Mask-adaptive Gated Convolution and Bi-directional Progressive Fusion Network for Depth Completion

Depth completion is a critical task for handling depth images with missing pixels, which can negatively impact further applications. Recent approaches have utilized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to reconstruct depth images with the assistance of color images. However, vanilla convolution has non-negligible drawbacks in handling missing pixels. To solve this problem, we propose a new model for depth completion based on an encoder-decoder structure. Our model introduces two key components: the Mask-adaptive Gated Convolution (MagaConv) architecture and the Bi-directional Progressive Fusion (BP-Fusion) module. The MagaConv architecture is designed to acquire precise depth features by modulating convolution operations with iteratively updated masks, while the BP-Fusion module progressively integrates depth and color features, utilizing consecutive bi-directional fusion structures in a global perspective. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks, including NYU-Depth V2, DIML, and SUN RGB-D, demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods. We achieved remarkable performance in completing depth maps and outperformed existing approaches in terms of accuracy and reliability.

When is it permissible for artificial intelligence to lie? A trust-based approach

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in industry settings can be trained to closely mimic human behaviors, including lying and deception. However, lying is often a necessary part of negotiation. To address this, we develop a normative framework for when it is ethical or unethical for a conversational AI to lie to humans, based on whether there is what we call "invitation of trust" in a particular scenario. Importantly, cultural norms play an important role in determining whether there is invitation of trust across negotiation settings, and thus an AI trained in one culture may not be generalizable to others. Moreover, individuals may have different expectations regarding the invitation of trust and propensity to lie for human vs. AI negotiators, and these expectations may vary across cultures as well. Finally, we outline how a conversational chatbot can be trained to negotiate ethically by applying autoregressive models to large dialog and negotiations datasets.