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Online Hierarchical Policy Learning using Physics Priors for Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments
Chen, Wei Han, Liu, Yuchen, Buynitsky, Alexiy, Qureshi, Ahmed H.
Robot navigation in large, complex, and unknown indoor environments is a challenging problem. The existing approaches, such as traditional sampling-based methods, struggle with resolution control and scalability, while imitation learning-based methods require a large amount of demonstration data. Active Neural Time Fields (ANTFields) have recently emerged as a promising solution by using local observations to learn cost-to-go functions without relying on demonstrations. Despite their potential, these methods are hampered by challenges such as spectral bias and catastrophic forgetting, which diminish their effectiveness in complex scenarios. To address these issues, our approach decomposes the planning problem into a hierarchical structure. At the high level, a sparse graph captures the environment's global connectivity, while at the low level, a planner based on neural fields navigates local obstacles by solving the Eikonal PDE. This physics-informed strategy overcomes common pitfalls like spectral bias and neural field fitting difficulties, resulting in a smooth and precise representation of the cost landscape. We validate our framework in large-scale environments, demonstrating its enhanced adaptability and precision compared to previous methods, and highlighting its potential for online exploration, mapping, and real-world navigation.
- North America > United States > Indiana > Tippecanoe County > West Lafayette (0.04)
- North America > United States > Indiana > Tippecanoe County > Lafayette (0.04)
- Europe > Switzerland > Basel-City > Basel (0.04)
FalseCrashReducer: Mitigating False Positive Crashes in OSS-Fuzz-Gen Using Agentic AI
Amusuo, Paschal C., Liu, Dongge, Mendez, Ricardo Andres Calvo, Metzman, Jonathan, Chang, Oliver, Davis, James C.
Fuzz testing has become a cornerstone technique for identifying software bugs and security vulnerabilities, with broad adoption in both industry and open-source communities. Directly fuzzing a function requires fuzz drivers, which translate random fuzzer inputs into valid arguments for the target function. Given the cost and expertise required to manually develop fuzz drivers, methods exist that leverage program analysis and Large Language Models to automatically generate these drivers. However, the generated fuzz drivers frequently lead to false positive crashes, especially in functions highly structured input and complex state requirements. This problem is especially crucial in industry-scale fuzz driver generation efforts like OSS-Fuzz-en, as reporting false positive crashes to maintainers impede trust in both the system and the team. This paper presents two AI-driven strategies to reduce false positives in OSS-Fuzz-Gen, a multi-agent system for automated fuzz driver generation. First, constraint-based fuzz driver generation proactively enforces constraints on a function's inputs and state to guide driver creation. Second, context-based crash validation reactively analyzes function callers to determine whether reported crashes are feasible from program entry points. Using 1,500 benchmark functions from OSS-Fuzz, we show that these strategies reduce spurious crashes by up to 8%, cut reported crashes by more than half, and demonstrate that frontier LLMs can serve as reliable program analysis agents. Our results highlight the promise and challenges of integrating AI into large-scale fuzzing pipelines.
- Europe > Austria > Vienna (0.14)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.05)
- Oceania > Australia (0.04)
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CRINN: Contrastive Reinforcement Learning for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
Li, Xiaoya, Sun, Xiaofei, Wang, Albert, Shum, Chris, Li, Jiwei
Approximate nearest-neighbor search (ANNS) algorithms have become increasingly critical for recent AI applications, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based LLM applications. In this paper, we present CRINN, a new paradigm for ANNS algorithms. CRINN treats ANNS optimization as a reinforcement learning problem where execution speed serves as the reward signal. This approach enables the automatic generation of progressively faster ANNS implementations while maintaining accuracy constraints. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates CRINN's effectiveness across six widely-used NNS benchmark datasets. When compared against state-of-the-art open-source ANNS algorithms, CRINN achieves best performance on three of them (GIST-960-Euclidean, MNIST-784-Euclidean, and GloVe-25-angular), and tied for first place on two of them (SIFT-128-Euclidean and GloVe-25-angular). The implications of CRINN's success reach well beyond ANNS optimization: It validates that LLMs augmented with reinforcement learning can function as an effective tool for automating sophisticated algorithmic optimizations that demand specialized knowledge and labor-intensive manual refinement. Code can be found at https://github.com/deepreinforce-ai/CRINN
Data extraction and processing methods to aid the study of driving behaviors at intersections in naturalistic driving
Pundlik, Shrinivas, Choe, Seonggyu, Baker, Patrick, Lee, Chen-Yuan, Al-Madi, Naser, Bowers, Alex R., Luo, Gang
Naturalistic driving studies use devices in participants' own vehicles to record daily driving over many months. Due to diverse and extensive amounts of data recorded, automated processing is necessary. This report describes methods to extract and characterize driver head scans at intersections from data collected from an in-car recording system that logged vehicle speed, GPS location, scene videos, and cabin videos. Custom tools were developed to mark the intersections, synchronize location and video data, and clip the cabin and scene videos for +/-100 meters from the intersection location. A custom-developed head pose detection AI model for wide angle head turns was run on the cabin videos to estimate the driver head pose, from which head scans >20 deg were computed in the horizontal direction. The scene videos were processed using a YOLO object detection model to detect traffic lights, stop signs, pedestrians, and other vehicles on the road. Turning maneuvers were independently detected using vehicle self-motion patterns. Stop lines on the road surface were detected using changing intensity patterns over time as the vehicle moved. The information obtained from processing the scene videos, along with the speed data was used in a rule-based algorithm to infer the intersection type, maneuver, and bounds. We processed 190 intersections from 3 vehicles driven in cities and suburban areas from Massachusetts and California. The automated video processing algorithm correctly detected intersection signage and maneuvers in 100% and 94% of instances, respectively. The median [IQR] error in detecting vehicle entry into the intersection was 1.1[0.4-4.9] meters and 0.2[0.1-0.54] seconds. The median overlap between ground truth and estimated intersection bounds was 0.88[0.82-0.93].
- North America > United States > California (0.24)
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston (0.04)
- North America > United States > Minnesota > Hennepin County > Bloomington (0.04)
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- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.68)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.46)
- Transportation > Ground > Road (1.00)
- Health & Medicine (1.00)
Confidence-based Intent Prediction for Teleoperation in Bimanual Robotic Suturing
Hu, Zhaoyang Jacopo, Xu, Haozheng, Kim, Sion, Li, Yanan, Baena, Ferdinando Rodriguez y, Burdet, Etienne
--Robotic-assisted procedures offer enhanced precision, but while fully autonomous systems are limited in task knowledge, difficulties in modeling unstructured environments, and generalisation abilities, fully manual teleoperated systems also face challenges such as delay, stability, and reduced sensory information. T o address these, we developed an interactive control strategy that assists the human operator by predicting their motion plan at both high and low levels. At the high level, a surgeme recognition system is employed through a Transformer-based real-time gesture classification model to dynamically adapt to the operator's actions, while at the low level, a Confidence-based Intention Assimilation Controller adjusts robot actions based on user intent and shared control paradigms. The system is built around a robotic suturing task, supported by sensors that capture the kinematics of the robot and task dynamics. Experiments across users with varying skill levels demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing statistically significant improvements in task completion time and user satisfaction compared to traditional teleoperation. N traditional teleoperation the human operator fully controls the robot's movements [1]. Robots like the da Vinci Surgical System are equipped with sensors and models offering valuable local information inaccessible to the human operator, such as during visual occlusions or operations with different sensory modalities. By spanning across the spectrum between traditional fully manual teleoperation and full autonomy, shared control leverages the benefits of both to enhance teleoperation with the robot's sensory data and control [2]. While demonstrated for suturing assistance [3], [4], these methods overlook the impact on positional uncertainty, environmental unknowns, or instrument errors. For example, robotic surgery cameras are frequently occluded by body tissues or parts of the robot [5].
- Europe > United Kingdom (0.05)
- Europe > Netherlands > North Holland > Amsterdam (0.04)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.47)
- Research Report > Experimental Study (0.47)
- Health & Medicine > Surgery (1.00)
- Health & Medicine > Health Care Technology (1.00)
LeetCodeDataset: A Temporal Dataset for Robust Evaluation and Efficient Training of Code LLMs
Xia, Yunhui, Shen, Wei, Wang, Yan, Liu, Jason Klein, Sun, Huifeng, Wu, Siyue, Hu, Jian, Xu, Xiaolong
We introduce LeetCodeDataset, a high-quality benchmark for evaluating and training code-generation models, addressing two key challenges in LLM research: the lack of reasoning-focused coding benchmarks and self-contained training testbeds. By curating LeetCode Python problems with rich metadata, broad coverage, 100+ test cases per problem, and temporal splits (pre/post July 2024), our dataset enables contamination-free evaluation and efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Experiments show reasoning models significantly outperform non-reasoning counterparts, while SFT with only 2.6K model-generated solutions achieves performance comparable to 110K-sample counterparts. The dataset and evaluation framework are available on Hugging Face and Github.
NodeRAG: Structuring Graph-based RAG with Heterogeneous Nodes
Xu, Tianyang, Zheng, Haojie, Li, Chengze, Chen, Haoxiang, Liu, Yixin, Chen, Ruoxi, Sun, Lichao
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) empowers large language models to access external and private corpus, enabling factually consistent responses in specific domains. By exploiting the inherent structure of the corpus, graph-based RAG methods further enrich this process by building a knowledge graph index and leveraging the structural nature of graphs. However, current graph-based RAG approaches seldom prioritize the design of graph structures. Inadequately designed graph not only impede the seamless integration of diverse graph algorithms but also result in workflow inconsistencies and degraded performance. To further unleash the potential of graph for RAG, we propose NodeRAG, a graph-centric framework introducing heterogeneous graph structures that enable the seamless and holistic integration of graph-based methodologies into the RAG workflow. By aligning closely with the capabilities of LLMs, this framework ensures a fully cohesive and efficient end-to-end process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that NodeRAG exhibits performance advantages over previous methods, including GraphRAG and LightRAG, not only in indexing time, query time, and storage efficiency but also in delivering superior question-answering performance on multi-hop benchmarks and open-ended head-to-head evaluations with minimal retrieval tokens. Our GitHub repository could be seen at https://github.com/Terry-Xu-666/NodeRAG.
- Europe > United Kingdom (0.14)
- Europe > Netherlands > South Holland > Leiden (0.04)
- North America > United States > Pennsylvania (0.04)
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- Personal > Honors (0.68)
- Workflow (0.68)
- Research Report > New Finding (0.46)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Text Processing (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Large Language Model (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.49)
ML-SceGen: A Multi-level Scenario Generation Framework
Xiao, Yicheng, Sun, Yangyang, Lin, Yicheng
Current scientific research witnesses various attempts at applying Large Language Models for scenario generation but is inclined only to comprehensive or dangerous scenarios. In this paper, we seek to build a three-stage framework that not only lets users regain controllability over the generated scenarios but also generates comprehensive scenarios containing danger factors in uncontrolled intersection settings. In the first stage, LLM agents will contribute to translating the key components of the description of the expected scenarios into Functional Scenarios. For the second stage, we use Answer Set Programming (ASP) solver Clingo to help us generate comprehensive logical traffic within intersections. During the last stage, we use LLM to update relevant parameters to increase the critical level of the concrete scenario.
- Transportation > Ground > Road (0.50)
- Transportation > Infrastructure & Services (0.47)
Field Insights for Portable Vine Robots in Urban Search and Rescue
McFarland, Ciera, Dhawan, Ankush, Kumari, Riya, Council, Chad, Coad, Margaret, Hanson, Nathaniel
Soft, growing vine robots are well-suited for exploring cluttered, unknown environments, and are theorized to be performant during structural collapse incidents caused by earthquakes, fires, explosions, and material flaws. These vine robots grow from the tip, enabling them to navigate rubble-filled passageways easily. State-of-the-art vine robots have been tested in archaeological and other field settings, but their translational capabilities to urban search and rescue (USAR) are not well understood. To this end, we present a set of experiments designed to test the limits of a vine robot system, the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT), operating in an engineered collapsed structure. Our testing is driven by a taxonomy of difficulty derived from the challenges USAR crews face navigating void spaces and their associated hazards. Initial experiments explore the viability of the vine robot form factor, both ideal and implemented, as well as the control and sensorization of the system. A secondary set of experiments applies domain-specific design improvements to increase the portability and reliability of the system. SPROUT can grow through tight apertures, around corners, and into void spaces, but requires additional development in sensorization to improve control and situational awareness.
- Energy > Oil & Gas > Upstream (0.46)
- Government > Military (0.34)
The Xbox Series S Starter Bundle is on sale for 220
The Xbox Series S is our recommendation for the best cheap game console for several reasons, not least because it's an excellent entry point into modern gaming. Even better, the most budget-friendly Xbox is on sale at Target. The price of a starter bundle has dropped from 300 to 220, making the Series S an even sweeter deal. A bundle of an Xbox Series S and three months of Game Pass Ultimate has dropped to 220, making it a relatively inexpensive entry point into modern gaming. The Xbox Series S Starter Bundle comes with three months of Game Pass Ultimate access (a value of 51).