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A mobile manipulator often finds itself in an application where it needs to take a close-up view before performing a manipulation task. Named this as a coupled active perception and manipulation (CAPM) problem, we model the uncertainty in the perception process and devise a key state/task planning approach that considers reachability conditions as task constraints of both perception and manipulation tasks for the mobile platform. By minimizing the expected energy usage in the body key state planning while satisfying task constraints, our algorithm achieves the best balance between the task success rate and energy usage. We have implemented the algorithm and tested it in both simulation and physical experiments. The results have confirmed that our algorithm has a lower energy consumption compared to a two-stage decoupled approach, while still maintaining a success rate of 100\% for the task., Comment: submitted to ICRA 2024

The spread of fake news has emerged as a critical challenge, undermining trust and posing threats to society. In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), the capability to generate believable fake content has intensified these concerns. In this study, we present a novel paradigm to evaluate fake news detectors in scenarios involving both human-written and LLM-generated misinformation. Intriguingly, our findings reveal a significant bias in many existing detectors: they are more prone to flagging LLM-generated content as fake news while often misclassifying human-written fake news as genuine. This unexpected bias appears to arise from distinct linguistic patterns inherent to LLM outputs. To address this, we introduce a mitigation strategy that leverages adversarial training with LLM-paraphrased genuine news. The resulting model yielded marked improvements in detection accuracy for both human and LLM-generated news. To further catalyze research in this domain, we release two comprehensive datasets, \texttt{GossipCop++} and \texttt{PolitiFact++}, thus amalgamating human-validated articles with LLM-generated fake and real news., Comment: The first two authors contributed equally

Data silos, mainly caused by privacy and interoperability, significantly constrain collaborations among different organizations with similar data for the same purpose. Distributed learning based on divide-and-conquer provides a promising way to settle the data silos, but it suffers from several challenges, including autonomy, privacy guarantees, and the necessity of collaborations. This paper focuses on developing an adaptive distributed kernel ridge regression (AdaDKRR) by taking autonomy in parameter selection, privacy in communicating non-sensitive information, and the necessity of collaborations in performance improvement into account. We provide both solid theoretical verification and comprehensive experiments for AdaDKRR to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness. Theoretically, we prove that under some mild conditions, AdaDKRR performs similarly to running the optimal learning algorithms on the whole data, verifying the necessity of collaborations and showing that no other distributed learning scheme can essentially beat AdaDKRR under the same conditions. Numerically, we test AdaDKRR on both toy simulations and two real-world applications to show that AdaDKRR is superior to other existing distributed learning schemes. All these results show that AdaDKRR is a feasible scheme to defend against data silos, which are highly desired in numerous application regions such as intelligent decision-making, pricing forecasting, and performance prediction for products., Comment: 46pages, 13figures

Misalignments between multi-modality images pose challenges in image fusion, manifesting as structural distortions and edge ghosts. Existing efforts commonly resort to registering first and fusing later, typically employing two cascaded stages for registration,i.e., coarse registration and fine registration. Both stages directly estimate the respective target deformation fields. In this paper, we argue that the separated two-stage registration is not compact, and the direct estimation of the target deformation fields is not accurate enough. To address these challenges, we propose a Cross-modality Multi-scale Progressive Dense Registration (C-MPDR) scheme, which accomplishes the coarse-to-fine registration exclusively using a one-stage optimization, thus improving the fusion performance of misaligned multi-modality images. Specifically, two pivotal components are involved, a dense Deformation Field Fusion (DFF) module and a Progressive Feature Fine (PFF) module. The DFF aggregates the predicted multi-scale deformation sub-fields at the current scale, while the PFF progressively refines the remaining misaligned features. Both work together to accurately estimate the final deformation fields. In addition, we develop a Transformer-Conv-based Fusion (TCF) subnetwork that considers local and long-range feature dependencies, allowing us to capture more informative features from the registered infrared and visible images for the generation of high-quality fused images. Extensive experimental analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method in the fusion of misaligned cross-modality images.

Continual learning (CL) trains NN models incrementally from a continuous stream of tasks. To remember previously learned knowledge, prior studies store old samples over a memory hierarchy and replay them when new tasks arrive. Edge devices that adopt CL to preserve data privacy are typically energy-sensitive and thus require high model accuracy while not compromising energy efficiency, i.e., cost-effectiveness. Our work is the first to explore the design space of hierarchical memory replay-based CL to gain insights into achieving cost-effectiveness on edge devices. We present Miro, a novel system runtime that carefully integrates our insights into the CL framework by enabling it to dynamically configure the CL system based on resource states for the best cost-effectiveness. To reach this goal, Miro also performs online profiling on parameters with clear accuracy-energy trade-offs and adapts to optimal values with low overhead. Extensive evaluations show that Miro significantly outperforms baseline systems we build for comparison, consistently achieving higher cost-effectiveness., Comment: This paper is published in the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom '23)

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem with broad real-world applications. Recently, neural networks have gained popularity in this research area because as shown in the literature, they provide strong heuristic solutions to TSPs. Compared to autoregressive neural approaches, non-autoregressive (NAR) networks exploit the inference parallelism to elevate inference speed but suffer from comparatively low solution quality. In this paper, we propose a novel NAR model named NAR4TSP, which incorporates a specially designed architecture and an enhanced reinforcement learning strategy. To the best of our knowledge, NAR4TSP is the first TSP solver that successfully combines RL and NAR networks. The key lies in the incorporation of NAR network output decoding into the training process. NAR4TSP efficiently represents TSP encoded information as rewards and seamlessly integrates it into reinforcement learning strategies, while maintaining consistent TSP sequence constraints during both training and testing phases. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world TSPs demonstrate that NAR4TSP outperforms five state-of-the-art models in terms of solution quality, inference speed, and generalization to unseen scenarios., Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, and 9 tables. This work has been accepted by TNNLS

Due to their quantitative nature, probabilistic programs pose non-trivial challenges for designing compositional and efficient program analyses. Many analyses for probabilistic programs rely on iterative approximation. This article presents an interprocedural dataflow-analysis framework, called NPA-PMA, for designing and implementing (partially) non-iterative program analyses of probabilistic programs with unstructured control-flow, nondeterminism, and general recursion. NPA-PMA is based on Newtonian Program Analysis (NPA), a generalization of Newton's method to solve equation systems over semirings. The key challenge for developing NPA-PMA is to handle multiple kinds of confluences in both the algebraic structures that specify analyses and the equation systems that encode control flow: semirings support a single confluence operation, whereas NPA-PMA involves three confluence operations (conditional, probabilistic, and nondeterministic). Our work introduces $\omega$-continuous pre-Markov algebras ($\omega$PMAs) to factor out common parts of different analyses; adopts regular infinite-tree expressions to encode program-execution paths in control-flow hyper-graphs; and presents a linearization method that makes Newton's method applicable to the setting of regular-infinite-tree equations over $\omega$PMAs. NPA-PMA allows analyses to supply a non-iterative strategy to solve linearized equations. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that (i) NPA-PMA holds considerable promise for outperforming Kleene iteration, and (ii) provides great generality for designing program analyses.

With its potential for drastically reduced operation power of information processing devices, electric field control of magnetism has generated huge research interest. Recently, novel perspectives offered by the inherently large spin-orbit coupling of 5d transition metals have emerged. Here, we demonstrate non-volatile electrical control of the proximity induced magnetism in SrIrO3 based back-gated heterostructures. We report up to a 700 % variation of the anomalous Hall conductivity {\sigma}_AHE and Hall angle {\theta}_AHE as function of the applied gate voltage Vg. In contrast, the Curie temperature TC = 100K and magnetic anisotropy of the system remain essentially unaffected by Vg indicating a robust ferromagnetic state in SrIrO3 which strongly hints to gating-induced changes of the anomalous Berry curvature. The electric-field induced ferroelectric-like state of SrTiO3 enables non-volatile switching behavior of {\sigma}_AHE and {\theta}_AHE below 60 K. The large tunability of this system, opens new avenues towards efficient electric-field manipulation of magnetism., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Advanced Functional Materials

In this paper, the ${\cal A}$-theory, an extension of F-theory, is described as a fully U-duality covariant brane theory. This theory has some distinguishing features not known from world-sheet models. In particular, seen as a sigma model, both world-volume and target space coordinates are specific representations of the same group (the U-duality group). The U-duality group in question is an exceptional group (a split form of the $E_d$ series). The structure of this group allows it to encompass both the T-duality group of string theory as well as the general linear symmetry group of ${\cal M}$-theory. ${\cal A}$-theory is defined by the current algebras in Hamiltonian formalism, or by world-volume actions in Lagrangian formalism. The spacetime coordinates are selfdual gauge fields on the world-volume, requiring the Gauss law constraints tying the world-volume to spacetime. Solving the Gauss law constraints/the Virasoro constraints gives the world-volume/spacetime sectioning from ${\cal A}$-theory to ${\cal T}$-theory/ ${\cal M}$-theory respectively. The ${\cal A}$-theory Lagrangian admits extended symmetry which has not been observed previously in the literature, where the background fields include both the spacetime and the world-volume gravitational fields. We also constructed the four-point amplitude of ${\cal A}$-theory in the low energy limit. The amplitude is written in a way that the U-duality symmetry is manifest, but after solving the section condition, it reduces to the usual four-graviton amplitude. In the previous papers, we have referred to this model as F-theory, however, F-theory initiated by Vafa is now a big branch of string theory as the study of elliptic fibrations, so we refer to these constructions as generalized models of theory for all dimensions with all duality symmetries as ${\cal A}$-theory., Comment: 71 pages, 2 figures

Actor-critic algorithms have shown remarkable success in solving state-of-the-art decision-making problems. However, despite their empirical effectiveness, their theoretical underpinnings remain relatively unexplored, especially with neural network parametrization. In this paper, we delve into the study of a natural actor-critic algorithm that utilizes neural networks to represent the critic. Our aim is to establish sample complexity guarantees for this algorithm, achieving a deeper understanding of its performance characteristics. To achieve that, we propose a Natural Actor-Critic algorithm with 2-Layer critic parametrization (NAC2L). Our approach involves estimating the $Q$-function in each iteration through a convex optimization problem. We establish that our proposed approach attains a sample complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon^{4}(1-\gamma)^{4}}\right)$. In contrast, the existing sample complexity results in the literature only hold for a tabular or linear MDP. Our result, on the other hand, holds for countable state spaces and does not require a linear or low-rank structure on the MDP., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.07675

In this paper, we study the problem of (finite horizon tabular) Markov decision processes (MDPs) with heavy-tailed rewards under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Compared with the previous studies for private reinforcement learning that typically assume rewards are sampled from some bounded or sub-Gaussian distributions to ensure DP, we consider the setting where reward distributions have only finite $(1+v)$-th moments with some $v \in (0,1]$. By resorting to robust mean estimators for rewards, we first propose two frameworks for heavy-tailed MDPs, i.e., one is for value iteration and another is for policy optimization. Under each framework, we consider both joint differential privacy (JDP) and local differential privacy (LDP) models. Based on our frameworks, we provide regret upper bounds for both JDP and LDP cases and show that the moment of distribution and privacy budget both have significant impacts on regrets. Finally, we establish a lower bound of regret minimization for heavy-tailed MDPs in JDP model by reducing it to the instance-independent lower bound of heavy-tailed multi-armed bandits in DP model. We also show the lower bound for the problem in LDP by adopting some private minimax methods. Our results reveal that there are fundamental differences between the problem of private RL with sub-Gaussian and that with heavy-tailed rewards., Comment: ICML 2023