Proprioceptive and Exteroceptive Information Perception in a Fabric Soft Robotic Arm via Physical Reservoir Computing with minimal training data

Over the past decades, we have witnessed a rapid emergence of soft and reconfigurable robots thanks to their capability to interact safely with humans and adapt to complex environments. However, their softness makes accurate control very challenging. High-fidelity sensing is critical in improving control performance, especially posture and contact estimation. To this end, traditional camera-based sensors and load cells have limited portability and accuracy, and they will inevitably increase the robot's cost and weight. In this study, instead of using specialized sensors, we only collect distributed pressure data inside a pneumatics-driven soft arm and apply the physical reservoir computing principle to simultaneously predict its kinematic posture (i.e., bending angle) and payload status (i.e., payload mass). Our results show that, with careful readout training, one can obtain accurate bending angle and payload mass predictions via simple, weighted linear summations of pressure readings. In addition, our comparative analysis shows that, to guarantee low prediction errors within 10\%, bending angle prediction requires less training data than payload prediction. This result reveals that balanced linear and nonlinear body dynamics are critical for the physical reservoir to accomplish complex proprioceptive and exteroceptive information perception tasks. Finally, the method of exploring the most efficient readout training methods presented in this paper could be extended to other soft robotic systems to maximize their perception capabilities.

WeatherGFM: Learning A Weather Generalist Foundation Model via In-context Learning

The Earth's weather system encompasses intricate weather data modalities and diverse weather understanding tasks, which hold significant value to human life. Existing data-driven models focus on single weather understanding tasks (e.g., weather forecasting). Although these models have achieved promising results, they fail to tackle various complex tasks within a single and unified model. Moreover, the paradigm that relies on limited real observations for a single scenario hinders the model's performance upper bound. In response to these limitations, we draw inspiration from the in-context learning paradigm employed in state-of-the-art visual foundation models and large language models. In this paper, we introduce the first generalist weather foundation model (WeatherGFM), designed to address a wide spectrum of weather understanding tasks in a unified manner. More specifically, we initially unify the representation and definition of the diverse weather understanding tasks. Subsequently, we devised weather prompt formats to manage different weather data modalities, namely single, multiple, and temporal modalities. Finally, we adopt a visual prompting question-answering paradigm for the training of unified weather understanding tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that our WeatherGFM can effectively handle up to ten weather understanding tasks, including weather forecasting, super-resolution, weather image translation, and post-processing. Our method also showcases generalization ability on unseen tasks.

Understanding Layer Significance in LLM Alignment

Aligning large language models (LLMs) through fine-tuning is essential for tailoring them to specific applications. Therefore, understanding what LLMs learn during the alignment process is crucial. Recent studies suggest that alignment primarily adjusts a model's presentation style rather than its foundational knowledge, indicating that only certain components of the model are significantly impacted. To delve deeper into LLM alignment, we propose to identify which layers within LLMs are most critical to the alignment process, thereby uncovering how alignment influences model behavior at a granular level. We propose a novel approach to identify the important layers for LLM alignment (ILA). It involves learning a binary mask for each incremental weight matrix in the LoRA algorithm, indicating the significance of each layer. ILA consistently identifies important layers across various alignment datasets, with nearly 90% overlap even with substantial dataset differences, highlighting fundamental patterns in LLM alignment. Experimental results indicate that freezing non-essential layers improves overall model performance, while selectively tuning the most critical layers significantly enhances fine-tuning efficiency with minimal performance loss.

PostCast: Generalizable Postprocessing for Precipitation Nowcasting via Unsupervised Blurriness Modeling

Precipitation nowcasting plays a pivotal role in socioeconomic sectors, especially in severe convective weather warnings. Although notable progress has been achieved by approaches mining the spatiotemporal correlations with deep learning, these methods still suffer severe blurriness as the lead time increases, which hampers accurate predictions for extreme precipitation. To alleviate blurriness, researchers explore generative methods conditioned on blurry predictions. However, the pairs of blurry predictions and corresponding ground truth need to be generated in advance, making the training pipeline cumbersome and limiting the generality of generative models within blur modes that appear in training data. By rethinking the blurriness in precipitation nowcasting as a blur kernel acting on predictions, we propose an unsupervised postprocessing method to eliminate the blurriness without the requirement of training with the pairs of blurry predictions and corresponding ground truth. Specifically, we utilize blurry predictions to guide the generation process of a pre-trained unconditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to obtain high-fidelity predictions with eliminated blurriness. A zero-shot blur kernel estimation mechanism and an auto-scale denoise guidance strategy are introduced to adapt the unconditional DDPM to any blurriness modes varying from datasets and lead times in precipitation nowcasting. Extensive experiments are conducted on 7 precipitation radar datasets, demonstrating the generality and superiority of our method.

A Preliminary Exploration Towards General Image Restoration

Despite the tremendous success of deep models in various individual image restoration tasks, there are at least two major technical challenges preventing these works from being applied to real-world usages: (1) the lack of generalization ability and (2) the complex and unknown degradations in real-world scenarios. Existing deep models, tailored for specific individual image restoration tasks, often fall short in effectively addressing these challenges. In this paper, we present a new problem called general image restoration (GIR) which aims to address these challenges within a unified model. GIR covers most individual image restoration tasks (\eg, image denoising, deblurring, deraining and super-resolution) and their combinations for general purposes. This paper proceeds to delineate the essential aspects of GIR, including problem definition and the overarching significance of generalization performance. Moreover, the establishment of new datasets and a thorough evaluation framework for GIR models is discussed. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing approaches for tackling the GIR challenge, illuminating their strengths and pragmatic challenges. By analyzing these approaches, we not only underscore the effectiveness of GIR but also highlight the difficulties in its practical implementation. At last, we also try to understand and interpret these models' behaviors to inspire the future direction. Our work can open up new valuable research directions and contribute to the research of general vision.

UniFashion: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Fashion Retrieval and Generation

The fashion domain encompasses a variety of real-world multimodal tasks, including multimodal retrieval and multimodal generation. The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence generated content, particularly in technologies like large language models for text generation and diffusion models for visual generation, have sparked widespread research interest in applying these multimodal models in the fashion domain. However, tasks involving embeddings, such as image-to-text or text-to-image retrieval, have been largely overlooked from this perspective due to the diverse nature of the multimodal fashion domain. And current research on multi-task single models lack focus on image generation. In this work, we present UniFashion, a unified framework that simultaneously tackles the challenges of multimodal generation and retrieval tasks within the fashion domain, integrating image generation with retrieval tasks and text generation tasks. UniFashion unifies embedding and generative tasks by integrating a diffusion model and LLM, enabling controllable and high-fidelity generation. Our model significantly outperforms previous single-task state-of-the-art models across diverse fashion tasks, and can be readily adapted to manage complex vision-language tasks. This work demonstrates the potential learning synergy between multimodal generation and retrieval, offering a promising direction for future research in the fashion domain. The source code is available at https://github.com/xiangyu-mm/UniFashion.

Learning A Low-Level Vision Generalist via Visual Task Prompt

Building a unified model for general low-level vision tasks holds significant research and practical value. Current methods encounter several critical issues. Multi-task restoration approaches can address multiple degradation-to-clean restoration tasks, while their applicability to tasks with different target domains (e.g., image stylization) is limited. Methods like PromptGIP can handle multiple input-target domains but rely on the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) paradigm. Consequently, they are tied to the ViT architecture, resulting in suboptimal image reconstruction quality. In addition, these methods are sensitive to prompt image content and often struggle with low-frequency information processing. In this paper, we propose a Visual task Prompt-based Image Processing (VPIP) framework to overcome these challenges. VPIP employs visual task prompts to manage tasks with different input-target domains and allows flexible selection of backbone network suitable for general tasks. Besides, a new prompt cross-attention is introduced to facilitate interaction between the input and prompt information. Based on the VPIP framework, we train a low-level vision generalist model, namely GenLV, on 30 diverse tasks. Experimental results show that GenLV can successfully address a variety of low-level tasks, significantly outperforming existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Codes are available at https://github.com/chxy95/GenLV.

GRIDS: Grouped Multiple-Degradation Restoration with Image Degradation Similarity

Traditional single-task image restoration methods excel in handling specific degradation types but struggle with multiple degradations. To address this limitation, we propose Grouped Restoration with Image Degradation Similarity (GRIDS), a novel approach that harmonizes the competing objectives inherent in multiple-degradation restoration. We first introduce a quantitative method for assessing relationships between image degradations using statistical modeling of deep degradation representations. This analysis facilitates the strategic grouping of similar tasks, enhancing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the restoration process. Based on the degradation similarity, GRIDS divides restoration tasks into one of the optimal groups, where tasks within the same group are highly correlated. For instance, GRIDS effectively groups 11 degradation types into 4 cohesive groups. Trained models within each group show significant improvements, with an average improvement of 0.09dB over single-task upper bound models and 2.24dB over the mix-training baseline model. GRIDS incorporates an adaptive model selection mechanism for inference, automatically selecting the appropriate grouped-training model based on the input degradation. This mechanism is particularly useful for real-world scenarios with unknown degradations as it does not rely on explicit degradation classification modules. Furthermore, our method can predict model generalization ability without the need for network inference, providing valuable insights for practitioners.

Safe MPC Alignment with Human Directional Feedback

In safety-critical robot planning or control, manually specifying safety constraints or learning them from demonstrations can be challenging. In this paper, we propose a certifiable alignment method for a robot to learn a safety constraint in its model predictive control (MPC) policy with human online directional feedback. To our knowledge, it is the first method to learn safety constraints from human feedback. The proposed method is based on an empirical observation: human directional feedback, when available, tends to guide the robot toward safer regions. The method only requires the direction of human feedback to update the learning hypothesis space. It is certifiable, providing an upper bound on the total number of human feedback in the case of successful learning of safety constraints, or declaring the misspecification of the hypothesis space, i.e., the true implicit safety constraint cannot be found within the specified hypothesis space. We evaluated the proposed method using numerical examples and user studies in two developed simulation games. Additionally, we implemented and tested the proposed method on a real-world Franka robot arm performing mobile water-pouring tasks in a user study. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our method, showing that it enables a robot to successfully learn safety constraints with a small handful (tens) of human directional corrections.

Small Aerial Target Detection for Airborne Infrared Detection Systems using LightGBM and Trajectory Constraints

Factors, such as rapid relative motion, clutter background, etc., make robust small aerial target detection for airborne infrared detection systems a challenge. Existing methods are facing difficulties when dealing with such cases. We consider that a continuous and smooth trajectory is critical in boosting small infrared aerial target detection performance. A simple and effective small aerial target detection method for airborne infrared detection system using light gradient boosting model (LightGBM) and trajectory constraints is proposed in this article. First, we simply formulate target candidate detection as a binary classification problem. Target candidates in every individual frame are detected via interesting pixel detection and a trained LightGBM model. Then, the local smoothness and global continuous characteristic of the target trajectory are modeled as short-strict and long-loose constraints. The trajectory constraints are used efficiently for detecting the true small infrared aerial targets from numerous target candidates. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than other existing methods. Furthermore, a public dataset for small aerial target detection in airborne infrared detection systems is constructed. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset has the largest data scale and richest scene types within this field.