OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-log grasping using reinforcement learning and virtual visual servoing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We explore multi-log grasping using reinforcement learning and virtual visual servoing for automated forwarding in a simulated environment. Automation of forest processes is a major challenge, and many techniques regarding robot control pose different challenges due to the unstructured and harsh outdoor environment. Grasping multiple logs involves various problems of dynamics and path planning, where understanding the interaction between the grapple, logs, terrain, and obstacles requires visual information. To address these challenges, we separate image segmentation from crane control and utilise a virtual camera to provide an image stream from reconstructed 3D data. We use Cartesian control to simplify domain transfer to real-world applications. Since log piles are static, visual servoing using a 3D reconstruction of the pile and its surroundings is equivalent to using real camera data until the point of grasping. This relaxes the limits on computational resources and time for the challenge of image segmentation and allows for collecting data in situations where the log piles are not occluded. The disadvantage is the lack of information during grasping. We demonstrate that this problem is manageable and present an agent that is 95% successful in picking one or several logs from challenging piles of 2--5 logs.
Cellular Wireless Networks in the Upper Mid-Band
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The upper mid-band - roughly from 7 to 24 GHz - has attracted considerable recent interest for new cellular services. This frequency range has vastly more spectrum than the highly congested bands below 7 GHz while offering more favorable propagation and coverage than the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies. The upper mid-band can thus provide a powerful and complementary frequency range to balance coverage and capacity. Realizing the full potential of these bands, however, will require fundamental changes to the design of cellular systems. Most importantly, spectrum will likely need to be shared with incumbents including communication satellites, military RADAR, and radio astronomy. Also, the upper mid-band is simply a vast frequency range. Due to this wide bandwidth, combined with the directional nature of transmission and intermittent occupancy of incumbents, cellular systems will need to be agile to sense and intelligently use large spatial and frequency degrees of freedom. This paper attempts to provide an initial assessment of the feasibility and potential gains of wideband cellular systems operating in the upper mid-band. The study includes: (1) a system study to assess potential gains of multi-band systems in a representative dense urban environment and illustrate the value of wide band system with dynamic frequency selectivity; (2) an evaluation of potential cross interference between satellites and terrestrial cellular services and interference nulling to reduce that interference; and (3) design and evaluation of a compact multi-band antenna array structure. Leveraging these preliminary results, we identify potential future research directions to realize next-generation systems in these frequencies.
Fitness Approximation through Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel approach to performing fitness approximation in genetic algorithms (GAs) using machine-learning (ML) models, through dynamic adaptation to the evolutionary state. Maintaining a dataset of sampled individuals along with their actual fitness scores, we continually update a fitness-approximation ML model throughout an evolutionary run. We compare different methods for: 1) switching between actual and approximate fitness, 2) sampling the population, and 3) weighting the samples. Experimental findings demonstrate significant improvement in evolutionary runtimes, with fitness scores that are either identical or slightly lower than that of the fully run GA -- depending on the ratio of approximate-to-actual-fitness computation. Although we focus on evolutionary agents in Gymnasium (game) simulators -- where fitness computation is costly -- our approach is generic and can be easily applied to many different domains.
RoDia: A New Dataset for Romanian Dialect Identification from Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce RoDia, the first dataset for Romanian dialect identification from speech. The RoDia dataset includes a varied compilation of speech samples from five distinct regions of Romania, covering both urban and rural environments, totaling 2 hours of manually annotated speech data. Along with our dataset, we introduce a set of competitive models to be used as baselines for future research. The top scoring model achieves a macro F1 score of 59.83% and a micro F1 score of 62.08%, indicating that the task is challenging. We thus believe that RoDia is a valuable resource that will stimulate research aiming to address the challenges of Romanian dialect identification. We release our dataset at https://github.com/codrut2/RoDia.
OSMOSIS: Enabling Multi-Tenancy in Datacenter SmartNICs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-tenancy is essential for unleashing SmartNIC's potential in datacenters. Our systematic analysis in this work shows that existing on-path SmartNICs have resource multiplexing limitations. For example, existing solutions lack multi-tenancy capabilities such as performance isolation and QoS provisioning for compute and IO resources. Compared to standard NIC data paths with a well-defined set of offloaded functions, unpredictable execution times of SmartNIC kernels make conventional approaches for multi-tenancy and QoS insufficient. We fill this gap with OSMOSIS, a SmartNICs resource manager co-design. OSMOSIS extends existing OS mechanisms to enable dynamic hardware resource multiplexing of the on-path packet processing data plane. We integrate OSMOSIS within an open-source RISC-V-based 400Gbit/s SmartNIC. Our performance results demonstrate that OSMOSIS fully supports multi-tenancy and enables broader adoption of SmartNICs in datacenters with low overhead.
PyGraft: Configurable Generation of Synthetic Schemas and Knowledge Graphs at Your Fingertips
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a prominent data representation and management paradigm. Being usually underpinned by a schema (e.g., an ontology), KGs capture not only factual information but also contextual knowledge. In some tasks, a few KGs established themselves as standard benchmarks. However, recent works outline that relying on a limited collection of datasets is not sufficient to assess the generalization capability of an approach. In some data-sensitive fields such as education or medicine, access to public datasets is even more limited. To remedy the aforementioned issues, we release PyGraft, a Python-based tool that generates highly customized, domain-agnostic schemas and KGs. The synthesized schemas encompass various RDFS and OWL constructs, while the synthesized KGs emulate the characteristics and scale of real-world KGs. Logical consistency of the generated resources is ultimately ensured by running a description logic (DL) reasoner. By providing a way of generating both a schema and KG in a single pipeline, PyGraft's aim is to empower the generation of a more diverse array of KGs for benchmarking novel approaches in areas such as graph-based machine learning (ML), or more generally KG processing. In graph-based ML in particular, this should foster a more holistic evaluation of model performance and generalization capability, thereby going beyond the limited collection of available benchmarks. PyGraft is available at: https://github.com/nicolas-hbt/pygraft.
Chat Failures and Troubles: Reasons and Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper examines some common problems in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) causing failures and troubles in Chat. A given use case's design decisions start with the suitable robot, the suitable chatting model, identifying common problems that cause failures, identifying potential solutions, and planning continuous improvement. In conclusion, it is recommended to use a closed-loop control algorithm that guides the use of trained Artificial Intelligence (AI) pre-trained models and provides vocabulary filtering, re-train batched models on new datasets, learn online from data streams, and/or use reinforcement learning models to self-update the trained models and reduce errors.
ArtiGrasp: Physically Plausible Synthesis of Bi-Manual Dexterous Grasping and Articulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We present ArtiGrasp, a novel method to synthesize bi-manual hand-object interactions that include grasping and articulation. This task is challenging due to the diversity of the global wrist motions and the precise finger control that are necessary to articulate objects. ArtiGrasp leverages reinforcement learning and physics simulations to train a policy that controls the global and local hand pose. Our framework unifies grasping and articulation within a single policy guided by a single hand pose reference. Moreover, to facilitate the training of the precise finger control required for articulation, we present a learning curriculum with increasing difficulty. It starts with single-hand manipulation of stationary objects and continues with multi-agent training including both hands and non-stationary objects. To evaluate our method, we introduce Dynamic Object Grasping and Articulation, a task that involves bringing an object into a target articulated pose. This task requires grasping, relocation, and articulation. We show our method's efficacy towards this task. We further demonstrate that our method can generate motions with noisy hand-object pose estimates from an off-the-shelf image-based regressor.
BOLA360: Near-optimal View and Bitrate Adaptation for 360-degree Video Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in omnidirectional cameras and AR/VR headsets have spurred the adoption of 360-degree videos that are widely believed to be the future of online video streaming. 360-degree videos allow users to wear a head-mounted display (HMD) and experience the video as if they are physically present in the scene. Streaming high-quality 360-degree videos at scale is an unsolved problem that is more challenging than traditional (2D) video delivery. The data rate required to stream 360-degree videos is an order of magnitude more than traditional videos. Further, the penalty for rebuffering events where the video freezes or displays a blank screen is more severe as it may cause cybersickness. We propose an online adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm for 360-degree videos called BOLA360 that runs inside the client's video player and orchestrates the download of video segments from the server so as to maximize the quality-of-experience (QoE) of the user. BOLA360 conserves bandwidth by downloading only those video segments that are likely to fall within the field-of-view (FOV) of the user. In addition, BOLA360 continually adapts the bitrate of the downloaded video segments so as to enable a smooth playback without rebuffering. We prove that BOLA360 is near-optimal with respect to an optimal offline algorithm that maximizes QoE. Further, we evaluate BOLA360 on a wide range of network and user head movement profiles and show that it provides $13.6\%$ to $372.5\%$ more QoE than state-of-the-art algorithms. While ABR algorithms for traditional (2D) videos have been well-studied over the last decade, our work is the first ABR algorithm for 360-degree videos with both theoretical and empirical guarantees on its performance.
One-to-Multiple Clean-Label Image Camouflage (OmClic) based Backdoor Attack on Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Image camouflage has been utilized to create clean-label poisoned images for implanting backdoor into a DL model. But there exists a crucial limitation that one attack/poisoned image can only fit a single input size of the DL model, which greatly increases its attack budget when attacking multiple commonly adopted input sizes of DL models. This work proposes to constructively craft an attack image through camouflaging but can fit multiple DL models' input sizes simultaneously, namely OmClic. Thus, through OmClic, we are able to always implant a backdoor regardless of which common input size is chosen by the user to train the DL model given the same attack budget (i.e., a fraction of the poisoning rate). With our camouflaging algorithm formulated as a multi-objective optimization, M=5 input sizes can be concurrently targeted with one attack image, which artifact is retained to be almost visually imperceptible at the same time. Extensive evaluations validate the proposed OmClic can reliably succeed in various settings using diverse types of images. Further experiments on OmClic based backdoor insertion to DL models show that high backdoor performances (i.e., attack success rate and clean data accuracy) are achievable no matter which common input size is randomly chosen by the user to train the model. So that the OmClic based backdoor attack budget is reduced by M$\times$ compared to the state-of-the-art camouflage based backdoor attack as a baseline. Significantly, the same set of OmClic based poisonous attack images is transferable to different model architectures for backdoor implant.
Toward Certifying Maps for Safe Registration-based Localization Under Adverse Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose a way to model the resilience of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm in the presence of corrupted measurements. In the context of autonomous vehicles, certifying the safety of the localization process poses a significant challenge. As robots evolve in a complex world, various types of noise can impact the measurements. Conventionally, this noise has been assumed to be distributed according to a zero-mean Gaussian distribution. However, this assumption does not hold in numerous scenarios, including adverse weather conditions, occlusions caused by dynamic obstacles, or long-term changes in the map. In these cases, the measurements are instead affected by large and deterministic faults. This paper introduces a closed-form formula approximating the pose error resulting from an ICP algorithm when subjected to the most detrimental adverse measurements. Using this formula, we develop a metric to certify and pinpoint specific regions within the environment where the robot is more vulnerable to localization failures in the presence of faults in the measurements.
Incremental Learning of Humanoid Robot Behavior from Natural Interaction and Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Natural-language dialog is key for intuitive human-robot interaction. It can be used not only to express humans' intents, but also to communicate instructions for improvement if a robot does not understand a command correctly. Of great importance is to endow robots with the ability to learn from such interaction experience in an incremental way to allow them to improve their behaviors or avoid mistakes in the future. In this paper, we propose a system to achieve incremental learning of complex behavior from natural interaction, and demonstrate its implementation on a humanoid robot. Building on recent advances, we present a system that deploys Large Language Models (LLMs) for high-level orchestration of the robot's behavior, based on the idea of enabling the LLM to generate Python statements in an interactive console to invoke both robot perception and action. The interaction loop is closed by feeding back human instructions, environment observations, and execution results to the LLM, thus informing the generation of the next statement. Specifically, we introduce incremental prompt learning, which enables the system to interactively learn from its mistakes. For that purpose, the LLM can call another LLM responsible for code-level improvements of the current interaction based on human feedback. The improved interaction is then saved in the robot's memory, and thus retrieved on similar requests. We integrate the system in the robot cognitive architecture of the humanoid robot ARMAR-6 and evaluate our methods both quantitatively (in simulation) and qualitatively (in simulation and real-world) by demonstrating generalized incrementally-learned knowledge.
Generating the Ground Truth: Synthetic Data for Soft Label and Label Noise Research
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In many real-world classification tasks, label noise is an unavoidable issue that adversely affects the generalization error of machine learning models. Additionally, evaluating how methods handle such noise is complicated, as the effect label noise has on their performance cannot be accurately quantified without clean labels. Existing research on label noise typically relies on either noisy or oversimplified simulated data as a baseline, into which additional noise with known properties is injected. In this paper, we introduce SYNLABEL, a framework designed to address these limitations by creating noiseless datasets informed by real-world data. SYNLABEL supports defining a pre-specified or learned function as the ground truth function, which can then be used for generating new clean labels. Furthermore, by repeatedly resampling values for selected features within the domain of the function, evaluating the function and aggregating the resulting labels, each data point can be assigned a soft label or label distribution. These distributions capture the inherent uncertainty present in many real-world datasets and enable the direct injection and quantification of label noise. The generated datasets serve as a clean baseline of adjustable complexity, into which various types of noise can be introduced. Additionally, they facilitate research into soft label learning and related applications. We demonstrate the application of SYNLABEL, showcasing its ability to precisely quantify label noise and its improvement over existing methodologies.
Compositional Learning of Visually-Grounded Concepts Using Reinforcement
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Children can rapidly generalize compositionally-constructed rules to unseen test sets. On the other hand, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be trained over millions of episodes, and their ability to generalize to unseen combinations remains unclear. Hence, we investigate the compositional abilities of RL agents, using the task of navigating to specified color-shape targets in synthetic 3D environments. First, we show that when RL agents are naively trained to navigate to target color-shape combinations, they implicitly learn to decompose the combinations, allowing them to (re-)compose these and succeed at held-out test combinations ("compositional learning"). Second, when agents are pretrained to learn invariant shape and color concepts ("concept learning"), the number of episodes subsequently needed for compositional learning decreased by 20 times. Furthermore, only agents trained on both concept and compositional learning could solve a more complex, out-of-distribution environment in zero-shot fashion. Finally, we verified that only text encoders pretrained on image-text datasets (e.g. CLIP) reduced the number of training episodes needed for our agents to demonstrate compositional learning, and also generalized to 5 unseen colors in zero-shot fashion. Overall, our results are the first to demonstrate that RL agents can be trained to implicitly learn concepts and compositionality, to solve more complex environments in zero-shot fashion.
Regret-Optimal Federated Transfer Learning for Kernel Regression with Applications in American Option Pricing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose an optimal iterative scheme for federated transfer learning, where a central planner has access to datasets ${\cal D}_1,\dots,{\cal D}_N$ for the same learning model $f_θ$. Our objective is to minimize the cumulative deviation of the generated parameters $\{θ_i(t)\}_{t=0}^T$ across all $T$ iterations from the specialized parameters $θ^\star_{1},\ldots,θ^\star_N$ obtained for each dataset, while respecting the loss function for the model $f_{θ(T)}$ produced by the algorithm upon halting. We only allow for continual communication between each of the specialized models (nodes/agents) and the central planner (server), at each iteration (round). For the case where the model $f_θ$ is a finite-rank kernel regression, we derive explicit updates for the regret-optimal algorithm. By leveraging symmetries within the regret-optimal algorithm, we further develop a nearly regret-optimal heuristic that runs with $\mathcal{O}(Np^2)$ fewer elementary operations, where $p$ is the dimension of the parameter space. Additionally, we investigate the adversarial robustness of the regret-optimal algorithm showing that an adversary which perturbs $q$ training pairs by at-most $\varepsilon>0$, across all training sets, cannot reduce the regret-optimal algorithm's regret by more than $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon q \bar{N}^{1/2})$, where $\bar{N}$ is the aggregate number of training pairs. To validate our theoretical findings, we conduct numerical experiments in the context of American option pricing, utilizing a randomly generated finite-rank kernel.
Towards Understanding Neural Collapse: The Effects of Batch Normalization and Weight Decay
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural Collapse (NC) is a geometric structure recently observed at the terminal phase of training deep neural networks, which states that last-layer feature vectors for the same class would "collapse" to a single point, while features of different classes become equally separated. We demonstrate that batch normalization (BN) and weight decay (WD) critically influence the emergence of NC. In the near-optimal loss regime, we establish an asymptotic lower bound on the emergence of NC that depends only on the WD value, training loss, and the presence of last-layer BN. Our experiments substantiate theoretical insights by showing that models demonstrate a stronger presence of NC with BN, appropriate WD values, lower loss, and lower last-layer feature norm. Our findings offer a novel perspective in studying the role of BN and WD in shaping neural network features.
Mirror-Aware Neural Humans
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Human motion capture either requires multi-camera systems or is unreliable when using single-view input due to depth ambiguities. Meanwhile, mirrors are readily available in urban environments and form an affordable alternative by recording two views with only a single camera. However, the mirror setting poses the additional challenge of handling occlusions of real and mirror image. Going beyond existing mirror approaches for 3D human pose estimation, we utilize mirrors for learning a complete body model, including shape and dense appearance. Our main contributions are extending articulated neural radiance fields to include a notion of a mirror, making it sample-efficient over potential occlusion regions. Together, our contributions realize a consumer-level 3D motion capture system that starts from off-the-shelf 2D poses by automatically calibrating the camera, estimating mirror orientation, and subsequently lifting 2D keypoint detections to 3D skeleton pose that is used to condition the mirror-aware NeRF. We empirically demonstrate the benefit of learning a body model and accounting for occlusion in challenging mirror scenes.