许多涉及某种形式的3D视觉感知的机器人任务极大地受益于对工作环境的完整知识。但是，机器人通常必须应对非结构化的环境，并且由于工作空间有限，混乱或对象自我划分，它们的车载视觉传感器只能提供不完整的信息。近年来，深度学习架构的形状完成架构已开始将牵引力作为从部分视觉数据中推断出完整的3D对象表示的有效手段。然而，大多数现有的最新方法都以体素电网形式提供了固定的输出分辨率，这与神经网络输出阶段的大小严格相关。尽管这足以完成某些任务，例如导航，抓握和操纵的障碍需要更精细的分辨率，并且简单地扩大神经网络输出在计算上是昂贵的。在本文中，我们通过基于隐式3D表示的对象形状完成方法来解决此限制，该方法为每个重建点提供了置信值。作为第二个贡献，我们提出了一种基于梯度的方法，用于在推理时在任意分辨率下有效地采样这种隐式函数。我们通过将重建的形状与地面真理进行比较，并通过在机器人握把管道中部署形状完成算法来实验验证我们的方法。在这两种情况下，我们将结果与最先进的形状完成方法进行了比较。

动作识别是人形机器人与人类互动和合作的基本能力。该应用程序需要设计动作识别系统，以便可以轻松添加新操作，同时识别和忽略未知的动作。近年来，深度学习的方法代表了行动识别问题的主要解决方案。但是，大多数模型通常需要大量的手动标记样品数据集。在这项工作中，我们针对单发的深度学习模型，因为它们只能处理课堂的一个实例。不幸的是，一击模型假设在推理时，识别的动作落入了支持集中，当动作位于支持集外时，它们会失败。几乎没有射击开放式识别（FSOSR）解决方案试图解决该缺陷，但是当前的解决方案仅考虑静态图像而不是图像序列。静态图像仍然不足以区分诸如坐下和站立之类的动作。在本文中，我们提出了一个新颖的模型，该模型通过一个单发模型来解决FSOSR问题，该模型用拒绝未知动作的歧视器增强。该模型对于人体机器人技术中的应用很有用，因为它允许轻松添加新类并确定输入序列是否是系统已知的序列。我们展示了如何以端到端的方式训练整个模型，并进行定量和定性分析。最后，我们提供现实世界中的例子。

It is well known that conservative mechanical systems exhibit local oscillatory behaviours due to their elastic and gravitational potentials, which completely characterise these periodic motions together with the inertial properties of the system. The classification of these periodic behaviours and their geometric characterisation are in an on-going secular debate, which recently led to the so-called eigenmanifold theory. The eigenmanifold characterises nonlinear oscillations as a generalisation of linear eigenspaces. With the motivation of performing periodic tasks efficiently, we use tools coming from this theory to construct an optimization problem aimed at inducing desired closed-loop oscillations through a state feedback law. We solve the constructed optimization problem via gradient-descent methods involving neural networks. Extensive simulations show the validity of the approach.

Detecting anomalous data within time series is a very relevant task in pattern recognition and machine learning, with many possible applications that range from disease prevention in medicine, e.g., detecting early alterations of the health status before it can clearly be defined as "illness" up to monitoring industrial plants. Regarding this latter application, detecting anomalies in an industrial plant's status firstly prevents serious damages that would require a long interruption of the production process. Secondly, it permits optimal scheduling of maintenance interventions by limiting them to urgent situations. At the same time, they typically follow a fixed prudential schedule according to which components are substituted well before the end of their expected lifetime. This paper describes a case study regarding the monitoring of the status of Laser-guided Vehicles (LGVs) batteries, on which we worked as our contribution to project SUPER (Supercomputing Unified Platform, Emilia Romagna) aimed at establishing and demonstrating a regional High-Performance Computing platform that is going to represent the main Italian supercomputing environment for both computing power and data volume.

Methods based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to build generative models of time-series. In addition to high computational overhead due to explicitly computing hidden states recurrence, existing ODE-based models fall short in learning sequence data with sharp transitions - common in many real-world systems - due to numerical challenges during optimization. In this work, we propose LS4, a generative model for sequences with latent variables evolving according to a state space ODE to increase modeling capacity. Inspired by recent deep state space models (S4), we achieve speedups by leveraging a convolutional representation of LS4 which bypasses the explicit evaluation of hidden states. We show that LS4 significantly outperforms previous continuous-time generative models in terms of marginal distribution, classification, and prediction scores on real-world datasets in the Monash Forecasting Repository, and is capable of modeling highly stochastic data with sharp temporal transitions. LS4 sets state-of-the-art for continuous-time latent generative models, with significant improvement of mean squared error and tighter variational lower bounds on irregularly-sampled datasets, while also being x100 faster than other baselines on long sequences.

This project leverages advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to improve the efficiency and flexibility of order-picking systems for commercial warehouses. We envision a warehouse of the future in which dozens of mobile robots and human pickers work together to collect and deliver items within the warehouse. The fundamental problem we tackle, called the order-picking problem, is how these worker agents must coordinate their movement and actions in the warehouse to maximise performance (e.g. order throughput) under given resource constraints. Established industry methods using heuristic approaches require large engineering efforts to optimise for innately variable warehouse configurations. In contrast, the MARL framework can be flexibly applied to any warehouse configuration (e.g. size, layout, number/types of workers, item replenishment frequency) and the agents learn via a process of trial-and-error how to optimally cooperate with one another. This paper details the current status of the R&D effort initiated by Dematic and the University of Edinburgh towards a general-purpose and scalable MARL solution for the order-picking problem in realistic warehouses.

With the rise in high resolution remote sensing technologies there has been an explosion in the amount of data available for forest monitoring, and an accompanying growth in artificial intelligence applications to automatically derive forest properties of interest from these datasets. Many studies use their own data at small spatio-temporal scales, and demonstrate an application of an existing or adapted data science method for a particular task. This approach often involves intensive and time-consuming data collection and processing, but generates results restricted to specific ecosystems and sensor types. There is a lack of widespread acknowledgement of how the types and structures of data used affects performance and accuracy of analysis algorithms. To accelerate progress in the field more efficiently, benchmarking datasets upon which methods can be tested and compared are sorely needed. Here, we discuss how lack of standardisation impacts confidence in estimation of key forest properties, and how considerations of data collection need to be accounted for in assessing method performance. We present pragmatic requirements and considerations for the creation of rigorous, useful benchmarking datasets for forest monitoring applications, and discuss how tools from modern data science can improve use of existing data. We list a set of example large-scale datasets that could contribute to benchmarking, and present a vision for how community-driven, representative benchmarking initiatives could benefit the field.

In this work, we devise robust and efficient learning protocols for orchestrating a Federated Learning (FL) process for the Federated Tumor Segmentation Challenge (FeTS 2022). Enabling FL for FeTS setup is challenging mainly due to data heterogeneity among collaborators and communication cost of training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Robust Learning Protocol (RoLePRO) which is a combination of server-side adaptive optimisation (e.g., server-side Adam) and judicious parameter (weights) aggregation schemes (e.g., adaptive weighted aggregation). RoLePRO takes a two-phase approach, where the first phase consists of vanilla Federated Averaging, while the second phase consists of a judicious aggregation scheme that uses a sophisticated reweighting, all in the presence of an adaptive optimisation algorithm at the server. We draw insights from extensive experimentation to tune learning rates for the two phases.

The paper addresses the problem of time offset synchronization in the presence of temperature variations, which lead to a non-Gaussian environment. In this context, regular Kalman filtering reveals to be suboptimal. A functional optimization approach is developed in order to approximate optimal estimation of the clock offset between master and slave. A numerical approximation is provided to this aim, based on regular neural network training. Other heuristics are provided as well, based on spline regression. An extensive performance evaluation highlights the benefits of the proposed techniques, which can be easily generalized to several clock synchronization protocols and operating environments.

Text-guided image editing can have a transformative impact in supporting creative applications. A key challenge is to generate edits that are faithful to input text prompts, while consistent with input images. We present Imagen Editor, a cascaded diffusion model built, by fine-tuning Imagen on text-guided image inpainting. Imagen Editor's edits are faithful to the text prompts, which is accomplished by using object detectors to propose inpainting masks during training. In addition, Imagen Editor captures fine details in the input image by conditioning the cascaded pipeline on the original high resolution image. To improve qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we introduce EditBench, a systematic benchmark for text-guided image inpainting. EditBench evaluates inpainting edits on natural and generated images exploring objects, attributes, and scenes. Through extensive human evaluation on EditBench, we find that object-masking during training leads to across-the-board improvements in text-image alignment -- such that Imagen Editor is preferred over DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion -- and, as a cohort, these models are better at object-rendering than text-rendering, and handle material/color/size attributes better than count/shape attributes.