Fiber jamming modules (FJMs) offer flexibility and quick stiffness variation, making them suitable for follow-the-leader (FTL) motions in continuum robots, which is ideal for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, their potential has not been fully exploited, particularly in designing and manufacturing small-sized FJMs with high stiffness variation. Although existing research has focused on factors like fiber materials and geometry to maximize stiffness variation, the results often do not apply to FJMs for MIS due to size constraints. Meanwhile, other factors such as fiber number and packing density, less significant to large FJMs but critical to small-sized FJMs, have received insufficient investigation regarding their impact on the stiffness variation for FTL deployment. In this paper, we design and fabricate FJMs with a diameter of 4mm. Through theoretical and experimental analysis, we find that fiber number and packing density significantly affect both absolute stiffness and stiffness variation. Our experiments confirm the feasibility of using FJMs in a medical FTL robot design. The optimal configuration is a 4mm FJM with 0.4mm fibers at a 56% packing density, achieving up to 3400% stiffness variation. A video demonstration of a prototype robot using the suggested parameters for achieving FTL motions can be found at https://youtu.be/7pI5U0z7kcE.

Vision-language pretraining (VLP) with transformers has demonstrated exceptional performance across numerous multimodal tasks. However, the adversarial robustness of these models has not been thoroughly investigated. Existing multimodal attack methods have largely overlooked cross-modal interactions between visual and textual modalities, particularly in the context of cross-attention mechanisms. In this paper, we study the adversarial vulnerability of recent VLP transformers and design a novel Joint Multimodal Transformer Feature Attack (JMTFA) that concurrently introduces adversarial perturbations in both visual and textual modalities under white-box settings. JMTFA strategically targets attention relevance scores to disrupt important features within each modality, generating adversarial samples by fusing perturbations and leading to erroneous model predictions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach achieves high attack success rates on vision-language understanding and reasoning downstream tasks compared to existing baselines. Notably, our findings reveal that the textual modality significantly influences the complex fusion processes within VLP transformers. Moreover, we observe no apparent relationship between model size and adversarial robustness under our proposed attacks. These insights emphasize a new dimension of adversarial robustness and underscore potential risks in the reliable deployment of multimodal AI systems.

One of the significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with noise is estimating latent states from observations. Causality provides rigorous theoretical support for ensuring that the underlying states can be uniquely recovered through identifiability. Consequently, some existing work focuses on establishing identifiability from a causal perspective to aid in the design of algorithms. However, these results are often derived from a purely causal viewpoint, which may overlook the specific RL context. We revisit this research line and find that incorporating RL-specific context can reduce unnecessary assumptions in previous identifiability analyses for latent states. More importantly, removing these assumptions allows algorithm design to go beyond the earlier boundaries constrained by them. Leveraging these insights, we propose a novel approach for general partially observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) by replacing the complicated structural constraints in previous methods with two simple constraints for transition and reward preservation. With the two constraints, the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to disentangle state and noise that is faithful to the underlying dynamics. Empirical evidence from extensive benchmark control tasks demonstrates the superiority of our approach over existing counterparts in effectively disentangling state belief from noise.

This paper presents the VLEIBot^* (Very Little Eel-Inspired roBot), a 45-mg/23-mm^3 microrobotic swimmer that is propelled by a bioinspired anguilliform propulsor. The propulsor is excited by a single 6-mg high-work-density (HWD) microactuator and undulates periodically due to wave propagation phenomena generated by fluid-structure interaction (FSI) during swimming. The microactuator is composed of a carbon-fiber beam, which functions as a leaf spring, and shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires, which deform cyclically when excited periodically using Joule heating. The VLEIBot can swim at speeds as high as 15.1mm * s^{-1} (0.33 Bl * s^{-1}}) when driven with a heuristically-optimized propulsor. To improve maneuverability, we evolved the VLEIBot design into the 90-mg/47-mm^3 VLEIBot^+, which is driven by two propulsors and fully controllable in the two-dimensional (2D) space. The VLEIBot^+ can swim at speeds as high as 16.1mm * s^{-1} (0.35 Bl * s^{-1}), when driven with heuristically-optimized propulsors, and achieves turning rates as high as 0.28 rad * s^{-1}, when tracking path references. The measured root-mean-square (RMS) values of the tracking errors are as low as 4 mm.

Theoretical studies on the representation power of GNNs have been centered around understanding the equivalence of GNNs, using WL-Tests for detecting graph isomorphism. In this paper, we argue that such equivalence ignores the accompanying optimization issues and does not provide a holistic view of the GNN learning process. We illustrate these gaps between representation and optimization with examples and experiments. We also explore the existence of an implicit inductive bias (e.g. fully connected networks prefer to learn low frequency functions in their input space) in GNNs, in the context of graph classification tasks. We further prove theoretically that the message-passing layers in the graph, have a tendency to search for either discriminative subgraphs, or a collection of discriminative nodes dispersed across the graph, depending on the different global pooling layers used. We empirically verify this bias through experiments over real-world and synthetic datasets. Finally, we show how our work can help in incorporating domain knowledge via attention based architectures, and can evince their capability to discriminate coherent subgraphs.

Research on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is being conducted in various sectors, from analyzing building materials and components to comprehensive evaluations of entire structures. However, reviews of the existing literature have been unable to provide a comprehensive overview of research in this field, leaving scholars without a definitive guideline for future investigations. This paper aims to fill this gap, mapping more than twenty years of research. Using an innovative methodology that combines social network analysis and text mining, the paper examined 8024 scientific abstracts. The authors identified seven key thematic groups, building and sustainability clusters (BSCs). To assess their significance in the broader discourse on building and sustainability, the semantic brand score (SBS) indicator was applied. Additionally, building and sustainability trends were tracked, focusing on the LCA concept. The major research topics mainly relate to building materials and energy efficiency. In addition to presenting an innovative approach to reviewing extensive literature domains, the article also provides insights into emerging and underdeveloped themes, outlining crucial future research directions.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems struggle when translating to and from low-resource languages, which lack large-scale data corpora for models to use for training. As manual data curation is expensive and time-consuming, we propose utilizing a generative-adversarial network (GAN) to augment low-resource language data. When training on a very small amount of language data (under 20,000 sentences) in a simulated low-resource setting, our model shows potential at data augmentation, generating monolingual language data with sentences such as "ask me that healthy lunch im cooking up," and "my grandfather work harder than your grandfather before." Our novel data augmentation approach takes the first step in investigating the capability of GANs in low-resource NMT, and our results suggest that there is promise for future extension of GANs to low-resource NMT.

This paper addresses the pressing need for an accurate solar energy prediction model, which is crucial for efficient grid integration. We explore the influence of the Air Quality Index and weather features on solar energy generation, employing advanced Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. Our methodology uses time series modeling and makes novel use of power transform normalization and zero-inflated modeling. Various Machine Learning algorithms and Conv2D Long Short-Term Memory model based Deep Learning models are applied to these transformations for precise predictions. Results underscore the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating enhanced prediction accuracy with Air Quality Index and weather features. We achieved a 0.9691 $R^2$ Score, 0.18 MAE, 0.10 RMSE with Conv2D Long Short-Term Memory model, showcasing the power transform technique's innovation in enhancing time series forecasting for solar energy generation. Such results help our research contribute valuable insights to the synergy between Air Quality Index, weather features, and Deep Learning techniques for solar energy prediction.

This paper investigates the interactions between multiple agents within Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of programming and coding tasks. We utilize the AutoGen framework to facilitate communication among agents, evaluating different configurations based on the success rates from 40 random runs for each setup. The study focuses on developing a flexible automation framework for applying the Finite Element Method (FEM) to solve linear elastic problems. Our findings emphasize the importance of optimizing agent roles and clearly defining their responsibilities, rather than merely increasing the number of agents. Effective collaboration among agents is shown to be crucial for addressing general FEM challenges. This research demonstrates the potential of LLM multi-agent systems to enhance computational automation in simulation methodologies, paving the way for future advancements in engineering and artificial intelligence.

A keyword spotting (KWS) engine that is continuously running on device is exposed to various speech signals that are usually unseen before. It is a challenging problem to build a small-footprint and high-performing KWS model with robustness under different acoustic environments. In this paper, we explore how to effectively apply adversarial examples to improve KWS robustness. We propose datasource-aware disentangled learning with adversarial examples to reduce the mismatch between the original and adversarial data as well as the mismatch across original training datasources. The KWS model architecture is based on depth-wise separable convolution and a simple attention module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed learning strategy improves false reject rate by $40.31%$ at $1%$ false accept rate on the internal dataset, compared to the strongest baseline without using adversarial examples. Our best-performing system achieves $98.06%$ accuracy on the Google Speech Commands V1 dataset.