Lifelike Agility and Play on Quadrupedal Robots using Reinforcement Learning and Generative Pre-trained Models

Summarizing knowledge from animals and human beings inspires robotic innovations. In this work, we propose a framework for driving legged robots act like real animals with lifelike agility and strategy in complex environments. Inspired by large pre-trained models witnessed with impressive performance in language and image understanding, we introduce the power of advanced deep generative models to produce motor control signals stimulating legged robots to act like real animals. Unlike conventional controllers and end-to-end RL methods that are task-specific, we propose to pre-train generative models over animal motion datasets to preserve expressive knowledge of animal behavior. The pre-trained model holds sufficient primitive-level knowledge yet is environment-agnostic. It is then reused for a successive stage of learning to align with the environments by traversing a number of challenging obstacles that are rarely considered in previous approaches, including creeping through narrow spaces, jumping over hurdles, freerunning over scattered blocks, etc. Finally, a task-specific controller is trained to solve complex downstream tasks by reusing the knowledge from previous stages. Enriching the knowledge regarding each stage does not affect the usage of other levels of knowledge. This flexible framework offers the possibility of continual knowledge accumulation at different levels. We successfully apply the trained multi-level controllers to the MAX robot, a quadrupedal robot developed in-house, to mimic animals, traverse complex obstacles, and play in a designed challenging multi-agent Chase Tag Game, where lifelike agility and strategy emerge on the robots. The present research pushes the frontier of robot control with new insights on reusing multi-level pre-trained knowledge and solving highly complex downstream tasks in the real world.

Game Theory and Coverage Optimization Based Multihop Routing Protocol for Network Lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are self-organizing monitoring networks with a large number of randomly deployed microsensor nodes to collect various physical information to realize tasks such as intelligent perception, efficient control, and decision-making. However, WSN nodes are powered by batteries, so they will run out of energy after a certain time. This energy limitation will greatly constrain the network performance like network lifetime and energy efficiency. In this study, to prolong the network lifetime, we proposed a multi-hop routing protocol based on game theory and coverage optimization (MRP-GTCO). Briefly, in the stage of setup, two innovational strategies including a clustering game with penalty function and cluster head coverage set were designed to realize the uniformity of cluster head distribution and improve the rationality of cluster head election. In the data transmission stage, we first derived the applicable conditions theorem of inter-cluster multi-hop routing. Based on this, a novel multi-hop path selection algorithm related to residual energy and node degree was proposed to provide an energy-efficient data transmission path. The simulation results showed that the MRP-GTCO protocol can effectively reduce the network energy consumption and extend the network lifetime by 159.22%, 50.76%, and 16.46% compared with LGCA, RLEACH, and ECAGT protocols.

Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol Based on Multi-Threshold Segmentation in Wireless Sensors Networks for Precision Agriculture

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), one of the fundamental technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), can provide sensing and communication services efficiently for IoT-based applications, especially energy-limited applications. Clustering routing protocol plays an important role in reducing energy consumption and prolonging network lifetime. The cluster formation and cluster head selection are the key to improving the performance of the clustering routing protocol. An energy-efficient routing protocol based on multi-threshold segmentation (EERPMS) was proposed in this paper to improve the rationality of cluster formation and cluster head selection. In the stage of cluster formation, inspired by multi-threshold image segmentation, an innovative node clustering algorithm was developed. In the stage of cluster head selection, aiming at minimizing the network energy consumption, a calculation theory of the optimal number and location of cluster heads was established. Furthermore, a novel cluster head selection algorithm was constructed based on the residual energy and optimal location of cluster heads. Simulation results show that EERPMS can improve the distribution uniformity of cluster heads, prolong the network lifetime and save up to 64.50%, 58.60%, and 56.15% network energy as compared to RLEACH, CRPFCM, and FIGWO protocols respectively.

Seeing is Believing: Detecting Sybil Attack in FANET by Matching Visual and Auditory Domains

The flying ad hoc network (FANET) will play a crucial role in the B5G/6G era since it provides wide coverage and on-demand deployment services in a distributed manner. The detection of Sybil attacks is essential to ensure trusted communication in FANET. Nevertheless, the conventional methods only utilize the untrusted information that UAV nodes passively ``heard'' from the ``auditory" domain (AD), resulting in severe communication disruptions and even collision accidents. In this paper, we present a novel VA-matching solution that matches the neighbors observed from both the AD and the ``visual'' domain (VD), which is the first solution that enables UAVs to accurately correlate what they ``see'' from VD and ``hear'' from AD to detect the Sybil attacks. Relative entropy is utilized to describe the similarity of observed characteristics from dual domains. The dynamic weight algorithm is proposed to distinguish neighbors according to the characteristics' popularity. The matching model of neighbors observed from AD and VD is established and solved by the vampire bat optimizer. Experiment results show that the proposed VA-matching solution removes the unreliability of individual characteristics and single domains. It significantly outperforms the conventional RSSI-based method in detecting Sybil attacks. Furthermore, it has strong robustness and achieves high precision and recall rates.

Curvilinear object segmentation in medical images based on ODoS filter and deep learning network

Automatic segmentation of curvilinear objects in medical images plays an important role in the diagnosis and evaluation of human diseases, yet it is a challenging uncertainty for the complex segmentation task due to different issues like various image appearance, low contrast between curvilinear objects and their surrounding backgrounds, thin and uneven curvilinear structures, and improper background illumination. To overcome these challenges, we present a unique curvilinear structure segmentation framework based on oriented derivative of stick (ODoS) filter and deep learning network for curvilinear object segmentation in medical images. Currently, a large number of deep learning models emphasis on developing deep architectures and ignore capturing the structural features of curvature objects, which may lead to unsatisfactory results. In consequence, a new approach that incorporates the ODoS filter as part of a deep learning network is presented to improve the spatial attention of curvilinear objects. In which, the original image is considered as principal part to describe various image appearance and complex background illumination, the multi-step strategy is used to enhance contrast between curvilinear objects and their surrounding backgrounds, and the vector field is applied to discriminate thin and uneven curvilinear structures. Subsequently, a deep learning framework is employed to extract varvious structural features for curvilinear object segmentation in medical images. The performance of the computational model was validated in experiments with publicly available DRIVE, STARE and CHASEDB1 datasets. Experimental results indicate that the presented model has yielded surprising results compared with some state-of-the-art methods.

Pulmonary Fissure Segmentation in CT Images Based on ODoS Filter and Shape Features

Priori knowledge of pulmonary anatomy plays a vital role in diagnosis of lung diseases. In CT images, pulmonary fissure segmentation is a formidable mission due to various of factors. To address the challenge, an useful approach based on ODoS filter and shape features is presented for pulmonary fissure segmentation. Here, we adopt an ODoS filter by merging the orientation information and magnitude information to highlight structure features for fissure enhancement, which can effectively distinguish between pulmonary fissures and clutters. Motivated by the fact that pulmonary fissures appear as linear structures in 2D space and planar structures in 3D space in orientation field, an orientation curvature criterion and an orientation partition scheme are fused to separate fissure patches and other structures in different orientation partition, which can suppress parts of clutters. Considering the shape difference between pulmonary fissures and tubular structures in magnitude field, a shape measure approach and a 3D skeletonization model are combined to segment pulmonary fissures for clutters removal. When applying our scheme to 55 chest CT scans which acquired from a publicly available LOLA11 datasets, the median F1-score, False Discovery Rate (FDR), and False Negative Rate (FNR) respectively are 0.896, 0.109, and 0.100, which indicates that the presented method has a satisfactory pulmonary fissure segmentation performance.

Automatic segmentation of novel coronavirus pneumonia lesions in CT images utilizing deep-supervised ensemble learning network

Background: The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been spread widely in the world, causing a huge threat to people's living environment. Objective: Under computed tomography (CT) imaging, the structure features of COVID-19 lesions are complicated and varied greatly in different cases. To accurately locate COVID-19 lesions and assist doctors to make the best diagnosis and treatment plan, a deep-supervised ensemble learning network is presented for COVID-19 lesion segmentation in CT images. Methods: Considering the fact that a large number of COVID-19 CT images and the corresponding lesion annotations are difficult to obtained, a transfer learning strategy is employed to make up for the shortcoming and alleviate the overfitting problem. Based on the reality that traditional single deep learning framework is difficult to extract COVID-19 lesion features effectively, which may cause some lesions to be undetected. To overcome the problem, a deep-supervised ensemble learning network is presented to combine with local and global features for COVID-19 lesion segmentation. Results: The performance of the proposed method was validated in experiments with a publicly available dataset. Compared with manual annotations, the proposed method acquired a high intersection over union (IoU) of 0.7279. Conclusion: A deep-supervised ensemble learning network was presented for coronavirus pneumonia lesion segmentation in CT images. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by visual inspection and quantitative evaluation. Experimental results shown that the proposed mehtod has a perfect performance in COVID-19 lesion segmentation.

Parallel Coordinate Descent Newton Method for Efficient $\ell_1$-Regularized Minimization

The recent years have witnessed advances in parallel algorithms for large scale optimization problems. Notwithstanding demonstrated success, existing algorithms that parallelize over features are usually limited by divergence issues under high parallelism or require data preprocessing to alleviate these problems. In this work, we propose a Parallel Coordinate Descent Newton algorithm using multidimensional approximate Newton steps (PCDN), where the off-diagonal elements of the Hessian are set to zero to enable parallelization. It randomly partitions the feature set into $b$ bundles/subsets with size of $P$, and sequentially processes each bundle by first computing the descent directions for each feature in parallel and then conducting $P$-dimensional line search to obtain the step size. We show that: (1) PCDN is guaranteed to converge globally despite increasing parallelism; (2) PCDN converges to the specified accuracy $\epsilon$ within the limited iteration number of $T_\epsilon$, and $T_\epsilon$ decreases with increasing parallelism (bundle size $P$). Using the implementation technique of maintaining intermediate quantities, we minimize the data transfer and synchronization cost of the $P$-dimensional line search. For concreteness, the proposed PCDN algorithm is applied to $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression and $\ell_2$-loss SVM. Experimental evaluations on six benchmark datasets show that the proposed PCDN algorithm exploits parallelism well and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in speed without losing accuracy.

Stochastic Feature Mapping for PAC-Bayes Classification

Probabilistic generative modeling of data distributions can potentially exploit hidden information which is useful for discriminative classification. This observation has motivated the development of approaches that couple generative and discriminative models for classification. In this paper, we propose a new approach to couple generative and discriminative models in an unified framework based on PAC-Bayes risk theory. We first derive the model-parameter-independent stochastic feature mapping from a practical MAP classifier operating on generative models. Then we construct a linear stochastic classifier equipped with the feature mapping, and derive the explicit PAC-Bayes risk bounds for such classifier for both supervised and semi-supervised learning. Minimizing the risk bound, using an EM-like iterative procedure, results in a new posterior over hidden variables (E-step) and the update rules of model parameters (M-step). The derivation of the posterior is always feasible due to the way of equipping feature mapping and the explicit form of bounding risk. The derived posterior allows the tuning of generative models and subsequently the feature mappings for better classification. The derived update rules of the model parameters are same to those of the uncoupled models as the feature mapping is model-parameter-independent. Our experiments show that the coupling between data modeling generative model and the discriminative classifier via a stochastic feature mapping in this framework leads to a general classification tool with state-of-the-art performance.