To enable a safe and effective human-robot cooperation, it is crucial to develop models for the identification of human activities. Egocentric vision seems to be a viable solution to solve this problem, and therefore many works provide deep learning solutions to infer human actions from first person videos. However, although very promising, most of these do not consider the major challenges that comes with a realistic deployment, such as the portability of the model, the need for real-time inference, and the robustness with respect to the novel domains (i.e., new spaces, users, tasks). With this paper, we set the boundaries that egocentric vision models should consider for realistic applications, defining a novel setting of egocentric action recognition in the wild, which encourages researchers to develop novel, applications-aware solutions. We also present a new model-agnostic technique that enables the rapid repurposing of existing architectures in this new context, demonstrating the feasibility to deploy a model on a tiny device (Jetson Nano) and to perform the task directly on the edge with very low energy consumption (2.4W on average at 50 fps).

在本报告中，我们描述了我们提交给Epic-Kitchens-100无监督的域适应（UDA）挑战的技术细节。为了应对UDA设置下存在的域移位，我们首先利用了最近的域概括（DG）技术，称为相对规范对准（RNA）。其次，我们将这种方法扩展到无标记的目标数据工作，从而使模型更简单地以无监督的方式适应目标分布。为此，我们将UDA算法包括在内，例如多级对抗对准和专心熵。通过分析挑战设置，我们注意到数据中存在二次并发转移，通常称为环境偏见。它是由存在不同环境（即厨房）引起的。为了处理这两个班次（环境和时间段），我们扩展了系统以执行多源多目标域的适应性。最后，我们在最终提案中采用了不同的模型来利用流行视频体系结构的潜力，并为合奏改编介绍了两次损失。我们的提交（条目“ PLNET”）在排行榜上可见，并在“动词”中排名第二，并且在“名词”和“ Action”中都处于第三位。

事件摄像机是新型生物启发传感器，其异步捕获“事件”形式的像素级强度变化。由于它们的传感机制，事件相机几乎没有运动模糊，这是一个非常高的时间分辨率，并且需要比传统的基于帧的相机更小的电力和存储器。这些特性使它们成为一个完美的拟合若干现实世界应用，如在可穿戴设备上的专门动作识别，其中快速相机运动和有限的电力挑战传统视觉传感器。然而，迄今为止，基于事件的愿景的不断增长的愿景领域已经忽略了在此类应用中的活动摄像机的潜力。在本文中，我们表明事件数据是自我监测行动识别的非常有价值的模态。为此，我们介绍了N-EPIC-Kitchens，这是大型史诗厨房数据集的第一个基于事件的相机扩展。在此背景下，我们提出了两种策略：（i）使用传统的视频处理架构（E $ ^ 2 $（GO））和（ii）使用事件数据直接处理事件相机数据（E $ ^ 2 $（GO））和蒸馏光流信息（E $ ^ 2 $（go）mo）。在我们提出的基准测试中，我们表明事件数据为RGB和光流提供了可比性的性能，但在部署时没有任何额外的流量计算，以及相对于RGB的信息高达4％的性能。

Diffusion models have achieved justifiable popularity by attaining state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic objects from seemingly arbitrarily complex data distributions, including when conditioning generation on labels. Unfortunately, however, their iterative nature renders them very computationally inefficient during the sampling process. For the multi-class conditional generation problem, we propose a novel, structurally unique framework of diffusion models which are hierarchically branched according to the inherent relationships between classes. In this work, we demonstrate that branched diffusion models offer major improvements in efficiently generating samples from multiple classes. We also showcase several other advantages of branched diffusion models, including ease of extension to novel classes in a continual-learning setting, and a unique interpretability that offers insight into these generative models. Branched diffusion models represent an alternative paradigm to their traditional linear counterparts, and can have large impacts in how we use diffusion models for efficient generation, online learning, and scientific discovery.

The polynomial kernels are widely used in machine learning and they are one of the default choices to develop kernel-based classification and regression models. However, they are rarely used and considered in numerical analysis due to their lack of strict positive definiteness. In particular they do not enjoy the usual property of unisolvency for arbitrary point sets, which is one of the key properties used to build kernel-based interpolation methods. This paper is devoted to establish some initial results for the study of these kernels, and their related interpolation algorithms, in the context of approximation theory. We will first prove necessary and sufficient conditions on point sets which guarantee the existence and uniqueness of an interpolant. We will then study the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (or native spaces) of these kernels and their norms, and provide inclusion relations between spaces corresponding to different kernel parameters. With these spaces at hand, it will be further possible to derive generic error estimates which apply to sufficiently smooth functions, thus escaping the native space. Finally, we will show how to employ an efficient stable algorithm to these kernels to obtain accurate interpolants, and we will test them in some numerical experiment. After this analysis several computational and theoretical aspects remain open, and we will outline possible further research directions in a concluding section. This work builds some bridges between kernel and polynomial interpolation, two topics to which the authors, to different extents, have been introduced under the supervision or through the work of Stefano De Marchi. For this reason, they wish to dedicate this work to him in the occasion of his 60th birthday.

This paper presents the development of a system able to estimate the 2D relative position of nodes in a wireless network, based on distance measurements between the nodes. The system uses ultra wide band ranging technology and the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol to acquire data. Furthermore, a nonlinear least squares problem is formulated and solved numerically for estimating the relative positions of the nodes. The localization performance of the system is validated by experimental tests, demonstrating the capability of measuring the relative position of a network comprised of 4 nodes with an accuracy of the order of 3 cm and an update rate of 10 Hz. This shows the feasibility of applying the proposed system for multi-robot cooperative localization and formation control scenarios.

Steerable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide a general framework for building neural networks equivariant to translations and other transformations belonging to an origin-preserving group $G$, such as reflections and rotations. They rely on standard convolutions with $G$-steerable kernels obtained by analytically solving the group-specific equivariance constraint imposed onto the kernel space. As the solution is tailored to a particular group $G$, the implementation of a kernel basis does not generalize to other symmetry transformations, which complicates the development of group equivariant models. We propose using implicit neural representation via multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to parameterize $G$-steerable kernels. The resulting framework offers a simple and flexible way to implement Steerable CNNs and generalizes to any group $G$ for which a $G$-equivariant MLP can be built. We apply our method to point cloud (ModelNet-40) and molecular data (QM9) and demonstrate a significant improvement in performance compared to standard Steerable CNNs.

The development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in space applications is growing quickly as the consensus increases on the potential benefits introduced. As more and more aerospace engineers are becoming aware of new trends in AI, traditional approaches are revisited to consider the applications of emerging AI technologies. Already at the time of writing, the scope of AI-related activities across academia, the aerospace industry and space agencies is so wide that an in-depth review would not fit in these pages. In this chapter we focus instead on two main emerging trends we believe capture the most relevant and exciting activities in the field: differentiable intelligence and on-board machine learning. Differentiable intelligence, in a nutshell, refers to works making extensive use of automatic differentiation frameworks to learn the parameters of machine learning or related models. Onboard machine learning considers the problem of moving inference, as well as learning, onboard. Within these fields, we discuss a few selected projects originating from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT), giving priority to advanced topics going beyond the transposition of established AI techniques and practices to the space domain.

The term ``neuromorphic'' refers to systems that are closely resembling the architecture and/or the dynamics of biological neural networks. Typical examples are novel computer chips designed to mimic the architecture of a biological brain, or sensors that get inspiration from, e.g., the visual or olfactory systems in insects and mammals to acquire information about the environment. This approach is not without ambition as it promises to enable engineered devices able to reproduce the level of performance observed in biological organisms -- the main immediate advantage being the efficient use of scarce resources, which translates into low power requirements. The emphasis on low power and energy efficiency of neuromorphic devices is a perfect match for space applications. Spacecraft -- especially miniaturized ones -- have strict energy constraints as they need to operate in an environment which is scarce with resources and extremely hostile. In this work we present an overview of early attempts made to study a neuromorphic approach in a space context at the European Space Agency's (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT).

Searching for a path between two nodes in a graph is one of the most well-studied and fundamental problems in computer science. In numerous domains such as robotics, AI, or biology, practitioners develop search heuristics to accelerate their pathfinding algorithms. However, it is a laborious and complex process to hand-design heuristics based on the problem and the structure of a given use case. Here we present PHIL (Path Heuristic with Imitation Learning), a novel neural architecture and a training algorithm for discovering graph search and navigation heuristics from data by leveraging recent advances in imitation learning and graph representation learning. At training time, we aggregate datasets of search trajectories and ground-truth shortest path distances, which we use to train a specialized graph neural network-based heuristic function using backpropagation through steps of the pathfinding process. Our heuristic function learns graph embeddings useful for inferring node distances, runs in constant time independent of graph sizes, and can be easily incorporated in an algorithm such as A* at test time. Experiments show that PHIL reduces the number of explored nodes compared to state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets by 58.5\% on average, can be directly applied in diverse graphs ranging from biological networks to road networks, and allows for fast planning in time-critical robotics domains.