Nature is often used to inspire solutions for complex engineering problems, but achieving its full potential is challenging due to difficulties in discovering relevant analogies and synthesizing from them. Here, we present an end-to-end system, BioSpark, that generates biological-analogical mechanisms and provides an interactive interface to comprehend and synthesize from them. BioSpark pipeline starts with a small seed set of mechanisms and expands it using an iteratively constructed taxonomic hierarchies, overcoming data sparsity in manual expert curation and limited conceptual diversity in automated analogy generation via LLMs. The interface helps designers with recognizing and understanding relevant analogs to design problems using four main interaction features. We evaluate the biological-analogical mechanism generation pipeline and showcase the value of BioSpark through case studies. We end with discussion and implications for future work in this area.
Despite impressive advancements in multimodal compositional reasoning approaches, they are still limited in their flexibility and efficiency by processing fixed modality inputs while updating a lot of model parameters. This paper tackles these critical challenges and proposes CREMA, an efficient and modular modality-fusion framework for injecting any new modality into video reasoning. We first augment multiple informative modalities (such as optical flow, 3D point cloud, audio) from given videos without extra human annotation by leveraging existing pre-trained models. Next, we introduce a query transformer with multiple parameter-efficient modules associated with each accessible modality. It projects diverse modality features to the LLM token embedding space, allowing the model to integrate different data types for response generation. Furthermore, we propose a fusion module designed to compress multimodal queries, maintaining computational efficiency in the LLM while combining additional modalities. We validate our method on video-3D, video-audio, and video-language reasoning tasks and achieve better/equivalent performance against strong multimodal LLMs, including BLIP-2, 3D-LLM, and SeViLA while using 96% fewer trainable parameters. We provide extensive analyses of CREMA, including the impact of each modality on reasoning domains, the design of the fusion module, and example visualizations.
Many-query computations, in which a computational model for an engineering system must be evaluated many times, are crucial in design and control. For systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), typical high-fidelity numerical models are high-dimensional and too computationally expensive for the many-query setting. Thus, efficient surrogate models are required to enable low-cost computations in design and control. This work presents a physics-preserving reduced model learning approach that targets PDEs whose quadratic operators preserve energy, such as those arising in governing equations in many fluids problems. The approach is based on the Operator Inference method, which fits reduced model operators to state snapshot and time derivative data in a least-squares sense. However, Operator Inference does not generally learn a reduced quadratic operator with the energy-preserving property of the original PDE. Thus, we propose a new energy-preserving Operator Inference (EP-OpInf) approach, which imposes this structure on the learned reduced model via constrained optimization. Numerical results using the viscous Burgers' and Kuramoto-Sivashinksy equation (KSE) demonstrate that EP-OpInf learns efficient and accurate reduced models that retain this energy-preserving structure.
One of the challenges in robotics is to enable robotic units with the reasoning capability that would be robust enough to execute complex tasks in dynamic environments. Recent advances in LLMs have positioned them as go-to tools for simple reasoning tasks, motivating the pioneering work of Liang et al. [35] that uses an LLM to translate natural language commands into low-level static execution plans for robotic units. Using LLMs inside robotics systems brings their generalization to a new level, enabling zero-shot generalization to new tasks. This paper extends this prior work to dynamic environments. We propose InCoRo, a system that uses a classical robotic feedback loop composed of an LLM controller, a scene understanding unit, and a robot. Our system continuously analyzes the state of the environment and provides adapted execution commands, enabling the robot to adjust to changing environmental conditions and correcting for controller errors. Our system does not require any iterative optimization to learn to accomplish a task as it leverages in-context learning with an off-the-shelf LLM model. Through an extensive validation process involving two standardized industrial robotic units -- SCARA and DELTA types -- we contribute knowledge about these robots, not popular in the community, thereby enriching it. We highlight the generalization capabilities of our system and show that (1) in-context learning in combination with the current state-of-the-art LLMs is an effective way to implement a robotic controller; (2) in static environments, InCoRo surpasses the prior art in terms of the success rate; (3) in dynamic environments, we establish new state-of-the-art for the SCARA and DELTA units, respectively. This research paves the way towards building reliable, efficient, intelligent autonomous systems that adapt to dynamic environments.
Topology optimization is a critical task in engineering design, where the goal is to optimally distribute material in a given space for maximum performance. We introduce Neural Implicit Topology Optimization (NITO), a novel approach to accelerate topology optimization problems using deep learning. NITO stands out as one of the first frameworks to offer a resolution-free and domain-agnostic solution in deep learning-based topology optimization. NITO synthesizes structures with up to seven times better structural efficiency compared to SOTA diffusion models and does so in a tenth of the time. In the NITO framework, we introduce a novel method, the Boundary Point Order-Invariant MLP (BPOM), to represent boundary conditions in a sparse and domain-agnostic manner, moving away from expensive simulation-based approaches. Crucially, NITO circumvents the domain and resolution limitations that restrict Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models to a structured domain of fixed size -- limitations that hinder the widespread adoption of CNNs in engineering applications. This generalizability allows a single NITO model to train and generate solutions in countless domains, eliminating the need for numerous domain-specific CNNs and their extensive datasets. Despite its generalizability, NITO outperforms SOTA models even in specialized tasks, is an order of magnitude smaller, and is practically trainable at high resolutions that would be restrictive for CNNs. This combination of versatility, efficiency, and performance underlines NITO's potential to transform the landscape of engineering design optimization problems through implicit fields.
Recently, researchers have been exploring various ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of autonomous vehicles by researching new methods, especially for indoor scenarios. Autonomous Vehicles in indoor navigation systems possess many challenges especially the limited accuracy of GPS in indoor scenarios. Several, robust methods have been explored for autonomous vehicles in indoor scenarios to solve this problem, but the ineffectiveness of the proposed methods is the high deployment cost. To address the above-mentioned problems we have presented A low-cost indoor navigation method for autonomous vehicles called Affordable Indoor Navigation Solution (AINS) which is based on based on Monocular Camera. Our proposed solution is mainly based on a mono camera without relying on various huge or power-inefficient sensors to find the path, such as range finders and other navigation sensors. Our proposed method shows that we can deploy autonomous vehicles indoor navigation systems while taking into consideration the cost. We can observe that the results shown by our solution are better than existing solutions and we can reduce the estimated error and time consumption.
Anomaly detection in decision-making sequences is a challenging problem due to the complexity of normality representation learning and the sequential nature of the task. Most existing methods based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) are difficult to implement in the real world due to unrealistic assumptions, such as having access to environment dynamics, reward signals, and online interactions with the environment. To address these limitations, we propose an unsupervised method named Offline Imitation Learning based Anomaly Detection (OIL-AD), which detects anomalies in decision-making sequences using two extracted behaviour features: action optimality and sequential association. Our offline learning model is an adaptation of behavioural cloning with a transformer policy network, where we modify the training process to learn a Q function and a state value function from normal trajectories. We propose that the Q function and the state value function can provide sufficient information about agents' behavioural data, from which we derive two features for anomaly detection. The intuition behind our method is that the action optimality feature derived from the Q function can differentiate the optimal action from others at each local state, and the sequential association feature derived from the state value function has the potential to maintain the temporal correlations between decisions (state-action pairs). Our experiments show that OIL-AD can achieve outstanding online anomaly detection performance with up to 34.8% improvement in F1 score over comparable baselines.
The problem of how to achieve cooperation among rational peers in order to discourage free riding is one that has received a lot of attention in peer-to-peer computing and is still an important one. The field of game theory is applied to the task of finding solutions that will encourage cooperation while discouraging free riding. The cooperative conduct of peers is typically portrayed as a traditional version of the game known as the "Prisoners' Dilemma." It is common knowledge that if two peers engage in a situation known as the Prisoner's Dilemma more than once, collaboration can be achieved through the use of punishment. Nevertheless, this is not the case when there is only one interaction between peers. This short article demonstrates that Kantian peers prefer to cooperate and attain social welfare even when they interacted only once. This, dissuade peers from freeriding.
Motion prediction has been an essential component of autonomous driving systems since it handles highly uncertain and complex scenarios involving moving agents of different types. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Granular TRansformer (MGTR) framework, an encoder-decoder network that exploits context features in different granularities for different kinds of traffic agents. To further enhance MGTR's capabilities, we leverage LiDAR point cloud data by incorporating LiDAR semantic features from an off-the-shelf LiDAR feature extractor. We evaluate MGTR on Waymo Open Dataset motion prediction benchmark and show that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance, ranking 1st on its leaderboard (//waymo.com/open/challenges/2023/motion-prediction/).
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some context). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendation systems. In this survey, we review works on explainable recommendation in or before the year of 2019. We first highlight the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation on three perspectives: 1) We provide a chronological research timeline of explainable recommendation, including user study approaches in the early years and more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a two-dimensional taxonomy to classify existing explainable recommendation research: one dimension is the information source (or display style) of the explanations, and the other dimension is the algorithmic mechanism to generate explainable recommendations. 3) We summarize how explainable recommendation applies to different recommendation tasks, such as product recommendation, social recommendation, and POI recommendation. We also devote a section to discuss the explanation perspectives in broader IR and AI/ML research. We end the survey by discussing potential future directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area and beyond.