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Improving connectivity and completeness are the most challenging aspects of small liver vessel segmentation. It is difficult for existing methods to obtain segmented liver vessel trees simultaneously with continuous geometry and detail in small vessels. We proposed a diffusion model-based method with a multi-scale graph attention guidance to break through the bottleneck to segment the liver vessels. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods used in this study on two public datasets of 3D-ircadb-01 and LiVS. Dice coefficient and Sensitivity are improved by at least 11.67% and 24.21% on 3D-ircadb-01 dataset, and are improved by at least 3.21% and 9.11% on LiVS dataset. Connectivity is also quantitatively evaluated in this study and our method performs best. The proposed method is reliable for small liver vessel segmentation., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

Predicting human intent is challenging yet essential to achieving seamless Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). Many existing approaches fail to fully exploit the inherent relationships between objects, tasks, and the human model. Current methods for predicting human intent, such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), often lack interpretability due to their failure to account for causal relationships between variables. To address these challenges, in this paper, we developed a novel Bayesian Intention (BI) framework to predict human intent within a multi-modality information framework in HRC scenarios. This framework captures the complexity of intent prediction by modeling the correlations between human behavior conventions and scene data. Our framework leverages these inferred intent predictions to optimize the robot's response in real-time, enabling smoother and more intuitive collaboration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a HRC task involving a UR5 robot, highlighting BI's capability for real-time human intent prediction and collision avoidance using a unique dataset we created. Our evaluations show that the multi-modality BI model predicts human intent within 2.69ms, with a 36% increase in precision, a 60% increase in F1 Score, and an 85% increase in accuracy compared to its best baseline method. The results underscore BI's potential to advance real-time human intent prediction and collision avoidance, making a significant contribution to the field of HRC.

Human intelligence possesses the ability to effectively focus on important environmental components, which enhances perception, learning, reasoning, and decision-making. Inspired by this cognitive mechanism, we introduced a novel concept termed relevance for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). Relevance is defined as the importance of the objects based on the applicability and pertinence of the objects for the human objective or other factors. In this paper, we further developed a novel two-loop framework integrating real-time and asynchronous processing to quantify relevance and apply relevance for safer and more efficient HRC. The asynchronous loop leverages the world knowledge from an LLM and quantifies relevance, and the real-time loop executes scene understanding, human intent prediction, and decision-making based on relevance. In decision making, we proposed and developed a human robot task allocation method based on relevance and a novel motion generation and collision avoidance methodology considering the prediction of human trajectory. Simulations and experiments show that our methodology for relevance quantification can accurately and robustly predict the human objective and relevance, with an average accuracy of up to 0.90 for objective prediction and up to 0.96 for relevance prediction. Moreover, our motion generation methodology reduces collision cases by 63.76% and collision frames by 44.74% when compared with a state-of-the-art (SOTA) collision avoidance method. Our framework and methodologies, with relevance, guide the robot on how to best assist humans and generate safer and more efficient actions for HRC.

Effective human-robot collaboration (HRC) requires the robots to possess human-like intelligence. Inspired by the human's cognitive ability to selectively process and filter elements in complex environments, this paper introduces a novel concept and scene-understanding approach termed `relevance.' It identifies relevant components in a scene. To accurately and efficiently quantify relevance, we developed an event-based framework that selectively triggers relevance determination, along with a probabilistic methodology built on a structured scene representation. Simulation results demonstrate that the relevance framework and methodology accurately predict the relevance of a general HRC setup, achieving a precision of 0.99 and a recall of 0.94. Relevance can be broadly applied to several areas in HRC to improve task planning time by 79.56% compared with pure planning for a cereal task, reduce perception latency by up to 26.53% for an object detector, improve HRC safety by up to 13.50% and reduce the number of inquiries for HRC by 80.84%. A real-world demonstration showcases the relevance framework's ability to intelligently assist humans in everyday tasks.

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made significant impacts across various domains, yet they often struggle in complex multi-agent environments due to issues like algorithm instability, low sampling efficiency, and the challenges of exploration and dimensionality explosion. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a structured approach to decompose complex tasks into simpler sub-tasks, which is promising for multi-agent settings. This paper advances the field by introducing a hierarchical architecture that autonomously generates effective subgoals without explicit constraints, enhancing both flexibility and stability in training. We propose a dynamic goal generation strategy that adapts based on environmental changes. This method significantly improves the adaptability and sample efficiency of the learning process. Furthermore, we address the critical issue of credit assignment in multi-agent systems by synergizing our hierarchical architecture with a modified QMIX network, thus improving overall strategy coordination and efficiency. Comparative experiments with mainstream reinforcement learning algorithms demonstrate the superior convergence speed and performance of our approach in both single-agent and multi-agent environments, confirming its effectiveness and flexibility in complex scenarios. Our code is open-sourced at: \url{https://github.com/SICC-Group/GMAH}.

The increasing volume of data in relational databases and the expertise needed for writing SQL queries pose challenges for users to access and analyze data. Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) solves the issues by utilizing natural language processing (NLP) techniques to convert natural language into SQL queries. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), a range of LLM-based Text2SQL methods have emerged. This survey provides a comprehensive review of LLMs in Text2SQL tasks. We review benchmark datasets, prompt engineering methods, fine-tuning methods, and base models in LLM-based Text2SQL methods. We provide insights in each part and discuss future directions in this field.

Few-shot and zero-shot text classification aim to recognize samples from novel classes with limited labeled samples or no labeled samples at all. While prevailing methods have shown promising performance via transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes, they are still limited by (1) Inherent dissimilarities among classes make the transformation of features learned from seen classes to unseen classes both difficult and inefficient. (2) Rare labeled novel samples usually cannot provide enough supervision signals to enable the model to adjust from the source distribution to the target distribution, especially for complicated scenarios. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a simple and effective strategy for few-shot and zero-shot text classification. We aim to liberate the model from the confines of seen classes, thereby enabling it to predict unseen categories without the necessity of training on seen classes. Specifically, for mining more related unseen category knowledge, we utilize a large pre-trained language model to generate pseudo novel samples, and select the most representative ones as category anchors. After that, we convert the multi-class classification task into a binary classification task and use the similarities of query-anchor pairs for prediction to fully leverage the limited supervision signals. Extensive experiments on six widely used public datasets show that our proposed method can outperform other strong baselines significantly in few-shot and zero-shot tasks, even without using any seen class samples., Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2024

Mine fleet management algorithms can significantly reduce operational costs and enhance productivity in mining systems. Most current fleet management algorithms are evaluated based on self-implemented or proprietary simulation environments, posing challenges for replication and comparison. This paper models the simulation environment for mine fleet management from a complex systems perspective. Building upon previous work, we introduce probabilistic, user-defined events for random event simulation and implement various evaluation metrics and baselines, effectively reflecting the robustness of fleet management algorithms against unforeseen incidents. We present ``OpenMines'', an open-source framework encompassing the entire process of mine system modeling, algorithm development, and evaluation, facilitating future algorithm comparison and replication in the field. Code is available in https://github.com/370025263/openmines., Comment: accepted in: 2024 35th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 4 figures, 1 table

Black-box hard-label adversarial attack on text is a practical and challenging task, as the text data space is inherently discrete and non-differentiable, and only the predicted label is accessible. Research on this problem is still in the embryonic stage and only a few methods are available. Nevertheless, existing methods rely on the complex heuristic algorithm or unreliable gradient estimation strategy, which probably fall into the local optimum and inevitably consume numerous queries, thus are difficult to craft satisfactory adversarial examples with high semantic similarity and low perturbation rate in a limited query budget. To alleviate above issues, we propose a simple yet effective framework to generate high quality textual adversarial examples under the black-box hard-label attack scenarios, named HQA-Attack. Specifically, after initializing an adversarial example randomly, HQA-attack first constantly substitutes original words back as many as possible, thus shrinking the perturbation rate. Then it leverages the synonym set of the remaining changed words to further optimize the adversarial example with the direction which can improve the semantic similarity and satisfy the adversarial condition simultaneously. In addition, during the optimizing procedure, it searches a transition synonym word for each changed word, thus avoiding traversing the whole synonym set and reducing the query number to some extent. Extensive experimental results on five text classification datasets, three natural language inference datasets and two real-world APIs have shown that the proposed HQA-Attack method outperforms other strong baselines significantly.

Perception serves as a critical component in the functionality of autonomous agents. However, the intricate relationship between perception metrics and robotic metrics remains unclear, leading to ambiguity in the development and fine-tuning of perception algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for quantifying this relationship, taking into account factors such as detection rate, detection quality, and latency. Furthermore, we introduce two novel metrics for Human-Robot Collaboration safety predicated upon perception metrics: Critical Collision Probability (CCP) and Average Collision Probability (ACP). To validate the utility of these metrics in facilitating algorithm development and tuning, we develop an attentive processing strategy that focuses exclusively on key input features. This approach significantly reduces computational time while preserving a similar level of accuracy. Experimental results indicate that the implementation of this strategy in an object detector leads to a maximum reduction of 30.091% in inference time and 26.534% in total time per frame. Additionally, the strategy lowers the CCP and ACP in a baseline model by 11.252% and 13.501%, respectively. The source code will be made publicly available in the final proof version of the manuscript.

Decision-based methods have shown to be effective in black-box adversarial attacks, as they can obtain satisfactory performance and only require to access the final model prediction. Gradient estimation is a critical step in black-box adversarial attacks, as it will directly affect the query efficiency. Recent works have attempted to utilize gradient priors to facilitate score-based methods to obtain better results. However, these gradient priors still suffer from the edge gradient discrepancy issue and the successive iteration gradient direction issue, thus are difficult to simply extend to decision-based methods. In this paper, we propose a novel Decision-based Black-box Attack framework with Gradient Priors (DBA-GP), which seamlessly integrates the data-dependent gradient prior and time-dependent prior into the gradient estimation procedure. First, by leveraging the joint bilateral filter to deal with each random perturbation, DBA-GP can guarantee that the generated perturbations in edge locations are hardly smoothed, i.e., alleviating the edge gradient discrepancy, thus remaining the characteristics of the original image as much as possible. Second, by utilizing a new gradient updating strategy to automatically adjust the successive iteration gradient direction, DBA-GP can accelerate the convergence speed, thus improving the query efficiency. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms other strong baselines significantly., Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2023

Human motion prediction is an essential step for efficient and safe human-robot collaboration. Current methods either purely rely on representing the human joints in some form of neural network-based architecture or use regression models offline to fit hyper-parameters in the hope of capturing a model encompassing human motion. While these methods provide good initial results, they are missing out on leveraging well-studied human body kinematic models as well as body and scene constraints which can help boost the efficacy of these prediction frameworks while also explicitly avoiding implausible human joint configurations. We propose a novel human motion prediction framework that incorporates human joint constraints and scene constraints in a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model to predict human motion over a set time horizon. This formulation is combined with an online context-aware constraints model to leverage task-dependent motions. It is tested on a human arm kinematic model and implemented on a human-robot collaborative setup with a UR5 robot arm to demonstrate the real-time capability of our approach. Simulations were also performed on datasets like HA4M and ANDY. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate considerable improvements in a Gaussian Process framework when these constraints are explicitly considered., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Associated video demonstration can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@MITMechatronics

Distribution estimation has been demonstrated as one of the most effective approaches in dealing with few-shot image classification, as the low-level patterns and underlying representations can be easily transferred across different tasks in computer vision domain. However, directly applying this approach to few-shot text classification is challenging, since leveraging the statistics of known classes with sufficient samples to calibrate the distributions of novel classes may cause negative effects due to serious category difference in text domain. To alleviate this issue, we propose two simple yet effective strategies to estimate the distributions of the novel classes by utilizing unlabeled query samples, thus avoiding the potential negative transfer issue. Specifically, we first assume a class or sample follows the Gaussian distribution, and use the original support set and the nearest few query samples to estimate the corresponding mean and covariance. Then, we augment the labeled samples by sampling from the estimated distribution, which can provide sufficient supervision for training the classification model. Extensive experiments on eight few-shot text classification datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly., Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2023

Multi-label aspect category detection allows a given review sentence to contain multiple aspect categories, which is shown to be more practical in sentiment analysis and attracting increasing attention. As annotating large amounts of data is time-consuming and labor-intensive, data scarcity occurs frequently in real-world scenarios, which motivates multi-label few-shot aspect category detection. However, research on this problem is still in infancy and few methods are available. In this paper, we propose a novel label-enhanced prototypical network (LPN) for multi-label few-shot aspect category detection. The highlights of LPN can be summarized as follows. First, it leverages label description as auxiliary knowledge to learn more discriminative prototypes, which can retain aspect-relevant information while eliminating the harmful effect caused by irrelevant aspects. Second, it integrates with contrastive learning, which encourages that the sentences with the same aspect label are pulled together in embedding space while simultaneously pushing apart the sentences with different aspect labels. In addition, it introduces an adaptive multi-label inference module to predict the aspect count in the sentence, which is simple yet effective. Extensive experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our proposed model LPN can consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance., Comment: Accepted to KDD 2022

Zero-shot intent classification is a vital and challenging task in dialogue systems, which aims to deal with numerous fast-emerging unacquainted intents without annotated training data. To obtain more satisfactory performance, the crucial points lie in two aspects: extracting better utterance features and strengthening the model generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective meta-learning paradigm for zero-shot intent classification. To learn better semantic representations for utterances, we introduce a new mixture attention mechanism, which encodes the pertinent word occurrence patterns by leveraging the distributional signature attention and multi-layer perceptron attention simultaneously. To strengthen the transfer ability of the model from seen classes to unseen classes, we reformulate zero-shot intent classification with a meta-learning strategy, which trains the model by simulating multiple zero-shot classification tasks on seen categories, and promotes the model generalization ability with a meta-adapting procedure on mimic unseen categories. Extensive experiments on two real-world dialogue datasets in different languages show that our model outperforms other strong baselines on both standard and generalized zero-shot intent classification tasks., Comment: Accepted to SIGIR 2022

User preference modeling is a vital yet challenging problem in personalized product search. In recent years, latent space based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance by jointly learning semantic representations of products, users, and text tokens. However, existing methods are limited in their ability to model user preferences. They typically represent users by the products they visited in a short span of time using attentive models and lack the ability to exploit relational information such as user-product interactions or item co-occurrence relations. In this work, we propose to address the limitations of prior arts by exploring local and global user behavior patterns on a user successive behavior graph, which is constructed by utilizing short-term actions of all users. To capture implicit user preference signals and collaborative patterns, we use an efficient jumping graph convolution to explore high-order relations to enrich product representations for user preference modeling. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated with existing latent space based methods and be potentially applied in any product retrieval method that uses purchase history to model user preferences. Extensive experiments on eight Amazon benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our approach. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/floatSDSDS/SBG}.

Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are critical building blocks in task-oriented dialogue systems. These two tasks are closely-related and can flourish each other. Since only a few utterances can be utilized for identifying fast-emerging new intents and slots, data scarcity issue often occurs when implementing IC and SF. However, few IC/SF models perform well when the number of training samples per class is quite small. In this paper, we propose a novel explicit-joint and supervised-contrastive learning framework for few-shot intent classification and slot filling. Its highlights are as follows. (i) The model extracts intent and slot representations via bidirectional interactions, and extends prototypical network to achieve explicit-joint learning, which guarantees that IC and SF tasks can mutually reinforce each other. (ii) The model integrates with supervised contrastive learning, which ensures that samples from same class are pulled together and samples from different classes are pushed apart. In addition, the model follows a not common but practical way to construct the episode, which gets rid of the traditional setting with fixed way and shot, and allows for unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that our model can achieve promising performance., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, Findings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (long paper), November 2021