Tracking of enriched dialog states for flexible conversational information access

Dialog state tracking (DST) is a crucial component in a task-oriented dialog system for conversational information access. A common practice in current dialog systems is to define the dialog state by a set of slot-value pairs. Such representation of dialog states and the slot-filling based DST have been widely employed, but suffer from three drawbacks. (1) The dialog state can contain only a single value for a slot, and (2) can contain only users' affirmative preference over the values for a slot. (3) Current task-based dialog systems mainly focus on the searching task, while the enquiring task is also very common in practice. The above observations motivate us to enrich current representation of dialog states and collect a brand new dialog dataset about movies, based upon which we build a new DST, called enriched DST (EDST), for flexible accessing movie information. The EDST supports the searching task, the enquiring task and their mixed task. We show that the new EDST method not only achieves good results on Iqiyi dataset, but also outperforms other state-of-the-art DST methods on the traditional dialog datasets, WOZ2.0 and DSTC2.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted by ICASSP201

Neutrinos with Zee-Mass Matrix in Vacuum and Matter

Neutrino mass matrix generated by the Zee (radiative) mechanism has zero (in general, small) diagonal elements and a natural hierarchy of the nondiagonal elements. It can be considered as an alternative (with strong predictive power) to the matrices generated by the see-saw mechanism. The propagation in medium of the neutrinos with the Zee-mass matrix is studied. The flavor neutrino transitions are described analytically. In the physically interesting cases the probabilities of transitions as functions of neutrino energy can be represented as two-neutrino probabilities modulated by the effect of vacuum oscillations related to the small mass splitting. Possible applications of the results to the solar, supernova, atmospheric and relic neutrinos are discussed. A set of the predictions is found which could allow to identify the Zee-mass matrix and therefore the corresponding mechanism of mass generation.Comment: 25 pages (3 figures available upon request), LaTeX, IC/94/4

Task-Oriented Dialog Systems that Consider Multiple Appropriate Responses under the Same Context

Conversations have an intrinsic one-to-many property, which means that multiple responses can be appropriate for the same dialog context. In task-oriented dialogs, this property leads to different valid dialog policies towards task completion. However, none of the existing task-oriented dialog generation approaches takes this property into account. We propose a Multi-Action Data Augmentation (MADA) framework to utilize the one-to-many property to generate diverse appropriate dialog responses. Specifically, we first use dialog states to summarize the dialog history, and then discover all possible mappings from every dialog state to its different valid system actions. During dialog system training, we enable the current dialog state to map to all valid system actions discovered in the previous process to create additional state-action pairs. By incorporating these additional pairs, the dialog policy learns a balanced action distribution, which further guides the dialog model to generate diverse responses. Experimental results show that the proposed framework consistently improves dialog policy diversity, and results in improved response diversity and appropriateness. Our model obtains state-of-the-art results on MultiWOZ

Finite element analysis of mechanical behavior of concrete-filled square steel tube short columns with inner I-shaped CFRP profiles subjected to bi-axial eccentric load

[EN] The concrete-filed square steel tube with inner I-shaped CFRP profiles short columns under bi-axial eccentric load were investigated by the finite element analysis software ABAQUS. The working mechanism of the composite columns which is under bi-axial eccentric load are investigated by using the stress distribution diagram of steel tube concrete and the I-shaped CFRP profiles. In this paper, the main parameters; eccentric ratio, steel ratio, steel yield strength, concrete compressive strength and CFRP distribution rate of the specimens were investigated to know the mechanical behavior of them. The interaction between the steel tube and the concrete interface at different characteristic points of the composite columns were analyzed. The results showed that the ultimate bearing capacity of the concrete-filed square steel tube with inner I-shaped CFRP profiles short columns under bi-axial eccentric load decrease with the increase of eccentric ratio, the ultimate bearing capacity of the composite columns increase with the increase of steel ratio, steel yield strength, concrete compressive strength and CFRP distribution rate. The contact pressure between the steel tube and the concrete decreased from the corner zone to the flat zone, and the contact pressure decreased from the mid-height cross section to other sections.Li, G.; Zhan, Z.; Yang, Z.; Yang, Y. (2018). Finite element analysis of mechanical behavior of concrete-filled square steel tube short columns with inner I-shaped CFRP profiles subjected to bi-axial eccentric load. En Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Steel-Concrete Composite Structures. ASCCS 2018. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 259-266. https://doi.org/10.4995/ASCCS2018.2018.6996OCS25926

Cooperative work behavior of high strength concrete-filled square high strength tubular stub columns with inner I-shaped CFRP under axial compression

[EN] The finite element software ABAQUS was used to analyze 22 high strength concrete-filled square high strength tubular short columns with inner I-shaped CFRP, all analysis results based on the finite element analysis data, six characteristic points were defined in the load-longitudinal strain curve of composite columns. The shared load of core concrete, square steel tube and inner I-shaped CFRP at different height sections of typical specimen corresponding to each characteristic point were analyzed and the cooperative work behavior of inner I-shaped CFRP, square steel tube and core concrete was analyzed. The results show that the existence of the inner I-shaped CFRP can effectively improve the ultimate bearing capacity composite columns, the middle region I-shaped CFRP sharing more longitudinal load than the end region CFRP and the shared load of concrete at the end region section is bigger than that of middle region section, before the CFRP brittle failure. The longitudinal load of square steel tube does not change with the change of the cross-section height.Li, G.; Yang, Y.; Yang, Z.; Zhan, Z. (2018). Cooperative work behavior of high strength concrete-filled square high strength tubular stub columns with inner I-shaped CFRP under axial compression. En Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Steel-Concrete Composite Structures. ASCCS 2018. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 281-288. https://doi.org/10.4995/ASCCS2018.2018.6999OCS28128

Online Monocular Lane Mapping Using Catmull-Rom Spline

In this study, we introduce an online monocular lane mapping approach that solely relies on a single camera and odometry for generating spline-based maps. Our proposed technique models the lane association process as an assignment issue utilizing a bipartite graph, and assigns weights to the edges by incorporating Chamfer distance, pose uncertainty, and lateral sequence consistency. Furthermore, we meticulously design control point initialization, spline parameterization, and optimization to progressively create, expand, and refine splines. In contrast to prior research that assessed performance using self-constructed datasets, our experiments are conducted on the openly accessible OpenLane dataset. The experimental outcomes reveal that our suggested approach enhances lane association and odometry precision, as well as overall lane map quality. We have open-sourced our code1 for this project.Comment: Accepted by IROS202

Pyramid Semantic Graph-based Global Point Cloud Registration with Low Overlap

Global point cloud registration is essential in many robotics tasks like loop closing and relocalization. Unfortunately, the registration often suffers from the low overlap between point clouds, a frequent occurrence in practical applications due to occlusion and viewpoint change. In this paper, we propose a graph-theoretic framework to address the problem of global point cloud registration with low overlap. To this end, we construct a consistency graph to facilitate robust data association and employ graduated non-convexity (GNC) for reliable pose estimation, following the state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods. Unlike previous approaches, we use semantic cues to scale down the dense point clouds, thus reducing the problem size. Moreover, we address the ambiguity arising from the consistency threshold by constructing a pyramid graph with multi-level consistency thresholds. Then we propose a cascaded gradient ascend method to solve the resulting densest clique problem and obtain multiple pose candidates for every consistency threshold. Finally, fast geometric verification is employed to select the optimal estimation from multiple pose candidates. Our experiments, conducted on a self-collected indoor dataset and the public KITTI dataset, demonstrate that our method achieves the highest success rate despite the low overlap of point clouds and low semantic quality. We have open-sourced our code https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/Pagor for this project.Comment: Accepted by IROS202