Catching high-speed targets in the flight is a complex and typical highly dynamic task. In this paper, we propose Catch Planner, a planning-with-decision scheme for catching. For sequential decision making, we propose a policy search method based on deep reinforcement learning. In order to make catching adaptive and flexible, we propose a trajectory optimization method to jointly optimize the highly coupled catching time and terminal state while considering the dynamic feasibility and safety. We also propose a flexible constraint transcription method to catch targets at any reasonable attitude and terminal position bias. The proposed Catch Planner provides a new paradigm for the combination of learning and planning and is integrated on the quadrotor designed by ourselves, which runs at 100hz on the onboard computer. Extensive experiments are carried out in real and simulated scenes to verify the robustness of the proposed method and its expansibility when facing a variety of high-speed flying targets.
In this paper, we propose a simultaneous transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) and energy buffer aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, which consists of a STAR-RIS, an access point (AP), and reflection users and transmission users with energy buffers. In the proposed system, the multi-antenna AP can transmit information and energy to several single-antenna reflection and transmission users simultaneously in a NOMA fashion, where the power transfer and information transmission states of the users are modeled using Markov chains. The reflection and transmission users harvest and store the energy in energy buffers as additional power supplies. The power outage probability, information outage probability, sum throughput, and joint outage probability closed-form expressions of the proposed system are derived over Nakagami-m fading channels, which are validated via simulations. Results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves better performance in comparison to the STAR-RIS aided MISO SWIPT-NOMA buffer-less, conventional RIS and energy buffer aided MISO SWIPT-NOMA, and STAR-RIS and energy buffer aided MISO SWIPT-time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems. Furthermore, a particle swarm optimization based power allocation (PSO-PA) algorithm is designed to maximize the sum throughput with a constraint on the joint outage probability. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed PSO-PA algorithm can achieve an improved sum throughput performance of the proposed system.
Model editing techniques modify a minor proportion of knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) at a relatively low cost, which have demonstrated notable success. Existing methods assume Transformer Layer (TL) hidden states are values of key-value memories of the Feed-Forward Network (FFN). They usually optimize the TL hidden states to memorize target knowledge and use it to update the weights of the FFN in LLMs. However, the information flow of TL hidden states comes from three parts: Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), FFN, and residual connections. Existing methods neglect the fact that the TL hidden states contains information not specifically required for FFN. Consequently, the performance of model editing decreases. To achieve more precise model editing, we analyze hidden states of MHSA and FFN, finding that MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns. This implies that MHSA weights do not require updating when new knowledge is introduced. Based on above findings, we introduce PMET, which simultaneously optimizes Transformer Component (TC, namely MHSA and FFN) hidden states, while only using the optimized TC hidden states of FFN to precisely update FFN weights. Our experiments demonstrate that PMET exhibits state-of-the-art performance on both the \textsc{counterfact} and zsRE datasets. Our ablation experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our enhancements, further reinforcing the finding that the MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns and indicating its storage of a small amount of factual knowledge. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/xpq-tech/PMET.git}.
Robots have been successfully used to perform tasks with high precision. In real-world environments with sparse rewards and multiple goals, learning is still a major challenge and Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms fail to learn good policies. Training in simulation environments and then fine-tuning in the real world is a common approach. However, adapting to the real-world setting is a challenge. In this paper, we present a method named Ready for Production Hierarchical RL (ReProHRL) that divides tasks with hierarchical multi-goal navigation guided by reinforcement learning. We also use object detectors as a pre-processing step to learn multi-goal navigation and transfer it to the real world. Empirical results show that the proposed ReProHRL method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in simulation and real-world environments in terms of both training time and performance. Although both methods achieve a 100% success rate in a simple environment for single goal-based navigation, in a more complex environment and multi-goal setting, the proposed method outperforms the baseline by 18% and 5%, respectively. For the real-world implementation and proof of concept demonstration, we deploy the proposed method on a nano-drone named Crazyflie with a front camera to perform multi-goal navigation experiments.
In this paper, we contribute a novel and extensive dataset for speaker verification, which contains noisy 38k identities/1.45M utterances (VoxBlink) and relatively cleaned 18k identities/1.02M (VoxBlink-Clean) utterances for training. Firstly, we collect a 60K+ users' list as well as their avatar and download their SHORT videos on the YouTube. Then, an automatically pipeline is devised to extract target user's speech segments and videos, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the VoxBlink dataset is the largest speaker recognition dataset. Secondly, we develop a series of experiments based on VoxBlink-clean together with VoxCeleb2. Our findings highlight a notable improvement in performance, ranging from 15% to 30%, across different backbone architectures, upon integrating our dataset for training. The dataset will be released SOON~.
This letter presents an accurate and robust Lidar Inertial Odometry framework. We fuse LiDAR scans with IMU data using a tightly-coupled iterative error state Kalman filter for robust and fast localization. To achieve robust correspondence matching, we represent the points as a set of Gaussian distributions and evaluate the divergence in variance for outlier rejection. Based on the fitted distributions, a new residual metric is proposed for the filter-based Lidar inertial odometry, which demonstrates an improvement from merely quantifying distance to incorporating variance disparity, further enriching the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the residual metric. Due to the strategic design of the residual metric, we propose a simple yet effective voxel-solely mapping scheme, which only necessities the maintenance of one centroid and one covariance matrix for each voxel. Experiments on different datasets demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our framework for various data inputs and environments. To the benefit of the robotics society, we open source the code at //github.com/Ji1Xingyu/lio_gvm.
This paper investigates the performance of the Large Language Models (LLMs) ChatGPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in solving introductory programming tasks. Based on the performance, implications for didactic scenarios and assessment formats utilizing LLMs are derived. For the analysis, 72 Python tasks for novice programmers were selected from the free site CodingBat. Full task descriptions were used as input to the LLMs, while the generated replies were evaluated using CodingBat's unit tests. In addition, the general availability of textual explanations and program code was analyzed. The results show high scores of 94.4 to 95.8% correct responses and reliable availability of textual explanations and program code, which opens new ways to incorporate LLMs into programming education and assessment.
In this paper, we introduce a two-level attention schema, Poolingformer, for long document modeling. Its first level uses a smaller sliding window pattern to aggregate information from neighbors. Its second level employs a larger window to increase receptive fields with pooling attention to reduce both computational cost and memory consumption. We first evaluate Poolingformer on two long sequence QA tasks: the monolingual NQ and the multilingual TyDi QA. Experimental results show that Poolingformer sits atop three official leaderboards measured by F1, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models by 1.9 points (79.8 vs. 77.9) on NQ long answer, 1.9 points (79.5 vs. 77.6) on TyDi QA passage answer, and 1.6 points (67.6 vs. 66.0) on TyDi QA minimal answer. We further evaluate Poolingformer on a long sequence summarization task. Experimental results on the arXiv benchmark continue to demonstrate its superior performance.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.