The versatility and adaptability of human grasping catalyze advancing dexterous robotic manipulation. While significant strides have been made in dexterous grasp generation, current research endeavors pivot towards optimizing object manipulation while ensuring functional integrity, emphasizing the synthesis of functional grasps following desired affordance instructions. This paper addresses the challenge of synthesizing functional grasps tailored to diverse dexterous robotic hands by proposing DexGrasp-Diffusion, an end-to-end modularized diffusion-based pipeline. DexGrasp-Diffusion integrates MultiHandDiffuser, a novel unified data-driven diffusion model for multi-dexterous hands grasp estimation, with DexDiscriminator, which employs a Physics Discriminator and a Functional Discriminator with open-vocabulary setting to filter physically plausible functional grasps based on object affordances. The experimental evaluation conducted on the MultiDex dataset provides substantiating evidence supporting the superior performance of MultiHandDiffuser over the baseline model in terms of success rate, grasp diversity, and collision depth. Moreover, we demonstrate the capacity of DexGrasp-Diffusion to reliably generate functional grasps for household objects aligned with specific affordance instructions.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered industrial fault diagnostics is important in ensuring the safe operation of industrial applications. Since complex industrial systems often involve multiple industrial plants (possibly belonging to different companies or subsidiaries) with sensitive data collected and stored in a distributed manner, collaborative fault diagnostic model training often needs to leverage federated learning (FL). As the scale of the industrial fault diagnostic models are often large and communication channels in such systems are often not exclusively used for FL model training, existing deployed FL model training frameworks cannot train such models efficiently across multiple institutions. In this paper, we report our experience developing and deploying the Federated Opportunistic Block Dropout (FEDOBD) approach for industrial fault diagnostic model training. By decomposing large-scale models into semantic blocks and enabling FL participants to opportunistically upload selected important blocks in a quantized manner, it significantly reduces the communication overhead while maintaining model performance. Since its deployment in ENN Group in February 2022, FEDOBD has served two coal chemical plants across two cities in China to build industrial fault prediction models. It helped the company reduce the training communication overhead by over 70% compared to its previous AI Engine, while maintaining model performance at over 85% test F1 score. To our knowledge, it is the first successfully deployed dropout-based FL approach.

Intelligent fault diagnosis is essential to safe operation of machinery. However, due to scarce fault samples and data heterogeneity in field machinery, deep learning based diagnosis methods are prone to over-fitting with poor generalization ability. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a personalized federated learning framework, enabling multi-task fault diagnosis method across multiple factories in a privacypreserving manner. Firstly, rotating machines from different factories with similar vibration feature data are categorized into machine groups using a federated clustering method. Then, a multi-task deep learning model based on convolutional neural network is constructed to diagnose the multiple faults of machinery with heterogeneous information fusion. Finally, a personalized federated learning framework is proposed to solve data heterogeneity across different machines using adaptive hierarchical aggregation strategy. The case study on collected data from real machines verifies the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The result shows that the diagnosis accuracy could be improved significantly using the proposed personalized federated learning, especially for those machines with scarce fault samples.

Most dialogue systems in real world rely on predefined intents and answers for QA service, so discovering potential intents from large corpus previously is really important for building such dialogue services. Considering that most scenarios have few intents known already and most intents waiting to be discovered, we focus on semi-supervised text clustering and try to make the proposed method benefit from labeled samples for better overall clustering performance. In this paper, we propose Deep Contrastive Semi-supervised Clustering (DCSC), which aims to cluster text samples in a semi-supervised way and provide grouped intents to operation staff. To make DCSC fully utilize the limited known intents, we propose a two-stage training procedure for DCSC, in which DCSC will be trained on both labeled samples and unlabeled samples, and achieve better text representation and clustering performance. We conduct experiments on two public datasets to compare our model with several popular methods, and the results show DCSC achieve best performance across all datasets and circumstances, indicating the effect of the improvements in our work.

Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e. 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in pre-operative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that undergone gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.