Contrastive self-supervised learning based on point-wise comparisons has been widely studied for vision tasks. In the visual cortex of the brain, neuronal responses to distinct stimulus classes are organized into geometric structures known as neural manifolds. Accurate classification of stimuli can be achieved by effectively separating these manifolds, akin to solving a packing problem. We introduce Contrastive Learning As Manifold Packing (CLAMP), a self-supervised framework that recasts representation learning as a manifold packing problem. CLAMP introduces a loss function inspired by the potential energy of short-range repulsive particle systems, such as those encountered in the physics of simple liquids and jammed packings.

Your monitor needs a monitor arm, and I've been testing every single one I can get my hands on to see which is best. A monitor arm should be one of those simple products you buy once and never think about again. But I've seen horror stories of cheap, knock-off models that collapse, damaging both the desk and the monitor. Anything that mounts a very heavy piece of expensive tech like a high-end monitor should be high-quality, which is true of all the options below. Each of the monitor arms on our list have been hand-tested by us. Most are currently clamped down to a desk of one of our product reviewers.

The Domain Mixed Unit (DMU) is a new neural arithmetic unit that learns a single parameter gate G that mixes a state between log-space and linear-space representations while performing either addition (DMU add) or subtraction (DMU sub) in said space. These are the two initializations proposed for the DMU: one covering addition and multiplication, and another covering subtraction and division. The DMU achieves state-of-the-art performance on the NALM Benchmark, a dataset designed to test the ability of neural arithmetic units to generalize arithmetic operations, specifically performing with the highest percentage solved over all seeds on multiplication and division. Neural Arithmetic Units (NAUs) are specialized sub-units or networks designed to interpretably represent arithmetic operations while maintaining differentiability, allowing gradients to flow through them during training. These units can be integrated into larger neural architectures to provide explicit arithmetic capabilities.

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis(MABSA) seeks to identify aspect terms within paired image-text data and determine their fine grained sentiment polarities, representing a fundamental task for improving the effectiveness of applications such as product review systems and public opinion monitoring. Existing methods face challenges such as cross modal alignment noise and insufficient consistency in fine-grained representations. While global modality alignment methods often overlook the connection between aspect terms and their corresponding local visual regions, bridging the representation gap between text and images remains a challenge. To address these limitations, this paper introduces an end to end Contrastive Learning framework with Adaptive Multi-loss and Progressive Attention Fusion(CLAMP). The framework is composed of three novel modules: Progressive Attention Fusion network, Multi-task Contrastive Learning, and Adaptive Multi-loss Aggregation. The Progressive Attention Fusion network enhances fine-grained alignment between textual features and image regions via hierarchical, multi-stage cross modal interactions, effectively suppressing irrelevant visual noise. Secondly, multi-task contrastive learning combines global modal contrast and local granularity alignment to enhance cross modal representation consistency. Adaptive Multi-loss Aggregation employs a dynamic uncertainty based weighting mechanism to calibrate loss contributions according to each task's uncertainty, thereby mitigating gradient interference. Evaluation on standard public benchmarks demonstrates that CLAMP consistently outperforms the vast majority of existing state of the art methods.

Contrastive self-supervised learning based on point-wise comparisons has been widely studied for vision tasks. In the visual cortex of the brain, neuronal responses to distinct stimulus classes are organized into geometric structures known as neural manifolds. Accurate classification of stimuli can be achieved by effectively separating these manifolds, akin to solving a packing problem. We introduce Contrastive Learning As Manifold Packing (CLAMP), a self-supervised framework that recasts representation learning as a manifold packing problem. CLAMP introduces a loss function inspired by the potential energy of short-range repulsive particle systems, such as those encountered in the physics of simple liquids and jammed packings. In this framework, each class consists of sub-manifolds embedding multiple augmented views of a single image. The sizes and positions of the sub-manifolds are dynamically optimized by following the gradient of a packing loss. This approach yields interpretable dynamics in the embedding space that parallel jamming physics, and introduces geometrically meaningful hyperparameters within the loss function. Under the standard linear evaluation protocol, which freezes the backbone and trains only a linear classifier, CLAMP achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art self-supervised models. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that neural manifolds corresponding to different categories emerge naturally and are effectively separated in the learned representation space, highlighting the potential of CLAMP to bridge insights from physics, neural science, and machine learning.

Localizing target objects in images is an important task in computer vision. Often it is the first step towards solving a variety of applications in autonomous driving, maintenance, quality insurance, robotics, and augmented reality. Best in class solutions for this task rely on deep neural networks, which require a set of representative training data for best performance. Creating sets of sufficient quality, variety, and size is often difficult, error prone, and expensive. This is where the method of luminance keying [10,8] can help: it provides a simple yet effective solution to record high quality data for training object detection and segmentation. We extend previous work that presented luminance keying on the common YCB-V set of household objects [14] by recording the remaining objects of the YCB superset. The additional variety of objects - addition of transparency, multiple color variations, non-rigid objects - further demonstrates the usefulness of luminance keying and might be used to test the applicability of the approach on new 2D object detection and segmentation algorithms.

Wire-harnessing tasks pose great challenges to be automated by the robot due to the complex dynamics and unpredictable behavior of the deformable wire. Traditional methods, often reliant on dual-robot arms or tactile sensing, face limitations in adaptability, cost, and scalability. This paper introduces a novel single-robot wire-harnessing pipeline that leverages a robot's twisting motion to generate necessary wire tension for precise insertion into clamps, using only one robot arm with an integrated force/torque (F/T) sensor. Benefiting from this design, the single robot arm can efficiently apply tension for wire routing and insertion into clamps in a narrow space. Our approach is structured around four principal components: a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based on the Koopman operator for tension tracking and wire following, a motion planner for sequencing harnessing waypoints, a suite of insertion primitives for clamp engagement, and a fix-point switching mechanism for wire constraint updating. Evaluated on an industrial-level wire harnessing task, our method demonstrated superior performance and reliability over conventional approaches, efficiently handling both single and multiple wire configurations with high success rates.

Abstract-- Articulated objects and their representations pose a difficult problem for robots. These objects require not only representations of geometry and texture, but also of the various connections and joint parameters that make up each articulation. We propose a method that learns a common Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation across a small number of collected scenes. This representation is combined with a parts-based image segmentation to produce an implicitspace part localization, from which the connectivity and joint parameters of the articulated object can be estimated, thus enabling configuration-conditioned rendering. Articulated objects pose significant challenges for robots due to their complex degrees of freedom compared to rigidbody objects, complicating tasks like pose estimation and grasp synthesis.