Time series forecasting is critical in numerous real-world applications, requiring accurate predictions of future values based on observed patterns. While traditional forecasting techniques work well in in-domain scenarios with ample data, they struggle when data is scarce or not available at all, motivating the emergence of zero-shot and few-shot learning settings. Recent advancements often leverage large-scale foundation models for such tasks, but these methods require extensive data and compute resources, and their performance may be hindered by ineffective learning from the available training set. This raises a fundamental question: What factors influence effective learning from data in time series forecasting? Toward addressing this, we propose using Fourier analysis to investigate how models learn from synthetic and real-world time series data. Our findings reveal that forecasters commonly suffer from poor learning from data with multiple frequencies and poor generalization to unseen frequencies, which impedes their predictive performance. To alleviate these issues, we present a novel synthetic data generation framework, designed to enhance real data or replace it completely by creating task-specific frequency information, requiring only the sampling rate of the target data. Our approach, Freq-Synth, improves the robustness of both foundation as well as nonfoundation forecast models in zero-shot and few-shot settings, facilitating more reliable time series forecasting under limited data scenarios. Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a critical role in various areas, such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where accurate predictions of future values are essential for decision-making and planning. Traditionally, in-domain learning has been the common setting for developing forecasting models, where a model is trained using data from the same domain it will later be deployed in (Salinas et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2021). This ensures that the model captures the patterns, seasonality, and trends specific to the target domain, improving its predictive performance. However, a significant challenge arises when there is scarce or no historical information available for training, limiting the ability to apply traditional in-domain learning approaches (Sarmas et al., 2022; Fong et al., 2020). In such cases, the emergence of zero-shot (ZS) and few-shot (FS) learning settings offer potential solutions. Zero-shot learning enables models to generalize to new, unseen domains without requiring domainspecific data by leveraging knowledge transfer from other domains or tasks.

Training neural networks is computationally heavy and energy-intensive. Many methodologies were developed to save computational requirements and energy by reducing the precision of network weights at inference time and introducing techniques such as rounding, stochastic rounding, and quantization. However, most of these techniques still require full gradient precision at training time, which makes training such models prohibitive on edge devices. This work presents a novel technique for training neural networks without needing gradients. This enables a training process where all the weights are one or two bits, without any hidden full precision computations. We show that it is possible to train models without gradient-based optimization techniques by identifying erroneous contributions of each neuron towards the expected classification and flipping the relevant bits using logical operations. We tested our method on several standard datasets and achieved performance comparable to corresponding gradient-based baselines with a fraction of the compute power.

The ability of robots to manipulate objects relies heavily on their aptitude for visual perception. In domains characterized by cluttered scenes and high object variability, most methods call for vast labeled datasets, laboriously hand-annotated, with the aim of training capable models. Once deployed, the challenge of generalizing to unfamiliar objects implies that the model must evolve alongside its domain. To address this, we propose a novel framework that combines Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) with Learning Through Interaction (LTI), allowing a model to learn by observing scene alterations and leverage visual consistency despite temporal gaps without requiring curated data of interaction sequences. As a result, our approach exploits partially annotated data through self-supervision and incorporates temporal context using pseudo-sequences generated from unlabeled still images. We validate our method on two common benchmarks, ARMBench mix-object-tote and OCID, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on ARMBench, we attain an $\text{AP}_{50}$ of $86.37$, almost a $20\%$ improvement over existing work, and obtain remarkable results in scenarios with extremely low annotation, achieving an $\text{AP}_{50}$ score of $84.89$ with just $1 \%$ of annotated data compared to $72$ presented in ARMBench on the fully annotated counterpart.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and strong vision models have enabled rapid research and development in the field of Vision-Language-Action models that enable robotic control. The main objective of these methods is to develop a generalist policy that can control robots with various embodiments. However, in industrial robotic applications such as automated assembly and disassembly, some tasks, such as insertion, demand greater accuracy and involve intricate factors like contact engagement, friction handling, and refined motor skills. Implementing these skills using a generalist policy is challenging because these policies might integrate further sensory data, including force or torque measurements, for enhanced precision. In our method, we present a global control policy based on LLMs that can transfer the control policy to a finite set of skills that are specifically trained to perform high-precision tasks through dynamic context switching. The integration of LLMs into this framework underscores their significance in not only interpreting and processing language inputs but also in enriching the control mechanisms for diverse and intricate robotic operations.

Radar sensors are low cost, long-range, and weather-resilient. Therefore, they are widely used for driver assistance functions, and are expected to be crucial for the success of autonomous driving in the future. In many perception tasks only pre-processed radar point clouds are considered. In contrast, radar spectra are a raw form of radar measurements and contain more information than radar point clouds. However, radar spectra are rather difficult to interpret. In this work, we aim to explore the semantic information contained in spectra in the context of automated driving, thereby moving towards better interpretability of radar spectra. To this end, we create a radar spectra-language model, allowing us to query radar spectra measurements for the presence of scene elements using free text. We overcome the scarcity of radar spectra data by matching the embedding space of an existing vision-language model (VLM). Finally, we explore the benefit of the learned representation for scene parsing, and obtain improvements in free space segmentation and object detection merely by injecting the spectra embedding into a baseline model.

CLIPSeg generates a 22 22 64 embedding tensor, which embeds a semantic mask that aligns with the input image spatially and is conditioned on text. To maintain a consistent embedding size throughout the pipeline, we employ an MLP (bottom left MLP in Figure 1) to upscale the 64-dimensional embedding to 256 dimensions, followed by a self-attention layer, which learns interpatch correlations to focus on the relevant patches. CLIPSeg's embedding output is enhanced with Dense Positional Encoding (DPE) to ensure that the self-attention layer has access to crucial geometric information. To this end, the DPE values are added to the embedding vector even after participating in the self-attention layer. To generate our DPE, we use an identical frequency matrix as SAM. This ensures that every element within each vector of the DPE conveys consistent information, that is aligned with what SAM's decoder has been trained to interpret.

Graph generation is integral to various engineering and scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, existing methodologies tend to overlook the generation of edge attributes. However, we identify critical applications where edge attributes are essential, making prior methods potentially unsuitable in such contexts. Moreover, while trivial adaptations are available, empirical investigations reveal their limited efficacy as they do not properly model the interplay among graph components. To address this, we propose a joint score-based model of nodes and edges for graph generation that considers all graph components. Our approach offers two key novelties: (i) node and edge attributes are combined in an attention module that generates samples based on the two ingredients; and (ii) node, edge and adjacency information are mutually dependent during the graph diffusion process. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks involving real-world and synthetic datasets in which edge features are crucial. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset that incorporates edge values. Furthermore, we propose a novel application that greatly benefits from the method due to its nature: the generation of traffic scenes represented as graphs. Our method outperforms other graph generation methods, demonstrating a significant advantage in edge-related measures.

Concept explanation is a popular approach for examining how human-interpretable concepts impact the predictions of a model. However, most existing methods for concept explanations are tailored to specific models. To address this issue, this paper focuses on model-agnostic measures. Specifically, we propose an approach to concept explanations that satisfy three natural axioms: linearity, recursivity, and similarity. We then establish connections with previous concept explanation methods, offering insight into their varying semantic meanings. Experimentally, we demonstrate the utility of the new method by applying it in different scenarios: for model selection, optimizer selection, and model improvement using a kind of prompt editing for zero-shot vision language models.

We introduce a method for inferring an explicit PDE from a data sample generated by previously unseen dynamics, based on a learned context. The training phase integrates knowledge of the form of the equation with a differential scheme, while the inference phase yields a PDE that fits the data sample and enables both signal prediction and data explanation. We include results of extensive experimentation, comparing our method to SOTA approaches, together with ablation studies that examine different flavors of our solution in terms of prediction error and explainability. Many scientific fields use the language of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs; Evans, 2010) to describe the physical laws governing observed natural phenomena with spatio-temporal dynamics. Typically, a PDE system is derived from first principles and a mechanistic understanding of the problem after experimentation and data collection by domain experts of the field. Well-known examples for such systems include Navier-Stokes and Burgers' equations in fluid dynamics, Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic theory, and Schrödinger's equations for quantum mechanics. Solving a PDE model could provide users with crucial information on how a signal evolves over time and space, and could be used for both prediction and control tasks. While creating PDE-based models holds great value, it is still a difficult task in many cases. For many complex real-world phenomena, we might only know some of the dynamics of the system. For example, an expert might tell us that a heat equation PDE has a specific functional form but we do not know the values of the diffusion and drift coefficient functions.

Reinforcement Learning has received wide interest due to its success in competitive games. Yet, its adoption in everyday applications is limited (e.g. industrial, home, healthcare, etc.). In this paper, we address this limitation by presenting a framework for planning over offline skills and solving complex tasks in real-world environments. Our framework is comprised of three modules that together enable the agent to learn from previously collected data and generalize over it to solve long-horizon tasks. We demonstrate our approach by testing it on a robotic arm that is required to solve complex tasks.