Robots have been steadily increasing their presence in our daily lives, where they can work along with humans to provide assistance in various tasks on industry floors, in offices, and in homes. Automated assembly is one of the key applications of robots, and the next generation assembly systems could become much more efficient by creating collaborative human-robot systems. However, although collaborative robots have been around for decades, their application in truly collaborative systems has been limited. This is because a truly collaborative human-robot system needs to adjust its operation with respect to the uncertainty and imprecision in human actions, ensure safety during interaction, etc. In this paper, we present a system for human-robot collaborative assembly using learning from demonstration and pose estimation, so that the robot can adapt to the uncertainty caused by the operation of humans. Learning from demonstration is used to generate motion trajectories for the robot based on the pose estimate of different goal locations from a deep learning-based vision system. The proposed system is demonstrated using a physical 6 DoF manipulator in a collaborative human-robot assembly scenario. We show successful generalization of the system's operation to changes in the initial and final goal locations through various experiments.

Dynamic movement primitives are widely used for learning skills which can be demonstrated to a robot by a skilled human or controller. While their generalization capabilities and simple formulation make them very appealing to use, they possess no strong guarantees to satisfy operational safety constraints for a task. In this paper, we present constrained dynamic movement primitives (CDMP) which can allow for constraint satisfaction in the robot workspace. We present a formulation of a non-linear optimization to perturb the DMP forcing weights regressed by locally-weighted regression to admit a Zeroing Barrier Function (ZBF), which certifies workspace constraint satisfaction. We demonstrate the proposed CDMP under different constraints on the end-effector movement such as obstacle avoidance and workspace constraints on a physical robot. A video showing the implementation of the proposed algorithm using different manipulators in different environments could be found here https://youtu.be/hJegJJkJfys.

我们介绍了基于学习的合规控制器，用于工业机器人的装配操作。我们提出了在从演示（LFD）中的一般环境中的一个解决方案，其中通过专家教师演示提供标称轨迹。这可以用于学习可以概括为组装中涉及的一个部件的新颖的技术的合适的表达，例如钉孔中的孔（PEG）插入任务。在期望中，在视觉或其他感测系统不完全准确地估计这种新颖的位置，机器人需要进一步修改产生的轨迹，以响应通过力 - 扭矩（F / T）传感器测量的力读数安装在机器人的手腕或另一个合适的位置。在组装期间遍历参考轨迹的恒定速度的假设，我们提出了一种新颖的容纳力控制器，其允许机器人安全地探索不同的接触配置。使用该控制器收集的数据用于训练高斯过程模型以预测栓地相对于目标孔的位置的未对准。我们表明所提出的基于学习的方法可以校正由PIH任务中组装部件之间的未对准引起的各种接触配置，在插入期间实现了高成功率。我们使用工业操纵器臂展示结果，并证明所提出的方法可以使用从培训的机器学习模型的力反馈来执行自适应插入。

在本文中，我们提出了一种基于模型的增强学习（MBRL）算法，称为\ emph {Monte Carlo概率的学习控制}（MC-PILCO）。该算法依赖于高斯流程（GPS）来对系统动力学进行建模以及蒙特卡洛方法以估计策略梯度。这定义了一个框架，在该框架中，我们可以在其中选择以下组件的选择：（i）成本函数的选择，（ii）使用辍学的策略优化，（iii）通过在使用中的结构内核来提高数据效率GP型号。上述方面的组合会极大地影响MC-PILCO的性能。在模拟卡车杆环境中的数值比较表明，MC-PILCO具有更好的数据效率和控制性能W.R.T.最先进的基于GP的MBRL算法。最后，我们将MC-PILCO应用于实际系统，考虑到具有部分可测量状态的特定系统。我们讨论了在策略优化过程中同时建模测量系统和国家估计器的重要性。已在模拟和两个真实系统（Furuta pendulum和一个球形式钻机）中测试了所提出的溶液的有效性。

Numerous works use word embedding-based metrics to quantify societal biases and stereotypes in texts. Recent studies have found that word embeddings can capture semantic similarity but may be affected by word frequency. In this work we study the effect of frequency when measuring female vs. male gender bias with word embedding-based bias quantification methods. We find that Skip-gram with negative sampling and GloVe tend to detect male bias in high frequency words, while GloVe tends to return female bias in low frequency words. We show these behaviors still exist when words are randomly shuffled. This proves that the frequency-based effect observed in unshuffled corpora stems from properties of the metric rather than from word associations. The effect is spurious and problematic since bias metrics should depend exclusively on word co-occurrences and not individual word frequencies. Finally, we compare these results with the ones obtained with an alternative metric based on Pointwise Mutual Information. We find that this metric does not show a clear dependence on frequency, even though it is slightly skewed towards male bias across all frequencies.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

Feature acquisition algorithms address the problem of acquiring informative features while balancing the costs of acquisition to improve the learning performances of ML models. Previous approaches have focused on calculating the expected utility values of features to determine the acquisition sequences. Other approaches formulated the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and applied reinforcement learning based algorithms. In comparison to previous approaches, we focus on 1) formulating the feature acquisition problem as a MDP and applying Monte Carlo Tree Search, 2) calculating the intermediary rewards for each acquisition step based on model improvements and acquisition costs and 3) simultaneously optimizing model improvement and acquisition costs with multi-objective Monte Carlo Tree Search. With Proximal Policy Optimization and Deep Q-Network algorithms as benchmark, we show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with experimental study.

360-degree panoramic videos have gained considerable attention in recent years due to the rapid development of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and panoramic cameras. One major problem in streaming panoramic videos is that panoramic videos are much larger in size compared to traditional ones. Moreover, the user devices are often in a wireless environment, with limited battery, computation power, and bandwidth. To reduce resource consumption, researchers have proposed ways to predict the users' viewports so that only part of the entire video needs to be transmitted from the server. However, the robustness of such prediction approaches has been overlooked in the literature: it is usually assumed that only a few models, pre-trained on past users' experiences, are applied for prediction to all users. We observe that those pre-trained models can perform poorly for some users because they might have drastically different behaviors from the majority, and the pre-trained models cannot capture the features in unseen videos. In this work, we propose a novel meta learning based viewport prediction paradigm to alleviate the worst prediction performance and ensure the robustness of viewport prediction. This paradigm uses two machine learning models, where the first model predicts the viewing direction, and the second model predicts the minimum video prefetch size that can include the actual viewport. We first train two meta models so that they are sensitive to new training data, and then quickly adapt them to users while they are watching the videos. Evaluation results reveal that the meta models can adapt quickly to each user, and can significantly increase the prediction accuracy, especially for the worst-performing predictions.

This paper presents a corpus annotated for the task of direct-speech extraction in Croatian. The paper focuses on the annotation of the quotation, co-reference resolution, and sentiment annotation in SETimes news corpus in Croatian and on the analysis of its language-specific differences compared to English. From this, a list of the phenomena that require special attention when performing these annotations is derived. The generated corpus with quotation features annotations can be used for multiple tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing.

With the ever-growing popularity of the field of NLP, the demand for datasets in low resourced-languages follows suit. Following a previously established framework, in this paper, we present the UNER dataset, a multilingual and hierarchical parallel corpus annotated for named-entities. We describe in detail the developed procedure necessary to create this type of dataset in any language available on Wikipedia with DBpedia information. The three-step procedure extracts entities from Wikipedia articles, links them to DBpedia, and maps the DBpedia sets of classes to the UNER labels. This is followed by a post-processing procedure that significantly increases the number of identified entities in the final results. The paper concludes with a statistical and qualitative analysis of the resulting dataset.