识别密集混乱中的物体准确地对各种机器人操纵任务发挥了重要作用，包括抓握，包装，重新安排等。但是，传统的视觉识别模型通常会因为实例之间的严重阻塞而错过对象，并且由于视觉上的歧义与高对象拥挤的歧义导致了不正确的预测。在本文中，我们提出了一个称为Smart Explorer的交互式探索框架，用于识别密集的杂物中的所有对象。我们的Smart Explorer会与混乱物进行物理互动，以最大程度地提高识别性能，同时最大程度地减少动作数量，在这种情况下，可以通过最佳的准确性效率折衷来有效地减轻误报和负面因素。具体而言，我们首先收集混乱的多视图RGB-D图像，然后重建相应的点云。通过跨视图汇总RGB图像的实例分割，我们获得了杂物的实例云分区，该杂物通过该杂物的存在和每个类的对象数量。生成有效物理互动的推动动作可大大减少由实例分割熵和多视图对象分歧组成的识别不确定性。因此，通过迭代实例预测和物理互动实现了对象识别在密集混乱中的最佳精度效率折衷。广泛的实验表明，我们的Smart Explorer仅使用几个动作获得了有希望的识别精度，这也超过了随机推动的大幅度。

在本文中，我们提出了激光雷达蒸馏，以弥合由不同的激光束引起的3D对象检测的域间隙。在许多现实世界中，大规模生产的机器人和车辆使用的激光点通常比大型公共数据集的光束少。此外，随着LIDARS升级到具有不同光束量的其他产品模型，使用先前版本的高分辨率传感器捕获的标记数据变得具有挑战性。尽管域自适应3D检测最近取得了进展，但大多数方法都难以消除梁诱导的域间隙。我们发现，在训练过程中，必须将源域的点云密度与目标域的点云密度保持一致。受到这一发现的启发，我们提出了一个渐进式框架，以减轻光束诱导的域移位。在每次迭代中，我们首先通过下采样高光束点云来产生低光束伪激光雷达。然后，使用教师学生的框架来将丰富的信息从数据中提取更多的信息。 Waymo，Nuscenes和Kitti数据集的大量实验具有三个不同的基于激光雷达的探测器，这证明了我们激光蒸馏的有效性。值得注意的是，我们的方法不会增加推理的任何额外计算成本。

Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

Given the increasingly intricate forms of partial differential equations (PDEs) in physics and related fields, computationally solving PDEs without analytic solutions inevitably suffers from the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recent advances in neural operators, a kind of mesh-independent neural-network-based PDE solvers, have suggested the dawn of overcoming this challenge. In this emerging direction, Koopman neural operator (KNO) is a representative demonstration and outperforms other state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Here we present KoopmanLab, a self-contained and user-friendly PyTorch module of the Koopman neural operator family for solving partial differential equations. Beyond the original version of KNO, we develop multiple new variants of KNO based on different neural network architectures to improve the general applicability of our module. These variants are validated by mesh-independent and long-term prediction experiments implemented on representative PDEs (e.g., the Navier-Stokes equation and the Bateman-Burgers equation) and ERA5 (i.e., one of the largest high-resolution data sets of global-scale climate fields). These demonstrations suggest the potential of KoopmanLab to be considered in diverse applications of partial differential equations.

In this chapter, we review and discuss the transformation of AI technology in HCI/UX work and assess how AI technology will change how we do the work. We first discuss how AI can be used to enhance the result of user research and design evaluation. We then discuss how AI technology can be used to enhance HCI/UX design. Finally, we discuss how AI-enabled capabilities can improve UX when users interact with computing systems, applications, and services.

Adversarial robustness assessment for video recognition models has raised concerns owing to their wide applications on safety-critical tasks. Compared with images, videos have much high dimension, which brings huge computational costs when generating adversarial videos. This is especially serious for the query-based black-box attacks where gradient estimation for the threat models is usually utilized, and high dimensions will lead to a large number of queries. To mitigate this issue, we propose to simultaneously eliminate the temporal and spatial redundancy within the video to achieve an effective and efficient gradient estimation on the reduced searching space, and thus query number could decrease. To implement this idea, we design the novel Adversarial spatial-temporal Focus (AstFocus) attack on videos, which performs attacks on the simultaneously focused key frames and key regions from the inter-frames and intra-frames in the video. AstFocus attack is based on the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework. One agent is responsible for selecting key frames, and another agent is responsible for selecting key regions. These two agents are jointly trained by the common rewards received from the black-box threat models to perform a cooperative prediction. By continuously querying, the reduced searching space composed of key frames and key regions is becoming precise, and the whole query number becomes less than that on the original video. Extensive experiments on four mainstream video recognition models and three widely used action recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed AstFocus attack outperforms the SOTA methods, which is prevenient in fooling rate, query number, time, and perturbation magnitude at the same.

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

Surgical robot automation has attracted increasing research interest over the past decade, expecting its huge potential to benefit surgeons, nurses and patients. Recently, the learning paradigm of embodied AI has demonstrated promising ability to learn good control policies for various complex tasks, where embodied AI simulators play an essential role to facilitate relevant researchers. However, existing open-sourced simulators for surgical robot are still not sufficiently supporting human interactions through physical input devices, which further limits effective investigations on how human demonstrations would affect policy learning. In this paper, we study human-in-the-loop embodied intelligence with a new interactive simulation platform for surgical robot learning. Specifically, we establish our platform based on our previously released SurRoL simulator with several new features co-developed to allow high-quality human interaction via an input device. With these, we further propose to collect human demonstrations and imitate the action patterns to achieve more effective policy learning. We showcase the improvement of our simulation environment with the designed new features and tasks, and validate state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms using the interactive environment. Promising results are obtained, with which we hope to pave the way for future research on surgical embodied intelligence. Our platform is released and will be continuously updated in the website: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL/