The importance of ground Mobile Robots (MRs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) within the research community, industry, and society is growing fast. Many of these agents are nowadays equipped with communication systems that are, in some cases, essential to successfully achieve certain tasks. In this context, we have begun to witness the development of a new interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of robotics and communications. This research field has been boosted by the intention of integrating UAVs within the 5G and 6G communication networks. This research will undoubtedly lead to many important applications in the near future. Nevertheless, one of the main obstacles to the development of this research area is that most researchers address these problems by oversimplifying either the robotics or the communications aspect. This impedes the ability of reaching the full potential of this new interdisciplinary research area. In this tutorial, we present some of the modelling tools necessary to address problems involving both robotics and communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. As an illustrative example of such problems, we focus in this tutorial on the issue of communication-aware trajectory planning.

Transformer networks have revolutionized NLP representation learning since they were introduced. Though a great effort has been made to explain the representation in transformers, it is widely recognized that our understanding is not sufficient. One important reason is that there lack enough visualization tools for detailed analysis. In this paper, we propose to use dictionary learning to open up these "black boxes" as linear superpositions of transformer factors. Through visualization, we demonstrate the hierarchical semantic structures captured by the transformer factors, e.g., word-level polysemy disambiguation, sentence-level pattern formation, and long-range dependency. While some of these patterns confirm the conventional prior linguistic knowledge, the rest are relatively unexpected, which may provide new insights. We hope this visualization tool can bring further knowledge and a better understanding of how transformer networks work. The code is available at https://github.com/zeyuyun1/TransformerVis

The notion of neural collapse refers to several emergent phenomena that have been empirically observed across various canonical classification problems. During the terminal phase of training a deep neural network, the feature embedding of all examples of the same class tend to collapse to a single representation, and the features of different classes tend to separate as much as possible. Neural collapse is often studied through a simplified model, called the unconstrained feature representation, in which the model is assumed to have "infinite expressivity" and can map each data point to any arbitrary representation. In this work, we propose a more realistic variant of the unconstrained feature representation that takes the limited expressivity of the network into account. Empirical evidence suggests that the memorization of noisy data points leads to a degradation (dilation) of the neural collapse. Using a model of the memorization-dilation (M-D) phenomenon, we show one mechanism by which different losses lead to different performances of the trained network on noisy data. Our proofs reveal why label smoothing, a modification of cross-entropy empirically observed to produce a regularization effect, leads to improved generalization in classification tasks.

Classification networks can be used to localize and segment objects in images by means of class activation maps (CAMs). However, without pixel-level annotations, classification networks are known to (1) mainly focus on discriminative regions, and (2) to produce diffuse CAMs without well-defined prediction contours. In this work, we approach both problems with two contributions for improving CAM learning. First, we incorporate importance sampling based on the class-wise probability mass function induced by the CAMs to produce stochastic image-level class predictions. This results in CAMs which activate over a larger extent of objects. Second, we formulate a feature similarity loss term which aims to match the prediction contours with edges in the image. As a third contribution, we conduct experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark dataset to demonstrate that these modifications significantly increase the performance in terms of contour accuracy, while being comparable to current state-of-the-art methods in terms of region similarity.

Conspicuous progression in the field of machine learning and deep learning have led the jump of highly realistic fake media, these media oftentimes referred as deepfakes. Deepfakes are fabricated media which are generated by sophisticated AI that are at times very difficult to set apart from the real media. So far, this media can be uploaded to the various social media platforms, hence advertising it to the world got easy, calling for an efficacious countermeasure. Thus, one of the optimistic counter steps against deepfake would be deepfake detection. To undertake this threat, researchers in the past have created models to detect deepfakes based on ML/DL techniques like Convolutional Neural Networks. This paper aims to explore different methodologies with an intention to achieve a cost-effective model with a higher accuracy with different types of the datasets, which is to address the generalizability of the dataset.

Cross-lingual science journalism generates popular science stories of scientific articles different from the source language for a non-expert audience. Hence, a cross-lingual popular summary must contain the salient content of the input document, and the content should be coherent, comprehensible, and in a local language for the targeted audience. We improve these aspects of cross-lingual summary generation by joint training of two high-level NLP tasks, simplification and cross-lingual summarization. The former task reduces linguistic complexity, and the latter focuses on cross-lingual abstractive summarization. We propose a novel multi-task architecture - SimCSum consisting of one shared encoder and two parallel decoders jointly learning simplification and cross-lingual summarization. We empirically investigate the performance of SimCSum by comparing it with several strong baselines over several evaluation metrics and by human evaluation. Overall, SimCSum demonstrates statistically significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on two non-synthetic cross-lingual scientific datasets. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth investigation into the linguistic properties of generated summaries and an error analysis.

In this paper, we follow a data-centric philosophy and propose a novel motion annotation method based on the inherent representativeness of motion data in a given dataset. Specifically, we propose a Representation-based Representativeness Ranking R3 method that ranks all motion data in a given dataset according to their representativeness in a learned motion representation space. We further propose a novel dual-level motion constrastive learning method to learn the motion representation space in a more informative way. Thanks to its high efficiency, our method is particularly responsive to frequent requirements change and enables agile development of motion annotation models. Experimental results on the HDM05 dataset against state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is one of the leading candidates for demonstrating the quantum advantage using near-term quantum computers. Unfortunately, high device error rates limit us from reliably running QAOA circuits for problems with more than a few qubits. In QAOA, the problem graph is translated into a quantum circuit such that every edge corresponds to two 2-qubit CNOT operations in each layer of the circuit. As CNOTs are extremely error-prone, the fidelity of QAOA circuits is dictated by the number of edges in the problem graph. We observe that majority of graphs corresponding to real-world applications follow the ``power-law`` distribution, where some hotspot nodes have significantly higher number of connections. We leverage this insight and propose ``FrozenQubits`` that freezes the hotspot nodes or qubits and intelligently partitions the state-space of the given problem into several smaller sub-spaces which are then solved independently. The corresponding QAOA sub-circuits are significantly less vulnerable to gate and decoherence errors due to the reduced number of CNOT operations in each sub-circuit. Unlike prior circuit-cutting approaches, FrozenQubits does not require any exponentially complex post-processing step. Our evaluations with 5,300 QAOA circuits on eight different quantum computers from IBM shows that FrozenQubits can improve the quality of solutions by 8.73x on average (and by up to 57x), albeit utilizing 2x more quantum resources.

Modern robots require accurate forecasts to make optimal decisions in the real world. For example, self-driving cars need an accurate forecast of other agents' future actions to plan safe trajectories. Current methods rely heavily on historical time series to accurately predict the future. However, relying entirely on the observed history is problematic since it could be corrupted by noise, have outliers, or not completely represent all possible outcomes. To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework for generating robust forecasts for robotic control. In order to model real-world factors affecting future forecasts, we introduce the notion of an adversary, which perturbs observed historical time series to increase a robot's ultimate control cost. Specifically, we model this interaction as a zero-sum two-player game between a robot's forecaster and this hypothetical adversary. We show that our proposed game may be solved to a local Nash equilibrium using gradient-based optimization techniques. Furthermore, we show that a forecaster trained with our method performs 30.14% better on out-of-distribution real-world lane change data than baselines.

Student modeling, the task of inferring a student's learning characteristics through their interactions with coursework, is a fundamental issue in intelligent education. Although the recent attempts from knowledge tracing and cognitive diagnosis propose several promising directions for improving the usability and effectiveness of current models, the existing public datasets are still insufficient to meet the need for these potential solutions due to their ignorance of complete exercising contexts, fine-grained concepts, and cognitive labels. In this paper, we present MoocRadar, a fine-grained, multi-aspect knowledge repository consisting of 2,513 exercise questions, 5,600 knowledge concepts, and over 12 million behavioral records. Specifically, we propose a framework to guarantee a high-quality and comprehensive annotation of fine-grained concepts and cognitive labels. The statistical and experimental results indicate that our dataset provides the basis for the future improvements of existing methods. Moreover, to support the convenient usage for researchers, we release a set of tools for data querying, model adaption, and even the extension of our repository, which are now available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/MOOC-Radar.