Planning robot dexterity is challenging due to the non-smoothness introduced by contacts, intricate fine motions, and ever-changing scenarios. We present a hierarchical planning framework for dexterous robotic manipulation (HiDex). This framework explores in-hand and extrinsic dexterity by leveraging contacts. It generates rigid-body motions and complex contact sequences. Our framework is based on Monte-Carlo Tree Search and has three levels: 1) planning object motions and environment contact modes; 2) planning robot contacts; 3) path evaluation and control optimization. This framework offers two main advantages. First, it allows efficient global reasoning over high-dimensional complex space created by contacts. It solves a diverse set of manipulation tasks that require dexterity, both intrinsic (using the fingers) and extrinsic (also using the environment), mostly in seconds. Second, our framework allows the incorporation of expert knowledge and customizable setups in task mechanics and models. It requires minor modifications to accommodate different scenarios and robots. Hence, it provides a flexible and generalizable solution for various manipulation tasks. As examples, we analyze the results on 7 hand configurations and 15 scenarios. We demonstrate 8 tasks on two robot platforms.

Maintaining freshness of data collection in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks has attracted increasing attention. By taking into account age-of-information (AoI), we investigate the trajectory planning problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is used to aid a cluster-based IoT network. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total AoI of the collected data by the UAV from the ground IoT network. Since the total AoI of the IoT network depends on the flight time of the UAV and the data collection time at hovering points, we jointly optimize the selection of hovering points and the visiting order to these points. We exploit the state-of-the-art transformer and the weighted A*, which is a path search algorithm, to design a machine learning algorithm to solve the formulated problem. The whole UAV-IoT system is fed into the encoder network of the proposed algorithm, and the algorithm's decoder network outputs the visiting order to ground clusters. Then, the weighted A* is used to find the hovering point for each cluster in the ground IoT network. Simulation results show that the trained model by the proposed algorithm has a good generalization ability to generate solutions for IoT networks with different numbers of ground clusters, without the need to retrain the model. Furthermore, results show that our proposed algorithm can find better UAV trajectories with the minimum total AoI when compared to other algorithms.

While Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) models deliver state-of-the-art accuracy in automated speech recognition (ASR) pipelines, their performance has been limited by CPU-based beam search decoding. We introduce a GPU-accelerated Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST) beam search decoder compatible with current CTC models. It increases pipeline throughput and decreases latency, supports streaming inference, and also supports advanced features like utterance-specific word boosting via on-the-fly composition. We provide pre-built DLPack-based python bindings for ease of use with Python-based machine learning frameworks at https://github.com/nvidia-riva/riva-asrlib-decoder. We evaluated our decoder for offline and online scenarios, demonstrating that it is the fastest beam search decoder for CTC models. In the offline scenario it achieves up to 7 times more throughput than the current state-of-the-art CPU decoder and in the online streaming scenario, it achieves nearly 8 times lower latency, with same or better word error rate.

Video games demand is constantly increasing, which requires the costly production of large amounts of content. Towards this challenge, researchers have developed Search-Based Procedural Content Generation (SBPCG), that is, the (semi-)automated creation of content through search algorithms. We survey the current state of SBPCG, reporting work appeared in the field between 2011-2022 and identifying open research challenges. The results lead to recommendations for practitioners and to the identification of several potential future research avenues for SBPCG.

Reasoning on large-scale knowledge graphs has been long dominated by embedding methods. While path-based methods possess the inductive capacity that embeddings lack, their scalability is limited by the exponential number of paths. Here we present A*Net, a scalable path-based method for knowledge graph reasoning. Inspired by the A* algorithm for shortest path problems, our A*Net learns a priority function to select important nodes and edges at each iteration, to reduce time and memory footprint for both training and inference. The ratio of selected nodes and edges can be specified to trade off between performance and efficiency. Experiments on both transductive and inductive knowledge graph reasoning benchmarks show that A*Net achieves competitive performance with existing state-of-the-art path-based methods, while merely visiting 10% nodes and 10% edges at each iteration. On a million-scale dataset ogbl-wikikg2, A*Net not only achieves a new state-of-the-art result, but also converges faster than embedding methods. A*Net is the first path-based method for knowledge graph reasoning at such scale.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have recently demonstrated success across a myriad of computer vision tasks. However, their elevated computational demands pose significant challenges for real-world deployment. While low-rank approximation stands out as a renowned method to reduce computational loads, efficiently automating the target rank selection in ViT remains a challenge. Drawing from the notable similarity and alignment between the processes of rank selection and One-Shot NAS, we introduce FLORA, an end-to-end automatic framework based on NAS. To overcome the design challenge of supernet posed by vast search space, FLORA employs a low-rank aware candidate filtering strategy. This method adeptly identifies and eliminates underperforming candidates, effectively alleviating potential undertraining and interference among subnetworks. To further enhance the quality of low-rank supernets, we design a low-rank specific training paradigm. First, we propose weight inheritance to construct supernet and enable gradient sharing among low-rank modules. Secondly, we adopt low-rank aware sampling to strategically allocate training resources, taking into account inherited information from pre-trained models. Empirical results underscore FLORA's efficacy. With our method, a more fine-grained rank configuration can be generated automatically and yield up to 33% extra FLOPs reduction compared to a simple uniform configuration. More specific, FLORA-DeiT-B/FLORA-Swin-B can save up to 55%/42% FLOPs almost without performance degradtion. Importantly, FLORA boasts both versatility and orthogonality, offering an extra 21%-26% FLOPs reduction when integrated with leading compression techniques or compact hybrid structures. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/shadowpa0327/FLORA.

Difficult, in particular NP-complete, optimization problems are traditionally solved approximately using search heuristics. These are usually slowed down by the rugged landscapes encountered, because local minima arrest the search process. Cover-encoding maps were devised to circumvent this problem by transforming the original landscape to one that is free of local minima and enriched in near-optimal solutions. By definition, these involve the mapping of the original (larger) search space into smaller subspaces, by processes that typically amount to a form of coarse-graining. In this paper, we explore the details of this coarse-graining using formal arguments, as well as concrete examples of cover-encoding maps, that are investigated analytically as well as computationally. Our results strongly suggest that the coarse-graining involved in cover-encoding maps bears a strong resemblance to that encountered in renormalisation group schemes. Given the apparently disparate nature of these two formalisms, these strong similarities are rather startling, and suggest deep mathematical underpinnings that await further exploration.

Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand a taxonomy of problems and methods in this realm, we present the first comprehensive survey of decision-theoretic approaches that enable efficient sampling of various environmental processes. We investigate representations for different environments, followed by a discussion of using these presentations to solve tasks of interest, such as learning, localization, and monitoring. To efficiently implement the tasks, decision-theoretic optimization algorithms consider: (1) where to take measurements from, (2) which tasks to be assigned, (3) what samples to collect, (4) when to collect samples, (5) how to learn environment; and (6) who to communicate. Finally, we summarize our study and present the challenges and opportunities in robotic environmental monitoring.

Motion planning for robotic systems with complex dynamics is a challenging problem. While recent sampling-based algorithms achieve asymptotic optimality by propagating random control inputs, their empirical convergence rate is often poor, especially in high-dimensional systems such as multirotors. An alternative approach is to first plan with a simplified geometric model and then use trajectory optimization to follow the reference path while accounting for the true dynamics. However, this approach may fail to produce a valid trajectory if the initial guess is not close to a dynamically feasible trajectory. In this paper, we present Iterative Discontinuity Bounded A* (iDb-A*), a novel kinodynamic motion planner that combines search and optimization iteratively. The search step utilizes a finite set of short trajectories (motion primitives) that are interconnected while allowing for a bounded discontinuity between them. The optimization step locally repairs the discontinuities with trajectory optimization. By progressively reducing the allowed discontinuity and incorporating more motion primitives, our algorithm achieves asymptotic optimality with excellent any-time performance. We provide a benchmark of 43 problems across eight different dynamical systems, including different versions of unicycles and multirotors. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, iDb-A* consistently solves more problem instances and finds lower-cost solutions more rapidly.

The existence of adversarial examples brings huge concern for people to apply Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in safety-critical tasks. However, how to generate adversarial examples with categorical data is an important problem but lack of extensive exploration. Previously established methods leverage greedy search method, which can be very time-consuming to conduct successful attack. This also limits the development of adversarial training and potential defenses for categorical data. To tackle this problem, we propose Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack (PCAA), which transfers the discrete optimization problem to a continuous problem that can be solved efficiently by Projected Gradient Descent. In our paper, we theoretically analyze its optimality and time complexity to demonstrate its significant advantage over current greedy based attacks. Moreover, based on our attack, we propose an efficient adversarial training framework. Through a comprehensive empirical study, we justify the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense algorithms.