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Infrared ship detection (IRSD) has received increasing attention in recent years due to the robustness of infrared images to adverse weather. However, a large number of false alarms may occur in complex scenes. To address these challenges, we propose the Scene Semantic Prior-Assisted Multi-Task Perception Network (SMPISD-MTPNet), which includes three stages: scene semantic extraction, deep feature extraction, and prediction. In the scene semantic extraction stage, we employ a Scene Semantic Extractor (SSE) to guide the network by the features extracted based on expert knowledge. In the deep feature extraction stage, a backbone network is employed to extract deep features. These features are subsequently integrated by a fusion network, enhancing the detection capabilities across targets of varying sizes. In the prediction stage, we utilize the Multi-Task Perception Module, which includes the Gradient-based Module and the Scene Segmentation Module, enabling precise detection of small and dim targets within complex scenes. For the training process, we introduce the Soft Fine-tuning training strategy to suppress the distortion caused by data augmentation. Besides, due to the lack of a publicly available dataset labelled for scenes, we introduce the Infrared Ship Dataset with Scene Segmentation (IRSDSS). Finally, we evaluate the network and compare it with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, indicating that SMPISD-MTPNet outperforms existing approaches. The source code and dataset for this research can be accessed at https://github.com/greekinRoma/KMNDNet.

In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on limited material types and tasks (e.g., cloth unfolding). However, these approaches face significant challenges when extended to a wider variety of thin-shell materials and a diverse range of tasks. While virtual simulations are shown to be effective in diverse robot skill learning and evaluation, prior thin-shell simulation environments only support a subset of thin-shell materials, which also limits their supported range of tasks. We introduce ThinShellLab - a fully differentiable simulation platform tailored for robotic interactions with diverse thin-shell materials possessing varying material properties, enabling flexible thin-shell manipulation skill learning and evaluation. Our experiments suggest that manipulating thin-shell objects presents several unique challenges: 1) thin-shell manipulation relies heavily on frictional forces due to the objects' co-dimensional nature, 2) the materials being manipulated are highly sensitive to minimal variations in interaction actions, and 3) the constant and frequent alteration in contact pairs makes trajectory optimization methods susceptible to local optima, and neither standard reinforcement learning algorithms nor trajectory optimization methods (either gradient-based or gradient-free) are able to solve the tasks alone. To overcome these challenges, we present an optimization scheme that couples sampling-based trajectory optimization and gradient-based optimization, boosting both learning efficiency and converged performance across various proposed tasks. In addition, the differentiable nature of our platform facilitates a smooth sim-to-real transition., Comment: ICLR 2024

Recently, state space model (SSM) has gained great attention due to its promising performance, linear complexity, and long sequence modeling ability in both language and image domains. However, it is non-trivial to extend SSM to the point cloud field, because of the causality requirement of SSM and the disorder and irregularity nature of point clouds. In this paper, we propose a novel SSM-based point cloud processing backbone, named Point Mamba, with a causality-aware ordering mechanism. To construct the causal dependency relationship, we design an octree-based ordering strategy on raw irregular points, globally sorting points in a z-order sequence and also retaining their spatial proximity. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with transformer-based counterparts, with 93.4% accuracy and 75.7 mIOU respectively on the ModelNet40 classification dataset and ScanNet semantic segmentation dataset. Furthermore, our Point Mamba has linear complexity, which is more efficient than transformer-based methods. Our method demonstrates the great potential that SSM can serve as a generic backbone in point cloud understanding. Codes are released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/Point-Mamba.

3D articulated objects are inherently challenging for manipulation due to the varied geometries and intricate functionalities associated with articulated objects.Point-level affordance, which predicts the per-point actionable score and thus proposes the best point to interact with, has demonstrated excellent performance and generalization capabilities in articulated object manipulation. However, a significant challenge remains: while previous works use perfect point cloud generated in simulation, the models cannot directly apply to the noisy point cloud in the real-world. To tackle this challenge, we leverage the property of real-world scanned point cloud that, the point cloud becomes less noisy when the camera is closer to the object. Therefore, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine affordance learning pipeline to mitigate the effect of point cloud noise in two stages. In the first stage, we learn the affordance on the noisy far point cloud which includes the whole object to propose the approximated place to manipulate. Then, we move the camera in front of the approximated place, scan a less noisy point cloud containing precise local geometries for manipulation, and learn affordance on such point cloud to propose fine-grained final actions. The proposed method is thoroughly evaluated both using large-scale simulated noisy point clouds mimicking real-world scans, and in the real world scenarios, with superiority over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness in tackling the noisy real-world point cloud problem., Comment: ICRA 2024

We present RoboGen, a generative robotic agent that automatically learns diverse robotic skills at scale via generative simulation. RoboGen leverages the latest advancements in foundation and generative models. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce policies or low-level actions, we advocate for a generative scheme, which uses these models to automatically generate diversified tasks, scenes, and training supervisions, thereby scaling up robotic skill learning with minimal human supervision. Our approach equips a robotic agent with a self-guided propose-generate-learn cycle: the agent first proposes interesting tasks and skills to develop, and then generates corresponding simulation environments by populating pertinent objects and assets with proper spatial configurations. Afterwards, the agent decomposes the proposed high-level task into sub-tasks, selects the optimal learning approach (reinforcement learning, motion planning, or trajectory optimization), generates required training supervision, and then learns policies to acquire the proposed skill. Our work attempts to extract the extensive and versatile knowledge embedded in large-scale models and transfer them to the field of robotics. Our fully generative pipeline can be queried repeatedly, producing an endless stream of skill demonstrations associated with diverse tasks and environments., Comment: ICML 2024

Mapping the electrostatic potential (ESP) distribution around ions in electrolyte solution is crucial for the establishment of a microscopic understanding of electrolyte solution properties. For solutions in the bulk phase, it has not been possible to measure the ESP distribution on Angstrom scale. Here we show that liquid electron scattering experiment using state-of-the-art relativistic electron beam can be used to measure the Debye screening length of aqueous LiCl, KCl, and KI solutions across a wide range of concentrations. We observe that the Debye screening length is long-ranged at low concentration and short-ranged at high concentration, providing key insight into the decades-long debate over whether the impact of ions in water is long-ranged or short-ranged. In addition, we show that the measured ESP can be used to retrieve the non-local dielectric function of electrolyte solution, which can serve as a promising route to investigate the electrostatic origin of special ion effects. Our observations show that, interaction, as one of the two fundamental perspectives for understanding electrolyte solution, can provide much richer information than structure., Comment: The small-angle signal in Fig. 2 C-H is highly likely to be an experimental artifact, due to that the electron beam is placed too close to the edge of the liquid sheet. This artifact invalidates the main conclusion of the paper

Safe corridor-based Trajectory Optimization (TO) presents an appealing approach for collision-free path planning of autonomous robots, offering global optimality through its convex formulation. The safe corridor is constructed based on the perceived map, however, the non-ideal perception induces uncertainty, which is rarely considered in trajectory generation. In this paper, we propose Distributionally Robust Safe Corridor Constraints (DRSCCs) to consider the uncertainty of the safe corridor. Then, we integrate DRSCCs into the trajectory optimization framework using Bernstein basis polynomials. Theoretically, we rigorously prove that the trajectory optimization problem incorporating DRSCCs is equivalent to a computationally efficient, convex quadratic program. Compared to the nominal TO, our method enhances navigation safety by significantly reducing the infeasible motions in presence of uncertainty. Moreover, the proposed approach is validated through two robotic applications, a micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and a quadruped robot Unitree A1., Comment: 7 pages

Molecular dynamics simulations have emerged as a fundamental instrument for studying biomolecules. At the same time, it is desirable to perform simulations of a collection of particles under various conditions in which the molecules can fluctuate. In this paper, we explore and adapt the soft prompt-based learning method to molecular dynamics tasks. Our model can remarkably generalize to unseen and out-of-distribution scenarios with limited training data. While our work focuses on temperature as a test case, the versatility of our approach allows for efficient simulation through any continuous dynamic conditions, such as pressure and volumes. Our framework has two stages: 1) Pre-trains with data mixing technique, augments molecular structure data and temperature prompts, then applies a curriculum learning method by increasing the ratio of them smoothly. 2) Meta-learning-based fine-tuning framework improves sample-efficiency of fine-tuning process and gives the soft prompt-tuning better initialization points. Comprehensive experiments reveal that our framework excels in accuracy for in-domain data and demonstrates strong generalization capabilities for unseen and out-of-distribution samples.

This document serves as a position paper that outlines the authors' vision for a potential pathway towards generalist robots. The purpose of this document is to share the excitement of the authors with the community and highlight a promising research direction in robotics and AI. The authors believe the proposed paradigm is a feasible path towards accomplishing the long-standing goal of robotics research: deploying robots, or embodied AI agents more broadly, in various non-factory real-world settings to perform diverse tasks. This document presents a specific idea for mining knowledge in the latest large-scale foundation models for robotics research. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce low-level policies and actions, it advocates for a fully automated generative pipeline (termed as generative simulation), which uses these models to generate diversified tasks, scenes and training supervisions at scale, thereby scaling up low-level skill learning and ultimately leading to a foundation model for robotics that empowers generalist robots. The authors are actively pursuing this direction, but in the meantime, they recognize that the ambitious goal of building generalist robots with large-scale policy training demands significant resources such as computing power and hardware, and research groups in academia alone may face severe resource constraints in implementing the entire vision. Therefore, the authors believe sharing their thoughts at this early stage could foster discussions, attract interest towards the proposed pathway and related topics from industry groups, and potentially spur significant technical advancements in the field.

Perceiving and interacting with 3D articulated objects, such as cabinets, doors, and faucets, pose particular challenges for future home-assistant robots performing daily tasks in human environments. Besides parsing the articulated parts and joint parameters, researchers recently advocate learning manipulation affordance over the input shape geometry which is more task-aware and geometrically fine-grained. However, taking only passive observations as inputs, these methods ignore many hidden but important kinematic constraints (e.g., joint location and limits) and dynamic factors (e.g., joint friction and restitution), therefore losing significant accuracy for test cases with such uncertainties. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named AdaAfford, that learns to perform very few test-time interactions for quickly adapting the affordance priors to more accurate instance-specific posteriors. We conduct large-scale experiments using the PartNet-Mobility dataset and prove that our system performs better than baselines., Comment: ECCV 2022

Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects (e.g., cabinets, doors) in human environments is an important yet challenging task for future home-assistant robots. The space of 3D articulated objects is exceptionally rich in their myriad semantic categories, diverse shape geometry, and complicated part functionality. Previous works mostly abstract kinematic structure with estimated joint parameters and part poses as the visual representations for manipulating 3D articulated objects. In this paper, we propose object-centric actionable visual priors as a novel perception-interaction handshaking point that the perception system outputs more actionable guidance than kinematic structure estimation, by predicting dense geometry-aware, interaction-aware, and task-aware visual action affordance and trajectory proposals. We design an interaction-for-perception framework VAT-Mart to learn such actionable visual representations by simultaneously training a curiosity-driven reinforcement learning policy exploring diverse interaction trajectories and a perception module summarizing and generalizing the explored knowledge for pointwise predictions among diverse shapes. Experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach using the large-scale PartNet-Mobility dataset in SAPIEN environment and show promising generalization capabilities to novel test shapes, unseen object categories, and real-world data. Project page: https://hyperplane-lab.github.io/vat-mart, Comment: ICLR 2022