Formation flight has a vast potential for aerial robot swarms in various applications. However, existing methods lack the capability to achieve fully autonomous large-scale formation flight in dense environments. To bridge the gap, we present a complete formation flight system that effectively integrates real-world constraints into aerial formation navigation. This paper proposes a differentiable graph-based metric to quantify the overall similarity error between formations. This metric is invariant to rotation, translation, and scaling, providing more freedom for formation coordination. We design a distributed trajectory optimization framework that considers formation similarity, obstacle avoidance, and dynamic feasibility. The optimization is decoupled to make large-scale formation flights computationally feasible. To improve the elasticity of formation navigation in highly constrained scenes, we present a swarm reorganization method that adaptively adjusts the formation parameters and task assignments by generating local navigation goals. A novel swarm agreement strategy called global-remap-local-replan and a formation-level path planner is proposed in this work to coordinate the global planning and local trajectory optimizations. To validate the proposed method, we design comprehensive benchmarks and simulations with other cutting-edge works in terms of adaptability, predictability, elasticity, resilience, and efficiency. Finally, integrated with palm-sized swarm platforms with onboard computers and sensors, the proposed method demonstrates its efficiency and robustness by achieving the largest scale formation flight in dense outdoor environments.
IC3 is a famous bit-level framework for safety verification. By incorporating datapath abstraction, a notable enhancement in the efficiency of hardware verification can be achieved. However, datapath abstraction entails a coarse level of abstraction where all datapath operations are approximated as uninterpreted functions. This level of abstraction, albeit useful, can lead to an increased computational burden during the verification process as it necessitates extensive exploration of redundant abstract state space. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called datapath propagation. Our method involves leveraging concrete constant values to iteratively compute the outcomes of relevant datapath operations and their associated uninterpreted functions. Meanwhile, we generate potentially useful datapath propagation lemmas in abstract state space and tighten the datapath abstraction. With this technique, the abstract state space can be reduced, and the verification efficiency is significantly improved. We implemented the proposed approach and conducted extensive experiments. The results show promising improvements of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art verifiers.
Joint intent detection and slot filling, which is also termed as joint NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is invaluable for smart voice assistants. Recent advancements in this area have been heavily focusing on improving accuracy using various techniques. Explainability is undoubtedly an important aspect for deep learning-based models including joint NLU models. Without explainability, their decisions are opaque to the outside world and hence, have tendency to lack user trust. Therefore to bridge this gap, we transform the full joint NLU model to be `inherently' explainable at granular levels without compromising on accuracy. Further, as we enable the full joint NLU model explainable, we show that our extension can be successfully used in other general classification tasks. We demonstrate this using sentiment analysis and named entity recognition.
This work presents an easy-to-use regularizer for GAN training, which helps explicitly link some axes of the latent space to a set of pixels in the synthesized image. Establishing such a connection facilitates a more convenient local control of GAN generation, where users can alter the image content only within a spatial area simply by partially resampling the latent code. Experimental results confirm four appealing properties of our regularizer, which we call LinkGAN. (1) The latent-pixel linkage is applicable to either a fixed region (\textit{i.e.}, same for all instances) or a particular semantic category (i.e., varying across instances), like the sky. (2) Two or multiple regions can be independently linked to different latent axes, which further supports joint control. (3) Our regularizer can improve the spatial controllability of both 2D and 3D-aware GAN models, barely sacrificing the synthesis performance. (4) The models trained with our regularizer are compatible with GAN inversion techniques and maintain editability on real images.
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the potential of moving over vertically challenging terrain (e.g., rocky outcroppings, rugged boulders, and fallen tree trunks), invalidate both assumptions. Navigating off-road vehicle chassis with long suspension travel and low tire pressure in places where the boundary between obstacles and free spaces is blurry requires precise 3D modeling of the interaction between the chassis and the terrain, which is complicated by suspension and tire deformation, varying tire-terrain friction, vehicle weight distribution and momentum, etc. In this paper, we present a learning approach to model wheeled mobility, i.e., in terms of vehicle-terrain forward dynamics, and plan feasible, stable, and efficient motion to drive over vertically challenging terrain without rolling over or getting stuck. We present physical experiments on two wheeled robots and show that planning using our learned model can achieve up to 60% improvement in navigation success rate and 46% reduction in unstable chassis roll and pitch angles.
In various applications, such as robotic navigation and remote visual assistance, expanding the field of view (FOV) of the camera proves beneficial for enhancing environmental perception. Unlike image outpainting techniques aimed solely at generating aesthetically pleasing visuals, these applications demand an extended view that faithfully represents the scene. To achieve this, we formulate a new problem of faithful FOV extrapolation that utilizes a set of pre-captured images as prior knowledge of the scene. To address this problem, we present a simple yet effective solution called NeRF-Enhanced Outpainting (NEO) that uses extended-FOV images generated through NeRF to train a scene-specific image outpainting model. To assess the performance of NEO, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on three photorealistic datasets and one real-world dataset. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets showcase the robustness and potential of our method in addressing this challenge. We believe our work lays a strong foundation for future exploration within the research community.
A vast number of applications for legged robots entail tasks in complex, dynamic environments. But these environments put legged robots at high risk for limb damage. This paper presents an empirical study of fault tolerant dynamic gaits designed for a quadrupedal robot suffering from a single, known "missing" limb. Preliminary data suggests that the featured gait controller successfully anchors a previously developed planar monopedal hopping template in the three-legged spatial machine. This compositional approach offers a useful and generalizable guide to the development of a wider range of tripedal recovery gaits for damaged quadrupedal machines.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a crucial component of situational awareness in military defense applications. With the growing use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs), MOT methods for aerial surveillance is in high demand. Application of MOT in UAS presents specific challenges such as moving sensor, changing zoom levels, dynamic background, illumination changes, obscurations and small objects. In this work, we present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations. We propose a kinematic prediction model, called Deep Extended Kalman Filter (DeepEKF), in which a sequence-to-sequence architecture is used to predict entity trajectories in latent space. DeepEKF utilizes a learned image embedding along with an attention mechanism trained to weight the importance of areas in an image to predict future states. For the visual scoring, we experiment with different similarity measures to calculate distance based on entity appearances, including a convolutional neural network (CNN) encoder, pre-trained using Siamese networks. In initial evaluation experiments, we show that our method, combining scoring structure of the kinematic and visual models within a MHT framework, has improved performance especially in edge cases where entity motion is unpredictable, or the data presents frames with significant gaps.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.