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.

We present Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance while being significantly more efficient than diffusion or autoregressive models. Muse is trained on a masked modeling task in discrete token space: given the text embedding extracted from a pre-trained large language model (LLM), Muse is trained to predict randomly masked image tokens. Compared to pixel-space diffusion models, such as Imagen and DALL-E 2, Muse is significantly more efficient due to the use of discrete tokens and requiring fewer sampling iterations; compared to autoregressive models, such as Parti, Muse is more efficient due to the use of parallel decoding. The use of a pre-trained LLM enables fine-grained language understanding, translating to high-fidelity image generation and the understanding of visual concepts such as objects, their spatial relationships, pose, cardinality etc. Our 900M parameter model achieves a new SOTA on CC3M, with an FID score of 6.06. The Muse 3B parameter model achieves an FID of 7.88 on zero-shot COCO evaluation, along with a CLIP score of 0.32. Muse also directly enables a number of image editing applications without the need to fine-tune or invert the model: inpainting, outpainting, and mask-free editing. More results are available at https://muse-model.github.io

The decarbonization of buildings presents new challenges for the reliability of the electrical grid as a result of the intermittency of renewable energy sources and increase in grid load brought about by end-use electrification. To restore reliability, grid-interactive efficient buildings can provide flexibility services to the grid through demand response. Residential demand response programs are hindered by the need for manual intervention by customers. To maximize the energy flexibility potential of residential buildings, an advanced control architecture is needed. Reinforcement learning is well-suited for the control of flexible resources as it is able to adapt to unique building characteristics compared to expert systems. Yet, factors hindering the adoption of RL in real-world applications include its large data requirements for training, control security and generalizability. Here we address these challenges by proposing the MERLIN framework and using a digital twin of a real-world 17-building grid-interactive residential community in CityLearn. We show that 1) independent RL-controllers for batteries improve building and district level KPIs compared to a reference RBC by tailoring their policies to individual buildings, 2) despite unique occupant behaviours, transferring the RL policy of any one of the buildings to other buildings provides comparable performance while reducing the cost of training, 3) training RL-controllers on limited temporal data that does not capture full seasonality in occupant behaviour has little effect on performance. Although, the zero-net-energy (ZNE) condition of the buildings could be maintained or worsened as a result of controlled batteries, KPIs that are typically improved by ZNE condition (electricity price and carbon emissions) are further improved when the batteries are managed by an advanced controller.

We propose an ensemble approach to predict the labels in linear programming word problems. The entity identification and the meaning representation are two types of tasks to be solved in the NL4Opt competition. We propose the ensembleCRF method to identify the named entities for the first task. We found that single models didn't improve for the given task in our analysis. A set of prediction models predict the entities. The generated results are combined to form a consensus result in the ensembleCRF method. We present an ensemble text generator to produce the representation sentences for the second task. We thought of dividing the problem into multiple small tasks due to the overflow in the output. A single model generates different representations based on the prompt. All the generated text is combined to form an ensemble and produce a mathematical meaning of a linear programming problem.

The current reinforcement learning algorithm uses forward-generated trajectories to train the agent. The forward-generated trajectories give the agent little guidance, so the agent can explore as much as possible. While the appreciation of reinforcement learning comes from enough exploration, this gives the trade-off of losing sample efficiency. The sampling efficiency is an important factor that decides the performance of the algorithm. Past tasks use reward shaping techniques and changing the structure of the network to increase sample efficiency, however these methods require many steps to implement. In this work, we propose novel reverse curriculum reinforcement learning. Reverse curriculum learning starts training the agent using the backward trajectory of the episode rather than the original forward trajectory. This gives the agent a strong reward signal, so the agent can learn in a more sample-efficient manner. Moreover, our method only requires a minor change in algorithm, which is reversing the order of trajectory before training the agent. Therefore, it can be simply applied to any state-of-art algorithms.

Applying Machine learning to domains like Earth Sciences is impeded by the lack of labeled data, despite a large corpus of raw data available in such domains. For instance, training a wildfire classifier on satellite imagery requires curating a massive and diverse dataset, which is an expensive and time-consuming process that can span from weeks to months. Searching for relevant examples in over 40 petabytes of unlabelled data requires researchers to manually hunt for such images, much like finding a needle in a haystack. We present a no-code end-to-end pipeline, Curator, which dramatically minimizes the time taken to curate an exhaustive labeled dataset. Curator is able to search massive amounts of unlabelled data by combining self-supervision, scalable nearest neighbor search, and active learning to learn and differentiate image representations. The pipeline can also be readily applied to solve problems across different domains. Overall, the pipeline makes it practical for researchers to go from just one reference image to a comprehensive dataset in a diminutive span of time.

Object instance segmentation is a key challenge for indoor robots navigating cluttered environments with many small objects. Limitations in 3D sensing capabilities often make it difficult to detect every possible object. While deep learning approaches may be effective for this problem, manually annotating 3D data for supervised learning is time-consuming. In this work, we explore zero-shot instance segmentation (ZSIS) from RGB-D data to identify unseen objects in a semantic category-agnostic manner. We introduce a zero-shot split for Tabletop Objects Dataset (TOD-Z) to enable this study and present a method that uses annotated objects to learn the ``objectness'' of pixels and generalize to unseen object categories in cluttered indoor environments. Our method, SupeRGB-D, groups pixels into small patches based on geometric cues and learns to merge the patches in a deep agglomerative clustering fashion. SupeRGB-D outperforms existing baselines on unseen objects while achieving similar performance on seen objects. Additionally, it is extremely lightweight (0.4 MB memory requirement) and suitable for mobile and robotic applications. The dataset split and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

The rapid growth of machine translation (MT) systems has necessitated comprehensive studies to meta-evaluate evaluation metrics being used, which enables a better selection of metrics that best reflect MT quality. Unfortunately, most of the research focuses on high-resource languages, mainly English, the observations for which may not always apply to other languages. Indian languages, having over a billion speakers, are linguistically different from English, and to date, there has not been a systematic study of evaluating MT systems from English into Indian languages. In this paper, we fill this gap by creating an MQM dataset consisting of 7000 fine-grained annotations, spanning 5 Indian languages and 7 MT systems, and use it to establish correlations between annotator scores and scores obtained using existing automatic metrics. Our results show that pre-trained metrics, such as COMET, have the highest correlations with annotator scores. Additionally, we find that the metrics do not adequately capture fluency-based errors in Indian languages, and there is a need to develop metrics focused on Indian languages. We hope that our dataset and analysis will help promote further research in this area.

The emergence of large pretrained models has enabled language models to achieve superior performance in common NLP tasks, including language modeling and question answering, compared to previous static word representation methods. Augmenting these models with a retriever to retrieve the related text and documents as supporting information has shown promise in effectively solving NLP problems in a more interpretable way given that the additional knowledge is injected explicitly rather than being captured in the models' parameters. In spite of the recent progress, our analysis on retriever-augmented language models shows that this class of language models still lack reasoning over the retrieved documents. In this paper, we study the strengths and weaknesses of different retriever-augmented language models such as REALM, kNN-LM, FiD, ATLAS, and Flan-T5 in reasoning over the selected documents in different tasks. In particular, we analyze the reasoning failures of each of these models and study how the models' failures in reasoning are rooted in the retriever module as well as the language model.

Quantum state tomography aims to estimate the state of a quantum mechanical system which is described by a trace one, Hermitian positive semidefinite complex matrix, given a set of measurements of the state. Existing works focus on estimating the density matrix that represents the state, using a compressive sensing approach, with only fewer measurements than that required for a tomographically complete set, with the assumption that the true state has a low rank. One very popular method to estimate the state is the use of the Singular Value Thresholding (SVT) algorithm. In this work, we present a machine learning approach to estimate the quantum state of n-qubit systems by unrolling the iterations of SVT which we call Learned Quantum State Tomography (LQST). As merely unrolling SVT may not ensure that the output of the network meets the constraints required for a quantum state, we design and train a custom neural network whose architecture is inspired from the iterations of SVT with additional layers to meet the required constraints. We show that our proposed LQST with very few layers reconstructs the density matrix with much better fidelity than the SVT algorithm which takes many hundreds of iterations to converge. We also demonstrate the reconstruction of the quantum Bell state from an informationally incomplete set of noisy measurements.