6D object pose estimation has been a research topic in the field of computer vision and robotics. Many modern world applications like robot grasping, manipulation, autonomous navigation etc, require the correct pose of objects present in a scene to perform their specific task. It becomes even harder when the objects are placed in a cluttered scene and the level of occlusion is high. Prior works have tried to overcome this problem but could not achieve accuracy that can be considered reliable in real-world applications. In this paper, we present an architecture that, unlike prior work, is context-aware. It utilizes the context information available to us about the objects. Our proposed architecture treats the objects separately according to their types i.e; symmetric and non-symmetric. A deeper estimator and refiner network pair is used for non-symmetric objects as compared to symmetric due to their intrinsic differences. Our experiments show an enhancement in the accuracy of about 3.2% over the LineMOD dataset, which is considered a benchmark for pose estimation in the occluded and cluttered scenes, against the prior state-of-the-art DenseFusion. Our results also show that the inference time we got is sufficient for real-time usage.

With large-scale adaption to biometric based applications, security and privacy of biometrics is utmost important especially when operating in unsupervised online mode. This work proposes a novel approach for generating new artificial fingerprints also called proxy fingerprints that are natural looking, non-invertible, revocable and privacy preserving. These proxy biometrics can be generated from original ones only with the help of a user-specific key. Instead of using the original fingerprint, these proxy templates can be used anywhere with same convenience. The manuscripts walks through an interesting way in which proxy fingerprints of different types can be generated and how they can be combined with use-specific keys to provide revocability and cancelability in case of compromise. Using the proposed approach a proxy dataset is generated from samples belonging to Anguli fingerprint database. Matching experiments were performed on the new set which is 5 times larger than the original, and it was found that their performance is at par with 0 FAR and 0 FRR in the stolen key, safe key scenarios. Other parameters on revocability and diversity are also analyzed for protection performance.

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.

Automation in farming processes is a growing field of research in both academia and industries. A considerable amount of work has been put into this field to develop systems robust enough for farming. Terrace farming, in particular, provides a varying set of challenges, including robust stair climbing methods and stable navigation in unstructured terrains. We propose the design of a novel autonomous terrace farming robot, Aarohi, that can effectively climb steep terraces of considerable heights and execute several farming operations. The design optimisation strategy for the overall mechanical structure is elucidated. Further, the embedded and software architecture along with fail-safe strategies are presented for a working prototype. Algorithms for autonomous traversal over the terrace steps using the scissor lift mechanism and performing various farming operations have also been discussed. The adaptability of the design to specific operational requirements and modular farm tools allow Aarohi to be customised for a wide variety of use cases.

Machine learning (ML) is revolutionizing protein structural analysis, including an important subproblem of predicting protein residue contact maps, i.e., which amino-acid residues are in close spatial proximity given the amino-acid sequence of a protein. Despite recent progresses in ML-based protein contact prediction, predicting contacts with a wide range of distances (commonly classified into short-, medium- and long-range contacts) remains a challenge. Here, we propose a multiscale graph neural network (GNN) based approach taking a cue from multiscale physics simulations, in which a standard pipeline involving a recurrent neural network (RNN) is augmented with three GNNs to refine predictive capability for short-, medium- and long-range residue contacts, respectively. Test results on the ProteinNet dataset show improved accuracy for contacts of all ranges using the proposed multiscale RNN+GNN approach over the conventional approach, including the most challenging case of long-range contact prediction.

With the increasing use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in critical real-world applications, several post hoc explanation methods have been proposed to understand their predictions. However, there has been no work in generating explanations on the fly during model training and utilizing them to improve the expressive power of the underlying GNN models. In this work, we introduce a novel explanation-directed neural message passing framework for GNNs, EXPASS (EXplainable message PASSing), which aggregates only embeddings from nodes and edges identified as important by a GNN explanation method. EXPASS can be used with any existing GNN architecture and subgraph-optimizing explainer to learn accurate graph embeddings. We theoretically show that EXPASS alleviates the oversmoothing problem in GNNs by slowing the layer wise loss of Dirichlet energy and that the embedding difference between the vanilla message passing and EXPASS framework can be upper bounded by the difference of their respective model weights. Our empirical results show that graph embeddings learned using EXPASS improve the predictive performance and alleviate the oversmoothing problems of GNNs, opening up new frontiers in graph machine learning to develop explanation-based training frameworks.

The primary obstacle to developing technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of representative, usable data. In this paper, we report the deployment of technology-driven data collection methods for creating a corpus of more than 60,000 translations from Hindi to Gondi, a low-resource vulnerable language spoken by around 2.3 million tribal people in south and central India. During this process, we help expand information access in Gondi across 2 different dimensions (a) The creation of linguistic resources that can be used by the community, such as a dictionary, children's stories, Gondi translations from multiple sources and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) based mass awareness platform; (b) Enabling its use in the digital domain by developing a Hindi-Gondi machine translation model, which is compressed by nearly 4 times to enable it's edge deployment on low-resource edge devices and in areas of little to no internet connectivity. We also present preliminary evaluations of utilizing the developed machine translation model to provide assistance to volunteers who are involved in collecting more data for the target language. Through these interventions, we not only created a refined and evaluated corpus of 26,240 Hindi-Gondi translations that was used for building the translation model but also engaged nearly 850 community members who can help take Gondi onto the internet.

Acquiring food items with a fork poses an immense challenge to a robot-assisted feeding system, due to the wide range of material properties and visual appearances present across food groups. Deformable foods necessitate different skewering strategies than firm ones, but inferring such characteristics for several previously unseen items on a plate remains nontrivial. Our key insight is to leverage visual and haptic observations during interaction with an item to rapidly and reactively plan skewering motions. We learn a generalizable, multimodal representation for a food item from raw sensory inputs which informs the optimal skewering strategy. Given this representation, we propose a zero-shot framework to sense visuo-haptic properties of a previously unseen item and reactively skewer it, all within a single interaction. Real-robot experiments with foods of varying levels of visual and textural diversity demonstrate that our multimodal policy outperforms baselines which do not exploit both visual and haptic cues or do not reactively plan. Across 6 plates of different food items, our proposed framework achieves 71% success over 69 skewering attempts total. Supplementary material, datasets, code, and videos are available on our website: https://sites.google.com/view/hapticvisualnet-corl22/home

We study the problem of profiling news media on the Web with respect to their factuality of reporting and bias. This is an important but under-studied problem related to disinformation and "fake news" detection, but it addresses the issue at a coarser granularity compared to looking at an individual article or an individual claim. This is useful as it allows to profile entire media outlets in advance. Unlike previous work, which has focused primarily on text (e.g.,~on the text of the articles published by the target website, or on the textual description in their social media profiles or in Wikipedia), here our main focus is on modeling the similarity between media outlets based on the overlap of their audience. This is motivated by homophily considerations, i.e.,~the tendency of people to have connections to people with similar interests, which we extend to media, hypothesizing that similar types of media would be read by similar kinds of users. In particular, we propose GREENER (GRaph nEural nEtwork for News mEdia pRofiling), a model that builds a graph of inter-media connections based on their audience overlap, and then uses graph neural networks to represent each medium. We find that such representations are quite useful for predicting the factuality and the bias of news media outlets, yielding improvements over state-of-the-art results reported on two datasets. When augmented with conventionally used representations obtained from news articles, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia, prediction accuracy is found to improve by 2.5-27 macro-F1 points for the two tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.