与语音界面进行互动以查询问答（QA）系统越来越流行。通常，质量保证系统依靠通道检索来选择候选上下文并阅读理解以提取最终答案。尽管人们一直在关注质量检查系统的阅读理解部分，以防止自动语音识别（ASR）模型引入的错误，但段落检索部分仍未开发。但是，此类错误会影响通过检索的性能，从而导致端到端的性能较低。为了解决这一差距，我们通过合成的ASR噪声增强了两个现有的大规模通道排名和开放域QA数据集，并研究了ASR噪声的问题，并研究词汇和密度捕捞器的鲁棒性。此外，我们研究了不同领域的数据增强技术的普遍性。每个域都是不同的语言方言或口音。最后，我们创建了一个新数据集，其中包含人类用户提出的问题，并使用其转录表明，在处理自然ASR噪声而不是合成ASR噪声时，检索性能会进一步降低。

侧重于查询的摘要（QFS）需要生成使用一组相关文档的查询给出文本摘要。但是，在实践中，此类相关文件不易获得，但应首先从文档收集中检索。因此，我们展示了如何扩展此任务以使其更加逼真。因此，任务设置也类似于开放式域问题应答任务的设置，其中答案是顶部检索到的文档的摘要。要解决此扩展任务，我们将通过文本生成组合通过文本生成来产生给定输入查询的检索段落的摘要。我们展示了第一个对拟议任务的评估结果，并表明一些样本足以通过检索的通道进行微调的大型生成模型。

实体消除歧义（ED）是实体链接（EL）的最后一步，当候选实体根据它们出现的上下文重新登录。所有数据集，用于培训和评估EL的模型，包括方便样本，如新闻文章和推文，将实体分布的现有概率偏置传播到更频繁发生的实体。前面表明，在这种数据集上的EL系统的性能高估，因为可以通过仅仅在学习之前获得更高的精度分数。为了提供更具足够的评估基准，我们介绍了ShadowLink数据集，其中包括16K短文本代码段，其中包含实体提出。我们评估并报告在Shadowlink基准上的流行EL系统的表现。结果表明，在评估中所有EL系统的越来越少的常见实体之间的准确性差异相当差异，证明了现有概率偏差和实体的效果。

Smart City applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response, often use swarms of intelligent and cooperative drones to efficiently collect sensor data over different areas of interest and time spans. However, when the required sensing becomes spatio-temporally large and varying, a collective arrangement of sensing tasks to a large number of battery-restricted and distributed drones is challenging. To address this problem, we introduce a scalable and energy-aware model for planning and coordination of spatio-temporal sensing. The coordination model is built upon a decentralized multi-agent collective learning algorithm (EPOS) to ensure scalability, resilience, and flexibility that existing approaches lack of. Experimental results illustrate the outstanding performance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Analytical results contribute a deeper understanding of how coordinated mobility of drones influences sensing performance. This novel coordination solution is applied to traffic monitoring using real-world data to demonstrate a $46.45\%$ more accurate and $2.88\%$ more efficient detection of vehicles as the number of drones become a scarce resource.

In this paper, we present an adjustable-equilibrium parallel elastic actuator (AE-PEA). The actuator consists of a motor, an equilibrium adjusting mechanism, and a spring arranged into a cylindrical geometry, similar to a motor-gearbox assembly. The novel component of the actuator is the equilibrium adjusting mechanism which (i) does not require external energy to maintain the equilibrium position of the actuator even if the spring is deformed and (ii) enables equilibrium position control with low energy cost by rotating the spring while keeping it undeformed. Adjustable equilibrium parallel elastic actuators resolve the main limitation of parallel elastic actuators (PEAs) by enabling energy-efficient operation at different equilibrium positions, instead of being limited to energy-efficient operation at a single equilibrium position. We foresee the use of AE-PEAs in industrial robots, mobile robots, exoskeletons, and prostheses, where efficient oscillatory motion and gravity compensation at different positions are required.

Automatic fake news detection is a challenging problem in misinformation spreading, and it has tremendous real-world political and social impacts. Past studies have proposed machine learning-based methods for detecting such fake news, focusing on different properties of the published news articles, such as linguistic characteristics of the actual content, which however have limitations due to the apparent language barriers. Departing from such efforts, we propose FNDaaS, the first automatic, content-agnostic fake news detection method, that considers new and unstudied features such as network and structural characteristics per news website. This method can be enforced as-a-Service, either at the ISP-side for easier scalability and maintenance, or user-side for better end-user privacy. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method using data crawled from existing lists of 637 fake and 1183 real news websites, and by building and testing a proof of concept system that materializes our proposal. Our analysis of data collected from these websites shows that the vast majority of fake news domains are very young and appear to have lower time periods of an IP associated with their domain than real news ones. By conducting various experiments with machine learning classifiers, we demonstrate that FNDaaS can achieve an AUC score of up to 0.967 on past sites, and up to 77-92% accuracy on newly-flagged ones.

Timely and effective feedback within surgical training plays a critical role in developing the skills required to perform safe and efficient surgery. Feedback from expert surgeons, while especially valuable in this regard, is challenging to acquire due to their typically busy schedules, and may be subject to biases. Formal assessment procedures like OSATS and GEARS attempt to provide objective measures of skill, but remain time-consuming. With advances in machine learning there is an opportunity for fast and objective automated feedback on technical skills. The SimSurgSkill 2021 challenge (hosted as a sub-challenge of EndoVis at MICCAI 2021) aimed to promote and foster work in this endeavor. Using virtual reality (VR) surgical tasks, competitors were tasked with localizing instruments and predicting surgical skill. Here we summarize the winning approaches and how they performed. Using this publicly available dataset and results as a springboard, future work may enable more efficient training of surgeons with advances in surgical data science. The dataset can be accessed from https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-simsurgskill-2021.

3D gaze estimation is most often tackled as learning a direct mapping between input images and the gaze vector or its spherical coordinates. Recently, it has been shown that pose estimation of the face, body and hands benefits from revising the learning target from few pose parameters to dense 3D coordinates. In this work, we leverage this observation and propose to tackle 3D gaze estimation as regression of 3D eye meshes. We overcome the absence of compatible ground truth by fitting a rigid 3D eyeball template on existing gaze datasets and propose to improve generalization by making use of widely available in-the-wild face images. To this end, we propose an automatic pipeline to retrieve robust gaze pseudo-labels from arbitrary face images and design a multi-view supervision framework to balance their effect during training. In our experiments, our method achieves improvement of 30% compared to state-of-the-art in cross-dataset gaze estimation, when no ground truth data are available for training, and 7% when they are. We make our project publicly available at https://github.com/Vagver/dense3Deyes.

Fast timescale state estimation for a large power system can be challenging if the sensors producing the measurements are few in number. This is particularly true for doing time-synchronized state estimation for a transmission system that has minimal phasor measurement unit (PMU) coverage. This paper proposes a Deep Neural network-based State Estimator (DeNSE) to overcome this extreme unobservability problem. For systems in which the existing PMU infrastructure is not able to bring the estimation errors within acceptable limits using the DeNSE, a data-driven incremental PMU placement methodology is also introduced. The practical utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by considering topology changes, non-Gaussian measurement noise, bad data detection and correction, and large system application.

This paper proposes Distributed Model Predictive Covariance Steering (DMPCS), a novel method for safe multi-robot control under uncertainty. The scope of our approach is to blend covariance steering theory, distributed optimization and model predictive control (MPC) into a single methodology that is safe, scalable and decentralized. Initially, we pose a problem formulation that uses the Wasserstein distance to steer the state distributions of a multi-robot team to desired targets, and probabilistic constraints to ensure safety. We then transform this problem into a finite-dimensional optimization one by utilizing a disturbance feedback policy parametrization for covariance steering and a tractable approximation of the safety constraints. To solve the latter problem, we derive a decentralized consensus-based algorithm using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). This method is then extended to a receding horizon form, which yields the proposed DMPCS algorithm. Simulation experiments on large-scale problems with up to hundreds of robots successfully demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of DMPCS. Its superior capability in achieving safety is also highlighted through a comparison against a standard stochastic MPC approach. A video with all simulation experiments is available in https://youtu.be/Hks-0BRozxA.