Spherical robots have garnered increasing interest 1 INTRODUCTION for their applications in exploration, tunnel inspection, Spherical rolling robots (SRRs) are a fascinating category and extraterrestrial missions. Diverse designs of robots characterized by their ability to move by have emerged, including barycentric configurations, rolling on themselves, owing to their unique spherical pendulum-based mechanisms, etc. However, beneath this seemingly simple concept wide spectrum of control strategies has been proposed, lies a plethora of sophisticated mechanisms and control ranging from traditional PID approaches to cutting-edge strategies that enable such motion. Our systematic review aims to comprehensively ago, NASA introduced the idea of "Beach-Ball" Robotic identify and categorize locomotion systems and Rovers Notably, the Rollo, designed the years 1996 to 2023. A meticulous search across five in 1996 at Finland's Helsinki University of Technology databases yielded a dataset of 3189 records. As a result [1], stands as one of the pioneering spherical of our exhaustive analysis, we identified a collection robots aimed at operating in hostile environments. Leveraging the inherent protective nature of their spherical shell renders insights garnered, we provide valuable recommendations them well-suited for challenging terrains, safeguarding for optimizing the design and control aspects of spherical sensitive mechatronics, including sensors and actuators. Furthermore, we illuminate [2], surveys of dusty construction sites, tracking key research directions that hold the potential to crop yields in muddy fields, and even missions in extreme unlock the full capabilities of spherical robots. Barycentric spherical robots (BSRs) manipulate reviews exist in the literature, they fail to encapsulate the the center of mass to achieve desired motion, exemplified latest advancements in this field. For instance, a comprehensive by wheeled mechanisms within a spherical shell examination of rolling in robotics [6] delves into or popular pendulum-driven spherical robots.

Alignment serves as an important step to steer large language models (LLMs) towards human preferences. In this paper, we explore contrastive post-training techniques for alignment by automatically constructing preference pairs from multiple models of varying strengths (e.g., InstructGPT, ChatGPT and GPT-4). We carefully compare the contrastive techniques of SLiC and DPO to SFT baselines and find that DPO provides a step-function improvement even after continueing SFT saturates. We also explore a data curriculum learning scheme for contrastive posttraining, which starts by learning from "easier" pairs and transitioning to "harder" ones, which further improves alignment. Finally, we scale up our experiments to train with more data and larger models like Orca. Remarkably, contrastive post-training further improves the performance of Orca, already a state-of-the-art instruction learning model tuned with GPT-4 outputs, to exceed that of ChatGPT. The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in a new era of natural language processing capabilities. These models, when scaled to billions of parameters and pretrained over trillions of text tokens, demonstrate unprecedented proficiency in a wide array of tasks (Brown et al., 2020; Chowdhery et al., 2022). Various post-training procedures like supervised instruction tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) fine-tune pretrained LLMs to better align with human expectations and preferences (Ouyang et al., 2022; OpenAI, 2023; Touvron et al., 2023a). This additional alignment procedure is crucial, because the pretraining objective of essentially predicting the next token in a text sequence is known to produce LLMs whose outputs are at times incorrect, irrelevant, or unsafe (Bai et al., 2022a). Traditionally, these post-training techniques rely on human preference annotations to inform an LLM which behaviors it ought to adopt in the scenario at hand. For instance, RLHF fits a reward model on these preference pairs, against which a LLM policy is then optimized (Ziegler et al., 2019; Bai et al., 2022a; Touvron et al., 2023b). However, such human feedback is expensive to obtain and often noisy (Stiennon et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022a). To align an LLM without human feedback, other methods such as Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) harvest preference signals via automatic feedback from another LLM (Lee et al., 2023; Bai et al., 2022b). However, studies have found AI feedback has a low agreement rate with humans (Perez et al., 2022; Casper et al., 2023b; Lee et al., 2021). Also, these methods suffer from the same drawbacks as RLHF, such as reward hacking (Skalse et al., 2022).

Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced code auto-completion systems, with a potential for substantial productivity enhancements for developers. However, current benchmarks mainly focus on single-file tasks, leaving an assessment gap for more complex, real-world, multi-file programming scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce RepoBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for evaluating repository-level code auto-completion systems. RepoBench supports both Python and Java and consists of three interconnected evaluation tasks: RepoBench-R (Retrieval), RepoBench-C (Code Completion), and RepoBench-P (Pipeline). Each task respectively measures the system's ability to retrieve the most relevant code snippets from other files as cross-file context, predict the next line of code with cross-file and in-file context, and handle complex tasks that require a combination of both retrieval and next-line prediction. RepoBench aims to facilitate a more complete comparison of performance and encouraging continuous improvement in auto-completion systems. RepoBench is publicly available at https://github.com/Leolty/repobench.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) showed great potential in improving the efficiency of parcel delivery applications in the coming smart cities era. Unfortunately, the trustworthy positioning and control algorithms of the UAV are significantly challenged in complex urban areas. For example, the ubiquitous global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning can be degraded by the signal reflections from surrounding high-rising buildings, leading to significantly increased positioning uncertainty. An additional challenge is introduced to the control algorithm due to the complex wind disturbances in urban canyons. Given the fact that the system positioning and control are highly correlated with each other, for example, the system dynamics of the control can largely help with the positioning, this paper proposed a joint positioning and control method (JPCM) based on factor graph optimization (FGO), which combines sensors' measurements and control intention. In particular, the positioning measurements are formulated as the factors in the factor graph model, such as the positioning from the GNSS. The model predictive control (MPC) is also formulated as the additional factors in the factor graph model. By solving the factor graph contributed by both the positioning factor and the MPC-based factors, the complementariness of positioning and control can be fully explored. To guarantee reliable system dynamic parameters, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed method using a simulated quadrotor system which showed significantly improved trajectory following performance. To benefit the research community, we open-source our code and make it available at https://github.com/RoboticsPolyu/IPN_MPC.

Photonic computing promises faster and more energy-efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference than traditional digital hardware. Advances in photonic computing can have profound impacts on applications such as autonomous driving and defect detection that depend on fast, accurate and energy efficient execution of image segmentation models. In this paper, we investigate image segmentation on photonic accelerators to explore: a) the types of image segmentation DNN architectures that are best suited for photonic accelerators, and b) the throughput and energy efficiency of executing the different image segmentation models on photonic accelerators, along with the trade-offs involved therein. Specifically, we demonstrate that certain segmentation models exhibit negligible loss in accuracy (compared to digital float32 models) when executed on photonic accelerators, and explore the empirical reasoning for their robustness. We also discuss techniques for recovering accuracy in the case of models that do not perform well. Further, we compare throughput (inferences-per-second) and energy consumption estimates for different image segmentation workloads on photonic accelerators. We discuss the challenges and potential optimizations that can help improve the application of photonic accelerators to such computer vision tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrating significant promise as an alternate strategy to facilitate analyses and optimizations of high-performance computing programs, circumventing the need for resource-intensive manual tool creation. In this paper, we explore a novel LLM-based data race detection approach combining prompting engineering and fine-tuning techniques. We create a dedicated dataset named DRB-ML, which is derived from DataRaceBench, with fine-grain labels showing the presence of data race pairs and their associated variables, line numbers, and read/write information. DRB-ML is then used to evaluate representative LLMs and fine-tune open-source ones. Our experiment shows that LLMs can be a viable approach to data race detection. However, they still cannot compete with traditional data race detection tools when we need detailed information about variable pairs causing data races.

Advocating for a sustainable, resilient and human-centric industry, the three pillars of Industry 5.0 call for an increased understanding of industrial processes and manufacturing systems, as well as their energy sustainability. One of the most fundamental elements of comprehension is knowing when the systems are operated, as this is key to locating energy intensive subsystems and operations. Such knowledge is often lacking in practice. Activation statuses can be recovered from sensor data though. Some non-intrusive sensors (accelerometers, current sensors, etc.) acquire mixed signals containing information about multiple actuators at once. Despite their low cost as regards the fleet of systems they monitor, additional signal processing is required to extract the individual activation sequences. To that end, sparse regression techniques can extract leading dynamics in sequential data. Notorious dictionary learning algorithms have proven effective in this regard. This paper considers different industrial settings in which the identification of binary subsystem activation sequences is sought. In this context, it is assumed that each sensor measures an extensive physical property, source signals are periodic, quasi-stationary and independent, albeit these signals may be correlated and their noise distribution is arbitrary. Existing methods either restrict these assumptions, e.g., by imposing orthogonality or noise characteristics, or lift them using additional assumptions, typically using nonlinear transforms.

Foundation models have excelled in various tasks but are often evaluated on general benchmarks. The adaptation of these models for specific domains, such as remote sensing imagery, remains an underexplored area. In remote sensing, precise building instance segmentation is vital for applications like urban planning. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) perform well, their generalization can be limited. For this aim, we present a novel approach to adapt foundation models to address existing models' generalization dropback. Among several models, our focus centers on the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a potent foundation model renowned for its prowess in class-agnostic image segmentation capabilities. We start by identifying the limitations of SAM, revealing its suboptimal performance when applied to remote sensing imagery. Moreover, SAM does not offer recognition abilities and thus fails to classify and tag localized objects. To address these limitations, we introduce different prompting strategies, including integrating a pre-trained CNN as a prompt generator. This novel approach augments SAM with recognition abilities, a first of its kind. We evaluated our method on three remote sensing datasets, including the WHU Buildings dataset, the Massachusetts Buildings dataset, and the AICrowd Mapping Challenge. For out-of-distribution performance on the WHU dataset, we achieve a 5.47% increase in IoU and a 4.81% improvement in F1-score. For in-distribution performance on the WHU dataset, we observe a 2.72% and 1.58% increase in True-Positive-IoU and True-Positive-F1 score, respectively. We intend to release our code repository, hoping to inspire further exploration of foundation models for domain-specific tasks within the remote sensing community.

As global attention on renewable and clean energy grows, the research and implementation of microgrids become paramount. This paper delves into the methodology of exploring the relationship between the operational and environmental costs of microgrids through multi-objective optimization models. By integrating various optimization algorithms like Genetic Algorithm, Simulated Annealing, Ant Colony Optimization, and Particle Swarm Optimization, we propose an integrated approach for microgrid optimization. Simulation results depict that these algorithms provide different dispatch results under economic and environmental dispatch, revealing distinct roles of diesel generators and micro gas turbines in microgrids. Overall, this study offers in-depth insights and practical guidance for microgrid design and operation.

Ensuring electricity grid reliability becomes increasingly challenging with the shift towards renewable energy and declining conventional capacities. Distribution System Operators (DSOs) aim to achieve grid reliability by verifying the n-1 principle, ensuring continuous operation in case of component failure. Electricity networks' complex graph-based data holds crucial information for n-1 assessment: graph structure and data about stations/cables. Unlike traditional machine learning methods, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) directly handle graph-structured data. This paper proposes using Graph Isomorphic Networks (GINs) for n-1 assessments in medium voltage grids. The GIN framework is designed to generalise to unseen grids and utilise graph structure and data about stations/cables. The proposed GIN approach demonstrates faster and more reliable grid assessments than a traditional mathematical optimisation approach, reducing prediction times by approximately a factor of 1000. The findings offer a promising approach to address computational challenges and enhance the reliability and efficiency of energy grid assessments.