YOLOOC: YOLO-based Open-Class Incremental Object Detection with Novel Class Discovery

Because of its use in practice, open-world object detection (OWOD) has gotten a lot of attention recently. The challenge is how can a model detect novel classes and then incrementally learn them without forgetting previously known classes. Previous approaches hinge on strongly-supervised or weakly-supervised novel-class data for novel-class detection, which may not apply to real applications. We construct a new benchmark that novel classes are only encountered at the inference stage. And we propose a new OWOD detector YOLOOC, based on the YOLO architecture yet for the Open-Class setup. We introduce label smoothing to prevent the detector from over-confidently mapping novel classes to known classes and to discover novel classes. Extensive experiments conducted on our more realistic setup demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for discovering novel classes in our new benchmark.

Metamorpheus: Interactive, Affective, and Creative Dream Narration Through Metaphorical Visual Storytelling

Human emotions are essentially molded by lived experiences, from which we construct personalised meaning. The engagement in such meaning-making process has been practiced as an intervention in various psychotherapies to promote wellness. Nevertheless, to support recollecting and recounting lived experiences in everyday life remains under explored in HCI. It also remains unknown how technologies such as generative AI models can facilitate the meaning making process, and ultimately support affective mindfulness. In this paper we present Metamorpheus, an affective interface that engages users in a creative visual storytelling of emotional experiences during dreams. Metamorpheus arranges the storyline based on a dream's emotional arc, and provokes self-reflection through the creation of metaphorical images and text depictions. The system provides metaphor suggestions, and generates visual metaphors and text depictions using generative AI models, while users can apply generations to recolour and re-arrange the interface to be visually affective. Our experience-centred evaluation manifests that, by interacting with Metamorpheus, users can recall their dreams in vivid detail, through which they relive and reflect upon their experiences in a meaningful way.

"It Felt Like Having a Second Mind": Investigating Human-AI Co-creativity in Prewriting with Large Language Models

Prewriting is the process of discovering and developing ideas before a first draft, which requires divergent thinking and often implies unstructured strategies such as diagramming, outlining, free-writing, etc. Although large language models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to be useful for a variety of tasks including creative writing, little is known about how users would collaborate with LLMs to support prewriting. The preferred collaborative role and initiative of LLMs during such a creativity process is also unclear. To investigate human-LLM collaboration patterns and dynamics during prewriting, we conducted a three-session qualitative study with 15 participants in two creative tasks: story writing and slogan writing. The findings indicated that during collaborative prewriting, there appears to be a three-stage iterative Human-AI Co-creativity process that includes Ideation, Illumination, and Implementation stages. This collaborative process champions the human in a dominant role, in addition to mixed and shifting levels of initiative that exist between humans and LLMs. This research also reports on collaboration breakdowns that occur during this process, user perceptions of using existing LLMs during Human-AI Co-creativity, and discusses design implications to support this co-creativity process.

Assistive Tele-op: Leveraging Transformers to Collect Robotic Task Demonstrations

Sharing autonomy between robots and human operators could facilitate data collection of robotic task demonstrations to continuously improve learned models. Yet, the means to communicate intent and reason about the future are disparate between humans and robots. We present Assistive Tele-op, a virtual reality (VR) system for collecting robot task demonstrations that displays an autonomous trajectory forecast to communicate the robot's intent. As the robot moves, the user can switch between autonomous and manual control when desired. This allows users to collect task demonstrations with both a high success rate and with greater ease than manual teleoperation systems. Our system is powered by transformers, which can provide a window of potential states and actions far into the future -- with almost no added computation time. A key insight is that human intent can be injected at any location within the transformer sequence if the user decides that the model-predicted actions are inappropriate. At every time step, the user can (1) do nothing and allow autonomous operation to continue while observing the robot's future plan sequence, or (2) take over and momentarily prescribe a different set of actions to nudge the model back on track. We host the videos and other supplementary material at https://sites.google.com/view/assistive-teleop.

Coarse-To-Fine Incremental Few-Shot Learning

Different from fine-tuning models pre-trained on a large-scale dataset of preset classes, class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to recognize novel classes over time without forgetting pre-trained classes. However, a given model will be challenged by test images with finer-grained classes, e.g., a basenji is at most recognized as a dog. Such images form a new training set (i.e., support set) so that the incremental model is hoped to recognize a basenji (i.e., query) as a basenji next time. This paper formulates such a hybrid natural problem of coarse-to-fine few-shot (C2FS) recognition as a CIL problem named C2FSCIL, and proposes a simple, effective, and theoretically-sound strategy Knowe: to learn, normalize, and freeze a classifier's weights from fine labels, once learning an embedding space contrastively from coarse labels. Besides, as CIL aims at a stability-plasticity balance, new overall performance metrics are proposed. In that sense, on CIFAR-100, BREEDS, and tieredImageNet, Knowe outperforms all recent relevant CIL/FSCIL methods that are tailored to the new problem setting for the first time.

A Variational Bayesian Inference-Inspired Unrolled Deep Network for MIMO Detection

The great success of deep learning (DL) has inspired researchers to develop more accurate and efficient symbol detectors for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. Existing DL-based MIMO detectors, however, suffer several drawbacks. To address these issues, in this paper, we develop a modeldriven DL detector based on variational Bayesian inference. Specifically, the proposed unrolled DL architecture is inspired by an inverse-free variational Bayesian learning framework which circumvents matrix inversion via maximizing a relaxed evidence lower bound. Two networks are respectively developed for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian channels and arbitrarily correlated channels. The proposed networks, referred to as VBINet, have only a few learnable parameters and thus can be efficiently trained with a moderate amount of training samples. The proposed VBINet-based detectors can work in both offline and online training modes. An important advantage of our proposed networks over state-of-the-art MIMO detection networks such as OAMPNet and MMNet is that the VBINet can automatically learn the noise variance from data, thus yielding a significant performance improvement over the OAMPNet and MMNet in the presence of noise variance uncertainty. Simulation results show that the proposed VBINet-based detectors achieve competitive performance for both i.i.d. Gaussian and realistic 3GPP MIMO channels.

Geometric Fabrics: Generalizing Classical Mechanics to Capture the Physics of Behavior

Classical mechanical systems are central to controller design in energy shaping methods of geometric control. However, their expressivity is limited by position-only metrics and the intimate link between metric and geometry. Recent work on Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs) has shown that shedding these restrictions results in powerful design tools, but at the expense of theoretical guarantees. In this work, we generalize classical mechanics to what we call geometric fabrics, whose expressivity and theory enable the design of systems that outperform RMPs in practice. Geometric fabrics strictly generalize classical mechanics forming a new physics of behavior by first generalizing them to Finsler geometries and then explicitly bending them to shape their behavior. We develop the theory of fabrics and present both a collection of controlled experiments examining their theoretical properties and a set of robot system experiments showing improved performance over a well-engineered and hardened implementation of RMPs, our current state-of-the-art in controller design.

DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System

Teleoperation offers the possibility of imparting robotic systems with sophisticated reasoning skills, intuition, and creativity to perform tasks. However, current teleoperation solutions for high degree-of-actuation (DoA), multi-fingered robots are generally cost-prohibitive, while low-cost offerings usually provide reduced degrees of control. Herein, a low-cost, vision based teleoperation system, DexPilot, was developed that allows for complete control over the full 23 DoA robotic system by merely observing the bare human hand. DexPilot enables operators to carry out a variety of complex manipulation tasks that go beyond simple pick-and-place operations. This allows for collection of high dimensional, multi-modality, state-action data that can be leveraged in the future to learn sensorimotor policies for challenging manipulation tasks. The system performance was measured through speed and reliability metrics across two human demonstrators on a variety of tasks. The videos of the experiments can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/dex-pilot.

Robust Bayesian Compressed sensing

We consider the problem of robust compressed sensing whose objective is to recover a high-dimensional sparse signal from compressed measurements corrupted by outliers. A new sparse Bayesian learning method is developed for robust compressed sensing. The basic idea of the proposed method is to identify and remove the outliers from sparse signal recovery. To automatically identify the outliers, we employ a set of binary indicator hyperparameters to indicate which observations are outliers. These indicator hyperparameters are treated as random variables and assigned a beta process prior such that their values are confined to be binary. In addition, a Gaussian-inverse Gamma prior is imposed on the sparse signal to promote sparsity. Based on this hierarchical prior model, we develop a variational Bayesian method to estimate the indicator hyperparameters as well as the sparse signal. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a substantial performance improvement over existing robust compressed sensing techniques.