62 research outputs found
Generalized Anthropomorphic Functional Grasping with Minimal Demonstrations
This article investigates the challenge of achieving functional tool-use
grasping with high-DoF anthropomorphic hands, with the aim of enabling
anthropomorphic hands to perform tasks that require human-like manipulation and
tool-use. However, accomplishing human-like grasping in real robots present
many challenges, including obtaining diverse functional grasps for a wide
variety of objects, handling generalization ability for kinematically diverse
robot hands and precisely completing object shapes from a single-view
perception. To tackle these challenges, we propose a six-step grasp synthesis
algorithm based on fine-grained contact modeling that generates physically
plausible and human-like functional grasps for category-level objects with
minimal human demonstrations. With the contact-based optimization and learned
dense shape correspondence, the proposed algorithm is adaptable to various
objects in same category and a board range of robot hand models. To further
demonstrate the robustness of the framework, over 10K functional grasps are
synthesized to train our neural network, named DexFG-Net, which generates
diverse sets of human-like functional grasps based on the reconstructed object
model produced by a shape completion module. The proposed framework is
extensively validated in simulation and on a real robot platform. Simulation
experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods by a large
margin in terms of grasp functionality and success rate. Real robot experiments
show that our method achieved an overall success rate of 79\% and 68\% for
tool-use grasp on 3-D printed and real test objects, respectively, using a
5-Finger Schunk Hand. The experimental results indicate a step towards
human-like grasping with anthropomorphic hands.Comment: 20 pages, 23 figures and 7 table
Eliminating Reasoning via Inferring with Planning: A New Framework to Guide LLMs' Non-linear Thinking
Chain-of-Thought(CoT) prompting and its variants explore equipping large
language models (LLMs) with high-level reasoning abilities by emulating
human-like linear cognition and logic. However, the human mind is complicated
and mixed with both linear and nonlinear thinking. In this work, we propose
\textbf{I}nferential \textbf{E}xclusion \textbf{P}rompting (IEP), a novel
prompting that combines the principles of elimination and inference in order to
guide LLMs to think non-linearly. IEP guides LLMs to plan and then utilize
Natural Language Inference (NLI) to deduce each possible solution's entailment
relation with context, commonsense, or facts, therefore yielding a broader
perspective by thinking back for inferring. This forward planning and backward
eliminating process allows IEP to better simulate the complex human thinking
processes compared to other CoT-based methods, which only reflect linear
cognitive processes. We conducted a series of empirical studies and have
corroborated that IEP consistently outperforms CoT across various tasks.
Additionally, we observe that integrating IEP and CoT further improves the
LLMs' performance on certain tasks, highlighting the necessity of equipping
LLMs with mixed logic processes. Moreover, to better evaluate comprehensive
features inherent in human logic, we introduce \textbf{M}ental-\textbf{A}bility
\textbf{R}easoning \textbf{B}enchmark (MARB). The benchmark comprises six novel
subtasks with a total of 9,115 questions, among which 1,685 are developed with
hand-crafted rationale references. We believe both \textsc{IEP} and
\textsc{MARB} can serve as a promising direction for unveiling LLMs' logic and
verbal reasoning abilities and drive further advancements. \textsc{MARB} will
be available at ~\texttt{anonymity link} soon
High-resolution load forecasting on multiple time scales using Long Short-Term Memory and Support Vector Machine
Electricity load prediction is an essential tool for power system planning, operation and manage-ment. The critical information it provides can be used by energy providers to maximise power system operation efficiency and minimise system operation costs. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are two suitable methods that have been successfully used for analysing time series problems. In this paper, the two algorithms are explored further for load prediction; two load prediction algorithms are developed and verified by using the half-hourly load data from the University of Warwick campus energy centre with four different prediction time horizons. The novelty lies in comparing and analysing the prediction accuracy of two intelligent algorithms with multiple time scales and in exploring better scenarios for their prediction applica-tions. High-resolution load forecasting over a long range of time is also conducted in this paper. The MAPE values for the LSTM are 2.501%, 3.577%, 25.073% and 69.947% for four prediction time horizons delineated. For the SVM, the MAPE values are 2.531%, 5.039%, 7.819% and 10.841%, respectively. It is found that both methods are suitable for shorter time horizon predictions. The results show that LSTM is more capable of ultra-short and short-term forecasting, while SVM has a higher prediction accuracy in medium-term and long-term forecasts. Further investigation is per-formed via blind tests and the test results are consistent
Development and comparison of two computational intelligence algorithms for electrical load forecasts with multiple time scales
Electricity load forecasting provides the critical information required for power institutions and authorities to develop rational, effective, and economic dispatch plans. The load forecasting at the regional power system is important for optimal management and accommodating local renewable energy sources, which is a challenging task as the demand variations are more sensitive to local weather changes (such as temperature, humidity, precipitation, and wind speed) and consumers' activities and behaviours. The paper aims to develop a new prediction method using intelligent computational algorithms. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a deep recurrent neural network, explores the long-term dependency of network memory sequence data to identify intrinsic variations in both horizontals (time series) and vertical (network depth) dimensions over a longer historical period. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a typical learning method that has been successfully implemented to solve nonlinear regression and time series problems. This paper studies the two methods and adapts the two methods to become suitable algorithms for load prediction. The paper presents the algorithms, their applications and prediction results. The prediction performance is compared for using LSTM and SVM at ultra-short, short-term, medium-term, and long-term forecasting. The results show that LSTM has higher prediction accuracy than SVM in both ultra-short and short-term forecasts, but SVM is more capable of medium-term and long-term forecasting. Finally, the epoch time for LSTM and SVM is also calculated and compared
Assessment of IBM and NASA's geospatial foundation model in flood inundation mapping
Vision foundation models are a new frontier in GeoAI research because of
their potential to enable powerful image analysis by learning and extracting
important image features from vast amounts of geospatial data. This paper
evaluates the performance of the first-of-its-kind geospatial foundation model,
IBM-NASA's Prithvi, to support a crucial geospatial analysis task: flood
inundation mapping. This model is compared with popular convolutional neural
network and vision transformer-based architectures in terms of mapping accuracy
for flooded areas. A benchmark dataset, Sen1Floods11, is used in the
experiments, and the models' predictability, generalizability, and
transferability are evaluated based on both a test dataset and a dataset that
is completely unseen by the model. Results show the impressive transferability
of the Prithvi model, highlighting its performance advantages in segmenting
flooded areas in previously unseen regions. The findings also suggest areas for
improvement for the Prithvi model in terms of adopting multi-scale
representation learning, developing more end-to-end pipelines for high-level
image analysis tasks, and offering more flexibility in terms of input data
bands.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
RL-ViGen: A Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Visual Generalization
Visual Reinforcement Learning (Visual RL), coupled with high-dimensional
observations, has consistently confronted the long-standing challenge of
generalization. Despite the focus on algorithms aimed at resolving visual
generalization problems, we argue that the devil is in the existing benchmarks
as they are restricted to isolated tasks and generalization categories,
undermining a comprehensive evaluation of agents' visual generalization
capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce RL-ViGen: a novel Reinforcement
Learning Benchmark for Visual Generalization, which contains diverse tasks and
a wide spectrum of generalization types, thereby facilitating the derivation of
more reliable conclusions. Furthermore, RL-ViGen incorporates the latest
generalization visual RL algorithms into a unified framework, under which the
experiment results indicate that no single existing algorithm has prevailed
universally across tasks. Our aspiration is that RL-ViGen will serve as a
catalyst in this area, and lay a foundation for the future creation of
universal visual generalization RL agents suitable for real-world scenarios.
Access to our code and implemented algorithms is provided at
https://gemcollector.github.io/RL-ViGen/
Self-Ensemble Protection: Training Checkpoints Are Good Data Protectors
As data become increasingly vital for deep learning, a company would be very
cautious about releasing data, because the competitors could use the released
data to train high-performance models, thereby posing a tremendous threat to
the company's commercial competence. To prevent training good models on the
data, imperceptible perturbations could be added to it. Since such
perturbations aim at hurting the entire training process, they should reflect
the vulnerability of DNN training, rather than that of a single model. Based on
this new idea, we seek adversarial examples that are always unrecognized (never
correctly classified) in training. In this paper, we uncover them by modeling
checkpoints' gradients, forming the proposed self-ensemble protection (SEP),
which is very effective because (1) learning on examples ignored during normal
training tends to yield DNNs ignoring normal examples; (2) checkpoints'
cross-model gradients are close to orthogonal, meaning that they are as diverse
as DNNs with different architectures in conventional ensemble. That is, our
amazing performance of ensemble only requires the computation of training one
model. By extensive experiments with 9 baselines on 3 datasets and 5
architectures, SEP is verified to be a new state-of-the-art, e.g., our small
perturbations reduce the accuracy of a CIFAR-10 ResNet18
from 94.56\% to 14.68\%, compared to 41.35\% by the best-known method.Code is
available at https://github.com/Sizhe-Chen/SEP
Compassion, Discrimination, and Prosocial Behaviors: Young Diasporic Chinese During the COVID-19 Pandemic
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has fueled anti-Asian, especially anti-Chinese sentiments worldwide, which may negatively impact diasporic Chinese youths\u27 adjustment and prosocial development. This study examined the association between compassion, discrimination and prosocial behaviors in diasporic Chinese youths during the COVID-19 pandemic. 360 participants participated and completed the multi-country, cross-sectional, web-based survey between April 22 and May 9, 2020, the escalating stage of the pandemic. This study found compassion as prosocial behaviors\u27 proximal predictor, while discrimination independently predicted participation in volunteering, and could potentially enhance the association between compassion and charitable giving. These findings suggest that prosociality among young people is sensitive to social context, and that racial discrimination should be considered in future prosocial studies involving young members of ethnic and racial minorities
Interaction Mechanisms Between the NOX4/ROS and RhoA/ROCK1 Signaling Pathways as New Anti- fibrosis Targets of Ursolic Acid in Hepatic Stellate Cells
BackgroundStudies have shown that both NOX4 and RhoA play essential roles in fibrosis and that they regulate each other. In lung fibrosis, NOX4/ROS is located upstream of the RhoA/ROCK1 signaling pathway, and the two molecules are oppositely located in renal fibrosis. Currently, no reports have indicated whether the above mechanisms or other regulatory mechanisms exist in liver fibrosis.ObjectivesTo investigate the effects of the NOX4/ROS and RhoA/ROCK1 signaling pathways on hepatic stellate cell (HSC)-T6 cells, the interaction mechanisms of the two pathways, and the impact of UA on the two pathways to elucidate the role of UA in the reduction of hepatic fibrosis and potential mechanisms of HSC-T6 cell proliferation, migration, and activation.MethodsStable cell lines were constructed using the lentiviral transduction technique. Cell proliferation, apoptosis, migration, and invasion were examined using the MTS, TdT-mediated dUTP nick-end labeling, cell scratch, and Transwell invasion assays, respectively. The DCFH-DA method was used to investigate the ROS levels in each group. RT-qPCR and western blotting techniques were utilized to assess the mRNA and protein expression in each group. CoIP and the Biacore protein interaction analysis systems were used to evaluate protein interactions.ResultsThe NOX4/ROS and RhoA/ROCK1 signaling pathways promoted the proliferation, migration, and activation of HSCs. UA inhibited cell proliferation, migration, and activation by inhibiting the activation of the two signaling pathways, but the mechanism of apoptosis was independent of these two pathways. The NOX4/ROS pathway was upstream of and positively regulated the RhoA/ROCK1 pathway in HSCs. No direct interaction between the NOX4 and RhoA proteins was detected.ConclusionThe NOX4/ROS and RhoA/ROCK1 signaling pathways are two critical signaling pathways in a series of behavioral processes in HSCs, and NOX4/ROS regulates RhoA/ROCK1 through an indirect pathway to control the activation of HSCs. Additionally, NOX4/ROS and RhoA/ROCK1 constitute a new target for UA antifibrosis treatment
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