Motion planning framed as optimisation in structured latent spaces has recently emerged as competitive with traditional methods in terms of planning success while significantly outperforming them in terms of computational speed. However, the real-world applicability of recent work in this domain remains limited by the need to express obstacle information directly in state-space, involving simple geometric primitives. In this work we address this challenge by leveraging learned scene embeddings together with a generative model of the robot manipulator to drive the optimisation process. In addition, we introduce an approach for efficient collision checking which directly regularises the optimisation undertaken for planning. Using simulated as well as real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our approach, AMP-LS, is able to successfully plan in novel, complex scenes while outperforming traditional planning baselines in terms of computation speed by an order of magnitude. We show that the resulting system is fast enough to enable closed-loop planning in real-world dynamic scenes.

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is an energy efficiency technique to track electricity consumption of an individual appliance in a household by one aggregated single, such as building level meter readings. The goal of NILM is to disaggregate the appliance from the aggregated singles by computational method. In this work, deep learning approaches are implemented to operate the desegregations. Deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks are employed for this operation. Additionally, sparse evolutionary training is applied to accelerate training efficiency of each deep learning model. UK-Dale dataset is used for this work.

The wind energy industry has been experiencing tremendous growth and confronting the failures of wind turbine components. Wind turbine gearbox malfunctions are particularly prevalent and lead to the most prolonged downtime and highest cost. This paper presents a data-driven gearbox fault detection algorithm base on high frequency vibration data using graph neural network (GNN) models and sparse filtering (SF). The approach can take advantage of the comprehensive data sources and the complicated sensing networks. The GNN models, including basic graph neural networks, gated graph neural networks, and gated graph sequential neural networks, are used to detect gearbox condition from knowledge-based graphs formed using wind turbine information. Sparse filtering is used as an unsupervised feature learning method to accelerate the training of the GNN models. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified on practical experimental data.

Recently, it has been shown that neural networks not only approximate the ground-state wave functions of a single molecular system well but can also generalize to multiple geometries. While such generalization significantly speeds up training, each energy evaluation still requires Monte Carlo integration which limits the evaluation to a few geometries. In this work, we address the inference shortcomings by proposing the Potential learning from ab-initio Networks (PlaNet) framework, in which we simultaneously train a surrogate model in addition to the neural wave function. At inference time, the surrogate avoids expensive Monte-Carlo integration by directly estimating the energy, accelerating the process from hours to milliseconds. In this way, we can accurately model high-resolution multi-dimensional energy surfaces for larger systems that previously were unobtainable via neural wave functions. Finally, we explore an additional inductive bias by introducing physically-motivated restricted neural wave function models. We implement such a function with several additional improvements in the new PESNet++ model. In our experimental evaluation, PlaNet accelerates inference by 7 orders of magnitude for larger molecules like ethanol while preserving accuracy. Compared to previous energy surface networks, PESNet++ reduces energy errors by up to 74%.

Abstract: In this work we test Wasserstein distance in conjunction with persistent homology, as a tool for discriminating large scale structures of simulated universes with different values of σ8 cosmological parameter (present root-mean-square matter fluctuation averaged over a sphere of radius 8 Mpc comoving). The Wasserstein distance (a.k.a. the pair-matching distance) was proposed to measure the difference between two networks in terms of persistent homology. The advantage of this approach consists in its non-parametric way of probing the topology of the Cosmic web, in contrast to graph-theoretical approach depending on linking length. By treating the halos of the Cosmic Web as points in a point cloud we calculate persistent homologies, build persistence (birth-death) diagrams and evaluate Wasserstein distance between them. The latter showed itself as a convenient tool to compare simulated Cosmic webs. We show that one can discern two Cosmic webs (simulated or real) with different σ8 parameter.

On Monday, researchers from Microsoft introduced Kosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. The researchers believe multimodal AI--which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video--is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human. "Being a basic part of intelligence, multimodal perception is a necessity to achieve artificial general intelligence, in terms of knowledge acquisition and grounding to the real world," the researchers write in their academic paper, Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models. While the media buzzes with news about large language models (LLM), some AI experts point to multimodal AI as a potential path toward general artificial intelligence, a hypothetical technology that will ostensibly be able to replace humans at any intellectual task (and any intellectual job). AGI is the stated goal of OpenAI, a key business partner of Microsoft in the AI space.

Aerodynamic performance evaluation is an important part of the aircraft aerodynamic design optimization process; however, traditional methods are costly and time-consuming. Despite the fact that various machine learning methods can achieve high accuracy, their application in engineering is still difficult due to their poor generalization performance and "black box" nature. In this paper, a knowledge-embedded meta learning model, which fully integrates data with the theoretical knowledge of the lift curve, is developed to obtain the lift coefficients of an arbitrary supercritical airfoil under various angle of attacks. In the proposed model, a primary network is responsible for representing the relationship between the lift and angle of attack, while the geometry information is encoded into a hyper network to predict the unknown parameters involved in the primary network. Specifically, three models with different architectures are trained to provide various interpretations. Compared to the ordinary neural network, our proposed model can exhibit better generalization capability with competitive prediction accuracy. Afterward, interpretable analysis is performed based on the Integrated Gradients and Saliency methods. Results show that the proposed model can tend to assess the influence of airfoil geometry to the physical characteristics. Furthermore, the exceptions and shortcomings caused by the proposed model are analysed and discussed in detail.

Whilst the partial differential equations that govern the dynamics of our world have been studied in great depth for centuries, solving them for complex, high-dimensional conditions and domains still presents an incredibly large mathematical and computational challenge. Analytical methods can be cumbersome to utilise, and numerical methods can lead to errors and inaccuracies. On top of this, sometimes we lack the information or knowledge to pose the problem well enough to apply these kinds of methods. Here, we present a new approach to approximating the solution to physical systems - physics-informed neural networks. The concept of artificial neural networks is introduced, the objective function is defined, and optimisation strategies are discussed. The partial differential equation is then included as a constraint in the loss function for the optimisation problem, giving the network access to knowledge of the dynamics of the physical system it is modelling. Some intuitive examples are displayed, and more complex applications are considered to showcase the power of physics informed neural networks, such as in seismic imaging. Solution error is analysed, and suggestions are made to improve convergence and/or solution precision. Problems and limitations are also touched upon in the conclusions, as well as some thoughts as to where physics informed neural networks are most useful, and where they could go next.

Everting, soft growing vine robots benefit from reduced friction with their environment, which allows them to navigate challenging terrain. Vine robots can use air pouches attached to their sides for lateral steering. However, when all pouches are serially connected, the whole robot can only perform one constant curvature in free space. It must contact the environment to navigate through obstacles along paths with multiple turns. This work presents a multi-segment vine robot that can navigate complex paths without interacting with its environment. This is achieved by a new steering method that selectively actuates each single pouch at the tip, providing high degrees of freedom with few control inputs. A small magnetic valve connects each pouch to a pressure supply line. A motorized tip mount uses an interlocking mechanism and motorized rollers on the outer material of the vine robot. As each valve passes through the tip mount, a permanent magnet inside the tip mount opens the valve so the corresponding pouch is connected to the pressure supply line at the same moment. Novel cylindrical pneumatic artificial muscles (cPAMs) are integrated into the vine robot and inflate to a cylindrical shape for improved bending characteristics compared to other state-of-the-art vine robots. The motorized tip mount controls a continuous eversion speed and enables controlled retraction. A final prototype was able to repeatably grow into different shapes and hold these shapes. We predict the path using a model that assumes a piecewise constant curvature along the outside of the multi-segment vine robot. The proposed multi-segment steering method can be extended to other soft continuum robot designs.

Attaining the equilibrium state of a catalyst-adsorbate system is key to fundamentally assessing its effective properties, such as adsorption energy. Machine learning methods with finer supervision strategies have been applied to boost and guide the relaxation process of an atomic system and better predict its properties at the equilibrium state. In this paper, we present a novel graph neural network (GNN) supervision and prediction strategy DR-Label. The method enhances the supervision signal, reduces the multiplicity of solutions in edge representation, and encourages the model to provide node predictions that are graph structural variation robust. DR-Label first Deconstructs finer-grained equilibrium state information to the model by projecting the node-level supervision signal to each edge. Reversely, the model Reconstructs a more robust equilibrium state prediction by transforming edge-level predictions to node-level with a sphere-fitting algorithm. The DR-Label strategy was applied to three radically distinct models, each of which displayed consistent performance enhancements. Based on the DR-Label strategy, we further proposed DRFormer, which achieved a new state-of-the-art performance on the Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset and the Cu-based single-atom-alloyed CO adsorption (SAA) dataset. We expect that our work will highlight crucial steps for the development of a more accurate model in equilibrium state property prediction of a catalysis system.