Eco-Friendly 0G Networks: Unlocking the Power of Backscatter Communications for a Greener Future

Backscatter Communication (BackCom) technology has emerged as a promising paradigm for the Green Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, offering advantages such as low power consumption, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployment. While traditional BackCom systems, such as RFID technology, have found widespread applications, the advent of ambient backscatter presents new opportunities for expanding applications and enhancing capabilities. Moreover, ongoing standardization efforts are actively focusing on BackCom technologies, positioning them as a potential solution to meet the near-zero power consumption and massive connectivity requirements of next-generation wireless systems. 0G networks have the potential to provide advanced solutions by leveraging BackCom technology to deliver ultra-low-power, ubiquitous connectivity for the expanding IoT ecosystem, supporting billions of devices with minimal energy consumption. This paper investigates the integration of BackCom and 0G networks to enhance the capabilities of traditional BackCom systems and enable Green IoT. We conduct an in-depth analysis of BackCom-enabled 0G networks, exploring their architecture and operational objectives, and also explore the Waste Factor (WF) metric for evaluating energy efficiency and minimizing energy waste within integrated systems. By examining both structural and operational aspects, we demonstrate how this synergy enhances the performance, scalability, and sustainability of next-generation wireless networks. Moreover, we highlight possible applications, open challenges, and future directions, offering valuable insights for guiding future research and practical implementations aimed at achieving large-scale, sustainable IoT deployments.

SSFold: Learning to Fold Arbitrary Crumpled Cloth Using Graph Dynamics from Human Demonstration

Robotic cloth manipulation faces challenges due to the fabric's complex dynamics and the high dimensionality of configuration spaces. Previous methods have largely focused on isolated smoothing or folding tasks and overly reliant on simulations, often failing to bridge the significant sim-to-real gap in deformable object manipulation. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-stream architecture with sequential and spatial pathways, unifying smoothing and folding tasks into a single adaptable policy model that accommodates various cloth types and states. The sequential stream determines the pick and place positions for the cloth, while the spatial stream, using a connectivity dynamics model, constructs a visibility graph from partial point cloud data of the self-occluded cloth, allowing the robot to infer the cloth's full configuration from incomplete observations. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we utilize a hand tracking detection algorithm to gather and integrate human demonstration data into our novel end-to-end neural network, improving real-world adaptability. Our method, validated on a UR5 robot across four distinct cloth folding tasks with different goal shapes, consistently achieves folded states from arbitrary crumpled initial configurations, with success rates of 99\%, 99\%, 83\%, and 67\%. It outperforms existing state-of-the-art cloth manipulation techniques and demonstrates strong generalization to unseen cloth with diverse colors, shapes, and stiffness in real-world experiments.Videos and source code are available at: https://zcswdt.github.io/SSFold/

Hologram Reasoning for Solving Algebra Problems with Geometry Diagrams

Solving Algebra Problems with Geometry Diagrams (APGDs) is still a challenging problem because diagram processing is not studied as intensively as language processing. To work against this challenge, this paper proposes a hologram reasoning scheme and develops a high-performance method for solving APGDs by using this scheme. To reach this goal, it first defines a hologram, being a kind of graph, and proposes a hologram generator to convert a given APGD into a hologram, which represents the entire information of APGD and the relations for solving the problem can be acquired from it by a uniform way. Then HGR, a hologram reasoning method employs a pool of prepared graph models to derive algebraic equations, which is consistent with the geometric theorems. This method is able to be updated by adding new graph models into the pool. Lastly, it employs deep reinforcement learning to enhance the efficiency of model selection from the pool. The entire HGR not only ensures high solution accuracy with fewer reasoning steps but also significantly enhances the interpretability of the solution process by providing descriptions of all reasoning steps. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HGR in improving both accuracy and interpretability in solving APGDs.

Contrast, Imitate, Adapt: Learning Robotic Skills From Raw Human Videos

Learning robotic skills from raw human videos remains a non-trivial challenge. Previous works tackled this problem by leveraging behavior cloning or learning reward functions from videos. Despite their remarkable performances, they may introduce several issues, such as the necessity for robot actions, requirements for consistent viewpoints and similar layouts between human and robot videos, as well as low sample efficiency. To this end, our key insight is to learn task priors by contrasting videos and to learn action priors through imitating trajectories from videos, and to utilize the task priors to guide trajectories to adapt to novel scenarios. We propose a three-stage skill learning framework denoted as Contrast-Imitate-Adapt (CIA). An interaction-aware alignment transformer is proposed to learn task priors by temporally aligning video pairs. Then a trajectory generation model is used to learn action priors. To adapt to novel scenarios different from human videos, the Inversion-Interaction method is designed to initialize coarse trajectories and refine them by limited interaction. In addition, CIA introduces an optimization method based on semantic directions of trajectories for interaction security and sample efficiency. The alignment distances computed by IAAformer are used as the rewards. We evaluate CIA in six real-world everyday tasks, and empirically demonstrate that CIA significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art works in terms of task success rate and generalization to diverse novel scenarios layouts and object instances.

Safety Control of Service Robots with LLMs and Embodied Knowledge Graphs

Safety limitations in service robotics across various industries have raised significant concerns about the need for robust mechanisms ensuring that robots adhere to safe practices, thereby preventing actions that might harm humans or cause property damage. Despite advances, including the integration of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with Large Language Models (LLMs), challenges in ensuring consistent safety in autonomous robot actions persist. In this paper, we propose a novel integration of Large Language Models with Embodied Robotic Control Prompts (ERCPs) and Embodied Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) to enhance the safety framework for service robots. ERCPs are designed as predefined instructions that ensure LLMs generate safe and precise responses. These responses are subsequently validated by EKGs, which provide a comprehensive knowledge base ensuring that the actions of the robot are continuously aligned with safety protocols, thereby promoting safer operational practices in varied contexts. Our experimental setup involved diverse real-world tasks, where robots equipped with our framework demonstrated significantly higher compliance with safety standards compared to traditional methods. This integration fosters secure human-robot interactions and positions our methodology at the forefront of AI-driven safety innovations in service robotics.

Large Language Models for UAVs: Current State and Pathways to the Future

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a transformative technology across diverse sectors, offering adaptable solutions to complex challenges in both military and civilian domains. Their expanding capabilities present a platform for further advancement by integrating cutting-edge computational tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. These advancements have significantly impacted various facets of human life, fostering an era of unparalleled efficiency and convenience. Large Language Models (LLMs), a key component of AI, exhibit remarkable learning and adaptation capabilities within deployed environments, demonstrating an evolving form of intelligence with the potential to approach human-level proficiency. This work explores the significant potential of integrating UAVs and LLMs to propel the development of autonomous systems. We comprehensively review LLM architectures, evaluating their suitability for UAV integration. Additionally, we summarize the state-of-the-art LLM-based UAV architectures and identify novel opportunities for LLM embedding within UAV frameworks. Notably, we focus on leveraging LLMs to refine data analysis and decision-making processes, specifically for enhanced spectral sensing and sharing in UAV applications. Furthermore, we investigate how LLM integration expands the scope of existing UAV applications, enabling autonomous data processing, improved decision-making, and faster response times in emergency scenarios like disaster response and network restoration. Finally, we highlight crucial areas for future research that are critical for facilitating the effective integration of LLMs and UAVs.

Identity-aware Dual-constraint Network for Cloth-Changing Person Re-identification

Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) aims to accurately identify the target person in more realistic surveillance scenarios, where pedestrians usually change their clothing. Despite great progress, limited cloth-changing training samples in existing CC-ReID datasets still prevent the model from adequately learning cloth-irrelevant features. In addition, due to the absence of explicit supervision to keep the model constantly focused on cloth-irrelevant areas, existing methods are still hampered by the disruption of clothing variations. To solve the above issues, we propose an Identity-aware Dual-constraint Network (IDNet) for the CC-ReID task. Specifically, to help the model extract cloth-irrelevant clues, we propose a Clothes Diversity Augmentation (CDA), which generates more realistic cloth-changing samples by enriching the clothing color while preserving the texture. In addition, a Multi-scale Constraint Block (MCB) is designed, which extracts fine-grained identity-related features and effectively transfers cloth-irrelevant knowledge. Moreover, a Counterfactual-guided Attention Module (CAM) is presented, which learns cloth-irrelevant features from channel and space dimensions and utilizes the counterfactual intervention for supervising the attention map to highlight identity-related regions. Finally, a Semantic Alignment Constraint (SAC) is designed to facilitate high-level semantic feature interaction. Comprehensive experiments on four CC-ReID datasets indicate that our method outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches.

AnimatableDreamer: Text-Guided Non-rigid 3D Model Generation and Reconstruction with Canonical Score Distillation

Text-to-3D model adaptations have advanced static 3D model quality, but sequential 3D model generation, particularly for animatable objects with large motions, is still scarce. Our work proposes AnimatableDreamer, a text-to-4D generation framework capable of generating diverse categories of non-rigid objects while adhering to the object motions extracted from a monocular video. At its core, AnimatableDreamer is equipped with our novel optimization design dubbed Canonical Score Distillation (CSD), which simplifies the generation dimension from 4D to 3D by denoising over different frames in the time-varying camera spaces while conducting the distillation process in a unique canonical space shared per video. Concretely, CSD ensures that score gradients back-propagate to the canonical space through differentiable warping, hence guaranteeing the time-consistent generation and maintaining morphological plausibility across different poses. By lifting the 3D generator to 4D with warping functions, AnimatableDreamer offers a novel perspective on non-rigid 3D model generation and reconstruction. Besides, with inductive knowledge from a multi-view consistent diffusion model, CSD regularizes reconstruction from novel views, thus cyclically enhancing the generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the capability of our method in generating high-flexibility text-guided 3D models from the monocular video, while also showing improved reconstruction performance over typical non-rigid reconstruction methods. Project page https://AnimatableDreamer.github.io.

A Survey on Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects: Recent Advances, Open Challenges and New Frontiers

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) for robots has a wide range of applications in various fields such as industrial, service and health care sectors. However, compared to manipulation of rigid objects, DOM poses significant challenges for robotic perception, modeling and manipulation, due to the infinite dimensionality of the state space of deformable objects (DOs) and the complexity of their dynamics. The development of computer graphics and machine learning has enabled novel techniques for DOM. These techniques, based on data-driven paradigms, can address some of the challenges that analytical approaches of DOM face. However, some existing reviews do not include all aspects of DOM, and some previous reviews do not summarize data-driven approaches adequately. In this article, we survey more than 150 relevant studies (data-driven approaches mainly) and summarize recent advances, open challenges, and new frontiers for aspects of perception, modeling and manipulation for DOs. Particularly, we summarize initial progress made by Large Language Models (LLMs) in robotic manipulation, and indicates some valuable directions for further research. We believe that integrating data-driven approaches and analytical approaches can provide viable solutions to open challenges of DOM.

Robot Learning in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has s fueled a shift in robot learning from automation towards general embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI). Adopting foundation models together with traditional learning methods to robot learning has increasingly gained recent interest research community and showed potential for real-life application. However, there are few literatures comprehensively reviewing the relatively new technologies combined with robotics. The purpose of this review is to systematically assess the state-of-the-art foundation model techniques in the robot learning and to identify future potential areas. Specifically, we first summarized the technical evolution of robot learning and identified the necessary preliminary preparations for foundation models including the simulators, datasets, foundation model framework. In addition, we focused on the following four mainstream areas of robot learning including manipulation, navigation, planning, and reasoning and demonstrated how the foundation model techniques can be adopted in the above scenarios. Furthermore, critical issues which are neglected in the current literatures including robot hardware and software decoupling, dynamic data, generalization performance with the presence of human, etc. were discussed. This review highlights the state-of-the-art progress of foundation models in robot learning and future research should focus on multimodal interaction especially dynamics data, exclusive foundation models for robots, and AI alignment, etc.