由于其合规性，安全性和高度自由，软机器人对操纵任务的操纵任务很有希望。然而，常用的双向连续段设计意味着软机器人操纵器仅在有限的半球工作空间中起作用。这项工作通过在软臂底部设计，制造和控制一个额外的软棱镜执行器来增加软机器人的工作区。该执行器由气动人造肌肉和活塞组成，使执行器可驱动。我们将任务空间量增加116 \％，现在我们能够执行以前不可能用于软机器人的操纵任务，例如拾取和将对象放在表面上的不同位置并从容器中抓住对象。通过将软机器人的臂与棱镜关节相结合，我们大大提高了软机器人对物体操纵的可用性。这项工作促进了在以人为本环境中进行实际操纵应用的集成和模块化软机器人系统的使用。

动态运动是机器人武器的关键特征，使他们能够快速有效地执行任务。在任务空间运行时，软连续式操纵器目前尚未考虑动态参数。这种缺点使现有的软机器人缓慢并限制了他们处理外力的能力，特别是在物体操纵期间。我们通过使用动态操作空间控制来解决此问题。我们的控制方法考虑了3D连续体臂的动态参数，并引入了新模型，使多段软机械师能够在任务空间中顺利运行。先前仅为刚性机器人提供的先进控制方法现在适用于软机器;例如，潜在的场避免以前仅针对刚性机器人显示，现在延伸到软机器人。使用我们的方法，柔软的机械手现在可以实现以前不可能的各种任务：我们评估机械手在闭环控制实验中的性能，如拾取和障碍物避免，使用附加的软夹具抛出物体，并通过用掌握的粉笔绘制来故意将力施加到表面上。除了新的技能之外，我们的方法还提高了59％的跟踪精度，并将速度提高到19.3的尺寸，与最新的任务空间控制相比。通过这些新发现能力，软机器人可以开始挑战操纵领域的刚性机器人。我们固有的安全和柔顺的软机器人将未来的机器人操纵到一个不用的设置，其中人和机器人并行工作。

软机器均由柔顺性和可变形的材料制成，可以对传统的刚性机器人进行具有挑战性的任务。软机器人的固有依从性使其更适合和适应与人类和环境的相互作用。然而，这种优势以成本为准：他们的连续性性质使得强大地发展基于稳健的基于模型的控制策略。具体地，解决这一挑战的自适应控制方法尚未应用于物理软机械臂。这项工作介绍了使用Euler-Lagrange方法对软连续式机械手进行动态的重新装配。该模型消除了先前作品中的简化假设，并提供了更准确的机器人惯性描述。基于我们的模型，我们介绍了任务空间自适应控制方案。该控制器对模型参数不确定性和未知输入干扰具有稳健。控制器在物理软连续臂上实现。进行了一系列实验以验证控制器在不同有效载荷下的任务空间轨迹跟踪中的有效性。在准确性和稳健性方面，控制器均优于最先进的方法。此外，所提出的基于模型的控制设计是柔性的，并且可以广泛地推广到具有任意数量的连续段的任何连续型机器人臂。

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditions. Synthetic aperture sensing is our fundamental sampling principle, and drone swarms are employed to approximate the optical signals of extremely wide and adaptable airborne lenses.

Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update the model parameters. When the model parameters directly affect a probability distribution, the gradient estimator will involve score function terms. This paper studies baselines, a variance reduction technique for score functions. Motivated primarily by reinforcement learning, we derive for the first time an expression for the optimal state-dependent baseline, the baseline which results in a gradient estimator with minimum variance. Although we show that there exist examples where the optimal baseline may be arbitrarily better than a value function baseline, we find that the value function baseline usually performs similarly to an optimal baseline in terms of variance reduction. Moreover, the value function can also be used for bootstrapping estimators of the return, leading to additional variance reduction. Our results give new insight and justification for why value function baselines and the generalized advantage estimator (GAE) work well in practice.

We propose a fairness-aware learning framework that mitigates intersectional subgroup bias associated with protected attributes. Prior research has primarily focused on mitigating one kind of bias by incorporating complex fairness-driven constraints into optimization objectives or designing additional layers that focus on specific protected attributes. We introduce a simple and generic bias mitigation approach that prevents models from learning relationships between protected attributes and output variable by reducing mutual information between them. We demonstrate that our approach is effective in reducing bias with little or no drop in accuracy. We also show that the models trained with our learning framework become causally fair and insensitive to the values of protected attributes. Finally, we validate our approach by studying feature interactions between protected and non-protected attributes. We demonstrate that these interactions are significantly reduced when applying our bias mitigation.

Automatic segmentation is essential for the brain tumor diagnosis, disease prognosis, and follow-up therapy of patients with gliomas. Still, accurate detection of gliomas and their sub-regions in multimodal MRI is very challenging due to the variety of scanners and imaging protocols. Over the last years, the BraTS Challenge has provided a large number of multi-institutional MRI scans as a benchmark for glioma segmentation algorithms. This paper describes our contribution to the BraTS 2022 Continuous Evaluation challenge. We propose a new ensemble of multiple deep learning frameworks namely, DeepSeg, nnU-Net, and DeepSCAN for automatic glioma boundaries detection in pre-operative MRI. It is worth noting that our ensemble models took first place in the final evaluation on the BraTS testing dataset with Dice scores of 0.9294, 0.8788, and 0.8803, and Hausdorf distance of 5.23, 13.54, and 12.05, for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method ranked first in the final ranking on another unseen test dataset, namely Sub-Saharan Africa dataset, achieving mean Dice scores of 0.9737, 0.9593, and 0.9022, and HD95 of 2.66, 1.72, 3.32 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The docker image for the winning submission is publicly available at (https://hub.docker.com/r/razeineldin/camed22).

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.

Often clickbait articles have a title that is phrased as a question or vague teaser that entices the user to click on the link and read the article to find the explanation. We developed a system that will automatically find the answer or explanation of the clickbait hook from the website text so that the user does not need to read through the text themselves. We fine-tune an extractive question and answering model (RoBERTa) and an abstractive one (T5), using data scraped from the 'StopClickbait' Facebook pages and Reddit's 'SavedYouAClick' subforum. We find that both extractive and abstractive models improve significantly after finetuning. We find that the extractive model performs slightly better according to ROUGE scores, while the abstractive one has a slight edge in terms of BERTscores.