We consider the problem of navigating a mobile robot towards a target in an unknown environment that is endowed with visual sensors, where neither the robot nor the sensors have access to global positioning information and only use first-person-view images. In order to overcome the need for positioning, we train the sensors to encode and communicate relevant viewpoint information to the mobile robot, whose objective it is to use this information to navigate to the target along the shortest path. We overcome the challenge of enabling all the sensors (even those that cannot directly see the target) to predict the direction along the shortest path to the target by implementing a neighborhood-based feature aggregation module using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture. In our experiments, we first demonstrate generalizability to previously unseen environments with various sensor layouts. Our results show that by using communication between the sensors and the robot, we achieve up to 2.0x improvement in SPL (Success weighted by Path Length) when compared to a communication-free baseline. This is done without requiring a global map, positioning data, nor pre-calibration of the sensor network. Second, we perform a zero-shot transfer of our model from simulation to the real world. Laboratory experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in various cluttered environments. Finally, we showcase examples of successful navigation to the target while both the sensor network layout as well as obstacles are dynamically reconfigured as the robot navigates. We provide a video demo, the dataset, trained models, and source code. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcmr6RUgucw //github.com/proroklab/sensor-guided-visual-nav
Accurate deformable object manipulation (DOM) is essential for achieving autonomy in robotic surgery, where soft tissues are being displaced, stretched, and dissected. Many DOM methods can be powered by simulation, which ensures realistic deformation by adhering to the governing physical constraints and allowing for model prediction and control. However, real soft objects in robotic surgery, such as membranes and soft tissues, have complex, anisotropic physical parameters that a simulation with simple initialization from cameras may not fully capture. To use the simulation techniques in real surgical tasks, the "real-to-sim" gap needs to be properly compensated. In this work, we propose an online, adaptive parameter tuning approach for simulation optimization that (1) bridges the real-to-sim gap between a physics simulation and observations obtained 3D perceptions through estimating a residual mapping and (2) optimizes its stiffness parameters online. Our method ensures a small residual gap between the simulation and observation and improves the simulation's predictive capabilities. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is evaluated in the manipulation of both a thin-shell and volumetric tissue, representative of most tissue scenarios. This work contributes to the advancement of simulation-based deformable tissue manipulation and holds potential for improving surgical autonomy.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) relying only on image-level supervision is a promising approach to deal with the need for Segmentation networks, especially for generating a large number of pixel-wise masks in a given dataset. However, most state-of-the-art image-level WSSS techniques lack an understanding of the geometric features embedded in the images since the network cannot derive any object boundary information from just image-level labels. We define a boundary here as the line separating an object and its background, or two different objects. To address this drawback, we are proposing our novel ReFit framework, which deploys state-of-the-art class activation maps combined with various post-processing techniques in order to achieve fine-grained higher-accuracy segmentation masks. To achieve this, we investigate a state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation network that can be used to construct a boundary map, which enables ReFit to predict object locations with sharper boundaries. By applying our method to WSSS predictions, we achieved up to 10% improvement over the current state-of-the-art WSSS methods for medical imaging. The framework is open-source, to ensure that our results are reproducible, and accessible online at //github.com/bharathprabakaran/ReFit.
We present TELESIM, a modular and plug-and-play framework for direct teleoperation of a robotic arm using a digital twin as the interface between the user and the robotic system. We tested TELESIM by performing a user survey with 37 participants on two different robots using two different control modalities: a virtual reality controller and a finger mapping hardware controller using different grasping systems. Users were asked to teleoperate the robot to pick and place 3 cubes in a tower and to repeat this task as many times as possible in 10 minutes, with only 5 minutes of training beforehand. Our experimental results show that most users were able to succeed by building at least a tower of 3 cubes regardless of the control modality or robot used, demonstrating the user-friendliness of TELESIM.
In the past decade, there has been significant advancement in designing wearable neural interfaces for controlling neurorobotic systems, particularly bionic limbs. These interfaces function by decoding signals captured non-invasively from the skin's surface. Portable high-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) modules combined with deep learning decoding have attracted interest by achieving excellent gesture prediction and myoelectric control of prosthetic systems and neurorobots. However, factors like pixel-shape electrode size and unstable skin contact make HD-sEMG susceptible to pixel electrode drops. The sparse electrode-skin disconnections rooted in issues such as low adhesion, sweating, hair blockage, and skin stretch challenge the reliability and scalability of these modules as the perception unit for neurorobotic systems. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning model providing resiliency for HD-sEMG modules, which can be used in the wearable interfaces of neurorobots. The proposed 3D Dilated Efficient CapsNet model trains on an augmented input space to computationally `force' the network to learn channel dropout variations and thus learn robustness to channel dropout. The proposed framework maintained high performance under a sensor dropout reliability study conducted. Results show conventional models' performance significantly degrades with dropout and is recovered using the proposed architecture and the training paradigm.
Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems are increasingly used in voice bio-metrics for user authentication but are susceptible to logical and physical spoofing attacks, posing security risks. Existing research mainly tackles logical or physical attacks separately, leading to a gap in unified spoofing detection. Moreover, when existing systems attempt to handle both types of attacks, they often exhibit significant disparities in the Equal Error Rate (EER). To bridge this gap, we present a Parallel Stacked Aggregation Network that processes raw audio. Our approach employs a split-transform-aggregation technique, dividing utterances into convolved representations, applying transformations, and aggregating the results to identify logical (LA) and physical (PA) spoofing attacks. Evaluation of the ASVspoof-2019 and VSDC datasets shows the effectiveness of the proposed system. It outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, displaying reduced EER disparities and superior performance in detecting spoofing attacks. This highlights the proposed method's generalizability and superiority. In a world increasingly reliant on voice-based security, our unified spoofing detection system provides a robust defense against a spectrum of voice spoofing attacks, safeguarding ASVs and user data effectively.
New web technologies have enabled the deployment of powerful GPU-based computational pipelines that run entirely in the web browser, opening a new frontier for accessible scientific visualization applications. However, these new capabilities do not address the memory constraints of lightweight end-user devices encountered when attempting to visualize the massive data sets produced by today's simulations and data acquisition systems. In this paper, we propose a novel implicit isosurface rendering algorithm for interactive visualization of massive volumes within a small memory footprint. We achieve this by progressively traversing a wavefront of rays through the volume and decompressing blocks of the data on-demand to perform implicit ray-isosurface intersections. The progressively rendered surface is displayed after each pass to improve interactivity. Furthermore, to accelerate rendering and increase GPU utilization, we introduce speculative ray-block intersection into our algorithm, where additional blocks are traversed and intersected speculatively along rays as other rays terminate to exploit additional parallelism in the workload. Our entire pipeline is run in parallel on the GPU to leverage the parallel computing power that is available even on lightweight end-user devices. We compare our algorithm to the state of the art in low-overhead isosurface extraction and demonstrate that it achieves 1.7x-5.7x reductions in memory overhead and up to 8.4x reductions in data decompressed.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
With the advent of 5G commercialization, the need for more reliable, faster, and intelligent telecommunication systems are envisaged for the next generation beyond 5G (B5G) radio access technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are not just immensely popular in the service layer applications but also have been proposed as essential enablers in many aspects of B5G networks, from IoT devices and edge computing to cloud-based infrastructures. However, most of the existing surveys in B5G security focus on the performance of AI/ML models and their accuracy, but they often overlook the accountability and trustworthiness of the models' decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) methods are promising techniques that would allow system developers to identify the internal workings of AI/ML black-box models. The goal of using XAI in the security domain of B5G is to allow the decision-making processes of the security of systems to be transparent and comprehensible to stakeholders making the systems accountable for automated actions. In every facet of the forthcoming B5G era, including B5G technologies such as RAN, zero-touch network management, E2E slicing, this survey emphasizes the role of XAI in them and the use cases that the general users would ultimately enjoy. Furthermore, we presented the lessons learned from recent efforts and future research directions on top of the currently conducted projects involving XAI.
Seeking the equivalent entities among multi-source Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is the pivotal step to KGs integration, also known as \emph{entity alignment} (EA). However, most existing EA methods are inefficient and poor in scalability. A recent summary points out that some of them even require several days to deal with a dataset containing 200,000 nodes (DWY100K). We believe over-complex graph encoder and inefficient negative sampling strategy are the two main reasons. In this paper, we propose a novel KG encoder -- Dual Attention Matching Network (Dual-AMN), which not only models both intra-graph and cross-graph information smartly, but also greatly reduces computational complexity. Furthermore, we propose the Normalized Hard Sample Mining Loss to smoothly select hard negative samples with reduced loss shift. The experimental results on widely used public datasets indicate that our method achieves both high accuracy and high efficiency. On DWY100K, the whole running process of our method could be finished in 1,100 seconds, at least 10* faster than previous work. The performances of our method also outperform previous works across all datasets, where Hits@1 and MRR have been improved from 6% to 13%.
Automatic image captioning has recently approached human-level performance due to the latest advances in computer vision and natural language understanding. However, most of the current models can only generate plain factual descriptions about the content of a given image. However, for human beings, image caption writing is quite flexible and diverse, where additional language dimensions, such as emotion, humor and language styles, are often incorporated to produce diverse, emotional, or appealing captions. In particular, we are interested in generating sentiment-conveying image descriptions, which has received little attention. The main challenge is how to effectively inject sentiments into the generated captions without altering the semantic matching between the visual content and the generated descriptions. In this work, we propose two different models, which employ different schemes for injecting sentiments into image captions. Compared with the few existing approaches, the proposed models are much simpler and yet more effective. The experimental results show that our model outperform the state-of-the-art models in generating sentimental (i.e., sentiment-bearing) image captions. In addition, we can also easily manipulate the model by assigning different sentiments to the testing image to generate captions with the corresponding sentiments.