RealDex: Towards Human-like Grasping for Robotic Dexterous Hand

In this paper, we introduce RealDex, a pioneering dataset capturing authentic dexterous hand grasping motions infused with human behavioral patterns, enriched by multi-view and multimodal visual data. Utilizing a teleoperation system, we seamlessly synchronize human-robot hand poses in real time. This collection of human-like motions is crucial for training dexterous hands to mimic human movements more naturally and precisely. RealDex holds immense promise in advancing humanoid robot for automated perception, cognition, and manipulation in real-world scenarios. Moreover, we introduce a cutting-edge dexterous grasping motion generation framework, which aligns with human experience and enhances real-world applicability through effectively utilizing Multimodal Large Language Models. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of our method on RealDex and other open datasets. The complete dataset and code will be made available upon the publication of this work.

Improving Building Temperature Forecasting: A Data-driven Approach with System Scenario Clustering

Heat, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems play a critical role in maintaining a comfortable thermal environment and cost approximately 40% of primary energy usage in the building sector. For smart energy management in buildings, usage patterns and their resulting profiles allow the improvement of control systems with prediction capabilities. However, for large-scale HVAC system management, it is difficult to construct a detailed model for each subsystem. In this paper, a new data-driven room temperature prediction model is proposed based on the k-means clustering method. The proposed data-driven temperature prediction approach extracts the system operation feature through historical data analysis and further simplifies the system-level model to improve generalization and computational efficiency. We evaluate the proposed approach in the real world. The results demonstrated that our approach can significantly reduce modeling time without reducing prediction accuracy.

User-LLM: Efficient LLM Contextualization with User Embeddings

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. However, effectively incorporating complex and potentially noisy user interaction data remains a challenge. To address this, we propose User-LLM, a novel framework that leverages user embeddings to contextualize LLMs. These embeddings, distilled from diverse user interactions using self-supervised pretraining, capture latent user preferences and their evolution over time. We integrate these user embeddings with LLMs through cross-attention and soft-prompting, enabling LLMs to dynamically adapt to user context. Our comprehensive experiments on MovieLens, Amazon Review, and Google Local Review datasets demonstrate significant performance gains across various tasks. Notably, our approach outperforms text-prompt-based contextualization on long sequence tasks and tasks that require deep user understanding while being computationally efficient. We further incorporate Perceiver layers to streamline the integration between user encoders and LLMs, reducing computational demands.

Private Gradient Descent for Linear Regression: Tighter Error Bounds and Instance-Specific Uncertainty Estimation

We provide an improved analysis of standard differentially private gradient descent for linear regression under the squared error loss. Under modest assumptions on the input, we characterize the distribution of the iterate at each time step. Our analysis leads to new results on the algorithm's accuracy: for a proper fixed choice of hyperparameters, the sample complexity depends only linearly on the dimension of the data. This matches the dimension-dependence of the (non-private) ordinary least squares estimator as well as that of recent private algorithms that rely on sophisticated adaptive gradient-clipping schemes (Varshney et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2023). Our analysis of the iterates' distribution also allows us to construct confidence intervals for the empirical optimizer which adapt automatically to the variance of the algorithm on a particular data set. We validate our theorems through experiments on synthetic data.

SealD-NeRF: Interactive Pixel-Level Editing for Dynamic Scenes by Neural Radiance Fields

The widespread adoption of implicit neural representations, especially Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), highlights a growing need for editing capabilities in implicit 3D models, essential for tasks like scene post-processing and 3D content creation. Despite previous efforts in NeRF editing, challenges remain due to limitations in editing flexibility and quality. The key issue is developing a neural representation that supports local edits for real-time updates. Current NeRF editing methods, offering pixel-level adjustments or detailed geometry and color modifications, are mostly limited to static scenes. This paper introduces SealD-NeRF, an extension of Seal-3D for pixel-level editing in dynamic settings, specifically targeting the D-NeRF network. It allows for consistent edits across sequences by mapping editing actions to a specific timeframe, freezing the deformation network responsible for dynamic scene representation, and using a teacher-student approach to integrate changes.

Autonomous Mapless Navigation on Uneven Terrains

We propose a new method for autonomous navigation in uneven terrains by utilizing a sparse Gaussian Process (SGP) based local perception model. The SGP local perception model is trained on local ranging observation (pointcloud) to learn the terrain elevation profile and extract the feasible navigation subgoals around the robot. Subsequently, a cost function, which prioritizes the safety of the robot in terms of keeping the robot's roll and pitch angles bounded within a specified range, is used to select a safety-aware subgoal that leads the robot to its final destination. The algorithm is designed to run in real-time and is intensively evaluated in simulation and real world experiments. The results compellingly demonstrate that our proposed algorithm consistently navigates uneven terrains with high efficiency and surpasses the performance of other planners. The code and video can be found here: https://rb.gy/3ov2r8

Emulated Disalignment: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models May Backfire!

Large language models (LLMs) need to undergo safety alignment to ensure safe conversations with humans. However, in this work, we introduce an inference-time attack framework, demonstrating that safety alignment can also unintentionally facilitate harmful outcomes under adversarial manipulation. This framework, named Emulated Disalignment (ED), adversely combines a pair of open-source pre-trained and safety-aligned language models in the output space to produce a harmful language model without additional training. Our experiments with ED across three datasets and four model families (Llama-1, Llama-2, Mistral, and Alpaca) show that ED doubles the harmfulness of pre-trained models and outperforms strong baselines, achieving the highest harmful rate in 43 out of 48 evaluation subsets by a large margin. Crucially, our findings highlight the importance of reevaluating the practice of open-sourcing language models even after safety alignment.

TESSERACT: Eliminating Experimental Bias in Malware Classification across Space and Time (Extended Version)

Machine learning (ML) plays a pivotal role in detecting malicious software. Despite the high F1-scores reported in numerous studies reaching upwards of 0.99, the issue is not completely solved. Malware detectors often experience performance decay due to constantly evolving operating systems and attack methods, which can render previously learned knowledge insufficient for accurate decision-making on new inputs. This paper argues that commonly reported results are inflated due to two pervasive sources of experimental bias in the detection task: spatial bias caused by data distributions that are not representative of a real-world deployment; and temporal bias caused by incorrect time splits of data, leading to unrealistic configurations. To address these biases, we introduce a set of constraints for fair experiment design, and propose a new metric, AUT, for classifier robustness in real-world settings. We additionally propose an algorithm designed to tune training data to enhance classifier performance. Finally, we present TESSERACT, an open-source framework for realistic classifier comparison. Our evaluation encompasses both traditional ML and deep learning methods, examining published works on an extensive Android dataset with 259,230 samples over a five-year span. Additionally, we conduct case studies in the Windows PE and PDF domains. Our findings identify the existence of biases in previous studies and reveal that significant performance enhancements are possible through appropriate, periodic tuning. We explore how mitigation strategies may support in achieving a more stable and better performance over time by employing multiple strategies to delay performance decay.

Real-time Stereo Speech Enhancement with Spatial-Cue Preservation based on Dual-Path Structure

We introduce a real-time, multichannel speech enhancement algorithm which maintains the spatial cues of stereo recordings including two speech sources. Recognizing that each source has unique spatial information, our method utilizes a dual-path structure, ensuring the spatial cues remain unaffected during enhancement by applying source-specific common-band gain. This method also seamlessly integrates pretrained monaural speech enhancement, eliminating the need for retraining on stereo inputs. Source separation from stereo mixtures is achieved via spatial beamforming, with the steering vector for each source being adaptively updated using post-enhancement output signal. This ensures accurate tracking of the spatial information. The final stereo output is derived by merging the spatial images of the enhanced sources, with its efficacy not heavily reliant on the separation performance of the beamforming. The algorithm runs in real-time on 10-ms frames with a 40 ms of look-ahead. Evaluations reveal its effectiveness in enhancing speech and preserving spatial cues in both fully and sparsely overlapped mixtures.

A Microstructure-based Graph Neural Network for Accelerating Multiscale Simulations

Simulating the mechanical response of advanced materials can be done more accurately using concurrent multiscale models than with single-scale simulations. However, the computational costs stand in the way of the practical application of this approach. The costs originate from microscale Finite Element (FE) models that must be solved at every macroscopic integration point. A plethora of surrogate modeling strategies attempt to alleviate this cost by learning to predict macroscopic stresses from macroscopic strains, completely replacing the microscale models. In this work, we introduce an alternative surrogate modeling strategy that allows for keeping the multiscale nature of the problem, allowing it to be used interchangeably with an FE solver for any time step. Our surrogate provides all microscopic quantities, which are then homogenized to obtain macroscopic quantities of interest. We achieve this for an elasto-plastic material by predicting full-field microscopic strains using a graph neural network (GNN) while retaining the microscopic constitutive material model to obtain the stresses. This hybrid data-physics graph-based approach avoids the high dimensionality originating from predicting full-field responses while allowing non-locality to arise. By training the GNN on a variety of meshes, it learns to generalize to unseen meshes, allowing a single model to be used for a range of microstructures. The embedded microscopic constitutive model in the GNN implicitly tracks history-dependent variables and leads to improved accuracy. We demonstrate for several challenging scenarios that the surrogate can predict complex macroscopic stress-strain paths. As the computation time of our method scales favorably with the number of elements in the microstructure compared to the FE method, our method can significantly accelerate FE2 simulations.