Extracting high-quality structured information from scientific literature is crucial for advancing material design through data-driven methods. Despite the considerable research in natural language processing for dataset extraction, effective approaches for multi-tuple extraction in scientific literature remain scarce due to the complex interrelations of tuples and contextual ambiguities. In the study, we illustrate the multi-tuple extraction of mechanical properties from multi-principal-element alloys and presents a novel framework that combines an entity extraction model based on MatSciBERT with pointer networks and an allocation model utilizing inter- and intra-entity attention. Our rigorous experiments on tuple extraction demonstrate impressive F1 scores of 0.963, 0.947, 0.848, and 0.753 across datasets with 1, 2, 3, and 4 tuples, confirming the effectiveness of the model. Furthermore, an F1 score of 0.854 was achieved on a randomly curated dataset. These results highlight the model's capacity to deliver precise and structured information, offering a robust alternative to large language models and equipping researchers with essential data for fostering data-driven innovations.

Autonomous exploration in complex and cluttered environments is essential for various applications. However, there are many challenges due to the lack of global heuristic information. Existing exploration methods suffer from the repeated paths and considerable computational resource requirement in large-scale environments. To address the above issues, this letter proposes an efficient exploration planner that reduces repeated paths in complex environments, hence it is called "Only Travelling Once Planner". OTO Planner includes fast frontier updating, viewpoint evaluation and viewpoint refinement. A selective frontier updating mechanism is designed, saving a large amount of computational resources. In addition, a novel viewpoint evaluation system is devised to reduce the repeated paths utilizing the enclosed sub-region detection. Besides, a viewpoint refinement approach is raised to concentrate the redundant viewpoints, leading to smoother paths. We conduct extensive simulation and real-world experiments to validate the proposed method. Compared to the state-of-the-art approach, the proposed method reduces the exploration time and movement distance by 10%-20% and improves the speed of frontier detection by 6-9 times.

Multi-edge cooperative computing that combines constrained resources of multiple edges into a powerful resource pool has the potential to deliver great benefits, such as a tremendous computing power, improved response time, more diversified services. However, the mass heterogeneous resources composition and lack of scheduling strategies make the modeling and cooperating of multi-edge computing system particularly complicated. This paper first proposes a system-level state evaluation model to shield the complex hardware configurations and redefine the different service capabilities at heterogeneous edges. Secondly, an integer linear programming model is designed to cater for optimally dispatching the distributed arriving requests. Finally, a learning-based lightweight real-time scheduler, CoRaiS, is proposed. CoRaiS embeds the real-time states of multi-edge system and requests information, and combines the embeddings with a policy network to schedule the requests, so that the response time of all requests can be minimized. Evaluation results verify that CoRaiS can make a high-quality scheduling decision in real time, and can be generalized to other multi-edge computing system, regardless of system scales. Characteristic validation also demonstrates that CoRaiS successfully learns to balance loads, perceive real-time state and recognize heterogeneity while scheduling.

Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints, attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g., persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently, the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy. Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for upcoming researchers.

Domain shift is a common problem in the realistic world, where training data and test data follow different data distributions. To deal with this problem, fully test-time adaptation (TTA) leverages the unlabeled data encountered during test time to adapt the model. In particular, Entropy-Based TTA (EBTTA) methods, which minimize the prediction's entropy on test samples, have shown great success. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective on the EBTTA, which interprets these methods from a view of clustering. It is an iterative algorithm: 1) in the assignment step, the forward process of the EBTTA models is the assignment of labels for these test samples, and 2) in the updating step, the backward process is the update of the model via the assigned samples. Based on the interpretation, we can gain a deeper understanding of EBTTA, where we show that the entropy loss would further increase the largest probability. Accordingly, we offer an alternative explanation for why existing EBTTA methods are sensitive to initial assignments, outliers, and batch size. This observation can guide us to put forward the improvement of EBTTA. We propose robust label assignment, weight adjustment, and gradient accumulation to alleviate the above problems. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve consistent improvements on various datasets. Code is provided in the supplementary material.

Although significant progress has been made, achieving place recognition in environments with perspective changes, seasonal variations, and scene transformations remains challenging. Relying solely on perception information from a single sensor is insufficient to address these issues. Recognizing the complementarity between cameras and LiDAR, multi-modal fusion methods have attracted attention. To address the information waste in existing multi-modal fusion works, this paper introduces a novel three-channel place descriptor, which consists of a cascade of image, point cloud, and fusion branches. Specifically, the fusion-based branch employs a dual-stage pipeline, leveraging the correlation between the two modalities with latent contacts, thereby facilitating information interaction and fusion. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, NCLT, USVInland, and the campus dataset demonstrate that the proposed place descriptor stands as the state-of-the-art approach, confirming its robustness and generality in challenging scenarios.

Identifying moving objects is an essential capability for autonomous systems, as it provides critical information for pose estimation, navigation, collision avoidance, and static map construction. In this paper, we present MotionBEV, a fast and accurate framework for LiDAR moving object segmentation, which segments moving objects with appearance and motion features in the bird's eye view (BEV) domain. Our approach converts 3D LiDAR scans into a 2D polar BEV representation to improve computational efficiency. Specifically, we learn appearance features with a simplified PointNet and compute motion features through the height differences of consecutive frames of point clouds projected onto vertical columns in the polar BEV coordinate system. We employ a dual-branch network bridged by the Appearance-Motion Co-attention Module (AMCM) to adaptively fuse the spatio-temporal information from appearance and motion features. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SemanticKITTI-MOS benchmark. Furthermore, to demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our method, we provide a LiDAR-MOS dataset recorded by a solid-state LiDAR, which features non-repetitive scanning patterns and a small field of view.

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the most popular optimization algorithm in deep learning, adaptive algorithms such as Adam have established empirical advantages over SGD in some deep learning applications such as training transformers. However, it remains a question that why Adam converges significantly faster than SGD in these scenarios. In this paper, we propose one explanation of why Adam converges faster than SGD using a new concept directional sharpness. We argue that the performance of optimization algorithms is closely related to the directional sharpness of the update steps, and show SGD has much worse directional sharpness compared to adaptive algorithms. We further observe that only a small fraction of the coordinates causes the bad sharpness and slow convergence of SGD, and propose to use coordinate-wise clipping as a solution to SGD and other optimization algorithms. We demonstrate the effect of coordinate-wise clipping on sharpness reduction and speeding up the convergence of optimization algorithms under various settings. We show that coordinate-wise clipping improves the local loss reduction when only a small fraction of the coordinates has bad sharpness. We conclude that the sharpness reduction effect of adaptive coordinate-wise scaling is the reason for Adam's success in practice and suggest the use of coordinate-wise clipping as a universal technique to speed up deep learning optimization.

While Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a widely studied task, making inferences of entities with only a few labeled data has been challenging, especially for entities with nested structures. Unlike flat entities, entities and their nested entities are more likely to have similar semantic feature representations, drastically increasing difficulties in classifying different entity categories in the few-shot setting. Although prior work has briefly discussed nested structures in the context of few-shot learning, to our best knowledge, this paper is the first one specifically dedicated to studying the few-shot nested NER task. Leveraging contextual dependency to distinguish nested entities, we propose a Biaffine-based Contrastive Learning (BCL) framework. We first design a Biaffine span representation module for learning the contextual span dependency representation for each entity span rather than only learning its semantic representation. We then merge these two representations by the residual connection to distinguish nested entities. Finally, we build a contrastive learning framework to adjust the representation distribution for larger margin boundaries and more generalized domain transfer learning ability. We conducted experimental studies on three English, German, and Russian nested NER datasets. The results show that the BCL outperformed three baseline models on the 1-shot and 5-shot tasks in terms of F1 score.

Many unanswerable adversarial questions fool the question-answer (QA) system with some plausible answers. Building a robust, frequently asked questions (FAQ) chatbot needs a large amount of diverse adversarial examples. Recent question generation methods are ineffective at generating many high-quality and diverse adversarial question-answer pairs from unstructured text. We propose the diversity controllable semantically valid adversarial attacker (DCSA), a high-quality, diverse, controllable method to generate standard and adversarial samples with a semantic graph. The fluent and semantically generated QA pairs fool our passage retrieval model successfully. After that, we conduct a study on the robustness and generalization of the QA model with generated QA pairs among different domains. We find that the generated data set improves the generalizability of the QA model to the new target domain and the robustness of the QA model to detect unanswerable adversarial questions.