HDCNet: A Hybrid Depth Completion Network for Grasping Transparent and Reflective Objects

Depth perception of transparent and reflective objects has long been a critical challenge in robotic manipulation.Conventional depth sensors often fail to provide reliable measurements on such surfaces, limiting the performance of robots in perception and grasping tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel depth completion network,HDCNet,which integrates the complementary strengths of Transformer,CNN and Mamba architectures.Specifically,the encoder is designed as a dual-branch Transformer-CNN framework to extract modality-specific features. At the shallow layers of the encoder, we introduce a lightweight multimodal fusion module to effectively integrate low-level features. At the network bottleneck,a Transformer-Mamba hybrid fusion module is developed to achieve deep integration of high-level semantic and global contextual information, significantly enhancing depth completion accuracy and robustness. Extensive evaluations on multiple public datasets demonstrate that HDCNet achieves state-of-the-art(SOTA) performance in depth completion tasks.Furthermore,robotic grasping experiments show that HDCNet substantially improves grasp success rates for transparent and reflective objects,achieving up to a 60% increase.

Measuring Fairness in Financial Transaction Machine Learning Models

Mastercard, a global leader in financial services, develops and deploys machine learning models aimed at optimizing card usage and preventing attrition through advanced predictive models. These models use aggregated and anonymized card usage patterns, including cross-border transactions and industry-specific spending, to tailor bank offerings and maximize revenue opportunities. Mastercard has established an AI Governance program, based on its Data and Tech Responsibility Principles, to evaluate any built and bought AI for efficacy, fairness, and transparency. As part of this effort, Mastercard has sought expertise from the Turing Institute through a Data Study Group to better assess fairness in more complex AI/ML models. The Data Study Group challenge lies in defining, measuring, and mitigating fairness in these predictions, which can be complex due to the various interpretations of fairness, gaps in the research literature, and ML-operations challenges.