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In spatial design, Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools often generate the entire spatial design outcome in a single automated step, rather than engaging users in a deepening and iterative process. This significantly reduces users' involvement, learning, and creative capabilities, leading to a superficial understanding of spatial design. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study, where Novices and AI (acted by experimenters) worked together to finish spatial design tasks using various AI models. We identified typical function and workflow patterns adopted by the participants, leading to the understanding of the opportunities and challenges in the human-AI co-creation process. Based on insights gathered from this research, we proposed some design implications of the novice-AI collaboration system that aims to democratize spatial design through a progressive, iterative co-creation process., Comment: draft submission to CHI 2025

The performance of disturbance observers is strongly influenced by the level of prior knowledge about the disturbance model. The simultaneous input and state estimation (SISE) algorithm is widely recognized for providing unbiased minimum-variance estimates under arbitrary disturbance models. In contrast, the Kalman filter-based disturbance observer (KF-DOB) achieves minimum mean-square error estimation when the disturbance model is fully specified. However, practical scenarios often fall between these extremes, where only partial knowledge of the disturbance model is available. This paper investigates the inherent bias-variance trade-off in KF-DOB when the disturbance model is incomplete. We further show that SISE can be interpreted as a special case of KF-DOB, where the disturbance noise covariance tends to infinity. To address this trade-off, we propose two novel estimators: the multi-kernel correntropy Kalman filter-based disturbance observer (MKCKF-DOB) and the interacting multiple models Kalman filter-based disturbance observer (IMMKF-DOB). Simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Retrieving external knowledge and prompting large language models with relevant information is an effective paradigm to enhance the performance of question-answering tasks. Previous research typically handles paragraphs from external documents in isolation, resulting in a lack of context and ambiguous references, particularly in multi-document and complex tasks. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new retrieval framework IIER, that leverages Inter-chunk Interactions to Enhance Retrieval. This framework captures the internal connections between document chunks by considering three types of interactions: structural, keyword, and semantic. We then construct a unified Chunk-Interaction Graph to represent all external documents comprehensively. Additionally, we design a graph-based evidence chain retriever that utilizes previous paths and chunk interactions to guide the retrieval process. It identifies multiple seed nodes based on the target question and iteratively searches for relevant chunks to gather supporting evidence. This retrieval process refines the context and reasoning chain, aiding the large language model in reasoning and answer generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IIER outperforms strong baselines across four datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in improving retrieval and reasoning capabilities.

Trajectory planning for quadrotors in cluttered environments has been challenging in recent years. While many trajectory planning frameworks have been successful, there still exists potential for improvements, particularly in enhancing the speed of generating efficient trajectories. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical trajectory planning framework to reduce computational time and memory usage called MINER-RRT*, which consists of two main components. First, we propose a sampling-based path planning method boosted by neural networks, where the predicted heuristic region accelerates the convergence of rapidly-exploring random trees. Second, we utilize the optimal conditions derived from the quadrotor's differential flatness properties to construct polynomial trajectories that minimize control effort in multiple stages. Extensive simulation and real-world experimental results demonstrate that, compared to several state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, our method can generate high-quality trajectories with better performance in 3D cluttered environments.

This paper presents a methodology for enhancing relation extraction from biomedical texts, focusing specifically on chemical-gene interactions. Leveraging the BioBERT model and a multi-layer fully connected network architecture, our approach integrates the ChemProt and DrugProt datasets using a novel merging strategy. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate significant performance improvements, particularly in CPR groups shared between the datasets. The findings underscore the importance of dataset merging in augmenting sample counts and improving model accuracy. Moreover, the study highlights the potential of automated information extraction in biomedical research and clinical practice.

The configuration of most robotic systems lies in continuous transformation groups. However, in mobile robot trajectory tracking, many recent works still naively utilize optimization methods for elements in vector space without considering the manifold constraint of the robot configuration. In this letter, we propose a geometric model predictive control (MPC) framework for wheeled mobile robot trajectory tracking. We first derive the error dynamics of the wheeled mobile robot trajectory tracking by considering its manifold constraint and kinematic constraint simultaneously. After that, we utilize the relationship between the Lie group and Lie algebra to convexify the tracking control problem, which enables us to solve the problem efficiently. Thanks to the Lie group formulation, our method tracks the trajectory more smoothly than existing nonlinear MPC. Simulations and physical experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods. Our pure Python-based simulation platform is publicly available to benefit further research in the community.

Direct shooting is an efficient method to solve numerical optimal control. It utilizes the Runge-Kutta scheme to discretize a continuous-time optimal control problem making the problem solvable by nonlinear programming solvers. However, conventional direct shooting raises a contradictory dynamics issue when using an augmented state to handle {high-order} systems. This paper fills the research gap by considering the direct shooting method for {high-order} systems. We derive the modified Euler and Runge-Kutta-4 methods to transcribe the system dynamics constraint directly. Additionally, we provide the global error upper bounds of our proposed methods. A set of benchmark optimal control problems shows that our methods provide more accurate solutions than existing approaches., Comment: Accepted by ECC24

Large language model (LLM) has achieved outstanding performance on various downstream tasks with its powerful natural language understanding and zero-shot capability, but LLM still suffers from knowledge limitation. Especially in scenarios that require long logical chains or complex reasoning, the hallucination and knowledge limitation of LLM limit its performance in question answering (QA). In this paper, we propose a novel framework KnowledgeNavigator to address these challenges by efficiently and accurately retrieving external knowledge from knowledge graph and using it as a key factor to enhance LLM reasoning. Specifically, KnowledgeNavigator first mines and enhances the potential constraints of the given question to guide the reasoning. Then it retrieves and filters external knowledge that supports answering through iterative reasoning on knowledge graph with the guidance of LLM and the question. Finally, KnowledgeNavigator constructs the structured knowledge into effective prompts that are friendly to LLM to help its reasoning. We evaluate KnowledgeNavigator on multiple public KGQA benchmarks, the experiments show the framework has great effectiveness and generalization, outperforming previous knowledge graph enhanced LLM methods and is comparable to the fully supervised models.

Label distribution learning (LDL) is an effective method to predict the label description degree (a.k.a. label distribution) of a sample. However, annotating label distribution (LD) for training samples is extremely costly. So recent studies often first use label enhancement (LE) to generate the estimated label distribution from the logical label and then apply external LDL algorithms on the recovered label distribution to predict the label distribution for unseen samples. But this step-wise manner overlooks the possible connections between LE and LDL. Moreover, the existing LE approaches may assign some description degrees to invalid labels. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel method to learn an LDL model directly from the logical label, which unifies LE and LDL into a joint model, and avoids the drawbacks of the previous LE methods. Extensive experiments on various datasets prove that the proposed approach can construct a reliable LDL model directly from the logical label, and produce more accurate label distribution than the state-of-the-art LE methods.

NL2VIS - which translates natural language (NL) queries to corresponding visualizations (VIS) - has attracted more and more attention both in commercial visualization vendors and academic researchers. In the last few years, the advanced deep learning-based models have achieved human-like abilities in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which clearly tells us that the deep learning-based technique is a good choice to push the field of NL2VIS. However, a big balk is the lack of benchmarks with lots of (NL, VIS) pairs. We present nvBench, the first large-scale NL2VIS benchmark, containing 25,750 (NL, VIS) pairs from 750 tables over 105 domains, synthesized from (NL, SQL) benchmarks to support cross-domain NL2VIS task. The quality of nvBench has been extensively validated by 23 experts and 300+ crowd workers. Deep learning-based models training using nvBench demonstrate that nvBench can push the field of NL2VIS.

Recent re-opening policies in the US, following a period of social distancing measures, introduced a significant increase in daily COVID-19 infections, calling for a roll-back or substantial revisiting of these policies in many states. The situation is suggestive of difficulties modeling the impact of partial distancing/re-opening policies on future epidemic spread for purposes of choosing safe alternatives. More specifically, one needs to understand the impact of manipulating the availability of social interaction venues (e.g., schools, workplaces, and retail establishments) on virus spread. We introduce a model, inspired by social networks research, that answers the above question. Our model compartmentalizes interaction venues into categories we call mixing domains, enabling one to predict COVID-19 contagion trends in different geographic regions under different what if assumptions on partial re-opening of individual domains. We apply our model to several highly impacted states showing (i) how accurately it predicts the extent of current resurgence (from available policy descriptions), and (ii) what alternatives might be more effective at mitigating the second wave. We further compare policies that rely on partial venue closure to policies that espouse wide-spread periodic testing instead (i.e., in lieu of social distancing). Our models predict that the benefits of (mandatory) testing out-shadow the benefits of partial venue closure, suggesting that perhaps more efforts should be directed to such a mitigation strategy.

Extensive research papers of three-dimensional computational techniques are widely used for the investigation of human brain pathophysiology. Eddy current analyzing could provide an indication of conductivity change within a biological body. A significant obstacle to current trend analyses is the development of a numerically stable and efficiency-finite element scheme that performs well at low frequency and does not require a large number of degrees of freedom. Here, a custom finite element method (FEM) solver based on edge elements is proposed using the weakly coupled theory, which separates the solution into two steps. First, the background field (the magnetic vector potential on each edge) is calculated and stored. Then, the electric scalar potential on each node is obtained by FEM based on Galerkin formulations. Consequently, the electric field and eddy current distribution in the object can be obtained. This solver is more efficient than typical commercial solvers since it reduces the vector eddy current equation to a scalar one, and reduces the meshing domain to just the eddy current region. It can therefore tackle complex eddy current calculations for models with much larger numbers of elements, such as those encountered in eddy current computation in biological tissues. An example is presented with a realistic human brain mesh of 2 million elements. In addition, with this solver, the equivalent magnetic field induced from the excitation coil is applied, and therefore there is no need to mesh the excitation coil. In combination, these significantly increase the efficiency of the solver.