OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Physical Human-Robot Interaction to Provide a Unique Rolling Experience with a Riding Ballbot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This study introduces the development of hands-free control schemes for a riding ballbot, designed to allow riders including manual wheelchair users to control its movement through torso leaning and twisting. The hardware platform, Personal Unique Rolling Experience (PURE), utilizes a ballbot drivetrain, a dynamically stable mobile robot that uses a ball as its wheel to provide omnidirectional maneuverability. To accommodate users with varying torso motion functions, the hanads-free control scheme should be adjustable based on the rider's torso function and personal preferences. Therefore, concepts of (a) impedance control and (b) admittance control were integrated into the control scheme. A duo-agent optimization framework was utilized to assess the efficiency of this rider-ballbot system for a safety-critical task: braking from 1.4 m/s. The candidate control schemes were further implemented in the physical robot hardware and validated with two experienced users, demonstrating the efficiency and robustness of the hands-free admittance control scheme (HACS). This interface, which utilized physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) as the input, resulted in lower braking effort and shorter braking distance and time. Subsequently, 12 novice participants (six able-bodied users and six manual wheelchair users) with different levels of torso motion capability were then recruited to benchmark the braking performance with HACS. The indoor navigation capability of PURE was further demonstrated with these participants in courses simulating narrow hallways, tight turns, and navigation through static and dynamic obstacles. By exploiting pHRI, the proposed admittance-style control scheme provided effective control of the ballbot via torso motions. This interface enables PURE to provide a personal unique rolling experience to manual wheelchair users for safe and agile indoor navigation.
Leveraging Long-Context Large Language Models for Multi-Document Understanding and Summarization in Enterprise Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid increase in unstructured data across various fields has made multi-document comprehension and summarization a critical task. Traditional approaches often fail to capture relevant context, maintain logical consistency, and extract essential information from lengthy documents. This paper explores the use of Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-document summarization, demonstrating their exceptional capacity to grasp extensive connections, provide cohesive summaries, and adapt to various industry domains and integration with enterprise applications/systems. The paper discusses the workflow of multi-document summarization for effectively deploying long-context LLMs, supported by case studies in legal applications, enterprise functions such as HR, finance, and sourcing, as well as in the medical and news domains. These case studies show notable enhancements in both efficiency and accuracy. Technical obstacles, such as dataset diversity, model scalability, and ethical considerations like bias mitigation and factual accuracy, are carefully analyzed. Prospective research avenues are suggested to augment the functionalities and applications of long-context LLMs, establishing them as pivotal tools for transforming information processing across diverse sectors and enterprise applications.
DynaWeightPnP: Toward global real-time 3D-2D solver in PnP without correspondences
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses a special Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem: estimating the optimal pose to align 3D and 2D shapes in real-time without correspondences, termed as correspondence-free PnP. While several studies have focused on 3D and 2D shape registration, achieving both real-time and accurate performance remains challenging. This study specifically targets the 3D-2D geometric shape registration tasks, applying the recently developed Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) to address the "big-to-small" issue. An iterative reweighted least squares method is employed to solve the RKHS-based formulation efficiently. Moreover, our work identifies a unique and interesting observability issue in correspondence-free PnP: the numerical ambiguity between rotation and translation. To address this, we proposed DynaWeightPnP, introducing a dynamic weighting sub-problem and an alternative searching algorithm designed to enhance pose estimation and alignment accuracy. Experiments were conducted on a typical case, that is, a 3D-2D vascular centerline registration task within Endovascular Image-Guided Interventions (EIGIs). Results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm achieves registration processing rates of 60 Hz (without post-refinement) and 31 Hz (with post-refinement) on modern single-core CPUs, with competitive accuracy comparable to existing methods. These results underscore the suitability of DynaWeightPnP for future robot navigation tasks like EIGIs.
Enhancing Crime Scene Investigations through Virtual Reality and Deep Learning Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The analysis of a crime scene is a pivotal activity in forensic investigations. Crime Scene Investigators and forensic science practitioners rely on best practices, standard operating procedures, and critical thinking, to produce rigorous scientific reports to document the scenes of interest and meet the quality standards expected in the courts. However, crime scene examination is a complex and multifaceted task often performed in environments susceptible to deterioration, contamination, and alteration, despite the use of contact-free and non-destructive methods of analysis. In this context, the documentation of the sites, and the identification and isolation of traces of evidential value remain challenging endeavours. In this paper, we propose a photogrammetric reconstruction of the crime scene for inspection in virtual reality (VR) and focus on fully automatic object recognition with deep learning (DL) algorithms through a client-server architecture. A pre-trained Faster-RCNN model was chosen as the best method that can best categorize relevant objects at the scene, selected by experts in the VR environment. These operations can considerably improve and accelerate crime scene analysis and help the forensic expert in extracting measurements and analysing in detail the objects under analysis. Experimental results on a simulated crime scene have shown that the proposed method can be effective in finding and recognizing objects with potential evidentiary value, enabling timely analyses of crime scenes, particularly those with health and safety risks (e.g. fires, explosions, chemicals, etc.), while minimizing subjective bias and contamination of the scene.
Fairness-aware Multiobjective Evolutionary Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multiobjective evolutionary learning (MOEL) has demonstrated its advantages of training fairer machine learning models considering a predefined set of conflicting objectives, including accuracy and different fairness measures. Recent works propose to construct a representative subset of fairness measures as optimisation objectives of MOEL throughout model training. However, the determination of a representative measure set relies on dataset, prior knowledge and requires substantial computational costs. What's more, those representative measures may differ across different model training processes. Instead of using a static predefined set determined before model training, this paper proposes to dynamically and adaptively determine a representative measure set online during model training. The dynamically determined representative set is then used as optimising objectives of the MOEL framework and can vary with time. Extensive experimental results on 12 well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches for mitigating unfairness in terms of accuracy as well as 25 fairness measures although only a few of them were dynamically selected and used as optimisation objectives. The results indicate the importance of setting optimisation objectives dynamically during training.
Wasserstein Distance-Weighted Adversarial Network for Cross-Domain Credit Risk Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper delves into the application of adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) for enhancing credit risk assessment in financial institutions. It addresses two critical challenges: the cold start problem, where historical lending data is scarce, and the data imbalance issue, where high-risk transactions are underrepresented. The paper introduces an improved ADA framework, the Wasserstein Distance Weighted Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network (WD-WADA), which leverages the Wasserstein distance to align source and target domains effectively. The proposed method includes an innovative weighted strategy to tackle data imbalance, adjusting for both the class distribution and the difficulty level of predictions. The paper demonstrates that WD-WADA not only mitigates the cold start problem but also provides a more accurate measure of domain differences, leading to improved cross-domain credit risk assessment. Extensive experiments on real-world credit datasets validate the model's effectiveness, showcasing superior performance in cross-domain learning, classification accuracy, and model stability compared to traditional methods.
Revisiting Weighted Information Extraction: A Simpler and Faster Algorithm for Ranked Enumeration
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Information extraction from textual data, where the query is represented by a finite transducer and the task is to enumerate all results without repetition, and its extension to the weighted case, where each output element has a weight and the output elements are to be enumerated sorted by their weights, are important and well studied problems in database theory. On the one hand, the first framework already covers the well-known case of regular document spanners, while the latter setting covers several practically relevant tasks that cannot be described in the unweighted setting. It is known that in the unweighted case this problem can be solved with linear time preprocessing $O(|D|)$ and output-linear delay $O(|s|)$ in data complexity, where $D$ is the input data and $s$ is the current output element. For the weighted case, Bourhis, Grez, Jachiet, and Riveros [ICDT 2021] recently designed an algorithm with linear time preprocessing, but the delay of $O(|s| \cdot \log|\mathsf{D}|)$ depends on the size of the data. We first show how to leverage the existing results on enumerating shortest paths to obtain a simple alternative algorithm with linear preprocessing and a delay of $O(|s_i| + \min\{ \log i, \log|\mathsf{D}|\})$ for the $i^{\text{th}}$ output element $s_i$ (in data complexity); thus, substantially improving the previous algorithm. Next, we develop a technically involved rounding technique that allows us to devise an algorithm with linear time preprocessing and output-linear delay $O(|s|)$ with high probability. To this end, we combine tools from algebra, high-dimensional geometry, and linear programming.
Towards an active-learning approach to resource allocation for population-based damage prognosis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Damage prognosis is, arguably, one of the most difficult tasks of structural health monitoring (SHM). To address common problems of damage prognosis, a population-based SHM (PBSHM) approach is adopted in the current work. In this approach the prognosis problem is considered as an information-sharing problem where data from past structures are exploited to make more accurate inferences regarding currently-degrading structures. For a given population, there may exist restrictions on the resources available to conduct monitoring; thus, the current work studies the problem of allocating such resources within a population of degrading structures with a view to maximising the damage-prognosis accuracy. The challenges of the current framework are mainly associated with the inference of outliers on the level of damage evolution, given partial data from the damage-evolution phenomenon. The current approach considers an initial population of structures for which damage evolution is extensively observed. Subsequently, a second population of structures with evolving damage is considered for which two monitoring systems are available, a low-availability and high-fidelity (low-uncertainty) one, and a widely-available and low-fidelity (high-uncertainty) one. The task of the current work is to follow an active-learning approach to identify the structures to which the high-fidelity system should be assigned in order to enhance the predictive capabilities of the machine-learning model throughout the population.
Unscented Transform-based Pure Pursuit Path-Tracking Algorithm under Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Automated driving has become more and more popular due to its potential to eliminate road accidents by taking over driving tasks from humans. One of the remaining challenges is to follow a planned path autonomously, especially when uncertainties in self-localizing or understanding the surroundings can influence the decisions made by autonomous vehicles, such as calculating how much they need to steer to minimize tracking errors. In this paper, a modified geometric pure pursuit path-tracking algorithm is proposed, taking into consideration such uncertainties using the unscented transform. The algorithm is tested through simulations for typical road geometries, such as straight and circular lines.
ASAG2024: A Combined Benchmark for Short Answer Grading
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Open-ended questions test a more thorough understanding than closed-ended questions and are often a preferred assessment method. However, open-ended questions are tedious to grade and subject to personal bias. Therefore, there have been efforts to speed up the grading process through automation. Short Answer Grading (SAG) systems aim to automatically score students' answers. Despite growth in SAG methods and capabilities, there exists no comprehensive short-answer grading benchmark across different subjects, grading scales, and distributions. Thus, it is hard to assess the capabilities of current automated grading methods in terms of their generalizability. In this preliminary work, we introduce the combined ASAG2024 benchmark to facilitate the comparison of automated grading systems. Combining seven commonly used short-answer grading datasets in a common structure and grading scale. For our benchmark, we evaluate a set of recent SAG methods, revealing that while LLM-based approaches reach new high scores, they still are far from reaching human performance. This opens up avenues for future research on human-machine SAG systems.
Reducing Diversity to Generate Hierarchical Archetypes
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The Artificial Intelligence field seldom address the development of a fundamental building piece: a framework, methodology or algorithm to automatically build hierarchies of abstractions. This is a key requirement in order to build intelligent behaviour, as recent neuroscience studies clearly expose. In this paper we present a primitive-based framework to automatically generate hierarchies of constructive archetypes, as a theory of how to generate hierarchies of abstractions. We assume the existence of a primitive with very specific characteristics, and we develop our framework over it. We prove the effectiveness of our framework through mathematical definitions and proofs. Finally, we give a few insights about potential uses of our framework and the expected results.
Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Inspired by the legal doctrine of stare decisis, which leverages precedents (prior cases) for informed decision-making, we explore methods to integrate them into LJP models. To facilitate precedent retrieval, we train a retriever with a fine-grained relevance signal based on the overlap ratio of alleged articles between cases. We investigate two strategies to integrate precedents: direct incorporation at inference via label interpolation based on case proximity and during training via a precedent fusion module using a stacked-cross attention model. We employ joint training of the retriever and LJP models to address latent space divergence between them. Our experiments on LJP tasks from the ECHR jurisdiction reveal that integrating precedents during training coupled with joint training of the retriever and LJP model, outperforms models without precedents or with precedents incorporated only at inference, particularly benefiting sparser articles.
SEART Data Hub: Streamlining Large-Scale Source Code Mining and Pre-Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Large-scale code datasets have acquired an increasingly central role in software engineering (SE) research. This is the result of (i) the success of the mining software repositories (MSR) community, that pushed the standards of empirical studies in SE; and (ii) the recent advent of deep learning (DL) in software engineering, with models trained and tested on large source code datasets. While there exist some ready-to-use datasets in the literature, researchers often need to build and pre-process their own dataset to meet specific requirements of the study/technique they are working on. This implies a substantial cost in terms of time and computational resources. In this work we present the SEART Data Hub, a web application that allows to easily build and pre-process large-scale datasets featuring code mined from public GitHub repositories. Through a simple web interface, researchers can specify a set of mining criteria (e.g., only collect code from repositories having more than 100 contributors and more than 1,000 commits) as well as specific pre-processing steps they want to perform (e.g., remove duplicates, test code, instances with syntax errors). After submitting the request, the user will receive an email with a download link for the required dataset within a few hours. A video showcasing the SEART Data Hub is available at https://youtu.be/lCgQaA7CYWA.
Beyond Decisiveness of Infinite Markov Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Verification of infinite-state Markov chains is still a challenge despite several fruitful numerical or statistical approaches. For decisive Markov chains, there is a simple numerical algorithm that frames the reachability probability as accurately as required (however with an unknown complexity). On the other hand when applicable, statistical model checking is in most of the cases very efficient. Here we study the relation between these two approaches showing first that decisiveness is a necessary and sufficient condition for almost sure termination of statistical model checking. Afterwards we develop an approach with application to both methods that substitutes to a non decisive Markov chain a decisive Markov chain with the same reachability probability. This approach combines two key ingredients: abstraction and importance sampling (a technique that was formerly used for efficiency). We develop this approach on a generic formalism called layered Markov chain (LMC). Afterwards we perform an empirical study on probabilistic pushdown automata (an instance of LMC) to understand the complexity factors of the statistical and numerical algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this prototype is the first implementation of the deterministic algorithm for decisive Markov chains and required us to solve several qualitative and numerical issues.
Exploiting Motion Prior for Accurate Pose Estimation of Dashboard Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Dashboard cameras (dashcams) record millions of driving videos daily, offering a valuable potential data source for various applications, including driving map production and updates. A necessary step for utilizing these dashcam data involves the estimation of camera poses. However, the low-quality images captured by dashcams, characterized by motion blurs and dynamic objects, pose challenges for existing image-matching methods in accurately estimating camera poses. In this study, we propose a precise pose estimation method for dashcam images, leveraging the inherent camera motion prior. Typically, image sequences captured by dash cameras exhibit pronounced motion prior, such as forward movement or lateral turns, which serve as essential cues for correspondence estimation. Building upon this observation, we devise a pose regression module aimed at learning camera motion prior, subsequently integrating these prior into both correspondences and pose estimation processes. The experiment shows that, in real dashcams dataset, our method is 22% better than the baseline for pose estimation in AUC5\textdegree, and it can estimate poses for 19% more images with less reprojection error in Structure from Motion (SfM).
Electro-Mechanical Contact Interactions Between Human Finger and Touchscreen Under Electroadhesion
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Electroadhesion (EA) has potential in robotics, automation, space missions, textiles, and tactile displays, but its physics remains underexplored due to limited models and experimental data. This thesis develops an electro-mechanical model to estimate electrostatic forces between human finger and touchscreen under EA and compares it to experimentally measured friction forces. The model aligns well with the data, showing that the electrostatic force changes mainly due to charge leakage from the Stratum Corneum at frequencies below 250 Hz and its electrical properties above 250 Hz. Additionally, a novel approach using electrical impedance measurements estimates electrostatic forces by subtracting skin and touchscreen impedances from the total impedance. This method is the first to experimentally estimate the average air gap between finger and voltage-induced capacitive touchscreen. The effect of electrode polarization impedance, particularly at low frequencies, was also studied, revealing its role in the charge leakage phenomenon. Tactile perception via EA was investigated using DC and AC voltage signals on a touchscreen with 10 participants of varying finger moisture levels. Results showed that AC voltage detection thresholds were significantly lower than for DC, explained by charge leakage at lower frequencies. Participants with moist fingers exhibited higher threshold levels, supported by impedance measurements. The thesis also investigated how touchscreen top coatings influence tactile perception, focusing on EA-free interactions. Psychophysical experiments and physical measurements demonstrated that coating materials significantly affect tactile perception, likely due to molecular interactions. These findings offer insights into finger-touchscreen interactions under EA and have potential applications in designing robotic systems and haptic interfaces using this technology.