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This paper addresses the task of modeling Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs), such as ropes and cables, during dynamic motion over long time horizons. This task presents significant challenges due to the complex dynamics of DLOs. To address these challenges, this paper proposes differentiable Discrete Elastic Rods For deformable linear Objects with Real-time Modeling (DEFORM), a novel framework that combines a differentiable physics-based model with a learning framework to model DLOs accurately and in real-time. The performance of DEFORM is evaluated in an experimental setup involving two industrial robots and a variety of sensors. A comprehensive series of experiments demonstrate the efficacy of DEFORM in terms of accuracy, computational speed, and generalizability when compared to state-of-the-art alternatives. To further demonstrate the utility of DEFORM, this paper integrates it into a perception pipeline and illustrates its superior performance when compared to the state-of-the-art methods while tracking a DLO even in the presence of occlusions. Finally, this paper illustrates the superior performance of DEFORM when compared to state-of-the-art methods when it is applied to perform autonomous planning and control of DLOs. Project page: https://roahmlab.github.io/DEFORM/., Comment: Accepted to CoRL 2024

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is set to profoundly impact the oil and gas industry by introducing unprecedented efficiencies and innovations. This paper explores AGI's foundational principles and its transformative applications, particularly focusing on the advancements brought about by large language models (LLMs) and extensive computer vision systems in the upstream sectors of the industry. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already begun reshaping the oil and gas landscape, offering enhancements in production optimization, downtime reduction, safety improvements, and advancements in exploration and drilling techniques. These technologies streamline logistics, minimize maintenance costs, automate monotonous tasks, refine decision-making processes, foster team collaboration, and amplify profitability through error reduction and actionable insights extraction. Despite these advancements, the deployment of AI technologies faces challenges, including the necessity for skilled professionals for implementation and the limitations of model training on constrained datasets, which affects the models' adaptability across different contexts. The advent of generative AI, exemplified by innovations like ChatGPT and the Segment Anything Model (SAM), heralds a new era of high-density innovation. These developments highlight a shift towards natural language interfaces and domain-knowledge-driven AI, promising more accessible and tailored solutions for the oil and gas industry. This review articulates the vast potential AGI holds for tackling complex operational challenges within the upstream oil and gas industry, requiring near-human levels of intelligence. We discussed the promising applications, the hurdles of large-scale AGI model deployment, and the necessity for domain-specific knowledge in maximizing the benefits of these technologies., Comment: 20 Pages, Review paper, 15 Figures

Bayesian personalized federated learning (BPFL) addresses challenges in existing personalized FL (PFL). BPFL aims to quantify the uncertainty and heterogeneity within and across clients towards uncertainty representations by addressing the statistical heterogeneity of client data. In PFL, some recent preliminary work proposes to decompose hidden neural representations into shared and local components and demonstrates interesting results. However, most of them do not address client uncertainty and heterogeneity in FL systems, while appropriately decoupling neural representations is challenging and often ad hoc. In this paper, we make the first attempt to introduce a general BPFL framework to decompose and jointly learn shared and personalized uncertainty representations on statistically heterogeneous client data over time. A Bayesian federated neural network BPFed instantiates BPFL by jointly learning cross-client shared uncertainty and client-specific personalized uncertainty over statistically heterogeneous and randomly participating clients. We further involve continual updating of prior distribution in BPFed to speed up the convergence and avoid catastrophic forgetting. Theoretical analysis and guarantees are provided in addition to the experimental evaluation of BPFed against the diversified baselines.

Knowledge tracing aims to track students' knowledge status over time to predict students' future performance accurately. Markov chain-based knowledge tracking (MCKT) models can track knowledge concept mastery probability over time. However, as the number of tracked knowledge concepts increases, the time complexity of MCKT predicting student performance increases exponentially (also called explaining away problem. In addition, the existing MCKT models only consider the relationship between students' knowledge status and problems when modeling students' responses but ignore the relationship between knowledge concepts in the same problem. To address these challenges, we propose an inTerpretable pRobAbilistiC gEnerative moDel (TRACED), which can track students' numerous knowledge concepts mastery probabilities over time. To solve \emph{explain away problem}, we design Long and Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based networks to approximate the posterior distribution, predict students' future performance, and propose a heuristic algorithm to train LSTMs and probabilistic graphical model jointly. To better model students' exercise responses, we proposed a logarithmic linear model with three interactive strategies, which models students' exercise responses by considering the relationship among students' knowledge status, knowledge concept, and problems. We conduct experiments with four real-world datasets in three knowledge-driven tasks. The experimental results show that TRACED outperforms existing knowledge tracing methods in predicting students' future performance and can learn the relationship among students, knowledge concepts, and problems from students' exercise sequences. We also conduct several case studies. The case studies show that TRACED exhibits excellent interpretability and thus has the potential for personalized automatic feedback in the real-world educational environment., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables

Ensuring safe, real-time motion planning in arbitrary environments requires a robotic manipulator to avoid collisions, obey joint limits, and account for uncertainties in the mass and inertia of objects and the robot itself. This paper proposes Autonomous Robust Manipulation via Optimization with Uncertainty-aware Reachability (ARMOUR), a provably-safe, receding-horizon trajectory planner and tracking controller framework for robotic manipulators to address these challenges. ARMOUR first constructs a robust controller that tracks desired trajectories with bounded error despite uncertain dynamics. ARMOUR then uses a novel recursive Newton-Euler method to compute all inputs required to track any trajectory within a continuum of desired trajectories. Finally, ARMOUR over-approximates the swept volume of the manipulator; this enables one to formulate an optimization problem that can be solved in real-time to synthesize provably-safe motions. This paper compares ARMOUR to state of the art methods on a set of challenging manipulation examples in simulation and demonstrates its ability to ensure safety on real hardware in the presence of model uncertainty without sacrificing performance. Project page: https://roahmlab.github.io/armour/., Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures

Learning rate is one of the most important hyper-parameters that has a significant influence on neural network training. Learning rate schedules are widely used in real practice to adjust the learning rate according to pre-defined schedules for fast convergence and good generalization. However, existing learning rate schedules are all heuristic algorithms and lack theoretical support. Therefore, people usually choose the learning rate schedules through multiple ad-hoc trials, and the obtained learning rate schedules are sub-optimal. To boost the performance of the obtained sub-optimal learning rate schedule, we propose a generic learning rate schedule plugin, called LEArning Rate Perturbation (LEAP), which can be applied to various learning rate schedules to improve the model training by introducing a certain perturbation to the learning rate. We found that, with such a simple yet effective strategy, training processing exponentially favors flat minima rather than sharp minima with guaranteed convergence, which leads to better generalization ability. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments which show that training with LEAP can improve the performance of various deep learning models on diverse datasets using various learning rate schedules (including constant learning rate)., Comment: 7 pages, Accepted by CIKM'22