Natural laws are often described through differential equations yet finding a differential equation that describes the governing law underlying observed data is a challenging and still mostly manual task. In this paper we make a step towards the automation of this process: we propose a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model that recovers scalar autonomous ordinary differential equations (ODEs) in symbolic form from time-series data of a single observed solution of the ODE. Our method is efficiently scalable: after one-time pretraining on a large set of ODEs, we can infer the governing laws of a new observed solution in a few forward passes of the model. Then we show that our model performs better or on par with existing methods in various test cases in terms of accurate symbolic recovery of the ODE, especially for more complex expressions.

In this paper a global reactive motion planning framework for robotic manipulators in complex dynamic environments is presented. In particular, the circular field predictions (CFP) planner from Becker et al. (2021) is extended to ensure obstacle avoidance of the whole structure of a robotic manipulator. Towards this end, a motion planning framework is developed that leverages global information about promising avoidance directions from arbitrary configuration space motion planners, resulting in improved global trajectories while reactively avoiding dynamic obstacles and decreasing the required computational power. The resulting motion planning framework is tested in multiple simulations with complex and dynamic obstacles and demonstrates great potential compared to existing motion planning approaches.

Information extraction from scholarly articles is a challenging task due to the sizable document length and implicit information hidden in text, figures, and citations. Scholarly information extraction has various applications in exploration, archival, and curation services for digital libraries and knowledge management systems. We present MORTY, an information extraction technique that creates structured summaries of text from scholarly articles. Our approach condenses the article's full-text to property-value pairs as a segmented text snippet called structured summary. We also present a sizable scholarly dataset combining structured summaries retrieved from a scholarly knowledge graph and corresponding publicly available scientific articles, which we openly publish as a resource for the research community. Our results show that structured summarization is a suitable approach for targeted information extraction that complements other commonly used methods such as question answering and named entity recognition.

The introductory programming sequence has been the focus of much research in computing education. The recent advent of several viable and freely-available AI-driven code generation tools present several immediate opportunities and challenges in this domain. In this position paper we argue that the community needs to act quickly in deciding what possible opportunities can and should be leveraged and how, while also working on how to overcome or otherwise mitigate the possible challenges. Assuming that the effectiveness and proliferation of these tools will continue to progress rapidly, without quick, deliberate, and concerted efforts, educators will lose advantage in helping shape what opportunities come to be, and what challenges will endure. With this paper we aim to seed this discussion within the computing education community.

We present a new convolution layer for deep learning architectures which we call QuadConv -- an approximation to continuous convolution via quadrature. Our operator is developed explicitly for use on unstructured data, and accomplishes this by learning a continuous kernel that can be sampled at arbitrary locations. In the setting of neural compression, we show that a QuadConv-based autoencoder, resulting in a Quadrature Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN), can match the performance of standard discrete convolutions on structured uniform data, as in CNNs, and maintain this accuracy on unstructured data.

Humans intuitively solve tasks in versatile ways, varying their behavior in terms of trajectory-based planning and for individual steps. Thus, they can easily generalize and adapt to new and changing environments. Current Imitation Learning algorithms often only consider unimodal expert demonstrations and act in a state-action-based setting, making it difficult for them to imitate human behavior in case of versatile demonstrations. Instead, we combine a mixture of movement primitives with a distribution matching objective to learn versatile behaviors that match the expert's behavior and versatility. To facilitate generalization to novel task configurations, we do not directly match the agent's and expert's trajectory distributions but rather work with concise geometric descriptors which generalize well to unseen task configurations. We empirically validate our method on various robot tasks using versatile human demonstrations and compare to imitation learning algorithms in a state-action setting as well as a trajectory-based setting. We find that the geometric descriptors greatly help in generalizing to new task configurations and that combining them with our distribution-matching objective is crucial for representing and reproducing versatile behavior.

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a flexible representation for real-world decision and control problems. However, POMDPs are notoriously difficult to solve, especially when the state and observation spaces are continuous or hybrid, which is often the case for physical systems. While recent online sampling-based POMDP algorithms that plan with observation likelihood weighting have shown practical effectiveness, a general theory characterizing the approximation error of the particle filtering techniques that these algorithms use has not previously been proposed. Our main contribution is bounding the error between any POMDP and its corresponding finite sample particle belief MDP (PB-MDP) approximation. This fundamental bridge between PB-MDPs and POMDPs allows us to adapt any sampling-based MDP algorithm to a POMDP by solving the corresponding particle belief MDP, thereby extending the convergence guarantees of the MDP algorithm to the POMDP. Practically, this is implemented by using the particle filter belief transition model as the generative model for the MDP solver. While this requires access to the observation density model from the POMDP, it only increases the transition sampling complexity of the MDP solver by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(C)$, where $C$ is the number of particles. Thus, when combined with sparse sampling MDP algorithms, this approach can yield algorithms for POMDPs that have no direct theoretical dependence on the size of the state and observation spaces. In addition to our theoretical contribution, we perform five numerical experiments on benchmark POMDPs to demonstrate that a simple MDP algorithm adapted using PB-MDP approximation, Sparse-PFT, achieves performance competitive with other leading continuous observation POMDP solvers.

完全自主移动机器人的现实部署取决于能够处理动态环境的强大的大满贯（同时本地化和映射）系统，其中对象在机器人的前面移动以及不断变化的环境，在此之后移动或更换对象。机器人已经绘制了现场。本文介绍了更换式SLAM，这是一种在动态和不断变化的环境中强大的视觉猛烈抨击的方法。这是通过使用与长期数据关联算法结合的贝叶斯过滤器来实现的。此外，它采用了一种有效的算法，用于基于对象检测的动态关键点过滤，该对象检测正确识别了不动态的边界框中的特征，从而阻止了可能导致轨道丢失的功能的耗竭。此外，开发了一个新的数据集，其中包含RGB-D数据，专门针对评估对象级别的变化环境，称为PUC-USP数据集。使用移动机器人，RGB-D摄像头和运动捕获系统创建了六个序列。这些序列旨在捕获可能导致跟踪故障或地图损坏的不同情况。据我们所知，更换 - 峰是第一个对动态和不断变化的环境既有坚固耐用的视觉大满贯系统，又不假设给定的相机姿势或已知地图，也能够实时运行。使用基准数据集对所提出的方法进行了评估，并将其与其他最先进的方法进行了比较，证明是高度准确的。

随着机器人越来越多地进入以人为本的环境，他们不仅必须能够在人类周围安全地浏览，还必须遵守复杂的社会规范。人类通常在围绕他人围绕他人（尤其是在密集占据的空间中）时，通常通过手势和面部表情依靠非语言交流。因此，机器人还需要能够将手势解释为解决社会导航任务的一部分。为此，我们提出了一种新型的社会导航方法，将基于图像的模仿学习与模型预测性控制结合在一起。手势是基于在图像流中运行的神经网络来解释的，而我们使用最先进的模型预测控制算法来求解点对点导航任务。我们将方法部署在真实的机器人上，并展示我们的方法对四个手势游动场景的有效性：左/右，跟随我，然后圈出一个圆圈。我们的实验表明，我们的方法能够成功地解释复杂的人类手势，并将其用作信号，以生成具有社会符合性的导航任务的轨迹。我们基于与机器人相互作用的参与者的原位等级验证了我们的方法。

我们提出了一种拓扑优化的样品深度学习策略。我们的端到端方法受到监督，包括基于物理学的预处理和模棱两可的网络。我们分析了深度学习管道的不同组成部分如何通过大规模比较影响所需的培训样品的数量。结果表明，包括物理概念不仅会极大地提高样本效率，还可以提高预测的身体正确性。最后，我们发布了两个拓扑优化数据集，其中包含问题和相应的地面真相解决方案。我们相信这些数据集将提高该领域的可比性和未来进度。