This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

对于多面体之间的障碍物躲避开发的控制器是在狭小的空间导航一个具有挑战性的和必要的问题。传统的方法只能制定的避障问题，因为离线优化问题。为了应对这些挑战，我们提出用非光滑控制屏障功能多面体之间的避障，它可以实时与基于QP的优化问题来解决基于二元安全关键最优控制。一种双优化问题被引入到表示被施加到构造控制屏障功能多面体和用于双形式的拉格朗日函数之间的最小距离。我们验证了避开障碍物与在走廊环境受控的L形（沙发形）机器人建议的双配制剂。据我们所知，这是第一次，实时紧避障与非保守的演习是在移动沙发（钢琴）与非线性动力学问题来实现的。

We propose an ensemble approach to predict the labels in linear programming word problems. The entity identification and the meaning representation are two types of tasks to be solved in the NL4Opt competition. We propose the ensembleCRF method to identify the named entities for the first task. We found that single models didn't improve for the given task in our analysis. A set of prediction models predict the entities. The generated results are combined to form a consensus result in the ensembleCRF method. We present an ensemble text generator to produce the representation sentences for the second task. We thought of dividing the problem into multiple small tasks due to the overflow in the output. A single model generates different representations based on the prompt. All the generated text is combined to form an ensemble and produce a mathematical meaning of a linear programming problem.

Transformer-based language models have been shown to be highly effective for several NLP tasks. In this paper, we consider three transformer models, BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet, in both small and large version, and investigate how faithful their representations are with respect to the semantic content of texts. We formalize a notion of semantic faithfulness, in which the semantic content of a text should causally figure in a model's inferences in question answering. We then test this notion by observing a model's behavior on answering questions about a story after performing two novel semantic interventions -- deletion intervention and negation intervention. While transformer models achieve high performance on standard question answering tasks, we show that they fail to be semantically faithful once we perform these interventions for a significant number of cases (~50% for deletion intervention, and ~20% drop in accuracy for negation intervention). We then propose an intervention-based training regime that can mitigate the undesirable effects for deletion intervention by a significant margin (from ~50% to ~6%). We analyze the inner-workings of the models to better understand the effectiveness of intervention-based training for deletion intervention. But we show that this training does not attenuate other aspects of semantic unfaithfulness such as the models' inability to deal with negation intervention or to capture the predicate-argument structure of texts. We also test InstructGPT, via prompting, for its ability to handle the two interventions and to capture predicate-argument structure. While InstructGPT models do achieve very high performance on predicate-argument structure task, they fail to respond adequately to our deletion and negation interventions.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are becoming increasingly more important in assisted and automated driving. Using such entities which are obtained using machine learning is inevitable: tasks such as recognizing traffic signs cannot be developed reasonably using traditional software development methods. DNN however do have the problem that they are mostly black boxes and therefore hard to understand and debug. One particular problem is that they are prone to hidden backdoors. This means that the DNN misclassifies its input, because it considers properties that should not be decisive for the output. Backdoors may either be introduced by malicious attackers or by inappropriate training. In any case, detecting and removing them is important in the automotive area, as they might lead to safety violations with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to remove backdoors. Our method works for both intentional as well as unintentional backdoors. We also do not require prior knowledge about the shape or distribution of backdoors. Experimental evidence shows that our method performs well on several medium-sized examples.

Multi-Exit models (MEMs) use an early-exit strategy to improve the accuracy and efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs) by allowing samples to exit the network before the last layer. However, the effectiveness of MEMs in the presence of distribution shifts remains largely unexplored. Our work examines how distribution shifts generated by common image corruptions affect the accuracy/efficiency of MEMs. We find that under common corruptions, early-exiting at the first correct exit reduces the inference cost and provides a significant boost in accuracy ( 10%) over exiting at the last layer. However, with realistic early-exit strategies, which do not assume knowledge about the correct exits, MEMs still reduce inference cost but provide a marginal improvement in accuracy (1%) compared to exiting at the last layer. Moreover, the presence of distribution shift widens the gap between an MEM's maximum classification accuracy and realistic early-exit strategies by 5% on average compared with the gap on in-distribution data. Our empirical analysis shows that the lack of calibration due to a distribution shift increases the susceptibility of such early-exit strategies to exit early and increases misclassification rates. Furthermore, the lack of calibration increases the inconsistency in the predictions of the model across exits, leading to both inefficient inference and more misclassifications compared with evaluation on in-distribution data. Finally, we propose two metrics, underthinking and overthinking, that quantify the different behavior of practical early-exit strategy under distribution shifts, and provide insights into improving the practical utility of MEMs.

Reinforcement learning (RL) operating on attack graphs leveraging cyber terrain principles are used to develop reward and state associated with determination of surveillance detection routes (SDR). This work extends previous efforts on developing RL methods for path analysis within enterprise networks. This work focuses on building SDR where the routes focus on exploring the network services while trying to evade risk. RL is utilized to support the development of these routes by building a reward mechanism that would help in realization of these paths. The RL algorithm is modified to have a novel warm-up phase which decides in the initial exploration which areas of the network are safe to explore based on the rewards and penalty scale factor.

Real engineering and scientific applications often involve one or more qualitative inputs. Standard Gaussian processes (GPs), however, cannot directly accommodate qualitative inputs. The recently introduced latent variable Gaussian process (LVGP) overcomes this issue by first mapping each qualitative factor to underlying latent variables (LVs), and then uses any standard GP covariance function over these LVs. The LVs are estimated similarly to the other GP hyperparameters through maximum likelihood estimation, and then plugged into the prediction expressions. However, this plug-in approach will not account for uncertainty in estimation of the LVs, which can be significant especially with limited training data. In this work, we develop a fully Bayesian approach for the LVGP model and for visualizing the effects of the qualitative inputs via their LVs. We also develop approximations for scaling up LVGPs and fully Bayesian inference for the LVGP hyperparameters. We conduct numerical studies comparing plug-in inference against fully Bayesian inference over a few engineering models and material design applications. In contrast to previous studies on standard GP modeling that have largely concluded that a fully Bayesian treatment offers limited improvements, our results show that for LVGP modeling it offers significant improvements in prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification over the plug-in approach.

水下机器人通常依靠声纳等声传感器来感知周围的环境。但是，这些传感器通常被多种源和噪声类型淹没，这使得使用原始数据对特征，对象或边界返回的任何有意义的推断都非常困难。尽管存在几种传统的处理噪声方法，但它们的成功率并不令人满意。本文介绍了有条件生成的对抗网络（CGAN）的新应用，以训练模型以产生无噪声的声纳图像，从而优于几种常规过滤方法。估计自由空间对于执行主动探索和映射的自主机器人至关重要。因此，与常规方法相比，我们将方法应用于水下占用映射的任务，并显示出卓越的自由和占用空间推断。

在未来几十年中部署的高级反应堆将面临放松管制的能源市场，并可能采用灵活的运营来提高盈利能力。为了帮助从基本负载到柔性操作范式的过渡，寻求自动操作。这项工作着重于自主操作的控制方面。具体而言，层次控制系统旨在支持常规操作瞬变期间的约束执法。在系统中，集成了数据驱动的建模，基于物理的状态观察和经典控制算法，以提供适应性和健壮的解决方案。 320 MW氟化物冷却的高温卵石床反应器是证明控制系统的设计基础。分层控制系统由监督层和低级层组成。监督层收到更改系统操作条件的请求，并根据已分配的约束接受或拒绝它们。发出限制条件以使工厂保持最佳操作区域。低级层与系统的执行器接口，以实现要求的更改，同时保持跟踪和调节职责。为了接受监督层的请求，采用了参考调查算法。为了建模反应器的动力学，使用了系统识别算法，动态模式分解。为了估计无法直接测量的过程变量的演变，采用了无味的卡尔曼滤波器，并结合了核动力学的非线性模型。这些算法的组成导致了40％功率降低瞬变期间约束执法的数值证明。通过修改约束值并在瞬态期间执行这些系统来证明所提出系统的适应性。在嘈杂的环境下执行约束也证明了鲁棒性。