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We present BehAV, a novel approach for autonomous robot navigation in outdoor scenes guided by human instructions and leveraging Vision Language Models (VLMs). Our method interprets human commands using a Large Language Model (LLM) and categorizes the instructions into navigation and behavioral guidelines. Navigation guidelines consist of directional commands (e.g., "move forward until") and associated landmarks (e.g., "the building with blue windows"), while behavioral guidelines encompass regulatory actions (e.g., "stay on") and their corresponding objects (e.g., "pavements"). We use VLMs for their zero-shot scene understanding capabilities to estimate landmark locations from RGB images for robot navigation. Further, we introduce a novel scene representation that utilizes VLMs to ground behavioral rules into a behavioral cost map. This cost map encodes the presence of behavioral objects within the scene and assigns costs based on their regulatory actions. The behavioral cost map is integrated with a LiDAR-based occupancy map for navigation. To navigate outdoor scenes while adhering to the instructed behaviors, we present an unconstrained Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based planner that prioritizes both reaching landmarks and following behavioral guidelines. We evaluate the performance of BehAV on a quadruped robot across diverse real-world scenarios, demonstrating a 22.49% improvement in alignment with human-teleoperated actions, as measured by Frechet distance, and achieving a 40% higher navigation success rate compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Navigating large-scale outdoor environments requires complex reasoning in terms of geometric structures, environmental semantics, and terrain characteristics, which are typically captured by onboard sensors such as LiDAR and cameras. While current mobile robots can navigate such environments using pre-defined, high-precision maps based on hand-crafted rules catered for the specific environment, they lack commonsense reasoning capabilities that most humans possess when navigating unknown outdoor spaces. To address this gap, we introduce the Global Navigation Dataset (GND), a large-scale dataset that integrates multi-modal sensory data, including 3D LiDAR point clouds and RGB and 360-degree images, as well as multi-category traversability maps (pedestrian walkways, vehicle roadways, stairs, off-road terrain, and obstacles) from ten university campuses. These environments encompass a variety of parks, urban settings, elevation changes, and campus layouts of different scales. The dataset covers approximately 2.7km2 and includes at least 350 buildings in total. We also present a set of novel applications of GND to showcase its utility to enable global robot navigation, such as map-based global navigation, mapless navigation, and global place recognition.

We present a multi-modal trajectory generation and selection algorithm for real-world mapless outdoor navigation in challenging scenarios with unstructured off-road features like buildings, grass, and curbs. Our goal is to compute suitable trajectories that (1) satisfy the environment-specific traversability constraints and (2) generate human-like paths while navigating in crosswalks, sidewalks, etc. Our formulation uses a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) generative model enhanced with traversability constraints to generate multiple candidate trajectories for global navigation. We use VLMs and a visual prompting approach with their zero-shot ability of semantic understanding and logical reasoning to choose the best trajectory given the contextual information about the task. We evaluate our methods in various outdoor scenes with wheeled robots and compare the performance with other global navigation algorithms. In practice, we observe at least 3.35% improvement in traversability and 20.61% improvement in terms of human-like navigation in generated trajectories in challenging outdoor navigation scenarios.

We present a new algorithm, Cross-Source-Context Place Recognition (CSCPR), for RGB-D indoor place recognition that integrates global retrieval and reranking into a single end-to-end model. Unlike prior approaches that primarily focus on the RGB domain, CSCPR is designed to handle the RGB-D data. We extend the Context-of-Clusters (CoCs) for handling noisy colorized point clouds and introduce two novel modules for reranking: the Self-Context Cluster (SCC) and Cross Source Context Cluster (CSCC), which enhance feature representation and match query-database pairs based on local features, respectively. We also present two new datasets, ScanNetIPR and ARKitIPR. Our experiments demonstrate that CSCPR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on these datasets by at least 36.5% in Recall@1 at ScanNet-PR dataset and 44% in new datasets. Code and datasets will be released.

In the field of evolutionary multi-objective optimization, the approximation of the Pareto front (PF) is achieved by utilizing a collection of representative candidate solutions that exhibit desirable convergence and diversity. Although several multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have been designed, they still have difficulties in keeping balance between convergence and diversity of population. To better solve multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs), this paper proposes a Two-stage Evolutionary Framework For Multi-objective Optimization (TEMOF). Literally, algorithms are divided into two stages to enhance the search capability of the population. During the initial half of evolutions, parental selection is exclusively conducted from the primary population. Additionally, we not only perform environmental selection on the current population, but we also establish an external archive to store individuals situated on the first PF. Subsequently, in the second stage, parents are randomly chosen either from the population or the archive. In the experiments, one classic MOEA and two state-of-the-art MOEAs are integrated into the framework to form three new algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate the superior and robust performance of the proposed framework across a wide range of MOPs. Besides, the winner among three new algorithms is compared with several existing MOEAs and shows better results. Meanwhile, we conclude the reasons that why the two-stage framework is effect for the existing benchmark functions., Comment: Accepted by the CEC conference of WCCI2024

Electroencephalography (EEG), a medical imaging technique that captures scalp electrical activity of brain structures via electrodes, has been widely used in affective computing. The spatial domain of EEG is rich in affective information. However, few of the existing studies have simultaneously analyzed EEG signals from multiple perspectives of geometric and anatomical structures in spatial domain. In this paper, we propose a multi-view Graph Transformer (MVGT) based on spatial relations, which integrates information from the temporal, frequency and spatial domains, including geometric and anatomical structures, so as to enhance the expressive power of the model comprehensively. We incorporate the spatial information of EEG channels into the model as encoding, thereby improving its ability to perceive the spatial structure of the channels. Meanwhile, experimental results based on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in recent years. In addition, the results also show that the MVGT could extract information from multiple domains and capture inter-channel relationships in EEG emotion recognition tasks effectively.

In trajectory forecasting tasks for traffic, future output trajectories can be computed by advancing the ego vehicle's state with predicted actions according to a kinematics model. By unrolling predicted trajectories via time integration and models of kinematic dynamics, predicted trajectories should not only be kinematically feasible but also relate uncertainty from one timestep to the next. While current works in probabilistic prediction do incorporate kinematic priors for mean trajectory prediction, _variance_ is often left as a learnable parameter, despite uncertainty in one time step being inextricably tied to uncertainty in the previous time step. In this paper, we show simple and differentiable analytical approximations describing the relationship between variance at one timestep and that at the next with the kinematic bicycle model. In our results, we find that encoding the relationship between variance across timesteps works especially well in unoptimal settings, such as with small or noisy datasets. We observe up to a 50% performance boost in partial dataset settings and up to an 8% performance boost in large-scale learning compared to previous kinematic prediction methods on SOTA trajectory forecasting architectures out-of-the-box, with no fine-tuning., Comment: 8 pages

With the advent of foundation models like ChatGPT, educators are excited about the transformative role that AI might play in propelling the next education revolution. The developing speed and the profound impact of foundation models in various industries force us to think deeply about the changes they will make to education, a domain that is critically important for the future of humans. In this paper, we discuss the strengths of foundation models, such as personalized learning, education inequality, and reasoning capabilities, as well as the development of agent architecture tailored for education, which integrates AI agents with pedagogical frameworks to create adaptive learning environments. Furthermore, we highlight the risks and opportunities of AI overreliance and creativity. Lastly, we envision a future where foundation models in education harmonize human and AI capabilities, fostering a dynamic, inclusive, and adaptive educational ecosystem., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Intelligent Systems

We present a novel end-to-end algorithm (PoCo) for the indoor RGB-D place recognition task, aimed at identifying the most likely match for a given query frame within a reference database. The task presents inherent challenges attributed to the constrained field of view and limited range of perception sensors. We propose a new network architecture, which generalizes the recent Context of Clusters (CoCs) to extract global descriptors directly from the noisy point clouds through end-to-end learning. Moreover, we develop the architecture by integrating both color and geometric modalities into the point features to enhance the global descriptor representation. We conducted evaluations on public datasets ScanNet-PR and ARKit with 807 and 5047 scenarios, respectively. PoCo achieves SOTA performance: on ScanNet-PR, we achieve R@1 of 64.63%, a 5.7% improvement from the best-published result CGis (61.12%); on Arkit, we achieve R@1 of 45.12%, a 13.3% improvement from the best-published result CGis (39.82%). In addition, PoCo shows higher efficiency than CGis in inference time (1.75X-faster), and we demonstrate the effectiveness of PoCo in recognizing places within a real-world laboratory environment.

We propose VLM-Social-Nav, a novel Vision-Language Model (VLM) based navigation approach to compute a robot's motion in human-centered environments. Our goal is to make real-time decisions on robot actions that are socially compliant with human expectations. We utilize a perception model to detect important social entities and prompt a VLM to generate guidance for socially compliant robot behavior. VLM-Social-Nav uses a VLM-based scoring module that computes a cost term that ensures socially appropriate and effective robot actions generated by the underlying planner. Our overall approach reduces reliance on large training datasets and enhances adaptability in decision-making. In practice, it results in improved socially compliant navigation in human-shared environments. We demonstrate and evaluate our system in four different real-world social navigation scenarios with a Turtlebot robot. We observe at least 27.38% improvement in the average success rate and 19.05% improvement in the average collision rate in the four social navigation scenarios. Our user study score shows that VLM-Social-Nav generates the most socially compliant navigation behavior.

We present a novel end-to-end diffusion-based trajectory generation method, DTG, for mapless global navigation in challenging outdoor scenarios with occlusions and unstructured off-road features like grass, buildings, bushes, etc. Given a distant goal, our approach computes a trajectory that satisfies the following goals: (1) minimize the travel distance to the goal; (2) maximize the traversability by choosing paths that do not lie in undesirable areas. Specifically, we present a novel Conditional RNN(CRNN) for diffusion models to efficiently generate trajectories. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive training method that ensures that the diffusion model generates more traversable trajectories. We evaluate our methods in various outdoor scenes and compare the performance with other global navigation algorithms on a Husky robot. In practice, we observe at least a 15% improvement in traveling distance and around a 7% improvement in traversability., Comment: 10 pages

Atomically thin cuprates exhibiting a superconducting phase transition temperature similar to bulk have recently been realized, although the device fabrication remains a challenge and limits the potential for many novel studies and applications. Here we use an optical pump-probe approach to noninvasively study the unconventional superconductivity in atomically thin Bi$_2$Sr$_2$Ca$_{0.92}$Y$_{0.08}$Cu$_2$O$_{8+{\delta}}$ (Y-Bi2212). Apart from finding an optical response due to the superconducting phase transition that is similar to bulk Y-Bi2212, we observe that the sign and amplitude of the pump-probe signal in the atomically thin flake vary significantly in different dielectric environments depending on the nature of the optical excitation. By exploiting the spatial resolution of the optical probe, we uncover the exceptional sensitivity of monolayer Y-Bi2212 to the environment. Our results provide the first optical evidence for the intralayer nature of the superconducting condensate in Bi2212, and highlight the role of double-sided encapsulation in preserving superconductivity in atomically thin cuprates., Comment: To be published in Nano Letters

In this paper, we highlight the critical issues of robustness and safety associated with integrating large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) into robotics applications. Recent works focus on using LLMs and VLMs to improve the performance of robotics tasks, such as manipulation and navigation. Despite these improvements, analyzing the safety of such systems remains underexplored yet extremely critical. LLMs and VLMs are highly susceptible to adversarial inputs, prompting a significant inquiry into the safety of robotic systems. This concern is important because robotics operate in the physical world where erroneous actions can result in severe consequences. This paper explores this issue thoroughly, presenting a mathematical formulation of potential attacks on LLM/VLM-based robotic systems and offering experimental evidence of the safety challenges. Our empirical findings highlight a significant vulnerability: simple modifications to the input can drastically reduce system effectiveness. Specifically, our results demonstrate an average performance deterioration of 19.4% under minor input prompt modifications and a more alarming 29.1% under slight perceptual changes. These findings underscore the urgent need for robust countermeasures to ensure the safe and reliable deployment of advanced LLM/VLM-based robotic systems.

Segmentation is a critical step in analyzing the developing human fetal brain. There have been vast improvements in automatic segmentation methods in the past several years, and the Fetal Brain Tissue Annotation (FeTA) Challenge 2021 helped to establish an excellent standard of fetal brain segmentation. However, FeTA 2021 was a single center study, and the generalizability of algorithms across different imaging centers remains unsolved, limiting real-world clinical applicability. The multi-center FeTA Challenge 2022 focuses on advancing the generalizability of fetal brain segmentation algorithms for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In FeTA 2022, the training dataset contained images and corresponding manually annotated multi-class labels from two imaging centers, and the testing data contained images from these two imaging centers as well as two additional unseen centers. The data from different centers varied in many aspects, including scanners used, imaging parameters, and fetal brain super-resolution algorithms applied. 16 teams participated in the challenge, and 17 algorithms were evaluated. Here, a detailed overview and analysis of the challenge results are provided, focusing on the generalizability of the submissions. Both in- and out of domain, the white matter and ventricles were segmented with the highest accuracy, while the most challenging structure remains the cerebral cortex due to anatomical complexity. The FeTA Challenge 2022 was able to successfully evaluate and advance generalizability of multi-class fetal brain tissue segmentation algorithms for MRI and it continues to benchmark new algorithms. The resulting new methods contribute to improving the analysis of brain development in utero., Comment: Results from FeTA Challenge 2022, held at MICCAI; Manuscript submitted. Supplementary Info (including submission methods descriptions) available here: https://zenodo.org/records/10628648

The recent surge in generative AI technologies, such as large language models and diffusion models, has boosted the development of AI applications in various domains, including science, finance, and education. Concurrently, adaptive learning, a concept that has gained substantial interest in the educational sphere, has proven its efficacy in enhancing students' learning efficiency. In this position paper, we aim to shed light on the intersectional studies of these two methods, which combine generative AI with adaptive learning concepts. By presenting discussions about the benefits, challenges, and potentials in this field, we argue that this union will contribute significantly to the development of the next-stage learning format in education., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures

In this paper, we propose a novel variational active contour model based on Aubert-Aujol (AA) denoising model, which hybrides geodesic active contour (GAC) model with active contours without edges (ACWE) model and can be used to segment images corrupted by multiplicative gamma noise. We transform the proposed model into classic ROF model by adding a proximity term. Inspired by a fast denosing algorithm proposed by Jia-Zhao recently, we propose two fast fixed point algorithms to solve SAR image segmentation question. Experimental results for real SAR images show that the proposed image segmentation model can efficiently stop the contours at weak or blurred edges, and can automatically detect the exterior and interior boundaries of images with multiplicative gamma noise. The proposed fast fixed point algorithms are robustness to initialization contour, and can further reduce about 15% of the time needed for algorithm proposed by Goldstein-Osher., Comment: 20 pages,28 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2312.08376, arXiv:2312.09365

In this paper, we propose a novel locally statistical active contour model (LACM) based on Aubert-Aujol (AA) denoising model and variational level set method, which can be used for SAR images segmentation with intensity inhomogeneity. Then we transform the proposed model into a global optimization model by using convex relaxation technique. Firstly, we apply the Split Bregman technique to transform the global optimization model into two alternating optimization processes of Shrink operator and Laplace operator, which is called SB_LACM model. Moreover, we propose two fast models to solve the global optimization model , which are more efficient than the SB_LACM model. The first model is: we add the proximal function to transform the global optimization model to a general ROF model[29], which can be solved by a fast denoising algorithm proposed by R.-Q.Jia, and H.Zhao; Thus we obtain a fast segmentation algorithm with global optimization solver that does not involve partial differential equations or difference equation, and only need simple difference computation. The second model is: we use a different splitting approach than one model to transform the global optimization model into a differentiable term and a general ROF model term, which can be solved by the same technique as the first model. Experiments using some challenging synthetic images and Envisat SAR images demonstrate the superiority of our proposed models with respect to the state-of-the-art models., Comment: 28 pages,49 figures

Understanding the nature of sliding ferroelectricity is of fundamental importance for the discovery and application of two-dimensional ferroelectric materials. In this work, we investigate the phenomenon of switchable polarization in a bilayer MoS$_2$ with a natural rhombohedral stacking, where the spontaneous polarization is coupled with excitonic effects through an asymmetric interlayer coupling. Using optical spectroscopy and imaging techniques, we observe how a released domain wall switches the polarization of a large single domain. Our results highlight the importance of domain walls in the polarization switching of non-twisted rhombohedral transition metal dichalcogenides and open new opportunities for the non-volatile control of their optical response., Comment: 4 Figures

Constructing a high-performance target detector under the background of sea clutter is always necessary and important. In this work, we propose a RepVGGA0-CWT detector, where RepVGG is a residual network that gains a high detection accuracy. Different from traditional residual networks, RepVGG keeps an acceptable calculation speed. Giving consideration to both accuracy and speed, the RepVGGA0 is selected among all the variants of RepVGG. Also, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is employed to extract the radar echoes' time-frequency feature effectively. In the tests, other networks (ResNet50, ResNet18 and AlexNet) and feature extraction methods (short-time Fourier transform (STFT), CWT) are combined to build detectors for comparison. The result of different datasets shows that the RepVGGA0-CWT detector performs better than those detectors in terms of low controllable false alarm rate, high training speed, high inference speed and low memory usage. This RepVGGA0-CWT detector is hardware-friendly and can be applied in real-time scenes for its high inference speed in detection.

Using a survey of international students from three different IHEs across the United States and follow-up focus groups, we gathered feedback directly from current international students studying in the United States on the practices and policies they have found most and least helpful in terms of supporting them in their studies and their suggestions for additional ways IHEs might better support their international students. Our findings suggest that international students are generally satisfied with the support provided by their international student offices at their institutes of higher education, although they also identified several areas for improvement. In both the surveys and the focus groups, participants emphasized the need for practical assistance with finding housing in the United States and navigating the complexities of attaining a social security number so they can open bank accounts, buy cell phones, and apply for leases on apartments. They also discussed the need to foster the development of meaningful friendships with other international students as well as students from the United States and for ensuring that the mental/emotional health of students, as well as their academic progress, are looked after. Suggestions for ways IHEs might address these identified needs are discussed.

We present a novel learning-based trajectory generation algorithm for outdoor robot navigation. Our goal is to compute collision-free paths that also satisfy the environment-specific traversability constraints. Our approach is designed for global planning using limited onboard robot perception in mapless environments while ensuring comprehensive coverage of all traversable directions. Our formulation uses a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) generative model that is enhanced with traversability constraints and an optimization formulation used for the coverage. We highlight the benefits of our approach over state-of-the-art trajectory generation approaches and demonstrate its performance in challenging and large outdoor environments, including around buildings, across intersections, along trails, and off-road terrain, using a Clearpath Husky and a Boston Dynamics Spot robot. In practice, our approach results in a 6% improvement in coverage of traversable areas and an 89% reduction in trajectory portions residing in non-traversable regions. Our video is here: https://youtu.be/3eJ2soAzXnU, Comment: 9

It is a big challenge to develop efficient models for identifying personalized drug targets (PDTs) from high-dimensional personalized genomic profile of individual patients. Recent structural network control principles have introduced a new approach to discover PDTs by selecting an optimal set of driver genes in personalized gene interaction network (PGIN). However, most of current methods only focus on controlling the system through a minimum driver-node set and ignore the existence of multiple candidate driver-node sets for therapeutic drug target identification in PGIN. Therefore, this paper proposed multi-objective optimization-based structural network control principles (MONCP) by considering minimum driver nodes and maximum prior-known drug-target information. To solve MONCP, a discrete multi-objective optimization problem is formulated with many constrained variables, and a novel evolutionary optimization model called LSCV-MCEA was developed by adapting a multi-tasking framework and a rankings-based fitness function method. With genomics data of patients with breast or lung cancer from The Cancer Genome Atlas database, the effectiveness of LSCV-MCEA was validated. The experimental results indicated that compared with other advanced methods, LSCV-MCEA can more effectively identify PDTs with the highest Area Under the Curve score for predicting clinically annotated combinatorial drugs. Meanwhile, LSCV-MCEA can more effectively solve MONCP than other evolutionary optimization methods in terms of algorithm convergence and diversity. Particularly, LSCV-MCEA can efficiently detect disease signals for individual patients with BRCA cancer. The study results show that multi-objective optimization can solve structural network control principles effectively and offer a new perspective for understanding tumor heterogeneity in cancer precision medicine., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures; This work has been submitted to IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation

Slip avalanches are ubiquitous phenomena occurring in 3D materials under shear strain and their study contributes immensely to our understanding of plastic deformation, fragmentation, and earthquakes. So far, little is known about the role of shear strain in 2D materials. Here we show some evidence of two-dimensional slip avalanches in exfoliated rhombohedral MoS2, triggered by shear strain near the threshold level. Utilizing interfacial polarization in 3R-MoS2, we directly probe the stacking order in multilayer flakes and discover a wide variety of polarization domains with sizes following a power-law distribution. These findings suggest slip avalanches can occur during the exfoliation of 2D materials, and the stacking orders can be changed via shear strain. Our observation has far-reaching implications for developing new materials and technologies, where precise control over the atomic structure of these materials is essential for optimizing their properties as well as for our understanding of fundamental physical phenomena., Comment: To be published in Nano Letters

Venture capital (VC) is a relatively newly emergent industry that is still subject to large uncertainties in China. Therefore, building a robust social network with other VC institutions is a good way to share information, various resources, and benefit from skill and knowledge complementarity to against risks. Strong evidences indicate that better networked VC institutions are of a better financial performance, however, most of previous works overlook the evolution of VC institutions and only focus on some simple topology indicators of the static syndication network, which also neglects higher-order network structure and cannot give a comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, based on VC investment records in the Chinese market, we construct temporal syndication networks between VC institutions year by year. As k-shell decomposition considers higher-order connection patterns, we employ k-shell as an evaluation of the influence of VC institutions in syndication networks. By clustering time series of k-shell values, the VC institutions in China fall into five groups that are quite different from each other on financial performances and investment behaviors. This, in turn, proves the power of our method that only based on proper sequential network properties, we can reveal their financial investment performance. Compared to other network centrality measurements, k-shell is a better indicator that is indicated by a smaller intra-group distance and a larger inter-group distance.