Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents

We investigate the challenge of task planning for multi-task embodied agents in open-world environments. Two main difficulties are identified: 1) executing plans in an open-world environment (e.g., Minecraft) necessitates accurate and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider how easy the current agent can achieve a given sub-task when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient or even infeasible. To this end, we propose "$\underline{D}$escribe, $\underline{E}$xplain, $\underline{P}$lan and $\underline{S}$elect" ($\textbf{DEPS}$), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). DEPS facilitates better error correction on initial LLM-generated $\textit{plan}$ by integrating $\textit{description}$ of the plan execution process and providing self-$\textit{explanation}$ of feedback when encountering failures during the extended planning phases. Furthermore, it includes a goal $\textit{selector}$, which is a trainable module that ranks parallel candidate sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion, consequently refining the initial plan. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first zero-shot multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly double the overall performances. Further testing reveals our method's general effectiveness in popularly adopted non-open-ended domains as well (i.e., ALFWorld and tabletop manipulation). The ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the $\texttt{ObtainDiamond}$ grand challenge with our approach. The code is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MC-Planner.Comment: NeurIPS 202

Recent Progress in Electric Furnace Titanium Slag Processing and Utilization: A Review

Titanium slags produced through ilmenite electric furnace smelting contain 60–80%TiO2, a vital titanium resource in the titanium industry. The processing and utilization of titanium slag is faced with many challenges, such as complex mineral structures, high requirements, severe environmental pollution, and heavy additives and energy consumption. This study aims to review the technologies for the processing and utilization of titanium slag. First, we analyze the characteristics of titanium slag from different regions. Then, we discuss in detail the methods for processing and using titanium slag. The progress in electric furnace titanium slag processing and utilization can be divided into two areas: the preparation of titanium dioxide and high-quality titanium-rich materials. These include H2SO4 leaching, HCl leaching, fluoride leaching, sulfur roasting–leaching, alkaline roasting–leaching, oxide roasting–leaching, oxidation and reduction roasting–leaching, phosphorylation roasting–leaching, and ammonia decomposition leaching. Further development of oxide roasting–leaching for the extraction of titanium from titanium slag is recommended

Recent Progress in Electric Furnace Titanium Slag Processing and Utilization: A Review

Titanium slags produced through ilmenite electric furnace smelting contain 60–80%TiO2, a vital titanium resource in the titanium industry. The processing and utilization of titanium slag is faced with many challenges, such as complex mineral structures, high requirements, severe environmental pollution, and heavy additives and energy consumption. This study aims to review the technologies for the processing and utilization of titanium slag. First, we analyze the characteristics of titanium slag from different regions. Then, we discuss in detail the methods for processing and using titanium slag. The progress in electric furnace titanium slag processing and utilization can be divided into two areas: the preparation of titanium dioxide and high-quality titanium-rich materials. These include H2SO4 leaching, HCl leaching, fluoride leaching, sulfur roasting–leaching, alkaline roasting–leaching, oxide roasting–leaching, oxidation and reduction roasting–leaching, phosphorylation roasting–leaching, and ammonia decomposition leaching. Further development of oxide roasting–leaching for the extraction of titanium from titanium slag is recommended

Large-Scale Fabrication of Ultrasensitive and Uniform Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Substrates for the Trace Detection of Pesticides

Technology transfer from laboratory into practical application needs to meet the demands of economic viability and operational simplicity. This paper reports a simple and convenient strategy to fabricate large-scale and ultrasensitive surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates. In this strategy, no toxic chemicals or sophisticated instruments are required to fabricate the SERS substrates. On one hand, Ag nanoparticles (NPs) with relatively uniform size were synthesized using the modified Tollens method, which employs an ultra-low concentration of Ag+ and excessive amounts of glucose as a reducing agent. On the other hand, when a drop of the colloidal Ag NPs dries on a horizontal solid surface, the droplet becomes ropy, turns into a layered structure under gravity, and hardens. During evaporation, capillary flow was burdened by viscidity resistance from the ropy glucose solution. Thus, the coffee-ring effect is eliminated, leading to a uniform deposition of Ag NPs. With this method, flat Ag NPs-based SERS active films were formed in array-well plates defined by hole-shaped polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) structures bonded on glass substrates, which were made for convenient detection. The strong SERS activity of these substrates allowed us to reach detection limits down to 10−14 M of Rhodamine 6 G and 10−10 M of thiram (pesticide)

High-resolution satellite video single object tracking based on thicksiam framework

High-resolution satellite videos realize the short-dated gaze observation of the designated area on the ground, and its emergence has improved the temporal resolution of remote sensing data to the second level. Single object tracking (SOT) task in satellite video has attracted considerable attention. However, it faces challenges such as complex background, poor object feature representation, and lack of publicly available datasets. To cope with these challenges, a ThickSiam framework consisting of a Thickened Residual Block Siamese Network (TRBS-Net) for extracting robust semantic features to obtain the initial tracking results and a Remoulded Kalman Filter (RKF) module for simultaneously correcting the trajectory and size of the targets is designed in this work. The results of TRBS-Net and RKF modules are combined by an N-frame-convergence mechanism to achieve accurate tracking results. Ablation experiments are implemented on our annotated dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed ThickSiam framework and other 19 state-of-the-art trackers. The comparison results show that our ThickSiam tracker obtains a precision value of 0.991 and a success value of 0.755 while running at 56.849 FPS implemented on one NVIDIA GTX1070Ti GPU

Physical and electrical properties of thermally oxidized dielectrics on Si-capped Ge-on-Si substrate

National Basic Research Program of China [2012CB933503]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [61036003, 61176092]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2010121056]Thermal oxidation of silicon (Si)-capped germanium (Ge) epilayer on Si substrate is performed to study the effect of the physical interface on the electrical properties of Ge metaloxide-semiconductor capacitors. During the growth and oxidation of the Si cap layer, Ge atoms diffuse through the Si cap layer, and they are oxidized to GeO2. Once the Si cap layer is consumed, more Ge suboxides are generated, resulting in the serious degradation of the capacitance-voltage characteristics. Both the positive fixed charges generated by the evaporation of GeO and the negative fixed charges induced by the formation of Si-O-dangling bonds are proposed to affect the flat-band voltage shifts. These results suggest that the deposition of a thin Si cap layer on Ge is effective in suppressing the generation of Ge sub-oxides during thermal oxidation, thereby improving the performance of Ge capacitors. (C) 2012 American Vacuum Society. [DOI: 10.1116/1.3668115

Physical and electrical properties of thermally oxidized dielectrics on Si-capped Ge-on-Si substrate

National Basic Research Program of China [2012CB933503]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [61036003, 61176092]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2010121056]Thermal oxidation of silicon (Si)-capped germanium (Ge) epilayer on Si substrate is performed to study the effect of the physical interface on the electrical properties of Ge metaloxide-semiconductor capacitors. During the growth and oxidation of the Si cap layer, Ge atoms diffuse through the Si cap layer, and they are oxidized to GeO2. Once the Si cap layer is consumed, more Ge suboxides are generated, resulting in the serious degradation of the capacitance-voltage characteristics. Both the positive fixed charges generated by the evaporation of GeO and the negative fixed charges induced by the formation of Si-O-dangling bonds are proposed to affect the flat-band voltage shifts. These results suggest that the deposition of a thin Si cap layer on Ge is effective in suppressing the generation of Ge sub-oxides during thermal oxidation, thereby improving the performance of Ge capacitors. (C) 2012 American Vacuum Society. [DOI: 10.1116/1.3668115