Improving 6D Pose Estimation of Objects in Clutter via Physics-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search

This work proposes a process for efficiently searching over combinations of individual object 6D pose hypotheses in cluttered scenes, especially in cases involving occlusions and objects resting on each other. The initial set of candidate object poses is generated from state-of-the-art object detection and global point cloud registration techniques. The best-scored pose per object by using these techniques may not be accurate due to overlaps and occlusions. Nevertheless, experimental indications provided in this work show that object poses with lower ranks may be closer to the real poses than ones with high ranks according to registration techniques. This motivates a global optimization process for improving these poses by taking into account scene-level physical interactions between objects. It also implies that the Cartesian product of candidate poses for interacting objects must be searched so as to identify the best scene-level hypothesis. To perform the search efficiently, the candidate poses for each object are clustered so as to reduce their number but still keep a sufficient diversity. Then, searching over the combinations of candidate object poses is performed through a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) process that uses the similarity between the observed depth image of the scene and a rendering of the scene given the hypothesized pose as a score that guides the search procedure. MCTS handles in a principled way the tradeoff between fine-tuning the most promising poses and exploring new ones, by using the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) technique. Experimental results indicate that this process is able to quickly identify in cluttered scenes physically-consistent object poses that are significantly closer to ground truth compared to poses found by point cloud registration methods.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Hexa: Self-Improving for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue System

A common practice in knowledge-grounded dialogue generation is to explicitly utilize intermediate steps (e.g., web-search, memory retrieval) with modular approaches. However, data for such steps are often inaccessible compared to those of dialogue responses as they are unobservable in an ordinary dialogue. To fill in the absence of these data, we develop a self-improving method to improve the generative performances of intermediate steps without the ground truth data. In particular, we propose a novel bootstrapping scheme with a guided prompt and a modified loss function to enhance the diversity of appropriate self-generated responses. Through experiments on various benchmark datasets, we empirically demonstrate that our method successfully leverages a self-improving mechanism in generating intermediate and final responses and improves the performances on the task of knowledge-grounded dialogue generation

Increasing Representation of Women on Private Sector Boards in Scotland

No abstract available

Diversity, Assortment, Dissimilarity, Variety: A Study of Diversity Measures Using Low Level Features for Video Retrieval

In this paper we present a number of methods for re-ranking video search results in order to introduce diversity into the set of search results. The usefulness of these approaches is evaluated in comparison with similarity based measures, for the TRECVID 2007 collection and tasks [11]. For the MAP of the search results we find that some of our approaches perform as well as similarity based methods. We also find that some of these results can improve the P@N values for some of the lower N values. The most successful of these approaches was then implemented in an interactive search system for the TRECVID 2008 interactive search tasks. The responses from the users indicate that they find the more diverse search results extremely useful

Core Hunter II: fast core subset selection based on multiple genetic diversity measures using Mixed Replica search

BACKGROUND: Sampling core subsets from genetic resources while maintaining as much as possible the genetic diversity of the original collection is an important but computationally complex task for gene bank managers. The Core Hunter computer program was developed as a tool to generate such subsets based on multiple genetic measures, including both distance measures and allelic diversity indices. At first we investigate the effect of minimum (instead of the default mean) distance measures on the performance of Core Hunter. Secondly, we try to gain more insight into the performance of the original Core Hunter search algorithm through comparison with several other heuristics working with several realistic datasets of varying size and allelic composition. Finally, we propose a new algorithm (Mixed Replica search) for Core Hunter II with the aim of improving the diversity of the constructed core sets and their corresponding generation times. RESULTS: Our results show that the introduction of minimum distance measures leads to core sets in which all accessions are sufficiently distant from each other, which was not always obtained when optimizing mean distance alone. Comparison of the original Core Hunter algorithm, Replica Exchange Monte Carlo (REMC), with simpler heuristics shows that the simpler algorithms often give very good results but with lower runtimes than REMC. However, the performance of the simpler algorithms is slightly worse than REMC under lower sampling intensities and some heuristics clearly struggle with minimum distance measures. In comparison the new advanced Mixed Replica search algorithm (MixRep), which uses heterogeneous replicas, was able to sample core sets with equal or higher diversity scores than REMC and the simpler heuristics, often using less computation time than REMC. CONCLUSION: The REMC search algorithm used in the original Core Hunter computer program performs well, sometimes leading to slightly better results than some of the simpler methods, although it doesn’t always give the best results. By switching to the new Mixed Replica algorithm overall results and runtimes can be significantly improved. Finally we recommend including minimum distance measures in the objective function when looking for core sets in which all accessions are sufficiently distant from each other. Core Hunter II is freely available as an open source project at http://www.corehunter.org

Comparing and Combining Lexicase Selection and Novelty Search

Lexicase selection and novelty search, two parent selection methods used in evolutionary computation, emphasize exploring widely in the search space more than traditional methods such as tournament selection. However, lexicase selection is not explicitly driven to select for novelty in the population, and novelty search suffers from lack of direction toward a goal, especially in unconstrained, highly-dimensional spaces. We combine the strengths of lexicase selection and novelty search by creating a novelty score for each test case, and adding those novelty scores to the normal error values used in lexicase selection. We use this new novelty-lexicase selection to solve automatic program synthesis problems, and find it significantly outperforms both novelty search and lexicase selection. Additionally, we find that novelty search has very little success in the problem domain of program synthesis. We explore the effects of each of these methods on population diversity and long-term problem solving performance, and give evidence to support the hypothesis that novelty-lexicase selection resists converging to local optima better than lexicase selection