Search

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, robotics, and Internet of Things, multi-robot systems are progressively acquiring human-like environmental perception and understanding capabilities, empowering them to complete complex tasks through autonomous decision-making and interaction. However, the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) faces significant challenges in terms of spectrum resources, sensing accuracy, communication latency, and energy supply. To address these issues, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided IoRT network is proposed to enhance the overall performance of robotic communication, sensing, computation, and energy harvesting. In the case studies, by jointly optimizing parameters such as transceiver beamforming, robot trajectories, and RIS coefficients, solutions based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and multi-objective optimization are proposed to solve problems such as beamforming design, path planning, target sensing, and data aggregation. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed solutions in improve communication quality, sensing accuracy, computation error, and energy efficiency of RIS-aided IoRT networks., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Constructing precise 3D maps is crucial for the development of future map-based systems such as self-driving and navigation. However, generating these maps in complex environments, such as multi-level parking garages or shopping malls, remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we introduce a participatory sensing approach that delegates map-building tasks to map users, thereby enabling cost-effective and continuous data collection. The proposed method harnesses the collective efforts of users, facilitating the expansion and ongoing update of the maps as the environment evolves. We realized this approach by developing Map++, an efficient system that functions as a plug-and-play extension, supporting participatory map-building based on existing SLAM algorithms. Map++ addresses a plethora of scalability issues in this participatory map-building system by proposing a set of lightweight, application-layer protocols. We evaluated Map++ in four representative settings: an indoor garage, an outdoor plaza, a public SLAM benchmark, and a simulated environment. The results demonstrate that Map++ can reduce traffic volume by approximately 46% with negligible degradation in mapping accuracy, i.e., less than 0.03m compared to the baseline system. It can support approximately $2 \times$ as many concurrent users as the baseline under the same network bandwidth. Additionally, for users who travel on already-mapped trajectories, they can directly utilize the existing maps for localization and save 47% of the CPU usage., Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures. Accepted by MobiCom 2024

SLAM is a fundamental capability of unmanned systems, with LiDAR-based SLAM gaining widespread adoption due to its high precision. Current SLAM systems can achieve centimeter-level accuracy within a short period. However, there are still several challenges when dealing with largescale mapping tasks including significant storage requirements and difficulty of reusing the constructed maps. To address this, we first design an elastic and lightweight map representation called CELLmap, composed of several CELLs, each representing the local map at the corresponding location. Then, we design a general backend including CELL-based bidirectional registration module and loop closure detection module to improve global map consistency. Our experiments have demonstrated that CELLmap can represent the precise geometric structure of large-scale maps of KITTI dataset using only about 60 MB. Additionally, our general backend achieves up to a 26.88% improvement over various LiDAR odometry methods., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

Large multimodal foundation models have been extensively utilized for image recognition tasks guided by instructions, yet there remains a scarcity of domain expertise in industrial vibration signal analysis. This paper presents a pipeline named VSLLaVA that leverages a large language model to integrate expert knowledge for identification of signal parameters and diagnosis of faults. Within this pipeline, we first introduce an expert rule-assisted signal generator. The generator merges signal provided by vibration analysis experts with domain-specific parameter identification and fault diagnosis question-answer pairs to build signal-question-answer triplets. Then we use these triplets to apply low-rank adaptation methods for fine-tuning the linear layers of the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) and large language model, injecting multimodal signal processing knowledge. Finally, the fine-tuned model is assessed through the combined efforts of large language model and expert rules to evaluate answer accuracy and relevance, which showcases enhanced performance in identifying, analyzing various signal parameters, and diagnosing faults. These enhancements indicate the potential of this pipeline to build a foundational model for future industrial signal analysis and monitoring.

Underwater communication is essential for environmental monitoring, marine biology research, and underwater exploration. Traditional underwater communication faces limitations like low bandwidth, high latency, and susceptibility to noise, while semantic communication (SC) offers a promising solution by focusing on the exchange of semantics rather than symbols or bits. However, SC encounters challenges in underwater environments, including semantic information mismatch and difficulties in accurately identifying and transmitting critical information that aligns with the diverse requirements of underwater applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Semantic Communication (SC) framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our framework leverages visual LLMs to perform semantic compression and prioritization of underwater image data according to the query from users. By identifying and encoding key semantic elements within the images, the system selectively transmits high-priority information while applying higher compression rates to less critical regions. On the receiver side, an LLM-based recovery mechanism, along with Global Vision ControlNet and Key Region ControlNet networks, aids in reconstructing the images, thereby enhancing communication efficiency and robustness. Our framework reduces the overall data size to 0.8\% of the original. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, ensuring high-quality, semantically accurate image reconstruction.

Autonomous systems often employ multiple LiDARs to leverage the integrated advantages, enhancing perception and robustness. The most critical prerequisite under this setting is the estimating the extrinsic between each LiDAR, i.e., calibration. Despite the exciting progress in multi-LiDAR calibration efforts, a universal, sensor-agnostic calibration method remains elusive. According to the coarse-to-fine framework, we first design a spherical descriptor TERRA for 3-DoF rotation initialization with no prior knowledge. To further optimize, we present JEEP for the joint estimation of extrinsic and pose, integrating geometric and motion information to overcome factors affecting the point cloud registration. Finally, the LiDAR poses optimized by the hierarchical optimization module are input to time synchronization module to produce the ultimate calibration results, including the time offset. To verify the effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on eight datasets, where 16 diverse types of LiDARs in total and dozens of calibration tasks are tested. In the challenging tasks, the calibration errors can still be controlled within 5cm and 1{\deg} with a high success rate., Comment: 19 pages, 19 figures

Localization and mapping are critical tasks for various applications such as autonomous vehicles and robotics. The challenges posed by outdoor environments present particular complexities due to their unbounded characteristics. In this work, we present MM-Gaussian, a LiDAR-camera multi-modal fusion system for localization and mapping in unbounded scenes. Our approach is inspired by the recently developed 3D Gaussians, which demonstrate remarkable capabilities in achieving high rendering quality and fast rendering speed. Specifically, our system fully utilizes the geometric structure information provided by solid-state LiDAR to address the problem of inaccurate depth encountered when relying solely on visual solutions in unbounded, outdoor scenarios. Additionally, we utilize 3D Gaussian point clouds, with the assistance of pixel-level gradient descent, to fully exploit the color information in photos, thereby achieving realistic rendering effects. To further bolster the robustness of our system, we designed a relocalization module, which assists in returning to the correct trajectory in the event of a localization failure. Experiments conducted in multiple scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our method., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

Visual Odometry (VO) plays a pivotal role in autonomous systems, with a principal challenge being the lack of depth information in camera images. This paper introduces OCC-VO, a novel framework that capitalizes on recent advances in deep learning to transform 2D camera images into 3D semantic occupancy, thereby circumventing the traditional need for concurrent estimation of ego poses and landmark locations. Within this framework, we utilize the TPV-Former to convert surround view cameras' images into 3D semantic occupancy. Addressing the challenges presented by this transformation, we have specifically tailored a pose estimation and mapping algorithm that incorporates Semantic Label Filter, Dynamic Object Filter, and finally, utilizes Voxel PFilter for maintaining a consistent global semantic map. Evaluations on the Occ3D-nuScenes not only showcase a 20.6% improvement in Success Ratio and a 29.6% enhancement in trajectory accuracy against ORB-SLAM3, but also emphasize our ability to construct a comprehensive map. Our implementation is open-sourced and available at: https://github.com/USTCLH/OCC-VO., Comment: 7pages, 3 figures

This paper summarizes the music demixing (MDX) track of the Sound Demixing Challenge (SDX'23). We provide a summary of the challenge setup and introduce the task of robust music source separation (MSS), i.e., training MSS models in the presence of errors in the training data. We propose a formalization of the errors that can occur in the design of a training dataset for MSS systems and introduce two new datasets that simulate such errors: SDXDB23_LabelNoise and SDXDB23_Bleeding. We describe the methods that achieved the highest scores in the competition. Moreover, we present a direct comparison with the previous edition of the challenge (the Music Demixing Challenge 2021): the best performing system achieved an improvement of over 1.6dB in signal-to-distortion ratio over the winner of the previous competition, when evaluated on MDXDB21. Besides relying on the signal-to-distortion ratio as objective metric, we also performed a listening test with renowned producers and musicians to study the perceptual quality of the systems and report here the results. Finally, we provide our insights into the organization of the competition and our prospects for future editions., Comment: Published in Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (https://transactions.ismir.net/articles/10.5334/tismir.171)

Let $m$ be an odd positive integer and $D_m(\mathcal {A})$ be the $m$-periodic derived category of a finitary hereditary abelian category $\mathcal {A}$. In this note, we prove that there is an embedding of algebras from the derived Hall algebra of $D_m(\mathcal {A})$ defined by Xu-Chen [13] to the extended derived Hall algebra of $D_m(\mathcal {A})$ defined in [16]. This homomorphism is given on basis elements, rather than just on generating elements., Comment: 14 pages; To appear in Journal of Algebra and Its Applications

In this paper, we present the USTC FLICAR Dataset, which is dedicated to the development of simultaneous localization and mapping and precise 3D reconstruction of the workspace for heavy-duty autonomous aerial work robots. In recent years, numerous public datasets have played significant roles in the advancement of autonomous cars and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, these two platforms differ from aerial work robots: UAVs are limited in their payload capacity, while cars are restricted to two-dimensional movements. To fill this gap, we create the "Giraffe" mapping robot based on a bucket truck, which is equipped with a variety of well-calibrated and synchronized sensors: four 3D LiDARs, two stereo cameras, two monocular cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), and a GNSS/INS system. A laser tracker is used to record the millimeter-level ground truth positions. We also make its ground twin, the "Okapi" mapping robot, to gather data for comparison. The proposed dataset extends the typical autonomous driving sensing suite to aerial scenes, demonstrating the potential of combining autonomous driving perception systems with bucket trucks to create a versatile autonomous aerial working platform. Moreover, based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM), we produce the Semantic FLICAR dataset, which provides fine-grained semantic segmentation annotations for multimodal continuous data in both temporal and spatial dimensions. The dataset is available for download at: https://ustc-flicar.github.io/., Comment: 23 pages, 34 figures

In this work, we propose a permutation invariant language model, SymphonyNet, as a solution for symbolic symphony music generation. We propose a novel Multi-track Multi-instrument Repeatable (MMR) representation for symphonic music and model the music sequence using a Transformer-based auto-regressive language model with specific 3-D positional embedding. To overcome length overflow when modeling extra-long symphony tokens, we also propose a modified Byte Pair Encoding algorithm (Music BPE) for music tokens and introduce a novel linear transformer decoder architecture as a backbone. Meanwhile, we train the decoder to learn automatic orchestration as a joint task by masking instrument information from the input. We also introduce a large-scale symbolic symphony dataset for the advance of symphony generation research. Empirical results show that the proposed approach can generate coherent, novel, complex and harmonious symphony as a pioneer solution for multi-track multi-instrument symbolic music generation.

To enlarge the perception range and reliability of individual autonomous vehicles, cooperative perception has been received much attention. However, considering the high volume of shared messages, limited bandwidth and computation resources in vehicular networks become bottlenecks. In this paper, we investigate how to balance the volume of shared messages and constrained resources in fog-based vehicular networks. To this end, we first characterize sum satisfaction of cooperative perception taking account of its spatial-temporal value and latency performance. Next, the sensing block message, communication resource block, and computation resource are jointly allocated to maximize the sum satisfaction of cooperative perception, while satisfying the maximum latency and sojourn time constraints of vehicles. Owing to its non-convexity, we decouple the original problem into two separate sub-problems and devise corresponding solutions. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can effectively boost the sum satisfaction of cooperative perception compared with existing baselines., Comment: Accepted by WCSP 2021

Background: Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich information of patients' health history, which usually include both structured and unstructured data. There have been many studies focusing on distilling valuable information from structured data, such as disease codes, laboratory test results, and treatments. However, relying on structured data only might be insufficient in reflecting patients' comprehensive information and such data may occasionally contain erroneous records. Objective: With the recent advances of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques, an increasing number of studies seek to obtain more accurate results by incorporating unstructured free-text data as well. This paper reviews studies that use multimodal data, i.e. a combination of structured and unstructured data, from EHRs as input for conventional ML or DL models to address the targeted tasks. Materials and Methods: We searched in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Digital Library, PubMed, and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library for articles related to ML-based multimodal EHR studies. Results and Discussion: With the final 94 included studies, we focus on how data from different modalities were combined and interacted using conventional ML and DL techniques, and how these algorithms were applied in EHR-related tasks. Further, we investigate the advantages and limitations of these fusion methods and indicate future directions for ML-based multimodal EHR research., Comment: 37 pages, 3 tables, 2 figures, to be submitted to JAMIA

Poetry generation has been a difficult task in natural language processing. Unlike plain neural text generation tasks, poetry has a high requirement for novelty, since an easily-understood sentence with too many high frequency words might not be considered as poetic, while adequately ambiguous sentences with low frequency words can possibly be novel and creative. Inspired by this, we present Lingxi, a diversity-aware Chinese modern poetry generation system. We propose nucleus sampling with randomized head (NS-RH) algorithm, which randomizes the high frequency part ("head") of the predicted distribution, in order to emphasize on the "comparatively low frequency" words. The proposed algorithm can significantly increase the novelty of generated poetry compared with traditional sampling methods. The permutation of distribution is controllable by tuning the filtering parameter that determines the "head" to permutate, achieving diversity-aware sampling. We find that even when a large portion of filtered vocabulary is randomized, it can actually generate fluent poetry but with notably higher novelty. We also propose a semantic-similarity-based rejection sampling algorithm, which creates longer and more informative context on the basis of the short input poetry title while maintaining high semantic similarity to the title, alleviating the off-topic issue.

In natural language processing (NLP), the semantic similarity task requires large-scale, high-quality human-annotated labels for fine-tuning or evaluation. By contrast, in cases of music similarity, such labels are expensive to collect and largely dependent on the annotator's artistic preferences. Recent research has demonstrated that embedding calibration technique can greatly increase semantic similarity performance of the pre-trained language model without fine-tuning. However, it is yet unknown which calibration method is the best and how much performance improvement can be achieved. To address these issues, we propose using composer information to construct labels for automatically evaluating music similarity. Under this paradigm, we discover the optimal combination of embedding calibration which achieves superior metrics than the baseline methods.

The neural text generation suffers from the text degeneration issue such as repetition. Traditional stochastic sampling methods only focus on truncating the unreliable "tail" of the distribution, and do not address the "head" part, which we show might contain tedious or even repetitive candidates with high probability that lead to repetition loops. They also do not consider the issue that human text does not always favor high-probability words. Inspired by these, in this work we propose a heuristic sampling method. We propose to use interquartile range of the predicted distribution to determine the "head" part, then permutate and rescale the "head" with inverse probability. This aims at decreasing the probability for the tedious and possibly repetitive candidates with higher probability, and increasing the probability for the rational but more surprising candidates with lower probability. The proposed algorithm provides a reasonable permutation on the predicted distribution which enhances diversity without compromising rationality of the distribution. We use pre-trained language model to compare our algorithm with traditional methods. Results show that our algorithm can effectively increase the diversity of generated samples while achieving close resemblance to human text.

The impasse surface is an important concept in the differential-algebraic equation (DAE) model of power systems, which is associated with short-term voltage collapse. This paper establishes a necessary condition for a system trajectory hitting the impasse surface. The condition is in terms of admittance matrices regarding the power network, generators and loads, which specifies the pattern of interaction between those system components that can induce voltage collapse. It applies to generic DAE models featuring high-order synchronous generators, static loads, induction motor loads and lossy power networks. We also identify a class of static load parameters that prevent power systems from hitting the impasse surface; this proves a conjecture made by Hiskens that has been unsolved for decades. Moreover, the obtained results lead to an early indicator of voltage collapse and a novel viewpoint that inductive compensation to the power network has a positive effect on preventing short-term voltage collapse, which are verified via numerical simulations., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Load modeling is difficult due to its uncertain and time-varying properties. Through the recently proposed ambient signals load modeling approach, these properties can be more frequently tracked. However, the large dataset of load modeling results becomes a new problem. In this paper, a hierarchical temporal and spatial clustering method of load models is proposed, after which the large size load model dataset can be represented by several representative load models (RLMs). In the temporal clustering stage, the RLMs of one load bus are picked up through clustering to represent all the load models of the load bus at different time. In the spatial clustering stage, the RLMs of all the load buses form a new set and the RLMs of the system are picked up through spatial clustering. In this way, the large sets of load models are represented by a small number of RLMs, through which the storage space of the load models is significantly reduced. The validation results in IEEE 39 bus system have shown that the simulation accuracy can still be maintained after replacing the load models with the RLMs. In this way, the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical clustering framework is validated.

Load modeling is an important issue in modeling a power system. The approach of ambient signals-based load modeling (ASLM) was recently proposed to better track the time-varying changes of load models. To improve computation efficiency and model structure complexity, a hierarchical framework for ASLM is proposed in this paper. Through this framework, the hidden quasi-convexity of load modeling problem is explored for the first time, and more complicated static load model structures can be applied. In the upper stage, the identification of dynamic load parameters is regarded as an optimization problem. In the lower stage, the optimal static load parameters are obtained through linear regression for a given group of dynamic load parameters. Afterwards, the regression residuals are regarded as the objective function (OF) of the upper stage optimization problem. The proposed method is validated by the case study results in Guangdong Power Grid. The results have shown that the OF is mostly quasi-convex after the transformation of induction motor model, which provides the basis for the application of gradient-based optimization algorithm. The case study results also validate that the proposed approach has better computation efficiency and model structure complexity compared with the previous ASLM approach., Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures

Cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is crucial to support future diverse vehicular applications. However, for safety-critical applications, unstable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) links and high signalling overhead of centralized resource allocation approaches become bottlenecks. In this paper, we investigate a joint optimization problem of transmission mode selection and resource allocation for cellular V2X communications. In particular, the problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, and a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based decentralized algorithm is proposed to maximize the sum capacity of vehicle-to-infrastructure users while meeting the latency and reliability requirements of V2V pairs. Moreover, considering training limitation of local DRL models, a two-timescale federated DRL algorithm is developed to help obtain robust model. Wherein, the graph theory based vehicle clustering algorithm is executed on a large timescale and in turn the federated learning algorithm is conducted on a small timescale. Simulation results show that the proposed DRL-based algorithm outperforms other decentralized baselines, and validate the superiority of the two-timescale federated DRL algorithm for newly activated V2V pairs., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, accepted by IEEE IoT Journal

Plug-in electric vehicles are receiving global attention. However, large-scale plug-in electric vehicles bring challenge to charging station deployment. This paper provides a deployment evaluation method and a planning method for plug-in electric vehicles charging stations based on simulation and genetic algorithm. In this research, reasonable user behaviors changes i.e., detouring for recharging, is included in the method for more practical application. A detailed logic for describing the plug-in electric vehicles users' detour behaviors is designed in this paper for the charging station deployment evaluation and further influence the later charging station planning strategy formulation. Intuitively, by taking the behaviors change of plug-in electric vehicles users after a charging station deployment is given into account, our evaluation method is the more reasonable. Actually a series of control experiments should be carried out to illustrate the different insights from our method. However, in this paper, due to the limited space, we just provide the result of our method in a relatively simple case with some analyses. Different insights from our method may work as useful suggestion for charging station plan in a city area.

Sensing the medical scenario can ensure the safety during the surgical operations. So, in this regard, a monitor platform which can obtain the accurate location information of the surgery room is desperately needed. Compared to 2D camera image, 3D data contains more information of distance and direction. Therefore, 3D sensors are more suitable to be used in surgical scene monitoring. However, each 3D sensor has its own limitations. For example, Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) can detect large-scale environment with high precision, but the point clouds or depth maps are very sparse. As for commodity RGBD sensors, such as Kinect, can accurately capture denser data, but limited to a small range from 0.5 to 4.5m. So, a proper method which can address these problems for fusing different modalities data is important. In this paper, we proposed a method which can fuse different modalities 3D data to get a large-scale and dense point cloud. The key contributions of our work are as follows. First, we proposed a 3D data collecting system to reconstruct the medical scenes. By fusing the Lidar and Kinect data, a large-scale medical scene with more details can be reconstructed. Second, we proposed a location-based fast point clouds registration algorithm to deal with different modality datasets., Comment: 2 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ACCAS