Attractor Memory for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting: A Chaos Perspective

In long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) tasks, existing deep learning models overlook the crucial characteristic that discrete time series originate from underlying continuous dynamic systems, resulting in a lack of extrapolation and evolution capabilities. Recognizing the chaotic nature of real-world data, our model, \textbf{\textit{Attraos}}, incorporates chaos theory into LTSF, perceiving real-world time series as observations from unknown high-dimensional chaotic dynamic systems. Under the concept of attractor invariance, Attraos utilizes the proposed multi-scale dynamic memory unit to memorize historical dynamics structure and predicts by a frequency-enhanced local evolution strategy. Detailed theoretical analysis and abundant empirical evidence consistently show that Attraos outperforms various LTSF methods on mainstream LTSF datasets and chaotic datasets.

Temporal Cross-Attention for Dynamic Embedding and Tokenization of Multimodal Electronic Health Records

The breadth, scale, and temporal granularity of modern electronic health records (EHR) systems offers great potential for estimating personalized and contextual patient health trajectories using sequential deep learning. However, learning useful representations of EHR data is challenging due to its high dimensionality, sparsity, multimodality, irregular and variable-specific recording frequency, and timestamp duplication when multiple measurements are recorded simultaneously. Although recent efforts to fuse structured EHR and unstructured clinical notes suggest the potential for more accurate prediction of clinical outcomes, less focus has been placed on EHR embedding approaches that directly address temporal EHR challenges by learning time-aware representations from multimodal patient time series. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic embedding and tokenization framework for precise representation of multimodal clinical time series that combines novel methods for encoding time and sequential position with temporal cross-attention. Our embedding and tokenization framework, when integrated into a multitask transformer classifier with sliding window attention, outperformed baseline approaches on the exemplar task of predicting the occurrence of nine postoperative complications of more than 120,000 major inpatient surgeries using multimodal data from three hospitals and two academic health centers in the United States.

Safe Execution of Learned Orientation Skills with Conic Control Barrier Functions

In the field of Learning from Demonstration (LfD), Dynamical Systems (DSs) have gained significant attention due to their ability to generate real-time motions and reach predefined targets. However, the conventional convergence-centric behavior exhibited by DSs may fall short in safety-critical tasks, specifically, those requiring precise replication of demonstrated trajectories or strict adherence to constrained regions even in the presence of perturbations or human intervention. Moreover, existing DS research often assumes demonstrations solely in Euclidean space, overlooking the crucial aspect of orientation in various applications. To alleviate these shortcomings, we present an innovative approach geared toward ensuring the safe execution of learned orientation skills within constrained regions surrounding a reference trajectory. This involves learning a stable DS on SO(3), extracting time-varying conic constraints from the variability observed in expert demonstrations, and bounding the evolution of the DS with Conic Control Barrier Function (CCBF) to fulfill the constraints. We validated our approach through extensive evaluation in simulation and showcased its effectiveness for a cutting skill in the context of assisted teleoperation.

Sparse Wearable Sonomyography Sensor-based Proprioceptive Proportional Control Across Multiple Gestures

Sonomyography (SMG) is a non-invasive technique that uses ultrasound imaging to detect the dynamic activity of muscles. Wearable SMG systems have recently gained popularity due to their potential as human-computer interfaces for their superior performance compared to conventional methods. This paper demonstrates real-time positional proportional control of multiple gestures using a multiplexed 8-channel wearable SMG system. The amplitude-mode ultrasound signals from the SMG system were utilized to detect muscle activity from the forearm of 8 healthy individuals. The derived signals were used to control the on-screen movement of the cursor. A target achievement task was performed to analyze the performance of our SMG-based human-machine interface. Our wearable SMG system provided accurate, stable, and intuitive control in real-time by achieving an average success rate greater than 80% with all gestures. Furthermore, the wearable SMG system's abilities to detect volitional movement and decode movement kinematic information from SMG trajectories using standard performance metrics were evaluated. Our results provide insights to validate SMG as an intuitive human-machine interface.

Looking Ahead to Avoid Being Late: Solving Hard-Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem

Many real-world problems can be formulated as a constrained Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). However, the constraints are always complex and numerous, making the TSPs challenging to solve. When the number of complicated constraints grows, it is time-consuming for traditional heuristic algorithms to avoid illegitimate outcomes. Learning-based methods provide an alternative to solve TSPs in a soft manner, which also supports GPU acceleration to generate solutions quickly. Nevertheless, the soft manner inevitably results in difficulty solving hard-constrained problems with learning algorithms, and the conflicts between legality and optimality may substantially affect the optimality of the solution. To overcome this problem and to have an effective solution against hard constraints, we proposed a novel learning-based method that uses looking-ahead information as the feature to improve the legality of TSP with Time Windows (TSPTW) solutions. Besides, we constructed TSPTW datasets with hard constraints in order to accurately evaluate and benchmark the statistical performance of various approaches, which can serve the community for future research. With comprehensive experiments on diverse datasets, MUSLA outperforms existing baselines and shows generalizability potential.

Consecutive Model Editing with Batch alongside HooK Layers

As the typical retraining paradigm is unacceptably time- and resource-consuming, researchers are turning to model editing in order to seek an effective, consecutive, and batch-supportive way to edit the model behavior directly. Despite all these practical expectations, existing model editing methods fail to realize all of them. Furthermore, the memory demands for such succession-supportive model editing approaches tend to be prohibitive, frequently necessitating an external memory that grows incrementally over time. To cope with these challenges, we propose COMEBA-HK, a model editing method that is both consecutive and batch-supportive. COMEBA-HK is memory-friendly as it only needs a small amount of it to store several hook layers with updated weights. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over other batch-supportive model editing methods under both single-round and consecutive batch editing scenarios. Extensive analyses of COMEBA-HK have been conducted to verify the stability of our method over 1) the number of consecutive steps and 2) the number of editing instance.

OmniJet-$α$: The first cross-task foundation model for particle physics

Foundation models are multi-dataset and multi-task machine learning methods that once pre-trained can be fine-tuned for a large variety of downstream applications. The successful development of such general-purpose models for physics data would be a major breakthrough as they could improve the achievable physics performance while at the same time drastically reduce the required amount of training time and data. We report significant progress on this challenge on several fronts. First, a comprehensive set of evaluation methods is introduced to judge the quality of an encoding from physics data into a representation suitable for the autoregressive generation of particle jets with transformer architectures (the common backbone of foundation models). These measures motivate the choice of a higher-fidelity tokenization compared to previous works. Finally, we demonstrate transfer learning between an unsupervised problem (jet generation) and a classic supervised task (jet tagging) with our new OmniJet-$\alpha$ model. This is the first successful transfer between two different and actively studied classes of tasks and constitutes a major step in the building of foundation models for particle physics.

VLSI Architectures of Forward Kinematic Processor for Robotics Applications

This paper aims to get a comprehensive review of current-day robotic computation technologies at VLSI architecture level. We studied several repots in the domain of robotic processor architecture. In this work, we focused on the forward kinematics architectures which consider CORDIC algorithms, VLSI circuits of WE DSP16 chip, parallel processing and pipelined architecture, and lookup table formula and FPGA processor. This study gives us an understanding of different implementation methods for forward kinematics. Our goal is to develop a forward kinematics processor with FPGA for real-time applications, requires a fast response time and low latency of these devices, useful for industrial automation where the processing speed plays a great role.

A Framework for Controlling Multiple Industrial Robots using Mobile Applications

Purpose: Over the last few decades, the development of the hardware and software has enabled the application of advanced systems. In the robotics field, the UI design is an intriguing area to be explored due to the creation of devices with a wide range of functionalities in a reduced size. Moreover, the idea of using the same UI to control several systems arouses a great interest considering that this involves less learning effort and time for the users. Therefore, this paper will present a mobile application to control two industrial robots with four modes of operation. Design/methodology/approach: The smartphone was selected to be the interface due to its wide range of capabilities and the MIT Inventor App was used to create the application, whose environment is supported by Android smartphones. For the validation, ROS was used since it is a fundamental framework utilised in industrial robotics and the Arduino Uno was used to establish the data transmission between the smartphone and the board NVIDIA Jetson TX2. In MIT Inventor App, the graphical interface was created to visualize the options available in the app whereas two scripts in python were programmed to perform the simulations in ROS and carry out the tests. Findings: The results indicated that the use of the sliders to control the robots is more favourable than the Orientation Sensor due to the sensibility of the sensor and human limitations to hold the smartphone perfectly still. Another important finding was the limitations of the autonomous mode, in which the robot grabs an object. In this case, the configuration of the Kinect camera and the controllers has a significant impact on the success of the simulation. Finally, it was observed that the delay was appropriate despite the use of the Arduino UNO to transfer the data between the Smartphone and the Nvidia Jetson TX2.

Vision-based Vehicle Re-identification in Bridge Scenario using Flock Similarity

Due to the needs of road traffic flow monitoring and public safety management, video surveillance cameras are widely distributed in urban roads. However, the information captured directly by each camera is siloed, making it difficult to use it effectively. Vehicle re-identification refers to finding a vehicle that appears under one camera in another camera, which can correlate the information captured by multiple cameras. While license plate recognition plays an important role in some applications, there are some scenarios where re-identification method based on vehicle appearance are more suitable. The main challenge is that the data of vehicle appearance has the characteristics of high inter-class similarity and large intra-class differences. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately distinguish between different vehicles by relying only on vehicle appearance information. At this time, it is often necessary to introduce some extra information, such as spatio-temporal information. Nevertheless, the relative position of the vehicles rarely changes when passing through two adjacent cameras in the bridge scenario. In this paper, we present a vehicle re-identification method based on flock similarity, which improves the accuracy of vehicle re-identification by utilizing vehicle information adjacent to the target vehicle. When the relative position of the vehicles remains unchanged and flock size is appropriate, we obtain an average relative improvement of 204% on VeRi dataset in our experiments. Then, the effect of the magnitude of the relative position change of the vehicles as they pass through two cameras is discussed. We present two metrics that can be used to quantify the difference and establish a connection between them. Although this assumption is based on the bridge scenario, it is often true in other scenarios due to driving safety and camera location.