To better care for the elderly and disabled, it is essential for service robots to have an effective fusion method of object detection and grasp estimation. However, limited research has been observed on the combination of object detection and grasp estimation. To overcome this technical difficulty, a novel integrated method of detection-grasping for specific object based on the box coordinate matching is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SOLOv2 instance segmentation model is improved by adding channel attention module (CAM) and spatial attention module (SAM). Then, the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and CAM are added to the generative residual convolutional neural network (GR-CNN) model to optimize grasp estimation. Furthermore, a detection-grasping integrated algorithm based on box coordinate matching (DG-BCM) is proposed to obtain the fusion model of object detection and grasp estimation. For verification, experiments on object detection and grasp estimation are conducted separately to verify the superiority of improved models. Additionally, grasping tasks for several specific objects are implemented on a simulation platform, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of DG-BCM algorithm proposed in this paper.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) serve as backbones for various real-world systems. For high-stake applications, it's equally essential to have reasonable confidence estimations in predictions. While the vanilla confidence scores of PLMs can already be effectively utilized, PLMs consistently become overconfident in their wrong predictions, which is not desirable in practice. Previous work shows that introducing an extra calibration task can mitigate this issue. The basic idea involves acquiring additional data to train models in predicting the confidence of their initial predictions. However, it only demonstrates the feasibility of this kind of method, assuming that there are abundant extra available samples for the introduced calibration task. In this work, we consider the practical scenario that we need to effectively utilize training samples to make PLMs both task-solvers and self-calibrators. Three challenges are presented, including limited training samples, data imbalance, and distribution shifts. We first conduct pilot experiments to quantify various decisive factors in the calibration task. Based on the empirical analysis results, we propose a training algorithm LM-TOAST to tackle the challenges. Experimental results show that LM-TOAST can effectively utilize the training data to make PLMs have reasonable confidence estimations while maintaining the original task performance. Further, we consider three downstream applications, namely selective classification, adversarial defense, and model cascading, to show the practical usefulness of LM-TOAST. The code will be made public at \url{https://github.com/Yangyi-Chen/LM-TOAST}.

A wide variety of nonmonotonic semantics can be expressed as approximators defined under AFT (Approximation Fixpoint Theory). Using traditional AFT theory, it is not possible to define approximators that rely on information computed in previous iterations of stable revision. However, this information is rich for semantics that incorporate classical negation into nonmonotonic reasoning. In this work, we introduce a methodology resembling AFT that can utilize priorly computed upper bounds to more precisely capture semantics. We demonstrate our framework's applicability to hybrid MKNF (minimal knowledge and negation as failure) knowledge bases by extending the state-of-the-art approximator.

Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision-making tasks requiring expansive exploration requires either careful design of reward functions or the use of novelty-seeking exploration bonuses. Human supervisors can provide effective guidance in the loop to direct the exploration process, but prior methods to leverage this guidance require constant synchronous high-quality human feedback, which is expensive and impractical to obtain. In this work, we present a technique called Human Guided Exploration (HuGE), which uses low-quality feedback from non-expert users that may be sporadic, asynchronous, and noisy. HuGE guides exploration for reinforcement learning not only in simulation but also in the real world, all without meticulous reward specification. The key concept involves bifurcating human feedback and policy learning: human feedback steers exploration, while self-supervised learning from the exploration data yields unbiased policies. This procedure can leverage noisy, asynchronous human feedback to learn policies with no hand-crafted reward design or exploration bonuses. HuGE is able to learn a variety of challenging multi-stage robotic navigation and manipulation tasks in simulation using crowdsourced feedback from non-expert users. Moreover, this paradigm can be scaled to learning directly on real-world robots, using occasional, asynchronous feedback from human supervisors.

Social robots are robots that are designed specifically to interact with their human users [14] for example by using spoken dialogue. For social robots, the interaction with humans plays a crucial role [7, 27], for example in the context of elderly care [15] or education [9]. Robots that use speech as a main mode of interaction do not only need to understand the user's utterances, but also need to select appropriate responses given the context. Dialogue management (DM), according to Traum and Larsson [88], is the part of a dialogue system that performs four key functions: 1) it maintains and updates the context of the dialogue, 2) it includes the context of the utterance for interpretation of input, 3) it selects the timing and content of the next utterance, and 4) it coordinates with (non-)dialogue modules. In spoken dialogue systems, the dialogue manager receives its input from a natural language understanding (NLU) module and forwards its results to a natural language generation (NLG) module, which then generates the output (see Figure 1). In contrast to general DM, DM in human-robot interaction (HRI) has to also consider and manage the complexity added by social robots (see Figure 1). The concentric circles of the figure describe decisions that have to be made when designing a dialogue manager for human-robot interaction. From each circle, one or more options can be chosen and combined with each other.

Music recommendation systems have emerged as a vital component to enhance user experience and satisfaction for the music streaming services, which dominates music consumption. The key challenge in improving these recommender systems lies in comprehending the complexity of music data, specifically for the underpinning music genre classification. The limitations of manual genre classification have highlighted the need for a more advanced system, namely the Automatic Music Genre Classification (AMGC) system. While traditional machine learning techniques have shown potential in genre classification, they heavily rely on manually engineered features and feature selection, failing to capture the full complexity of music data. On the other hand, deep learning classification architectures like the traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are effective in capturing the spatial hierarchies but struggle to capture the temporal dynamics inherent in music data. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel approach using visual spectrograms as input, and propose a hybrid model that combines the strength of the Residual neural Network (ResNet) and the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). This model is designed to provide a more comprehensive analysis of music data, offering the potential to improve the music recommender systems through achieving a more comprehensive analysis of music data and hence potentially more accurate genre classification.

Extracting noisy or incorrectly labeled samples from a labeled dataset with hard/difficult samples is an important yet under-explored topic. Two general and often independent lines of work exist, one focuses on addressing noisy labels, and another deals with hard samples. However, when both types of data are present, most existing methods treat them equally, which results in a decline in the overall performance of the model. In this paper, we first design various synthetic datasets with custom hardness and noisiness levels for different samples. Our proposed systematic empirical study enables us to better understand the similarities and more importantly the differences between hard-to-learn samples and incorrectly-labeled samples. These controlled experiments pave the way for the development of methods that distinguish between hard and noisy samples. Through our study, we introduce a simple yet effective metric that filters out noisy-labeled samples while keeping the hard samples. We study various data partitioning methods in the presence of label noise and observe that filtering out noisy samples from hard samples with this proposed metric results in the best datasets as evidenced by the high test accuracy achieved after models are trained on the filtered datasets. We demonstrate this for both our created synthetic datasets and for datasets with real-world label noise. Furthermore, our proposed data partitioning method significantly outperforms other methods when employed within a semi-supervised learning framework.

We present a new framework called KorraAI for conceiving and building embodied conversational agents (ECAs). Our framework models ECAs' behavior considering contextual information, for example, about environment and interaction time, and uncertain information provided by the human interaction partner. Moreover, agents built with KorraAI can show proactive behavior, as they can initiate interactions with human partners. For these purposes, KorraAI exploits probabilistic programming. Probabilistic models in KorraAI are used to model its behavior and interactions with the user. They enable adaptation to the user's preferences and a certain degree of indeterminism in the ECAs to achieve more natural behavior. Human-like internal states, such as moods, preferences, and emotions (e.g., surprise), can be modeled in KorraAI with distributions and Bayesian networks. These models can evolve over time, even without interaction with the user. ECA models are implemented as plugins and share a common interface. This enables ECA designers to focus more on the character they are modeling and less on the technical details, as well as to store and exchange ECA models. Several applications of KorraAI ECAs are possible, such as virtual sales agents, customer service agents, virtual companions, entertainers, or tutors.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative training among different parties. Unlike traditional centralized learning, which requires collecting data from each party, FL allows clients to share privacy-preserving information without exposing private datasets. This approach not only guarantees enhanced privacy protection but also facilitates more efficient and secure collaboration among multiple participants. Therefore, FL has gained considerable attention from researchers, promoting numerous surveys to summarize the related works. However, the majority of these surveys concentrate on methods sharing model parameters during the training process, while overlooking the potential of sharing other forms of local information. In this paper, we present a systematic survey from a new perspective, i.e., what to share in FL, with an emphasis on the model utility, privacy leakage, and communication efficiency. This survey differs from previous ones due to four distinct contributions. First, we present a new taxonomy of FL methods in terms of the sharing methods, which includes three categories of shared information: model sharing, synthetic data sharing, and knowledge sharing. Second, we analyze the vulnerability of different sharing methods to privacy attacks and review the defense mechanisms that provide certain privacy guarantees. Third, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance and communication overhead of various sharing methods in FL. Besides, we assess the potential privacy leakage through model inversion and membership inference attacks, while comparing the effectiveness of various defense approaches. Finally, we discuss potential deficiencies in current methods and outline future directions for improvement.

Yet, these considerations are often overlooked, leading to issues of bias, discrimination, and perceived untrustworthiness. In response, we conducted a Systematic Review to unearth challenges and solutions relating to D&I in AI. Our rigorous search yielded 48 research articles published between 2017 and 2022. Open coding of these papers revealed 55 unique challenges and 33 solutions for D&I in AI, as well as 24 unique challenges and 23 solutions for enhancing such practices using AI. This study, by offering a deeper understanding of these issues, will enlighten researchers and practitioners seeking to integrate these principles into future AI systems.