This article explores human-like movement from a fresh perspective on motion planning. We analyze the coordinated and compliant movement mechanisms of the human body from the perspective of biomechanics. Based on these mechanisms, we propose an optimal control framework that integrates compliant control dynamics, optimizing robotic arm motion through a response time matrix. This matrix sets the timing parameters for joint movements, turning the system into a time-parameterized optimal control problem. The model focuses on the interaction between active and passive joints under external disturbances, improving adaptability and compliance. This method achieves optimal trajectory generation and balances precision and compliance. Experimental results on both a manipulator and a humanoid robot validate the approach.

This paper introduces a model-agnostic approach designed to enhance uncertainty estimation in the predictive modeling of soil properties, a crucial factor for advancing pedometrics and the practice of digital soil mapping. For addressing the typical challenge of data scarcity in soil studies, we present an improved technique for uncertainty estimation. This method is based on the transformation of regression tasks into classification problems, which not only allows for the production of reliable uncertainty estimates but also enables the application of established machine learning algorithms with competitive performance that have not yet been utilized in pedometrics. Empirical results from datasets collected from two German agricultural fields showcase the practical application of the proposed methodology. Our results and findings suggest that the proposed approach has the potential to provide better uncertainty estimation than the models commonly used in pedometrics.

We propose a new benchmark to measure a language model's linguistic reasoning skills without relying on pre-existing language-specific knowledge. The test covers 894 questions grouped in 160 problems across 75 (mostly) extremely low-resource languages, extracted from the International Linguistic Olympiad corpus. To attain high accuracy on this benchmark, models don't need previous knowledge of the tested language, as all the information needed to solve the linguistic puzzle is presented in the context. We find that, while all analyzed models rank below 25% accuracy, there is a significant gap between open and closed models, with the best-performing proprietary model at 24.05% and the best-performing open model at 8.84%.

Identification of suspects based on partial and smudged fingerprints, commonly referred to as fingermarks or latent fingerprints, presents a significant challenge in the field of fingerprint recognition. Although fixed-length embeddings have shown effectiveness in recognising rolled and slap fingerprints, the methods for matching latent fingerprints have primarily centred around local minutiae-based embeddings, failing to fully exploit global representations for matching purposes. Consequently, enhancing latent fingerprints becomes critical to ensuring robust identification for forensic investigations. Current approaches often prioritise restoring ridge patterns, overlooking the fine-macroeconomic details crucial for accurate fingerprint recognition. To address this, we propose a novel approach that uses generative adversary networks (GANs) to redefine Latent Fingerprint Enhancement (LFE) through a structured approach to fingerprint generation. By directly optimising the minutiae information during the generation process, the model produces enhanced latent fingerprints that exhibit exceptional fidelity to ground-truth instances. This leads to a significant improvement in identification performance. Our framework integrates minutiae locations and orientation fields, ensuring the preservation of both local and structural fingerprint features. Extensive evaluations conducted on two publicly available datasets demonstrate our method's dominance over existing state-of-the-art techniques, highlighting its potential to significantly enhance latent fingerprint recognition accuracy in forensic applications.

While there has been a lot of research recently on robots in household environments, at the present time, most robots in existence can be found on shop floors, and most interactions between humans and robots happen there. ``Collaborative robots'' (cobots) designed to work alongside humans on assembly lines traditionally require expert programming, limiting ability to make changes, or manual guidance, limiting expressivity of the resulting programs. To address these limitations, we explore using Large Language Models (LLMs), and in particular, their abilities of doing in-context learning, for conversational code generation. As a first step, we define RATS, the ``Repetitive Assembly Task'', a 2D building task designed to lay the foundation for simulating industry assembly scenarios. In this task, a `programmer' instructs a cobot, using natural language, on how a certain assembly is to be built; that is, the programmer induces a program, through natural language. We create a dataset that pairs target structures with various example instructions (human-authored, template-based, and model-generated) and example code. With this, we systematically evaluate the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs for synthesising this kind of code, given in-context examples. Evaluating in a simulated environment, we find that LLMs are capable of generating accurate `first order code' (instruction sequences), but have problems producing `higher-order code' (abstractions such as functions, or use of loops).

The problem of identifying to which of a given set of classes objects belong is ubiquitous, occurring in many research domains and application areas, including medical diagnosis, financial decision making, online commerce, and national security. But such assignments are rarely completely perfect, and classification errors occur. This means it is necessary to compare classification methods and algorithms to decide which is ``best'' for any particular problem. However, just as there are many different classification methods, so there are many different ways of measuring their performance. It is thus vital to choose a measure of performance which matches the aims of the research or application. This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the relative merits of different performance measures. Its particular focus is the critical importance of matching the properties of the measure to the aims for which the classification is being made.

There has been much recent interest in designing symmetry-aware neural networks (NNs) exhibiting relaxed equivariance. Such NNs aim to interpolate between being exactly equivariant and being fully flexible, affording consistent performance benefits. In a separate line of work, certain structured parameter matrices -- those with displacement structure, characterized by low displacement rank (LDR) -- have been used to design small-footprint NNs. Displacement structure enables fast function and gradient evaluation, but permits accurate approximations via compression primarily to classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work, we propose a general framework -- based on a novel construction of symmetry-based structured matrices -- to build approximately equivariant NNs with significantly reduced parameter counts. Our framework integrates the two aforementioned lines of work via the use of so-called Group Matrices (GMs), a forgotten precursor to the modern notion of regular representations of finite groups. GMs allow the design of structured matrices -- resembling LDR matrices -- which generalize the linear operations of a classical CNN from cyclic groups to general finite groups and their homogeneous spaces. We show that GMs can be employed to extend all the elementary operations of CNNs to general discrete groups. Further, the theory of structured matrices based on GMs provides a generalization of LDR theory focussed on matrices with cyclic structure, providing a tool for implementing approximate equivariance for discrete groups. We test GM-based architectures on a variety of tasks in the presence of relaxed symmetry. We report that our framework consistently performs competitively compared to approximately equivariant NNs, and other structured matrix-based compression frameworks, sometimes with a one or two orders of magnitude lower parameter count.

Molecular Foundation Models are emerging as powerful tools for accelerating molecular design, material science, and cheminformatics, leveraging transformer architectures to speed up the discovery of new materials and drugs while reducing the computational cost of traditional ab initio methods. However, current models are constrained by closed-vocabulary tokenizers that fail to capture the full diversity of molecular structures. In this work, we systematically evaluate thirteen chemistry-specific tokenizers for their coverage of the SMILES language, uncovering substantial gaps. Using N-gram language models, we accessed the impact of tokenizer choice on model performance and quantified the information loss of unknown tokens. We introduce two new tokenizers, smirk and smirk-gpe, which can represent the entirety of the OpenSMILES specification while avoiding the pitfalls of existing tokenizers. Our work highlights the importance of open-vocabulary modeling for molecular foundation models and the need for chemically diverse benchmarks for cheminformatics.

Two people have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a baby died in Stoke-on-Trent. Police and the ambulance service were called to Sherwin Road, Burslem, shortly after 09:00 BST on 27 August following the death of a baby boy. A woman, 26, and man, 25, were arrested on 30 August on suspicion of causing or allowing the death of a child. The pair, from Stoke-on-Trent, were further arrested on suspicion of murder on Tuesday, Staffordshire Police said. A spokesperson for the force said specialist officers were supporting the baby's family.

Abstract--Efficient satellite communications play an enormously important role in all of our daily lives. This includes the transmission of data for communication purposes, the operation of IoT applications or the provision of data for ground stations. More and more, AI-based methods are finding their way into these areas. This paper gives an overview of current research in the field of intelligent optimization of satellite communication. For this purpose, a text-mining based literature review was conducted and the identified papers were thematically clustered and analyzed. The identified clusters cover the main topics of routing, resource allocation and, load balancing. Through such a clustering of the literature in overarching topics, a structured analysis of the research papers was enabled, allowing the identification of latest technologies and approaches as well as research needs for intelligent optimization of satellite communication.