Can Transformers Smell Like Humans?

The human brain encodes stimuli from the environment into representations that form a sensory perception of the world. Despite recent advances in understanding visual and auditory perception, olfactory perception remains an under-explored topic in the machine learning community due to the lack of large-scale datasets annotated with labels of human olfactory perception. In this work, we ask the question of whether pre-trained transformer models of chemical structures encode representations that are aligned with human olfactory perception, i.e., can transformers smell like humans? We demonstrate that representations encoded from transformers pre-trained on general chemical structures are highly aligned with human olfactory perception. We use multiple datasets and different types of perceptual representations to show that the representations encoded by transformer models are able to predict: (i) labels associated with odorants provided by experts; (ii) continuous ratings provided by human participants with respect to pre-defined descriptors; and (iii) similarity ratings between odorants provided by human participants. Finally, we evaluate the extent to which this alignment is associated with physicochemical features of odorants known to be relevant for olfactory decoding.

Reducing Variance in Meta-Learning via Laplace Approximation for Regression Tasks

Given a finite set of sample points, meta-learning algorithms aim to learn an optimal adaptation strategy for new, unseen tasks. Often, this data can be ambiguous as it might belong to different tasks concurrently. This is particularly the case in meta-regression tasks. In such cases, the estimated adaptation strategy is subject to high variance due to the limited amount of support data for each task, which often leads to sub-optimal generalization performance. In this work, we address the problem of variance reduction in gradient-based meta-learning and formalize the class of problems prone to this, a condition we refer to as \emph{task overlap}. Specifically, we propose a novel approach that reduces the variance of the gradient estimate by weighing each support point individually by the variance of its posterior over the parameters. To estimate the posterior, we utilize the Laplace approximation, which allows us to express the variance in terms of the curvature of the loss landscape of our meta-learner. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and highlight the importance of variance reduction in meta-learning.

Towards Sim-to-Real Industrial Parts Classification with Synthetic Dataset

This paper is about effectively utilizing synthetic data for training deep neural networks for industrial parts classification, in particular, by taking into account the domain gap against real-world images. To this end, we introduce a synthetic dataset that may serve as a preliminary testbed for the Sim-to-Real challenge; it contains 17 objects of six industrial use cases, including isolated and assembled parts. A few subsets of objects exhibit large similarities in shape and albedo for reflecting challenging cases of industrial parts. All the sample images come with and without random backgrounds and post-processing for evaluating the importance of domain randomization. We call it Synthetic Industrial Parts dataset (SIP-17). We study the usefulness of SIP-17 through benchmarking the performance of five state-of-the-art deep network models, supervised and self-supervised, trained only on the synthetic data while testing them on real data. By analyzing the results, we deduce some insights on the feasibility and challenges of using synthetic data for industrial parts classification and for further developing larger-scale synthetic datasets. Our dataset and code are publicly available.

Will You Participate? Exploring the Potential of Robotics Competitions on Human-centric Topics

This paper presents findings from an exploratory needfinding study investigating the research current status and potential participation of the competitions on the robotics community towards four human-centric topics: safety, privacy, explainability, and federated learning. We conducted a survey with 34 participants across three distinguished European robotics consortia, nearly 60% of whom possessed over five years of research experience in robotics. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis revealed that current mainstream robotic researchers prioritize safety and explainability, expressing a greater willingness to invest in further research in these areas. Conversely, our results indicate that privacy and federated learning garner less attention and are perceived to have lower potential. Additionally, the study suggests a lack of enthusiasm within the robotics community for participating in competitions related to these topics. Based on these findings, we recommend targeting other communities, such as the machine learning community, for future competitions related to these four human-centric topics.

LM2D: Lyrics- and Music-Driven Dance Synthesis

Dance typically involves professional choreography with complex movements that follow a musical rhythm and can also be influenced by lyrical content. The integration of lyrics in addition to the auditory dimension, enriches the foundational tone and makes motion generation more amenable to its semantic meanings. However, existing dance synthesis methods tend to model motions only conditioned on audio signals. In this work, we make two contributions to bridge this gap. First, we propose LM2D, a novel probabilistic architecture that incorporates a multimodal diffusion model with consistency distillation, designed to create dance conditioned on both music and lyrics in one diffusion generation step. Second, we introduce the first 3D dance-motion dataset that encompasses both music and lyrics, obtained with pose estimation technologies. We evaluate our model against music-only baseline models with objective metrics and human evaluations, including dancers and choreographers. The results demonstrate LM2D is able to produce realistic and diverse dance matching both lyrics and music. A video summary can be accessed at: https://youtu.be/4XCgvYookvA.

Mind Meets Robots: A Review of EEG-Based Brain-Robot Interaction Systems

Brain-robot interaction (BRI) empowers individuals to control (semi-)automated machines through their brain activity, either passively or actively. In the past decade, BRI systems have achieved remarkable success, predominantly harnessing electroencephalogram (EEG) signals as the central component. This paper offers an up-to-date and exhaustive examination of 87 curated studies published during the last five years (2018-2023), focusing on identifying the research landscape of EEG-based BRI systems. This review aims to consolidate and underscore methodologies, interaction modes, application contexts, system evaluation, existing challenges, and potential avenues for future investigations in this domain. Based on our analysis, we present a BRI system model with three entities: Brain, Robot, and Interaction, depicting the internal relationships of a BRI system. We especially investigate the essence and principles on interaction modes between human brains and robots, a domain that has not yet been identified anywhere. We then discuss these entities with different dimensions encompassed. Within this model, we scrutinize and classify current research, reveal insights, specify challenges, and provide recommendations for future research trajectories in this field. Meanwhile, we envision our findings offer a design space for future human-robot interaction (HRI) research, informing the creation of efficient BRI frameworks.

Scalable Motion Style Transfer with Constrained Diffusion Generation

Current training of motion style transfer systems relies on consistency losses across style domains to preserve contents, hindering its scalable application to a large number of domains and private data. Recent image transfer works show the potential of independent training on each domain by leveraging implicit bridging between diffusion models, with the content preservation, however, limited to simple data patterns. We address this by imposing biased sampling in backward diffusion while maintaining the domain independence in the training stage. We construct the bias from the source domain keyframes and apply them as the gradient of content constraints, yielding a framework with keyframe manifold constraint gradients (KMCGs). Our validation demonstrates the success of training separate models to transfer between as many as ten dance motion styles. Comprehensive experiments find a significant improvement in preserving motion contents in comparison to baseline and ablative diffusion-based style transfer models. In addition, we perform a human study for a subjective assessment of the quality of generated dance motions. The results validate the competitiveness of KMCGs.

Music- and Lyrics-driven Dance Synthesis

Lyrics often convey information about the songs that are beyond the auditory dimension, enriching the semantic meaning of movements and musical themes. Such insights are important in the dance choreography domain. However, most existing dance synthesis methods mainly focus on music-to-dance generation, without considering the semantic information. To complement it, we introduce JustLMD, a new multimodal dataset of 3D dance motion with music and lyrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset with triplet information including dance motion, music, and lyrics. Additionally, we showcase a cross-modal diffusion-based network designed to generate 3D dance motion conditioned on music and lyrics. The proposed JustLMD dataset encompasses 4.6 hours of 3D dance motion in 1867 sequences, accompanied by musical tracks and their corresponding English lyrics.

Effects of Explanation Strategies to Resolve Failures in Human-Robot Collaboration

Despite significant improvements in robot capabilities, they are likely to fail in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high unpredictability in human environments and varying human expectations. In this work, we explore the role of explanation of failures by a robot in a human-robot collaborative task. We present a user study incorporating common failures in collaborative tasks with human assistance to resolve the failure. In the study, a robot and a human work together to fill a shelf with objects. Upon encountering a failure, the robot explains the failure and the resolution to overcome the failure, either through handovers or humans completing the task. The study is conducted using different levels of robotic explanation based on the failure action, failure cause, and action history, and different strategies in providing the explanation over the course of repeated interaction. Our results show that the success in resolving the failures is not only a function of the level of explanation but also the type of failures. Furthermore, while novice users rate the robot higher overall in terms of their satisfaction with the explanation, their satisfaction is not only a function of the robot's explanation level at a certain round but also the prior information they received from the robot.

FlowIBR: Leveraging Pre-Training for Efficient Neural Image-Based Rendering of Dynamic Scenes

We introduce a novel approach for monocular novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes. Existing techniques already show impressive rendering quality but tend to focus on optimization within a single scene without leveraging prior knowledge. This limitation has been primarily attributed to the lack of datasets of dynamic scenes available for training and the diversity of scene dynamics. Our method FlowIBR circumvents these issues by integrating a neural image-based rendering method, pre-trained on a large corpus of widely available static scenes, with a per-scene optimized scene flow field. Utilizing this flow field, we bend the camera rays to counteract the scene dynamics, thereby presenting the dynamic scene as if it were static to the rendering network. The proposed method reduces per-scene optimization time by an order of magnitude, achieving comparable results to existing methods - all on a single consumer-grade GPU.