尽管社交媒体中的Echo Chambers受到了相当大的审查，但仍缺少用于检测和分析的一般模型。在这项工作中，我们旨在通过提出一个概率的生成模型来填补这一空白，该模型通过一系列具有一定程度的回声室行为来解释社交媒体足迹（即社交网络结构和信息传播）。并以极性。具体而言，回声室被建模为可渗透到具有相似意识形态极性的信息的社区，并且对相反的倾向信息不渗透：这允许将回声室与缺乏明确意识形态保持一致的社区区分。为了了解模型参数，我们提出了对广义期望最大化算法的可扩展的随机适应，该算法优化了观察社会联系和信息传播的关节可能性。合成数据的实验表明，我们的算法能够及其具有回声室行为和意见极性的程度正确地重建地面真相社区。关于两极分化社会和政治辩论的现实数据的实验，例如英国脱欧公投或COVID-19疫苗运动，证实了我们提议在检测回声室方面的有效性。最后，我们展示了我们的模型如何提高辅助预测任务的准确性，例如立场检测和未来传播的预测。

It is well known that conservative mechanical systems exhibit local oscillatory behaviours due to their elastic and gravitational potentials, which completely characterise these periodic motions together with the inertial properties of the system. The classification of these periodic behaviours and their geometric characterisation are in an on-going secular debate, which recently led to the so-called eigenmanifold theory. The eigenmanifold characterises nonlinear oscillations as a generalisation of linear eigenspaces. With the motivation of performing periodic tasks efficiently, we use tools coming from this theory to construct an optimization problem aimed at inducing desired closed-loop oscillations through a state feedback law. We solve the constructed optimization problem via gradient-descent methods involving neural networks. Extensive simulations show the validity of the approach.

Our aim is to build autonomous agents that can solve tasks in environments like Minecraft. To do so, we used an imitation learning-based approach. We formulate our control problem as a search problem over a dataset of experts' demonstrations, where the agent copies actions from a similar demonstration trajectory of image-action pairs. We perform a proximity search over the BASALT MineRL-dataset in the latent representation of a Video PreTraining model. The agent copies the actions from the expert trajectory as long as the distance between the state representations of the agent and the selected expert trajectory from the dataset do not diverge. Then the proximity search is repeated. Our approach can effectively recover meaningful demonstration trajectories and show human-like behavior of an agent in the Minecraft environment.

Object instance segmentation is a key challenge for indoor robots navigating cluttered environments with many small objects. Limitations in 3D sensing capabilities often make it difficult to detect every possible object. While deep learning approaches may be effective for this problem, manually annotating 3D data for supervised learning is time-consuming. In this work, we explore zero-shot instance segmentation (ZSIS) from RGB-D data to identify unseen objects in a semantic category-agnostic manner. We introduce a zero-shot split for Tabletop Objects Dataset (TOD-Z) to enable this study and present a method that uses annotated objects to learn the ``objectness'' of pixels and generalize to unseen object categories in cluttered indoor environments. Our method, SupeRGB-D, groups pixels into small patches based on geometric cues and learns to merge the patches in a deep agglomerative clustering fashion. SupeRGB-D outperforms existing baselines on unseen objects while achieving similar performance on seen objects. Additionally, it is extremely lightweight (0.4 MB memory requirement) and suitable for mobile and robotic applications. The dataset split and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in so called ``echo chambers'' of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack sufficient means to measure viewpoint diversity in conversations. To this end, in this paper, we operationalize two viewpoint metrics proposed for recommender systems and adapt them to the context of social media conversations. This is the first study to apply these two metrics (Representation and Fragmentation) to real world data and to consider the implications for online conversations specifically. We apply these measures to two topics -- daylight savings time (DST), which serves as a control, and the more politically polarized topic of immigration. We find that the diversity scores for both Fragmentation and Representation are lower for immigration than for DST. Further, we find that while pro-immigrant views receive consistent pushback on the platform, anti-immigrant views largely operate within echo chambers. We observe less severe yet similar patterns for DST. Taken together, Representation and Fragmentation paint a meaningful and important new picture of viewpoint diversity.

This volume contains revised versions of the papers selected for the third volume of the Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI). Previously, formal theories of argument and argument interaction have been proposed and studied, and this has led to the more recent study of computational models of argument. Argumentation, as a field within artificial intelligence (AI), is highly relevant for researchers interested in symbolic representations of knowledge and defeasible reasoning. The purpose of this handbook is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the argumentation research community. OHAAI is designed to serve as a research hub to keep track of the latest and upcoming PhD-driven research on the theory and application of argumentation in all areas related to AI.

Evaluating and comparing text-to-image models is a challenging problem. Significant advances in the field have recently been made, piquing interest of various industrial sectors. As a consequence, a gold standard in the field should cover a variety of tasks and application contexts. In this paper a novel evaluation approach is experimented, on the basis of: (i) a curated data set, made by high-quality royalty-free image-text pairs, divided into ten categories; (ii) a quantitative metric, the CLIP-score, (iii) a human evaluation task to distinguish, for a given text, the real and the generated images. The proposed method has been applied to the most recent models, i.e., DALLE2, Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, GLIDE and Craiyon. Early experimental results show that the accuracy of the human judgement is fully coherent with the CLIP-score. The dataset has been made available to the public.

Real-time monocular 3D reconstruction is a challenging problem that remains unsolved. Although recent end-to-end methods have demonstrated promising results, tiny structures and geometric boundaries are hardly captured due to their insufficient supervision neglecting spatial details and oversimplified feature fusion ignoring temporal cues. To address the problems, we propose an end-to-end 3D reconstruction network SST, which utilizes Sparse estimated points from visual SLAM system as additional Spatial guidance and fuses Temporal features via a novel cross-modal attention mechanism, achieving more detailed reconstruction results. We propose a Local Spatial-Temporal Fusion module to exploit more informative spatial-temporal cues from multi-view color information and sparse priors, as well a Global Spatial-Temporal Fusion module to refine the local TSDF volumes with the world-frame model from coarse to fine. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and 7-Scenes demonstrate that SST outperforms all state-of-the-art competitors, whilst keeping a high inference speed at 59 FPS, enabling real-world applications with real-time requirements.

Robotics software is pushing the limits of software engineering practice. The 3rd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering held a panel on "the best practices for robotic software engineering". This article shares the key takeaways that emerged from the discussion among the panelists and the workshop, ranging from architecting practices at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, model-driven development at Bosch, development and testing of autonomous driving systems at Waymo, and testing of robotics software at XITASO. Researchers and practitioners can build on the contents of this paper to gain a fresh perspective on their activities and focus on the most pressing practices and challenges in developing robotics software today.

Soft actuators have attracted a great deal of interest in the context of rehabilitative and assistive robots for increasing safety and lowering costs as compared to rigid-body robotic systems. During actuation, soft actuators experience high levels of deformation, which can lead to microscale fractures in their elastomeric structure, which fatigues the system over time and eventually leads to macroscale damages and eventually failure. This paper reports finite element modeling (FEM) of pneu-nets at high angles, along with repetitive experimentation at high deformation rates, in order to study the effect and behavior of fatigue in soft robotic actuators, which would result in deviation from the ideal behavior. Comparing the FEM model and experimental data, we show that FEM can model the performance of the actuator before fatigue to a bending angle of 167 degrees with ~96% accuracy. We also show that the FEM model performance will drop to 80% due to fatigue after repetitive high-angle bending. The results of this paper objectively highlight the emergence of fatigue over cyclic activation of the system and the resulting deviation from the computational FEM model. Such behavior can be considered in future controllers to adapt the system with time-variable and non-autonomous response dynamics of soft robots.