Hyper-SAMARL: Hypergraph-based Coordinated Task Allocation and Socially-aware Navigation for Multi-Robot Systems

A team of multiple robots seamlessly and safely working in human-filled public environments requires adaptive task allocation and socially-aware navigation that account for dynamic human behavior. Current approaches struggle with highly dynamic pedestrian movement and the need for flexible task allocation. We propose Hyper-SAMARL, a hypergraph-based system for multi-robot task allocation and socially-aware navigation, leveraging multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Hyper-SAMARL models the environmental dynamics between robots, humans, and points of interest (POIs) using a hypergraph, enabling adaptive task assignment and socially-compliant navigation through a hypergraph diffusion mechanism. Our framework, trained with MARL, effectively captures interactions between robots and humans, adapting tasks based on real-time changes in human activity. Experimental results demonstrate that Hyper-SAMARL outperforms baseline models in terms of social navigation, task completion efficiency, and adaptability in various simulated scenarios.

SRLM: Human-in-Loop Interactive Social Robot Navigation with Large Language Model and Deep Reinforcement Learning

An interactive social robotic assistant must provide services in complex and crowded spaces while adapting its behavior based on real-time human language commands or feedback. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach called Social Robot Planner (SRLM), which integrates Large Language Models (LLM) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to navigate through human-filled public spaces and provide multiple social services. SRLM infers global planning from human-in-loop commands in real-time, and encodes social information into a LLM-based large navigation model (LNM) for low-level motion execution. Moreover, a DRL-based planner is designed to maintain benchmarking performance, which is blended with LNM by a large feedback model (LFM) to address the instability of current text and LLM-driven LNM. Finally, SRLM demonstrates outstanding performance in extensive experiments. More details about this work are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/navi-srlm

PatchAD: Patch-based MLP-Mixer for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection stands as a crucial aspect of time series analysis, aiming to identify abnormal events in time series samples. The central challenge of this task lies in effectively learning the representations of normal and abnormal patterns in a label-lacking scenario. Previous research mostly relied on reconstruction-based approaches, restricting the representational abilities of the models. In addition, most of the current deep learning-based methods are not lightweight enough, which prompts us to design a more efficient framework for anomaly detection. In this study, we introduce PatchAD, a novel multi-scale patch-based MLP-Mixer architecture that leverages contrastive learning for representational extraction and anomaly detection. Specifically, PatchAD is composed of four distinct MLP Mixers, exclusively utilizing the MLP architecture for high efficiency and lightweight architecture. Additionally, we also innovatively crafted a dual project constraint module to mitigate potential model degradation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PatchAD achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple real-world multivariate time series datasets. Our code is publicly available https://github.com/EmorZz1G/PatchAD

Hyper-STTN: Social Group-aware Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Human Trajectory Prediction with Hypergraph Reasoning

Predicting crowded intents and trajectories is crucial in varouls real-world applications, including service robots and autonomous vehicles. Understanding environmental dynamics is challenging, not only due to the complexities of modeling pair-wise spatial and temporal interactions but also the diverse influence of group-wise interactions. To decode the comprehensive pair-wise and group-wise interactions in crowded scenarios, we introduce Hyper-STTN, a Hypergraph-based Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for crowd trajectory prediction. In Hyper-STTN, crowded group-wise correlations are constructed using a set of multi-scale hypergraphs with varying group sizes, captured through random-walk robability-based hypergraph spectral convolution. Additionally, a spatial-temporal transformer is adapted to capture pedestrians' pair-wise latent interactions in spatial-temporal dimensions. These heterogeneous group-wise and pair-wise are then fused and aligned though a multimodal transformer network. Hyper-STTN outperformes other state-of-the-art baselines and ablation models on 5 real-world pedestrian motion datasets.

Multi-Robot Cooperative Socially-Aware Navigation Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In public spaces shared with humans, ensuring multi-robot systems navigate without collisions while respecting social norms is challenging, particularly with limited communication. Although current robot social navigation techniques leverage advances in reinforcement learning and deep learning, they frequently overlook robot dynamics in simulations, leading to a simulation-to-reality gap. In this paper, we bridge this gap by presenting a new multi-robot social navigation environment crafted using Dec-POSMDP and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we introduce SAMARL: a novel benchmark for cooperative multi-robot social navigation. SAMARL employs a unique spatial-temporal transformer combined with multi-agent reinforcement learning. This approach effectively captures the complex interactions between robots and humans, thus promoting cooperative tendencies in multi-robot systems. Our extensive experiments reveal that SAMARL outperforms existing baseline and ablation models in our designed environment. Demo videos for this work can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/samarl

Generative Pre-trained Transformer: A Comprehensive Review on Enabling Technologies, Potential Applications, Emerging Challenges, and Future Directions

The Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) represents a notable breakthrough in the domain of natural language processing, which is propelling us toward the development of machines that can understand and communicate using language in a manner that closely resembles that of humans. GPT is based on the transformer architecture, a deep neural network designed for natural language processing tasks. Due to their impressive performance on natural language processing tasks and ability to effectively converse, GPT have gained significant popularity among researchers and industrial communities, making them one of the most widely used and effective models in natural language processing and related fields, which motivated to conduct this review. This review provides a detailed overview of the GPT, including its architecture, working process, training procedures, enabling technologies, and its impact on various applications. In this review, we also explored the potential challenges and limitations of a GPT. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions and future directions. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of GPT, enabling technologies, their impact on various applications, emerging challenges, and potential solutions.

NaviSTAR: Socially Aware Robot Navigation with Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer and Preference Learning

Developing robotic technologies for use in human society requires ensuring the safety of robots' navigation behaviors while adhering to pedestrians' expectations and social norms. However, maintaining real-time communication between robots and pedestrians to avoid collisions can be challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a novel socially-aware navigation benchmark called NaviSTAR, which utilizes a hybrid Spatio-Temporal grAph tRansformer (STAR) to understand interactions in human-rich environments fusing potential crowd multi-modal information. We leverage off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm with preference learning to train a policy and a reward function network with supervisor guidance. Additionally, we design a social score function to evaluate the overall performance of social navigation. To compare, we train and test our algorithm and other state-of-the-art methods in both simulator and real-world scenarios independently. Our results show that NaviSTAR outperforms previous methods with outstanding performance\footnote{The source code and experiment videos of this work are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/san-navistar

Husformer: A Multi-Modal Transformer for Multi-Modal Human State Recognition

Human state recognition is a critical topic with pervasive and important applications in human-machine systems.Multi-modal fusion, the combination of metrics from multiple data sources, has been shown as a sound method for improving the recognition performance. However, while promising results have been reported by recent multi-modal-based models, they generally fail to leverage the sophisticated fusion strategies that would model sufficient cross-modal interactions when producing the fusion representation; instead, current methods rely on lengthy and inconsistent data preprocessing and feature crafting. To address this limitation, we propose an end-to-end multi-modal transformer framework for multi-modal human state recognition called Husformer.Specifically, we propose to use cross-modal transformers, which inspire one modality to reinforce itself through directly attending to latent relevance revealed in other modalities, to fuse different modalities while ensuring sufficient awareness of the cross-modal interactions introduced. Subsequently, we utilize a self-attention transformer to further prioritize contextual information in the fusion representation. Using two such attention mechanisms enables effective and adaptive adjustments to noise and interruptions in multi-modal signals during the fusion process and in relation to high-level features. Extensive experiments on two human emotion corpora (DEAP and WESAD) and two cognitive workload datasets (MOCAS and CogLoad) demonstrate that in the recognition of human state, our Husformer outperforms both state-of-the-art multi-modal baselines and the use of a single modality by a large margin, especially when dealing with raw multi-modal signals. We also conducted an ablation study to show the benefits of each component in Husformer/

CardioID: Mitigating the Effects of Irregular Cardiac Signals for Biometric Identification

Cardiac patterns are being used to obtain hard-to-forge biometric signatures and have led to high accuracy in state-of-the-art (SoA) identification applications. However, this performance is obtained under controlled scenarios where cardiac signals maintain a relatively uniform pattern, facilitating the identification process. In this work, we analyze cardiac signals collected in more realistic (uncontrolled) scenarios and show that their high signal variability (i.e., irregularity) makes it harder to obtain stable and distinct user features. Furthermore, SoA usually fails to identify specific groups of users, rendering existing identification methods futile in uncontrolled scenarios. To solve these problems, we propose a framework with three novel properties. First, we design an adaptive method that achieves stable and distinct features by tailoring the filtering spectrum to each user. Second, we show that users can have multiple cardiac morphologies, offering us a much bigger pool of cardiac signals and users compared to SoA. Third, we overcome other distortion effects present in authentication applications with a multi-cluster approach and the Mahalanobis distance. Our evaluation shows that the average balanced accuracy (BAC) of SoA drops from above 90% in controlled scenarios to 75% in uncontrolled ones, while our method maintains an average BAC above 90% in uncontrolled scenarios.

Feedback-efficient Active Preference Learning for Socially Aware Robot Navigation

Socially aware robot navigation, where a robot is required to optimize its trajectories to maintain a comfortable and compliant spatial interaction with humans in addition to the objective of reaching the goal without collisions, is a fundamental yet challenging task for robots navigating in the context of human-robot interaction. Much as existing learning-based methods have achieved a better performance than previous model-based ones, they still have some drawbacks: the reinforcement learning approaches, which reply on a handcrafted reward for optimization, are unlikely to emulate social compliance comprehensively and can lead to reward exploitation problems; the inverse reinforcement learning approaches, which learn a policy via human demonstrations, suffer from expensive and partial samples, and need extensive feature engineering to be reasonable. In this paper, we propose FAPL, a feedback-efficient interactive reinforcement learning approach that distills human preference and comfort into a reward model, which serves as a teacher to guide the agent to explore latent aspects of social compliance. Hybrid experience and off-policy learning are introduced to improve the efficiency of samples and human feedback. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the advantages of FAPL quantitatively and qualitatively.