移动机器人和无人机的异构团队在对环境的自主探索方面提供了可观的好处。然而，尽管广泛讨论了此类系统的联合勘探方案，但它们仍未对无人机对接过程中外部条件变化和群体断层的适应性低。当一个代理商失去其位置信号时，我们提出了一种基于视觉的无人机群对接系统，以在移动平台上稳健地着陆。拟议的蜂鹰系统依靠基于视觉的检测来进行移动平台跟踪和导航其代理。群的每架无人机都带有RGB摄像头和APRILTAG3 QR代码标记。 Swarmhawk可以在两种操作模式之间切换，在全球无人机本地化的情况下充当均匀的群，或者在一个无人机或全球本地化故障中出现相机故障的情况下，将领导者的无人机指向其邻居。进行了两项实验，以通过静态和移动平台在全球和本地定位下评估Swarmhawk的性能。实验结果表明，静态移动平台上的群体着陆任务具有足够的准确性（均匀地层的4.2 cm误差为4.2厘米，领导者 - 追随者形成中的1.9厘米）和移动平台（同质地层中的6.9厘米和4.7 cm的误差为6.9 cm，在4.7 cm中的误差领导者追随者组）。此外，无人机在领导者追随者组中沿着复杂的轨迹（平均误差为19.4 cm）移动的平台上显示出良好的降落。拟议的蜂鹰技术可以潜在地应用于各种群情景中，包括复杂的环境勘探，检查和无人机交付。

该论文着重于无人机的异质群，以实现移动机器人上层的动态着陆。科学家尚未实现这项具有挑战性的任务。关键技术是，我们没有用计算机视觉来促进无人机群的每个代理，这大大增加了有效载荷并缩短飞行时间，而是建议在领导者无人机上仅安装一台摄像头。追随者无人机从无人机中接收命令，并保持无冲突的轨迹。实验结果表明，群体降落在静态移动平台上（4.48厘米的RMSE）上很高。 RMSE群落在移动平台上的降落，最大速度为1.0 m/s和1.5 m/s，分别为8.76厘米和8.98厘米。拟议的蜂群技术将允许蜂群的省时降落，以进一步充电。这将使可以在救援操作，检查和维护，自主仓库库存，货物交付等方面实现多代理机器人系统的自我维护操作。

This work addresses an alternative approach for query expansion (QE) using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance the effectiveness of information search in e-commerce. We propose a modified QE conditional GAN (mQE-CGAN) framework, which resolves keywords by expanding the query with a synthetically generated query that proposes semantic information from text input. We train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model as the generator to produce keywords and use a recurrent neural network model as the discriminator to classify an adversarial output with the generator. With the modified CGAN framework, various forms of semantic insights gathered from the query document corpus are introduced to the generation process. We leverage these insights as conditions for the generator model and discuss their effectiveness for the query expansion task. Our experiments demonstrate that the utilization of condition structures within the mQE-CGAN framework can increase the semantic similarity between generated sequences and reference documents up to nearly 10% compared to baseline models

In this manuscript, we present a novel method for estimating the stochastic stability characteristics of metastable legged systems using the unscented transformation. Prior methods for stability analysis in such systems often required high-dimensional state space discretization and a broad set of initial conditions, resulting in significant computational complexity. Our approach aims to alleviate this issue by reducing the dimensionality of the system and utilizing the unscented transformation to estimate the output distribution. This technique allows us to account for multiple sources of uncertainty and high-dimensional system dynamics, while leveraging prior knowledge of noise statistics to inform the selection of initial conditions for experiments. As a result, our method enables the efficient assessment of controller performance and analysis of parametric dependencies with fewer experiments. To demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method, we apply it to the analysis of a one-dimensional hopper and an underactuated bipedal walking simulation with a hybrid zero dynamics controller.

Social insects such as ants communicate via pheromones which allows them to coordinate their activity and solve complex tasks as a swarm, e.g. foraging for food. This behaviour was shaped through evolutionary processes. In computational models, self-coordination in swarms has been implemented using probabilistic or action rules to shape the decision of each agent and the collective behaviour. However, manual tuned decision rules may limit the behaviour of the swarm. In this work we investigate the emergence of self-coordination and communication in evolved swarms without defining any rule. We evolve a swarm of agents representing an ant colony. We use a genetic algorithm to optimize a spiking neural network (SNN) which serves as an artificial brain to control the behaviour of each agent. The goal of the colony is to find optimal ways to forage for food in the shortest amount of time. In the evolutionary phase, the ants are able to learn to collaborate by depositing pheromone near food piles and near the nest to guide its cohorts. The pheromone usage is not encoded into the network; instead, this behaviour is established through the optimization procedure. We observe that pheromone-based communication enables the ants to perform better in comparison to colonies where communication did not emerge. We assess the foraging performance by comparing the SNN based model to a rule based system. Our results show that the SNN based model can complete the foraging task more efficiently in a shorter time. Our approach illustrates that even in the absence of pre-defined rules, self coordination via pheromone emerges as a result of the network optimization. This work serves as a proof of concept for the possibility of creating complex applications utilizing SNNs as underlying architectures for multi-agent interactions where communication and self-coordination is desired.

Recent large-scale image generation models such as Stable Diffusion have exhibited an impressive ability to generate fairly realistic images starting from a very simple text prompt. Could such models render real images obsolete for training image prediction models? In this paper, we answer part of this provocative question by questioning the need for real images when training models for ImageNet classification. More precisely, provided only with the class names that have been used to build the dataset, we explore the ability of Stable Diffusion to generate synthetic clones of ImageNet and measure how useful they are for training classification models from scratch. We show that with minimal and class-agnostic prompt engineering those ImageNet clones we denote as ImageNet-SD are able to close a large part of the gap between models produced by synthetic images and models trained with real images for the several standard classification benchmarks that we consider in this study. More importantly, we show that models trained on synthetic images exhibit strong generalization properties and perform on par with models trained on real data.

In this paper, we empirically analyze a simple, non-learnable, and nonparametric Nadaraya-Watson (NW) prediction head that can be used with any neural network architecture. In the NW head, the prediction is a weighted average of labels from a support set. The weights are computed from distances between the query feature and support features. This is in contrast to the dominant approach of using a learnable classification head (e.g., a fully-connected layer) on the features, which can be challenging to interpret and can yield poorly calibrated predictions. Our empirical results on an array of computer vision tasks demonstrate that the NW head can yield better calibration than its parametric counterpart, while having comparable accuracy and with minimal computational overhead. To further increase inference-time efficiency, we propose a simple approach that involves a clustering step run on the training set to create a relatively small distilled support set. In addition to using the weights as a means of interpreting model predictions, we further present an easy-to-compute "support influence function," which quantifies the influence of a support element on the prediction for a given query. As we demonstrate in our experiments, the influence function can allow the user to debug a trained model. We believe that the NW head is a flexible, interpretable, and highly useful building block that can be used in a range of applications.

This work studies networked agents cooperating to track a dynamical state of nature under partial information. The proposed algorithm is a distributed Bayesian filtering algorithm for finite-state hidden Markov models (HMMs). It can be used for sequential state estimation tasks, as well as for modeling opinion formation over social networks under dynamic environments. We show that the disagreement with the optimal centralized solution is asymptotically bounded for the class of geometrically ergodic state transition models, which includes rapidly changing models. We also derive recursions for calculating the probability of error and establish convergence under Gaussian observation models. Simulations are provided to illustrate the theory and to compare against alternative approaches.

Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio and limited resolution of functional MRI data, and the high complexity of natural images, reconstructing a visual stimulus from human brain fMRI measurements is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel approach for this task, which we call Cortex2Image, to decode visual stimuli with high semantic fidelity and rich fine-grained detail. In particular, we train a surface-based convolutional network model that maps from brain response to semantic image features first (Cortex2Semantic). We then combine this model with a high-quality image generator (Instance-Conditioned GAN) to train another mapping from brain response to fine-grained image features using a variational approach (Cortex2Detail). Image reconstructions obtained by our proposed method achieve state-of-the-art semantic fidelity, while yielding good fine-grained similarity with the ground-truth stimulus. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zijin-gu/meshconv-decoding.git.

We consider the constrained sampling problem where the goal is to sample from a distribution $\pi(x)\propto e^{-f(x)}$ and $x$ is constrained on a convex body $\mathcal{C}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$. Motivated by penalty methods from optimization, we propose penalized Langevin Dynamics (PLD) and penalized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (PHMC) that convert the constrained sampling problem into an unconstrained one by introducing a penalty function for constraint violations. When $f$ is smooth and the gradient is available, we show $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d/\varepsilon^{10})$ iteration complexity for PLD to sample the target up to an $\varepsilon$-error where the error is measured in terms of the total variation distance and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\cdot)$ hides some logarithmic factors. For PHMC, we improve this result to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{d}/\varepsilon^{7})$ when the Hessian of $f$ is Lipschitz and the boundary of $\mathcal{C}$ is sufficiently smooth. To our knowledge, these are the first convergence rate results for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods in the constrained sampling setting that can handle non-convex $f$ and can provide guarantees with the best dimension dependency among existing methods with deterministic gradients. We then consider the setting where unbiased stochastic gradients are available. We propose PSGLD and PSGHMC that can handle stochastic gradients without Metropolis-Hasting correction steps. When $f$ is strongly convex and smooth, we obtain an iteration complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d/\varepsilon^{18})$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\sqrt{d}/\varepsilon^{39})$ respectively in the 2-Wasserstein distance. For the more general case, when $f$ is smooth and non-convex, we also provide finite-time performance bounds and iteration complexity results. Finally, we test our algorithms on Bayesian LASSO regression and Bayesian constrained deep learning problems.