34 accepted papers
Evolutionary pressures have pushed humans to become efficient walkers, but inefficient divers. People consume more energy to travel the same distance underwater than on land. In diverse overground locomotion, emerging exoskeletons have reduced the metabolic cost of humans. Can we also improve the en…
Existing generative models for 3D shapes can synthesize high-fidelity and visually plausible shapes. For certain classes of shapes that have undergone an engineering design process, the realism of the shape is tightly coupled with the underlying physical properties, e.g., aerodynamic efficiency for
We present MMD-Reg, a novel correspondence-free approach to point-cloud registration that is differentiable and has linear computational complexity in the number of points. We model registration as a nonlinear least-squares problem based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy, approximated using random Fou…
Cable-driven soft manipulators, with inherent compliance and hyper-redundancy, offer significant advantages in unstructured environments but present formidable challenges in modeling of inverse kinematics due to nonlinear deformations and underactuation. In this paper, building on a modified forward
Task automation has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) via Python code, where the tasks range from software engineering development to general-purpose reasoning. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can solve tasks using programs like human develop…
Evaluating large vision-language models (LVLMs) is very expensive, due to high computational cost and the wide variety of tasks. The good news is that if we already have some observed performance scores, we may be able to infer unknown ones. In this study, we propose a new framework for predicting u…
Pneumatic soft robots offer outstanding flexibility and safety in human-robot interactions. However, achieving full integration requires air sources that are not only highly flexible but also lightweight. Existing soft air pumps are often constrained by structural limitations and inadequate output p
Text-guided diffusion models have revolutionized static 3D generation, which significantly accelerated progress in 4D content creation. However, applying diffusion models to 4D content creation poses huge challenges due to the complexity and diversity of motion. The task of text to 4D customized gen…
Diffusion Models have gained significant popularity due to their remarkable capabilities in image generation, albeit at the cost of intensive computation requirement. Meanwhile, despite their widespread deployment in inference services such as Midjourney, concerns about the potential leakage of sens…
In remote areas without continuous internet connectivity, patients often need to travel long distances to access healthcare services. Ensuring secure and efficient healthcare in remote areas has become a significant challenge. Inspired by delay tolerant networks and identity authentication protocols…
Soft pneumatic joints are the main driving components of soft arthropod robots, but the problems of high start-up air pressure and low rotation angle limit the range of motion, control accuracy, and flexibility of the robots. Inspired by the hydraulic joints of spider leg, an innovative folding memb
Embodied perception is essential for intelligent vehicles and robots in interactive environmental understanding. However, these advancements primarily focus on vision, with limited attention given to using 3D modeling sensors, restricting a comprehensive understanding of objects in response to promp
Pneumatic soft robots are becoming a research hotspot because to their high flexibility, compliance, and adaptability, and they typically use external air pumps as their air supply. However, being the “heart” of pneumatic soft robots, these air pumps are extremely large and heavy, inevitably limitin
This work explores the challenging problem of molecule design by framing it as a conditional generative modeling task, where target biological properties or desired chemical constraints serve as conditioning variables. We propose the Latent Prompt Transformer (LPT), a novel generative model comprisi…
We propose a novel approach to the action segmentation task for long untrimmed videos based on solving an optimal transport problem. By encoding a temporal consistency prior into a Gromov-Wasserstein problem we are able to decode a temporally consistent segmentation from a noisy affinity/matching co…
"Large vision-language models (LVLMs), designed to interpret and respond to human instructions, occasionally generate hallucinated or harmful content due to inappropriate instructions. This study uses linear probing to shed light on the hidden knowledge at the output layers of LVLMs. We demonstrate…
Feature shaping refers to a family of methods that exhibit state-of-the-art performance for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. These approaches manipulate the feature representation, typically from the penultimate layer of a pre-trained deep learning model, so as to better differentiate between in…
"Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a crucial component of many visual localization pipelines for embodied agents. VPR is often formulated as an image retrieval task aimed at jointly learning local features and an aggregation method. The current state-of-the-art VPR methods rely on VLAD aggregation,…
This paper addresses learning end-to-end models for time series data that include a temporal alignment step via dynamic time warping (DTW). Existing approaches to differentiable DTW either differentiate through a fixed warping path or apply a differentiable relaxation to the min operator found in th…
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tasks often involve multiple contrasts. Recently, numerous deep learning-based multi-contrast MRI super-resolution (SR) and reconstruction methods have been proposed to explore the complementary information from the multi-contrast images. However, these methods eithe…
This paper proposes a new method for differentiating through optimal trajectories arising from non-convex, constrained discrete-time optimal control (COC) problems using the implicit function theorem (IFT). Previous works solve a differential Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system for the trajectory deriva…
Noisy labels damage the performance of deep networks. For robust learning, a prominent two-stage pipeline alternates between eliminating possible incorrect labels and semi-supervised training. However, discarding part of noisy labels could result in a loss of information, especially when the corrup…
"Although deep-learning based methods for monocular pedestrian detection have made a great progress, they are still vulnerable to heavy occlusions. Using multi-view information fusion is a potential solution but has limited applications, due to the lack of annotated training samples in existing mult…
Federated learning (FL) allows multiple clients to collectively train a high-performance global model without sharing their private data. However, the key challenge in federated learning is that the clients have significant statistical heterogeneity among their local data distributions, which would…
Road segmentation in challenging domains, such as night, snow or rain, is a difficult task. Most current approaches boost performance using fine-tuning, domain adaptation, style transfer, or by referencing previously acquired imagery. These approaches share one or more of three significant limitatio
6-DoF visual localization systems utilize principled approaches rooted in 3D geometry to perform accurate camera pose estimation of images to a map. Current techniques use hierarchical pipelines and learned 2D feature extractors to improve scalability and increase performance. However, despite gains
Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy to leverage prior knowledge for accelerated robot learning. Skills are typically extracted from expert demonstrations and are embedded into a latent space from which they can be sampled as actions by a high-level RL agent. H…
Presents corrections to author information in the above named paper.
Visual Place Recognition is a challenging task for robotics and autonomous systems, which must deal with the twin problems of appearance and viewpoint change in an always changing world. This paper introduces Patch-NetVLAD, which provides a novel formulation for combining the advantages of both loca…
Probabilistic state-estimation approaches offer a principled foundation for designing localization systems, because they naturally integrate sequences of imperfect motion and exteroceptive sensor data. Recently, probabilistic localization systems utilizing appearance-invariant visual place recogniti
Visual localization techniques often comprise a hierarchical localization pipeline, with a visual place recognition module used as a coarse localizer to initialize a pose refinement stage. While improving the pose refinement step has been the focus of much recent research, most work on the coarse lo
Visual place recognition (VPR) algorithms are a key part of many autonomous systems, but typically consist of many parameters which require non-trivial optimization for a given deployment environment. Being able to automatically select the optimal operating point for parameters within a VPR algorith
Snapshot-based visual localization is an important problem in several computer vision and robotics applications such as Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). To achieve real-time performance in very large-scale environments with massive amounts of training and map data, techniques such as ap…
The reparameterization trick is widely used in variational inference as it yields more accurate estimates of the gradient of the variational objective than alternative approaches such as the score function method. Although there is overwhelming empirical evidence in the literature showing its succes…