由于有限的有效载荷能力有限，因此在山区环境中的救援任务几乎无法通过标准的腿部机器人或飞行机器人来实现。我们提出了一个新颖的概念，用于绳索攀岩机器人，该机器人可以谈判最新的斜坡并承担重载的有效载荷。机器人通过绳子固定在山上，并配备了一条腿来推向山上并开始跳跃动作。在跳跃之间，提升机被用来绕/放开绳索，以垂直移动并影响横向运动。这种简单的（但有效）的两倍致动，使系统能够实现高安全性和能源效率。确实，绳索可以防止机器人掉落，同时弥补了大部分重量，从而大大减少了腿部执行器所需的努力。我们还提出了一种最佳控制策略，以生成克服障碍的点对点轨迹。由于使用了自定义简化的机器人模型，我们可以实现快速计算时间（$ <$ 1 s）。我们使用完整的机器人模型验证了凉亭模拟中生成的最佳运动，显示了提出的方法的有效性，并确认了我们概念的兴趣。最后，我们进行了可及性分析，表明可实现的目标区域受到脚壁接触的摩擦特性的强烈影响。

确定高精度和可扩展性的资产位置是市场上最多的调查技术之一。当需要抽取量级精度或需要在室内环境中运行时，基于卫星的定位系统（即GLONASS或GLILEO）提供的基于卫星的定位系统（即GLONASS或GALILEO）的准确性并不总是足够的。在处理室内定位系统时，可扩展性也是一种反复出现的问题。本文介绍了一种创新的UWB室内GPS，可以追踪任意数量的资产而不降低测量更新率。为了提高系统的准确性，研究了数学模型和不确定性源。结果突出了所提出的实施方式提供定位信息，其中最大误差低于20厘米。由于DTDOA传输机制，也解决了不需要从资产被跟踪的活动作用的可扩展性。

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast to small, domain-specific, and modifiable knowledge bases that are prominent in real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of injecting domain-specific knowledge prior to fine-tuning on TOD tasks. To this end, we utilize light-weight adapters that can be easily integrated with PLMs and serve as a repository for facts learned from different KBs. To measure the efficacy of proposed knowledge injection methods, we introduce Knowledge Probing using Response Selection (KPRS) -- a probe designed specifically for TOD models. Experiments on KPRS and the response generation task show improvements of knowledge injection with adapters over strong baselines.

The current trend of applying transfer learning from CNNs trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present Colab NAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows it to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset in just 4.5 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

In this paper we propose a general approach to define a many-valued preferential interpretation of gradual argumentation semantics. The approach allows for conditional reasoning over arguments and boolean combination of arguments, with respect to a class of gradual semantics, through the verification of graded (strict or defeasible) implications over a preferential interpretation. As a proof of concept, in the finitely-valued case, an Answer set Programming approach is proposed for conditional reasoning in a many-valued argumentation semantics of weighted argumentation graphs. The paper also develops and discusses a probabilistic semantics for gradual argumentation, which builds on the many-valued conditional semantics.

Weather forecasting centers currently rely on statistical postprocessing methods to minimize forecast error. This improves skill but can lead to predictions that violate physical principles or disregard dependencies between variables, which can be problematic for downstream applications and for the trustworthiness of postprocessing models, especially when they are based on new machine learning approaches. Building on recent advances in physics-informed machine learning, we propose to achieve physical consistency in deep learning-based postprocessing models by integrating meteorological expertise in the form of analytic equations. Applied to the post-processing of surface weather in Switzerland, we find that constraining a neural network to enforce thermodynamic state equations yields physically-consistent predictions of temperature and humidity without compromising performance. Our approach is especially advantageous when data is scarce, and our findings suggest that incorporating domain expertise into postprocessing models allows to optimize weather forecast information while satisfying application-specific requirements.

We study the learning dynamics of self-predictive learning for reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that learn representations by minimizing the prediction error of their own future latent representations. Despite its recent empirical success, such algorithms have an apparent defect: trivial representations (such as constants) minimize the prediction error, yet it is obviously undesirable to converge to such solutions. Our central insight is that careful designs of the optimization dynamics are critical to learning meaningful representations. We identify that a faster paced optimization of the predictor and semi-gradient updates on the representation, are crucial to preventing the representation collapse. Then in an idealized setup, we show self-predictive learning dynamics carries out spectral decomposition on the state transition matrix, effectively capturing information of the transition dynamics. Building on the theoretical insights, we propose bidirectional self-predictive learning, a novel self-predictive algorithm that learns two representations simultaneously. We examine the robustness of our theoretical insights with a number of small-scale experiments and showcase the promise of the novel representation learning algorithm with large-scale experiments.

Pretrained transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks and benchmarks recently. Many state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs), however, do not scale well above the threshold of 512 input tokens. In specialized domains though (such as legal, scientific or biomedical), models often need to process very long text (sometimes well above 10000 tokens). Even though many efficient transformers have been proposed (such as Longformer, BigBird or FNet), so far, only very few such efficient models are available for specialized domains. Additionally, since the pretraining process is extremely costly in general - but even more so as the sequence length increases - it is often only in reach of large research labs. One way of making pretraining cheaper is the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) task, by providing more signal during training, since the loss can be computed over all tokens. In this work, we train Longformer models with the efficient RTD task on legal data to showcase that pretraining efficient LMs is possible using much less compute. We evaluate the trained models on challenging summarization tasks requiring the model to summarize long texts to show to what extent the models can achieve good performance on downstream tasks. We find that both the small and base models outperform their baselines on the in-domain BillSum and out-of-domain PubMed tasks in their respective parameter range. We publish our code and models for research purposes.

Synthetic data generation has recently gained widespread attention as a more reliable alternative to traditional data anonymization. The involved methods are originally developed for image synthesis. Hence, their application to the typically tabular and relational datasets from healthcare, finance and other industries is non-trivial. While substantial research has been devoted to the generation of realistic tabular datasets, the study of synthetic relational databases is still in its infancy. In this paper, we combine the variational autoencoder framework with graph neural networks to generate realistic synthetic relational databases. We then apply the obtained method to two publicly available databases in computational experiments. The results indicate that real databases' structures are accurately preserved in the resulting synthetic datasets, even for large datasets with advanced data types.

In this paper, we propose the first-ever real benchmark thought for evaluating Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and, in general, Neural Rendering (NR) frameworks. We design and implement an effective pipeline for scanning real objects in quantity and effortlessly. Our scan station is built with less than 500$ hardware budget and can collect roughly 4000 images of a scanned object in just 5 minutes. Such a platform is used to build ScanNeRF, a dataset characterized by several train/val/test splits aimed at benchmarking the performance of modern NeRF methods under different conditions. Accordingly, we evaluate three cutting-edge NeRF variants on it to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The dataset is available on our project page, together with an online benchmark to foster the development of better and better NeRFs.