串联连接的机器人是希望在大规模灾害中的搜索和救援等限制空间中执行任务的候选人。这种机器人通常是韧带，我们假设肢体的添加可以改善移动性。然而，在设计和控制这种装置方面的挑战在于以提高移动性的方式协调高维冗余模块。在这里，我们开发了一个控制串联连接的多腿机器人的一般框架。具体地，我们结合了两种方法来构建一般的形状控制方案，其可以为各种机器人形态的有效运动提供自变形（“Gaits”）的基线模式。首先，我们从维度降低和生物步态分类方案中获取灵感，以产生身体变形和脚提升/降低的循环模式，其促进了任意基板接触图案的产生。其次，我们使用几何力学方法来促进识别这些起伏的最佳相位，以最大化速度和/或稳定性。我们的方案允许在扁平摩擦地形上的多腿机器人机车上的有效Gaits开发有多种数量的四肢（4,6,16，甚至0四肢）和身体致动能力（包括在Limbless设备上的侧壁Gaits）。通过适当协调身体波动和腿部放置，我们的框架结合了Limbless机器人（模块化）和腿机器人（移动性）的优势。我们预计我们的框架可以提供一般的控制方案，以便快速部署一般的多腿机器人，铺平往达在现实条件下遍历复杂环境的机器的方式。

模块化机器人可以在每天重新排列到新设计中，通过为每项新任务形成定制机器人来处理各种各样的任务。但是，重新配置的机制是不够的：每个设计还需要自己独特的控制策略。人们可以从头开始为每个新设计制作一个政策，但这种方法不可扩展，特别是给出了甚至一小组模块可以生成的大量设计。相反，我们创建了一个模块化策略框架，策略结构在硬件排列上有调节，并仅使用一个培训过程来创建控制各种设计的策略。我们的方法利用了模块化机器人的运动学可以表示为设计图，其中节点作为模块和边缘作为它们之间的连接。给定机器人，它的设计图用于创建具有相同结构的策略图，其中每个节点包含一个深神经网络，以及通过共享参数的相同类型共享知识的模块（例如，Hexapod上的所有腿都相同网络参数）。我们开发了一种基于模型的强化学习算法，交织模型学习和轨迹优化，以培训策略。我们展示了模块化政策推广到培训期间没有看到的大量设计，没有任何额外的学习。最后，我们展示了与模拟和真实机器人一起控制各种设计的政策。

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.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

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.

Pre-training is an effective technique for ensuring robust performance on a variety of machine learning tasks. It typically depends on large-scale crawled corpora that can result in toxic or biased models. Such data can also be problematic with respect to copyright, attribution, and privacy. Pre-training with synthetic tasks and data is a promising way of alleviating such concerns since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our goal in this paper is to understand what makes for a good pre-trained model when using synthetic resources. We answer this question in the context of neural machine translation by considering two novel approaches to translation model pre-training. Our first approach studies the effect of pre-training on obfuscated data derived from a parallel corpus by mapping words to a vocabulary of 'nonsense' tokens. Our second approach explores the effect of pre-training on procedurally generated synthetic parallel data that does not depend on any real human language corpus. Our empirical evaluation on multiple language pairs shows that, to a surprising degree, the benefits of pre-training can be realized even with obfuscated or purely synthetic parallel data. In our analysis, we consider the extent to which obfuscated and synthetic pre-training techniques can be used to mitigate the issue of hallucinated model toxicity.

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.