current state-of-the-art ASAG models are large neural networks (NN) often described as "black box", providing no explanation for which characteristics of an input are important for the produced output. This inexplicable nature can be frustrating to teachers and students when trying to interpret, or learn from an automatically-generated grade. To create a powerful yet intelligible ASAG model, we experiment with a type of model called a Neural Additive Model that combines the performance of a NN with the explainability of an additive model. We use a Knowledge Integration (KI) framework from the learning sciences to guide feature engineering to create inputs that reflect whether a student includes certain ideas in their response. We hypothesize that indicating the inclusion (or exclusion) of predefined ideas as features will be sufficient for the NAM to have good predictive power and interpretability, as this may guide a human scorer using a KI rubric. We compare the performance of the NAM with another explainable model, logistic regression, using the same features, and to a non-explainable neural model, DeBERTa, that does not require feature engineering.
Ultrasound robots are increasingly used in medical diagnostics and early disease screening. However, current ultrasound robots lack the intelligence to understand human intentions and instructions, hindering autonomous ultrasound scanning. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Ultrasound Embodied Intelligence system that equips ultrasound robots with the large language model (LLM) and domain knowledge, thereby improving the efficiency of ultrasound robots. Specifically, we first design an ultrasound operation knowledge database to add expertise in ultrasound scanning to the LLM, enabling the LLM to perform precise motion planning. Furthermore, we devise a dynamic ultrasound scanning strategy based on a \textit{think-observe-execute} prompt engineering, allowing LLMs to dynamically adjust motion planning strategies during the scanning procedures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system significantly improves ultrasound scan efficiency and quality from verbal commands. This advancement in autonomous medical scanning technology contributes to non-invasive diagnostics and streamlined medical workflows.
Humans have exceptional tactile sensing capabilities, which they can leverage to solve challenging, partially observable tasks that cannot be solved from visual observation alone. Research in tactile sensing attempts to unlock this new input modality for robots. Lately, these sensors have become cheaper and, thus, widely available. At the same time, the question of how to integrate them into control loops is still an active area of research, with central challenges being partial observability and the contact-rich nature of manipulation tasks. In this study, we propose to use Reinforcement Learning to learn an end-to-end policy, mapping directly from tactile sensor readings to actions. Specifically, we use Dreamer-v3 on a challenging, partially observable robotic insertion task with a Franka Research 3, both in simulation and on a real system. For the real setup, we built a robotic platform capable of resetting itself fully autonomously, allowing for extensive training runs without human supervision. Our preliminary results indicate that Dreamer is capable of utilizing tactile inputs to solve robotic manipulation tasks in simulation and reality. Furthermore, we find that providing the robot with tactile feedback generally improves task performance, though, in our setup, we do not yet include other sensing modalities. In the future, we plan to utilize our platform to evaluate a wide range of other Reinforcement Learning algorithms on tactile tasks.
Traditional trajectory planning methods for autonomous vehicles have several limitations. For example, heuristic and explicit simple rules limit generalizability and hinder complex motions. These limitations can be addressed using reinforcement learning-based trajectory planning. However, reinforcement learning suffers from unstable learning and existing reinforcement learning-based trajectory planning methods do not consider the uncertainties. Thus, this paper, proposes a reinforcement learning-based trajectory planning method for autonomous vehicles. The proposed method includes an iterative reward prediction method that stabilizes the learning process, and an uncertainty propagation method that makes the reinforcement learning agent aware of uncertainties. The proposed method was evaluated using the CARLA simulator. Compared to the baseline methods, the proposed method reduced the collision rate by 60.17%, and increased the average reward by 30.82 times. A video of the proposed method is available at //www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfDbaeLfcN4.
Collaborative robots must effectively communicate their internal state to humans to enable a smooth interaction. Nonverbal communication is widely used to communicate information during human-robot interaction, however, such methods may also be misunderstood, leading to communication errors. In this work, we explore modulating the acoustic parameter values (pitch bend, beats per minute, beats per loop) of nonverbal auditory expressions to convey functional robot states (accomplished, progressing, stuck). We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on noisy human feedback to produce accurately interpreted nonverbal auditory expressions. The proposed approach was evaluated through a user study with 24 participants. The results demonstrate that: 1. Our proposed RL-based approach is able to learn suitable acoustic parameter values which improve the users' ability to correctly identify the state of the robot. 2. Algorithm initialization informed by previous user data can be used to significantly speed up the learning process. 3. The method used for algorithm initialization strongly influences whether participants converge to similar sounds for each robot state. 4. Modulation of pitch bend has the largest influence on user association between sounds and robotic states.
Information Extraction processes in handwritten documents tend to rely on obtaining an automatic transcription and performing Named Entity Recognition (NER) over such transcription. For this reason, in publicly available datasets, the performance of the systems is usually evaluated with metrics particular to each dataset. Moreover, most of the metrics employed are sensitive to reading order errors. Therefore, they do not reflect the expected final application of the system and introduce biases in more complex documents. In this paper, we propose and publicly release a set of reading order independent metrics tailored to Information Extraction evaluation in handwritten documents. In our experimentation, we perform an in-depth analysis of the behavior of the metrics to recommend what we consider to be the minimal set of metrics to evaluate a task correctly.
We introduce and study a new cooperative delivery problem inspired by drone-assisted package delivery. We consider a scenario where a drone, en route to deliver a package to a destination (a point on the plane), unexpectedly loses communication with its central command station. The command station cannot know whether the drone's system has wholly malfunctioned or merely experienced a communications failure. Consequently, a second, helper drone must be deployed to retrieve the package to ensure successful delivery. The central question of this study is to find the optimal trajectory for this second drone. We demonstrate that the optimal solution relies heavily on the relative spatial positioning of the command station, the destination point, and the last known location of the disconnected drone.
We introduce the task of human action anomaly detection (HAAD), which aims to identify anomalous motions in an unsupervised manner given only the pre-determined normal category of training action samples. Compared to prior human-related anomaly detection tasks which primarily focus on unusual events from videos, HAAD involves the learning of specific action labels to recognize semantically anomalous human behaviors. To address this task, we propose a normalizing flow (NF)-based detection framework where the sample likelihood is effectively leveraged to indicate anomalies. As action anomalies often occur in some specific body parts, in addition to the full-body action feature learning, we incorporate extra encoding streams into our framework for a finer modeling of body subsets. Our framework is thus multi-level to jointly discover global and local motion anomalies. Furthermore, to show awareness of the potentially jittery data during recording, we resort to discrete cosine transformation by converting the action samples from the temporal to the frequency domain to mitigate the issue of data instability. Extensive experimental results on two human action datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines formed by adapting state-of-the-art human activity AD approaches to our task of HAAD.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.
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