Octopuses can whip their soft arms with a characteristic “bend propagation” motion to capture prey with sensitive suckers. This relatively simple strategy provides models for robotic grasping, controllable with a small number of inputs, and a highly deformable arm with sensing capabilities. Here, we implemented an electronics-integrated soft octopus arm (E-SOAM) capable of reaching, sensing, grasping

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promising results in learning a task-specific policy from a fixed dataset. However, successful offline RL often relies heavily on the coverage and quality of the given dataset. In scenarios where the dataset for a specific task is limited, a natural approach is to improve offline RL with datasets from other tasks, namely, to conduct Multi-Task Data Sharing

In-hand object reorientation is necessary for performing many dexterous manipulation tasks, such as tool use in less structured environments, which remain beyond the reach of current robots. Prior works built reorientation systems assuming one or many of the following conditions: reorienting only specific objects with simple shapes, limited range of reorientation, slow or quasi-static manipulation

Automated building processes that enable efficient in situ resource utilization can facilitate construction in remote locations while simultaneously offering a carbon-reducing alternative to commonplace building practices. Toward these ends, we present a robotic construction pipeline that is capable of planning and building freeform stone walls and landscapes from highly heterogeneous local materials

Further progress in AI may require learning algorithms to generate their own data rather than assimilate static datasets. A Perspective in this issue proposes that they could do so by interacting with other learning agents in a socially structured way.

An overreliance on the less-affected limb for functional tasks at the expense of the paretic limb and in spite of recovered capacity is an often-observed phenomenon in survivors of hemispheric stroke. The difference between capacity for use and actual spontaneous use is referred to as arm nonuse. Obtaining an ecologically valid evaluation of arm nonuse is challenging because it requires the observation

From quadrotors delivering packages in urban areas to robot arms moving in confined warehouses, motion planning around obstacles is a core challenge in modern robotics. Planners based on optimization can design trajectories in high-dimensional spaces while satisfying the robot dynamics. However, in the presence of obstacles, these optimization problems become nonconvex and very hard to solve, even

In this paper, we study how to fairly allocate a set of m indivisible chores to a group of n agents, each of which has a general additive cost function on the items. Since envy-free (EF) allocations are not guaranteed to exist, we consider the notion of envy-freeness up to any item (EFX). In contrast to the fruitful results regarding the (approximation of) EFX allocations for goods, very little is

We propose a new approach to formally describing the requirement for statistical inference and checking whether a program uses the statistical method appropriately. Specifically, we define belief Hoare logic (BHL) for formalizing and reasoning about the statistical beliefs acquired via hypothesis testing. This program logic is sound and relatively complete with respect to a Kripke model for hypothesis

Although no specific domain knowledge is considered in the design, plain vision transformers have shown excellent performance in visual recognition tasks. However, little effort has been made to reveal the potential of such simple structures for body pose estimation tasks. In this paper, we show the surprisingly good properties of plain vision transformers for body pose estimation from various aspects

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a fundamental task in visual surveillance. Given a query image of the target person, conventional Re-ID focuses on the pairwise similarities between the candidate images and the query. However, conventional Re-ID does not evaluate the consistency of the retrieval results of whether the most similar images ranked in each place contain the same person, which is risky

This brief investigates the stability problem of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with time-varying delay. First, by introducing some flexibility factors, a flexible negative-determination quadratic function method is proposed, which contains some existing methods and has less conservatism. Second, some integral inequalities and the flexible negative-determination quadratic function method are used

Multiagent reinforcement learning (RL) training is usually difficult and time-consuming due to mutual interference among agents. Safety concerns make an already difficult training process even harder. This study proposes a safe adaptive policy transfer RL approach for multiagent cooperative control. Specifically, a pioneer and follower off-policy policy transfer learning (PFOPT) method is presented

Universal adversarial patch attacks, which are readily implemented, have been validated to be able to fool real-world deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), posing a serious threat to practical computer vision systems based on CNNs. Unfortunately, current defending approaches are severely understudied facing the following problems. Patch detection-based methods suffer from dramatic performance

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an important technology for the monitoring, management, and control of communication systems. In recent years, machine learning approaches are becoming popular to improve the effectiveness of AMC for radio signals. However, the automatic modulation open-set recognition (AMOSR) scheme that aims to identify the known modulation types and recognize the unknown

In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised approach for 3D object detection, which makes it possible to train a strong 3D detector with position-level annotations (i.e. annotations of object centers and categories). In order to remedy the information loss from box annotations to centers, our method makes use of synthetic 3D shapes to convert the position-level annotations into virtual scenes with

The state and input constraints of nonlinear systems could greatly impede the realization of their optimal control when using reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches since the commonly used quadratic utility functions cannot meet the requirements of solving constrained optimization problems. This article develops a novel optimal control approach for constrained discrete-time (DT) nonlinear systems

3-D point clouds facilitate 3-D visual applications with detailed information of objects and scenes but bring about enormous challenges to design efficient compression technologies. The irregular signal statistics and high-order geometric structures of 3-D point clouds cannot be fully exploited by existing sparse representation and deep learning based point cloud attribute compression schemes and graph

This paper proposes a novel pipeline to estimate a non-parametric environment map with high dynamic range from a single human face image. Lighting-independent and -dependent intrinsic images of the face are first estimated separately in a cascaded network. The influence of face geometry on the two lighting-dependent intrinsics, diffuse shading and specular reflection, are further eliminated by distributing

Large-scale Gaussian process (GP) modeling is becoming increasingly important in machine learning. However, the standard modeling method of GPs, which uses the maximum likelihood method and the best linear unbiased predictor, is designed to run on a single computer, which often has limited computing power. Therefore, there is a growing demand for approximate alternatives, such as composite likelihood

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) harnesses the power of massive datasets for resolving sequential decision problems. Most existing papers only discuss defending against out-of-distribution (OOD) actions while we investigate a broader issue, the false correlations between epistemic uncertainty and decision-making, an essential factor that causes suboptimality. In this paper, we propose falSe COrrelation

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is considered as a challenging task due to complex and nonlinear interdependencies between time steps and series. With the advance of deep learning, significant efforts have been made to model long-term and short-term temporal patterns hidden in historical information by recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with a temporal attention mechanism. Although various

This study presents a state nonparametric identifier based on neural networks with continuous dynamics, also known as differential neural networks (DNNs). The laws for adjusting their parameters are developed using a control barrier Lyapunov functions (BLFs). The motivation for using the BLF comes from the preliminary information of the system states, which remain in a predefined time-depending set

With the advent of the data era, most power secondary side equipment tends to be digitized. The power system needs more accurate numerical results to further improve its operating efficiency. Therefore, it is important to study the electromagnetic interferences of very fast transient overvoltage (VFTO) generated by gas-insulated switchgear (GIS). To protect the secondary side cable from interferences

Hyperspectral (HS) pansharpening aims at fusing an observed HS image with a panchromatic (PAN) image, to produce an image with the high spectral resolution of the former and the high spatial resolution of the latter. Most of the existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based pansharpening methods reconstruct the desired high-resolution image from the encoded low-resolution (LR) representation

Data stream clustering can be performed to discover the patterns underlying continuously arriving sequences of data. A number of data stream clustering algorithms for finding clusters in arbitrary shapes and handling outliers, such as density-based clustering algorithms, have been proposed. However, these algorithms are often limited in their ability to construct and merge microclusters by measuring

To meet requirements for real-time trajectory scheduling and distributed coordination, underwater target hunting task is challenging in terms of turbulent ocean environments and dynamic adversarial environment. Despite the existing research in game-based target hunting area, few approaches have considered dynamic environmental factors, such as sea currents, winds, and communication delay. In this article

Fusion-based spectral super-resolution aims to yield a high-resolution hyperspectral image (HR-HSI) by integrating the available high-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI) with the corresponding low-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI). With the prosperity of deep convolutional neural networks, plentiful fusion methods have made breakthroughs in reconstruction performance promotions. Nevertheless

Individual fairness requires that similar individuals are treated similarly. It is supposed to prevent the unfair treatment of individuals on the subgroup level and to overcome the problem that group fairness measures are susceptible to manipulation or gerrymandering. The goal of the present paper is to explore the extent to which individual fairness itself can be gerrymandered. It will be proved that

Forgetting is an important concept in knowledge representation and automated reasoning with widespread applications across a number of disciplines. A standard forgetting operator, characterized in [26] in terms of model-theoretic semantics and primarily focusing on the propositional case, opened up a new research subarea. In this paper, a new operator called weak forgetting, dual to standard forgetting

Existing image inpainting methods often produce artifacts that are caused by using vanilla convolution layers as building blocks that treat all image regions equally and generate holes at random locations with equal probability. This design does not differentiate the missing regions and valid regions in inference and does not consider the predictability of missing regions in training. To address these

With the help of neural network-based representation learning, significant progress has been recently made in data-driven online dynamic stability assessment (DSA) of complex electric power systems. However, without sufficient attention to diverse data loss conditions in practice, the existing data-driven DSA solutions' performance could be largely degraded due to practical defective input data. To

Purely data-driven deep neural networks (DNNs) applied to physical engineering systems can infer relations that violate physics laws, thus leading to unexpected consequences. To address this challenge, we propose a physics-knowledge-enhanced DNN framework called Phy-Taylor, accelerating learning-compliant representations with physics knowledge. The Phy-Taylor framework makes two key contributions;

Realistically improving upper-limb prostheses is only possible if we listen to users' actual technological needs.

Better integration of assistive robots with humans and adoption of a user-centric approach in their development will improve performance.

Collaborative robotics principles and advancements may transform the field of assistive and rehabilitation robotics.

Above-knee amputees were capable of weight-bearing symmetry during stand-to-sit transitions when using a powered prosthesis.

The use of wearable robots to provide walking assistance has rapidly grown over the past decade, with notable advances made in robot design and control methods toward reducing physical effort while performing an activity. The reduction in walking effort has mainly been achieved by assisting forward progression in the sagittal plane. Human gait, however, is a complex movement that combines motions in

Video captioning aims to generate natural language descriptions for a given video clip. Existing methods mainly focus on end-to-end representation learning via word-by-word comparison between predicted captions and ground-truth texts. Although significant progress has been made, such supervised approaches neglect semantic alignment between visual and linguistic entities, which may negatively affect

Random-walk-based network embedding algorithms like DeepWalk and node2vec are widely used to obtain Euclidean representation of the nodes in a network prior to performing downstream inference tasks. However, despite their impressive empirical performance, there is a lack of theoretical results explaining their large-sample behavior. In this paper, we study node2vec and DeepWalk through the perspective

To improve user experience, recommender systems have been widely used on many online platforms. In these systems, recommendation models are typically learned from positive/negative feedback that are collected automatically. Notably, recommender systems are a little different from general supervised learning tasks. In recommender systems, there are some factors (e.g. previous recommendation models or

Density peaks clustering detects modes as points with high density and large distance to points of higher density. Each non-mode point is assigned to the same cluster as its nearest neighbor of higher density. Density peaks clustering has proved capable in applications, yet little work has been done to understand its theoretical properties or the characteristics of the clusterings it produces. Here