本文解决了开发一种用于垂直起飞和降落（VTOL）无人驾驶飞机（UAV）自动船舶登陆算法的问题，仅使用无人机中的单眼相机进行跟踪和本地化。船舶着陆是一项具有挑战性的任务，这是由于较小的着陆空间，六个自由度船甲板运动，定位的视觉参考有限以及诸如风阵等的对抗环境条件。我们首先开发了一种计算机视觉算法，该算法估计了使用无人机上的单眼视觉摄像头的图像流在着陆平台上在降落平台上的地平线参考栏的相对位置。我们的方法是由实际的船舶着陆程序动机，然后是海军直升机飞行员在跟踪视觉提示的地平线参考栏时的动机。然后，我们开发了一种强大的增强学习（RL）算法，即使在存在诸如风阵的对抗环境条件的情况下，也可以控制无人机朝着着陆平台。我们证明了与基准非线性PID控制方法相比，我们的算法的性能优越自由（DOF）甲板运动。

该论文讨论了一种基于智能视觉的控制解决方案，用于自主跟踪和降落垂直起飞和降落（VTOL）在船上具有无人驾驶飞机（UAV）的无人使用，而无需使用GPS信号。中心想法涉及自动化海军直升机船着陆程序，该程序将飞行员利用该船作为远程跟踪的视觉参考；但是，是指大多数称为“地平线棒”的海军船上安装的标准化视觉提示，以进行最终进近和着陆阶段。该想法是使用与机器视觉集成的独特设计的非线性控制器实现的。视觉系统利用基于机器学习的对象检测来进行远程船舶跟踪和经典的计算机视觉，以在最终进近和着陆阶段使用地平线估算飞机相对位置和方向。非线性控制器根据视觉系统估计的信息运行，即使在存在不确定性的情况下，也证明了强大的跟踪性能。开发的自动船舶着陆系统是在配备了板载摄像头的四轮摩托车无人机上实施的，在移动的甲板上成功证明了进近和着陆，该甲板模仿了现实的船甲板运动。进行了广泛的模拟和飞行测试，以证明垂直着陆安全性，跟踪能力和着陆精度。

The 3D-aware image synthesis focuses on conserving spatial consistency besides generating high-resolution images with fine details. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has been introduced for synthesizing novel views with low computational cost and superior performance. While several works investigate a generative NeRF and show remarkable achievement, they cannot handle conditional and continuous feature manipulation in the generation procedure. In this work, we introduce a novel model, called Class-Continuous Conditional Generative NeRF ($\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF), which can synthesize conditionally manipulated photorealistic 3D-consistent images by projecting conditional features to the generator and the discriminator. The proposed $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF is evaluated with three image datasets, AFHQ, CelebA, and Cars. As a result, our model shows strong 3D-consistency with fine details and smooth interpolation in conditional feature manipulation. For instance, $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF exhibits a Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 7.64 in 3D-aware face image synthesis with a $\text{128}^{2}$ resolution. Additionally, we provide FIDs of generated 3D-aware images of each class of the datasets as it is possible to synthesize class-conditional images with $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF.

Cellular automata (CA) captivate researchers due to teh emergent, complex individualized behavior that simple global rules of interaction enact. Recent advances in the field have combined CA with convolutional neural networks to achieve self-regenerating images. This new branch of CA is called neural cellular automata [1]. The goal of this project is to use the idea of idea of neural cellular automata to grow prediction machines. We place many different convolutional neural networks in a grid. Each conv net cell outputs a prediction of what the next state will be, and minimizes predictive error. Cells received their neighbors' colors and fitnesses as input. Each cell's fitness score described how accurate its predictions were. Cells could also move to explore their environment and some stochasticity was applied to movement.

There is a dramatic shortage of skilled labor for modern vineyards. The Vinum project is developing a mobile robotic solution to autonomously navigate through vineyards for winter grapevine pruning. This necessitates an autonomous navigation stack for the robot pruning a vineyard. The Vinum project is using the quadruped robot HyQReal. This paper introduces an architecture for a quadruped robot to autonomously move through a vineyard by identifying and approaching grapevines for pruning. The higher level control is a state machine switching between searching for destination positions, autonomously navigating towards those locations, and stopping for the robot to complete a task. The destination points are determined by identifying grapevine trunks using instance segmentation from a Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask-RCNN). These detections are sent through a filter to avoid redundancy and remove noisy detections. The combination of these features is the basis for the proposed architecture.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

In this paper, we learn a diffusion model to generate 3D data on a scene-scale. Specifically, our model crafts a 3D scene consisting of multiple objects, while recent diffusion research has focused on a single object. To realize our goal, we represent a scene with discrete class labels, i.e., categorical distribution, to assign multiple objects into semantic categories. Thus, we extend discrete diffusion models to learn scene-scale categorical distributions. In addition, we validate that a latent diffusion model can reduce computation costs for training and deploying. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to apply discrete and latent diffusion for 3D categorical data on a scene-scale. We further propose to perform semantic scene completion (SSC) by learning a conditional distribution using our diffusion model, where the condition is a partial observation in a sparse point cloud. In experiments, we empirically show that our diffusion models not only generate reasonable scenes, but also perform the scene completion task better than a discriminative model. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zoomin-lee/scene-scale-diffusion

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

We propose a new causal inference framework to learn causal effects from multiple, decentralized data sources in a federated setting. We introduce an adaptive transfer algorithm that learns the similarities among the data sources by utilizing Random Fourier Features to disentangle the loss function into multiple components, each of which is associated with a data source. The data sources may have different distributions; the causal effects are independently and systematically incorporated. The proposed method estimates the similarities among the sources through transfer coefficients, and hence requiring no prior information about the similarity measures. The heterogeneous causal effects can be estimated with no sharing of the raw training data among the sources, thus minimizing the risk of privacy leak. We also provide minimax lower bounds to assess the quality of the parameters learned from the disparate sources. The proposed method is empirically shown to outperform the baselines on decentralized data sources with dissimilar distributions.

Given a large graph with few node labels, how can we (a) identify the mixed network-effect of the graph and (b) predict the unknown labels accurately and efficiently? This work proposes Network Effect Analysis (NEA) and UltraProp, which are based on two insights: (a) the network-effect (NE) insight: a graph can exhibit not only one of homophily and heterophily, but also both or none in a label-wise manner, and (b) the neighbor-differentiation (ND) insight: neighbors have different degrees of influence on the target node based on the strength of connections. NEA provides a statistical test to check whether a graph exhibits network-effect or not, and surprisingly discovers the absence of NE in many real-world graphs known to have heterophily. UltraProp solves the node classification problem with notable advantages: (a) Accurate, thanks to the network-effect (NE) and neighbor-differentiation (ND) insights; (b) Explainable, precisely estimating the compatibility matrix; (c) Scalable, being linear with the input size and handling graphs with millions of nodes; and (d) Principled, with closed-form formula and theoretical guarantee. Applied on eight real-world graph datasets, UltraProp outperforms top competitors in terms of accuracy and run time, requiring only stock CPU servers. On a large real-world graph with 1.6M nodes and 22.3M edges, UltraProp achieves more than 9 times speedup (12 minutes vs. 2 hours) compared to most competitors.