Human activity recognition (HAR) is a rapidly growing field that utilizes smart devices, sensors, and algorithms to automatically classify and identify the actions of individuals within a given environment. These systems have a wide range of applications, including assisting with caring tasks, increasing security, and improving energy efficiency. However, there are several challenges that must be addressed in order to effectively utilize HAR systems in multi-resident environments. One of the key challenges is accurately associating sensor observations with the identities of the individuals involved, which can be particularly difficult when residents are engaging in complex and collaborative activities. This paper provides a brief overview of the design and implementation of HAR systems, including a summary of the various data collection devices and approaches used for human activity identification. It also reviews previous research on the use of these systems in multi-resident environments and offers conclusions on the current state of the art in the field.

Mobility, power, and price points often dictate that robots do not have sufficient computing power on board to run contemporary robot algorithms at desired rates. Cloud computing providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure offer immense computing power and increasingly low latency on demand, but tapping into that power from a robot is non-trivial. We present FogROS2, an open-source platform to facilitate cloud and fog robotics that is included in the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) distribution. FogROS2 is distinct from its predecessor FogROS1 in 9 ways, including lower latency, overhead, and startup times; improved usability, and additional automation, such as region and computer type selection. Additionally, FogROS2 gains performance, timing, and additional improvements associated with ROS 2. In common robot applications, FogROS2 reduces SLAM latency by 50 %, reduces grasp planning time from 14 s to 1.2 s, and speeds up motion planning 45x. When compared to FogROS1, FogROS2 reduces network utilization by up to 3.8x, improves startup time by 63 %, and network round-trip latency by 97 % for images using video compression. The source code, examples, and documentation for FogROS2 are available at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/FogROS2, and is available through the official ROS 2 repository at https://index.ros.org/p/fogros2/.

Automated medical coding, an essential task for healthcare operation and delivery, makes unstructured data manageable by predicting medical codes from clinical documents. Recent advances in deep learning and natural language processing have been widely applied to this task. However, deep learning-based medical coding lacks a unified view of the design of neural network architectures. This review proposes a unified framework to provide a general understanding of the building blocks of medical coding models and summarizes recent advanced models under the proposed framework. Our unified framework decomposes medical coding into four main components, i.e., encoder modules for text feature extraction, mechanisms for building deep encoder architectures, decoder modules for transforming hidden representations into medical codes, and the usage of auxiliary information. Finally, we introduce the benchmarks and real-world usage and discuss key research challenges and future directions.

In recent years, deep learning has achieved remarkable success in various fields such as image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition. The effectiveness of deep learning largely depends on the optimization methods used to train deep neural networks. In this paper, we provide an overview of first-order optimization methods such as Stochastic Gradient Descent, Adagrad, Adadelta, and RMSprop, as well as recent momentum-based and adaptive gradient methods such as Nesterov accelerated gradient, Adam, Nadam, AdaMax, and AMSGrad. We also discuss the challenges associated with optimization in deep learning and explore techniques for addressing these challenges, including weight initialization, batch normalization, and layer normalization. Finally, we provide recommendations for selecting optimization methods for different deep learning tasks and datasets. This paper serves as a comprehensive guide to optimization methods in deep learning and can be used as a reference for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Neural models for abstractive summarization tend to generate output that is fluent and well-formed but lacks semantic faithfulness, or factuality, with respect to the input documents. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff between abstractiveness and factuality of generated summaries across multiple datasets and models, using extensive human evaluations of factuality. In our analysis, we visualize the rates of change in factuality as we gradually increase abstractiveness using a decoding constraint, and we observe that, while increased abstractiveness generally leads to a drop in factuality, the rate of factuality decay depends on factors such as the data that the system was trained on. We introduce two datasets with human factuality judgements; one containing 10.2k generated summaries with systematically varied degrees of abstractiveness; the other containing 4.2k summaries from five different summarization models. We propose new factuality metrics that adjust for the degree of abstractiveness, and we use them to compare the abstractiveness-adjusted factuality of previous summarization works, providing baselines for future work.

Reinforcement Learning(RL) has achieved tremendous development in recent years, but still faces significant obstacles in addressing complex real-life problems due to the issues of poor system generalization, low sample efficiency as well as safety and interpretability concerns. The core reason underlying such dilemmas can be attributed to the fact that most of the work has focused on the computational aspect of value functions or policies using a representational model to describe atomic components of rewards, states and actions etc, thus neglecting the rich high-level declarative domain knowledge of facts, relations and rules that can be either provided a priori or acquired through reasoning over time. Recently, there has been a rapidly growing interest in the use of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning(KRR) methods, usually using logical languages, to enable more abstract representation and efficient learning in RL. In this survey, we provide a preliminary overview on these endeavors that leverage the strengths of KRR to help solving various problems in RL, and discuss the challenging open problems and possible directions for future work in this area.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven their capabilities in many areas in the past years, such as robotics, or automated driving, enabling technological breakthroughs. DNNs play a significant role in environment perception for the challenging application of automated driving and are employed for tasks such as detection, semantic segmentation, and sensor fusion. Despite this progress and tremendous research efforts, several issues still need to be addressed that limit the applicability of DNNs in automated driving. The bad generalization of DNNs to new, unseen domains is a major problem on the way to a safe, large-scale application, because manual annotation of new domains is costly, particularly for semantic segmentation. For this reason, methods are required to adapt DNNs to new domains without labeling effort. The task, which these methods aim to solve is termed unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). While several different domain shifts can challenge DNNs, the shift between synthetic and real data is of particular importance for automated driving, as it allows the use of simulation environments for DNN training. In this work, we present an overview of the current state of the art in this field of research. We categorize and explain the different approaches for UDA. The number of considered publications is larger than any other survey on this topic. The scope of this survey goes far beyond the description of the UDA state-of-the-art. Based on our large data and knowledge base, we present a quantitative comparison of the approaches and use the observations to point out the latest trends in this field. In the following, we conduct a critical analysis of the state-of-the-art and highlight promising future research directions. With this survey, we aim to facilitate UDA research further and encourage scientists to exploit novel research directions to generalize DNNs better.

Neural networks have been successfully employed in various domains such as classification, regression and clustering, etc. Generally, the back propagation (BP) based iterative approaches are used to train the neural networks, however, it results in the issues of local minima, sensitivity to learning rate and slow convergence. To overcome these issues, randomization based neural networks such as random vector functional link (RVFL) network have been proposed. RVFL model has several characteristics such as fast training speed, direct links, simple architecture, and universal approximation capability, that make it a viable randomized neural network. This article presents the first comprehensive review of the evolution of RVFL model, which can serve as the extensive summary for the beginners as well as practitioners. We discuss the shallow RVFLs, ensemble RVFLs, deep RVFLs and ensemble deep RVFL models. The variations, improvements and applications of RVFL models are discussed in detail. Moreover, we discuss the different hyperparameter optimization techniques followed in the literature to improve the generalization performance of the RVFL model. Finally, we give potential future research directions/opportunities that can inspire the researchers to improve the RVFL's architecture and learning algorithm further.

The discriminability of feature representation is the key to open-set face recognition. Previous methods rely on the learnable weights of the classification layer that represent the identities. However, the evaluation process learns no identity representation and drops the classifier from training. This inconsistency could confuse the feature encoder in understanding the evaluation goal and hinder the effect of identity-based methods. To alleviate the above problem, we propose a novel approach namely Contrastive Regularization for Face recognition (CoReFace) to apply image-level regularization in feature representation learning. Specifically, we employ sample-guided contrastive learning to regularize the training with the image-image relationship directly, which is consistent with the evaluation process. To integrate contrastive learning into face recognition, we augment embeddings instead of images to avoid the image quality degradation. Then, we propose a novel contrastive loss for the representation distribution by incorporating an adaptive margin and a supervised contrastive mask to generate steady loss values and avoid the collision with the classification supervision signal. Finally, we discover and solve the semantically repetitive signal problem in contrastive learning by exploring new pair coupling protocols. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our CoReFace which is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Smart grid is the modern two way mechanism combining the power grid, control center, smart metering facility, energy routing and customer demand response services. The system being complicated, security vulnerabilities are paramount for the sound operation and process continuation. Since smart grid connects with the end user to the energy providers, these two parties can interact with each other within the whole energy management work flow. In this regard, game theory provides effective insights in the analysis of security measures for smart grid. The mentioned parties will be the players in the game model to provide a solution for the various threats to the grid aspects. In this work, a brief review has presented with the existing approaches to the threat models for divergent sectors of the smart grid. The solution approaches to these threats are based on the game theoretical approaches that connect the attackers and defenders in the scenarios.