Robot navigation requires an autonomy pipeline that is robust to environmental changes and effective in varying conditions. Teach and Repeat (T&R) navigation has shown high performance in autonomous repeated tasks under challenging circumstances, but research within T&R has predominantly focused on motion planning as opposed to motion control. In this paper, we propose a novel T&R system based on a robust motion control technique for a skid-steering mobile robot using sliding-mode control that effectively handles uncertainties that are particularly pronounced in the T&R task, where sensor noises, parametric uncertainties, and wheel-terrain interaction are common challenges. We first theoretically demonstrate that the proposed T&R system is globally stable and robust while considering the uncertainties of the closed-loop system. When deployed on a Clearpath Jackal robot, we then show the global stability of the proposed system in both indoor and outdoor environments covering different terrains, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of mean average trajectory error and stability in these challenging environments. This paper makes an important step towards long-term autonomous T&R navigation with ensured safety guarantees.
We investigate a class of recovery problems for which observations are a noisy combination of continuous and step functions. These problems can be seen as non-injective instances of non-linear ICA with direct applications to image decontamination for magnetic resonance imaging. Alternately, the problem can be viewed as clustering in the presence of structured (smooth) contaminant. We show that a global topological property (graph connectivity) interacts with a local property (the degree of smoothness of the continuous component) to determine conditions under which the components are identifiable. Additionally, a practical estimation algorithm is provided for the case when the contaminant lies in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space of continuous functions. Algorithm effectiveness is demonstrated through a series of simulations and real-world studies.
Mathematical understanding and reasoning are crucial tasks for assessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). However, existing benchmarks either require just a few steps of reasoning, or only contain a small amount of data in one specific topic, making it hard to analyse AI's behaviour with reference to different problems within a specific topic in detail. In this work, we propose Conic10K, a challenging math problem dataset on conic sections in Chinese senior high school education. Our dataset contains various problems with different reasoning depths, while only the knowledge from conic sections is required. Since the dataset only involves a narrow range of knowledge, it is easy to separately analyse the knowledge a model possesses and the reasoning ability it has. For each problem, we provide a high-quality formal representation, the reasoning steps, and the final solution. Experiments show that existing large language models, including GPT-4, exhibit weak performance on complex reasoning. We hope that our findings could inspire more advanced techniques for precise natural language understanding and reasoning. Our dataset and codes are available at //github.com/whyNLP/Conic10K.
Legged robots with high locomotive performance have been extensively studied, and various leg structures have been proposed. Especially, a leg structure that can achieve both continuous and high jumps is advantageous for moving around in a three-dimensional environment. In this study, we propose a parallel wire-driven leg structure, which has one DoF of linear motion and two DoFs of rotation and is controlled by six wires, as a structure that can achieve both continuous jumping and high jumping. The proposed structure can simultaneously achieve high controllability on each DoF, long acceleration distance and high power required for jumping. In order to verify the jumping performance of the parallel wire-driven leg structure, we have developed a parallel wire-driven monopedal robot, RAMIEL. RAMIEL is equipped with quasi-direct drive, high power wire winding mechanisms and a lightweight leg, and can achieve a maximum jumping height of 1.6 m and a maximum of seven continuous jumps.
Recent years have witnessed the resurgence of knowledge engineering which is featured by the fast growth of knowledge graphs. However, most of existing knowledge graphs are represented with pure symbols, which hurts the machine's capability to understand the real world. The multi-modalization of knowledge graphs is an inevitable key step towards the realization of human-level machine intelligence. The results of this endeavor are Multi-modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs). In this survey on MMKGs constructed by texts and images, we first give definitions of MMKGs, followed with the preliminaries on multi-modal tasks and techniques. We then systematically review the challenges, progresses and opportunities on the construction and application of MMKGs respectively, with detailed analyses of the strength and weakness of different solutions. We finalize this survey with open research problems relevant to MMKGs.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, such as quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a $ProbSparse$ Self-attention mechanism, which achieves $O(L \log L)$ in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can produce images of surprising complexity and realism, but are generally modeled to sample from a single latent source ignoring the explicit spatial interaction between multiple entities that could be present in a scene. Capturing such complex interactions between different objects in the world, including their relative scaling, spatial layout, occlusion, or viewpoint transformation is a challenging problem. In this work, we propose to model object composition in a GAN framework as a self-consistent composition-decomposition network. Our model is conditioned on the object images from their marginal distributions to generate a realistic image from their joint distribution by explicitly learning the possible interactions. We evaluate our model through qualitative experiments and user evaluations in both the scenarios when either paired or unpaired examples for the individual object images and the joint scenes are given during training. Our results reveal that the learned model captures potential interactions between the two object domains given as input to output new instances of composed scene at test time in a reasonable fashion.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.