Age of Information Guaranteed Scheduling for Asynchronous Status Updates in Collaborative Perception

We consider collaborative perception (CP) systems where a fusion center monitors various regions by multiple sources. The center has different age of information (AoI) constraints for different regions. Multi-view sensing data for a region generated by sources can be fused by the center for a reliable representation of the region. To ensure accurate perception, differences between generation time of asynchronous status updates for CP fusion should not exceed a certain threshold. An algorithm named scheduling for CP with asynchronous status updates (SCPA) is proposed to minimize the number of required channels and subject to AoI constraints with asynchronous status updates. SCPA first identifies a set of sources that can satisfy the constraints with minimum updating rates. It then chooses scheduling intervals and offsets for the sources such that the number of required channels is optimized. According to numerical results, the number of channels required by SCPA can reach only 12% more than a derived lower bound.

Can MusicGen Create Training Data for MIR Tasks?

We are investigating the broader concept of using AI-based generative music systems to generate training data for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. To kick off this line of work, we ran an initial experiment in which we trained a genre classifier on a fully artificial music dataset created with MusicGen. We constructed over 50 000 genre- conditioned textual descriptions and generated a collection of music excerpts that covers five musical genres. Our preliminary results show that the proposed model can learn genre-specific characteristics from artificial music tracks that generalise well to real-world music recordings.

Formal Proofs as Structured Explanations: Proposing Several Tasks on Explainable Natural Language Inference

In this position paper, we propose a way of exploiting formal proofs to put forward several explainable natural language inference (NLI) tasks. The formal proofs will be produced by a reliable and high-performing logic-based NLI system. Taking advantage of the in-depth information available in the generated formal proofs, we show how it can be used to define NLI tasks with structured explanations. The proposed tasks can be ordered according to difficulty defined in terms of the granularity of explanations. We argue that the tasks will suffer with substantially fewer shortcomings than the existing explainable NLI tasks (or datasets).

Data-driven building energy efficiency prediction based on envelope heat losses using physics-informed neural networks

The analytical prediction of building energy performance in residential buildings based on the heat losses of its individual envelope components is a challenging task. It is worth noting that this field is still in its infancy, with relatively limited research conducted in this specific area to date, especially when it comes for data-driven approaches. In this paper we introduce a novel physics-informed neural network model for addressing this problem. Through the employment of unexposed datasets that encompass general building information, audited characteristics, and heating energy consumption, we feed the deep learning model with general building information, while the model's output consists of the structural components and several thermal properties that are in fact the basic elements of an energy performance certificate (EPC). On top of this neural network, a function, based on physics equations, calculates the energy consumption of the building based on heat losses and enhances the loss function of the deep learning model. This methodology is tested on a real case study for 256 buildings located in Riga, Latvia. Our investigation comes up with promising results in terms of prediction accuracy, paving the way for automated, and data-driven energy efficiency performance prediction based on basic properties of the building, contrary to exhaustive energy efficiency audits led by humans, which are the current status quo.

Implementation and Comparison of Methods to Extract Reliability KPIs out of Textual Wind Turbine Maintenance Work Orders

Maintenance work orders are commonly used to document information about wind turbine operation and maintenance. This includes details about proactive and reactive wind turbine downtimes, such as preventative and corrective maintenance. However, the information contained in maintenance work orders is often unstructured and difficult to analyze, making it challenging for decision-makers to use this information for optimizing operation and maintenance. To address this issue, this work presents three different approaches to calculate reliability key performance indicators from maintenance work orders. The first approach involves manual labeling of the maintenance work orders by domain experts, using the schema defined in an industrial guideline to assign the label accordingly. The second approach involves the development of a model that automatically labels the maintenance work orders using text classification methods. The third technique uses an AI-assisted tagging tool to tag and structure the raw maintenance information contained in the maintenance work orders. The resulting calculated reliability key performance indicator of the first approach are used as a benchmark for comparison with the results of the second and third approaches. The quality and time spent are considered as criteria for evaluation. Overall, these three methods make extracting maintenance information from maintenance work orders more efficient, enable the assessment of reliability key performance indicators and therefore support the optimization of wind turbine operation and maintenance.

A BERT based Ensemble Approach for Sentiment Classification of Customer Reviews and its Application to Nudge Marketing in e-Commerce

According to the literature, Product reviews are an important source of information for customers to support their buying decision. Product reviews improve customer trust and loyalty. Reviews help customers in understanding what other customers think about a particular product and helps in driving purchase decisions. Therefore, for an e-commerce platform it is important to understand the sentiments in customer reviews to understand their products and services, and it also allows them to potentially create positive consumer interaction as well as long lasting relationships. Reviews also provide innovative ways to market the products for an ecommerce company. One such approach is Nudge Marketing. Nudge marketing is a subtle way for an ecommerce company to help their customers make better decisions without hesitation.

Multiple View Geometry Transformers for 3D Human Pose Estimation

In this work, we aim to improve the 3D reasoning ability of Transformers in multi-view 3D human pose estimation. Recent works have focused on end-to-end learning-based transformer designs, which struggle to resolve geometric information accurately, particularly during occlusion. Instead, we propose a novel hybrid model, MVGFormer, which has a series of geometric and appearance modules organized in an iterative manner. The geometry modules are learning-free and handle all viewpoint-dependent 3D tasks geometrically which notably improves the model's generalization ability. The appearance modules are learnable and are dedicated to estimating 2D poses from image signals end-to-end which enables them to achieve accurate estimates even when occlusion occurs, leading to a model that is both accurate and generalizable to new cameras and geometries. We evaluate our approach for both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, where our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and especially does so by a significant margin in the out-of-domain setting. We will release the code and models: https://github.com/XunshanMan/MVGFormer.

LATIS: Lambda Abstraction-based Thermal Image Super-resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an effective technique to improve the quality of low-resolution thermal images. Recently, transformer-based methods have achieved significant performance in SISR. However, in the SR task, only a small number of pixels are involved in the transformers self-attention (SA) mechanism due to the computational complexity of the attention mechanism. The lambda abstraction is a promising alternative to SA in modeling long-range interactions while being computationally more efficient. This paper presents lambda abstraction-based thermal image super-resolution (LATIS), a novel lightweight architecture for SISR of thermal images. LATIS sequentially captures local and global information using the local and global feature block (LGFB). In LGFB, we introduce a global feature extraction (GFE) module based on the lambda abstraction mechanism, channel-shuffle and convolution (CSConv) layer to encode local context. Besides, to improve the performance further, we propose a differentiable patch-wise histogram-based loss function. Experimental results demonstrate that our LATIS, with the least model parameters and complexity, achieves better or comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.

SecondPose: SE(3)-Consistent Dual-Stream Feature Fusion for Category-Level Pose Estimation

Category-level object pose estimation, aiming to predict the 6D pose and 3D size of objects from known categories, typically struggles with large intra-class shape variation. Existing works utilizing mean shapes often fall short of capturing this variation. To address this issue, we present SecondPose, a novel approach integrating object-specific geometric features with semantic category priors from DINOv2. Leveraging the advantage of DINOv2 in providing SE(3)-consistent semantic features, we hierarchically extract two types of SE(3)-invariant geometric features to further encapsulate local-to-global object-specific information. These geometric features are then point-aligned with DINOv2 features to establish a consistent object representation under SE(3) transformations, facilitating the mapping from camera space to the pre-defined canonical space, thus further enhancing pose estimation. Extensive experiments on NOCS-REAL275 demonstrate that SecondPose achieves a 12.4% leap forward over the state-of-the-art. Moreover, on a more complex dataset HouseCat6D which provides photometrically challenging objects, SecondPose still surpasses other competitors by a large margin. The code will be released soon.

Challenges in data-based geospatial modeling for environmental research and practice

With the rise of electronic data, particularly Earth observation data, data-based geospatial modelling using machine learning (ML) has gained popularity in environmental research. Accurate geospatial predictions are vital for domain research based on ecosystem monitoring and quality assessment and for policy-making and action planning, considering effective management of natural resources. The accuracy and computation speed of ML has generally proved efficient. However, many questions have yet to be addressed to obtain precise and reproducible results suitable for further use in both research and practice. A better understanding of the ML concepts applicable to geospatial problems enhances the development of data science tools providing transparent information crucial for making decisions on global challenges such as biosphere degradation and climate change. This survey reviews common nuances in geospatial modelling, such as imbalanced data, spatial autocorrelation, prediction errors, model generalisation, domain specificity, and uncertainty estimation. We provide an overview of techniques and popular programming tools to overcome or account for the challenges. We also discuss prospects for geospatial Artificial Intelligence in environmental applications.