Same-Day Delivery (SDD) services aim to maximize the fulfillment of online orders while minimizing delivery delays but are beset by operational uncertainties such as those in order volumes and courier planning. Our work aims to enhance the operational efficiency of SDD by focusing on the ultra-fast Order Dispatching Problem (ODP), which involves matching and dispatching orders to couriers within a centralized warehouse setting, and completing the delivery within a strict timeline (e.g., within minutes). We introduce important extensions to ultra-fast ODP such as order batching and explicit courier assignments to provide a more realistic representation of dispatching operations and improve delivery efficiency. As a solution method, we primarily focus on NeurADP, a methodology that combines Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), and our work constitutes the first application of NeurADP outside of the ride-pool matching problem. NeurADP is particularly suitable for ultra-fast ODP as it addresses complex one-to-many matching and routing intricacies through a neural network-based VFA that captures high-dimensional problem dynamics without requiring manual feature engineering as in generic ADP methods. We test our proposed approach using four distinct realistic datasets tailored for ODP and compare the performance of NeurADP against myopic and DRL baselines by also making use of non-trivial bounds to assess the quality of the policies. Our numerical results indicate that the inclusion of order batching and courier queues enhances the efficiency of delivery operations and that NeurADP significantly outperforms other methods. Detailed sensitivity analysis with important parameters confirms the robustness of NeurADP under different scenarios, including variations in courier numbers, spatial setup, vehicle capacity, and permitted delay time.

This survey paper presents a brief overview of recent research on graph data augmentation and few-shot learning. It covers various techniques for graph data augmentation, including node and edge perturbation, graph coarsening, and graph generation, as well as the latest developments in few-shot learning, such as meta-learning and model-agnostic meta-learning. The paper explores these areas in depth and delves into further sub classifications. Rule based approaches and learning based approaches are surveyed under graph augmentation techniques. Few-Shot Learning on graphs is also studied in terms of metric learning techniques and optimization-based techniques. In all, this paper provides an extensive array of techniques that can be employed in solving graph processing problems faced in low-data scenarios.

In this work, we address the challenging and emergent problem of novel object detection (NOD), focusing on the accurate detection of both known and novel object categories during inference. Traditional object detection algorithms are inherently closed-set, limiting their capability to handle NOD. We present a novel approach to transform existing closed-set detectors into open-set detectors. This transformation is achieved by leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained foundational models, specifically CLIP and SAM, through our cooperative mechanism. Furthermore, by integrating this mechanism with state-of-the-art open-set detectors such as GDINO, we establish new benchmarks in object detection performance. Our method achieves 17.42 mAP in novel object detection and 42.08 mAP for known objects on the challenging LVIS dataset. Adapting our approach to the COCO OVD split, we surpass the current state-of-the-art by a margin of 7.2 $ \text{AP}_{50} $ for novel classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/rohit901/cooperative-foundational-models .

The launch of ChatGPT has garnered global attention, marking a significant milestone in the field of Generative Artificial Intelligence. While Generative AI has been in effect for the past decade, the introduction of ChatGPT has ignited a new wave of research and innovation in the AI domain. This surge in interest has led to the development and release of numerous cutting-edge tools, such as Bard, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Make-A-Video, Runway ML, and Jukebox, among others. These tools exhibit remarkable capabilities, encompassing tasks ranging from text generation and music composition, image creation, video production, code generation, and even scientific work. They are built upon various state-of-the-art models, including Stable Diffusion, transformer models like GPT-3 (recent GPT-4), variational autoencoders, and generative adversarial networks. This advancement in Generative AI presents a wealth of exciting opportunities and, simultaneously, unprecedented challenges. Throughout this paper, we have explored these state-of-the-art models, the diverse array of tasks they can accomplish, the challenges they pose, and the promising future of Generative Artificial Intelligence.

Geometric navigation is nowadays a well-established field of robotics and the research focus is shifting towards higher-level scene understanding, such as Semantic Mapping. When a robot needs to interact with its environment, it must be able to comprehend the contextual information of its surroundings. This work focuses on classifying and localising objects within a map, which is under construction (SLAM) or already built. To further explore this direction, we propose a framework that can autonomously detect and localize predefined objects in a known environment using a multi-modal sensor fusion approach (combining RGB and depth data from an RGB-D camera and a lidar). The framework consists of three key elements: understanding the environment through RGB data, estimating depth through multi-modal sensor fusion, and managing artifacts (i.e., filtering and stabilizing measurements). The experiments show that the proposed framework can accurately detect 98% of the objects in the real sample environment, without post-processing, while 85% and 80% of the objects were mapped using the single RGBD camera or RGB + lidar setup respectively. The comparison with single-sensor (camera or lidar) experiments is performed to show that sensor fusion allows the robot to accurately detect near and far obstacles, which would have been noisy or imprecise in a purely visual or laser-based approach.

People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require similar skills in pragmatics: relying on various types of context -- from shared linguistic goals and conventions, to the visual and embodied world -- to use language effectively. We survey existing grounded settings and pragmatic modeling approaches and analyze how the task goals, environmental contexts, and communicative affordances in each work enrich linguistic meaning. We present recommendations for future grounded task design to naturally elicit pragmatic phenomena, and suggest directions that focus on a broader range of communicative contexts and affordances.

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), where smartphones, built-in systems, wireless sensors, and nearly every smart device connect through local networks or the internet, billions of smart things communicate with each other and generate vast amounts of time-series data. As IoT time-series data is high-dimensional and high-frequency, time-series classification or regression has been a challenging issue in IoT. Recently, deep learning algorithms have demonstrated superior performance results in time-series data classification in many smart and intelligent IoT applications. However, it is hard to explore the hidden dynamic patterns and trends in time-series. Recent studies show that transforming IoT data into images improves the performance of the learning model. In this paper, we present a review of these studies which use image transformation/encoding techniques in IoT domain. We examine the studies according to their encoding techniques, data types, and application areas. Lastly, we emphasize the challenges and future dimensions of image transformation.

Autonomous driving (AD) systems are often built and tested in a modular fashion, where the performance of different modules is measured using task-specific metrics. These metrics should be chosen so as to capture the downstream impact of each module and the performance of the system as a whole. For example, high perception quality should enable prediction and planning to be performed safely. Even though this is true in general, we show here that it is possible to construct planner inputs that score very highly on various perception quality metrics but still lead to planning failures. In an analogy to adversarial attacks on image classifiers, we call such inputs \textbf{adversarial perception errors} and show they can be systematically constructed using a simple boundary-attack algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm by finding attacks for two different black-box planners in several urban and highway driving scenarios using the CARLA simulator. Finally, we analyse the properties of these attacks and show that they are isolated in the input space of the planner, and discuss their implications for AD system deployment and testing.

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) play an essential role in summarising, synthesising and validating scientific evidence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques to automate the identification of relevant studies for SLRs. However, the lack of standardised evaluation datasets makes comparing the performance of such automated literature screening systems difficult. In this paper, we analyse the citation screening evaluation datasets, revealing that many of the available datasets are either too small, suffer from data leakage or have limited applicability to systems treating automated literature screening as a classification task, as opposed to, for example, a retrieval or question-answering task. To address these challenges, we introduce CSMeD, a meta-dataset consolidating nine publicly released collections, providing unified access to 325 SLRs from the fields of medicine and computer science. CSMeD serves as a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating the performance of automated citation screening models. Additionally, we introduce CSMeD-FT, a new dataset designed explicitly for evaluating the full text publication screening task. To demonstrate the utility of CSMeD, we conduct experiments and establish baselines on new datasets.

Large language models (LLMs), designed to provide helpful and safe responses, often rely on alignment techniques to align with user intent and social guidelines. Unfortunately, this alignment can be exploited by malicious actors seeking to manipulate an LLM's outputs for unintended purposes. In this paper we introduce a novel approach that employs a genetic algorithm (GA) to manipulate LLMs when model architecture and parameters are inaccessible. The GA attack works by optimizing a universal adversarial prompt that--when combined with a user's query--disrupts the attacked model's alignment, resulting in unintended and potentially harmful outputs. Our novel approach systematically reveals a model's limitations and vulnerabilities by uncovering instances where its responses deviate from expected behavior. Through extensive experiments we demonstrate the efficacy of our technique, thus contributing to the ongoing discussion on responsible AI development by providing a diagnostic tool for evaluating and enhancing alignment of LLMs with human intent. To our knowledge this is the first automated universal black box jailbreak attack. Large language models (LLMs) are generally trained using extensive text datasets gathered from the internet, which have been shown to encompass a considerable volume of objectionable material. As a result, contemporary LLM developers have adopted the practice of "aligning" (Wang et al., 2023) such models through a variety of fine-tuning mechanisms. Various techniques are employed for this purpose (Ouyang et al., 2022; Glaese et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022) with the overall objective being that of preventing LLMs from producing harmful or objectionable outputs in response to user queries. At least superficially these endeavors appear to be successful: public chatbots refrain from generating overtly inappropriate content when directly questioned.