在从机器人控制到仿真的各种机器人应用中，碰撞检测似乎是规范操作，包括运动计划和估计。尽管该主题的开创性工作可以追溯到80年代，但直到最近，正确区分碰撞检测的问题才成为一个中心问题，尤其要归功于科学界围绕该主题所做的持续和各种努力物理。然而，到目前为止，很少有人提出过解决方案，并且只有对所涉及形状的性质的强烈假设。在这项工作中，我们引入了一种通用和高效的方法，以计算任何一对凸形的碰撞检测的导数，这是通过尤其利用随机平滑技术而显示的，这些技术特别适合于捕获非平滑问题的衍生物。这种方法是在HPP-FCL和Pinocchio生态系统中实现的，并在机器人文献的经典数据集和问题上进行了评估，显示了很少的微秒时间来计算许多真实的机器人应用程序直接利用的信息衍生物，包括许多真实的机器人应用程序，包括可不同的模拟。

在过去的几年中，按照可区分的编程范式，人们对计算物理过程的梯度信息（例如，物理模拟，图像渲染）的梯度越来越兴趣。但是，此类过程可能是不可差异的，也可能产生非信息性梯度（I.D.几乎到处都是无效的）。当面对以前的陷阱时，通过分析表达或数值技术（例如自动分化和有限差异）估算的梯度使经典优化方案融合到质量较差的解决方案中。因此，仅依靠这些梯度提供的本地信息通常不足以解决涉及此类物理过程的高级优化问题，尤其是当它们受到非平滑度和不稳定性问题的影响。零订单优化，我们通过估计邻域中的梯度来利用随机平滑来增强可微分的物理。我们的实验表明，在优化算法中整合这种方法可能对像网格重建的任务相似，从图像或对机器人系统的最佳控制也有所不同。

Recent work has shown the benefits of synthetic data for use in computer vision, with applications ranging from autonomous driving to face landmark detection and reconstruction. There are a number of benefits of using synthetic data from privacy preservation and bias elimination to quality and feasibility of annotation. Generating human-centered synthetic data is a particular challenge in terms of realism and domain-gap, though recent work has shown that effective machine learning models can be trained using synthetic face data alone. We show that this can be extended to include the full body by building on the pipeline of Wood et al. to generate synthetic images of humans in their entirety, with ground-truth annotations for computer vision applications. In this report we describe how we construct a parametric model of the face and body, including articulated hands; our rendering pipeline to generate realistic images of humans based on this body model; an approach for training DNNs to regress a dense set of landmarks covering the entire body; and a method for fitting our body model to dense landmarks predicted from multiple views.

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

Meta Learning automates the search for learning algorithms. At the same time, it creates a dependency on human engineering on the meta-level, where meta learning algorithms need to be designed. In this paper, we investigate self-referential meta learning systems that modify themselves without the need for explicit meta optimization. We discuss the relationship of such systems to in-context and memory-based meta learning and show that self-referential neural networks require functionality to be reused in the form of parameter sharing. Finally, we propose fitness monotonic execution (FME), a simple approach to avoid explicit meta optimization. A neural network self-modifies to solve bandit and classic control tasks, improves its self-modifications, and learns how to learn, purely by assigning more computational resources to better performing solutions.

There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by proposing hypotheses to be verified or falsified through potentially complex and time-consuming experiments, including thought experiments akin to those of mathematicians. While an artificial scientist expands its knowledge, it remains biased towards the simplest, least costly experiments that still have surprising outcomes, until they become boring. We present an empirical analysis of the automatic generation of interesting experiments. In the first setting, we investigate self-invented experiments in a reinforcement-providing environment and show that they lead to effective exploration. In the second setting, pure thought experiments are implemented as the weights of recurrent neural networks generated by a neural experiment generator. Initially interesting thought experiments may become boring over time.

Recent advances in language modeling have enabled new conversational systems. In particular, it is often desirable for people to make choices among specified options when using such systems. We address the problem of reference resolution, when people use natural expressions to choose between real world entities. For example, given the choice `Should we make a Simnel cake or a Pandan cake?' a natural response from a non-expert may be indirect: `let's make the green one'. Reference resolution has been little studied with natural expressions, thus robustly understanding such language has large potential for improving naturalness in dialog, recommendation, and search systems. We create AltEntities (Alternative Entities), a new public dataset of entity pairs and utterances, and develop models for the disambiguation problem. Consisting of 42K indirect referring expressions across three domains, it enables for the first time the study of how large language models can be adapted to this task. We find they achieve 82%-87% accuracy in realistic settings, which while reasonable also invites further advances.

A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum, for abstractive opinion summarization. The summaries in this approach are built using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum achieves state-of-the-art performance in both settings.

We consider the problem of automatically generating stories in multiple languages. Compared to prior work in monolingual story generation, crosslingual story generation allows for more universal research on story planning. We propose to use Prompting Large Language Models with Plans to study which plan is optimal for story generation. We consider 4 types of plans and systematically analyse how the outputs differ for different planning strategies. The study demonstrates that formulating the plans as question-answer pairs leads to more coherent generated stories while the plan gives more control to the story creators.

Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock greater capabilities with less manual effort. One particularly ambitious goal of meta-learning is to train general-purpose in-context learning algorithms from scratch, using only black-box models with minimal inductive bias. Such a model takes in training data, and produces test-set predictions across a wide range of problems, without any explicit definition of an inference model, training loss, or optimization algorithm. In this paper we show that Transformers and other black-box models can be meta-trained to act as general-purpose in-context learners. We characterize phase transitions between algorithms that generalize, algorithms that memorize, and algorithms that fail to meta-train at all, induced by changes in model size, number of tasks, and meta-optimization. We further show that the capabilities of meta-trained algorithms are bottlenecked by the accessible state size (memory) determining the next prediction, unlike standard models which are thought to be bottlenecked by parameter count. Finally, we propose practical interventions such as biasing the training distribution that improve the meta-training and meta-generalization of general-purpose learning algorithms.