Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose MatCha (Math reasoning and Chart derendering pretraining) to enhance visual language models' capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. Specifically, we propose several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are the key capabilities in visual language modeling. We perform the MatCha pretraining starting from Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, the MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as nearly 20%. We also examine how well MatCha pretraining transfers to domains such as screenshots, textbook diagrams, and document figures and observe overall improvement, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer.github.io

flaping fin无人管理的水下车辆（UUV）推进系统为海军任务（例如监视和地形勘探）提供了高度机动性。最近的工作探索了时间序列神经网络替代模型的使用，以预测车辆设计和FIN运动学的推力。我们开发了一个基于搜索的逆模型，该模型利用运动学对神经网络模型进行控制系统设计。我们的反向模型找到了一组FIN运动学，其多目标目标是达到目标推力并在拍打周期之间创建平滑的运动学过渡。我们演示了整合此逆模型的控制系统如何使在线，周期周期调整以优先考虑不同的系统目标。

大型语言模型可以编码有关世界的大量语义知识。这种知识对于旨在采取自然语言表达的高级，时间扩展的指示的机器人可能非常有用。但是，语言模型的一个重大弱点是，它们缺乏现实世界的经验，这使得很难利用它们在给定的体现中进行决策。例如，要求语言模型描述如何清洁溢出物可能会导致合理的叙述，但是它可能不适用于需要在特定环境中执行此任务的特定代理商（例如机器人）。我们建议通过预处理的技能来提供现实世界的基础，这些技能用于限制模型以提出可行且在上下文上适当的自然语言动作。机器人可以充当语​​言模型的“手和眼睛”，而语言模型可以提供有关任务的高级语义知识。我们展示了如何将低级技能与大语言模型结合在一起，以便语言模型提供有关执行复杂和时间扩展说明的过程的高级知识，而与这些技能相关的价值功能则提供了连接必要的基础了解特定的物理环境。我们在许多现实世界的机器人任务上评估了我们的方法，我们表明了对现实世界接地的需求，并且这种方法能够在移动操纵器上完成长远，抽象的自然语言指令。该项目的网站和视频可以在https://say-can.github.io/上找到。

AI正在经历范式转变，随着模型的兴起（例如Bert，Dall-E，GPT-3），这些模型经过大规模的数据训练，并且可以适应广泛的下游任务。我们称这些模型基础模型来强调其至关重要但不完整的特征。该报告提供了基础模型的机会和风险的详尽说明，包括其功能（例如语言，愿景，机器人技术，推理，人类互动）和技术原则（例如，模型架构，培训程序，数据，系统，安全，安全性，评估，理论）对其应用（例如法律，医疗保健，教育）和社会影响（例如不平等，滥用，经济和环境影响，法律和道德考虑）。尽管基础模型基于标准的深度学习和转移学习，但它们的规模导致了新的新兴能力，以及它们在许多任务中的有效性都激发了同质化。同质化提供了强大的杠杆作用，但要求谨慎，因为基础模型的缺陷均由下游的所有适应模型继承。尽管即将广泛地部署基础模型，但我们目前对它们的工作方式，失败以及由于其新兴属性的影响而缺乏清晰的了解。为了解决这些问题，我们认为基础模型的许多批判性研究都需要与他们的基本社会技术性质相称。

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects.

Feedforward fully convolutional neural networks currently dominate in semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds. Despite their great success, they suffer from the loss of local information at low-level layers, posing significant challenges to accurate scene segmentation and precise object boundary delineation. Prior works either address this issue by post-processing or jointly learn object boundaries to implicitly improve feature encoding of the networks. These approaches often require additional modules which are difficult to integrate into the original architecture. To improve the segmentation near object boundaries, we propose a boundary-aware feature propagation mechanism. This mechanism is achieved by exploiting a multi-task learning framework that aims to explicitly guide the boundaries to their original locations. With one shared encoder, our network outputs (i) boundary localization, (ii) prediction of directions pointing to the object's interior, and (iii) semantic segmentation, in three parallel streams. The predicted boundaries and directions are fused to propagate the learned features to refine the segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on the S3DIS and SensatUrban datasets against various baseline methods, demonstrating that our proposed approach yields consistent improvements by reducing boundary errors. Our code is available at https://github.com/shenglandu/PushBoundary.

Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.