OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Segment Anything in Light Fields for Real-Time Applications via Constrained Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Segmented light field images can serve as a powerful representation in many of computer vision tasks exploiting geometry and appearance of objects, such as object pose tracking. In the light field domain, segmentation presents an additional objective of recognizing the same segment through all the views. Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) allows producing semantically meaningful segments for monocular images and videos. However, using SAM 2 directly on light fields is highly ineffective due to unexploited constraints. In this work, we present a novel light field segmentation method that adapts SAM 2 to the light field domain without retraining or modifying the model. By utilizing the light field domain constraints, the method produces high quality and view-consistent light field masks, outperforming the SAM 2 video tracking baseline and working 7 times faster, with a real-time speed. We achieve this by exploiting the epipolar geometry cues to propagate the masks between the views, probing the SAM 2 latent space to estimate their occlusion, and further prompting SAM 2 for their refinement.
Trajectory Tracking Using Frenet Coordinates with Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies the application of the DDPG algorithm in trajectory-tracking tasks and proposes a trajectorytracking control method combined with Frenet coordinate system. By converting the vehicle's position and velocity information from the Cartesian coordinate system to Frenet coordinate system, this method can more accurately describe the vehicle's deviation and travel distance relative to the center line of the road. The DDPG algorithm adopts the Actor-Critic framework, uses deep neural networks for strategy and value evaluation, and combines the experience replay mechanism and target network to improve the algorithm's stability and data utilization efficiency. Experimental results show that the DDPG algorithm based on Frenet coordinate system performs well in trajectory-tracking tasks in complex environments, achieves high-precision and stable path tracking, and demonstrates its application potential in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems. Keywords- DDPG; path tracking; robot navigation
SpikEmo: Enhancing Emotion Recognition With Spiking Temporal Dynamics in Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

In affective computing, the task of Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has emerged as a focal area of research. The primary objective of this task is to predict emotional states within conversations by analyzing multimodal data including text, audio, and video. While existing studies have progressed in extracting and fusing representations from multimodal data, they often overlook the temporal dynamics in the data during conversations. To address this challenge, we have developed the SpikEmo framework, which is based on spiking neurons and employs a Semantic & Dynamic Two-stage Modeling approach to more precisely capture the complex temporal features of multimodal emotional data. Additionally, to tackle the class imbalance and emotional semantic similarity problems in the ERC tasks, we have devised an innovative combination of loss functions that significantly enhances the model's performance when dealing with ERC data characterized by long-tail distributions. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple ERC benchmark datasets demonstrate that SpikEmo significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in ERC tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yu-xm/SpikEmo.git.
Cooperative Grasping and Transportation using Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Ternary Force Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Cooperative grasping and transportation require effective coordination to complete the task. This study focuses on the approach leveraging force-sensing feedback, where robots use sensors to detect forces applied by others on an object to achieve coordination. Unlike explicit communication, it avoids delays and interruptions; however, force-sensing is highly sensitive and prone to interference from variations in grasping environment, such as changes in grasping force, grasping pose, object size and geometry, which can interfere with force signals, subsequently undermining coordination. We propose multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with ternary force representation, a force representation that maintains consistent representation against variations in grasping environment. The simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method to changes in grasping force, object size and geometry as well as inherent sim2real gap.
Hybrid-Neuromorphic Approach for Underwater Robotics Applications: A Conceptual Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the concept of employing neuromorphic methodologies for task-oriented underwater robotics applications. In contrast to the increasing computational demands of conventional deep learning algorithms, neuromorphic technology, leveraging spiking neural network architectures, promises sophisticated artificial intelligence with significantly reduced computational requirements and power consumption, emulating human brain operational principles. Despite documented neuromorphic technology applications in various robotic domains, its utilization in marine robotics remains largely unexplored. Thus, this article proposes a unified framework for integrating neuromorphic technologies for perception, pose estimation, and haptic-guided conditional control of underwater vehicles, customized to specific user-defined objectives. This conceptual framework stands to revolutionize underwater robotics, enhancing efficiency and autonomy while reducing energy consumption. By enabling greater adaptability and robustness, this advancement could facilitate applications such as underwater exploration, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance, thereby contributing to significant progress in marine science and technology.
Breadboarding the European Moon Rover System: discussion and results of the analogue field test campaign
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This document compiles results obtained from the test campaign of the European Moon Rover System (EMRS) project. The test campaign, conducted at the Planetary Exploration Lab of DLR in Wessling, aimed to understand the scope of the EMRS breadboard design, its strengths, and the benefits of the modular design. The discussion of test results is based on rover traversal analyses, robustness assessments, wheel deflection analyses, and the overall transportation cost of the rover. This not only enables the comparison of locomotion modes on lunar regolith but also facilitates critical decision-making in the design of future lunar missions.
Contact Tooling Manipulation Control for Robotic Repair Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper delves into various robotic manipulation control methods designed for dynamic contact tooling operations on a robotic repair platform. The explored control strategies include hybrid position-force control, admittance control, bilateral telerobotic control, virtual fixture, and shared control. Each approach is elucidated and assessed in terms of its applicability and effectiveness for handling contact tooling tasks in real-world repair scenarios. The hybrid position-force controller is highlighted for its proficiency in executing precise force-required tasks, but it demands contingent on an accurate model of the environment and structured, static environment. In contrast, for unstructured environments, bilateral teleoperation control is investigated, revealing that the compliance with the remote robot controller is crucial for stable contact, albeit at the expense of reduced motion tracking performance. Moreover, advanced controllers for tooling manipulation tasks, such as virtual fixture and shared control approaches, are investigated for their potential applications.
Spatiotemporal Decoupling for Efficient Vision-Based Occupancy Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The task of occupancy forecasting (OCF) involves utilizing past and present perception data to predict future occupancy states of autonomous vehicle surrounding environments, which is critical for downstream tasks such as obstacle avoidance and path planning. Existing 3D OCF approaches struggle to predict plausible spatial details for movable objects and suffer from slow inference speeds due to neglecting the bias and uneven distribution of changing occupancy states in both space and time. In this paper, we propose a novel spatiotemporal decoupling vision-based paradigm to explicitly tackle the bias and achieve both effective and efficient 3D OCF. To tackle spatial bias in empty areas, we introduce a novel spatial representation that decouples the conventional dense 3D format into 2D bird's-eye view (BEV) occupancy with corresponding height values, enabling 3D OCF derived only from 2D predictions thus enhancing efficiency. To reduce temporal bias on static voxels, we design temporal decoupling to improve end-to-end OCF by temporally associating instances via predicted flows. We develop an efficient multi-head network EfficientOCF to achieve 3D OCF with our devised spatiotemporally decoupled representation. A new metric, conditional IoU (C-IoU), is also introduced to provide a robust 3D OCF performance assessment, especially in datasets with missing or incomplete annotations. The experimental results demonstrate that EfficientOCF surpasses existing baseline methods on accuracy and efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a fast inference time of 82.33ms with a single GPU. Our code will be released as open source.
OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Scientific progress depends on researchers' ability to synthesize the growing body of literature. Can large language models (LMs) assist scientists in this task? We introduce OpenScholar, a specialized retrieval-augmented LM that answers scientific queries by identifying relevant passages from 45 million open-access papers and synthesizing citation-backed responses. To evaluate OpenScholar, we develop ScholarQABench, the first large-scale multi-domain benchmark for literature search, comprising 2,967 expert-written queries and 208 long-form answers across computer science, physics, neuroscience, and biomedicine. On ScholarQABench, OpenScholar-8B outperforms GPT-4o by 5% and PaperQA2 by 7% in correctness, despite being a smaller, open model. While GPT4o hallucinates citations 78 to 90% of the time, OpenScholar achieves citation accuracy on par with human experts. OpenScholar's datastore, retriever, and self-feedback inference loop also improves off-the-shelf LMs: for instance, OpenScholar-GPT4o improves GPT-4o's correctness by 12%. In human evaluations, experts preferred OpenScholar-8B and OpenScholar-GPT4o responses over expert-written ones 51% and 70% of the time, respectively, compared to GPT4o's 32%. We open-source all of our code, models, datastore, data and a public demo.
FocusLLaVA: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Efficient and Effective Visual Token Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances on Multi-modal Large Language Models have demonstrated that high-resolution image input is crucial for model capabilities, especially for fine-grained tasks. However, high-resolution images lead to a quadratic increase in the number of visual tokens input into LLMs, resulting in significant computational costs. Current work develop visual token compression methods to achieve efficiency improvements, often at the expense of performance. We argue that removing visual redundancy can simultaneously improve both efficiency and performance. We build a coarse-to-fine visual token compression method, with a vision-guided sampler for compressing redundant regions with low information density, and a text-guided sampler for selecting visual tokens that are strongly correlated with the user instructions.With these two modules, the proposed FocusLLaVA achieves improvements in both efficiency and performance. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of evaluation datasets.
Neuro-Symbolic Query Optimization in Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

This chapter delves into the emerging field of neuro-symbolic query optimization for knowledge graphs (KGs), presenting a comprehensive exploration of how neural and symbolic techniques can be integrated to enhance query processing. Traditional query optimizers in knowledge graphs rely heavily on symbolic methods, utilizing dataset summaries, statistics, and cost models to select efficient execution plans. However, these approaches often suffer from misestimations and inaccuracies, particularly when dealing with complex queries or large-scale datasets. Recent advancements have introduced neural models, which capture non-linear aspects of query optimization, offering promising alternatives to purely symbolic methods. In this chapter, we introduce neuro-symbolic query optimizers, a novel approach that combines the strengths of symbolic reasoning with the adaptability of neural computation. We discuss the architecture of these hybrid systems, highlighting the interplay between neural and symbolic components to improve the optimizer's ability to navigate the search space and produce efficient execution plans. Additionally, the chapter reviews existing neural components tailored for optimizing queries over knowledge graphs and examines the limitations and challenges in deploying neuro-symbolic query optimizers in real-world environments.
Q-CSM: Q-Learning-based Cognitive Service Management in Heterogeneous IoT Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The dramatic increase in the number of smart services and their diversity poses a significant challenge in Internet of Things (IoT) networks: heterogeneity. This causes significant quality of service (QoS) degradation in IoT networks. In addition, the constraints of IoT devices in terms of computational capability and energy resources add extra complexity to this. However, the current studies remain insufficient to solve this problem due to the lack of cognitive action recommendations. Therefore, we propose a Q-learning-based Cognitive Service Management framework called Q-CSM. In this framework, we first design an IoT Agent Manager to handle the heterogeneity in data formats. After that, we design a Q-learning-based recommendation engine to optimize the devices' lifetime according to the predicted QoS behaviour of the changing IoT network scenarios. We apply the proposed cognitive management to a smart city scenario consisting of three specific services: wind turbines, solar panels, and transportation systems. We note that our proposed cognitive method achieves 38.7% faster response time to the dynamical IoT changes in topology. Furthermore, the proposed framework achieves 19.8% longer lifetime on average for constrained IoT devices thanks to its Q-learning-based cognitive decision capability. In addition, we explore the most successive learning rate value in the Q-learning run through the exploration and exploitation phases.
BugSpotter: Automated Generation of Code Debugging Exercises
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Debugging is an essential skill when learning to program, yet its instruction and emphasis often vary widely across introductory courses. In the era of code-generating large language models (LLMs), the ability for students to reason about code and identify errors is increasingly important. However, students frequently resort to trial-and-error methods to resolve bugs without fully understanding the underlying issues. Developing the ability to identify and hypothesize the cause of bugs is crucial but can be time-consuming to teach effectively through traditional means. This paper introduces BugSpotter, an innovative tool that leverages an LLM to generate buggy code from a problem description and verify the synthesized bugs via a test suite. Students interact with BugSpotter by designing failing test cases, where the buggy code's output differs from the expected result as defined by the problem specification. This not only provides opportunities for students to enhance their debugging skills, but also to practice reading and understanding problem specifications. We deployed BugSpotter in a large classroom setting and compared the debugging exercises it generated to exercises hand-crafted by an instructor for the same problems. We found that the LLM-generated exercises produced by BugSpotter varied in difficulty and were well-matched to the problem specifications. Importantly, the LLM-generated exercises were comparable to those manually created by instructors with respect to student performance, suggesting that BugSpotter could be an effective and efficient aid for learning debugging.
Using Formal Models, Safety Shields and Certified Control to Validate AI-Based Train Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The certification of autonomous systems is an important concern in science and industry. The KI-LOK project explores new methods for certifying and safely integrating AI components into autonomous trains. We pursued a two-layered approach: (1) ensuring the safety of the steering system by formal analysis using the B method, and (2) improving the reliability of the perception system with a runtime certificate checker. This work links both strategies within a demonstrator that runs simulations on the formal model, controlled by the real AI output and the real certificate checker. The demonstrator is integrated into the validation tool ProB. This enables runtime monitoring, runtime verification, and statistical validation of formal safety properties using a formal B model. Consequently, one can detect and analyse potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the AI and the certificate checker. We apply these techniques to a signal detection case study and present our findings.
23 DoF Grasping Policies from a Raw Point Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Coordinating the motion of robots with high degrees of freedom (DoF) to grasp objects gives rise to many challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel imitation learning approach to learn a policy that directly predicts 23 DoF grasp trajectories from a partial point cloud provided by a single, fixed camera. At the core of the approach is a second-order geometric-based model of behavioral dynamics. This Neural Geometric Fabric (NGF) policy predicts accelerations directly in joint space. We show that our policy is capable of generalizing to novel objects, and combine our policy with a geometric fabric motion planner in a loop to generate stable grasping trajectories. We evaluate our approach on a set of three different objects, compare different policy structures, and run ablation studies to understand the importance of different object encodings for policy learning.
Multimodal Autoregressive Pre-training of Large Vision Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a novel method for pre-training of large-scale vision encoders. Building on recent advancements in autoregressive pre-training of vision models, we extend this framework to a multimodal setting, i.e., images and text. In this paper, we present AIMV2, a family of generalist vision encoders characterized by a straightforward pre-training process, scalability, and remarkable performance across a range of downstream tasks. This is achieved by pairing the vision encoder with a multimodal decoder that autoregressively generates raw image patches and text tokens. Our encoders excel not only in multimodal evaluations but also in vision benchmarks such as localization, grounding, and classification. Notably, our AIMV2-3B encoder achieves 89.5% accuracy on ImageNet-1k with a frozen trunk. Furthermore, AIMV2 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art contrastive models (e.g., CLIP, SigLIP) in multimodal image understanding across diverse settings.
Landing Trajectory Prediction for UAS Based on Generative Adversarial Network
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Models for trajectory prediction are an essential component of many advanced air mobility studies. These models help aircraft detect conflict and plan avoidance maneuvers, which is especially important in Unmanned Aircraft systems (UAS) landing management due to the congested airspace near vertiports. In this paper, we propose a landing trajectory prediction model for UAS based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The GAN is a prestigious neural network that has been developed for many years. In previous research, GAN has achieved many state-of-the-art results in many generation tasks. The GAN consists of one neural network generator and a neural network discriminator. Because of the learning capacity of the neural networks, the generator is capable to understand the features of the sample trajectory. The generator takes the previous trajectory as input and outputs some random status of a flight. According to the results of the experiences, the proposed model can output more accurate predictions than the baseline method(GMR) in various datasets. To evaluate the proposed model, we also create a real UAV landing dataset that includes more than 2600 trajectories of drone control manually by real pilots.
From RNNs to Foundation Models: An Empirical Study on Commercial Building Energy Consumption
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate short-term energy consumption forecasting for commercial buildings is crucial for smart grid operations. While smart meters and deep learning models enable forecasting using past data from multiple buildings, data heterogeneity from diverse buildings can reduce model performance. The impact of increasing dataset heterogeneity in time series forecasting, while keeping size and model constant, is understudied. We tackle this issue using the ComStock dataset, which provides synthetic energy consumption data for U.S. commercial buildings. Two curated subsets, identical in size and region but differing in building type diversity, are used to assess the performance of various time series forecasting models, including fine-tuned open-source foundation models (FMs). The results show that dataset heterogeneity and model architecture have a greater impact on post-training forecasting performance than the parameter count. Moreover, despite the higher computational cost, fine-tuned FMs demonstrate competitive performance compared to base models trained from scratch.
Transformer-based Heuristic for Advanced Air Mobility Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Safety is extremely important for urban flights of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Risk-aware path planning is one of the most effective methods to guarantee the safety of UAVs. This type of planning can be represented as a Constrained Shortest Path (CSP) problem, which seeks to find the shortest route that meets a predefined safety constraint. Solving CSP problems is NP-hard, presenting significant computational challenges. Although traditional methods can accurately solve CSP problems, they tend to be very slow. Previously, we introduced an additional safety dimension to the traditional A* algorithm, known as ASD A*, to effectively handle Constrained Shortest Path (CSP) problems. Then, we developed a custom learning-based heuristic using transformer-based neural networks, which significantly reduced computational load and enhanced the performance of the ASD A* algorithm. In this paper, we expand our dataset to include more risk maps and tasks, improve the proposed model, and increase its performance. We also introduce a new heuristic strategy and a novel neural network, which enhance the overall effectiveness of our approach.