我们为多机器人任务计划和分配问题提出了一种新的公式，该公式结合了（a）任务之间的优先关系； （b）任务的协调，允许多个机器人提高效率； （c）通过形成机器人联盟的任务合作，而单独的机器人不能执行。在我们的公式中，任务图指定任务和任务之间的关系。我们在任务图的节点和边缘上定义了一组奖励函数。这些功能对机器人联盟规模对任务绩效的影响进行建模，并结合一个任务的性能对依赖任务的影响。最佳解决此问题是NP-HARD。但是，使用任务图公式使我们能够利用最小成本的网络流量方法有效地获得近似解决方案。此外，我们还探索了一种混合整数编程方法，该方法为问题的小实例提供了最佳的解决方案，但计算上很昂贵。我们还开发了一种贪婪的启发式算法作为基准。我们的建模和解决方案方法导致任务计划，即使在与许多代理商的大型任务中，也利用任务优先关系的关系以及机器人的协调和合作来实现高级任务绩效。

本文介绍了2021年进行的一系列教育事件的方法和结果，该活动利用机器人群来教育高中生和大学生有关流行病学模型以及如何为社会和政府政策提供信息。这些事件特别关注Covid-19的大流行，由4个在线和3个面对面的研讨会组成，学生有机会与一群20个定制的Brushbots互动 - 针对优化的小规模振动驱动的机器人便携性和鲁棒性。通过对事后调查中收集的数据的分析，本文展示了这些事件如何对学生对指导现实世界决策的科学方法的看法产生积极影响，以及他们对机器人技术的兴趣。

The rapid development of remote sensing technologies have gained significant attention due to their ability to accurately localize, classify, and segment objects from aerial images. These technologies are commonly used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with high-resolution cameras or sensors to capture data over large areas. This data is useful for various applications, such as monitoring and inspecting cities, towns, and terrains. In this paper, we presented a method for classifying and segmenting city road traffic dashed lines from aerial images using deep learning models such as U-Net and SegNet. The annotated data is used to train these models, which are then used to classify and segment the aerial image into two classes: dashed lines and non-dashed lines. However, the deep learning model may not be able to identify all dashed lines due to poor painting or occlusion by trees or shadows. To address this issue, we proposed a method to add missed lines to the segmentation output. We also extracted the x and y coordinates of each dashed line from the segmentation output, which can be used by city planners to construct a CAD file for digital visualization of the roads.

As information extraction (IE) systems have grown more capable at whole-document extraction, the classic task of \emph{template filling} has seen renewed interest as a benchmark for evaluating them. In this position paper, we call into question the suitability of template filling for this purpose. We argue that the task demands definitive answers to thorny questions of \emph{event individuation} -- the problem of distinguishing distinct events -- about which even human experts disagree. We show through annotation studies and error analysis that this raises concerns about the usefulness of template filling evaluation metrics, the quality of datasets for the task, and the ability of models to learn it. Finally, we consider possible solutions.

Bike sharing systems often suffer from poor capacity management as a result of variable demand. These bike sharing systems would benefit from models to predict demand in order to moderate the number of bikes stored at each station. In this paper, we attempt to apply a graph neural network model to predict bike demand in the New York City, Citi Bike dataset.

This paper proposes an easy-to-compute upper bound for the overlap index between two probability distributions without requiring any knowledge of the distribution models. The computation of our bound is time-efficient and memory-efficient and only requires finite samples. The proposed bound shows its value in one-class classification and domain shift analysis. Specifically, in one-class classification, we build a novel one-class classifier by converting the bound into a confidence score function. Unlike most one-class classifiers, the training process is not needed for our classifier. Additionally, the experimental results show that our classifier \textcolor{\colorname}{can be accurate with} only a small number of in-class samples and outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on various datasets in different one-class classification scenarios. In domain shift analysis, we propose a theorem based on our bound. The theorem is useful in detecting the existence of domain shift and inferring data information. The detection and inference processes are both computation-efficient and memory-efficient. Our work shows significant promise toward broadening the applications of overlap-based metrics.

We propose a framework in which multiple entities collaborate to build a machine learning model while preserving privacy of their data. The approach utilizes feature embeddings from shared/per-entity feature extractors transforming data into a feature space for cooperation between entities. We propose two specific methods and compare them with a baseline method. In Shared Feature Extractor (SFE) Learning, the entities use a shared feature extractor to compute feature embeddings of samples. In Locally Trained Feature Extractor (LTFE) Learning, each entity uses a separate feature extractor and models are trained using concatenated features from all entities. As a baseline, in Cooperatively Trained Feature Extractor (CTFE) Learning, the entities train models by sharing raw data. Secure multi-party algorithms are utilized to train models without revealing data or features in plain text. We investigate the trade-offs among SFE, LTFE, and CTFE in regard to performance, privacy leakage (using an off-the-shelf membership inference attack), and computational cost. LTFE provides the most privacy, followed by SFE, and then CTFE. Computational cost is lowest for SFE and the relative speed of CTFE and LTFE depends on network architecture. CTFE and LTFE provide the best accuracy. We use MNIST, a synthetic dataset, and a credit card fraud detection dataset for evaluations.

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has proven to be an essential component of Vision-Language (VL) pretraining. To implement MLM, the researcher must make two design choices: the masking strategy, which determines which tokens to mask, and the masking rate, which determines how many tokens to mask. Previous work has focused primarily on the masking strategy while setting the masking rate at a default of 15\%. In this paper, we show that increasing this masking rate improves downstream performance while simultaneously reducing performance gap among different masking strategies, rendering the uniform masking strategy competitive to other more complex ones. Surprisingly, we also discover that increasing the masking rate leads to gains in Image-Text Matching (ITM) tasks, suggesting that the role of MLM goes beyond language modeling in VL pretraining.

Predicting the physical interaction of proteins is a cornerstone problem in computational biology. New classes of learning-based algorithms are actively being developed, and are typically trained end-to-end on protein complex structures extracted from the Protein Data Bank. These training datasets tend to be large and difficult to use for prototyping and, unlike image or natural language datasets, they are not easily interpretable by non-experts. We present Dock2D-IP and Dock2D-IF, two "toy" datasets that can be used to select algorithms predicting protein-protein interactions$\unicode{x2014}$or any other type of molecular interactions. Using two-dimensional shapes as input, each example from Dock2D-IP ("interaction pose") describes the interaction pose of two shapes known to interact and each example from Dock2D-IF ("interaction fact") describes whether two shapes form a stable complex or not. We propose a number of baseline solutions to the problem and show that the same underlying energy function can be learned either by solving the interaction pose task (formulated as an energy-minimization "docking" problem) or the fact-of-interaction task (formulated as a binding free energy estimation problem).

This paper presents a new approach for analyzing and identifying potentially useful generalized plans. It presents a new conceptual framework along with an algorithmic process for assessing termination and reachability related properties of generalized plans. The presented framework builds upon classic results on the analysis of graphs to decompose generalized plans into smaller components in a novel algorithm for conducting a hierarchical analysis for termination of arbitrary generalized plans. Theoretical analysis of the new framework establishes soundness of the presented algorithms and shows how it goes beyond existing approaches; empirical analysis illustrates the scope of this approach. Our analysis shows that this new approach can effectively identify termination for a significantly larger class of generalized plans than was possible using existing methods.