In this paper, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted generalized receive quadrature spatial modulation (RIS-GRQSM) is proposed to improve the spectral efficiency of RIS-aided quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) systems by utilizing the concept of generalized spatial modulation (GSM). That is, multiple antennas are activated at the receiver independently for both the real and imaginary parts. We propose a max-min optimization problem to adjust the phase shifts of all RIS elements to maximize the relevant signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) at all activated receive antennas. Using Lagrange duality, the non-convex optimization problem involving the phase shifts of all RIS elements reduces to a convex optimization involving a number of variables equal to the number of activated receive antennas. A successive greedy detector (GD) can be used at the receiver to detect the active antennas, which simplifies the detection process. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the benchmark schemes in terms of error rate performance, especially in systems with a larger number of receive antennas. In the special case where each receive antenna corresponds to a user and is activated, the RIS-GRQSM system becomes a multicast communication system. In this context, in contrast to existing phase shift optimization algorithms which exhibit an impractical level of complexity, our proposed solution offers the advantage of low complexity and practical feasibility of implementation.
This paper introduces a new type of soft continuum robot, called SCoReS, which is capable of self-controlling continuously its curvature at the segment level; in contrast to previous designs which either require external forces or machine elements, or whose variable curvature capabilities are discrete -- depending on the number of locking mechanisms and segments. The ability to have a variable curvature, whose control is continuous and independent from external factors, makes a soft continuum robot more adaptive in constrained environments, similar to what is observed in nature in the elephant's trunk or ostrich's neck for instance which exhibit multiple curvatures. To this end, our soft continuum robot enables reconfigurable variable curvatures utilizing a variable stiffness growing spine based on micro-particle granular jamming for the first time. We detail the design of the proposed robot, presenting its modeling through beam theory and FEA simulation -- which is validated through experiments. The robot's versatile bending profiles are then explored in experiments and an application to grasp fruits at different configurations is demonstrated.
This paper explores the integration of optimal transport (OT) theory with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). This integration uses OT to handle distributions and transportation problems to enhance the efficiency, coordination, and adaptability of MARL. There are five key areas where OT can impact MARL: (1) policy alignment, where OT's Wasserstein metric is used to align divergent agent strategies towards unified goals; (2) distributed resource management, employing OT to optimize resource allocation among agents; (3) addressing non-stationarity, using OT to adapt to dynamic environmental shifts; (4) scalable multi-agent learning, harnessing OT for decomposing large-scale learning objectives into manageable tasks; and (5) enhancing energy efficiency, applying OT principles to develop sustainable MARL systems. This paper articulates how the synergy between OT and MARL can address scalability issues, optimize resource distribution, align agent policies in cooperative environments, and ensure adaptability in dynamically changing conditions.
We introduce a new task -- language-driven video inpainting, which uses natural language instructions to guide the inpainting process. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional video inpainting methods that depend on manually labeled binary masks, a process often tedious and labor-intensive. We present the Remove Objects from Videos by Instructions (ROVI) dataset, containing 5,650 videos and 9,091 inpainting results, to support training and evaluation for this task. We also propose a novel diffusion-based language-driven video inpainting framework, the first end-to-end baseline for this task, integrating Multimodal Large Language Models to understand and execute complex language-based inpainting requests effectively. Our comprehensive results showcase the dataset's versatility and the model's effectiveness in various language-instructed inpainting scenarios. We will make datasets, code, and models publicly available.
This paper introduces an enormous dataset, HaGRID (HAnd Gesture Recognition Image Dataset), to build a hand gesture recognition (HGR) system concentrating on interaction with devices to manage them. That is why all 18 chosen gestures are endowed with the semiotic function and can be interpreted as a specific action. Although the gestures are static, they were picked up, especially for the ability to design several dynamic gestures. It allows the trained model to recognize not only static gestures such as "like" and "stop" but also "swipes" and "drag and drop" dynamic gestures. The HaGRID contains 554,800 images and bounding box annotations with gesture labels to solve hand detection and gesture classification tasks. The low variability in context and subjects of other datasets was the reason for creating the dataset without such limitations. Utilizing crowdsourcing platforms allowed us to collect samples recorded by 37,583 subjects in at least as many scenes with subject-to-camera distances from 0.5 to 4 meters in various natural light conditions. The influence of the diversity characteristics was assessed in ablation study experiments. Also, we demonstrate the HaGRID ability to be used for pretraining models in HGR tasks. The HaGRID and pretrained models are publicly available.
This paper introduces the batch-parallel Compressed Packed Memory Array (CPMA), a compressed, dynamic, ordered set data structure based on the Packed Memory Array (PMA). Traditionally, batch-parallel sets are built on pointer-based data structures such as trees because pointer-based structures enable fast parallel unions via pointer manipulation. When compared with cache-optimized trees, PMAs were slower to update but faster to scan. he batch-parallel CPMA overcomes this tradeoff between updates and scans by optimizing for cache-friendliness. On average, the CPMA achieves 3x faster batch-insert throughput and 4x faster range-query throughput compared with compressed PaC-trees, a state-of-the-art batch-parallel set library based on cache-optimized trees. We further evaluate the CPMA compared with compressed PaC-trees and Aspen, a state-of-the-art system, on a real-world application of dynamic-graph processing. The CPMA is on average 1.2x faster on a suite of graph algorithms and 2x faster on batch inserts when compared with compressed PaC-trees. Furthermore, the CPMA is on average 1.3x faster on graph algorithms and 2x faster on batch inserts compared with Aspen.
We propose GAN-Supervised Learning, a framework for learning discriminative models and their GAN-generated training data jointly end-to-end. We apply our framework to the dense visual alignment problem. Inspired by the classic Congealing method, our GANgealing algorithm trains a Spatial Transformer to map random samples from a GAN trained on unaligned data to a common, jointly-learned target mode. We show results on eight datasets, all of which demonstrate our method successfully aligns complex data and discovers dense correspondences. GANgealing significantly outperforms past self-supervised correspondence algorithms and performs on-par with (and sometimes exceeds) state-of-the-art supervised correspondence algorithms on several datasets -- without making use of any correspondence supervision or data augmentation and despite being trained exclusively on GAN-generated data. For precise correspondence, we improve upon state-of-the-art supervised methods by as much as $3\times$. We show applications of our method for augmented reality, image editing and automated pre-processing of image datasets for downstream GAN training.
Non-IID data present a tough challenge for federated learning. In this paper, we explore a novel idea of facilitating pairwise collaborations between clients with similar data. We propose FedAMP, a new method employing federated attentive message passing to facilitate similar clients to collaborate more. We establish the convergence of FedAMP for both convex and non-convex models, and propose a heuristic method to further improve the performance of FedAMP when clients adopt deep neural networks as personalized models. Our extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as useful resources for various natural language processing applications. Previous KG completion approaches require a large number of training instances (i.e., head-tail entity pairs) for every relation. The real case is that for most of the relations, very few entity pairs are available. Existing work of one-shot learning limits method generalizability for few-shot scenarios and does not fully use the supervisory information; however, few-shot KG completion has not been well studied yet. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot relation learning model (FSRL) that aims at discovering facts of new relations with few-shot references. FSRL can effectively capture knowledge from heterogeneous graph structure, aggregate representations of few-shot references, and match similar entity pairs of reference set for every relation. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that FSRL outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.